Why digital advertising is broken and how we’re fixing it: (thread)

1/ Attention is a scarce asset. Yet, today’s advertising platforms are built on a model of interruption, forcing brands between you and your intention.
2/ Though ads are everywhere, people don’t trust them. Study after study shows, when you pay to reach people in an interruptive way, less than 5% pay attention.
3/ In today’s interruption-based ad model, the more money you spend, the more people you annoy. Advertisers are trying to solve this problem by spending more money and showing more ads but that only makes it worse.
4/ Ads interrupt us everywhere, leading to more people tuning them out. This is not a content problem. This is not a targeting problem. It’s a context problem.
5/ People don’t trust ads. People trust people. Brands don’t need more ads. They need more people sharing them in trusted contexts.
6/ By making images available for open use, Unsplash has become the primary source for visuals on the internet. Images on Unsplash are regularly seen more than the frontpage of The New York Times.
7/ Unsplash puts your content in the hands of people, the creators of the internet. They add context by sharing your visuals with their audiences as part of their content.
8/ When content is leveraged by choice and embedded in a trusted context, it is no longer tuned out.
9/ When your content is made available for use in a platform where all the creators go, reach compounds exponentially. Initially, you reach all the creators. Then, with their networks, you reach the entire internet.
10/ Through this mechanism, your content organically spreads across the internet reinforcing your message.
11/ The attention of devoted audiences can't be bought. It can only be earned by brands that stop trying to take value and start trying to add it instead.

more: https://t.co/3XBXuCOE0K

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A brief analysis and comparison of the CSS for Twitter's PWA vs Twitter's legacy desktop website. The difference is dramatic and I'll touch on some reasons why.

Legacy site *downloads* ~630 KB CSS per theme and writing direction.

6,769 rules
9,252 selectors
16.7k declarations
3,370 unique declarations
44 media queries
36 unique colors
50 unique background colors
46 unique font sizes
39 unique z-indices

https://t.co/qyl4Bt1i5x


PWA *incrementally generates* ~30 KB CSS that handles all themes and writing directions.

735 rules
740 selectors
757 declarations
730 unique declarations
0 media queries
11 unique colors
32 unique background colors
15 unique font sizes
7 unique z-indices

https://t.co/w7oNG5KUkJ


The legacy site's CSS is what happens when hundreds of people directly write CSS over many years. Specificity wars, redundancy, a house of cards that can't be fixed. The result is extremely inefficient and error-prone styling that punishes users and developers.

The PWA's CSS is generated on-demand by a JS framework that manages styles and outputs "atomic CSS". The framework can enforce strict constraints and perform optimisations, which is why the CSS is so much smaller and safer. Style conflicts and unbounded CSS growth are avoided.