Let’s also not ruin every discussion with speculation about how someone will eventually ruin everything with ads.

Watch Adam Curtis Century of the Self. I don't think he set out to explain ads in tech, but to my mind it answers a lot about how ads specifically came to power.

Might be of interest - new AC series: https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2025/jun/14/shifty-...

We need to make ads cost more than they are worth - here's one small way (what are others?): https://adnauseam.io/

Haha that's brilliant. Does it actually 'work'? I expect there is more to recording ads than simply a click?

Also is this somewhat not just lining Google's/ad networks pockets? They won't care about even a large-ish number of people using this add on.

So, this works only for a subset of ads, specifically, ads that are CPC (cost-per-click) (sometimes called CPL -> cost-per-link), this wouldn't work for CPA campaigns (cost-per-action), which only pay out when a sign up or some other arbitrary action is performed by the user.

The larger adtech companies will have some form of bot-activity-detection, _but_ plenty will let it all just slip on by. (I've personally written a Babashka script at $job that checks performance of our publishers, and flags any fraudulent-seeming activity)

Somewhat ... But it's not just about costing the advertised money but also obfuscates my actual interests with lots of noise.

when there's a need to make money, but there's noone who wants to pay (but they want to use the service), then it naturally falls onto being ad-driven.

> no one wants to pay

Fewer people went to pay. That’s the crux. Companies wanting mass market penetration, rather than just accept the natural size of the market.

Turns out that it doesn’t matter whether people want to pay. Many paid services also include advertising.