You won't see it if you don't like it

It's true. You won't see it if you don't like it. The reason is not that even you look at it you choose to ignore it, but because you will find every means to get rid of it if you dislike it indeed. The result is that thing will not appear in the world again, that's why you won't see it.

Why I talk about this? There's a story. In somehow I investigated the "Web 2.0" concept last month. When I talked with some friends, some of them worried about the advertisements. If everyone uses RSS to read the web pages, then no one will visit the website. At present, the advertisement is one of the major revenues for the website. No one visits the web means that the ad-agencies will not pay the website. Then, will Web 2.0 kill most of the websites which depend on the advertisement? It seemed that their concerns were quite reasonable. I thought about it for a while, then I said that the websites could learn from the cable TV. They could provide free services to the public, with advertising in them. The high quality services are also provided, without advertising, but charge for some fee. I didn't expect this will evoke the panic. It seems that when comes to money/fee everyone will widen his/her eyes.

Why widen the eyes? They started to worry about the public website services will be mixed with all kind of advertising that they don't want to see. But, that's quite normal, right? On today's website, could you avoid yourself seeing that annoying advertising? If not, why do you keep dreaming "Web 2.0" should sweep them out completely? Actually, I thought Web 2.0 has already done this somehow. When you use RSS to subscribe some content, you will only read the summaries or the full articles you want in your RSS reader, no advertising.

On the other hand, the worry was not unreasonable. If everyone just subscribes the RSS and read the contents just in the RSS reader, how could the website get their income from advertisement? Will they embed the advertising into the RSS contents?

Maybe yes, maybe no. In my mind, at least two strategies exist. The first strategy, as the above mentioned, include some advertising in the RSS contents, provide the RSS without any charges. If the user want to read the plain contents without advertising, they could subscribe and pay for the ad-free RSS. The second strategy, the website would not earn the money from the ordinary users who don't want to pay. They just provide the services. And when the user want more than RSS contents, they could charge the user on different levels. As the famous saying, the 80% profits come from 20% clients; 20% profits come from 80% clients. If we choose to be the 80% ordinary clients, we don't have to worry about the advertising. The website would provide us the services for free. They would just need us to compose their hierarchy of clients. They would make money from the other 20% clients, or from other ways such as the co-operating companies or sponsors.

Viewed from the user's side, you won't see it if you don't like it. If the user don't want to see the advertising, he/she will try to find the ad-free website to read. If he/she could not find this kind, he might start thinking about pay some money to avoid the advertising. Or maybe he/she should give up surfing the network for this reason. Or, maybe he/she will set up a company to provide such free services without advertising.

Put the network aside, in the daily life sometimes we just complain something, but we never do something to avoid them. Why? Maybe in our mind we don't dislike them enough. When we see some negative phenomenons in the society, do we criticize it enough? Or do we do something concrete to prevent these phenomenons? Think it over how much you like it or how much you dislike it. Then let's do something for what we believe is right...

You won't see it if you don't like it. That depends on how much you dislike it. All on you.