|
I agree with your sentiments about advertising. I haven't had a TV in my house for five years, mainly for that reason. When I go to my parents' house and watch TV ads there, I find them ridiculous and wonder how anyone could take them seriously. Then I realize that most people watching them don't even notice, so their brains must be somehow conditioned by watching them. That's the part that disturbs me the most. I don't agree with everything in your blog post, though it was an interesting read, thank you. Specifically, I don't run an adblocker, but for most sites I don't seem to even notice the ads. I'm not sure if that's because I'm conditioned to see them as normal, or because I'm just not seeing them. I would hazard a guess that their impact is much less than TV ads though. Regardless, I do sympathize with people who run websites that offer useful information or services, but don't have a viable revenue model that doesn't involve ads. I get a lot of value from these sorts of sites (for instance, the sites of open source software projects), but there are too many of them for me to want to pay a subscription to all of them. (Perhaps there's an opportunity there?) However, most of these sites that I get the most value out of are not about screwing money out of people, just paying for their hosting costs. To compare this with TV, I generally don't want what's on TV, even if I can download it for free, but I do want the content on many of the sites supported by advertising. For the moment, I see it as a fair trade. EDIT: Clarify last sentence of third paragraph. |