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In addition to what pavel_lishin says... > people seem happy to complain but pretty hesitant to pay actual money to reduce them. First, you have to look at th

In addition to what pavel_lishin says... > people seem happy to complain but pretty hesitant to pay actual money to reduce them. First, you have to look at this in the context of the actual economic situation of the average American, which has been, more or less, getting steadily worse in a relative sense for roughly 40-50 years. Second, you can't actually say this with any degree of rigor because in the vast majority of cases, there isn't an option to pay money to reduce the ads. Sure, I could subscribe to YouTube Premium to reduce the number of ads on YouTube—but it wouldn't eliminate sponsored segments of videos, most of it (all of it? I don't actually know the economics off the top of my head) goes to Google rather than to the creators of the videos you watch, and it doesn't do anything about ads outside of YouTube. Even if you were to subscribe to every single service that has an option to do so to remove ads, you would still be seeing intrusive online ads constantly (assuming you weren't using an adblocker). You would still have your personal data sold and sold again to try to squeeze every last drop of profit out of you for people already more wealthy than God. And, as can be seen on places like Netflix and Amazon Prime, there's zero guarantee that subscribing will actually keep the ads away permanently. Given all that, why would most people give up another $9.99 a month just to reduce the number of ads on Yet Another Website?

ngriffiths 2y ago
> First, you have to look at this in the context of the actual economic situation of the average American, which has been, more or less, getting steadily worse in a relative sense for roughly 40-50 years. I don't have a good grasp of the broad economic trends, but the accessibility of ~free, high quality, valuable knowledge (as well as entertaining content) online has exploded in this time frame. That may be unrelated to wages but it certainly has to do with demand. > Second, you can't actually say this with any degree of rigor because in the vast majority of cases, there isn't an option to pay money to reduce the ads. Maybe, but this seems like a problem that could have been solved if it were actually profitable to do so, no? I mean, I guess it's possible that we're in some local minimum where it's really hard to set up a less terrible system. But the simpler explanation is people would rather "pay" with attention than money. I'm honestly not sure though.

ngriffiths 2y ago

> First, you have to look at this in the context of the actual economic situation of the average American, which has been, more or less, getting steadily worse in a relative sense for roughly 40-50 years. I don't have a good grasp of the broad economic trends, but the accessibility of ~free, high quality, valuable knowledge (as well as entertaining content) online has exploded in this time frame. That may be unrelated to wages but it certainly has to do with demand. > Second, you can't actually say this with any degree of rigor because in the vast majority of cases, there isn't an option to pay money to reduce the ads. Maybe, but this seems like a problem that could have been solved if it were actually profitable to do so, no? I mean, I guess it's possible that we're in some local minimum where it's really hard to set up a less terrible system. But the simpler explanation is people would rather "pay" with attention than money. I'm honestly not sure though.