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Advertising is not free lunch. We pay by being manipulated into spending more. Would have been nice if there was a free source of money, but clearly this cannot

Advertising is not free lunch. We pay by being manipulated into spending more. Would have been nice if there was a free source of money, but clearly this cannot possibly be true. Even if advertisements wouldn't work, the cost of advertisement is still baked into prices. There is also no contract, no trade. People go on a website, ignore any and all terms of services and privacy notes and try to read what's up. Presenting such terms of services etc. is acting in bad faith (as no layperson is able to understand it and no lawyer has time to read all of it). Third party code is executed on their computer. Could be bitcoin miners or even ransomware. Your example with spotify may be true, but you can't ignore that Netflix and others are raking in a lot of money and provide a really expensive product (compared to website articles which yes, were produced for free by many people for years, on some level). I used to subscribe to The Athletic and will probably do so again if there's football in autumn. I really wouldn't mind seeing some ads. On a shoe website, see a banner ad for shoes, with a hyper link to another shoe website. No tracking, no code, just a link.

Alupis 6y ago
> No tracking, no code, just a link. I think the problem there is those types of ads aren't effective. And therefore, advertisers won't pay for them, which then goes back to the original problem of "who's paying the hosting bill"? Let alone paying the salaries of a dozen journalists or content creators. If tastefully done, ads can be discrete and effective. There are bad apples out there, who plaster every pixel of page space with ads and more ads and more ads. I don't think anyone enjoys that experience - but that's not the ads fault, it's the webmaster who did it! Eventually, that strategy won't pay for itself anymore as people stop using the website. Netflix is a strange thing to relate to here, I think. People have always paid for movies - so I think it was a natural progression to pay for a movie streaming service. Websites have mostly always been free - and the ones that successfully run a subscription model absolutely limit their market appeal and userbase. Making people pay for every page view (the effective equivalence of running impression-based ads) is simply not going to work; you'll have an immense challenge to convince people what was previously "free" is now going to cost them actual money directly from their bank account. At the end of the day, there's two arguments going on here. 1) Tracking is a violation of expected privacy, and should not be done. 2) Ads are bad and should go away. Number 1 is true! However, the result of stopping would be unrelated ads being shown to people with practically zero percent chance of converting into a transaction for the advertiser (showing diaper ads to a single man that lives by their self, for example). That could be fine, but again, reduces advertising effectiveness which means advertisers will pay less for the ad space. This could work... but will have ramifications that are potentially not great (more paywalls, for example). Number 2, in my opinion, isn't true, and isn't realistic for the reasons laid out above.

Alupis 6y ago

> No tracking, no code, just a link. I think the problem there is those types of ads aren't effective. And therefore, advertisers won't pay for them, which then goes back to the original problem of "who's paying the hosting bill"? Let alone paying the salaries of a dozen journalists or content creators. If tastefully done, ads can be discrete and effective. There are bad apples out there, who plaster every pixel of page space with ads and more ads and more ads. I don't think anyone enjoys that experience - but that's not the ads fault, it's the webmaster who did it! Eventually, that strategy won't pay for itself anymore as people stop using the website. Netflix is a strange thing to relate to here, I think. People have always paid for movies - so I think it was a natural progression to pay for a movie streaming service. Websites have mostly always been free - and the ones that successfully run a subscription model absolutely limit their market appeal and userbase. Making people pay for every page view (the effective equivalence of running impression-based ads) is simply not going to work; you'll have an immense challenge to convince people what was previously "free" is now going to cost them actual money directly from their bank account. At the end of the day, there's two arguments going on here. 1) Tracking is a violation of expected privacy, and should not be done. 2) Ads are bad and should go away. Number 1 is true! However, the result of stopping would be unrelated ads being shown to people with practically zero percent chance of converting into a transaction for the advertiser (showing diaper ads to a single man that lives by their self, for example). That could be fine, but again, reduces advertising effectiveness which means advertisers will pay less for the ad space. This could work... but will have ramifications that are potentially not great (more paywalls, for example). Number 2, in my opinion, isn't true, and isn't realistic for the reasons laid out above.