An interesting issue would come up with the adopocalyse - internet content would be for those who could pay for it. What % of Brazil (or US for that matter) would lose access to free/adtracked services like gmail, twitter, etc.
And it won't be necessarily copying Netflix model, that is just a past example. It will be by inovating in ways I can't predict.
If the people start loosing access to beneficial things because of their behavior, they will change behavior.
There is a term for this fallacy I guess - when you threat with an absurd proposition "imagine what happens if all advertising is sunddenly completely banned from internet, bad things will happen", only to push forward your proposition of "hey, let's just keep everything as it is right now, it's all fine, we don't want to risk imploding capitalismo do we?"
That is what this guy is doing.
I also agree just because I cannot imagine it that there is not a better model out there.
It is not trivial though if we explode the current DoubleClick / Amazon paradigm of advertising/ recommending by tracking. Walled gardens - subscription or ad driven - are not the answer either.
"we don't want to risk imploding capitalismo do we?"
No I really don't. The stock market crashes and poor people disproportionately suffer. If the EFF were running this adpocalypse maybe but it won't be. It will be whoever can keep the lights on.
But in this narrow case here is what I worry about. The Doubleclick model emerged in a very similar climate of a scourge killing the internet. In that case SPAM in the late 90's.
Targeted ads were among other things the spam killer. So the spammeisters went to work in adtech (I've worked for a few)...plus c'est la même chose .
To be fair, the author admits in the second half of the article that the industry has done things wrongly and proposes some solutions.
But we have popups, in-page popups ("sign up to our newsletter!"), blinking, flashing, audio and video. As realistic as the article is about the approach to advertising; that is never going to happen. If anything advertisers are going to be more aggressive as the market that does not run blockers diminishes.
I'm guessing that eventually the internet is going to become unusable without blocker; at that point blockers will become de-facto and universal. Advertisers simply aren't learning.
This is 100% true and something I don't understand. Marketers/Advertisers are, from who I've met, really smart people. Yet the reaction to people blocking annoying/aggressive ads is full on idiotic. Instead of toning it down, they dial things to 11, prompting more people to block their ads.
"People are blocking our ads because they are annoying and piss them off. What should we do Sam?"
"Make the ads more annoying and piss them off even more!"
What bothered me most: that to threat advertising industry on the internet is to threat democratic capitalism; that advertising is the only possible imaginable way to support good content creating and that consumer paying themselves for content is necessarily a bad thing.
There are a lot of examples where the ad industry went too far and changes came for better(in form of new business models in general or government regulations). I think now of HBO, Netflix, Wikipedia, the bilboard proihibition in my city, São Paulo.
Ultimately, the democratic capitalism is working and the "apocalypse" will only happen if people do not consider it a apocalypse at all. If people consider that adblocking is too much (the author opinion) then nothing much relevant will happen. The reason? Democratic capitalism helps us defend ourselves from guys with self-serving interests not shared by most people. He is writing this because he is being threatened by capitalism, not because something else is threating it.