Advertising Is a Cancer on Society (2019)

> Maybe a better way is, instead of banning anything, to supervise and explain to our children what they're seeing.

Now that I have 3 of them, and the oldest is almost 6, I guess I need to update the article on how this panned out.

Long story short: replacing Spotify and YouTube for music with yt-dlp + Audacity (to cut out ads, padding, channel jingles and other nonsense, + normalize volume) worked to an extent, and I built up a small library for my eldest daughter, which I then reused with the younger ones. However, once the oldest one went to kindergarten, she immediately contracted the Paw Patrol fever, and we couldn't continue keeping our kids oblivious to children programming anymore.

I mean, you can try and fight Paw Patrol, but you can't win in the end, and the more you resist, the harder it gets for your kid to make friends. Same with other major franchises. It's the same kind of problem as teenagers and smartphones, just couple years earlier.

Anyway, from that point on, curating a local library stripped of advertising became too much of a hassle. Instead, we embraced Netflix and YouTube - I just keep the ad-blocker running to reduce ad exposure, but since advertising is everywhere and can't be avoided, we focus on teaching our kids how to process it.

As evidenced by TFA, I do have some strong views on advertising in general, but I'm not dumping them on my kids. Letting them see advertising as just a fact of life seems to make it less impactful. Turns out, most ads are 100% boring to my kids (after we get past the "why is the man doing ${something they never saw someone do before}" questions); my oldest one actually figured out on her own where the "skip ad" button is on YouTube and how to operate the mouse to click it and resume the song that was playing. And those that aren't boring, we actually learned to enjoy.

I can go on and on, but I'll leave it for an eventual blog article.

I believe I covered that too, but maybe not explicitly enough. The root of the problem is that engaging in bad practices is a) allowed, and b) is profitable on the margin. In a competitive environment, this creates a zero-sum game, and that alone is enough of an explanation. Quoting myself from the article:

If you have competitors, you can't not participate.

> But those are just the cost of consuming all our favorite content for ~free, right?

It's not like we're being given much of a choice. Most people have less money than they need to satisfy even just the reasonable needs and wants, so being extremely price-sensitive is the default state for customers. In this environment, "free with ads" is a one-way strategy: it's impossible to compete on price with "free", so once someone goes for this model, all their direct competitors are forced to follow suit. It's why I see "free + ads" as an extremely anti-competitive move: it prevents any other business model from working.

> The size of the company has to be a major factor here. If your local shop takes out an ad in the local newspaper, I don't care what weird psychological tactics they use, does it really hit the same way?

It can be a factor, but I think its effect is often inverse. Large companies are a big, fat target for lawyers and regulators; there's only so much they can get away with these days. Small businesses can and do get much more scammy without repercussion, because their impact is much smaller and localized, and they're individually too small a target for the legal system to bother.

Also let's remember that, while small local companies are small and local, there's also a lot of them. And even as their "weird psychological tactics" affect only few people in each case, it isn't much of a consolation when you're one of those people.