Comment by miki123211
9 days ago
Ads are progressive taxes in disguise.
If you make the kind of content that costs a lot to create but almost nothing to copy, you have a dilemma: Set the price too high, and you aren't getting any money from the poor at all at all, even though they're willing to pay far above your copying costs. Set the price too low, and you aren't extracting as much profit from the rich as you could be.
Ads let you serve the same product to everybody, regardless of income, because they pay for the product indirectly, by buying the advertised products. Rich people have more money and buy more products, so they, in effect, pay more for the same content. poor people pay less.
I think this is a beautiful system in many ways. Ads give us access to all the world's music, plenty of educational content (on Youtube), including from the world's topmost universities, international texting, picture messaging, phone and video calls of unlimited duration, even some movies and TV. And it's all free, which it wouldn't be if not for ads.
If we banned ads, many people just wouldn't be able to afford to talk to their family or listen to their favorite artists every day.
>Ads let you serve the same product to everybody, regardless of income,
It may be true that if they just put a little bit of fecal matter in the soup that they could give the soup away for free... but why would I want to eat shit soup? Even if you were to tell me that rationally there's so little shit in the soup that I couldn't notice the taste, and that there'd be no statistically significant health risks from it, why would I eat it? "Both rich and poor pay the same amount for this soup" doesn't sway me either.
And never mind that me, looking from the outside inward, I see them cranking up the shit percentage constantly.
If banning fecal matter in soup means the world has less soup, I've already made peace with that consequence.
>phone and video calls of unlimited duration,
Perhaps I'm so old now that I've lost the plot, but my phone calls (what few I make) are paid for explicitly and directly. Them being unmetered has nothing to do with advertisement revenue. Care to explain?
The world's topmost universities (e.g. Yale, MIT) publish those same lectures on their own websites along with other course materials. We could demand public universities do the same for all courses. If they weren't part of monopolized platforms already, by now we'd probably have widespread p2p video chat (we already had p2p calling with Skype; we've regressed in that area), and it'd be unmetered just like phone calls. Music, movies, TV could be mostly free if we had retained the original 28 year copyright period, making everything up to 1998 available, or we could even shorten it to 10-15 years.
The things you list are all free or nearly free to run with modern technology. It's not ads that make it possible. Ads enable market capture that prevents other low-cost alternatives from proliferating. They raise costs to society.
> by now we'd probably have widespread p2p video chat
we still have it. WhatsApp video chat is the most widely used video chat app.
> we already had p2p calling with Skype; we've regressed in that area
Skype was barely present on mobile and got acquired by Microsoft before Mobile took off. Then it was as good as dead. So we have in fact progressed massively that anyone in Asia with a crappy handset and a decent connection can still have a video chat with anyone else in the world.
> Music, movies, TV could be mostly free if we had retained the original 28 year copyright period
And world would be so much better if no one was greedy. The fact is that we have not retained original copyright period and the reasons are beyond adtech, so what are you gonna do about it? Also, that doesn't solve the problem of long-tail content which is massively entertaining.
> The things you list are all free or nearly free to run with modern technology
Lol wut? Try running your own Youtube and you will discover massive technical problems (storage, network bandwidth, content moderation, discovery etc).
> Ads enable market capture
Google tried YT premium and look at its adoption numbers. It starts at 89 INR in India (less than a USD) and yet its adoption is minimal. 89 INR is cheap for at least a few hundred million Indians. People simply prefer ads over paying up.
My point here is that the reason any of this stuff is possible is because the underlying technology makes it extremely cheap. It's not ads that make it so anyone on Asia can have a video chat on a cheap phone; it's that even cheap phones are absurdly powerful and bandwidth is plentiful. Signaling a p2p call is cheap, and phone companies already do it for voice calls. Wasn't WhatsApp the one that had something like 100M-1B MAU charging $1/year on hardware from a decade ago? The actual cost of these things is trivial.
Ads don't make it possible for people to have cheap access to movies. The fact that it costs literally nothing (c.f. bittorrent) to distribute them does. Especially for older recordings that were already paid for generations ago. It actually costs more resources to centralize distribution to serve ads.
Yes it is expensive to run a giant worldwide monopoly on video distribution. But that's not necessary. And some of those problems (e.g. content moderation, discovery) don't exist when self-publishing or curating partners.
People taking ads over paying is exactly why they are anticompetitive. They allow below cost services, destroying competition from companies that just want to fairly offer a service, leading to everything having ads and surveillance, eventually driving up costs of everything.
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Video isn't free to host, not at scale. Look at how much providers charge for "video on your own site" services. Sure, you can bypass these providers and implement everything yourself, but that isn't going to be much cheaper. Storage, transcoding and egress just cost what they cost.
Movies and TV are video, hence they couldn't be free and without ads, just like they aren't on YT. Music seems much more believable.
P2P technology assumes no firewalls, plenty of IP addresses (and no CGNAT), no intermittent connectivity and no energy saving measures. P2p works well if you have a desktop connected directly to the internet via a dial-up modem with its own IP address, it works decently on an always on ADSL connection behind a router, on a cellular connection which mostly stays powered down to save battery life, it doesn't work at all.
"Not at scale" is kind of the point; there's no need for one company to host everything. If I were so inclined I could host Netflix quality streaming off my home Internet connection to my entire neighborhood with a selection of thousands of movies for about the capital cost of a new iphone.
Centralized services aren't going to make intermittent cellular connections somehow work for video chat. You need reliable bandwidth to the endpoints for that. AFAIK cellular devices are almost all ipv6 already.
I brought up p2p in that context, but if one wanted to also do movies, my understanding is three's already software you can put on a raspberry pi/SBC/spare computer to act as a torrent->stream relay.
The fact is "implement everything yourself" is already done. There's already off the shelf free software for this stuff.
I think you mean progressive pricing in disguise. The problem is that they are also a psychological attack.
I believe that we should, generally, as a society, discourage communication in bad faith, and ads very, very easily fall into that category. So perhaps in a local sense it is worth it for the reasons you suggest, but I think the mass dependence of our society on advertising makes our lives worse.
And slavery provides free housing and meals, without it many would starve.