> no web monetization plan that involves redirecting some of our discretionary spending towards paying websites can make up for the advertising revenue they currently get, because that ad revenue is funded by not only a portion of our discretionary spending, but a portion of ALL our spending, and the non-discretionary portion is much larger.

It kind of sounds like ads are like a pollution on the web, and we should just ban them.

What you describe is a lot like the pollution due to over packaging many products in the food industry. You can say consumers shouldn't buy it, but consumers as an aggregate can't handle that and if you want to solve the problem, it's to put less packaging on the shelves.

Similarly, if what you describe is true (and it sounds true, because how massive the internet ad industry is, indeed to me never seemed to quite add up to what people do online), then no matter what sort of monetization schemes we come up with for Internet content, most industry everywhere is still going to pollute the Internet with ads, simply because the content producers want more money, the consumer doesn't have it, but the industry marketing budgets do.

I think this is partly due to "content producers want more money", because if it's never enough you can wreck any good thing. But the other part is that "the industry" can apparently stuff the Internet full of as many ads as they want without actually being bound by how much the consumer wants to "pay" for the content via ads or (if we figure out micropayments or something) money. Because their spending budget dwarfs that of the consumer.

So, just like I always suspected, all these ads are there because the industry wants to advertise on the Internet, not because it needs to be there to pay for the content.

Content automatically becomes advertising when it exists by the virtue of a marketing budget.

Turns out this whole "your data for our content" deal, that consumers are supposedly choosing for, isn't the relevant transaction at all.

You see pretty much the same problem with outdoor advertising and store front signage. The industry has way more than enough money to spend on advertising to ruin the urban scenery with ads and giant billboards. Where I live we have regulations to keep that in check, but when I go to other countries it's really ugly. It's quite bad in the USA, but at least that country hasn't existed for very long. The saddest thing is in older countries where you see historical buildings being half-obscured or even have the billboards bolted on them. Fortunately due to tourism, there are some regulations.

Anyway, the point is that our Internet is being ruined with ads by the marketing budgets of the industry, not because the ads are necessary to support the content (they never were--there was content on the Internet before advertising, lots of it too), but simply because they have the money to put as much ads as they want onto our Internet.

It reminds me of certain cafes where they play bad commercial radio. You paid for your coffee, to sit there, but you're still subjected to over-loud ads every 15 minutes. This is not because you didn't pay enough for the coffee, it's because whoever paid for that ad has the resources to pollute the soundscape regardless of whether you pay or not.