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> Try this thought experiment from the article - imagine a world without advertising. Products would still exist. Commerce would still happen. But newspapers,

> Try this thought experiment from the article - imagine a world without advertising. Products would still exist. Commerce would still happen. But newspapers, TV and Youtube would die out.

Henchman21 2y ago
Very little of value would be lost.
immibis 2y ago
Is that such a bad thing? Are they really providing that much value? The remaining YouTube channels would be concentrated around the ones that are of higher quality, rather than easy slop produced to push ads. Nobody would try to clone someone else's channel for money. They would only be produced by people who were passionate about that topic. There would be fewer channels by passionate people, but the percentage would be much higher, so it's not necessarily a worse situation overall. TV has always cost money - you pay for satellite or cable, and the free-to-air programming available to you is overtly subsidized by your government - they shouldn't need to double-dip by showing ads. We used to pay for newspaper subscriptions too. A lot of newspapers are trying to go back to that, but it's a market for lemons. Maybe if advertising was banned, we'd each subscribe to one or two online newspapers and discover which ones are decent and which ones are crap. Remember, it's harder to make someone who was paying $0.00 pay $0.01, than to make someone who was paying $10 pay $20. Would the market be more efficient at price discovery if there was no $0.00 at all?
- worik 2y ago
  > Maybe if advertising was banned, we'd each subscribe to one or two online newspapers and discover which ones are decent and which ones are crap. I keep hoping that decent aggregators will emerge - or I will find the ones that exist. I am happy to pay for news, but I cannot afford to pay for all the ones I want, and I cannot afford the time to read all I want. I would like to pay good aggregators....
- vitus 2y ago
  > The remaining YouTube channels would be concentrated around the ones that are of higher quality, rather than easy slop produced to push ads. Nobody would try to clone someone else's channel for money. They would only be produced by people who were passionate about that topic. There would be fewer channels by passionate people, but the percentage would be much higher, so it's not necessarily a worse situation overall. I have some questions about your vision. - How many content creators would no longer be able to make passion videos as their full-time job because they're no longer getting revenue-sharing from YouTube? - Okay, some content creators also have Patreon etc. What's the incentive to post these videos publicly for free, as opposed to hoarding them behind their Patreon paywall? - What's the incentive for YouTube to continue existing as a free-to-watch service? Or even at all? Take away the ad money, and I can't imagine that the remaining subscription revenue comes anywhere close to paying for the infrastructure.
  - charcircuit 2y ago
    The vast majority of Patreon contributions come from the YouTuber advertising it.
  - azemetre 2y ago
    Who says we have to keep using YouTube for this vision? There's no reason why the government can't nationalize these services if they are so vital for a variety of commerce. Or at the very least regulate it as a utility and allow users the ability to bring in their own advertising.
    - vitus 2y ago
      I'm not saying that we have to keep using YouTube for this vision, but GP stated that there would be fewer YouTube channels (but not none!). In that scenario, what incentives are there to provide a video-sharing platform that is a net negative to operate? I don't think that nationalizing such a service makes much sense either. What motivation does a government have to operate a service for global benefit (as opposed to just its citizens)? Surely we shouldn't want a US YouTube, a French YouTube, a Japanese YouTube, etc. > Or at the very least regulate it as a utility and allow users the ability to bring in their own advertising. Doesn't that run counter to the premise of banning advertising in the first place?
pseufaux 2y ago
TV and YouTube would definitely suffer. Not sure if that's an issue or benefit. But I'm not sure newspapers or journalism would be so bad. My expectation would be that people would still need/want information from somewhere might begin paying to get it.
- LunaSea 2y ago
  They already have this choice and don't pick it.
  - dcow 2y ago
    Choosing “free” in free vs paid is not the same as choosing “none” in none vs paid.
jajko 2y ago
Yeah, some loss, a very visible one. But what we are losing now is much bigger, albeit much harder to point finger on and quantify. Some inner quality and strength that probably doesnt even have a name. Most people never even thought about ads that way. For my own little part - firefox and ublock origin since it exists, on phone too. To the point of almost physically allergic to ads, aby ads, they cause a lasting disgust with given brand. I detest being manipulated, and this is not even hidden, a very crude and primitive way.
- PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
  > I detest being manipulated It's even worse when you can't even be detested because you don't realize it is happening.
chronogram 2y ago
News would still exist and would not be competing with engagement driven news because there's no engagement=ad views. I wager it would be very helpful to news. TV would absolutely still exist, given that people pay for it and there is a big industry around ad-free streaming services already.
- LunaSea 2y ago
  Almost no online newspaper survives from subscriptions. Non public broadcasters are rarely if ever and free. Meaning that their business model requires this as revenue to survive.
  - azemetre 2y ago
    If there is such a small ability for the average person to make SMB viable without massive subsidies by advertisers maybe it's time to argue that there should be more public investment and grants given to independent journalists that meet a certain criteria.
    - ipaddr 2y ago
      Government paid press? How long before someone realizes they better write inline with current government views. Who would a Trump government hire/fire who would a Biden government hire/fire.. independent of what?
      - wild_egg 2y ago
        Many countries have this in various forms and it works out fine. Generally illegal to interfere with the press and a good way to lose the next election
      - azemetre 2y ago
        You realize NPR and PBS, along with the foreign US press (name escapes me), have been a thing for 50+ years right? Laws can be written in a way to guarantee independence from despots too. Idk it feels better than this whole private affair where rules are arbitrary and the only thing that matters is how many ad impressions you sell.
inopinatus 2y ago
only the shit ones
cauch 2y ago
Advertisement get the source money from the viewers, it does not create any money in itself. So, if advertisement is banned, people will have more money, and this money can be used to finance what they want to consume. This is something that I still struggle to wrap my head around: if a company is paying X$ for advertisement, it means that people subjected to this advertisement will give Y$ to this company that they would not have paid otherwise, Y higher than X, otherwise there is no reason for this company to pay for advertisement. Yet everyone is saying "yeah, advertisement, I don't care, I just ignore it". Surely it cannot be true.
- parkaboy 2y ago
  Even if it seems like everyone is saying this, it's just statistically not true / in the aggregate, at least in the context of direct online ads. Otherwise the direct ad industry would be totally dead (ad performance is measured to death by companies). Conversion (getting someone to purchase) at scale with ads is not so simple as person sees ad, clicks, and buys. There are many steps along the funnel and sometimes ads can be used in concert with other channels (influencer content, sponsored news articles, etc). Within direct ads you typically have multiple steps depending on how cold or warm (e.g. have they seen or interacted with your content previously) the lead is when viewing the ad and you tailor the ad content accordingly to try to keep pushing the person down the funnel. Generally if you know your customer persona well and have good so-called product-market-fit, then (1) you will be able to build a funnel that works at scale. So then (2) the question is does the cost to convert a customer / CAC fit within the profit margin, which is much more difficult to unpack. However, it's worth keeping in mind that digital ad costs are essentially invented by the ad platform. There is a market-type of force. If digital ads become less effective and the CAC goes too high across an industry/sector, the platform may be forced to reduce the cost to deliver ads if the channel just doesn't make enough financial sense for enough businesses. All this is to say, the system does/can work. Tends to work better for large established companies or startups with lots of funding. In general, not a suggested approach as a first channel for a small startup/small business. Building up effective funnels is incredibly expensive and takes a lot of time in my depressing personal experience.
  - 2y ago
Enginerrrd 2y ago
I don't know. I would GLADLY pay for ad-free youtube if the price were set at what they'd otherwise make on ads for me. In which case, that'd be about $3.50/month. Instead they want to price-gouge me for 5x that so... no thanks. I'll just use my ad blocker.
- wintermutestwin 2y ago
  I would gladly pay for ad-free youtube if they weren’t double dipping by tracking me (which is now more valuable because you have my cc#)
- hanspeter 2y ago
  Could you explain how you arrived at the $3.50/month figure? The model I understand you're suggesting is individual pricing based on usage and value as an ad target. A lot more complex and opaque than a straightforward fixed fee for all users. Also, it's worth noting that YouTube Premium includes YouTube Music, which serves as your Spotify replacement. You might not need this, but the subscription fee covers more than just the lost ad revenue on YouTube.
  - Enginerrrd 2y ago
    I calculated this with some degree of rigor as a VERY conservative estimate of their ad revenue from me. THAT came out to more like $3 and I just adjusted for inflation this time around. I don't really recall the details of that calculation unfortunately. But it would have been based on cost per ad view (no clicks) times the number I expect to be shown in a month. The model I'm suggesting would be more like I load YouTube up with $10 and slowly burn through it as I view videos instead of being shown ads. The cost per view could actually be just as or even more transparent. Perhaps videos are tagged with the cost to view, which could open up a whole new world of economy among creators to gatekeep with higher fees themselves if they want to value their videos at more than the default. Being transparent on pricing this way is literally using the exact same infrastructure they already use to price ads, just letting me pay the cost instead of the advertisers.
jzb 2y ago
"But newspapers, TV and Youtube would die out." The missing part of this sentence is "as they exist now". There are other models that exist that could support broadcast and publications. There are other models yet to be explored or that have floundered because they've been snuffed out or avoided because the easiest (for certain values of "easy") path to dollars, right now, is advertising. It is a pipe dream, of course -- and the author of the piece doesn't really do the hard work of following through on not just how difficult it would be to make advertising illegal, but the ramificaitons. While an ad-free world would be wonderful, that's a lot of people out of a job real quick-like. Deciding what constitutes an "ad" versus content marketing or just "hey, this thing exists" would be harder than it might seem at first thought.
- theamk 2y ago
  Which models are there? The only other ones I know is patreon-like, which totally destroy the long tail. And long-tail ones are the best. There are some great videos on youtube which are 10+ years old and do not have millions of views. I am sure many of their uploaders already forgot about them. I cannot see them existing without being supported by "something", and if that's not advertisement, than what?
  - jzb 2y ago
    Are you referring to a model for supporting YouTube hosting the videos or for the people who produce the videos? YouTube already has subscriptions. An ad-free YouTube could extend that and maybe add lower tiers of subscriptions for X hours per month viewing. This would be a double-win, if YouTube's were centered around catering to users and not maximizing time on site with The Algorithm(TM) to ensure people see more ads -- which also encourages some of the worst content on YT. But a big shift like ridding the world of advertising would, of course, have tradeoffs. Maybe that would be "long tail" videos on YouTube. If you can get rid of ads and have to lose those, is it worth it? Conversely, what has advertising killed off that we might be able to have again if it was gone?
TeMPOraL 2y ago
> But newspapers, TV and Youtube would die out. Good. They're but shells of themselves, eaten through and bloated up by cancer of advertising. Even if they were to die out, the demand for the value they used to provide will remain strong, so these services would reappear in a better form. I thought people in tech/enterpreneurship circles were generally fans of "creative disruption"? Well, there's nothing more creatively disruptive than rebuilding the digital markets around scummy business models. (Think of all business models - many of them more honest - that are suppressed by advertising, because they can't compete with "free + ads". Want business innovation? Ban "free + ads" and see it happen.)
appreciatorBus 2y ago
* “the newspapers, tv channels and YouTube content that had so little value to society that no one was willing to pay for will die out.” Yes.
hanspeter 2y ago
It's interesting that you leave out Google (and similar search engines). We would lose one of the most useful tools introduced to mankind in the last 3 decades.

> Try this thought experiment from the article - imagine a world without advertising. Products would still exist. Commerce would still happen. But newspapers, TV and Youtube would die out.

Henchman21 2y ago

Very little of value would be lost.

immibis 2y ago

Is that such a bad thing? Are they really providing that much value? The remaining YouTube channels would be concentrated around the ones that are of higher quality, rather than easy slop produced to push ads. Nobody would try to clone someone else's channel for money. They would only be produced by people who were passionate about that topic. There would be fewer channels by passionate people, but the percentage would be much higher, so it's not necessarily a worse situation overall. TV has always cost money - you pay for satellite or cable, and the free-to-air programming available to you is overtly subsidized by your government - they shouldn't need to double-dip by showing ads. We used to pay for newspaper subscriptions too. A lot of newspapers are trying to go back to that, but it's a market for lemons. Maybe if advertising was banned, we'd each subscribe to one or two online newspapers and discover which ones are decent and which ones are crap. Remember, it's harder to make someone who was paying $0.00 pay $0.01, than to make someone who was paying $10 pay $20. Would the market be more efficient at price discovery if there was no $0.00 at all?

worik 2y ago
> Maybe if advertising was banned, we'd each subscribe to one or two online newspapers and discover which ones are decent and which ones are crap. I keep hoping that decent aggregators will emerge - or I will find the ones that exist. I am happy to pay for news, but I cannot afford to pay for all the ones I want, and I cannot afford the time to read all I want. I would like to pay good aggregators....
vitus 2y ago
> The remaining YouTube channels would be concentrated around the ones that are of higher quality, rather than easy slop produced to push ads. Nobody would try to clone someone else's channel for money. They would only be produced by people who were passionate about that topic. There would be fewer channels by passionate people, but the percentage would be much higher, so it's not necessarily a worse situation overall. I have some questions about your vision. - How many content creators would no longer be able to make passion videos as their full-time job because they're no longer getting revenue-sharing from YouTube? - Okay, some content creators also have Patreon etc. What's the incentive to post these videos publicly for free, as opposed to hoarding them behind their Patreon paywall? - What's the incentive for YouTube to continue existing as a free-to-watch service? Or even at all? Take away the ad money, and I can't imagine that the remaining subscription revenue comes anywhere close to paying for the infrastructure.
- charcircuit 2y ago
  The vast majority of Patreon contributions come from the YouTuber advertising it.
- azemetre 2y ago
  Who says we have to keep using YouTube for this vision? There's no reason why the government can't nationalize these services if they are so vital for a variety of commerce. Or at the very least regulate it as a utility and allow users the ability to bring in their own advertising.
  - vitus 2y ago
    I'm not saying that we have to keep using YouTube for this vision, but GP stated that there would be fewer YouTube channels (but not none!). In that scenario, what incentives are there to provide a video-sharing platform that is a net negative to operate? I don't think that nationalizing such a service makes much sense either. What motivation does a government have to operate a service for global benefit (as opposed to just its citizens)? Surely we shouldn't want a US YouTube, a French YouTube, a Japanese YouTube, etc. > Or at the very least regulate it as a utility and allow users the ability to bring in their own advertising. Doesn't that run counter to the premise of banning advertising in the first place?

pseufaux 2y ago

TV and YouTube would definitely suffer. Not sure if that's an issue or benefit. But I'm not sure newspapers or journalism would be so bad. My expectation would be that people would still need/want information from somewhere might begin paying to get it.

LunaSea 2y ago
They already have this choice and don't pick it.
- dcow 2y ago
  Choosing “free” in free vs paid is not the same as choosing “none” in none vs paid.

jajko 2y ago

Yeah, some loss, a very visible one. But what we are losing now is much bigger, albeit much harder to point finger on and quantify. Some inner quality and strength that probably doesnt even have a name. Most people never even thought about ads that way. For my own little part - firefox and ublock origin since it exists, on phone too. To the point of almost physically allergic to ads, aby ads, they cause a lasting disgust with given brand. I detest being manipulated, and this is not even hidden, a very crude and primitive way.

PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
> I detest being manipulated It's even worse when you can't even be detested because you don't realize it is happening.

chronogram 2y ago

News would still exist and would not be competing with engagement driven news because there's no engagement=ad views. I wager it would be very helpful to news. TV would absolutely still exist, given that people pay for it and there is a big industry around ad-free streaming services already.

LunaSea 2y ago
Almost no online newspaper survives from subscriptions. Non public broadcasters are rarely if ever and free. Meaning that their business model requires this as revenue to survive.
- azemetre 2y ago
  If there is such a small ability for the average person to make SMB viable without massive subsidies by advertisers maybe it's time to argue that there should be more public investment and grants given to independent journalists that meet a certain criteria.
  - ipaddr 2y ago
    Government paid press? How long before someone realizes they better write inline with current government views. Who would a Trump government hire/fire who would a Biden government hire/fire.. independent of what?
    - wild_egg 2y ago
      Many countries have this in various forms and it works out fine. Generally illegal to interfere with the press and a good way to lose the next election
    - azemetre 2y ago
      You realize NPR and PBS, along with the foreign US press (name escapes me), have been a thing for 50+ years right? Laws can be written in a way to guarantee independence from despots too. Idk it feels better than this whole private affair where rules are arbitrary and the only thing that matters is how many ad impressions you sell.

inopinatus 2y ago

only the shit ones

cauch 2y ago

Advertisement get the source money from the viewers, it does not create any money in itself. So, if advertisement is banned, people will have more money, and this money can be used to finance what they want to consume. This is something that I still struggle to wrap my head around: if a company is paying X$ for advertisement, it means that people subjected to this advertisement will give Y$ to this company that they would not have paid otherwise, Y higher than X, otherwise there is no reason for this company to pay for advertisement. Yet everyone is saying "yeah, advertisement, I don't care, I just ignore it". Surely it cannot be true.

parkaboy 2y ago
Even if it seems like everyone is saying this, it's just statistically not true / in the aggregate, at least in the context of direct online ads. Otherwise the direct ad industry would be totally dead (ad performance is measured to death by companies). Conversion (getting someone to purchase) at scale with ads is not so simple as person sees ad, clicks, and buys. There are many steps along the funnel and sometimes ads can be used in concert with other channels (influencer content, sponsored news articles, etc). Within direct ads you typically have multiple steps depending on how cold or warm (e.g. have they seen or interacted with your content previously) the lead is when viewing the ad and you tailor the ad content accordingly to try to keep pushing the person down the funnel. Generally if you know your customer persona well and have good so-called product-market-fit, then (1) you will be able to build a funnel that works at scale. So then (2) the question is does the cost to convert a customer / CAC fit within the profit margin, which is much more difficult to unpack. However, it's worth keeping in mind that digital ad costs are essentially invented by the ad platform. There is a market-type of force. If digital ads become less effective and the CAC goes too high across an industry/sector, the platform may be forced to reduce the cost to deliver ads if the channel just doesn't make enough financial sense for enough businesses. All this is to say, the system does/can work. Tends to work better for large established companies or startups with lots of funding. In general, not a suggested approach as a first channel for a small startup/small business. Building up effective funnels is incredibly expensive and takes a lot of time in my depressing personal experience.
- 2y ago

Enginerrrd 2y ago

I don't know. I would GLADLY pay for ad-free youtube if the price were set at what they'd otherwise make on ads for me. In which case, that'd be about $3.50/month. Instead they want to price-gouge me for 5x that so... no thanks. I'll just use my ad blocker.

wintermutestwin 2y ago
I would gladly pay for ad-free youtube if they weren’t double dipping by tracking me (which is now more valuable because you have my cc#)
hanspeter 2y ago
Could you explain how you arrived at the $3.50/month figure? The model I understand you're suggesting is individual pricing based on usage and value as an ad target. A lot more complex and opaque than a straightforward fixed fee for all users. Also, it's worth noting that YouTube Premium includes YouTube Music, which serves as your Spotify replacement. You might not need this, but the subscription fee covers more than just the lost ad revenue on YouTube.
- Enginerrrd 2y ago
  I calculated this with some degree of rigor as a VERY conservative estimate of their ad revenue from me. THAT came out to more like $3 and I just adjusted for inflation this time around. I don't really recall the details of that calculation unfortunately. But it would have been based on cost per ad view (no clicks) times the number I expect to be shown in a month. The model I'm suggesting would be more like I load YouTube up with $10 and slowly burn through it as I view videos instead of being shown ads. The cost per view could actually be just as or even more transparent. Perhaps videos are tagged with the cost to view, which could open up a whole new world of economy among creators to gatekeep with higher fees themselves if they want to value their videos at more than the default. Being transparent on pricing this way is literally using the exact same infrastructure they already use to price ads, just letting me pay the cost instead of the advertisers.

jzb 2y ago

"But newspapers, TV and Youtube would die out." The missing part of this sentence is "as they exist now". There are other models that exist that could support broadcast and publications. There are other models yet to be explored or that have floundered because they've been snuffed out or avoided because the easiest (for certain values of "easy") path to dollars, right now, is advertising. It is a pipe dream, of course -- and the author of the piece doesn't really do the hard work of following through on not just how difficult it would be to make advertising illegal, but the ramificaitons. While an ad-free world would be wonderful, that's a lot of people out of a job real quick-like. Deciding what constitutes an "ad" versus content marketing or just "hey, this thing exists" would be harder than it might seem at first thought.

theamk 2y ago
Which models are there? The only other ones I know is patreon-like, which totally destroy the long tail. And long-tail ones are the best. There are some great videos on youtube which are 10+ years old and do not have millions of views. I am sure many of their uploaders already forgot about them. I cannot see them existing without being supported by "something", and if that's not advertisement, than what?
- jzb 2y ago
  Are you referring to a model for supporting YouTube hosting the videos or for the people who produce the videos? YouTube already has subscriptions. An ad-free YouTube could extend that and maybe add lower tiers of subscriptions for X hours per month viewing. This would be a double-win, if YouTube's were centered around catering to users and not maximizing time on site with The Algorithm(TM) to ensure people see more ads -- which also encourages some of the worst content on YT. But a big shift like ridding the world of advertising would, of course, have tradeoffs. Maybe that would be "long tail" videos on YouTube. If you can get rid of ads and have to lose those, is it worth it? Conversely, what has advertising killed off that we might be able to have again if it was gone?

TeMPOraL 2y ago

> But newspapers, TV and Youtube would die out. Good. They're but shells of themselves, eaten through and bloated up by cancer of advertising. Even if they were to die out, the demand for the value they used to provide will remain strong, so these services would reappear in a better form. I thought people in tech/enterpreneurship circles were generally fans of "creative disruption"? Well, there's nothing more creatively disruptive than rebuilding the digital markets around scummy business models. (Think of all business models - many of them more honest - that are suppressed by advertising, because they can't compete with "free + ads". Want business innovation? Ban "free + ads" and see it happen.)

appreciatorBus 2y ago

* “the newspapers, tv channels and YouTube content that had so little value to society that no one was willing to pay for will die out.” Yes.

hanspeter 2y ago

It's interesting that you leave out Google (and similar search engines). We would lose one of the most useful tools introduced to mankind in the last 3 decades.