> Along the way I've also adopted a new mental model for advertising. Basically I think of attention as a currency and advertising as a foreign exchange. When y

> Along the way I've also adopted a new mental model for advertising. Basically I think of attention as a currency and advertising as a foreign exchange. When you use an ad-supported service, you're not "the product," you are the customer. You pay with attention, and the service trades some of that attention to an advertiser in exchange for regular currency. This is missing what I think is the most important value proposition of online advertising these days: your profile, your data, what you like, so that you, personally, can be psychologically squeezed for money. "Your attention" is a small percentage of the value proposition compared to the tracking and all the things that tracking enables (profile creation, targeted advertising, etc.).