At the bottom of it all though, there need to be enough people who actually do follow through on the call to action in order for the ads to be profitable. In casino parlance these are the "whales" who make all the freeloaders at the buffet worthwhile. In the 1990s the "whales" of the Internet were AOL users, they had that sweet combination of impulsive action and disposable income that advertisers love. I don't know who their target market is today, but it's not me.
In fact, Buzzfeed will probably still be available to the general public, since they already engage in "native advertising", where the content is the ad. It's sites that still maintain some editorial independence that will be most affected.
We're not talking about a return to the past; we're talking about a two tier system, where the good information will be served with all the speed and amenities of the web to those who can afford it. Having other means of disseminating the information is irrelevant, because the real money will come from the paywalled sites. It's the JSTOR model, now for all the information.
And what I'm saying is not "let's keep the current model"; all I want is to urge the anti-ad advocates to at least acknowledge the issue -which is real- instead of brushing it off as only affecting Buzzfeed and the likes, and to come up with a better answer than "manufacturers will still publish their product data", as if that covered the important information we're talking about.
If you wanted to redistribute wealth to the global poor, forcing everyone (poor and not-poor alike) to download massive, useless megabytes of untargeted advertising, malware, and phishing scams is not the most efficient way to do it. This is defending the current broken and destructive ad regime on the basis of a distant third-order effect.
Yes, the current ad system is inefficient, regularly disruptive and even occasionally destructive. But it's here and it's redistributing, while the proponents of alternatives don't even mention that aspect, let alone have a working solution.
And it might be a "distance third-order effect" to you, but as someone who lives in a country where credit cards are rare and the average wage is under $15k/y, it's not as abstract to me.
Talk about fallacies! Based on that kind of argument, you can defend any awful, destructive policy if it benefits someone, somewhere.
> as someone who lives in a country where credit cards are rare and the average wage is under $15k/y, it's not as abstract to me.
I'm sorry, but I can't seem to find the contract I signed where I agreed to be tracked by giant corporations and choke all my devices to the point of nonfunctionality with malware and ads just so a stranger wouldn't have to pay for content. Maybe you have a copy?
Sure, and what I'm saying is that it's not a good point for the reasons I've stated already. I'll add that if you deliberately wanted to turn people against redistribution of wealth, you could hardly do better than to associate it with the intrusive web advertising that everyone hates!