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Advertising is a cancer. Change my mind. - Online privacy is basically dead because of it. - Consumer manipulation is so well developed that it either borders

Advertising is a cancer. Change my mind. - Online privacy is basically dead because of it. - Consumer manipulation is so well developed that it either borders on, or tips right into mind control territory. - Targeted for political advertisement, it fractures the society and lets demagogues/morons like Trump and Boris Johnson get elected. - It's nickling and diming us out of our attention on our smartphones and websites, assuming no countermeasures taken by the end user - Now, it's threatening to affect artistic and historic integrity of our recorded media by turning into a for-profit Ministry of Truth. What else is it going to destroy?

jfengel 6y ago
I certainly wouldn't try to change your mind. The question is, what would you like to do about it? Advertising is the most frictionless way to monetize content. If you own content and want to make money, advertising requires your consumers to pay nothing and install nothing except what they already have. Everything else is harder to use and less effective. People keep trying and nothing works as well. Users ignore tip jars. They circumvent paywalls. They share passwords. Micropayments cost too much and have too much overhead. We'd all love a good alternative, but nobody's found it yet. We all think that privacy is the worst, except for all the others. As with cancer, we wish it didn't exist, but that's not effective. We need to research cures.
- nonameiguess 6y ago
  What a ridiculous take. The film industry has been tremendously successful at earning money for over a century. It built California well before there was ever a Silicon Valley. Even when disrupted temporarily by the Netflix and Amazons of the world, they're pretty quickly making a comeback and the only way for Netflix and Amazon to continue competing is to make their own content. The most straightforward way to monetize it is to sell it. Plenty of people seem perfectly willing to pay money to Netflix and Disney. The problem of monetization is now every single person with access to a keyboard or camera can post something identical to the content produced by a few hundred thousand other content creators and think they deserve to get paid for it. Nobody seems to be running the Washington Post or the Economist out of business. HBO isn't going anywhere. Whenever James Cameron gets around to finally releasing something again, he'll make another billion. It doesn't mean anyone who can put a camera in their bedroom and post their personal thoughts about life on YouTube deserves to make a living doing that. The answer to how to monetize content is the same as it has always been for any business. Make a sufficiently valuable and differentiated product that consumers are willing to pay for it.

jfengel 6y ago

I certainly wouldn't try to change your mind. The question is, what would you like to do about it? Advertising is the most frictionless way to monetize content. If you own content and want to make money, advertising requires your consumers to pay nothing and install nothing except what they already have. Everything else is harder to use and less effective. People keep trying and nothing works as well. Users ignore tip jars. They circumvent paywalls. They share passwords. Micropayments cost too much and have too much overhead. We'd all love a good alternative, but nobody's found it yet. We all think that privacy is the worst, except for all the others. As with cancer, we wish it didn't exist, but that's not effective. We need to research cures.

nonameiguess 6y ago
What a ridiculous take. The film industry has been tremendously successful at earning money for over a century. It built California well before there was ever a Silicon Valley. Even when disrupted temporarily by the Netflix and Amazons of the world, they're pretty quickly making a comeback and the only way for Netflix and Amazon to continue competing is to make their own content. The most straightforward way to monetize it is to sell it. Plenty of people seem perfectly willing to pay money to Netflix and Disney. The problem of monetization is now every single person with access to a keyboard or camera can post something identical to the content produced by a few hundred thousand other content creators and think they deserve to get paid for it. Nobody seems to be running the Washington Post or the Economist out of business. HBO isn't going anywhere. Whenever James Cameron gets around to finally releasing something again, he'll make another billion. It doesn't mean anyone who can put a camera in their bedroom and post their personal thoughts about life on YouTube deserves to make a living doing that. The answer to how to monetize content is the same as it has always been for any business. Make a sufficiently valuable and differentiated product that consumers are willing to pay for it.