I'll admit, the idea for a version of Gimkit made possible by advertisements sounds not just good, but great. It's Gimkit, but 100% free for all schools & educators.
And it even goes beyond that. Gimkit's growth has been great, but it's also been limited by our paid plan. Sure, we have a free plan, but that can only get you so far. Now how about a completely free version of Gimkit, but with advertisements? With that, imagine how many more students and educators could use Gimkit?
Sounds great, no?
Of course, it does. But free isn't really free.
The version of Gimkit that's supported by ads might not cost educators money to use, but educators would pay in other ways. Here are the three main things educators would be sacrificing if we decided to swap our current subscription model out for an ad-supported model.
Attention
Educators and schools pay for Gimkit. They pay for it because of its effectiveness.
When we work on Gimkit, we have a clear question to answer: What will make Gimkit most effective for educators and students?
Effective makes sense to us. Effective means Gimkit works well in the classroom. Effective means students enjoy the learning experience Gimkit provides. Effective means Gimkit saves teachers time.
Effective ties in directly to improving education.
Advertisements in Gimkit would shift our focus from effectiveness to attention. Without attention, there'd be no money to keep Gimkit running. So, when working on Gimkit, we'd be asking ourselves new kinds of questions. We'd have to start asking questions like: What will attract the most eyeballs to Gimkit?
Attracting eyeballs doesn't make sense to us. Attracting eyeballs means making something flashy, rather than something that works well. Attracting eyeballs means focusing on the number of times someone visits Gimkit rather than the quality of the visit. Attracting eyeballs means adding distractions from the educational content.
Attracting eyeballs doesn't tie in directly to improving education.
Privacy
Sites that run ads make money when somebody clicks on an advertisement. So naturally, you want more click-enticing ads to show up on your site. Well, how do you get more click-enticing ads? You collect personal information on them, and then you tailor more specific ads to them.
Because of this, you're incentivized to collect or utilize as much personal information on someone as you can, because more personal information leads to more personalized ads which leads to more clicks.
This normally means using third parties to help track users across the web. All of a sudden, the focus is on learning what sites users visit, what user interests are, user marital status, user income, user political affiliation, what TV show users are into, what users last purchased online.
Hold on a second, how did we end up in a place where a classroom game show is incentivized to learn about what you last purchased online?
To me, this seems like an invasion of your privacy. We want to worry about making memorable learning experiences, not what you searched for last time you were shopping online.
Who's important?
A free, ad-supported version of Gimkit changes who our customer is, which alters our hierarchy of importance.
Right now the most important group of stakeholders to us are our customers. Our customers are the reason we get to work on Gimkit and so nothing is more important to us than them.
But if educators and schools no longer pay for Gimkit, they'd no longer be our customers. We'd have a new customer, and a new most-important group in our hierarchy: advertisers.
The problem with this is how different the advertiser's needs are than an educator or student's.
An advertiser wants an ad to show at the end of a Gimkit game, perhaps on the results screen. An educator does not want that.
An advertiser wants you to click and leave Gimkit to purchase something. An educator does not want that.
An advertiser wants to be distracting to garner attention. An educator does not want that.
Because advertiser interests and educator interests are so different, we'd be constantly making decisions that helped one side at the expense of the other. And since advertising dollars would be the thing keeping the lights on, guess who we'd have to help more often?
We don't have the problem of choosing sides right now because our customers and our users are one and the same.
Even if it's free, we don't want to run a version of Gimkit where we work to attract your attention, track you across the internet, and have to put you as less important than advertisers.
Right now, you're the reason we can work on Gimkit. You're the reason we can focus on building the most effective version of Gimkit. You're the reason we don't have to care if you use Gimkit every week or month. You're the reason we don't care about your personal information. And you're the reason we can put your wants and needs at the top of our priority list.
So, as cool as it sounds to offer Gimkit for free, we'd rather build Gimkit for you, not for advertisers.
