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As you self-admitted, there's important nuances.

When you say: "you can read all the content on my website for one year for $2".

...nobody will give you $2. Because they're conditioned that content is free. Because payment is a hassle. Because they may not know one year ahead what the value is.

Same thing with games in the app store. A game you love and play a lot, clearly would be fairly priced at 5$. And still game developers are forced to make them free to play with in-game purchases to make up for it.

People really do not want to pay for anything in the digital space. They won't pay a fixed fee, hate subscriptions too, and don't really donate at scale.

As still people eagerly consume all this stuff anyway, I think the ethical point is incredibly one-sided if not hypocritical. You claim that the economic value is zero yet consume it anyway.

Ads are the only model widely usable to overcome this. No other successful model has emerged. Nobody wants to run ads, they have to, because the "customers" are in fact the immoral ones.

With no immediate successor on the horizon, I think ads should be redesigned to be less invasive. No excessive tracking, no absurd resource usage, and security protection.

I think steam and world of warcraft would say otherwise with respect to gaming. Most of my friends have large catalogues of $60+ games that they've bought on a whim and probably never played much.

Yes, and people also pay for Netflix. But focusing on the exceptions is missing the forest for the trees.

No, I think that's absurd. People pay for all kinds of shit all the time, and it's silly to say that game developers are forced to do anything. They're certainly incentivized to try and make the most money possible, but that doesn't mean that fixed price digital or subscription games are exceptions. Every console platform has some kind of subscription service, and wouldn't be around if people didn't buy fixed price games. Blizzard and Activision's main cash cows are fixed price and subscription products (that also have additional superfluous purchases) and were just purchased for $70b. Ya there are a ton of super profitable free to play games, I play one of them, but I originally bought it before it was free. But it's not freemium exclusively.

Steam isn't mobile gaming. You're ten thousand miles outside the scope of the discussion. You might as well say that people pay for bread, if the point is that people do pay for some things.

> Ads are the only model widely usable to overcome this. No other successful model has emerged. Nobody wants to run ads, they have to, because the "customers" are in fact the immoral ones.

This is why I don't think the ethics are worth considering - this isn't a failing on individual users making personal choices. The ad industry has essentially made parts of the economy anticompetitive. Facebook and Google pick winners and losers via the ad market (whether intentionally or not), subsidized by private equity, which most of the actual producers of games do not want to participate in, but have no choice. Consumers may or may not be getting the best products, they are getting the products promoted by the ad industry.

I don't see how any reasonable legislator or regulator can look at that situation as healthy, competitive or sustainable.

I agree with you that most internet content and mobile apps could not exist without advertising because they would not be profitable.

But similar to D&D alignments, whether something is profitable is completely orthogonal to whether it is ethical. Human endeavors may be profitable but not ethical, ethical but not profitable, both profitable and ethical, or neither ethical nor profitable.

So I share the parent commenter's concern about people who seem to be claiming that a thing must be ethical because it is necessary to be profitable. It's perfectly possible for a profitable thing to be profitable-good, profitable-neutral, or profitable-evil.

I agree with this separation of concerns, but you have to paint the full picture.

Without ads, we have a pure ethical situation. Desirable content and an eager reader to consume it. All is good. Except for the fact that this content cannot exist unless the producer runs ads, which some consider unethical.

If we end the story here, the content disappears since there's no ethical way to sustain it. So the original ethical transaction (content -> reader) is gone. Also known as throwing away the baby with the bath water.

If we are to complete the picture though, you might as well claim it's the consumer being unethical here, for flat out refusing to offer any payment for a service they want, and clearly costs money to produce.

Perhaps you are right. I can think of a couple additional considerations:

First, it's worth acknowledging that some amount of desirable content already exists without advertising. My partner and I pay a subscription to three streaming services, a couple local newspapers, a town newsletter, and a physical news magazine. Besides the magazine they do not use ads to supplement their revenue. Having said that, I certainly agree that content that is only marginally valuable to people (who have money) would cease to be profitable and would therefore decrease in a world without advertising.

Second, I think it depends on to what degree you believe that the ends can justify the means. How acceptable is it to manipulate consumers if it means you can achieve a more ethical end like giving them desirable content? Do those things cancel out? Personally I think it depends on how unethical one finds the advertising and how beneficial one finds the content. We already restrict certain kinds of advertising to children or for addictive substances. Many countries do not allow advertisements that encourage consumers to request brand-name medications from their doctors, and China has even banned advertisements for luxury products. Many people are concerned about advertising that creates unrealistic body expectations in children or promotes excessive levels of consumption.

(Having worked on a DARPA project in a war zone a decade ago, I have spent a lot of time thinking about to what degree the ends justify the means, and I still have no good answers.)

> However the author seems to be saying because the business is not profitable that makes ads morally correct*?

As your edit admits, this is not at all what I said. To expand a bit--I think there's a big distinction between advertisement in a fundamental sense and how advertisement often is implemented today. I think that advertising can be done in a good way, and I'm concerned that too many people dismiss advertising altogether because of things like real-time bidding.

So some advertising is ok, while the vast majority of online advertising today falls into the bad category? I think I could agree that advertising is acceptable if we'd have:

* No personalisation * Full transparency (must be publicly available who is paying for this, ...) * No brainwashing, lies, propaganda, ... * No advertising of certain controversial things (alcohol, tabacco,... I don't know who'd define what's ok)

Since we have basically no restrictions today on what is allowed, I'll still use ad blocker, advice everyone to do the same. And of course I'll rant how ads are bad on the internet.

> So some advertising is ok, while the vast majority of online advertising today falls into the bad category?

I have no idea, it's an extremely complicated problem, especially considering trade-offs between privacy and competition.

> No advertising of certain controversial things (alcohol, tabacco,... I don't know who'd define what's ok)

That last bit is the kicker ;).

You never really answered the question "Why I changed my mind" in your post. You adopted a new model and that allows you to look at advertising favorably, but why you made that change in the first place isn't clear. Advertising hasn't changed, nor did you discover any new information about it.

Your post reminds me of a friend who was an ardent Bernie Sanders supporter in the 2016 primaries, until Bernie lost to Hillary, and this man became a huge Hillary champion overnight. It wasn't enough for him to vote for an odious candidate for practical reasons. Now, Hillary was always the best candidate because she's very "qualified" or "details oriented". Nothing about Hillary changed, nor did he learn any new information about her. But he changed his mental model of Hillary to support his "change of mind".

Yes, sorry for putting words into your mouth, I hope I correctly added the edit. I kept the comment just because I thought it'd still add value to the overall conversation.

Agreed again, but IMHO even if you go with "traditional" advertising it definitely can be done too much, it's (in)famous now between us people who are overall against ads the pictures of cities that banned ads:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cidade_Limpa

https://dontdrinkthetapwatercom.wordpress.com/2017/09/25/291...

I am from an old European city and I love looking at the buildings and public spaces and not being bombarded by ads. In contrast, I think it's interesting now that I live in Tokyo and there's areas where ads creep up buildings, but because it's a somewhat very jarring visual experience in some places, in general it's one of the things that I really dislike here, beautiful buildings covered by giant ugly paper ads.

So rephrasing things, where do I think ads are okay? I haven't thought about it too much, but possibly:

- On a sidebar in a website, like Google did back on the day

- On a magazine, both full-page and in-page, as long as they are limited

- On TV as long as they are limited (they are by law in Spain)

- Newspaper ads section

- Specialized magazines, websites, directories, etc (white-pages-like), including Google Maps

- Recommendations within the page's theme (a section with new or highlighted restaurants in tripdavisor/yelp).

- Probably few more places like this.

For things that you _need_ to do to live your normal life I don't think we should be forced to stare at ads. I'm sure a lot more people would stop staring at their phones if the train/bus showed art, interesting videos, etc. in their tvs instead of ads (as they used to do in my hometown). Now wherever you look, it's all ads.

To your credit I agree that it takes a particular type of person to be very thoughtful about ads but not have any thought whatsoever on their morality but rather in their utility.

How anyone can look around with even the foggiest of eyes at the current incentive structures around ads and say “this is providing a moral and helpful service” is a bit beyond me.

It turns out that the employees prefer the whip and before that they complained about not being paid enough. And new studies show that organic food is not particularly different and the suppliers are lying anyway, so people really just want to feel good about what they're buying. /s