Why we don't sell ads?

And now they sold themselves to a company that sells ads. Huh.

Too many have bought into the utter bullshit that advertising makes things free, a delusion that helps bury the fact that one had made a deal with the devil. There is no free lunch, and there is no free web. The cost of the "fee lunch" is simply shifted to the price of the things being advertised. In other words we still end up paying. It may even shift costs regressively, to products predominately consumed by those with lower incomes, in which case the poor are subsidizing the better off.

BUT IT'S WORSE...

We end up paying a lot more than if we just paid for our content and services straight up. Not only are you still paying for the costs of the "free website", you are paying for all that advertising overhead, the costs of advertising technology and infrastructure (huge, btw), the agency and creative costs (Don Draper and company have to pay for the hookers and scotch somehow, not to mention what’s-his-name who basically just lounges in his office barefoot thinking Japanese), and big marketing departments that often outnumber the people who actually write or make things.

You are also paying the opportunity cost of inferior product, because that’s what happens when websites have to design to please advertisers over pleasing us, the users. Dalton Caldwell makes this point comparing Sourceforge to Github: http://daltoncaldwell.com/an-audacious-proposal.

Our identities and privacy are bought and sold to the highest bidders. So we foot the bill for those bids AND we pay the cost of lost privacy. A double whammy! It's personalization? Bullshit. Personalization means optimizing something for me, not optimizing for the advertiser. Again, who's the real customer?

IT GETS EVEN WORSE...

Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need. – Tyler Durden, Fight Club

Think of the social costs of advertising. The web is infested with misinformation and manipulation. Beside the lying ads themselves, relying on a revenue stream entirely dependent on how many ads are seen severely affects the moral choices of those who decide what gets produced and how its presented. What are the costs of a misinformed and variously manipulated citizenry, of distortions to the free-market?

Knowledge and discourse are the lifeblood of both democracy, free markets, progress. The web, from the little scammy websites to the big brand ones that so many blindly trust, has a huge influence on who we vote for, what we buy, and most importantly, what we believe.