Well, I don’t have the option of walking into a store, watching some ads, and walking out of the store with whatever I want.
I totally get it and some people are happy to produce online stuff without direct compensation—and a handful can attract enough cash to live on from fans. But you can bet there would be plenty of screaming on here if most content went behind hard paywalls. And people here probably on average make a lot more money than the average member of society.
If you're correct, and I fear that you are, then that means there's no room on the web for people like me. Which, I guess, has already been made really clear over the last couple of years.
I'm not arguing against your statements here, just crying in my beer over the loss.
Indeed, and this is something we didn't know before the "move fast and break things" phase but now we do, also the side-effects.
But my argument is that the stuff we get with money changing hands dwarfs the novelty of "freebies-for-data" by orders or magnitude.
And for that broader economy to properly integrate into the digital age its just not possible to keep basing the internet infrastructure on adtech.