In order to maintain access to (currently) free services without making one's computer unusable.
The problem I see is that the processing and bandwidth used by advertising are currently "as much as advertisers can get away with" and I think it's leading to a tragedy of the commons.
But I see no need to eliminate ads and free services either. There just needs to be a cap enforced on the resources used.
Agreed; so figuring out how to sustainably meet (and ideally exceed) people's basic needs is important to safeguard content production.
Meanwhile, I don't think consumer expectation of free service is likely to change, and expect there's a market for ad-free reimplementations of existing services.
No thanks for me. Advertisements if nothing else consume too much of my local compute resources for zero benefit to me. Why should I give them this free compute?
That's also an imbalance, assuming we want to keep "free" on the table. Now ads are centralised, and one has to elect to go to a special portal to see ads. This won't pay for all the stuff we get for "free" but is most definitely not "free". If ads were reasonable and based on stated interests we might not even be having this conversation. To me it feels like the advertising platforms are shooting themselves in the foot. There will be a tipping point where even the "regular internet users" will have enough of this crap.
Your last sentence is intriguing. Do you believe that ads are the only means to keep services "free" or "cheaper"?
If you do, then that would explain why you have come to accept them as "necessary" for services to be "free" or "cheap". (i.e., you've made a causal link between ads and "free/cheap")
If you don't, then I have more questions for you to answer.
Wouldn’t that mean an end to a lot of free services? If I want to pay for email there are plenty of services. If I want to trade viewing some ads for free email service shouldn’t that choice be up to me?
You can have free without ads if the consumers shoulder the distrubtion themselves. Decentralized p2p content distribution is the key. The more people consume want it the more will contribute resources.
Well of course, everyone wants free stuff without paying for it. That's just as much an economic principle as the one you brought up.
However, I don't think services which offer a free-but-with-ads-version are the issue here. After all you could just not use those services.
I think the way bigger issue is the ubiquitousness of advertisements/spam in our daily life. Most e-mail traffic is spam. If you walk around in your city you most probably get to see an ad every couple of meters. And this is not just your local butcher putting up a sign with today's specials. These are footholds of international corporations which manipulate your emotions so they can sell you their shitty products (Oh, I forgot, it's not shitty, after all if I believe the ads your corporation somehow has some deep connection to my family life and that's what makes the product so great!)
How it ever got like that is insanity in its own right. Now giving these public space polluters another tool for manipulating people? I can't see much good coming off of it.
I really and truly do wish this wasn't true, but it is. Part of this is because we've built an expectation that the only thing one needs to pay for to use services connected on the Internet is access, and once access is paid for, the problem is solved.
But that's not the case. Products cost money, and we've established a pattern of free to play to freemium for much of the most popular services. This could change, but it would take the major players to flip the script, and they've invested so much into ad systems that they'd be hard pressed to abandon it.
and those people keep things free for the rest of us, so I'm fine with it. Everybody likes to complain about advertising but no one has come up with a way to eliminate it without a large portion of the sites we use everyday shutting down.
I dislike ads so much I would stop using your service if it wasn't possible to block them. I would much rather pay for all the ad-supported (well, not by me) service I use.
Everybody should be looking for ad-free ways to support their services.
If you are not paying for something the provider has incentive to sell your data, not so much if you paid for it. Example: I'm currently on a free Dropbox account simply because I don't need much storage. I would love to pay for the option to have my files encrypted. This would mean that Dropbox can't save space, thus it's alright I should pay for that.
I agree, but it's an absolute fallacy that consumption is free. In fact, it is more much more expensive with ads:
1. The advertisers who pay for it all still get their money from us, but baked into prices of the things we buy from them. There is no free lunch.
2. The overhead cost of advertising is huge and we pay for that too. Ad systems and data collection systems, ad engineers and people like the author. Ad agencies. Creative agencies. Ad tracking. Marketing departments.
3. We pay the opportunity cost of a product that cannot put users first because they live or die by giving advertisers what they want (what we want only indirectly and secondarily, if at all). This includes both the cost of lost privacy as well as well as design that optimizes advertising revenue. As has been said, we are more Google's products than we are their customers.
4. We pay the social costs. Democracy and the free market assume people make voting and purchasing decisions based on facts and reason. Advertising is predominantly about manipulation and deceit. To me this is the most expensive cost of all.
Added together, we are paying a lot more for "free" web content and services than if we could just straight up pay web sites for straight-up ad-free versions. A system to make that convenient is possible, but we're too hooked on ads to even try.
The problem I see is that the processing and bandwidth used by advertising are currently "as much as advertisers can get away with" and I think it's leading to a tragedy of the commons.
But I see no need to eliminate ads and free services either. There just needs to be a cap enforced on the resources used.
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