I used to hate ads..

This is going to be a confessional.

I have Ad Block Plus and Ghostery on Safari on my personal laptop. I seldom pay for online content. I think ads are the bane of human society.

Online ads have been known to spread malware and eat up your data. Autoplay ads are jarring, almost always unwelcome, and almost always too loud.

I quietly nodded to myself when Apple CEO Tim Cook took umbrage at tech's ad based revenue model.

This should surprise no one - I am not a fan of ads.

A common gripe on the Internet is that discovery is broken. If you are a widget maker, good luck getting heard by your customers across the vast expanse of the internet. And if you are a potential widget buyer, good luck discovering the one widget maker in the world whose widgets exactly match your needs.

I am currently facing exactly this problem. I just released the best Cucumber based web automation framework on the planet. It is currently in use at a client site and they love it. I enjoyed writing it and I am pretty sure it can be used to serve any and all web automation needs. My struggle is - how do I put Kheera in front of that one team that is currently evaluating web automation frameworks.

And I don't see this problem going away. In my opinion, the problem of connecting people with a need with others who can satisfy that need is unsolvable. It is just not in us to clearly articulate what we need so that some algorithm can go out and get us exactly one product which matches those needs.

And this is the Discovery problem.

Ads are a way to overcome this discovery problem. The goal of ads is to create brand recognition so that in future when you need a widget, you will have remember that Company X makes widgets, thereby increasing the probability of making a sale.

Other discovery methods have been invented.

Take the Kickstarter type platforms: here customers and vendors first acknowledge and pair up with each other before a single widget is produced.

Then there are the Product Hunt and Hacker News type platforms. Your users find your product, then tell others about it through a voting mechanism.

And since, these discovery platforms remain very niche, ads are the most common way to get discovered.

In summary, I used to hate ads and I scoffed at Facebook and Google's ad based revenue model. I thought it was a lame way to make money.

Now I am not so sure - as long as discovery is broken, ads are here to stay.