That's maybe the ultimate economic argument about ads: They may produce value, but probably not enough to be worthwhile if you ignore external costs. My standa

That's maybe the ultimate economic argument about ads: They may produce value, but probably not enough to be worthwhile if you ignore external costs. My standard example is, I strongly suspect that the added bandwidth consumption of ads translates into a greater cost to me (via increased hope and cellular Internet service prices to cover the extra bandwidth consumed) than what people are actually making off of the ads. It's almost like a version of the tragedy of the commons, where, in this case, the "commons" is everyone's personal space.