Is Internet Democratic Medium?

Today I would like to share some thoughts with you about how to advertise products on the Internet.

Internet sales are growing day by day. For some time now, a large percentage of customers have been choosing to buy online. There are several reasons, we all know them, for example health reasons, lack of time, etc.

However, I would like to talk about how this can be a very deep trap for advertisers, for buyers, and for the economy as a whole.

Let's say we have a hundred companies that each produce one product and all of them want to sell them on the Internet. Let say, as a simplified example, our company monchicstore.eu produces just a mini desktop chest of drawers.

Other manufacturers produce similar desktop organizers and call them mini dresser, small furniture etc. It doesn't matter the shape or color, four or nine drawers or other shapes. A buyer decides. Someone likes one form, others another. Let's say that all products in terms of quality and purpose can be used for storing jewelry and have the same chances with customers.

Buyers who search, say, a desktop organizer, browse on their phone or computer and find some companies, others not. Some products appear when we search mini chest of drawers, others when we search box with drawers. It depends on how the search engine finds these companies. Different searches bring different order of products.

Manufacturers who were on the top, suddenly find that they dropped down or completely out of the list. So they change something in an online shop that makes them easier to be found. Others notice that now the competition is greater and that they struggle to stay on the list as well. That's why they add some procedures that make them more visible. Then others notice that. And so on and so on. It all goes round in a circle, in an upward spiral. Sometimes one is on top, other times the other.

The end result is that all producers have spent a lot of money, and the results are neutral for the entire economy, i.e. for these hundred companies. We suppose that customers didn't buy significantly more because of advertising, but instead jumped from one manufacturer to another depending on whether they found it online or not.

This way we have created a new industry, online advertising, whose purpose is to increase the possibility of selling to one at the expense of another. The key is just how much you paid advertising agencies to feature you in advertising. This spiral is infinite. Financially stronger can pay more for advertising and stays in the play. Is this democratic internet?

If we look at it from a purely economic point of view, the question is, what have we done in the first place? Did this affect the product itself? Probably mostly indirectly. First of all, we achieved that all products became more expensive because manufacturers had to invest money in advertising. As more and more is invested into sales, cheaper and cheaper must become the production as well. The first victim is quality. On the other hand a manufacturer who managed to make a product cheaper, inundates the market with millions of copies (to exploit the opportunity and amass a profit) and pushes out other manufacturers. Since not everything can be sold because there are not enough buyers to buy these products, the last few thousand products are sold for the minimum price (at the expense of the environment and low wages.) An industry of cheap discounted products is born.

From the point of view as a customer, I noticed that good quality products are rarely discounted. We will never be able to buy some products at a discount, except for used ones. Among them are definitely handmade items that cannot be produced in large series and cheaply.

The rest of manufacturers, like www.monchicstore.eu are limited to organic search, because we do not earn enough to invest into paid traffic. Present blog is one of these possibilities, but it is a very long way, hoping that search machines will find a blog, on the first place, someone will click on it and read it, hoping that links that we put into this blog will be noticed by search machines and at the end hoping that a live person visiting our site will click on these links and finally buy a product. There is a very long way to get there, which is even longer and harder to reach for us small producers.

The Internet has become a very undemocratic medium, even though initially advertised otherwise. Unfortunately, the Internet has become a medium that separates ordinary people from the wealthy, a medium for manipulation and spread of falsehoods of scandalous news. We hardly see good news anymore, they are hidden somewhere in the background.

Interesting, isn't it?