[nyczomg]

I disagree completely with the author's point that the ad model is not regressive. The author points out correctly that charging everyone some $ is regressive, because for some people that amount of money is a lot, and for others that is a little. Totally makes sense.

Then, we go on to ads. Ads charge everyone a similar amount of bandwidth, attention, etc. But you know what? Some people who have more resources or knowhow will understand how to block ads. And they probably won't be paying by the MB on a crappy cell phone plan such that they spend their money on bandwidth to load the ads, while the content they want to read languishes below the fold of the ads and they struggle to navigate to it on their crappy device struggling to render ads.

The costs are more abstract than when paying in actual dollars, but surely we can recognize that the cost of ad supported web pages is also not felt evenly by everyone. As a privileged software engineer, I can guarantee you that the impact of "paying" for things with ads is felt far less by me than many others. That is regressive in my opinion.

[bnralt]

> The costs are more abstract than when paying in actual dollars

Keep in mind people are still paying in actual dollars. Companies spend money on advertisement because they want something in return, and that comes from the people being targeted from the ads. I wouldn't be surprised if the poor end up paying much more than the rich in the end. It might even be more regressive than a subscription model.

Also worth noting that their are other negative externalities as well. Health for example - the poor tend to have a much worse diet that leads to bad health conditions, and there's likely a large connection between this and the advertisements for unhealthy products.