Please read the linked comment for an explanation of other costs. It's not exhaustive. I didn't write about other costs, such as the stifling of competition (advertising favors the establishment, the rich get richer) and negative sum arms races[1].
I'm implicitly proposing that people pay directly for the products they use. Be the customer, not the product. Reward businesses that put the user first, with no advertiser conflict of interest. We need to evolve a way to do this efficiently, since people aren't going to pull out their credit card for every different site they use, especially not the one-offs.
The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks. – Jeff Hammerbacher, fmr. Manager of Facebook Data Team, founder of Cloudera
If we can redirect just a fraction of those best minds at coming up with a micropayment system for the web, it won't take long to solve. Some people make themselves feel better about advertising by saying it helps the poor (who can't, presumably, afford to pay for Gmail or Facebook or whatever online journalism they read). These same people conveniently forget that the poor spend a greater share of their income on goods, thus a greater share goes to advertising costs, which could mean that the ad-supported web model we have today is regressive (as in regressive tax).
I'm implicitly proposing that people pay directly for the products they use. Be the customer, not the product. Reward businesses that put the user first, with no advertiser conflict of interest. We need to evolve a way to do this efficiently, since people aren't going to pull out their credit card for every different site they use, especially not the one-offs.
The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks. – Jeff Hammerbacher, fmr. Manager of Facebook Data Team, founder of Cloudera
If we can redirect just a fraction of those best minds at coming up with a micropayment system for the web, it won't take long to solve. Some people make themselves feel better about advertising by saying it helps the poor (who can't, presumably, afford to pay for Gmail or Facebook or whatever online journalism they read). These same people conveniently forget that the poor spend a greater share of their income on goods, thus a greater share goes to advertising costs, which could mean that the ad-supported web model we have today is regressive (as in regressive tax).
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[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7927862