Haystack Blog

Our online lives are increasingly spent staring at advertisements and commercials.  Understandably so, we’re bombarded in hopes that we’ll click something, and someone, somewhere is making money off of our time this way.  Traditional models of online advertising are pay-per-impression (per view on websites), pay-per-click (for clicking through), or pay-per-action (where users actually act on the ads they’ve seen).

Recently, a new trend in online advertising is appearing.  As many social sites incorporate ‘like’ features or other approval mechanisms, some have started adding this feature to advertisements.  Hulu.com, which streams network-approved videos of television shows and movies, has this feature for their advertisements; another example is popular social networking site Facebook.com.

I can’t purport to speak on the actual financial models behind these actions, but I’m assuming that your thumbs-up on an ad is something that can be monetized as well.  From the user’s perspective , it’s a conflicted action.  Do we like being advertised to?  Are we approving this particular ad?  Are we asking to see more of the same?  Does a click of approval mean we’re interested in this product or service?

The ‘like’ feature is a nebulous thing on its own.  If my friend posts that her car has gotten towed and I ‘like’ that post, does that mean I don’t condone her actions and am satisfied that her car was towed, or is it a symbol of support for her?  However, the real-world analogue of this action comes much more naturally in communication, both verbal and non-verbal.  The confusion here arises when we’ve made this feedback discrete and countable, as opposed to  appropriately complex, complicated, and communcative actions in the non-digital world.