Thread by @alexandrosM

Can we use advertising to end advertising? Hear me out:

Here's Twitter's ads targeting page: business.twitter.com/en/advertising…

I can target by all sorts of demographic characteristics: location, language, device, age, and gender. I can target by audience: interests, keywords, movies...🧵

If we go deeper into their product, I can target by "custom audiences", which boils down to certain lists. business.twitter.com/en/help/campai…

I can literally make a list with the people I want to target, and buy ads to target them. So... what if I target myself?

Like, literally, make a list, add myself to it, and pay twitter top dollar to show me a white banner ad. Or a kitten or something. If that works, I would be paying twitter an amount to *not* show me ads, but replace them with neutral/awwww content. Almost like YouTube Premium.

There's a question of what that would cost me, but for people who don't want to use AdBlock and believe the websites must be rewarded for their service, but also don't want their attention distracted, it may be something they'd be interested in. Now imagine doing this everywhere.

Imagine having a service you could go to, that could sell you all the ad inventory targeted at you. (or as much as they could find). They might ask you to use specific cookies or plugins or visit certain websites to get tagged, and then they'd buy it all up and sell it to you.

This would in effect, turn most of the internet into a subscription service that is effectively ad-free. What's more, it's actually using the system itself to do it. It doesn't break TOS or prevent people from getting paid. Just making sure that the ad buyer is you.

There is of course the issue of how much this would cost, but on some level, by first principles, it can't be that much, as your value to advertisers is a fraction of your income. And some people are willing to spend that to be ethically ad free.

I'm sure there's all sorts of kinks and plot twists, and I have little idea of adtech , just thought it was an entertaining notion that you could turn the system inside out by leaving it in place. Thanks to @HomeMediaX for kicking my ass to rewrite this:

https://twitter.com/alexandrosM/status/1407803235356725253?s=20