[Wowfunhappy]

The people who "accept ads as a part of life" are funding the content you read and watch. You are not in any way "a bad person", but you should be thankful that not everyone blocks ads.

[rchaud]

Venture capital funds the content, on the hope that people watch ads in the future. Online ads now are a very different beast compared to what AdWords was from 2002-2007 - not dependent on full-spectrum surveillance through their own browser, their own mobile operating system, video streaming and cloud suite.

Google accumulated untold riches from those primitive ads yet they and Meta have tightened the screw a little bit more in each passing year.

[Wowfunhappy]

> Venture capital funds the content, on the hope that people watch ads in the future.

Obviously, this isn't sustainable in itself.

> Google accumulated untold riches from those primitive ads yet they and Meta have tightened the screw a little bit more in each passing year.

Google doesn't have to actually make any content, they just link to it. This is relatively cheap.

If you're actually producing content (that isn't AI slop), you don't get the benefit of that sort of scale. There's no way to automate it.

[fsflover]

Ads are intentional psychological manipulation, and nobody should be thankful to anyone allowing this. See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43595269

[Ukv]

Have always felt it's not really any different to allowing a website to run a JS crypto miner. It moves money (which is why it's done) but wastes resources (time/energy) so is on net a detriment to affordability.

[Wowfunhappy]

So then how do you think websites should make money?