9 ms·

That would be a dream, though I'm sure that this will never happen. The web is cursed, advertising is an immanent feature of the web.

• permo-w 4y ago
  there would of course be unintended consequences. you would probably be making advertising “cool”, which would probably make the adverts that do succeed in filtering through all the more successful. you can imagine it being a treat for people to go to a country that still has advertising. a bit like visiting the US from Europe is now and if you don’t ensure robust public funding for journalism and the arts while doing it, you’d be locking away certain forms of content from poorer people. the BBC shows that it can be done and done well, it would just have to be secured in a way that takes it out of the political arena, as you can be damn sure the first thing a free-market party would do would be to kill that funding so that further down the line they can point and say “look at the failing arts, we need corporate funding back to support this industry” but yeah, the web, with its tendency towards “free” content, has an innate problem that I don’t see going anywhere. there are occasional pushbacks against advertising. the TV industry went that way for a while, but now even Netflix is introducing an ad-supported tier