Is Ad Avoidance a Problem?

What is the point of advertisement?

Capitalism is an interesting trick. It is an artificial game, which exploits people's selfishness to benefit the world.

But selfishness doesn't usually work like that, so humans naturally try to find loopholes which would make them rich.

Instead of spending money on improving their services & products, corporations find it more profitable to spend huge amounts of resources on patent trolling, tax evasion and advertisement.

Sadly, ads will not go away any time soon, because they are much more difficult to get rid of then other loopholes I mentioned above.

I am happy to look at ads - if they are maintained and a hosted on the site serving them.

Far more than the intrusion into my awareness (and that's what I initially started resenting) I resent the cross-site tracking that is implicit with any hosted ad or third party ad provider.

If someone wants my attention, all they have to do is ask for it - themselves. Because while I'm willing to pay for my consumption with my attention to what is being sold, I am not willing to pay for it by sharing my browsing and viewing habits with third parties.

What if you've built an amazing, revolutionary product but no one knows about it? You make it seem like the concept of advertising at it's core is inherently bad; it isn't.

The author reflects how much we've all bought into the utter bullshit that advertising makes things free. There is no free lunch, and there is no free web. In truth ads actually make things much more expensive, as I'll explain below. In addition most ads are fundamentally manipulative if not dishonest, and thereby undermine democracy and rational free markets.

Advertising simply shifts the cost of the "fee lunch" to the price of the advertised products. In other words we still end up paying. It may even shift costs regressively, toward lower incomes and the less educated, in which case the poor are subsidizing the better off.

BUT IT'S WORSE...

We end up paying a lot more than if we just paid for our content and services straight up. Not only are you still paying for the costs of the "free website", you are paying for all that advertising overhead, the costs of advertising technology and infrastructure (huge, btw), the agency and creative costs (Don Draper and company have to pay for the hookers and scotch somehow, not to mention what’s-his-name who basically just lounges in his office barefoot thinking Japanese), and big marketing departments that often outnumber the people who actually write or make things.

You are also paying the opportunity cost of inferior product, because that’s what happens when websites have to design to please advertisers over pleasing us, the users. Dalton Caldwell makes this point comparing Sourceforge to Github: http://daltoncaldwell.com/an-audacious-proposal.

Our identities and privacy are bought and sold to the highest bidders. So we foot the bill for those bids AND we pay the cost of lost privacy. A double whammy! It's personalization? Bullshit. Personalization means optimizing something for me, not optimizing for the advertiser. Again, who's the real customer?

IT GETS EVEN WORSE...

Think of the social costs of advertising. The web is infested with misinformation and manipulation. Beside the lying ads themselves, relying on a revenue stream entirely dependent on how many ads are seen severely affects the moral choices of those who decide what gets produced and how its presented. What are the costs of a misinformed and variously manipulated citizenry, of distortions to the free-market?

Knowledge and discourse are the lifeblood of both democracy, free markets, progress. The web, from the little scammy websites to the big brand ones that so many blindly trust, has a huge influence on who we vote for, what we buy, and most importantly, what we believe.

You are correct in saying there's no free lunch. However, I disagree with a couple things.

1) We, as consumers, do not pay for the ad tech infrastructure - the publishers do. Their purpose is to make the inventory more valuable and allow publishers to get more money than they normally would. Better targeted ads mean less ads.

2) The Dalton Caldwell argument doesn't hold up. Do television programs design for advertisers? Yes, but they also need to design for consumers. A television show that has commercials all the time will get less views and so will an ad infested website with a terrible experience. That fear of alienation is why Facebook isn't a giant display ad.

3) Websites aren't necessarily backed by the purchase of products through ads. There are such things as "brand recognition" ads that do not rely on instant action. After all, most television ads are not informomercials or "buy now" ads. I think we'll see more brand recognition ads online in the next couple years and online ads will become more mainstream. You'll see less scummy ads as the internet continues to grow more influential and the social cost will diminish.