I like the term &quot;cognitive pollution&quot; only as a metaphor but the rest is just economics.<p>A negative externality is when one does something which imposes a cost or an &#x27;economic bad&#x27; on someone else who is not being compensated for it.<p>The noise from the neighbor who mows his lawn at 7:00 on a Sunday morning is a negative externality. The neighbors lives are slightly worse off because their sleep, which was interrupted, has value to them.<p>When determining what should be done about this there are only a few ways this could go, the lawn-mower compensates his neighbors for the noise, the neighbors compensate the lawn-mower to mow his lawn at some other time, or the homeowner&#x27;s association compels the lawn-mower to stop.<p>But there&#x27;s at least one solution with a problem. If the neighbors pay the lawn-mower to not mow his lawn then we&#x27;ve created a situation where someone can be paid for doing something annoying to others and then demanding compensation to stop.<p>Hopefully you&#x27;ve seen how this metaphor translates to advertising, and specifically for the practice of paying to remove advertising.<p>Based on the numbers of users of various ad blockers there are a huge amount of people who find ads in general as a negative externality. Although you might argue that they&#x27;re being compensated on websites by receiving some desirable content in return this doesn&#x27;t translate to billboards where the annoyed viewer is gaining no other value.