by camgunz | 2025-04-07 11:11:12+00:00
(First, I appreciate you engaging!)

> I believe that would be very difficult, it would likely create some additional interesting cases (are adblockers now fraud?)

I don't know if companies consider it fraud, but for example Telly is giving away a TV as long as you let it eat your data and serve you ads, and if they figure out you're preventing that somehow they want the TV back [0]. So models like this countenance some kind of evasion at least a little.

I've asked other people this same question because most of the time platforms don't make advertising opt-in/out, basically for any amount of money. The best answer I've gotten--which I buy--is that the value in ads/marketing/data isn't 1 person, it's the aggregate. So like, if you have 1M users generating $100k, but then 500k of those users opt-out each for a dollar, ostensibly it seems like this is equivalent but the value of data on 500k users isn't $500k, it's substantially less, so the opt-out isn't a dollar, it's more like $5 or something, which makes this a non-option. So conceiving of this business model as a kind of "advertising lets you have this 'for free'" is only true in the most literal sense, as long as you don't think your individual data or privacy has any value or you ignore the implication that you could opt-out for whatever that value is.

Beyond that, it creates perverse incentives. We don't think that advertising benefits people, we have a whole other category called "Public Service Announcements" that kind of benefits people, and represents a sliver of actual "advertising". Say what you want about ads for diabetes meds or whatever, but they're not PSAs. The value to the consumer isn't the ad but what the ad funds, which makes platforms (tv stations, social media network, whatever) very interested in finding the exact line where you have both maximum advertising revenue and maximum engagement... which is a euphemistic way of saying "we want to trap you in our platform for as long as possible so we can make as many ad dollars on you as possible". That's bad! Even the value you're supposedly getting--the content--is now geared towards making you watch more ads instead of whatever you thought you were getting (sober political commentary, funny dance videos, makeup tips, whatever). This perfectly diagnoses the slop of media these days; I think there's no real disagreement here.

Finally, I think advertising is just 100% weird on its own. It sounds innocuous, but the business of advertising is persuasion: fine at the "marketing grad out of uni" level, real terrifying at the "billions of dollars convincing people to buy things they don't need and feel things they wouldn't otherwise feel about 'brands' or issues" level. There is no real regulation of this either; companies can spend as much money as they want literally blanketing our buildings, skies, cars, and media broadly with their message, which can be things like, "Happy Mother's Day" or "don't be a sucker: buy Bitcoin". This is also pretty bad.

Maybe jumping right to "let's ban all advertising" isn't the right way to start this conversation. Fair enough. But I do think we're starting to come around to the notion that advertising as we know it today isn't a good idea and we should do something about it.

[0]: https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/10/23910631/telly-free-tv-a...