https://adnauseam.io/

The solution is less, but better ads sold at a higher cost. This is generally what makes search advertising work. Popular keywords garner a premium price, which in turn prices out those who are looking to manipulate the advertising platform with misleading ads. Higher cost ads means that less ads need to be sold to make a profit. Unfortunately, such an elegant solution has yet to be seen for content based websites, and so massive amounts of ad placements are added to websites just to break even.

I really, really despise advertising. It can't disappear soon enough.

To make this comment a bit less ranty, I'd like to add something: some people believe that ads don't work on them. I very much disagree. Ads DO work. That's exactly why I don't want anywhere near me.

Optionally, adjust the price according to rating. The higher the rating the lower the payment for interaction with the ad. Let unpopular/unsuccessful ads/advertisers pay more for the same customer.

Let me adjust the price and rating thresholds to exluce low priced / low quality ads.

Keep track of my purchases to build my reputation among advertisers.

That's where we started. It's a solution, but only for one side of the market. It leaves a lot of potential inventory and revenue on the table.

Presumably your ad blocker doesn’t prevent sites that display ads from loading at all. How then do you make the calculation about doing without?

Otherwise, if you use websites that are solely ad-supported, then you are neither paying for the service nor doing without.

Web sites that require payment are more than welcome to return HTTP 402 Payment Required instead of sending a copy of the requested data for free.

We can play semantic games - “looking at” ads - or we can acknowledge that people pay for websites by allowing their browser to load ads, which is both true and the uncontroversial truth my comment was assuming.

Websites are obviously capable of returning that response or a 200 with text that states that the site declines to show the page...

I’m still curious how OP decides that OP is doing without.

This expectation that "you pay for content by looking at ads included" is a unilateral decision made by publishers who embed ads, and pushed by the advertising industry. We have every moral right to refuse looking at ads. And if you demand payment for the value you provide, do it the honest way: demand up-front. HTTP protocol has provisions for that too.

Not even close. There is only one truth here: nobody's charging users for anything. There are no payments.

Webmasters run servers that send pages to any client that asks, 100% free of charge. Advertisers pay webmasters to load these pages full of ads. What clients do with these ads is not under anybody's control. They might look at it. They might delete it. Who knows?

So any problems that arise here are between webmaster and advertiser. The ads aren't being displayed? People aren't clicking on the ads? Not making enough money? None of that is the user's problem. Nobody is obligated to solve these problems for them or even to help out by looking at or clicking on ads.

Poor phrasing on my part. I meant: Presumably if your ad blocker detects ads, it doesn’t prevent the site itself from loading.

Once they got a click, they know that this user does not have an ad blocker so is less tech savvy, and more susceptible to be influenced by marketing.

Click through rates and conversion rates have increased on desktop traffic in the past few fears.

This alone makes ad blocking a moral imperative. They don't really care about the internet, it's just some money making scheme to them.

> But then, if everyone did what I did, could capitalism even survive?

Aren't capitalists all about adapting to adversity? If capitalism can't survive without ads, then let it die a well-deserved death. Nobody should be putting up with advertising for the sake of it.

A) What you wrote: Not to mention the brightest engineers, managers are being sucked en-masse into FAANG and the supporting industries, where they waste humanities potential into improving engagement by 0.001%.

But then, if everyone did what I did, could capitalism even survive?

B) What people say about 'the brightest wasting their time on Wall Street instead of creating things'

*

Why are we assuming these people would do something meaningful with their lives if they were not working on 'better advertising and better conversion'

??

Perhaps they would just be doing something else that pays well but has little long term contribution to humanity