The move to advertising as the basis for the Internet has hidden, at least from most users, the cost of running a website and putting content online, which is frankly quite low compared to what it used to be, both in terms of actual money and the time/effort/experience required.

While in the mid/late 90s running a website could be a financially risky proposition (there are all sorts of semi-funny horror stories about people who ran labor of love sites that got Slashdotted and ended up with hundreds of dollars in bandwidth bills), today you can stand up a VPS on a Gigabit connection that's capable of serving orders of magnitude more users than most sites will ever see for a few bucks a month. I don't think that is necessarily a bad entry point for a communications platform that lets you talk to a significant percentage of the global population in one shot.

I'm not convinced that having the dominant model be "labor of love" as opposed to "make $$ off advertising" is necessarily worse or would result in less quality content. The advertising-driven model has given us clickbait and even machine-written garbage articles, link farms, etc., none of which would really exist under a publisher-pays model. There are significant hidden costs to the ad-based model, which are externalized on all players, including hard-to-define costs of privacy in terms of the way major players are incentivized to build detailed dossiers on users in order to improve ad targeting.

I think the ad model needs to improve where the major players will start enforcing strict rules on what types of adverts are allowed for example, they could reject any advert that waste CPU cycles, reject ones using too much memory, ban buggy adverts.

Plus, the number one concern these days, the privacy concern, I am forced to use adblockers everywhere on the Internet except for a few sites because I do not want some company giving me product recommendations just because I had a conversation with a friend about something related.

You could argue that this doesn't solve your problem, because we have to identify you to tell if you have paid or not. But actually paying for a service radically alters the relationship - it's suddenly in our interests to keep your information private, because if we don't you'll stop paying us and move to competitors who can provide better privacy. So we're now on the same side on this issue.

The old adage that if it's free, YOU are the product is now understood by more and more people.

Honestly I don't think we should even think about getting rid of adverts, but I definitely think that these adverts need to focus on being non intrusive, they have to start respecting people's privacy. I would willingly support a product which helps keep something I love online. But I would definitely think twice if that said company tries to get through to me by tracking and observing what I do online.

The trouble is, most third party networks are so laser focused on getting people to "interact" with their advertising that they've skewed the game in favor of distracting users from the content they arrived to consume. They're so focused on targeted advertising that they regularly invade users privacy, utilize questionable data collection practices, and break down security barriers when browsers try to shut down their violations of user trust. It's no wonder ad blockers are on the rise, because the existing ad networks are all untrustworthy.

There will always be a place for advertising when it's done properly. Watch an NFL broadcast and observe the product placement, the logos and sponsors everywhere. It's organic, integrated into the very fiber of the broadcast in a way that couldn't be blocked with even the most sophisticated blocking software. And it's also usually quite tasteful, there to promote the product, but not distracting enough to detract from the game the viewers came to the channel to watch.

This kind of advertising, organic product placement and sponsorships, where the content creator and the advertiser have a real partnership and coordinate their efforts, this is the kind of advertising I want to see more of. For all the drama they tend to draw, I commend the Gawker sites (Gizmodo is particularly good about this) for their Sponsored posts and their frequent "Deal of the Day" posts, which are first-party advertising that my blocker regularly fails to block. And you know what? Some of the deals are genuinely interesting to me, because Gizmodo clearly knows their audience, and selects advertising partners that make sense on their blogs. More of that please!

If the ad floats over the content. If the ad overlays my screen. If the ad forces me to do something to dismiss it, I don't care what the product is. I'm going to be less inclined to buy.

Put a normal, rectangular ad on the screen that doesn't dynamically resize itself while I'm trying to read the content and don't spread the content across 31 different pages just to increase the number of ads you show me.

I would perhaps say that it's the way that ad networks interact with content sites that's the problem.

With the current "automated just-in-time auction of the eyeballs of the person-we-identified-using-the-site's-metrics, with the site itself just providing the rectangle of space to slot the result into" model, content providers are essentially entirely beholden to whatever the ad network thinks is the best thing to put on their page.

An ad network could instead be a sort of "marketplace" service that lets content providers browse ads from various sources (or get ads suggested to them, using the same algorithm they'd have used originally to force ads on users), and then approve for display the ones they find tasteful/in line with their brand.

That is, after all, the model for running ads in any other medium: the publisher gets to provide ultimate editorial judgement on whether a given ad belongs in their publication.

(Also, in such a model, the content provider would likely be the one hosting the resulting ads, so we'd be able to avoid the whole ads = tracking beacons problem we face today.)

I also sell and self-host my own advertising which can only be non-animated jpgs/pngs which gives me ultimate judgement. There is a barrier to entry on this style of ad sales, but overall I feel like it has been worthwhile pursuit so far in the 3 or so years I've been doing it.

Thus my view: we need a "catalogue of creative, you pick what you run"-style ad network, so that the little guys have somewhere to turn instead of acquiescing to the existing networks and ending off with their sites showing chumboxes[1].

[1] https://theawl.com/a-complete-taxonomy-of-internet-chum-de0b...

As an aside, I've seen multiple cases of live video-processing to replace or overlay advertisements on sporting events, such as those plastered on the walls of arenas. (Generally done during broadcasts of those events, as part of deals that separate the market for broadcast and in-person advertising at those events.) So, don't underestimate the ability to block advertisements given sufficient motivation.

I've thought about that many times when watching old sports videos, especially some motor racing and football which used to have very prominent cigarette advertising - thankfully illegal now here in Australia.

Often the ads are blurred which I actually don't like as it kind of ruins the feel of the show. I'm not a fan of such retroactive censorship, it feels historically dishonest. What is a film if not a recording of the zeitgeist? And within that zeitgeist, cigarette advertising was acceptable. I'm not sure if it's actually required legally as I could have sworn that I've seen some without the blurring.

Customisable TV ads is not an idea I'd be prepared to release onto the world. If there's one thing that humanity doesn't need, it's more advertising.

So if the the ad networks themselves truly are the problem (and as a result adblocking is ever on the rise), it sounds like there is an opportunity for a better, more "organic" solution accessible to the long tail of smaller sites looking for monetization options. Sounds like a tricky nut to crack, as I'm sure anyone who works in the industry would tell me.

For me that is quite funny in a way Americans might not get since brands and commercials are more or less everywhere.

Some great examples of this are the TWiT network and the Co-Optional podcast.

I switched right from "well, ads support the internet so" to "kill this s### with whatever fire I can enable my browser with".

Web advertisers, we gave you a chance and the rich benefit of the doubt. You completely and totally earned every bit of this thats coming down on you now.

The trouble is that incentives are misaligned so we can't get to a middle ground position.

- Content owners and ad networks have little incentive to make ads that are better for users. They just want to get an ad system going that's simple to implement and allows tracking and fraud detection.

- Users who dislike the privacy, security, resource use issues with ads find it easier to just block ads completely. It would be much harder to work out a solution involving proxying, sandboxing, etc.

These conflicting incentives mean ad networks produce something good for them but bad for users and users (who know what to do) will do something that's good for them but bad for ad networks. There's a middle position, but neither party has a reason to attempt it.

If end-user can instruct their computer "do this and don't do that" and freely share those scenarios with other end-users - I guess, everything's fine... or it isn't?

(Of course there's a never-ending-until-the-singularity arms race between ever-complicating advertisement delivery code vs ever-improving advertisement blocking rules... but that's just bound to happen, so personally I'm just looking forward to whatever would speed things up to their logical conclusion, whatever it will be.)

Ads are not the only way to support free content, and in most cases free content is paid for with advertisement (at least not amounts you could see as a payment).

On the other hand ads lead to consumerism, overconsumption, poor spending habits, waste of resources for the adverts and the products they sell, and they reduce our attention to things that actually matter (like the traffic while we're driving cars).

Ads are about what's being sent from publisher to consumer. It can be solicited, unsolicited or something in-between. And privacy is about what's being sent in the very opposite direction.

Certainly the untargeted adds I see (or even those I can tell are by virtue of the place I am, instead of my own customer profile, seem much lower quality.