3 ms·

I’ve bought hundreds of products from ads. Most of them I wouldn’t have known about if not for the ads. And I’m pretty happy with all those purchases.

• WD-42 11mo ago
  Look everyone, we found one!
• hdgvhicv 11mo ago
  Great. So set your agent to “show me adverts” and let the rest of use set our agents to “don’t show me adverts”.
  • zbentley 11mo ago
    Then we come to the rub: if "don't show me adverts" suddenly made common tasks (checking email, using a search engine) cost a bit of money, how many people would go for that?
    • s1mplicissimus 11mo ago
      Hard to tell, as those 2 specific services are currently monopolized by a company who refuses to offer those specific services ad-free
      • hdgvhicv 10mo ago
        Email certainly isn’t monopolised! I can think of at least 3 mainstream search engines - although all advert driven
    • hdgvhicv 11mo ago
      Quite a few. Hence people who pay for Netflix, YouTube, etc. Certainly I don’t have adverts when I check my email, does Hotmail etc do adverts now? I’m sure they didn’t back in the early 00s.
      • zbentley 10mo ago
        Netflix is not a good counter argument, since lots of that content is not (legally/easily for casual users) available anywhere else even with ads. YouTube premium might be a better counterargument—but I’m not sure how many people are buying it just for ad removal versus buying it to get access to additional games/movies/content. Is that data available? I’d be interested in checking it out if so!