[FiatLuxDave]

People desire to bad ads because they are overwhelmed with the quantity of them, especially of the lower value ones which don't do anything for them. It's not the entertaining informative ads for things they want that anger them, it's the ads for things they would never want that get repeated ad-nauseum that bother them.

So, what do you think about additional taxes aimed directly at advertising to reduce the overall amount of advertising? In the same way that increasing cigarette taxes reduces the rate of smoking, taxing advertising should reduce the amount of it. Less advertising means less other ads competing for attention, making the remaining advertising more likely to reach its intended audience.

An ideal ad tax would be based upon volume of ads, but I can't think of a good way to implement this without it being channel-specific, which is likely to introduce market distortions. Any ideas? But even just a simple ad revenue tax would help filter out the low-value ads from the market, as their ROI would go down fastest.