The US began with a theory that email was like mail since the recipients resource use was minimal and now treats it more like fax since the senders burden proved even more minimal.

On the web in general, the delivery costs are exceptionally low for the producer leading to the general sense that most content should be long lived and ad free. Especially on mobile, where people with ridiculous data plans have large costs.

Clearly, traditional news publishers have other production costs and a decaying product. But how do you fairly make the distinction between real ones and pseudo publishers in a way that doesn't over-reward being near the blurry lines that separate them?

Normally, search should have a mechanism to specify these kinds of qualities, hence a separate mobile mode in google's search. But Google working out penalties for use of display ad networks (which deliver different content to different users) is a conflict of interest.

Do you have a third way to facilitate this business model that's likely to succeed?

But how it does it? Tracking your every click across time, across the entire web? No, that's completely new, utterly unprecedented, and a thing the consequences of which we haven't even begun to unpack.

There's two issues here only one of which I think is worth fighting:

1) Do companies have the right to serve advertisements in exchange for consumption of their content? I'd agree they do.

2) Do companies have the right to track your every move across the web and use that to improve the efficacy of #1? Absolutely not.

If companies have the right to serve advertisements, then they also have the duty to ensure those advertisements are a) not harmful to the consumer b) don't exceed a given file-size c) don't prevent the consumer from continuing whatever journey they were on. That's in rough order of importance/realism.

Advertising providers are currently failing on all three of these, and it's hardly a surprise that the market is reacting by preventing all advertising, even that which might be deemed acceptable. The industry needs to fix this soon or it's going to destroy itself. As a consumer, I don't mind - alternative content will prevail - but from the companies' point of view, they need to fix this problem urgently.

They have the right to put whatever they want into the page as the author of the content. The realities of the Web and HTML being what they are make avoiding advertising quite trivial, especially when the advertisements are large video or image files. If you want to serve advertisements that are less than trivial to block then the future of that is likely going to be either native advertisement where the entire story/content piece is the advertisement or advertisement bound directly into the final story and served as a single request.

You have the right to be on the street corner yelling your paranoid conspiracy theories at people. They have the right to ignore you.

The article is describing that 50% of the data is spent on ads. And many times the actual page is 90% ads (often video, audio, moving, popups) with a couple sentences of content, wrapped in a clickbait title.

Newspaper ads don't shoot loud screaming video in your face that grinds your brain to a halt and covers the content of the paper.

Advertisers in the past had to play by some rules. Imagine if a cable TV station ran an illegal ad that destroyed your cable box. That would be unspeakably unacceptable. The TV provider would be crucified, their ratings would tank and they would cease to exist (not to mention legal proceedings) -- stations are accountable for the ads they serve. Now our expectations have degraded to the point where it's somehow okay for a google search for something innocuous to return an ad which is actually a virus. I have a pretty powerful machine and often if I click on a clickbait article it grinds to a complete halt for minutes at a time and crashes the browser.

The state of the art in advertising is far, far worse than it has ever been and we're seeing a fundamental shift with the Internet away from accountability in advertising.

It's comforting to think that things aren't different from how they used to be, and that there isn't any fundamental difference; well here there absolutely is.

Actually I consider that much worse, and it seems crazy to me that American TV has ads 1/3 of the time! You can click away even the most annoying (non-malware) ads in less than 1/3 of the total time on a website.

Data usage is often irrelevant, time OTOH is strictly limited.

Moreover, it's not actually been a dominant form for funding of content creation except for a few decades. This model is very much historically unusual, but there are many interests behind pretending that it's a natural and indeed rightful state of affairs.

You pay for the machine that turns radio signal into video/audio and you pay the opportunity cost of the radio bandwidth which is public property that is used for transmission of TV signal.

When was the last time you had a pay-per-use TV subscription?

And now even some mobile providers are blocking ads. I'm guessing that's because they're concerned that they won't recover investment in additional infrastructure. That is, providers who block ads and charge less will be more competitive than providers who allow ads and charge more.

https://www.eff.org/cases/newmark-v-turner

I'm not really trying to defend advertising per-se but I'm trying to point out this isn't a new problem, however the level of entitlement which people feel definitely appears to have increased.

Guilty as charged.

If advertisers do find some way to prevent "active" ad blocking, the next step will be to download an entire page, ads and all, and then strip out the useless bits. This would even have the side effect of inflating download counts in comparison to actual views.