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I realized a truism years ago: Anytime there are 3 or more parties involved in a business deal, at least one of them is getting fucked. And it's usually the least powerful party, which 99% of the time is just the ordinary user/consumer/taxpayer. However, not always. And sometimes it's two parties getting screwed. This happens a lot with government contracts. Where the people paid for it, the government got garbage, and the contractor(s) got rich.

Here's is the quintessential example: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-book-of-broken-promis_b_5... We paid $400 billion dollars to entrenched ISPs and got absolutely nothing for it.

And advertising is almost always a 3 party business deal. The merchant. The advertiser. The unwitting public. Sometimes the merchant gets screwed. Sometimes it's the advertiser. But almost always the target audience.

So when it comes to adblocking, I have zero sympathy for the advertiser or the merchant. I want zero advertisements in my life. But I get them anyway.

discuss

hibikir|2 years ago

Online advertising is even more fun than that: There's the merchant/website, the advertiser, the ad network, and the public. You can even add the advertiser's competitors! The public gets ads they don't want, the merchant can fake some of their traffic, or maybe it's the advertiser's competitors. The ad network is ultimately not all that interested in giving the advertiser that great a deal, or even if they are, they might still lose to those trying to steal ad revenue. You then see a company that was trying to sell ads to sports fans in indiana, that see that all their budget really went to ads placed in front of a bot farm from Philippines. I know of a failed alcohol startup who, after analysis, saw that 40% of their youtube marketing budget ended up attached to channels playing Peppa Pig.

So sure, adblock away, but don't think that the consumer is the sole loser in the ads race: It's far worse than that.

RoyGBivCap|2 years ago

Yeah, in advertising there's supply side and demand side. So even more parties can get screwed!