Why ads are a problem

This is a rather shallow article with barely any real points. Talking about all those externalities only serves to create noise rather than support any arguments against the ad model. You can just as easily argue that images and CSS should be removed to save even more bandwidth and processing power. Why even go online at all actually when you can get a newspaper for a few cents?<p>Here&#x27;s the reality - We only have 2 options to enable the value exchange of content: direct (via you moving funds to the publisher) or in-direct (monetizing through ads). It&#x27;s a binary choice. It&#x27;s one or the other, that&#x27;s it. There&#x27;s no magic 3rd option that&#x27;s available (today).<p>Here are a few reasons why advertising is still a better model:<p>- It&#x27;s fast. Faster than money transfer.<p>- It&#x27;s efficient. Money is not cheap to transfer, even today.<p>- It&#x27;s passive. No mental energy expended or decision making required.<p>- It&#x27;s anonymous. No need for payment details or 3rd party to handle funds.<p>- It&#x27;s secure. Again no need for payment information, there&#x27;s not much ads can do. (Malware is a different problem.)<p>- It&#x27;s accessible. Your wealth doesn&#x27;t determine the amount of content you can get. Everyone can access everything equally.<p>This is fundamentally a question of human behavior and the common reaction is to take things for free when possible. People just do not value content that highly, if at all. You can already see the reaction to rising rates for netflix and spotify even though they provide so much value, certainly more than an equally priced cup of coffee.<p>Add to that the amount of willpower and decisioning it requires to judge whether a piece of content is worth it or not and it&#x27;s clear that this is not a scalable system. Perhaps a &quot;cable subscription&quot; for the internet with time-based billing for each domain might be something that works as a direct-payment option in the future but this is a massive technical, security and privacy challenge the way things are now.<p>I do agree that ads have gotten out of hand recently - however this is an <i>implementation</i> problem. Regulation and standards and enforcement are what&#x27;s needed to fix this. It has nothing to do with the ad model itself which is still the most universally scalable and viable monetization system for content.

&quot;Advertisers must pay to publish ads, this results (indirectly) in higher prices of products and services.&quot;<p>Not really. This is the same as the &quot;stealing causes us to raise prices for other shoppers&quot; misperception. Supply and demand set the prices of products and services. If advertisers could maximize profits by charging more they already would be. Advertisement dollars mainly just come out of profits.

While online ads consume substantial resources (energy, etc.), traditional ads did as well. Consider the cost of printed pages, or even making your TV run for slightly longer than it otherwise would because your TV show lasts 30 minutes with ads even though it would last 22 minutes with no ads.<p>An interesting environmentalist argument would be, to ask everyone to pay more to producers of all kinds (online or otherwise), to prevent the &quot;need&quot; for extra resource consumption on any medium.<p>It &quot;should&quot; be an easy argument because people are clearly already paying for ads, they just don&#x27;t see how. For instance, your electric bill would go down if you knew your TV would run for a half hour less every day.

Is it fair to assume that the model of voluntary contribution&#x2F;donation doesn&#x27;t stick with the major publishers because they could potentially make less money by adopting such model? Is there any major content publisher which adopts voluntary-donation-as-income model? I can see that a lot of casual reader like me will forget (or some intentionally ignore) to &quot;tip&#x2F;donate&quot; whenever we read, say, the New York Times (by &quot;casual&quot;, I mean someone like me who reads one NYT article a day at most). For cases like mine, what about encouraging (via a pop-up at the corner?) the site visitors to donate if they visit your site to read a certain number of articles in a day or a week? Will that work?<p>I feel like there has to be a happy medium where publishers get paid some reasonable amount for their content, and readers also get to enjoy the content for a reasonable price. I think this model can coexist with the current model if the reader&#x2F;content consumer doesn&#x27;t mind the ads.

Donations rarely work. They certainly fail any game theoretic model.<p>A rationally self-interested person would not donate, because in most cases, their donation would not give them as much benefit as the cost.<p>The way you&#x27;d measure benefit is the value received from the site, times times the chance that their donation makes the difference between the site existing and not existing. That chance is typically a very small number.<p>Naive articles like this don&#x27;t bother factoring in what the chance is that your donation will make a difference....in other words they ignore the fact that most people would rather be a freeloader than a sucker.

How many of you do actually donate?

stackoverflow.com fixed ads problem beautifully<p>one designated spotlight, no animations<p>i actually pay attention to them willingly

Ahh yes. Another &quot;ads are bad&quot; post.<p>People always seem to forget that most of the Internet is free BECAUSE of ads.