My unpopular opinion: I would rather see content disappear than ever see an ad of any kind. I used to be tolerant of ads but I'm never going back, ads of any kind are repulsive. I even think that billboards on the highway should be banned, they're eyesores.

You are not alone. I'm also like this. Ads are horrible both in concept and in execution; their existence causes all kind of troubling incentives (for example: all those discussions about youtube radicalising young people because their algorithm prioritises polarising content? Remove the incentive to increase engagement at all costs, which is caused first and foremost by advertising, and the problem it's gone); and the worse of it is that we know there are a lot of very smart people out there, with a good grasp of how a human mind works, whose job is to insert tricks into advertising to manipulate you (by the way, this is not just about dark patterns, which is another can of worms of its own, but about neuromarketing and similar concepts). And then there are astroturfing campaings, which by design are even more dishonest than standard advertising.

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.

I agree. About your last point, I can feel how ads affect me emotionally now and that's why I find them repulsive. My household is a "no-ads" household and I don't allow my children to view ads.

Ads have been around as long as human societies have been around. Just look at the murals of Pompeii for example, or the rock walls in modern day Syria with commercial advertisements. As long as humans have something that others want, there will be advertising.. unfortunately.

I think it anachronistic to construe signs and graffito from the ancient world to be equivalent to modern advertisement, marketing, or public relations, which belong to the world Edward Bernays (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays) helped invent. It really is different in kind from the menu with prices someone painted on a wall around 79 CE.

My unpopular opinion: Show me ads and pay me for interating with them. You can even get all my data (income, recent purchases, hobbies, ...) preferably anonymised in some way. Let me rate ads and show the rating to everybody. If I buy the advertised product/service increase the public rating of the ad, otherwise decrease it.

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.

>The solution is less, but better ads sold at a higher cost.

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.

Maybe, but I think part of the solution is to convince more people to block ads. Most people I know still don't have an adblocker, even though modern ad blockers have been around over 15 years. I think they need to get over the fact that it's not immoral to block ads when those ads not only destroy the experience of the internet but also are often outright scams that Google and the like are complicit with. If the punishment for having overly aggressive and deceptive ads was that the average person blocks the ads, the bar for where ads start to lose money becomes far lower. Most legitimate content creators these days take subscriptions directly, have preroll sponsor ads, or sell merch. If ads make up the majority of the money you take in, what you're peddling probably isn't worth much on its own.

That seems akin to an 'ethical' approach to ads. But as always with ethical products that are competing in a common market, how do you prevent cut-throat/unethical competitors from dominating the market if they have better engagement, conversion rates due to more aggressive/deceptive/manipulative techniques?

I don't want better ads or more targeted ads because they are more likely to influence my behaviour.