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(Does this count as CW? Happy to post it somewhere else if that would be more appropriate.)
I really liked the idea of banning advertising from this blog post (though the post itself is somewhat poorly written and light on the details). HN has a lively discussion of it. I've seen some mentions of this idea here and there but never a really good analysis on it. And I want to change that!
The first step is of course to tighten up the definitions. The most important is to define advertising. I would define it as:
(Maybe the resident lawyers here could have a crack at cleaning this up?)
The underlying theory of harm is that party C is getting inaccurate information designed (often very well designed) to manipulate them into a decision not in their interests. Note that crowding out good information is also very much part of the harm. If C is getting good information from sources not paid for it, it is reasonable that these unpaid sources won't put as much effort into disseminating information as sources paid to spread information (which presumably won't be as truthful due to the conflicting interests from party A).
To clean up potential fuzzy boundaries (I'm sure I've missed a bunch):
So, what is illegal?
Why do I want this?
Possible objections?
Any thoughts?
This is a terrible, infantile idea.
This is so blatantly untrue that it's hard to take the rest of the essay seriously. Advertising appears with the newspaper. The first paid newspaper advertisement in American history was in 1704 in Boston, it is literally older than the United States of America. Zero research was done going into this, just a whiny infant complaining about advertising that could be easily avoided.
There's not going to BE any general experience of the web you stupid slut.
The entire general experience of the web is built around advertising. An entirely paid model of web usage is not something we've ever really seen. Note that I don't include a model that is built primarily around free-riding on government/university research dollars, like the early internet. Nor a model that is built around the millennial lifestyle subsidy like current Substack or ChatGPT, where the free infrastructure is funded by VC money with the expectation of later exploitation. All that's left after you remove those are hobbies or charity, like TheMotte or Wikipedia, which probably can't exist without the infrastructure built by the advertising-funded products anyway.
Moreover, on the web or not, you are asking for every ad you are ever shown, other than billboards I guess. Libraries exist! Physical media can be borrowed from them, and you would have more media than you would ever be able to consume in fifteen lifetimes, and never see a single ad beyond a flier for the knitting circle. Yet nobody who complains about advertising does that. If ads on youtube offended people, they could pay for youtube premium, but they mostly don't. If ads on twitter offended people, they could pay for whatever it is Elon is calling it now. They mostly don't. Why not? The ad-supported Kindle is $20 cheaper than the ad free one, the ad-supported model outsells the ad-free version. And, of course, physical media exists, you could purchase movies on DVD and books at bookstores and you would have more than enough content for the rest of your life, but people don't do that. Because people are more than willing to accept the cost of advertising to get free-to-them, or even just reduced price, content. There is no circumstance in which you are forced to watch ads, in every case you are choosing to consume content that would not be available without advertising to support it, or you are choosing to consume it through a medium that is supported by ads. The revealed preference is that people don't care about ads.
The only real exception that occurs to me is sports, which are impossible to watch without seeing ads. American sports like the NFL and MLB are shown with ads in the broadcast, while racecars and MMA fighters and soccer teams give no option to skip ads as they are on the competitors themselves! But, of course, without those ads we wouldn't have those competitions at those levels. Without advertising, I wouldn't be able to get the game on the radio or OTA TV, I'd have to go PPV, which I would not do. Without sponsor dollars, MMA fighters wouldn't be able to train to the level that they have pushed the sport. The ecosystem would be impossible. The same, of course, applies to things like local radio news: no traffic on the twos without Chevy dealers BLOWING OUT THEIR INVENTORY. Well, I guess we'd still have NPR, that bastion of politically neutral fact-finding...
Which is the real point, advertising in media is a good thing because it supports neutral media motivated purely by capitalism. When we mourn the decline of the politically-neutral American local newspaper, we are too stupid to realize what we are mourning is mostly the decline of newspaper advertising. Time was, you needed the newspaper to find out basic facts about the world. Movie times, church schedules, the weather. Every responsible American needed access to a newspaper, which drove mass subscriptions, which made advertising in the newspaper profitable, which funded investigative journalism and reporting. And because the goal was to sell ads, newspapers wanted the broadest reach possible, Republicans buy sneakers too. Once the advertising model breaks down, you get the modern newspaper industry. Local papers lack any but the most rudimentary reporting, while national papers like the New York Times cater to subscriber biases and lose even the pretense of neutrality. Substack, again, suffers from this: while an occasional gem might appear in the muck, almost every substack author becomes captured by his audience, forced to cater to their whims. So many interesting bloggers or writers become increasingly less interesting as they cater to their audiences' whims. In a world without advertising, we are at the mercy of subscribers and their biases.
Dude... Chill... This is just a random internet forum. No need to get worked up about it.
First off, chill out. There's no need for personal attacks. And quantity very much matters here. Some random ad in a medium that nobody pays attention to is very different from our current environment where we are positively bathed in this stuff every moment of every day.
I agree that people not paying for ad-free products is a good argument. My first counter-argument is that e.g. paying for youtube premium would only get rid of a small fraction of ads that I experience every day. The marginal gain isn't worthwhile. People do regularly pay for ad blockers (or at least put in effort into getting them). And friction is a thing. There are lots of services that I could theoretically benefit from but don't pay for because it isn't worth the hassle of managing. Youtube is a tiny part of my day. The hassle of managing a youtube premium subscription isn't worthwhile (and they've done nothing to reduce the hassle because they don't have an incentive to).
My second is something I brought up in my original post:
I genuinely think this soft marketing war drastically inflates the "value" of ads. After all, does Amazon (or their marketing clients) really expect people to buy twenty dollars worth of stuff off the ads on a Kindle? I'm an order of magnitude away from that for my entire life for all ads I've ever seen anywhere! No, I suspect it is companies trying not to get drowned out.
There's also a large economy of scale problem here. Consumer Reports exists. They are small because they're expensive and they're expensive because they're small. Yes, removing ads would be a sea change in how our information systems have to operate and people are going to have to get used to paying explicitly for a lot more stuff. It's going to require new business models and interfaces. Substack is a great example. I woul;d have never paid for individual bloggers before them. It was just too much of a hassle even if I enjoyed the content. But Substack (and Patreon as well) have drastically reduced friction and as a result, I just checked and I'm paying for ~ten blogs (with subscriptions to a few more). And if after all that, customers still don't want to pay... I contend that's a good thing. It's the market aligning with people's actual expressed preferences.
Regarding neutral media: capitalism is customers paying for neutral media. And I don't know about you but most of my neutral media comes from Substack (which you also don't like for some reason...) where I do in fact pay directly to hear from sources that I care about. And Substack the company is technically not profitable yet but the popular writers on there are extremely profitable which makes me think that Substack the company could be easily profitable if they wanted to be. After all, how much does it really cost to host a bunch of simple mostly-text-and-images websites in 2026?
Dude...Chill...This just a random internet forum. No need to get worked up about it. We argue, we hang out. Stick around, somebody will accuse you of much worse.
But I don't think we disagree that much really. When you say:
Then I can't philosophically argue with it. If you think the internet as it exists today is bad and should be burned to the ground and salted, great, I can jive with that. The vast majority of content would not exist or be accessible without ad supported models, if that is your goal than this is a good policy to reach it. If you are willing to bite the bullet and say Twitter Delenda Est, and youtube and facebook and instagram and every other social media service with it, then we can get to a logical position. But that is what you are arguing for here, and it's much bigger than advertising, there's not going to be social media or open content platforms that are subscription based. I'm actually curious to see someone try to make one, but I'm not sure I would subscribe if they did anyway. Even this place I wouldn't want to subscribe, a one time payment maybe, but the hassle isn't worth it.
I'm not sure what you're saying here. Youtube exists you can choose: a) not to consume youtube, b) to pay for youtube, c) pay for premium. The same choices exist for every content outlet. If ads offended you and you wanted to minimize consumption of ads, it would make sense to avoid advertising based content and stick to a few outlets that you can make ad free. Premium would give you an ad-free outlet, and if ads were as distasteful to the average consumer as believed, then one would consume only ad-free outlets. There's clearly a free market for ad-based and ad-free content operating right now, and most people consistently choose ad-based content over ad-free content.
This gets into a much bigger discussion, but I strongly suspect this isn't true, even if you think it is. You've almost definitely had >$20 of marginal spend for all the ads you've ever seen in your life, across every category of good. TLP's favorite scene from The Devil Wears Prada fits in here. Another example: when I was a kid the Greyhound Rescue had a booth at the fair every year. Fifteen years later, at 26, my wife wanted a dog, and I thought a greyhound would be a good pick, based on that awareness that formed long ago. I just wasn't in the market until then, but if they hadn't done that "advertising" I would never have gotten one.
Consider also with the Kindle example: I owned and used my first kindle for over a decade. Ten years of advertising is worth something.
But I'm not sure what the difference is to you between "Buying $20 worth of stuff" vs "not getting drowned out" anyway.
Clearly it costs more than Substack is making! I exclude Substack not because I dislike it, but because it is not profitable. Virtually every place we complain about ads today, didn't have ads at one point, and then they were introduced later to try to make the company profitable. Netflix, Amazon, Youtube, Twitter. All used to be ad free. The Millenial Lifestyle Subsidy is the generational trauma of our time. Elon briefly mooted making Twitter subscription only and eliminating advertisements, but quickly abandoned that plan because it had no hope of success.
My other problem with substack as a neutral source of information is that subscriber based content inevitably tends towards siloed bubbles and extremes as writers cater to their subscribers. You're never going to subscribe to Heather Cox Richardson, and she is never going to subscribe to Kulak. Advertising on its own does not fix this, but it offers at least one path to success that doesn't rely on catering to the whims of your hardcore supporters. I'm glad Substack exists, there's value in allowing marginal and extreme voices to exist, but I don't find it a good source for neutral fact based reporting. Substack isn't going to tell me what went on at my local township meetings, or even in Harrisburg or Philadelphia. It's good for news in the sense of current events-commentary-opinion, it's not yet good for the kind of fundamentally uninteresting hard news that one historically got from a newspaper. And newspapers themselves have gotten worse at that job because of their reliance on subscriptions, leading to spiraling left-wing bias, leading to a shrinking and more left wing subscriber base, leading to spiraling left wing bias.
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