Why ads are a problem

I certainly don't find celebrity gossip very valuable but the vast amount of people who read and consume that content shows that it is valuable to them. Who am I to judge that? There's nothing good to come of vastly reducing the amount of content out there. More choice and options are always a good thing.

Ads are fast. Ad networks however are slow. Bad tech with old vendors is most of the problem. Our ads load faster than the content half the time. Sites like Washington Post, The Guardian, Ars Technica show how you can have a fast site with ads. Very solvable through technology.

Ads are definitely more anonymous than payments. Payments = credit cards or bank accounts. Guess what that means? Your name, address, age, credit history, employment, etc all perfectly accessible and tied to your identity. Profiling is used to give you more relevant ads. Someone who doesn't have children doesn't need to see diaper ads so it's a perfectly reasonable thing. I agree that sometimes it's taken too far with retargeting where you see the same ads constantly but this is a different matter. Our network focuses mostly on context of the page (tech site = tech ads) and performs just as well without any tracking (other than history of ads seen to avoid showing same ads).

The internet is a vector for malware. There absolutely is a way to vet content, but standards and enforcement is just not there right now. Ad networks dont really suffer anything when bad stuff happens so they have no incentive to do much about it. We don't even accept any 3rd party content on our network so we're far more secure than even the sites we run on.

Again, all of this is down to implementation - nothing wrong with the ad model itself.

http://www.wired.com/insights/2014/11/malvertising-is-cyberc...

Advertising is an attack vector. A security risk for the end user.

> I mean, would you say that dumping a type of toxic waste into a river is an "implementation" problem when there's no law against it?

Yes. This doesn't mean we stop doing anything that produces toxic waste. Cars are also a vector for criminal activity. Like guns and knives and cellphones. We don't get rid of them either. Instead we use regulation and standards to enforce the safety mechanisms and proper ethical behavior.

> It's efficient

Money may not be changing hands, but a lot of information is, which is easily worth more. Leaving out these costs are yet another reason why advertisers have a reputation for dishonesty.

Also, the article specifically discussed the terrible power efficency that is always going to be associated with the extra transfer and processing associated with fetching ads. Or do you think they get to violate conservation on energy to be downloaded? If you are adding ad to a page, you are making the client pay more to see it. Offloading costs like this - while pretending it is efficient - should really be criminal.

> It's passive

Bullshit, and you know it.

The very idea of advertising is to be distracting. The arms-race we've seen over the last few decades where advertising went from simple banners, to popups, to various other dynamic rendering tricks, to the modern modal/click-through video ads - and worse - are all about not being passive. This is suck a basic concept in advertising that I have to conclude you are dissembling deliberately, or are such a "true believer" in advertising you cannot see it any other way.

Also, it takes an incredible amount of energy to ignore ads. Anybody that thinks ads don't cost any mental energy is either lying or addicted. Install an adblocker and use it 100% reliably for several months to break the addiction, and you will be shocked at the energy advertising wastes when you see it again.

> It's accessible

Except if someone is poor, they cannot afford whatever it is you are advertising. I've seen this meme a lot recently, so it's obviously a talking point the advertising indujstry is using to try to justify their drain on society. You're not fooling anybody, and this kind of appeal only makes advertisers look desperate.

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While Terr_ already mentioned this one...

> It's secure.

You don't get to exclude malware, when advertising is the vector.

Even ignoring that, leaking tracking information makes you malware!