Summary Of The Internet's Original Sin By Ethan Zuckerman

In the article “The Internet’s Original Sin” written by Ethan Zuckerman, the author’s purpose was to apologize for creating the pop-up ads and for letting advertising become the default business model for the internet. The author’s perspective in this article is that all he wanted was to build a tool that is easy for everyone to use; but because he screwed up with his partner, they wanted to fix it into something better.

I totally agree with the author that Advertising is the original sin of the web. Advertising is a tool that allows everyone to have the opportunity to express themselves and to be heard from anywhere from a few friends to the entire glob. It is a free web page hosting that makes money. Most businesses make money from advertising. What matters for them is the growth of their audiences, thus more

profit.

According to Zuckerman: “ Advertising lead to surveillance through the investor storytime mechanism”. It is so true for example Facebook. Facebook requests so many details about us “to fill out our profile” but discreetly they analyze us so they can target later on ads according to our interests. They use online advertising that has the ability to see who’s looking at an ad; which can targets ads according to the viewer’s interests. It feels like we are being watched at all times, and by letting ourselves become reliant on advertising as the main income model, we’ve all put ourselves under surveillance. My favorite part in this article is when he mentioned that “… most hated tools in the advertiser’s toolkit: the pop-up ad.” Before reading this article, I never understood the main objective of ads. All I was thinking is that they are so annoying and so boring. They were and still are a barrier that competes with my attention when I am focused on something I like. At the end, I understood that Ads’ objective is to attract audience to win money. It is the involvement between the company’s

brand and the page content. I believe that it is a challenging idea that we have to build businesses around advertising. According to the author building businesses around advertisement, they promise and persuade investors that advertising will be more “ invasive, ubiquitous, and targeted “; I agree with him because that way they can collect more data about their users and their behaviors. Thus, it increases their percentage of winning.
In other words, businesses now depend on advertisement on the web because it can bring them profits. It is a complicated and competitive web where everyone wants to be better and earn more. It is a clever tool to deliver what the audiences are interested in seeing but also it is annoying. We’re being watched at all time, which is irritating because we’re being analyzed like lab rats in order for them to set their targets that will aim higher profits.
Finally, I can conclude that this article helped me in contributing to my understanding the issues in communication by understanding how ads work in the field of businesses and how a company must advertise through the web in able to grow. I agree with Zuckerman that by starting to pay for privacy, to support services and to abandon those that are free to sell us the users and our attention as the products, we can embrace micropayments, members, crowd funding that are bound to be unintended consequences to make the model a better one and easy to use.