I want to get as far away from the ad economy and ad culture as possible. Since there’s a 0% chance the morons supporting it will ever learn from their mistakes, I’m starting to realize the only option going forward is to create new places where we aren’t stuck with the “tunnel vision of the stupids.”
It doesn’t have to be large, start small and work our way out. It also doesn’t have to be expensive. It shouldn’t be too difficult to enforce a ban on physical advertisements within the borders, but digital advertising is a whole 'nother ballgame.
Even for a small town, would it be possible to sue companies for running ads in it? Similar to how the same company will show different content on their web services depending on where the user connects from to adhere to local laws. It would be fine if they just blocked connections from where advertising is illegal, but it’s not okay for them to show ads to our residents.
Any insight into this besides useful idiots saying advertising is good or necessary would be greatly appreciated!
Websites, newspapers, t.v., blogs, etc. pay their workers and expenses through ads. Are you suggesting all these become pay per use?
Yes. We are paying one way or another. Right now people choose based on free or not. So the “product” that can cram the most ads in and get people to buy ads wins. Not the best product. Make it cost real money, the quality of product will matter more than it does now. Clickbait is a perfect example. If they don’t get paid by the click, it would no longer be the best choice for them. It would end up being word of mouth that drives choice. So meaningful headlines and articles would drive sales again.
I mean, while that sounds like it makes things more expensive, I’m not entirely sure that it does, given that:
It doesn’t really make sense to run ads unless the average person watching the ad will ultimately buy enough that they wouldn’t otherwise from the company the ad is for that the extra profit exceeds the ad cost, thus still making watching ads have a cost that just isnt visible
Or, ads might be run to simply get people to switch what product in a category they buy without increasing the amount, in which case, they become a required cost to stay competitive, and because suppliers must now all pay that extra cost, the cost to buy products in that category must be increased, again making the ads cost the viewer in a non-visible way
Or, we could be seeing things like political ads that dont ask one to buy things, just support a politician or policy. However even here, the policies most likely to get ad spending are those most beneficial to people that already have money (since they’re the ones that can most easily afford to run ads) and in general, benefiting those people means giving them a bigger share of the economies wealth, which means the average person has a smaller share when the ads are effective, again costing the viewer in an roundabout way.
If people are going to end up paying for the use of these things in some way anyway, doing it directly seems more honest to me.
Clearly… imagine you have an allowance of say 100€ a month managed by ISPs and all of that would be spread across all used services based on usage. Internet services PAYU.
That would drive interesting changes in the landscape for sure.
And how retributions would be shared between the various layers and ecosystems.
Also would likely kill all new entrants and innovation. Plus some legit use cases for advertising (goodbye marketplace I guess?).
Your ISP would have to track everything you did on the internet, even more so than they do now. They’d have to coordinate with every web service you use to share billing information and what you did there to be able to invoice and distribute the money.
We’ll see this would be a use case for blockchain and such so that every participant in the flow gets it’s bit in exchange of the bytes they serve.
So that the isp doesn’t act like an even worse dpi point indeed.
I’m not saying it’s desirable. Just a fun thought experiment.
Just maybe this would be a way to finance content creators with more transparency and it would probably cut YouTube and the likes of it from their dominant position.