An argument I read that has merit is that ad supported services does democratize the web for developing countries.
If for example youtube with all of its information or even Google search required a subscription, suddenly a lot of people who make significantly less than the average for the developed world would no longer be able to access those resources.
I still hate the ad surveillance everywhere, but it was a point I hadn't considered before.
> An argument I read that has merit is that ad supported services does democratize the web for developing countries.
You know who has seeded that argument into the public domain? PR agencies working for the advertising industry. It doesn't have any merit whatsoever. People in developing countries don't like ads any more than anyone else.
>People in developing countries don't like ads any more than anyone else.
Almost no one likes ads. What many people do like is the trade-off of some ads for access to high quality services that would otherwise cost them money.
> An argument I read that has merit is that ad supported services does democratize the web for developing countries.
This argument definitely gets pushed now and then, but seeing you write it out actually made me realize it seems like a red herring.
Ads are priced, bid, bought, and sold based on their expected return on investment.
If lower-income countries would be unable to sustain a public website because of being unable to pay for subscriptions, wouldn't they also be unable to sustain that website because ads sold there should have lower prices?
There are plenty of online resources which don't require ads. Sibling comment mentions Wikipedia, Open Street Map also comes to mind. We need more of these in this world. Not this ad-supported nonsense.
I love the concept of advertising-free cities! It's actually the advertising situation with public transport that I have found particularly frustrating where I am. For instance, some bus seats have transport maps on the ceiling above them, but others have private advertisements. Likewise, some stations have dozens of electronic advertising boards where they could have timetables. Perhaps they could at least have a button on them to switch them momentarily to a map or timetable.
I wonder how many millions of people have missed their train/bus connection because they couldn't find a departure board among the billboards.
Those were really interesting reads, thanks. I'm not aware of any similar step-change. It would be interesting to learn more about the aftermath, especially the effect on business overall.
>There are plenty of online resources which don't require ads
So you claim, but one of the two links you provided contains an ad. Which did not bother me at all, of course -- I'm happy to provide a couple of seconds of my attention in return for the interesting and useful information someone spent time preparing.
If everyone blocks that ad, though, the site will make less money, unless they start charging a fee to view some or all of it. I'm interested enough to read for "free" (paying with a couple of seconds of my attention), but not interested enough to pay cash -- and the world is full of people like me. What do you think will happen to sites like this if everyone blocks ads? Is that what you want?
Yes, there is Wikipedia, which is excellent and free. I think Wikipedia is an outlier, though. It's high-profile enough that people actually donate money to it, which is exceedingly rare. In some countries, the government donates only a small amount to well-known charities like the Blind Foundation or the Red Cross because they are known to be high-profile and trusted enough that large numbers of the public will give to them directly -- but there is a long, long tail of deserving charities that almost no one has ever even heard of, which the government has to subsidise fully. What do you propose to do about the long tail of websites that no one cares enough to donate to, once you shut off their main (and possibly only) source of income?
If for example youtube with all of its information or even Google search required a subscription, suddenly a lot of people who make significantly less than the average for the developed world would no longer be able to access those resources.
I still hate the ad surveillance everywhere, but it was a point I hadn't considered before.