In the short term I think many sites would die, but in the longer run we would see other forms of people trying influence other people to make them buy something or vote for something or believe in something.

I fear that we would see a huge wave of advertising in disguise and other not necessarily more transparent forms of indirect funding and influencing.

For instance, there would suddenly be a very big incentive for product companies to become media companies themselves to make the distinction between reporting, advertising and simply describing their own product go away.

I believe an advertising ban would have a very large number of unintended and undesirable consequences.

Lots of non-ad companies rely on advertising. You would probably kill every marketing department worldwide. You would probably throw a huge number of companies in the world into chaos as they try to figure out how to grow revenue. The world would probably enter a depression worse than the 1920s as revenues severely tank because companies are not allowed to advertise their business.

"The world would probably enter a depression worse than the 1920s as revenues severely tank because companies are not allowed to advertise their business."

Nonsense. I'm not going to stop buying food or soap because I don't see ads for it.

There's no reason to conflate "advertising" with "user-targeted advertising". There's nothing inherently privacy-breaking about advertising. A regular billboard doesn't track users, a print magazine ad doesn't track users and there's no reason internet advertisements absolutely need to track users.

I wasn't conflating anything! I would be perfectly happy if all forms of advertising went away, targeted or otherwise. This wasn't a conversation about the reasons advertising was bad. I was just commenting that I don't think the internet would break if publishers stopped making money through advertising.

The vast majority of the content on the internet would disappear and the entire western world would likely be thrown into one of the worst economic recessions in history.

Probably less than 5% of the internet would work as is. If you give more time (like 10 years), the number would be more than that though.

$300B is no way negligible by any mean and businesses are tightly coupled so the impact will propagate across everywhere. For instance, almost every functional search engines are powered by advertisement in some way (even DDG); how would you use the internet without a search engine?

Given the absolutely ridiculous amount of content that is ad-funded, I very much disagree. All of my preferred youtubers and streamers would immediately be without livelihood. Same is probably true for a whole lot of news websites.

I suggest you pay those people with your money, instead of everyone’s privacy.

I'm completely fine with paying with my privacy. I feel like the vast majority of users prefers to look at ads compared to paying for content. Which matches reality where most people don't care if their browser blocks cookies or not.

As long as this patronage gets traction enough to support creators' livelihood. Unfortunately, the majority is not going to spend a single cent on those small creators when their alternatives are high quality contents built upon millions of dollars. It's even proven by Google Contributor program's failure.

> It's even proven by Google Contributor program's failure.

Although I think your point is correct, I don't think that this program's failure is evidence for it. I give cash money to numerous small creators, but there's absolutely no way that I would have used the Google Contributer program to do it. That requires more trust in Google than I can muster.

The point is that this needs to be done at scale. Even with Google's advantage on its pre-established publisher ecosystem, they couldn't make it because most publishers quickly realized that donation was not enough to offset the loss from disabling advertisements.

Most Magazines and Newspapers would stop too, since they're subsidized by advertising. Broadcast television and radio would cease to exist as well.

Public broadcasters don't live off advertising, do they?

In the US, public broadcasters get most of their money through contributions -- but advertising is a significant part of the mix as well.

More Wikipedia, more paywalls, less free news sites, Facebook, Instagram, etc.

A tremendous amount of resources are wasted on adtech - bandwidth, latency, which ultimately are accounted for in non-renewable time. Just compare using hacker news on mobile to reddit. I have a newish iPhone and reddit is basically unusable. Plausibly it’s a net-neutral situation, the downsides balancing out the upsides.

Similar evaluations can be made in the gaming space, comparing paid, freemium, and advertising driven. It wasn’t until fairly recently that advertising was even a viable revenue source for game developers.

The larger question perhaps is who loses their audience when they can no longer buy targeted advertising? Hint: it’s not the giant brands who blast billions of dollar blindly on mass advertising campaigns and can purchase Super Bowl commercials.

Disclaimer, a significant proration of the money I’ve made in the past decade + was from digital advertising.

> A tremendous amount of resources are wasted on adtech - bandwidth, latency

Not to mention cognitive resources. How much brain power has the world wasted on trying to get people to look at or click on things?

> reddit is basically unusable

Just a tip, if I want to use reddit on an iPhone, I usually go to i.reddit.com or reddit.com/.compact

There are also third party apps (I like Slide for Reddit) which are pretty good.