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Ads are the problem in itself. Nobody likes them, at best we tolerate them and or manage to ignore them. So why have something that nobody likes? They're not

• jplayer01 8y ago
  Most normal businesses don't provide free access without payment. Until recently, the only ones that did were newspapers. They were financed through ads and to a minor portion subscriptions. If you remove ads, you remove free internet. That's how it works. Unless you propose taxing everybody.
• pwang 8y ago
  Exactly. Ads are a legacy business model of a legacy distribution system. Too few people have read JPB's excellent "Selling wine without bottles", but that is in full effect here. The problem is that new content-centric business models have not yet emerged. So, some people remain chained to the old paradigms. The crisis we have is a gap in vision. People don't realize that driving cost of information distribution to zero means that it no longer has enough scarcity to force the economic transfer of other scarce resources. Basically, what OSS did for commercial software, the Internet did for anything that fits within a 2D screen. Netflix, NYTimes, Fortnite, JK Rowling, and Jenna Jameson are all competitors in a space whose Pixels*Seconds value is commoditized. Capitalism doesn't thrive unless there is an exponentiating dynamic. The only one available on the Internet is bandwidth capture. Which, for now, translates into attentional capture. With the imminent arrival of P2P web software (e.g. Beaker Browser) and mesh networking, the tides will turn back towards a creator-centric peer network.