Those families are indirectly paying that price today, through their ad-influenced purchases.

Not only are they paying for the end-product, but they're paying for the arms-race between advertisers as well, and that's a huge industry.

The amount of money the ad industry deals out to "content providers" must necessarily be less than the amount they get paid by their clients, which in turn must be less than the amount people paid to those clients.

If the distribution is not uniform, and some people benefit from the ad-influenced overspending of others, the business is then predatory.

That's an interesting way to look at it, if I understand it correctly: Advertising itself is a problematic concept. Why should we weep? Everyone would be equally affected by this, it's not like someone is getting an advantage. Maybe this hurting advertising is a net positive for all of us. It forces people to actually pay for stuff directly rather than by being subconsciously tricked into buying more of the stuff advertised, later.

The worst case scenario I have seen people come up with is more sponsored articles but I doubt that is a sustainable business model. Honestly, I never understood why I can read the New York Times online for free. I'm not feeling bad about it, but it's fucking strange. Baby steps, but I really hope something like Contributor (https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/) becomes popular. Preferably not run by google.

I agree - the direct , and especially indirect price[1] people pay for ads is huge.

[1]ads have a huge impact on society and on the psych of people.

Indeed.

When tobacco advertising was banned in the UK, tobacco profits soared because they no longer had to take part in the arms race.

I'd pay hundreds of dollars a month to be free of all the ads that bombard me from every fucking direction every fucking waking minute of my life. I'd love Apple to get so big and monopolistic they could curate the Internet, and you'd just pay them a monthly fee and they'd pass a percentage on to the sites you visited.

I will set up a proxy for you for a mere 99 dollars a month.

> I'd love Apple to get so big and monopolistic they could curate the Internet

So basically just for your own comfort you'd like a big company to become monopolistic and force its views on the web? I am not found of ads myself, but I think they are a better alternative to what you describe.

In other words, roughly AOL. That didn't end well.

Adblock?

I use it on my desktops, but feel kind of like I'm littering. I would like to pay for the content if possible. Also, where do I get ad block for IRL. Some airports have ads on their escalator handles now.

Found a link: http://www.marketwatch.com/story/this-is-how-much-ad-free-in...

>of the 316 million people living in the U.S. are online, according to recent estimates by Pew Research Center and Forrester Research, that would equate to roughly $159 per person per year

So yeah about $50 for a family of four per month.

I would pay for this site, reddit, google search, maps and gmail.

Why would you pay for anything from Google? They are already making loads off of you by reading/scanning your email, saving all of your search queries, and noting all of your locations via maps. They then sell all of that information. Haven't you paid them enough already to then have to fork over actual money?

> They then sell all of that information

Source? Their product is ad targeting. Selling the data itself would devalue their product.

If it ever comes to alternative non-ads form, I would consider this way.