I think one way to look at this is that--why are Meta and Google so successful? Because they are basically an index fund on the world economy right. If you want to sell soup in Jakarta you advertise on Instagram. If you want to sell paint in France you advertise on Youtube. If you want to sell T-Shirts in Boston you advertise on Facebook
So then the flipside is that without ads these sellers now have to complete head on with giant companies who have all the brand recognition. Now you need to somehow make your Etsy store viral instead of just putting it in Facebook ads
I LOVE this idea and advocate for it in private convos all the time. Banning ads and enabling (micro-)payments for accessing content that is currently ad-supported would be an unimaginable game-changer.
Definitely not. I don't want to pay for every single website I visit for example, it creates a chilling effect overall as to my want of visiting many different sites.
1) Not every single site is displaying ads, e.g. Codeberg.org
2) aren't you paying indirectly anyways? (With only a part of the revenue actually landing in the bags of the operator of the site - another part is used to fund Google Chrome and people who design ads)
Sure. But the sites I read and others like news site definitely have ads. Imagine news all being a subscription, fewer people would actually be informed, the opposite of what should be the case. NYTimes can do it because they're big enough but most news sites especially smaller or local ones cannot.
Your story is therefore irrelevant to this conversation about advertising versus micropayments. Like, good for you that you don't read news but many people do.
what if it was paid for as part of your internet subscription and you had more than enough credits for all your current internet usage?
wouldn’t it actually feel good to patronize websites you were interested in with actual direct value instead of everyone relying on spyware and obnoxious spam covering content directed at you?
We could just start making it illegal to advertise to children. Without age verification, it's just a burden of proof with the advertiser that their ad isn't targeting children and a ban on age specific target groups for ad platforms.
The best concert I ever went to was one I only knew about from a TV commercial. Somewhere along the way I started blocking ads and commercials aggressively and in hindsight I've noticed that (for example) there's fewer movies/concerts I'm seeing because I've cut off a mechanism for learning what's out there for subjects I'm not in the habit of actively researching.
After 30 years I've stopped watching baseball altogether because the announcers read tiny ads between pitches and at-bats and I can't stand it.
I accidentally let myself get too extreme about deciding that ads are evil. Not surprising I regret that, given the nature of extremism. For better or worse ads are a kind of information, and I should remember that I'm an adult and can tell the difference between the facts and opinions there in.
> The financial incentives to create addictive digital content would instantly disappear, and so would the mechanisms that allow both commercial and political actors to create personalized, reality-distorting bubbles.
It's coupled to the financial incentives of the entities operating the platforms used to create and distribute this content (Google, Meta, ...). And as we depend on them in so many aspects of our life unfortunately, they'll initially start acting as usual when being "regulated":
"We're so sorry dear $REGION_OF_THE_WORLD, your legislators declared our products as ads. Due to how we've built these products (Pixel Phone, Gmail, WhatsApp, ...), we can't sell them to you in a legal way anymore. Yes, we made a ton of money from you, but it's your government's fault that you now loose access to what feels like essential communication services."
We all know it's been different in the early 2000s, but today these distribution/communication channels only exist because there's money to be made. We can't take them for granted and just expect different content on YouTube, non-addictive TikTok and less privacy-invasive Gmail or search engines.
I'm glad the author acknowledges this:
> Word-of-mouth and community networks worked just fine. First-party websites and online communities would now improve on that.
Changing behavior and expectations will be necessary; and I'm all here for it. I'm hosting my own emails since 2013. *DAV works just fine and I never uploaded contacts or calendar events to iCloud. I pay for search results. And even though I like the iPhone or would prefer a MacBook, I could reactive my 10yrs old "gaming PC" as a Linux workstation to fulfill my computing needs.
I understand this is not for everyone, but I hope that after the band-aid got ripped off, the digital life will improve to become easily accessible again while staying privacy friendly and pro society.
I'm blown away by author's refusal to spend even a second to adversarially pressure-test his idea and try to imagine for a second what the world would realistically looked like with advertisement banned.
Like, the movie industry as a whole cannot exist without advertisement. Nobody would spend hundreds of millions of dollars on production of the scale of Odyssey, if there's no way to communicate to enough people about the movie's existence so they could come to a theater on a given date and pay to watch it.
How can someone take risks and spend time and capital inventing or building a new product if there's no reliable way to let potentially interested people know about it other than word of mouth? What about antisocial people who don't have friends and prefer to not talk to strangers? How are they supposed to ever find out about new shit that could change their lives?
Am I allowed to walk around saying "I really like product X" out loud? If not, then it feels like a freedom of speech problem. If yes, how can you be sure I'm not financially or some other way incentivized to do so by the company producing product X?
The fact that the author doesn't even attempt to engage with any of these questions makes articles like these really infuriating to read.
Imagine an empty cafeteria. You and your friend enter, get your meal, sit down, and enjoy quiet conversation. Then two other people do the same thing and, because your voices reverberate in the room, you and your friend begin to talk a little louder. As more people enter, the ambient volume increases until no one can hear themself think, never mind hear the person across the table from them.
That is how advertising seems to me. If only one person hired false witnesses, their hires might rightly be consigned to the eighth circle of Hell where they belong. But because everyone hires false witnesses, it's become an operating expense necessary to overcome the ambient lying.
I despise advertising, but anecdotally, I can think of three ads in the past week that informed me about products I didn’t know existed but would enjoy. I also learned about multiple new games releasing, sporting events that were happening, etc. The claim that ads are not at all informative is incorrect.
That being said, I also block as many ads as possible from my life, so the few I actively notice tend to be more noticeable.
Every idea taken to extreme becomes unbearable. I ask friends for recommendations on what to read or watch, and I enjoy doing that. But if they would follow me around everywhere and keep suggesting things non stop purely because they make money out of it then they would stop being my friends very quickly.
You could have a service that lets you look for promotional information, only when you want.
And lets you configure it from a completely random choice of ad, to something tailored for what you're really looking for at the moment (as opposed to the surveillance industry trying to read your mind).
If you steal the idea please give me a slice of the revenue xD (although it would be best if it were not for profit, so that there could be a single one)
Hard to quantify the benefits, but I think anyone other than advertisers would say it's a vast improvement. I cannot objectively prove that these cities, public spaces are more beautiful without ads, but all of us know that it is true. Then again you have places like times square where ads are integral to character of the place.
A happy middle ground might be a designated billboard zone (e.g. Times Square), with billboards outside a certain area being outlawed, or restricted by size.
But the Devil is always in the details: how would businesses advertise their presence? A sign is an ad of sorts, and regulations would have to be drawn up for every type of sign that might exist: size, wording, color, etc, lest it be deemed too "advertise-y."
How about mom-and-pop businesses or sole proprietors? Would it be illegal to tack your business card to the local laundromat bulletin board? All these questions, and many more, would have to be answered in the quest to fully (or nearly fully) ban ads.
This isn't rigorous of course, but "free speech" has come to mean oligarchs and corporations more-or-less outright buying politicians and supreme court judges, and media that's limited to touting some oligarch's best interests, and carrying very invasive, targeted advertising. When ordinary people do manage to offer up an opinion on a larger scale, they're cancelled or worse, doxxed and targeted by something like Alex Jones' or Trump's armies of followers.
So you think free speech only benefits Trump and his friends?
Have you stopped for a split second and thought about what can happen to YOU, you know, someone who seem to have issues with the current president, if there is no free speech?
I liked it a whole lot better when advertising pharmaceuticals and legal services were still illegal, like it was for the better part of the 20th century.
It had always been unethical since at least the 19th century, before it was ever regulated overwhelmingly, so the regulations were mainly just codifying the common respectability that was already established from the most honest business operators.
Even if tobacco was allowed in ways that are no longer OK.
I used to know one of the great ad execs from Mama Bell and he told me nothing happens in this world until a person decides to trade a dollar for something.
How do they decide such things? How do people become aware of what things are available for purchase?
Another thing he said was that they knew half of their ad spend was "wasted" on people who would never buy what you have to sell.
The feeling I get from the author is that targeted advertising is the problem, which also has a 50%+ waste factor (due in large part to fraud). I suspect it is unlikely all the complexities of contemporary marketing and advertising are worth it.
Also worth considering to what extent the author's website is a form of advertisement itself.
> feeling I get from the author is that targeted advertising is the problem
Non-targeted advertising is also a blight. If you've never visited a place where billboards are illegal, it may be hard to imagine what a relief it is to be free of them.
yeah, and now those trucks with video on the side they drive around, all that stuff needs to end, citizens united too while we're at it (possibly a pre-req)
That would be a phenomenal ROI. In almost all advertising contexts the hit rate is far, far lower. Resulting in everyone drowning in ads to hit the few targets.
To the commenters saying, "but how will people/companies know what to buy?"...
1) Through the same high-quality information channels you usually use today: customer reviews, word of mouth, point of sale, and lived experience. For B2B, you could still have industry events or demos where it is essentially a physical opt-in for advertising.
2) I could not possibly care. The offsetting benefit of living in a world where I am not surrounded by messages trying to deceive me into spending money is well worth losing whatever tiny signal might be in that noise.
That ad exec certainly had a myopic point of view. Just like the old saying, "If you wear shoes, the world is covered with leather."
For sure, our economy depends on buying and selling, and buying and selling depends on advertising. Like other things that can be abused, advertising needs regulation.
But to say that "nothing" happens without money changing hands ignores a vast swath of the human experience. I pity the person who thinks that everything has a price in dollars and cents.
I believe the comment about trading a dollar is more a comment on money being the medium of exchange. Humanity had a history without money, and while some bartering still exists, by and large we live in a society where money is how we trade in situations where you have something I want, but I lack something you want.
Maybe it's not possible (tried and failed or just technical fantasy), but if the ad market could be inverted where I could manage what I am and am not interested in, as well as sell feedback on the ad (couldn't understand the value prop, thought it was dumb, loved it, etc) where the end user is not the product but a partner in that marketplace.
I've not thought it through deeply, but the notion intrigued me.
Flip side of it is - I love not seeing advertisements, of any type.
Sponsorblock and uBlock Origin makes YouTube a whole different experience. Locally backed-up or on-demand TV shows are so much more bingeable than the ones on DVR. I love watching livestreams and not being pulled aside for a 30 second sponsored interruption. It makes me giddy with excitement paying for software and media that does not have any advertisement in it whatsoever.
The big picture is great and all, but watching something like the Super Bowl you get a sense of how wasteful all that marketing is. If half those companies reinvested their ad budget into their product, they'd be more likely to earn my money than if they jumped over a dolphin with a jet ski to promote H&R Block or Polymarket.
Marketing has always been one big, slippery slope of transgression that could always benefit from a reset.
I wholeheartedly agree and put effort into not seeing ads as well. At the same time, there are companies I like doing business with that I would never have known about were it not for their advertising, marketing, and/or sponsorships.
If only there were some institution full of independently minded individuals who could tell us, plainly and evenhandedly, without undue influence, about products we might be interested in.
advertising IS illegal in my little corner of the world, I have never allowed advertising in my house, no tv, no radio, tinkered with browsers that block everything but HTML by default, and a whole layered process to access anything more elaborite.
no subscriptions, have even gone to useing cash for most personal purchases.
I do have several web sites, and all of my work comes through those, but all of that is from deliberate searches made by people looking for my services, and there is no promotions on other platforms.
Works for me!
> Think about what's happened since 2016: Populists exploit ad marketplaces, using them to bypass traditional media gatekeepers and deliver tailored messages to susceptible audiences.
I'm neither a fan of advertising nor Trump, but this reads like yet another patronizing think piece about how the wrong people get a vote and it's terrible that they use it in ways of which the author does not approve. "If only there were some way to control what these people say and hear, we would not have such problems as Trump."
The problem with controlling the flow of information, besides being morally reprehensible, is that it leads inevitably to ignoring problems that do not directly affect or concern the gatekeepers, like rural economic devastation. As well, these censorious advocates always imagine the mechanisms of control will only be used by people they agree with, never imagining the mechanisms of control will be used by their political opponents.
The author later reveals the agenda:
> “But it's free speech!” Bullshit. No one is entitled to yell at you “GET 20% OFF THIS UNDERWEAR YOU GLANCED AT YESTERDAY” with a dopamine megaphone in your bedroom. And to track 90% of your life to know when and how to say it. That's not free speech, that's harassment.
A fair and honest reckoning with the question would acknowledge the problems such a ban would introduce with free speech, not simply dismiss them as he does here. If you make a thing, and then you tell people about the thing, then you transgress against the advertising ban. The idea is nonsense.
> What if we made all advertising illegal? It's such a wild idea that I've never heard it in the public discourse.
Local jurisdictions have restricted or even forbidden outdoor advertising since it was invented.
Related:
Sao Paulo: A city with no outdoor advertisements (2013) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36586632 - July 2023 (413 comments)
São Paulo’s Outdoor Advertising Ban (2016) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20725409 - Aug 2019 (95 comments)
True, but the OXO Tower in London is a terrific example of a cheeky yet elegant workaround.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxo_Tower#History
I think one way to look at this is that--why are Meta and Google so successful? Because they are basically an index fund on the world economy right. If you want to sell soup in Jakarta you advertise on Instagram. If you want to sell paint in France you advertise on Youtube. If you want to sell T-Shirts in Boston you advertise on Facebook
So then the flipside is that without ads these sellers now have to complete head on with giant companies who have all the brand recognition. Now you need to somehow make your Etsy store viral instead of just putting it in Facebook ads
I LOVE this idea and advocate for it in private convos all the time. Banning ads and enabling (micro-)payments for accessing content that is currently ad-supported would be an unimaginable game-changer.
Definitely not. I don't want to pay for every single website I visit for example, it creates a chilling effect overall as to my want of visiting many different sites.
1) Not every single site is displaying ads, e.g. Codeberg.org
2) aren't you paying indirectly anyways? (With only a part of the revenue actually landing in the bags of the operator of the site - another part is used to fund Google Chrome and people who design ads)
Sure. But the sites I read and others like news site definitely have ads. Imagine news all being a subscription, fewer people would actually be informed, the opposite of what should be the case. NYTimes can do it because they're big enough but most news sites especially smaller or local ones cannot.
I do not read news sites and I do not consider myself as uninformed.
Your story is therefore irrelevant to this conversation about advertising versus micropayments. Like, good for you that you don't read news but many people do.
where are you getting informed about the news?
Mostly family or friends.
Not the best source of news, I'm afraid.
In terms how one can consider oneself about news, I think this is closer to uninformed than the other way. But that's me.
what if it was paid for as part of your internet subscription and you had more than enough credits for all your current internet usage?
wouldn’t it actually feel good to patronize websites you were interested in with actual direct value instead of everyone relying on spyware and obnoxious spam covering content directed at you?
We could just start making it illegal to advertise to children. Without age verification, it's just a burden of proof with the advertiser that their ad isn't targeting children and a ban on age specific target groups for ad platforms.
What's the advantage to stopping there?
Oh it's just saving me money during checkout
Do you really want to give platforms more incentives to push for age verification?
The best concert I ever went to was one I only knew about from a TV commercial. Somewhere along the way I started blocking ads and commercials aggressively and in hindsight I've noticed that (for example) there's fewer movies/concerts I'm seeing because I've cut off a mechanism for learning what's out there for subjects I'm not in the habit of actively researching.
After 30 years I've stopped watching baseball altogether because the announcers read tiny ads between pitches and at-bats and I can't stand it.
I accidentally let myself get too extreme about deciding that ads are evil. Not surprising I regret that, given the nature of extremism. For better or worse ads are a kind of information, and I should remember that I'm an adult and can tell the difference between the facts and opinions there in.
> I accidentally let myself get too extreme about deciding that ads are evil. Not surprising I regret that, given the nature of extremism.
Sounds like a good argumentation to consume some cocaine.
Not consuming it at all is just too extreme
Sure. And water. And food too.
As always there is also the gradual sunset option: slap a tax on it and increase over time.
- That's easier to get past the lobbies.
- It still surfaces unexpected consequences but reduces impact.
> The financial incentives to create addictive digital content would instantly disappear, and so would the mechanisms that allow both commercial and political actors to create personalized, reality-distorting bubbles.
It's coupled to the financial incentives of the entities operating the platforms used to create and distribute this content (Google, Meta, ...). And as we depend on them in so many aspects of our life unfortunately, they'll initially start acting as usual when being "regulated":
"We're so sorry dear $REGION_OF_THE_WORLD, your legislators declared our products as ads. Due to how we've built these products (Pixel Phone, Gmail, WhatsApp, ...), we can't sell them to you in a legal way anymore. Yes, we made a ton of money from you, but it's your government's fault that you now loose access to what feels like essential communication services."
We all know it's been different in the early 2000s, but today these distribution/communication channels only exist because there's money to be made. We can't take them for granted and just expect different content on YouTube, non-addictive TikTok and less privacy-invasive Gmail or search engines.
I'm glad the author acknowledges this:
> Word-of-mouth and community networks worked just fine. First-party websites and online communities would now improve on that.
Changing behavior and expectations will be necessary; and I'm all here for it. I'm hosting my own emails since 2013. *DAV works just fine and I never uploaded contacts or calendar events to iCloud. I pay for search results. And even though I like the iPhone or would prefer a MacBook, I could reactive my 10yrs old "gaming PC" as a Linux workstation to fulfill my computing needs.
I understand this is not for everyone, but I hope that after the band-aid got ripped off, the digital life will improve to become easily accessible again while staying privacy friendly and pro society.
It'll get replaced with something even more annoying that isn't called advertising but is functionally identical.
People make things then talk about them. It's normal.
A careful read of this piece should show you why advertising was invented in the first place and why it's fundamental to commerce.
Unless you want to go back to buying from your neighbor or buying only what your limited circle of friends can recommend you?
Why product needs advertisement? Because it's terrible and is unable to justify it's existence. Good product is advertisement to itself.
Imagine that market is filled only by useful products.
I'm blown away by author's refusal to spend even a second to adversarially pressure-test his idea and try to imagine for a second what the world would realistically looked like with advertisement banned.
Like, the movie industry as a whole cannot exist without advertisement. Nobody would spend hundreds of millions of dollars on production of the scale of Odyssey, if there's no way to communicate to enough people about the movie's existence so they could come to a theater on a given date and pay to watch it.
How can someone take risks and spend time and capital inventing or building a new product if there's no reliable way to let potentially interested people know about it other than word of mouth? What about antisocial people who don't have friends and prefer to not talk to strangers? How are they supposed to ever find out about new shit that could change their lives?
Am I allowed to walk around saying "I really like product X" out loud? If not, then it feels like a freedom of speech problem. If yes, how can you be sure I'm not financially or some other way incentivized to do so by the company producing product X?
The fact that the author doesn't even attempt to engage with any of these questions makes articles like these really infuriating to read.
Imagine an empty cafeteria. You and your friend enter, get your meal, sit down, and enjoy quiet conversation. Then two other people do the same thing and, because your voices reverberate in the room, you and your friend begin to talk a little louder. As more people enter, the ambient volume increases until no one can hear themself think, never mind hear the person across the table from them.
That is how advertising seems to me. If only one person hired false witnesses, their hires might rightly be consigned to the eighth circle of Hell where they belong. But because everyone hires false witnesses, it's become an operating expense necessary to overcome the ambient lying.
I despise advertising, but anecdotally, I can think of three ads in the past week that informed me about products I didn’t know existed but would enjoy. I also learned about multiple new games releasing, sporting events that were happening, etc. The claim that ads are not at all informative is incorrect.
That being said, I also block as many ads as possible from my life, so the few I actively notice tend to be more noticeable.
Every idea taken to extreme becomes unbearable. I ask friends for recommendations on what to read or watch, and I enjoy doing that. But if they would follow me around everywhere and keep suggesting things non stop purely because they make money out of it then they would stop being my friends very quickly.
You could have a service that lets you look for promotional information, only when you want.
And lets you configure it from a completely random choice of ad, to something tailored for what you're really looking for at the moment (as opposed to the surveillance industry trying to read your mind).
If you steal the idea please give me a slice of the revenue xD (although it would be best if it were not for profit, so that there could be a single one)
Don't need to ban advertising everywhere
Just need to ban advertising on the internet
When I first used the internet, advertising, i.e., commercial use, was prohibited
> In France, there has been some ban on advertising alcohol, cigarettes.
So technically, it's possible but of course politician's corruption is a big issue..
Cities have banned billboards. Sao Paulo did it, so did parts of London: https://99percentinvisible.org/article/clean-city-law-secret...
Hard to quantify the benefits, but I think anyone other than advertisers would say it's a vast improvement. I cannot objectively prove that these cities, public spaces are more beautiful without ads, but all of us know that it is true. Then again you have places like times square where ads are integral to character of the place.
A happy middle ground might be a designated billboard zone (e.g. Times Square), with billboards outside a certain area being outlawed, or restricted by size.
But the Devil is always in the details: how would businesses advertise their presence? A sign is an ad of sorts, and regulations would have to be drawn up for every type of sign that might exist: size, wording, color, etc, lest it be deemed too "advertise-y."
How about mom-and-pop businesses or sole proprietors? Would it be illegal to tack your business card to the local laundromat bulletin board? All these questions, and many more, would have to be answered in the quest to fully (or nearly fully) ban ads.
i am in favor of this. of course, in America, that would mean no 1st Amendment which I am okay with doing away with as it has served its purpose.
I would say the exception would be one must speak with 100% certainty. No 'virtually no side effects' and none of this 'best burger in 200 miles'.
> ...no 1st Amendment which I am okay with doing away with as it has served its purpose.
Has it? I would love to here the reasoning behind this.
This isn't rigorous of course, but "free speech" has come to mean oligarchs and corporations more-or-less outright buying politicians and supreme court judges, and media that's limited to touting some oligarch's best interests, and carrying very invasive, targeted advertising. When ordinary people do manage to offer up an opinion on a larger scale, they're cancelled or worse, doxxed and targeted by something like Alex Jones' or Trump's armies of followers.
So you think free speech only benefits Trump and his friends?
Have you stopped for a split second and thought about what can happen to YOU, you know, someone who seem to have issues with the current president, if there is no free speech?
Just change it to right to express your opinions, which is what was probably meant by the founding fathers.
For sure they didn't mean right to bribe and right of companies to "speak", anyhow, so it needs to changed in any case.
Opinions are the positions of those outside of power. Opinions with a sword quickly become fact or treated with the same weight.
Eh?
I liked it a whole lot better when advertising pharmaceuticals and legal services were still illegal, like it was for the better part of the 20th century.
It had always been unethical since at least the 19th century, before it was ever regulated overwhelmingly, so the regulations were mainly just codifying the common respectability that was already established from the most honest business operators.
Even if tobacco was allowed in ways that are no longer OK.
I used to know one of the great ad execs from Mama Bell and he told me nothing happens in this world until a person decides to trade a dollar for something.
How do they decide such things? How do people become aware of what things are available for purchase?
Another thing he said was that they knew half of their ad spend was "wasted" on people who would never buy what you have to sell.
The feeling I get from the author is that targeted advertising is the problem, which also has a 50%+ waste factor (due in large part to fraud). I suspect it is unlikely all the complexities of contemporary marketing and advertising are worth it.
Also worth considering to what extent the author's website is a form of advertisement itself.
> feeling I get from the author is that targeted advertising is the problem
Non-targeted advertising is also a blight. If you've never visited a place where billboards are illegal, it may be hard to imagine what a relief it is to be free of them.
yeah, and now those trucks with video on the side they drive around, all that stuff needs to end, citizens united too while we're at it (possibly a pre-req)
> half of their ad spend was "wasted"
That would be a phenomenal ROI. In almost all advertising contexts the hit rate is far, far lower. Resulting in everyone drowning in ads to hit the few targets.
To the commenters saying, "but how will people/companies know what to buy?"... 1) Through the same high-quality information channels you usually use today: customer reviews, word of mouth, point of sale, and lived experience. For B2B, you could still have industry events or demos where it is essentially a physical opt-in for advertising. 2) I could not possibly care. The offsetting benefit of living in a world where I am not surrounded by messages trying to deceive me into spending money is well worth losing whatever tiny signal might be in that noise.
If I want to know what's available for purchase, I check out https://geizhals.de or visit a store and look what's there.
Hope I could give insight into a largely ad free life
That ad exec certainly had a myopic point of view. Just like the old saying, "If you wear shoes, the world is covered with leather."
For sure, our economy depends on buying and selling, and buying and selling depends on advertising. Like other things that can be abused, advertising needs regulation.
But to say that "nothing" happens without money changing hands ignores a vast swath of the human experience. I pity the person who thinks that everything has a price in dollars and cents.
“Nothing” can easily be understood as a rhetorical emphasis in that quote.
I believe the comment about trading a dollar is more a comment on money being the medium of exchange. Humanity had a history without money, and while some bartering still exists, by and large we live in a society where money is how we trade in situations where you have something I want, but I lack something you want.
Maybe it's not possible (tried and failed or just technical fantasy), but if the ad market could be inverted where I could manage what I am and am not interested in, as well as sell feedback on the ad (couldn't understand the value prop, thought it was dumb, loved it, etc) where the end user is not the product but a partner in that marketplace.
I've not thought it through deeply, but the notion intrigued me.
Flip side of it is - I love not seeing advertisements, of any type.
Sponsorblock and uBlock Origin makes YouTube a whole different experience. Locally backed-up or on-demand TV shows are so much more bingeable than the ones on DVR. I love watching livestreams and not being pulled aside for a 30 second sponsored interruption. It makes me giddy with excitement paying for software and media that does not have any advertisement in it whatsoever.
The big picture is great and all, but watching something like the Super Bowl you get a sense of how wasteful all that marketing is. If half those companies reinvested their ad budget into their product, they'd be more likely to earn my money than if they jumped over a dolphin with a jet ski to promote H&R Block or Polymarket.
Marketing has always been one big, slippery slope of transgression that could always benefit from a reset.
I wholeheartedly agree and put effort into not seeing ads as well. At the same time, there are companies I like doing business with that I would never have known about were it not for their advertising, marketing, and/or sponsorships.
Legislating advertisement as an opt-in experience would probably satisfy both of us.
If only there were some institution full of independently minded individuals who could tell us, plainly and evenhandedly, without undue influence, about products we might be interested in.
I've almost never used YouTube with ads, and I'd argue that it's instead insane to have long ads breaking your experience so often.
Of course it's a costly service that needs to at least recover the costs, but yeah not with full-screen ads please.
If they want to call piracy theft, then I reserve the right to call advertising theft of my attention
sorry, not buying it
advertising IS illegal in my little corner of the world, I have never allowed advertising in my house, no tv, no radio, tinkered with browsers that block everything but HTML by default, and a whole layered process to access anything more elaborite. no subscriptions, have even gone to useing cash for most personal purchases. I do have several web sites, and all of my work comes through those, but all of that is from deliberate searches made by people looking for my services, and there is no promotions on other platforms. Works for me!
> Think about what's happened since 2016: Populists exploit ad marketplaces, using them to bypass traditional media gatekeepers and deliver tailored messages to susceptible audiences.
I'm neither a fan of advertising nor Trump, but this reads like yet another patronizing think piece about how the wrong people get a vote and it's terrible that they use it in ways of which the author does not approve. "If only there were some way to control what these people say and hear, we would not have such problems as Trump."
The problem with controlling the flow of information, besides being morally reprehensible, is that it leads inevitably to ignoring problems that do not directly affect or concern the gatekeepers, like rural economic devastation. As well, these censorious advocates always imagine the mechanisms of control will only be used by people they agree with, never imagining the mechanisms of control will be used by their political opponents.
The author later reveals the agenda:
> “But it's free speech!” Bullshit. No one is entitled to yell at you “GET 20% OFF THIS UNDERWEAR YOU GLANCED AT YESTERDAY” with a dopamine megaphone in your bedroom. And to track 90% of your life to know when and how to say it. That's not free speech, that's harassment.
A fair and honest reckoning with the question would acknowledge the problems such a ban would introduce with free speech, not simply dismiss them as he does here. If you make a thing, and then you tell people about the thing, then you transgress against the advertising ban. The idea is nonsense.