by James Wallace Harris, August 22, 2023
I hate advertisements, yet ads are essential in our economy. But are they really? I’m wondering if capitalism could succeed without ads. I don’t want to put people and corporations out of business by conducting a war against ads, but I want to arrange my life, so I never see them.
We now live in an era where most of the digital content we consume is free, but I hate the price of free when it means looking at ads. What percentage of content providers would go under if they couldn’t sell ads? From what I can tell there are a lot of desperate companies out there barely staying afloat by cramming in even more ads. At some point, everyone will become like me and decide to avoid all content that comes with ads.
I gave up listening to the radio in the early 1970s because I just couldn’t stand the ads. I just switched to buying LPs, CDs, and now Spotify and Apple Music.
I stopped watching movies on TV after TCM, HBO, Blockbusters, and Netflix offered ad free alternative.
The only way I can watch a television show is on streaming services without ads or by using YouTube TV’s DVR where I can scan over the ads.
I’m so sick of web page ads that I want to stop reading web pages or using apps like Flipboard or Feedly.
I’m so aggravated at sponsored ads on Google that I don’t trust the search engine anymore. Even the results not marked sponsored are usually aimed to sell me something. Google should have a little check box on its input line that says, “I’m buying” and if it’s not checked just give me the information I want.
I love The New York Times but reading it is getting more annoying because of the ads. It seems like if I’m paying, I shouldn’t have to view ads. I’m now looking for alternate sources for daily news.
I’m absolutely addicted to YouTube but if they didn’t offer an ad free version, I’d be going cold turkey.
I love shopping online. And when I want to buy something, I do plenty of research, so I’d be open to visiting sites that promoted their products. But unless I want to buy a hedge trimmer, I don’t want to see anything about hedge trimmers.
You’d think corporations would have thought up a more efficient way to promote their products. Do people really buy Cokes because they just saw an ad? Just how much compulsive buying goes on?
Searching engines should be for learning about things.
We should have shopping engines for when we’re ready to buy something.
JWH
p.s. – WordPress ate my last post about women milling lumber. Some people saw it, but it’s disappeared. That’s annoying, especially since I can’t figure out how it happened.
Auxiliary Memory 
Advertising seems to be increasingly intrusive these days in every direction, it’s integral to the YouTube business model even if you’re on a paid subscription, because the YouTubers are constantly pressing you to visit their sponsors, or advertising their own channel. I’ve reached the point where I intentionally ignore everything like this. I don’t have time to waste on being deluged with promotions for stuff I don’t want. I also stopped blogging earlier this year after WordPress began saturating their sites with adverts to the point of rendering posts unreadable. I wasn’t prepared to go for a paid subscription because there are limits to what’s reasonable to throw into platforms that don’t sell the books I write. They’ve pegged back a bit on since, and I’ve restarted, but I am seriously looking at other platforms.
I pay WordPress so they won’t put ads on my site. I hope they aren’t showing up.
I saw a video about this and the guy said the internet might divide in two user types. Those that will pay to not see ads and those who won’t.
That assumption presupposes that all people can afford to pay and that some make a choice not to. Not everybody has that much disposable income. And then there are companies such as Meta, whose Facebook product is ‘always free’, and thus always saturated with adverts, like it or not. Personally I won’t pay for WordPress because it only marginally meets my needs and a cost-benefit analysis relative to any income it could generate for me in terms of book sales shows it’ll always be a cost if I subscribe. I am wondering about Substack as a better alternative.
That’s true, many people can’t afford to pay to avoid ads, which is sad. It reminds me of a science fiction story, “The Midas Plague” where the poor must constantly consume to maintain capitalism, while the rich can live quiet lives of non-consumption.
There is an emerging third way. Patrons support many sites. YouTubers survive because of Patreon supporters. Wikipedia survives because of donations. I saw a prediction on a YouTube site the other day that the Internet is undergoing a paradigm shift. It will be divided into free ad-support sites, free sites supported by volunteers and patrons, and paid sites. The YouTuber predicted the dependence on ads is going through a shake up because too many sites are chasing shrinking ad dollars.
There are thousands (even millions) that dream of making a freelance living off YouTube and other sites. The more that try to depend on ad revenue, the less the ads will bring in, which means showing even more ads. It’s going to break. My guess is we’ll see fewer sites and more paywalls.
Advertising is tool to create demand for products and services. Capitalism needs to fuel the need to buy more products and services to keep the economy growing. Sadly, most advertising is stale and repetitive. But, it works.
But I think there would be better solutions, especially with all the computer power we have. Why pay a million people to see your ad when only 1,000 people need to see it?
seems as though there was a time (back in the stone age when i was a kid) that some of the most creative content on television. if you can still find it (check youtube , maybe), take a look at an alka-seltzer spot, circa 1967: pie eating contest; it still cracks me up. remember, ‘next time you overeat, take what the guys who overeat for a living take.’ how come they never told me about that on career day back in high school?
I also despise ads, of every type. In case you didn’t know, you can get an ad-blocker for you web browser that will eliminate nearly all of the annoying ads on websites, and many ads on video streaming services as well. For example, I use Firefox with the uBlock Origin plugin and it works nicely. Once in a while it will block something that is not an ad, but not very often. I have been using an ad-blocker for years, and would never go back – the proliferation of ads drives me crazy! Sometimes I feel bad that I am blocking a revenue source for some sites that depend on it… but not often.
Jim, all that computer power we have is busy mining Bitcoins and other dubious cryptocurrencies! We don’t have the algorithms to pinpoint buyers’ interests…yet. So instead of a marketing rifle, companies use a shotgun approach to motivate consumers to buy.
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Good work. Will support