Of Course There Are Ads Everywhere
It’s the official business model of capitalism, folks.
The advertising world is uncomplicated at its core, and utterly bewildering when seen from the outside. The easy bit stems from a simple axiom: Wherever you can find the attention of potential customers, you pay to get your message in front of them. That’s the essence of advertising: paying for attention. It gets complicated by the details — the medium, the message, the targeting, the tech — but wherever customers gather, advertising will follow. There’s simply too much money to be made for it to be otherwise.
So it was utterly unsurprising to learn, a few hours ago as I write this, that there will soon be ads on PayPal, driven by the data the company collects. PayPal recorded 6.5 billion payments in the first quarter of 2024 alone, according to the Journal. The company plans on creating what’s known as a “retail media network” allowing advertisers to leverage PayPal’s data to target users both on platform and off.
PayPal is just playing catchup. Walmart, JP Morgan Chase, Target, and many others have already built ad businesses based on the data they collect. PayPal’s been struggling lately, and it needs a new revenue line to keep Wall Street happy. If it can build an efficient programmatic ads business, margins will perk up, and so will its…
