If X% of people despise ads, then can we have X% of the year with a ban on ads?
Maybe this will wake up more people.
Maybe this will wake up more people.
At this point, pay for use has clearly lost to ad supported. People prefer ads to paying.
Eh. Spotify has 250 million subscribers. Netflix has 300 million. Amazon Prime has 180 million. Heck, there's something like a million people paying Twitter for a checkmark, and half a million paying Reddit for nothing at all.
People don't seem to be opposed to paying for online services. They were just never given choice. I have no doubt that publishers prefer ads because it just lets them extract value "for free" - which is probably why you're increasingly seeing ads in paid services, too (Netflix, etc).
Meta has network effects which is a different issue. But what’re your thoughts on consumers using Google for free versus the paid search models? There, at least, there are good alternatives and people clearly prefer ads.
There was Google Contributor[1], which they tried three launching three different times before giving up on it. It seems like nobody was interested in paying to remove ads on the web.
So you paid, and you still saw adverts, it was never available outside of the USA, and didn't last very long for each launch.
Not that people weren't interested. However this is the first I've heard of it, so there's that too.
People's use of ad-driven services should not be taken as a true expression of their preferences, or as consent. The data that is collected in the name of ad-tech is used for many things other than to display ads. But most people have zero awareness of that. The true price we are paying is kept hidden from us.
People who would prefer paying with money rather than data are not given the opportunity to express that preference. There is no premium version of YouTube where my viewing history is not tracked. No "AT&T Platinum" subscription where my location history is not sold to third parties.
The human mind seems to, as a default state, only care about visible and immediate cost, filtered through a lens of many other biases.
At this point, I feel we need to judge based on observed behaviors rather than armchair psychology of what people actually want but have been given no chance to try. Alternatives to Google exist only as a niche; to me, this feels like pretty conclusive evidence about what most people prefer.