Advertising needs to become as socially acceptable as smoking.
It indiscriminately pollutes the environment, and inflicts harm on non participants by incentivising unbridled data collection.
It indiscriminately pollutes the environment, and inflicts harm on non participants by incentivising unbridled data collection.
Society needs to pay directly for content.
I'm a huge advocate of paying for content and artist (when you have the budget for) but what they are doing has nothing to do about it.
I find ads intolerable, but I am privileged enough to be able to afford to make them go away in almost all cases.
For those on a very tight budget, Disney+ with ads, Kindle with ads, podcasts with ads, etc. are the only thing that is affordable.
I suspect for many in the lowest income brackets, traditional cable TV with good old fashioned commercials is a primary source of entertainment.
Thus, we also need to keep in mind that those who cannot afford to make commercials go away are subsidizing this further for those who can in an unfortunate irony.
I understand many don't care, but I hate ads with an intensity I cannot describe with words.
As the upstream commenter, I am in complete alignment. Whenever I have been too broke not to be advertised at, I have always completely opted out.
1) Video games are sold at full price and still include ads and microtransactions
2) Cable TV was originally ad free (and marketed as such), until they realized they could include ads and make even more money.
I hold the opinion that executives at many of these companies hold the view, "Why only get some of our customer's money when we can get all of it?" (though they probably word it differently, something about recurring revenue and monetizing the existing customer base).
This is why I laugh whenever some new ad-free service launches. People forget history and then are surprised when it repeats itself. Any service that touts itself as "the ad-free version of X," will eventually be stuffed full of ads.
And to top that off, the frequent mass sale events on popular game distribution channels have led to a culture of people not purchasing games UNLESS they are on sale.
I'm not a fan of the implementations they have selected to make up for that, but it's a bit disingenuous to imply that all money making on top of the $60 cost is profiteering.
With all due respect, the inflation argument sounds good but is not based in the reality of the market. Other folks have gone into a lot more detail on why this argument is badly flawed.
But to pick a single argument: if the inflation argument was valid, companies - both AAA and indy - would be unable to make a profit without selling microtransactions. But those games and companies they are turning profits. Even companies selling games with microtransactions are getting record profits when you discount recurring revenue - microtransactions.
See Digital Devolver. See God of War.
Valve has proven with lots of data that holding deep discount sales actually greatly increases revenue. It took a long time for the industry to fully realize this.
They are not simply trying to cover costs. It's indeed charging what the market will bear. Which I have nothing against, I'm more upset that gamers fork over cash for all these micro-transactions. But that is another topic.
Then the “Superstations” like TBS and WGN came to cable. They were local broadcast channels that used satellites to broadcast nationwide to cable companies.
Then came cable TV channels like CNN, ESPN, MTV etc with ads.
Cable TV has always had ads.
https://www.nytimes.com/1981/07/26/arts/will-cable-tv-be-inv...
Also, there were some Cable TV channels, sometimes bundled with other channels, that explicitly did not have ads (HBO, to name one), just to complicate things further.
Cable never marketed itself as being ad free
> Although cable television was never conceived of as television without commercial interruption…
HBO has always been a premium add on to basic cable. Just like it is today and it still doesn’t have ads.
> But scores of big companies, including General Foods, American Express, Procter & Gamble and Pepsico, are already cable advertisers, along with innumerable used-car dealers and other local businesses that can afford cable's relatively low rates.
> Many cable channels have yet to begin operating, and those now running commercials, such as Ted Turner's 24-hour Cable News Network or U.S.A. Network's ''You'' program for women, carry 30-second and one-minute commercials that are a standard feature of regular television.
If you look at the earliest basic cable channels, they also had commercials from day one.
The real problem is that content creation/disribution industries are addicted to ridiculous pricing and distribution policies. Nobody can buy what they want, at reasonable terms, we're stuck with them playing stupid games that hurt everyone (likely including themselves).
Unless there's some dis-incentive we can expect to see more ads in more places. People abandoning the service doesn't seem to be enough, I suspect the longer someone has a particular service the more they become accustomed to it and the more pain it takes to get them to move to another service.
People do pay and it does not work. The only thing that works is government regulations.
Pay for subscription services? They show you ads for their own shows at best or half a minute of paid advertising before every episode at worst.
Pay for anything at all? They track everything you do whether you pay or not. Worse: now they know you have disposable income since you're spending money on frivolous entertainment. The value of your attention just went up and so did the opportunity cost of not advertising to you. The more society pays, the more annoyed the executives get at the money they're leaving on the table.
What society needs to do is make advertising illegal. Just straight up prohibit it, consequences be damned. No buts, no compromises.
https://99percentinvisible.org/article/clean-city-law-secret...
Around 1994 my parents were paying $110~ USD for a cable package in suburban NY. It was basic cable, the extra premium channels, and HBO. Adjusted for inflation that's $210, I know that inflation doesn't always tell the entire economic story but now I'm paying
Netflix $20, HBO $15, Disney+ $6.76, Hulu is free with my cell phone plan but let's say $10. That's $52, my internet is $65 however I would have that anyway for many other reasons. Even if you added that in it's still much less expensive that in the past. The quality is also significantly better, and I can choose to watch most shows when I want.
Network effect companies (e.g Facebook) would see how useless their network effects are when only some are willing to pay, and they therefore can't get all their friends updates.
And most creators will find out just how little their content is worth (you probably need to be in the top 50% just to make pennies per hour).
I would say bring it on, but most sites would run into the problem that for their media customer it wouldn't be worth the effort to click the apple pay (or whatever) button to get access.
I think paying for content/product doesn't ensure you wont see ads, well perhaps it doea but until the company decides it needs higher margins.
Also, it's common for companies to offer a paid service and then double dip with an advertisement offering as well.
I’ll hold my drink while you convince America why it should pay 10x for a TV because ads are bad.
It is the TV and media companies that are a) using lies and deception to convince America that it's ok to instead pay (1x + advertising + a hidden loss of privacy) for a TV, and b) colluding to raise the prices of 'dumb' TVs as an added lever against consumers.
Educating people on the real costs, and pointing out better alternatives are the best ways to combat this.
This is just silly; TVs can maybe made a little bit cheaper by some ads, but not much, and TVs were plenty cheap for a long time well before "smart TVs with ads" became a thing (my TV wasn't a luxury model, but not the cheapest either).
Convince people? Any ban on advertising is already likely to enjoy significant public support. There's precedent for this.
Edit: also who you vote for, what laws are passed, who goes to prison, who lives and who dies. But no they don't _directly_ give you cancer.
Do people know the risks of being profiled by ad companies? I am not sure most people can even begin to understand the associated risk. The few attempts to show people what companies know about you were shut down pretty hard.
So did the ads that told people to smoke. They were banned precisely because they were driving behavior that causes harm.