by luckylion | 2025-04-07 14:47:27+00:00
I think the aggregate is one thing, the other is that it's _much_ simpler dealing with one or 100 advertisers (or a network or three) to monetize than it is dealing with thousands or millions of users, facilitating payments, dealing with charge-backs, storing sensitive data etc. I can start a blog today and slap ads on it, it's easy. Doing the same and having to offer the full option to opt-out for payment is months of work.

Not to mention the interesting question of what happens if you're just starting out and you aren't making FAANG-levels of money yet? Is your content free? Should there be some big pool where this is being paid out of?

Germany has VG-Wort, which is private entity that collectively handles licensing-payments for authors. If you sell a printer, you could potentially print out copyrighted materials with it, so the law demands you to pay them some tiny amount for the possible infraction, and they will distribute it among their members according to the type and reach of their texts. That could work, but it doesn't make things simple.

Then there's things like content-pass which offer this model. They are integrated into the GDPR-consent, and you can pay 2.99 (or so) a month to bypass ads & tracking on sites that use it. I work in affiliation, and everyone I know who uses it only does so because it's a convenient way to enforce consent on GDPR banners because you're technically offering an alternative. If lots of people were to go that route, they'd have to increase the monthly price to make it unattractive. I know one site who built it themselves and set the price to $99/m, and had some stressful evenings when they actually got a person to buy to it, because they didn't consider that someone would. That person is still paying for their content as far as I'm aware.

The media-consumption-increase incentive you mention is definitely a problem - but is it new? I'm not sure. Even if you pay for a magazine which has no ads (I do!), if they are driven by commercial interest (the one I subscribe to isn't really), they'll try to make sure that you're deriving as much value from it as possible so you don't question your subscription - and the best way to ensure that is probably to make sure you read it front to back. At the same time, if you read it front to back, it did give you something, right?

I definitely see the point with Youtube & similar where they might figure out the minimum quality required for you to keep watching and aim barely above it, never really satisfying you, but keeping you entertained just enough so you don't leave. In the end, I think you'd still derive value from it, or you'd quit it - even if that value is small -- an sometimes, someone's life might leave them in a place where mindless distraction is valuable enough to them.

> 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

Why don't they? If it was a clear way into peoples minds, I'm sure they would. But maybe it's more of a sustainability issue -- if you overdo, you'll turn people away (who wants to go into an inner city where you're screamed at from all sides?), if you underdo it, you're not maximizing your messaging potential. So I'm not sure they can increase it without limit - not to mention that they'd need to pay _a lot_, and there's no guarantee they'd make that money back.

> 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.

Maybe, I'm not sure. I'm probably less affected by it than most, because I do use an adblocker, I do use sponsorblock, and I avoid places where ads make economic sense (lots of people to see them). I'm probably still getting some of it, but I'm largely not being targeted because I'm part of very small subset of the population that is weird and there's much more to gain from targeting the rest.

Ultimately, the line between product information (30 years ago the ads in an IT magazine I read were often just price lists of available products; very useful to me, but undoubtedly an ad) and advertisements is very fuzzy. I think you'd have a much easier time regulating away unwanted behaviors in ads like we do for some industries (e.g. pharma, or finance, you can't imply that there's no risk), which doesn't automatically kill the useful bits but can still curtail the unwanted stuff.

Ultimately, limiting screen time for children and others who find themselves unable to control their use is probably more helpful, because most ads today are on screens. Who sees those billboards while staring at the cell phone?