Adblock bad, advertising good!

quote: “I do not sympathize with the distaste of standard banner advertisements that pay for all the free content we currently enjoy. … Since day one, I’ve understood the back end reason for banner ads. They are a necessity of free content. … Adblock effectively robs these free sites of their revenue.”– poptech

Advertising is a hugely inefficient method of paying for content. The site creates content which attracts visitors. Advertising agents add a fee and charge advertisers per visitor click. Advertisers (for this example, online shops) sell products to some people, take a cut, and with a proportion of the money, pay the advertising agents. The rest of the money goes to the manufacturer (well, via various others).

So random people are spending money on random products, which slowly (and in tiny, tiny proportion) filters down the chain to the web site creating the content.

If there was a convenient way for me to pay an *optional* small fee directly to the content creators then I’d happily do so (for the content that I like). I currently do much more than that in some cases anyway, by buying their merchandising (usually t-shirts). Considering that, with no advertising, perhaps people won’t be coerced into buying as many bullshit products, they’d have spare cash to spend.

In this model, some people will obviously read for free, without donating anything, even if they enjoy it. I doubt this would be to the detriment of good sites publishing good content though. If people don’t dontate, then the good sites die. Visitors will learn this very quickly, and if they don’t? well the sites weren’t good enough.

I don’t think our mentality is ready for this, but it never will be as long as advertising keeps paying the rent. With a model like this I think our mentality would change quickly, for the better.

Another plus is that hundreds of people in advertising will lose their jobs, which sounds good to me.