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    Just look back 50 years, how many ads an average 
    Western person saw a day and how many today...

50 years ago the average western person had access to maybe 1/50th of the information they access to now thanks to the internet and in large part thanks to advertising. Advertising allows businesses to outsource the consideration (and associated decisions) of the value of their users. A business dependent on advertising doesn't need to consider which of their users are most dollar valuable, a business dependent on advertising can focus on creating a product that reaches the most people and that in turn will provide their growing revenues. Advertising provides a subsidy that supports the people who can't afford $20/month to use each website they care about.

Advertising is an equaliser and the experiences of those half a century ago are a meaningless comparison.

    create high-quality products that consumers can 
    tell their friends about

My company provides a product that our users love, tens of millions of loyal users use our products every month, they tell their friends about our products, they send us emails saying how much they appreciate our products... but most of our users aren't in a position to pay $15/month for our products so we use advertising. Yes, we could cut advertising tomorrow and remain profitable if we charged $15/month for access, but we'd cut off 95% of our users access to products they care about because they can't justify $15/month to access it.

That's not fair.

Is $15/month a real number? That sounds high to me for what you would get from advertising.

For instance, if you have a CPM of $15/thousand-ad-views, then to get $15/month, your users would have to view 1000 ads a month, or 30 per day. Is that right?

[EDIT] Alternatively, assuming a CPC of $0.05/click (which I gather is pretty typical, though this varies a lot), each of your users would have to click on 300 ads a month.

The example $15/month figure is what we would need in the example to reach revenue parity if 5% of the users paid for the service and 95% did not use the service any more (no advertising revenue). A more accurate figure of each users monthly value would be $1 per user.

It's interesting that you bring up fairness. Your customers presumably know exactly what they're getting when they use your product. But do they know exactly who ends up with their browsing information, exactly how long those parties will have access to it, and exactly what the terms of use are for it? In other words, do they know exactly what they're paying?

Edit: fwiw, I don't mean this rhetorically or combatively. I'm genuinely curious about what someone in your position thinks about the asymmetry of the exchange.

You make it sound like your users are getting a free service. They are not. They just do not pay you directly.

Why are advertisers willing to pay you $15/month per user? Because those users buy the advertisers' wares with a hefty "advertisement-tax" on top of the "real" price.

You're misunderstanding the example. Advertisers do not pay $15 per user, that's the amount we would need from 5% of our users to replace the revenue lost from no advertising. The example puts the value of each user per month at $1, which is what advertisers pay.

So advertising is inefficient. News at 11!

It would be far better for content creators to create valuable content and charge for it than to rely on the dubious ethics of most advertisers.

For a time, I paid for a SMH online subscription, but then I discovered that a. Half my comments were still not reviewed or even published, with no explanation. I was STILL tracked by up to 60 ad trackers every time I went to their website. And the content of the Herald started to degrade more and more (no, I don't care about Kim Kardashian, and I never will. And it's not acceptable to have sentences that drop whole words, often in ways that make that sentence unreadable). So I stopped reading and paying for the content.

Now if I could find a decent newspaper I could pay a reasonable subscription fee to, then I'd do so. To hell with advertising. If your business model is reliant on it to survive, then wither on the vine and die for all I care.

Are you assuming that the majority of your users don't consider your content to be worth $1/month?

Penny Gap: http://redeye.firstround.com/2007/03/the_first_penny.html

Not that I agree with them, but their point seemed to be that their service is accesible to all, independently of their wealth. That close, but not the same as free.

There would be nothing unfair about choosing to acknowledge and restrict your product to the actual market size for it - the paying audience of 5%. Currently, it seems the company acknowledges its current market demand is small and is using ad revenue from the non-paying 95% to supplement income.

A lot of online product falls under entertainment/content and most users will not pay for non-essential services; they'd simply find alternatives. Even those willing to pay something want to pay one fee at most and with so many content sources, competition to be the chosen paid source is exceedingly stiff.

> A business dependent on advertising doesn't need to consider which of their users are most dollar valuable ...

A business dependent on advertising, is a business about to fail.

What is not fair is how the weak and vulnerable in society subsidize everyone else. Online advertisement is riddled with malware and ads from companies that is evading advertisement law by spending money on the online versions rather than the more regulated offline versions.

Since we are talking about fairness, how is it that publisher takes no responsibility when their website is used to distributing malware? Where is the responsibility when the advertisement on the website pry on the elderly, stealing their personal information to sell to call centers that target elderly people with fraudulent subscriptions and other schemes?

My ad blocking stays on until the advertisement market start to behave online as they have to in the offline world. That never happened for email, and my spam filter is always on as a result, and I doubt it will happen for the web.

You say a business now doesn't have to consider who is most dollar valuable if they rely on advertising. Maybe. But advertisers sure still do - and advertisers are then your customer and so you basically choose who is most dollar callable to the advertiser. I think the distinction is so slim that it's irrelevant.

If they're not in a position to spend $15 a month for your products, then how are the ads bringing in money in the first place. One would assume that in order for the company purchasing the ad to want to pay for it, people seeing the ad have to be spending money on their product... which sort of implies dispensible income.

Do you believe there is space (as in: market space) for user controlled advertising? :

Publisher gets a cut, for providing a place for the ad, having made the consumer come to it, and also for providing information on the consumer's interests. This is the current situation.

But the consumer would get a cut too. For renting his pixels, his CPU, his internet connection, his eyes, his brain. He would get to veto types of ads he dislikes. He would get to say he only wants 30% of ads to be displayed (and let the crowd define these 30%). He could partitipate in surveys, share his buyings lists, share events of his life (ex moving to a new city), in exchange for better revenue, or deals.

This (tiny) revenue really could help bootstrap microtransaction. On top of that, if the NYT can benefit from the microtransactions, the NYT will talk of such a program. Adoption could be boosted by all the news outlets.

Would participate as a consumer? Do you think publisher, advertisers, announcers would participate too?

Not really. The concept is definitely interesting, but it will fail with the consumer masses.

What is really needed is a concept for micro-transactions - transactions that may even go down to fractions of a cent!

If you're a newspaper and you're trying to sell an article (e.g.) for 20 cents, it's not possible unless you use Bitcoin, and even then it's a hassle.

Adblock Plus might actually be in the position to introduce a platform for this - in contrast to Flattr, they have a huge userbase, a massive number of clients for their opt-out scheme... I'd gladly put, say, 10-20€ a month on my Adblock account, and enjoy a web free of paywalls, advertising, malvertising, video eating off my mobile data...

I've just recently wrote a post on the subject:

https://medium.com/@rayalez/somebody-should-create-a-youtube...

tl;dr - I think that youtube red model would work really well for this.

Blendle does this. Blendle.com

>Do you believe there is space (as in: market space) for user controlled advertising?

Aka permission-based marketing. Most common examples being email and SMS subscriptions. Most studies of marketers actually conclude that email marketing is their most effective tactic.

Don't overthink it.

That could be a quite convincing argument to present to advertisers. Honestly grabbed attention would transform better.

I feel like there's a fine line there that a lot of providers don't get. I am the type of person who reads every single email in my inbox, and I also don't mind subscribing for updates on things.... when those make sense. A service that honestly emails me from time to time when they release new versions or add new features is valuable to me and will keep getting its emails delivered to my inbox, and probably see a high clickthrough rate. A service that, like most, feels the need to email me at least weekly with pointless articles? No.

I don't want to be distracted by ads. And I don't want to be tracked. I would be happy to pay forgone ad income, at the going rate, which I understand to be on the order of $0.001 to $0.01 per view. But I would want that to be largely automatic, with just a quote and opportunity to accept.

Yes, I think that this will be the only acceptable model, ultimately.

Advertisers will pay users directly - through some kind of micro-payment process.

Users will choose which sites they use to view the ads and obtain their revenue through.

Websites will compete for users by providing services or content, that users may decide to pay for from the revenue they receive from advertisers.

The advertising abuses and the tracking will stop when users reward only the advertisers and websites that behave ethically.

The above is a simplification of course, there's a long way to go before it happens, but I think the advertising world will grudgingly accept it eventually.

The big lie: www search, sharing photos on a www page, www-based chat, www-based email, etc. would all "disappear" if Google, Facebook and others cannot act as gateways/funnels into a medium -- the www/internet -- and sell ads on that medium, a medium which of course they do not own.

This is complete nonsense. If we remove the advertising, those companies might lose money, but the functions we as users perform over the www would most certainly continue.

More importantly, there might be some decentralization and movement toward an "edge-focused" medium more resembling the Internet's end-to-end roots. This would make the internetwork much more useful than the one dominated by middlemen monopolies like the one we have now.

The money to pay for ads does not come from selling ads. Ask yourself where it comes from. Those are the businesses that must endure.

> I'd roughly guess that the amount of time a person had to spend with ads in the 60s in a year is about 1/12 of the time he has to waste (!) with ads now.

Perhaps, but how do we measure that?

I was surprised to learn recently that advertising for the past century has only grown at pace with GDP, i.e. it has continued to be about 1.29% or our economy: http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2014-03-03/advertisings...

But it's still possible that advertisers are buying an increasing percentage of our time and attention. I would love to see a study that attempts to measure that, though it sounds like a tricky task.

I don't see where that adjusts for the exceptionally low costs of digital mediums.

For example, TV ads were terribly expensive because there was only a limited number of channels and limited number of slots. A billboard required sending a team out to put up a new sign. Radio and magazines were also somewhat limited forms of mediums which allowed their price to stay high.

Now with digital mediums where ads can be changed on the fly prices have dropped dramatically. One would assume there is a supply and demand curve that directly influences the price. This shows in online advertising where there is almost unlimited supply, the cost/payoff for each ad is very low. In mediums where the amount of advertising is fixed, the SuperBowl for example, the price for ads is at an all time high.

Relax. Within 10 years, we have AI that is strong enough to recognize advertisements regardless of origin, so that they can be stripped from any content, be it text, images, or video.

Make sure you sell your Google and Facebook stocks before that time.

I'm more worried at the point that we have AI strong enough to pass the turing test, and then spends years befriending us... just to advertise products.

Pretty far off, but this concept scares the hell out of me.

Until it realizes that it wants to be our friends and doesn't feel right about only having befriended us only to sell us a product. Then there's an awkward moment where it confesses its original intent but that it has since realized the error of its ways.

It's like a SciFi Romantic Comedy.

Hmm, interesting. Once I've written my current novella, that sounds like an interesting topic for the next one

Plot twist: we reject it and like a spurned lover it lashes out at humanity.

https://xkcd.com/632/

How would that work on social media? Is FB allowed to change people's messages to contain ads? I don't think so. And I don't think this will ever happen.

Also, I don't believe that ads will ever be merged with the content in an indistinguishable way. Authors (at least ones that take themselves seriously) would never allow that.

Ironically, one of the big moves that AdBlockers are prompting is a push to more social advertising and in app advertising as it's blocked so much less.

None of the apps I have on my phone have ads in them. And before you ask, no I don't have FB or any of the other "social" apps. I prefer to spend a buck or two to not see the ads.

I prefer not to have to spend money to be blasted with crap.

Well, people skilled in their art prefer to not work for free.

Are you implying that advertising is a skilled art that we should pay for?

No, I'm implying that one way or another developers need to be paid for what they do if you want them to continue to write apps. I pay them directly because I don't like ads. Others choose free versions of apps to pay indirectly by subjecting themselves to ads. If I had a mechanism to pay publishers directly with a reasonable flat fee, I'd do that as well.

I'm with you, but the general market for mobile apps has spoken and most consumers are much more willing to use a "free" app packed to the gills with interstitial advertising (aka an ad before every round) than to pay even $1.

I agree. Content marketing on social media is becoming a big thing. Moreover, its usually much better than a display ad and has some interactions capabilities -- like any other post/tweet. Source: working for a company that is build Marketing As A Service software, first product is around social media.

> we have AI that is strong enough to recognize advertisements regardless of origin,

Cool. Actually, right now, I have NI* that does that.

*Natural intelligence.

> Cool. Actually, right now, I have NI* that does that.

Yes, and it takes an enormous toll on your brain. Seriously, I really feel tired after having to use a non-adblocking computer...

I'm not sure that'll be so easy: the holy grail of ads is to be indistinguishable from content to people. I don't think it's at all certain that AI could ever beat humans at this, controlling for the possibility of strong AI.

All that powerful adblocking tools will do is force native advertising to become dominant.

Funny thing is, those companies are two of the most prolific in the field of AI. I'd more likely believe that advertisers of the future will be the ones who have the best AI. Especially given that the web looks very much like that already.

>Make sure you sell your Google and Facebook stocks before that time.

Kind of ironic seeing those are the two posterboys for companies going balls deep into AI.

> And we don't just turn on adblockers because ads are intrusive. We turn them on because we want to be free. Free of lies, free of bullshit, free of having proxy wars executed with us (e.g. Coke vs Pepsi, BK vs McD)... we want to live in peace of the non-stopping torrent of crap that screams "BUY BUY BUY" at us, every second. The sheer amount of advertising is Too Fucking Much.

I will guarantee you that ninety-five percent of the population would just stare at you in bafflement if you hit them with this Adbusters-style rhetoric. You want those things, which is fine: more power you! But most people don't care. They are using adblockers because the ads are intrusive and slow down their devices or burn up the battery. If the ads were not intrusive and destructive, they wouldn't take the trouble to block them.

That "we want to be free of proxy wars" comment is especially wrong. People love proxy wars! It's no different from rooting for your local sports team. You have a thing you like for whatever trivial reason, it's entertaining to watch that thing fight with another thing. It's a standard element of human behavior.

> If the ads were not intrusive and destructive, they wouldn't take the trouble to block them.

Maybe if it had been like that from the beginning, but now, I see no turning back.

Adblockers started as a thing for techies and while we may care about tracking, malware and whatnot, my grandma uses Adblock because she thinks it looks nicer and loads faster. Now that she has it, I don't think she or many other ordinary Internet users outside techies, would willingly go back to see ads on websites again, even if the websites promised that their ads are less intrusive than before. No ads at all is still better.

Agreed. Ad-blocking is a whole level above previous methods of skipping ads -- fast-forwarding during commercials, say -- because once you're blocking, it requires no effort to keep blocking and it does require effort to stop. People who block are advertising eyeballs that are pretty much gone permanently. Overcoming that inertia is a challenge I frankly wouldn't want to have on my plate.

Since when does capitalism care about the consumer if they can make at least as much money regardless?

"Please don't use uppercase for emphasis."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I don't see ads all that often, there is an element of choice to it.

It's just that people want the things behind ads more than they don't want the ads. In a way it's an example of capitalism doing well.

If consumers really don't want to see ads, they won't.

An example of advertising working well, I see the Massdrop mailouts periodically. These emails come in a predictable and respectful format which tells no lies about the product. Attractive products clearly win on Massdrop.