[Thread] For media and advertising, Web3's focus on decentralization and tokenization solves few, if any, problems and is the last thing ad tech needs
This web3 shit is starting to annoy me, so here's a thread with my opinions on the relevance to media and advertising. 1/21 🧵 Tweets: @davlgd , @dustinwstout , @zachweinberg , @levie , @livepaola , @craw , @bznotes , @tkawaja , @dhruvapandey , @ghadjia , and @averyj See also Mediagazer Tweets: @davlgd : 1. Because we need to distribute all the things https://twitter.com/... @dustinwstout : Wow. Finally some sober perspective on web3. It's not the utopia most are making it out to be. Don't get me wrong, I'm for web3. But I'm also getting a bit tired of the blind, vague, and often gibberish fluff hype being regurgitated over and over. https://twitter.com/... @zachweinberg : Thorough, detailed, worth the read. https://twitter.com/... Aaron Levie / @levie : One of *many* reasons why we don't just “decentralize all the things”. Worth a minute or two of your time.👇 https://twitter.com/... Paola Bonomo / @livepaola : Web3 is, for now, a story full of misunderstandings, and sometimes wishful thinking (Ht @levie) https://twitter.com/... Crawford Del Prete / @craw : This is a very thoughtful post on #web3. Thanks @levie for sharing. It's worth going through if you want a concise perspective on a super confusing topic. https://twitter.com/... Bilal Zuberi / @bznotes : Thoughtful thread below: - how does one solve distribution problem without creating alternative big tech companies that just happen to be web3 - not sure consumers are looking for adhoc shitty ads, lots of paywalls, or toll booths/ subscriptions required across the internet. https://twitter.com/... Terence Kawaja / @tkawaja : Excellent thread debunking the near term hoopla about the intersection of web3 and media. https://twitter.com/... Dhruva Pandey / @dhruvapandey : Good to see now folks are atleast talking about other side of things... https://twitter.com/... George Hadjia / @ghadjia : I've been doing a lot of reading on web3 to educate myself on the topic. By no means an expert but struggling to reconcile the unbridled optimism with the vagueness of web3's promises. This thread is fantastic and makes clear that decentralisation probably isn't a panacea. https://twitter.com/... James Avery / @averyj : This is all true - but much like the move to the internet it will take time for the real use cases to emerge. We are in the “copy of the front page of a newspaper on a website” stage right now. https://twitter.com/... See also Mediagazer
Context & Ripple Effects
Ari Paparo's thread lands mid-wave of Web3 skepticism: weeks earlier, a sci-fi writer's critique from inside the tech had already flagged Web3 as expensive, undemocratic, and hostile to ephemerality, and Paparo applies the same utility test to his own domain — arguing decentralization and tokenization address almost nothing in media and advertising.
The rebuttal matters because ad tech has real, unsolved problems to spend its attention on: Stratechery had argued two years prior that media's woes run through ad markets themselves, and Paparo's thread forces the industry to choose between chasing tokenization and fixing those.
First-order effects
- Ad-tech executives and investors pitching blockchain-based media products now face a concrete utility challenge from an industry insider, echoed by respondents like @dustinwstout calling it 'sober perspective' — making tokenization pitches harder to sell uncritically into agencies and publishers.
Second-order effects
- Capital and talent allocated to Web3-for-advertising ventures come under sharper scrutiny; the later framing of the pivot as ideology over utility — a 'collective Theranos' warping the economy toward professional investors — shows where this skepticism converged six months on.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, ad tech's roadmap re-centers on measurable failures — identity loss after Apple's ATT changes, weak moderation, and the junk ad epidemic documented in 2023 — rather than decentralized rails, leaving crypto-adjacent ad products to prove legitimacy or fade.
The trend: Web3's application to advertising is being winnowed out by utility-first critiques from insiders, pushing ad tech investment back toward identity, measurement, and quality problems.