This is not a path forward. The people with the money to pay for the content are the same people with the money to buy the products that advertisers make money by advertising.
You can’t outrun the incentive alignment. Nobody can. Case in point - Apple is shifting hard into the ad space after laying low and crafting a premium brand.
Incidentally, yes. I get to choose what my computer displays to me and that's non-negotiable however. If that breaks your business model that is 100% a you problem.
I feel like this is somewhat of a false dichotomy - I pay for plenty of content and have a good number of subscriptions, but that doesn't make the ads go away like magic.
If anything, I've seen more and more services where paying is just for "premium features," of which getting away from ads isn't one of them. Spotify is a key example - if you pay for premium you don't get ads interrupting music, but you still see their bundled advertisements on the home screen of the app, you get content suggested to you in a way that is very advertiser-centric, etc.
I think we should maybe split off the discussion of "how will these businesses get paid the way ads get paid" from "ads are bad and we should get rid of them." Frankly, I don't care if advertising as a business tanks and that takes other businesses with it. The externalities of surveillance capitalism are pretty shitty, and I'm fairly confident there are other ways for people to be productive within the economy that don't involve the invasive nature of today's advertising ecosystem.
I pay for several subscription services, yet they always want more and more of my data. Whatever I give, it's never enough, they want to have their cake and eat it too.
I use open source stuff when I can, and similarly, I contribute to the projects when I can. This seems to be the only legitimate way to avoid ads.
Most of the content I consume is produced for free without any expectation of payment. My friends don't get paid for posting pictures on Instagram. However, Meta still sees the need to inject an ad between every two posts and greedily extract value from its users.
sfvegandude|3 years ago
You can’t outrun the incentive alignment. Nobody can. Case in point - Apple is shifting hard into the ad space after laying low and crafting a premium brand.
The money is just too good.
xhrpost|3 years ago
bastardoperator|3 years ago
disintegore|3 years ago
ThatGeoGuy|3 years ago
If anything, I've seen more and more services where paying is just for "premium features," of which getting away from ads isn't one of them. Spotify is a key example - if you pay for premium you don't get ads interrupting music, but you still see their bundled advertisements on the home screen of the app, you get content suggested to you in a way that is very advertiser-centric, etc.
I think we should maybe split off the discussion of "how will these businesses get paid the way ads get paid" from "ads are bad and we should get rid of them." Frankly, I don't care if advertising as a business tanks and that takes other businesses with it. The externalities of surveillance capitalism are pretty shitty, and I'm fairly confident there are other ways for people to be productive within the economy that don't involve the invasive nature of today's advertising ecosystem.
teawrecks|3 years ago
I use open source stuff when I can, and similarly, I contribute to the projects when I can. This seems to be the only legitimate way to avoid ads.
tarakat|3 years ago
tornato7|3 years ago
raxxorraxor|3 years ago
folmar|3 years ago