I’ve thought about advertising and ad-blockers a lot over the years, and the debate is getting some attention right now starting with a recent Ars Technica article, so I thought I’d put down some of my own thoughts on it.
Funding your content through advertising is hugely inefficient. Of the people who visit your site, usually only a tiny proportion click on (or notice) an advert, and only a tiny proportion of those then spends any money. So a tiny, tiny proportion of your visitors give any money to your advertisers. So money filters down this system in tiny margins. Then, at the bottom of the system, a tiny amount of the profits from the income covers the cost of advertising. Then this money moves back up the system to you, usually via your advertising agent who takes a nice cut (I’ve heard Google pass as little as one twelfth onto the publisher in some cases).
And this doesn’t consider the costs of the advertiser choosing and designing the ad or the tonnes of bandwidth and gatrillions of CPU cycles used to serve the actual adverts.
It also does not consider externalities, such as pollution. Advertising is mind pollution. Advertising is designed to affect the behaviour of people for the benefit of the advertiser. Why would anyone willingly expose themselves to something designed to steal their attention?
You might argue that advertising creates value – some viewers choose to buy when otherwise they wouldn’t have. But what of the huge proportion of people who just had their attention stolen? No value was created there.
Because not everyone is suckered in by it, advertising squanders billions of hours of attention every day to produce nothing.
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