Presumably you are viewing ads on a website that is giving you some sort of value so you aren't doing it for free.

In my experience the most valuable websites have few ads and the most trashy websites have the most.

So why are you frequenting these 'trashy' sites? If you are, it must be because they offer some value, right? If you're not... then you don't see any ads from them. Someone else will, because they find value in the site.

Not really, sometimes you search for some information (camera review, headphones review, medical information, toys, whatever) and instead of landing on some site that has good information you end up on some crap site with crap content and tons of ads.

Why? Because owner of that site had resources to do SEO (if one has money, one can trick Google algorithms without much trouble). How they earned that money? Through ads, obviously.

The more ads such site has, the more revenue comes in and more money can be spend on SEO to increase revenue. And so one.

Who pays for that? Those who landed on such site, they wasted time, read some potentially infomercial content.

This ads -> money -> SEO -> more ads -> money is not particularly beneficial for the economy. This looks like one more incarnation of Gresham-Copernicus law - bad content is pushing away good content. If you spend money on content, you don't spend them on SEO, so you earn less money from ads and finally you end up on 5th Google results page and that's the end.

Because the trashy sites are also the best at SEO (and google isn't properly incentivized to punish them for their ads) so you end up seeing them by accident.

Maybe trashy is the wrong word, but rather "low-effort" or "repetitive".

A whole lot of news articles are just regurgitated Reuters or AP. There's nothing wrong with that and it is a valuable service. But I am completely indifferent to these sites existence.

The sites that I would really care about if they went under, like HN, Wikipedia, NYT, etc, either use subscriptions or are donation funded. HN has job ads but they are super low key.

The real question is: Why should you watch them at all?

Because you're probably not paying for 99% of the contents that your web browser loads.

But that's exactly what the ancestor comment was suggesting

>I would personally much rather allocate actual dollars instead of CryptoBuckOfTheDay backed by ads I have no desire to ever watch. Say, $20/month that gets allocated to sites I visit. The whole "reward people for watching ads" model just seems... wrong.

If you don't want to provide free content then stop publishing on the web, a free medium.

You're confusing what is technically possible with what is ethical.

Advertising isn't ethical. It is lies and manipulation.

Hey, remember OTA television? That is also a free medium. Where did this notion come from?

And you have the freedom to block/skip ads from your TV, too.

Or course you do, but you also seem to think no one should be using the web if they want to make ad revenue.

>If you don't want to provide free content then stop publishing on the web, a free medium.

How would that not also apply to television?

If you want to provide TV content, go for it. But if your content has ads, don't be surprised when people skip all the ads, because ads are offensive, and they're free to skip them. So that's an awkward business model to rely on. The consumers aren't the ones being unethical; you chose to put yourself in an aggressive and dubious position in the first place. I prefer public and collectively-funded broadcasting.

I was only commenting on the "...then don't publish on the web" bit, which you seem to be back peddling on.

Ah I see what you're getting at now. Sure, ads are unethical and they shouldn't publish them, but since they will anyway, and it would be too heavyhanded to prevent them (by making it illegal, say), we should look at ways to defend ourselves against them.

They're not paying me for the compute resources their suspicious unnecessary JavaScript payload consumes. If they were good actors respecting my property, I would respect theirs.