Is Ad Avoidance a Problem?

And there's the Google stock (a company which, last time I checked, made most part of its revenue through ads) sky rocketing to prove once and for all that ads are a thing of the past...

I see this more as a crisis of the "old" media than a global ad avoidance phenomenon. Brand avoidance, consumer activism and anti-advertisement movements are real, but their size and impact on our culture (at least in Brazil) is not that big for the time being.

Underlying the issue of attention and ethics is the fact that most ads are not benign static elements. They are accompanied by increasingly complex, increasingly opaque, increasingly ubiquitous, and increasingly intrusive forms of commercial (and therefore also government) surveillance.

The concept that no ads leads to cultural wasteland is so ludicrously wrong it makes me angry. First ads are the wasteland. Second advertising is relatively new. Somehow culture was able to flourish without ads for thousands of years.

Excuse my ignorance but where do the advertisers get the money to pay for the content? They get it from me if I buy their product. So instead giving my money to the advertiser who then gives it to the artist, why wouldn't I just give it to the artist myself (like with Netflix, etc.)?

I don't have the numbers but I am quite sure that movies at the theater woudldn't be that much more expensive either. The advertisers don't invest their own money, they invest the money they get from us the customers obviously. And they only can invest as much as we buy, not more.

Wouldn't cutting out the middleman save some bugs too?

I use ad-block.

Ads are polluting my brain. I'm thinking of something while traveling on the bus and suddenly I catch myself reading some silly slogan on a board. Now it's stored somewhere and I might think about it later again. I never wanted to read that thing and feel like it has been forced upon me. How many hours of collective thinking power have been lost to ads processing ?

Ads publishers treat us like a free resources that they can tap into. They hire psychologist and sociologists to know the best way to trigger emotional responses into us. They track our every move on the Internet. TV shows are especially created to dumb us down and make us more receptive to the ad-break. And ads are so omnipresent that they are virtually unavoidable. I don't remember the last time I got convinced to buy by an ad but it must work since they keep doing it.

So yes, I don't feel bad and ad-block the hell of everything and wish I could do it in the real life too.

EDIT: Actually my biggest grief is that the price of ads is not clearly exposed. I need to know upfront how much of purchasing influence I'm expected to spend on average otherwise how can I choose what is cheaper ?