> When you use an ad-supported service, you're not "the product," you are the customer. You pay with attention, and the service trades some of that attention to an advertiser in exchange for regular currency

But this is exactly what we meant when we said that you are the product. Your attention is being sold to advertisers, under the assumption that it will be converted into regular currency in the form of influencing your purchasing decisions.

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I'm not going to jump on the hate wagon, if the author changed their mind, fine. There are more constructive ways to engage than calling them a traitor. But this sentence really confuses me, it's like saying, "you're not the product, your blood is." What did you used to mean when you said that the user was the product, if not that the user's own presence and mental state was being sold?

It's also worth noting (and doesn't get brought up that often) that advertisers only care about consumer attention because it gets converted through roundabout processes into consumer spending. The whole of the advertising model relies on the idea that being able to get people's attention allows advertisers to change what consumers buy. Even the most innocent, ethical forms of advertising where people are genuinely being made aware of a product that they didn't know existed and that solves one of their needs still operates under this premise. What advertising does is it directly sells people's attention, and indirectly sells people's purchasing decisions.

This is exactly why some people like me are so anti-advertising in its current online form. Sites need to maximize attention so that they can siphon some of that attention towards a product. This leads to some bad outcomes in what content gets produced, and I personally believe it leads to bad outcomes overall for society -- I think it leads to a situation where people are constantly having their concentration/focus/awareness drained from them. This is (in my mind) exacerbated by the fact that advertising is often omnipresent rather than the result of a conscious decision to "spend" attention. With money, you get a purchase screen. With ads, they just kind of show up in your regular life. The advertising model often takes the form of ads inserting themselves into other unrelated activities without explicit permission or any explicit contract with the consumer.

Going back to the blood analogy, if a normal monetary model is kind of like getting blood drawn and selling it, advertising is more like mosquitoes. Advertisers show up where you want to be, and while you're doing other things they suck your blood; there's very rarely an explicit transactional step where you decide to give them your blood, and the only way to get rid of them is to either not go into certain places at all or to block them as best as you can.

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Again, I don't want to just jump on the author and make them feel bad. It's good for someone to write a piece like this and try to think through why they're doing the things they do and to describe how they feel about advertising. It's better for this piece to be written then for the author to just ignore the disconnect. And I'll also push back on some of the blanket criticisms, because ads as micropayments is also a good way of looking at why the advertising industry has thrived online. I think that is a really good insight, I have often complained that one of the things holding back the web is the absence of a good, low-fee, (it feels weird to use word this in relation to ads, but we're talking comparatively here) "private" micropayments system (and no, cryptocurrency is not currently solving this problem).

However, ultimately I find the arguments in this piece really uncompelling, and they don't capture why I oppose advertising in the first place. I'm not necessarily saying that paying via attention is always wrong, nor am I saying that consumers never want to know about new products. However, the way the advertising industry currently operates is (I believe) bad for society on an almost fundamental level, and making those ads less invasive or making them more private doesn't really solve the problem. Even if you look at a browser like Brave, Brave is trying to tackle privacy issues with advertising, but it's not tackling the more fundamental issue that an omnipresent monetization of attention is toxic for society.

This article doesn't offer any strong reasoning as to why I should change my mind about that. I already knew ads monetize attention, that's one of the biggest parts about them that I don't like.