[simplicio]

Maybe, but on the otherside, ads make available a huge amount of media and services to people who would otherwise be unable to afford it. Like, I suspect a non-trivial percentage of people wouldn't have email if it weren't for gmail and other free w/ads services.

[Aachen]

> ads make available a huge amount of media and services to people who would otherwise be unable to afford it.

They don't. Follow the money: why do ads power free services? The advertiser needs to expect to make more money in the scenario where they run the ad as compared to where they don't. The viewer must be spending more money in response to having seen it

If the viewer doesn't have the money to pay the first party fair and straight (say, a video website), they also don't have money to splurge on that fancy vacuum cleaner in addition to the website and advertisement broker getting paid, no matter how many ads you throw at them

Ads are useful for honest products, like if I were to start a company and believe that I've made a vacuum cleaner that's genuinely better (more or better cleaning at a lower or equal cost) but nobody knows about it yet. However, I don't see the point in money redirection schemes where affluent people inefficiently pay for public services (if they're indistinguishable and the company shows ads to both, thereby funding the poor people's usage). Let's do that through taxes please

[simplicio]

"They don't. Follow the money: why do ads power free services? The advertiser needs to expect to make more money in the scenario where they run the ad as compared to where they don't. The viewer must be spending more money in response to having seen it"

The first part is true, the second part pretty obviously isn't. Advertizers expect to net $ from ad buys, but most advertising isn't trying to increase a consumers total spending, its trying to drive that spending towards the companies products.

To give the most obvious example, the largest category of advertising is for food and beverage products. But no one thinks that if those ads all suddenly disappeared, people would stop buying food.

[Aachen]

That makes sense, though you're still paying for the service or product that includes advertising as part of buying the third party product such as a beverage. If you can't afford the service or product then you're down to off-brand products that don't run ads

[thfuran]

>The advertiser needs to expect to make more money in the scenario where they run the ad as compared to where they don't

They don’t necessarily make more money from every user though.

[Aachen]

I addressed that above. If that's the point, the people with disposable income who view the ad subsidise the ad broker and the website as a hidden charge on a product which they probably didn't need. It doesn't get less efficient than that. I'd rather that people living under the poverty threshold get subsidised directly

Advertisers/brokers will also do everything to optimise to whom the ad is being shown to not waste they money. Poor people can't turn it into arbitrary cash, they can just waste time on video sites and freemium games while they barely (or don't) have enough money to make ends meet

I guess I am very much in the "let's pay fair and square" corner, both for websites/services and for taxes/subsidies where needed. I don't see it working reliably or efficiently any other way in the long run

[iso1631]

If a company is willing to spend $5 to force you to watch an advert, then they are expecting more than $5 from you in return.

[simplicio]

Sure, but a lot of that is 1) just influencing what type or brand you get of products your going to buy anyways, and 2) only an average, presumably wealthier consumers are "subsidizing" poorer ones, since they have more spending to be influenced.

[abuob]

Probably not too popular of an opinion on HN but email in my opinion would be a great example of a service that could be run by the government. Just like postal service (at least in some parts of the world)

[geek_at]

There was something like that in Germany called de-mail. It was official and receiving and reading a mail was considered legally binding (invoices, etc.)

It could have been great but the implementation lacked encryption and had wild security issues. So nobody used it and it was shut down

[stemlord]

Then we'd be living in a world that didn't require you to have an email in order to do anything like have a job or a social life, which is probably a good thing

[oneeyedpigeon]

Maybe. Or maybe we could fund those services from all the money we'd save without advertising.

[pixl97]

Assuming a zero sum economy, which is a pretty poor assumption.

[thuuuomas]

We aren’t even mining asteroids near Earth’s orbit. Space colonization is a ketamine dream. There’s no extraterrestrial economy. Earth is all we have. One pie.

[twoodfin]

A pie that includes sand which is now turned into GPUs that can solve complex problems described in English. Value that was unlocked fairly recently from “one pie”.

[thuuuomas]

Tell me, is the deployment of that famous talking sand at all resource-constrained?

[twoodfin]

Of course: Everything is resource-constrained. That’s why it’s called economics.

The question was whether the “pie”—total economic output—has a meaningful upper bound on growth because we only have a whole planet full of resources to exploit as our minds and capabilities allow.

The answer is no, and history bears that out.

[elevatortrim]

Because we are spending our resources on stupid shit like tiktok virals funded by ads.

[somenameforme]

Most internet services are very low cost to offer for any company that has some infrastructure setup already. So for instance 'back in the day', before Google hoovered up everybody's email, what would typically happen is you would get an email address with your ISP.

[thaumasiotes]

> So for instance 'back in the day', before Google hoovered up everybody's email, what would typically happen is you would get an email address with your ISP.

Well, no, not even close. You'd get an email address from your ISP. You still do; nothing about that has changed.

Among the things that haven't changed is that you were more likely to use a free online email service, most notably Hotmail or Yahoo.

[RHSeeger]

But that also bound you to your ISP in a way, because switching ISPs meant switching emails. It is better to have then separated.

[layer8]

ISPs could be required by law to allow the porting of email addresses, just like it happens with mobile phone numbers.

[RHSeeger]

How would that work? The email address generally has the ISP's domain name in it.

[layer8]

Similar as it happens for phone numbers, where there is internal routing of phone calls between providers. A customer can be at a different provider with their phone number than the provider who “owns” the containing block of numbers.