When not paying at all is an option people will reliably pick that option. They'll even go into extremes to avoid paying. I know somebody that plays a particular mobile game about an hour each day. Every round (taking 90s or so) it's interrupted by 1-3 mins of ads. It's maddening. She suffers through this instead of paying a one-time $4.99. We're talking about somebody firmly upper middle class.
On the user end:
- People click scam download buttons or fake links and are blasted with scams or malware.
- Nobody I know has ever, not once, purchased something from an ad and been happy with it. The one person I know who did purchase something from a Facebook ad got scammed.
- The actual content people want to watch is delayed or interrupted by constant nonsense that they will never engage with.
So already there is absolutely no incentive as an end user to want ads. Then over on the content creator end:
- Because they work through clicks, ads generate a ton of bad incentives to make divisive content or just otherwise harmful content. See Elsagate for one way this manifests.
- For honest creators who make genuinely good and creative works, ads harm them by consistently underpaying them. Only the very absolute peak of content creators make a livable wage from ads alone. See the rise of Patreon and other such subscription methods that they have had to rely on to get away from ad revenue dependency.
- Ads also harm honest creators by incentivizing bad actors to steal their work, either by direct reuploads on various platforms or by simple plagiarism. See any Facebook page for stolen content or the whole James Somerton expose that happened a couple years ago for the plagiarism bit.
People are making millions/year just by writing articles on Substack. Just look at the "paid leaderboards", number of paid subscribers, and multiply by 70% of the annual price of the newsletter.
Our newsletter is doing mid-6-figures. You simply can't find that content anywhere else, and I am not aware of a newsletter-piracy phenomenon. Even if it existed, I think many people would pay to have guaranteed day-1 access.
And anecdotes aren't data.
Furthermore if there is a content subscription involved, I will only ever consider it via Apple because I refuse to risk having to telephone someone to cancel something I signed up for online.
The well has been poisoned by an obnoxious industry and that industry is unlikely to ever gain even a modicum of respectability.
Forget about those reasons. They don't matter. They can have merit or not, it's irrelevant. Because the behavior takes place regardless. When people can legally avoid paying for something whilst still consuming it, they'll do that.
The idea that if only ads were more privacy-friendly people would not block them or start paying for content at any scale is laughable. They won't. When there's a free path, people take that path.
Further, ads are often sold as a way to keep access "free".
I haven't the time to read it myself at the moment, but the gist appears to be about "attention economy" and how technology affects our lives. There's a blurb and some discussion on goodreads [1].
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38364667-stand-out-of-ou...
With the rise of privacy being breached by American companies and now AI, the way we deal with technology should change altogether.
Basics first, if you only use your PC to access the internet, YouTube, office/excel(LibreOffice) and alike, Mint Cinnamon Linux to replace Windows. No money wasted with licensing and its AI flooding you with ADs
Android and iPhone are such major issue with targeted ADs, GrapheneOS running on Pixel phones are the only way to have a phone and life without having all your personal life leaked, plus ADs.
At home, I run Pihole + Unbound as recursive DNS, OPNSense to force all the DNS traffic to them, and WireGuard to connect to home when I am out. Pihole blocked traffic goes brrrrrrrrrrr
If people knew how much crappy their phones, Windows/Mac PCs are sending out to Microsof, Apple, Meta, Google, etc, to be exchanged into targeted ADs, people would lose their mind lmao
So, um, is this what internet ads are now? Because even if it weren't "ok" to block these ads, I'm sure as shit going to keep blocking them.
YouTube ads are terrifying. Probably others are to, but my opinion to avoid any product showed on internet if possible is vindicated. How can I trust an Axe ad if it's advertised side by side with an obvious scam?
We often use our TV to plan trips using google maps or do some planning using excel sheets with this setup.
If you were given free pizza and a stack of ad flyers, do you have to read the ads? Do you have to even acknowledge them? Can you accept the free food while putting the flyers directly in the trash?
Obviously yes you would toss those ads in the garbage, because what fool would give away food and expect you to look at ads in exchange? So it is with ads online: their business model is not your responsibility and you can ignore stuff (even automatically) if you want, they're your eyes.
I would like to say I've only run into one person like this, but no. I've lost count of how many of these people I've run into. I like to think I'm pretty good at understand other people's point of view, even if I don't agree with it. This is one I have a lot of trouble with.
I'm fine with relevant ads, but I think they should be relevant based on the context around them, not on the viewer. If I go to a website about trout fishing, show me ads that would be useful to a trout fisherman. There is no need to track anyone to do that.
They think the system is thinking "ohh! I bet X will like this pair of shoes! And this is a great deal on them!" when in fact a more accurate model is "Who is willing to pay the most to put a message in front of someone with the following detailed list of characteristics?" and then people bid for the right to manipulate you, so even if 2 companies are trying to sell you the exact same thing that you do want, the one that thinks they can extract more from you will pay more and win the spot.
What I ended up doing is setting up two separate wifi networks, one with the pihole DNS server and one without it. So she can opt to turn it on.
But yeah overall I agree with you, the ads skew the research by whoever is paying the most for marketing BUT they also work as a filter so you only see stuff that people actually spend money to market on. For _some_ types of products the "barrier to entry" in the ad space can guarantee a certain level of quality (or at least reduce the change for scams).
I have always associated online ads with people who are trying to scam me. Like the giant “download” button ads on sites hosting actual software downloads. Decades of dealing with this kind of thing has led to a deep distrust of all online advertising, to the point where I pay for Kagi to not only not have ads in my search engine, but not even support the business model of using ads to fund a website.
I see people get scammed all the time from ads. It’s an easy way for the scammers to funnel users to their site. Most people I know have tried buying something based on a Facebook ad, from some random Shopify site, and never got their purchase.
Profit driven targeted content of any kind, especially ads, are poison. I could never knowingly enable anyone in my household to harm themselves with something so toxic to brain health and quality of life.
In terms of things I want far away from my home and family, surveillance capitalism driven technology ranks up there with meth.
But yeah I tend to agree with you, the companies/products paying for the ads are not necessarily the best ones to buy from.
A lot of this stuff is being purchased with debt. People aren’t happy about their debt, their inability to buy a house, or all the clutter that consumes their home. Yet, in the moment, they are led to believe that a Labubu is what they really desire. It’s not.
These tracking system: it’s just stalking, but done on such a massive scale that, unfortunately, law enforcement and politicians don’t see it that way.
I think if you take ads away from the internet, you'll also take away a lot of the bullshit and inaccurate or misleading information. If no-one is making any money off of it, you'll be left with largely relevant information.
The internet today is like a free to air television network, but I remember a time when it was nothing like that.
Just a gut feeling, but I doubt it. You'll still get a lot of bullshit inaccurate/misleading information, just only pushed by those with the budgets to keep pushing it.
Right-wing podcasters that take money from the Russian government to spread disinformation[0] will still get their checks even if their supplement sponsorships get outlawed.
You can take away all of Alex Jones' money and he'll still find some way to put his nonsense out there.
[0] https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/two-rt-employees-ind...
I think most sensible people are quite competent at ignoring the bullshit, so I would love it if there was less bullshit to wade through to get to the nuggets of useful information which are out there. For those too stupid to look past misleading information, there's no helping them anyway.
Generally the most useful information on the web is freely given. Turns out actual experts frequently like nerding out about their thing and trying to get other people interested in it/to understand some facet of it.
Sure, I could pay for Hackernews or Github or whatever else (these may be bad examples due to the lack of ads) but lets even say the blogpost linked above.
If I could easily send 0.20$ to someone instantly, without much thought, I would.
I was hoping cryptocurrency would solve this, although the complexity and immense fees with most networks really rule that out.
And if I'm actually reading instead of working, isn't the time I spend more of a debt than a declaration that I want to donate as much money as I wasted by not working for X minutes?
Employers haven't paid me for spending a lot of time with them so far.
But let's stick with the argument and claim that our time is worth the hourly rate of whoever creates what we consume. That also doesn't make sense, no matter how charitably I view it, for media.
Even if I want to live in a radically equal society where everyone's time is worth the same amount of money, it would only make sense when trading 1:1 - for example, I can compare my hourly rate to that of my barber, if I pretend there are no corporations, no taxes etc.
But yeah, to be brief, no, it doesn't make sense to give all of your time a monterary value. And when it comes to non-working time, I even find it to be a deeply gross way of thinking. Not regarding the willingness to pay, it's fair to think about your own income and how other workers have to make ends meet and to put it into perspective.
There is plenty of stuff online which is worth the money, just YouTube premium alone is a great bargain with the highest quality content conceivable inside. Or if you prefer empirical evidence, millions of people pay for Spotify.
The standard on the internet is that people send what they want and the recipients render it however they want. That’s how it’s always been, and how it always will be. That includes the possibility that they won’t want to send me anything. But once it is sent, it is my bits in my RAM, to do with what I will.
My project manager wanted to try just changing our endpoints periodically to evade the list. I said to him "You fool! You fell victim to one of the classic blunders. The most famous is 'Never get involved in a land war in Asia,' but only slightly less well known is this: 'Never go up against a software pirate or ad blocker when privacy is on the line!'
I see no way adtech will reform unless conversion rates plummet to the point that the business model becomes unsustainable.
Genuine question: If millions of people ran automated ad-clicking bots, how would your industry survive?
Wait, these people are clearly not just saying: Do Not Track me, they're also saying: Don't show me ads!
Which is a demand that any ad-tech company must take very seriously! We can't ignore the privacy implications of our ad networks. We better avoid any such privacy concerns and comply with the user's expressed priorities.And to risk being seen as preaching, have you read https://drewdevault.com/2025/04/20/2025-04-20-Tech-sector-re... ?
Like in this thread you have people asking what about retailers that take money for product placement, or how will people find products without ads? It's apparently inconceivable that retailers spotlight actual high quality products that they believe in and they do some industry research into what they should carry and actually stand by what they're selling instead of treating their customers like suckers to be sold.
Meanwhile this forces other brands in the same category to also spend on advertising even if they have a better product, thus increasing the cost.
Yes, advertisements make customers aware of a particular category of product but by pushing one specific brand instead of the whole category. I would OK with advertisements which push the whole category, that is positive-sum.
But currently we have an arms race where you have to invest in ads to compete with other products of the same category and that is zero-sum. Inter-category competition should be based on quality/longevity/cost.
This doesn't get rid of people buying what is most well known. In fact without the possibility of being exposed to more niche options people will just go with the incumbents. Advertising allows new competitors in a space to be able to acquire customers based off their value for customers instead of being a wellknown thing.
Ads mean the brand with more money wins. It is completely orthogonal to value/cost.
You can in theory get investors to fund ads for a new brand but it just increases the upfront cost. Organic growth is no longer possible. And who benefits most are the already rich.
Perhaps you searched "laptops". You see a handful of results, and at the top a banner says "Dell XPS - 20% off!"
Have we manipulated you in any way? Have we lied to you? The fact that a laptop is 20% off is valuable information to a user who might consider price in their purchase. What we sell is not advertising, but real estate on your screen
Am I in love with what I do? No. But we dont engage in the kind of advertising market described in the OP's article. What we do is the equivalent of a grocery store putting products on the end cap of an aisle and getting paid extra for the valuable real estate
Other ads just take up screen space and bandwidth: they displace more useful uses of these scarce resources, but they don't cause any direct harm. By contrast, ads targeting people in the market for a good or service actively displace quality signals. In doing so they make quality uneconomical and thus destroy it. They make the world a worse place.
I’m surprised your business model doesn’t completely dominate over the social media algorithmic nonsense. I’d expect people who searched for something to be actually interested in it.
My company operates only on small ecommerce sites. Because we have a huge catalog of products, advertisers can come to us and launch a campaign, and we can automatically deliver across dozens of sites. We can connect small ecommerce sites to large advertisers so that they dont need first party relationships with those advertisers. The way I see it, we are helping smaller retailers be more competitive against Amazon by helping them squeeze more blood from the stone, as we like to say in advertising.
What keeps me up at night is who our customers are. Among our advertisers, we sell ads for alcohol. While those who see our ads generally already have high intent to buy alcohol in the first place, I know from family history that even the slightest temptation can put an alcoholic back at step 0. We dont run too many of those but im still struggling with it
So you see, it is exploitative. Amazon has an advantageous position thanks to its brand name and it allows it to extract money from companies who want their product sold which in turn is extracted from customers. Meanwhile if a better (in terms of quality/longevity/cost) product existed, it would be unable to compete without also being forced to advertise. It has to spend money on ads which would be better spent improving the product (or making it cheaper in the complete absence of advertising).
EDIT: Btw, I do appreciate the honesty. There are absolutely different levels of severity of anti-social / anti-consumer behavior - the exploitation I pointed out has lower severity but a higher scale/prevalence and your alcohol example is a good example of low scale/prevalence but high severity.
If the reason is "because they paid us to" then it leads to the absolute horror show we all see these days.
And no, papering over this issue by maximizing click-through rate along with revenue in your optimisation problem does not cut it. The only advertisements I will accept are those that dont have any weird incentives backing them. Example that is OK: shopkeeper recommending dell laptops because his previous customers have given good reviews for it. But if the shopkeeper takes even a bottle of wine from a dell salesman, oops, I'm blocking that ad.
In my "analysis", approximately zero advertisements in the internet today run the way I accept them. This can mostly be attributed to the fact that google/meta run most of the ads and they definitely take money from merchants:).
It logically follows from this that I need to use an adblocker everywhere.
Same goes for all of marketing and sales: all forms of deceit (something that we are taught as kids to be morally wrong) that are normalised today. Entire trillion dollars companies' primary product is deceit.
It is possible to do these things without deceit, but the tragedy of the commons dictates that the deceitful win.
Unless you are a psychopath, your human instincts will alert you to when you need to show respect or gratitude, or reciprocity is expected from you. You don't need to try to think your way in or out of those things, especially when the other party is a large corporation bothering you over the internet. The whole premise of the article is just nuts.
TLDR: You should blocks ads because they are annoying. Don't overthink it.
I'm blocking unaccountable third party advertising networks that let random javascript code run in my session.
If site operators want to put their ads inline then there really isn't anything I can do about it and I doubt I would even try.
I think the danger is the opposite. Normal (non-psychopathic) people are prone to being manipulated into feeling for inanimate objects, such as corporations, especially if those are driven by exploitative incentives where humanizing _itselves_ is beneficial.
Attention is scarce, but what makes it valuable?
On the other hand, others value my attention because they can make fractions of a cent by making me look at stuff, because there’s a minimal chance they’ll convince me to spend money on stuff of probably little value.
Seems to me they don’t value my attention a lot, and I don’t get much of value out of it.
Attention's value lies in its scarcity and its ability to drive action, connection, and influence.
Every moment you spend focusing on something comes at the cost of not focusing on something else.
Attention is still being consumed.
In the case of children, I actually strongly believe it is immoral to allow then to be inundated with ads. It runs completely counter to teaching them virtues like temperance. It is not just "convenient" but an actual moral imperative to keep them away from those who would push consumerism onto them. This has only become more obvious as climate change worsens as the top problem they will inherit, or as we see 70% of adults in the US now destroying their bodies with disordered eating while still ubiquitous ads encourage them to continue. Ads are a blight. Allowing them to reach the next generation is somewhere between neglect and abuse.
So no, your idea of these things is not "our shared understanding".
fwiw making an offline analogy, I also live in a city where outdoor advertising signs are generally banned (with some exceptions like saying the land is for sale, or small ground-level signs with height/width restrictions at an entrance indicating which businesses are on a lot), so even on their own land/their own space, businesses putting up things like billboards would be spam and disallowed.
Without the malware part, there would obviously be no objection on the grounds that you're "free-riding" since there would be no measurement. But even simple images or text can be and frequently are a malicious attack on one's mind (e.g. soda/fast food ads, links to fraudsters), so even without a software component, it is good security posture to filter them.
The scripting capabilities of the web are meant for people like [0] to use. Using them for surveillance and propaganda distribution is abuse.