I prefer to be able to steer my own attention, and not have it be steered by those who win the bids for it. I don't like paying a surcharge on every product to enable this practice. It seems like an inefficient way to finance the web.

Ad blockers are popular because ads got creepy. Seriously creepy. And majorly intrusive and auto-playing and so on and so forth. No one considers TV ads or print ads to be "inefficient" - yes, there are pay channels, but even the bulk of paid cable channels show ads, and pay magazines are sometimes a full 50% or more ads.

I can't expect you to suddenly cheer for ads. They're everywhere and there is definitely fatigue throughout the day. They uglify highways, they can definitely be pushy. But it's not like people haven't attempted other ways of monetizing content.

But taken at face value, my first thought was that it's just difficult to establish an alternative model against an incumbent. Advertising was there first, but on a level playing field, maybe micropayments could have taken off?

Of course, elsewhere, incumbents fall all the time. So I guess it's just difficult to establish an alternative model against an incumbent that sells the illusion that you're getting something for free. At the same time, people routinely spend 10+ cents for every web page access through mobile access charges. I don't even think about it when I browse the web on the subway.

Let me hasten to add that not all alternatives to classic ads are an improvement. Native advertising and other forms of embedded marketing come to mind. Although I am hopeful that readers will fairly quickly come to despise it even more than the more honest and easier to ignore ads.

  >Advertising was there first, but on a level playing field, maybe micropayments could have taken off?

He who pays the piper calls the tune. Very few people are going to create content for you for free. If you don't want your attention steered, prepare to pay the piper.

> I don't like paying a surcharge on every product to enable this practice.

The theory that advertising is a "surcharge on every product" assumes that the dynamics of sales and competition wouldn't be hurt in the absence of ads, that honest, unbiased, uncommercial content would pick up the information slack from ads. These assumptions does not stand up to basic scrutiny:

a: Ads support the entrance of new products into the market. For new products to be successful, they need to drive either new value, higher efficiency, better status-signalling or lower prices.

b: There is nothing to keep uncommercial content from recommending alternative equal-quality non-advertising products, which we would then expect to be cheaper, as they don't incur the surcharge. Certainly, there are examples of such products (eg. consumables that have a store-brand alternative), but if the theory were true, those alternatives would be widely available throughout the market. Consumer Reports routinely recommend products from brands with expensive ad campaigns.

c: Status-signalling is a thing, it really is, and while certainly exploited and supported by the ad industry, it wasn't invented by it, and won't go away if the ad industry does.

> It seems like an inefficient way to finance the web.

Perhaps so, but in a century and a half(?) of ad-supported mass media, not a lot of viable alternatives have appeared. Subscriptions (newspapers, magazines, still contains ads), donations (NPR), tax support (BBC and the like). It's not obvious to me either model would support the almost absurdly rich pluralism of content the web has with ad-finance.

EDIT: spelling, cleaned up ambiguous language.

> Ads support the entrance of new products into the market.

It's going to be difficult for this trend to stop until there are some technical hurdles built. Until then, I think it's unrealistic to say we should subject ourselves to ads because "historically the market has worked that way". It may have worked that way in the past, but times are changing.

My take on your argument is that despite the fact that products get cheaper when you remove the "ad portion" of the price, the consumer markets would get more inefficient, and hence the price would increase (or products would be worse, which is basically the same thing). Which is a fair point. But if that were true, it's still not clear which of the two would have a greater impact.

However, I don't think it's very hard to come up with mechanisms that serve the same function as ads in terms of market transparency. You don't even have to be very creative about it, since they already exist (e.g. consumer reports are a thing, and vaguely 10% of the Internet seems to be dedicated to discuss the dos and don'ts of buying shit). Ads are already one of the worst ways to get information about products, particularly in non-niche markets.

Yes, that is what I meant. I guess "net surcharge" is a better term.

> it's still not clear which of the two would have a greater impact

I believe it is, which is essentially what my argument is about. If the net surcharge is non-trivial and positive, then where are the people (trying to) capture it for profit? They can even piggy-back for free on certain kinds of competitors advertising (your competitors spend on ads explaining why everybody must have a dishwasher, you can just show up a sell a dishwasher).

> However, I don't think it's very hard to come up with mechanisms that serve the same function as ads in terms of market transparency

In theory correct, but in empirical practice this doesn't happen. Where is the car/dishwasher/whatever brand that is cheaper because it doesn't advertise, but consistently come out top in Consumer Reports? Even store brand consumables doesn't consistently test as better or equally good, just as good enough, and cheaper.

This is not one of those things where an obvious inefficiency shows up and everybody is falling over themselves because the market takes a few years or ten to smooth things out -- ads have been a fixture of the market, well, since the 60s, going by Mad Men.

This is the bit where I speculate wildly, but I think some of the fallacy is thinking about product, ad and consumer in an abstract isolation. Effects are probably much more diffused and harder to quantify. Broader status-confirmation than that of being seen carrying a can of Coke rather than Walmart Quality Cola is probably one: it feels good to be buying Tide, even is nobody ever sees the bottle, it's a confirmation to yourself that you've made it, and when you and I can shrug that off and get the cheap alternative, it partly because we can derive status confirmation from our work in a way that frankly isn't available to everybody. Also, positive branding (as supported by ads) is pretty important for employee morale which rubs off on product quality. This is way out in the margins, but an employee at the white-label detergent factory probably isn't going to feel the same pride the Tide employee is, and even a little compounds over time.

The very popular site you yourself are posting on for free demonstrates the opposite. Millions provide valuable content for free every day in twitter, medium, HN, Reddit, blogs, Wikipedia etc etc.

An ad-driven web should not be the only future we can envisage, and ads and the search for clicks are what is actively damaging our news media at present IMO. We can do better than ads.

As far as I know, this is the most efficient way to finance a website. What's your most efficient way?

While I would like to watch online ads, for the information might be useful to me, is impossible to disable the tracking, somewhere in a log file an IP will be associated with receiving and/or clicking this ad. This IP might be associated already with my identity because I did login to Gmail from the same IP, for example.

That's why I am using ad-blocker.

I do. Some years ago, I've read an essay where the author, among other things, considered banning paid advertisements, i.e. getting paid to promote someone else's work.

I sadly didn't save a link at the time, and I can't find it on Google. The author argued that today's social networks are effective ways for word-of-mouth advertising, which is why classical advertising is not strictly required for a new product to take off (esp. when combined with crowdfunding).

Furthermore, advertisements regularly create requirements that are irrational and even harmful to the people involved (e.g. sodas and sweets) or the society or its natural resources. I can see how banning paid advertisement could help in transitioning to a zero-growth economy, which I consider one of the most remarkable challenges of our generation.

I would love to see these ideas explored with scientific scrutiny, because, as always with economic policies on this scale, it's near impossible to estimate their effect in advance.

Even ads in magazines aren't there to "inform" people.

"Informing" would be objective. Ads are meant to show the product in the best possible light and get people to buy them.

They corrupt the developers, because the purpose is no longer to create a great product. You now have to think on how to:

* tweak your product to accommodate ads

* trick the user to comeback even when he shouldn't have to

* collect as much data about the user as you can

And they corrupt content creators, because it makes them focus on volume (views) instead of quality.

And yes, we painted ourselves into this corner, where is really tough to make it without using ads. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't explore other options. And without ad blockers, the industry will have no motivation to search for alternatives.

Since in 2016 this is mostly not the case, I have to go with whitelisting the sites instead of the other way around.

The internet is in need of a unified subscription service. One that you can pay a monthly fee and see as many ad supported websites as you want, without ads.

Yeah, the adv industry is a nasty one, but still this movement is not providing a viable (any?) alternative option to finance the web.

edit: 4. I really did enjoy South Park sponsored content

Never mind the technical hurdles; from a strictly ethical standpoint, would it make sense? The industry seems to have settled on 70/30 being a fair split. Why shouldn't sites be able to opt in to receiving a portion of 30% of the profits coming from a particular ISP subscriber, proportional to how many times that user visited their site compared to other sites?

ISPs profit by transferring other people's copyrighted content but sharing none of that money with the content creators. Wasn't MegaUpload raided and destroyed for doing essentially the same thing?

I would be OK with watching ads instead of paying a website, I'm not OK to be tracked in doing so.

Security, performance, aesthetics help in strengthening my resolve.

If I really want to help a website I'll value whether to disable the adblocker (ublock origin) or not, or perhaps pay for an ad-less service.