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.