Is it taken without consent? Don't you consent when you watch YouTube, or use some ad-funded site? Don't you get something (the content) in return?
There are alternatives, but most people choose to pay with attention, so that's where creators are being pulled to. But that doesn't mean that you're forced to consume it.
It is taken without consent if you leave your house or use public transport, or use certain private sector services that are de facto required to live a normal life.
With that line of thought we'd quickly get into very strange territory. You can't use public transport without either standing or sitting on their chairs, even though you might prefer different chairs. Are they now forcing you to use their services without your consent?
You said it yourself - you literally can't use public transport without either standing or sitting on their chairs. It's a physical limitation. But it's entirely possible to use public transport without having ads shoved into your face. It's even the default! If people didn't put up ads in/around public transport, you could use public transport without seeing any.
They could simply put the chairs you like into their cars though, there's nothing stopping them from doing that. They just choose not to, much like they choose to put ads in the windows and on the door - for economical reasons.
There's obviously one issue stopping them: there are far more people using public transportation than there are chairs in there, so it's once again physically impossible to accommodate everyones tastes. This is not the case with advertising.
I think the difference here is people don't really know what they're giving up psychologically.
When you're manipulating someone to choose against their best interests, it's happening on an unconscious level and freedom of choice is completely removed from the picture. In these types of cases, no I don't believe there is consent involved.
If I go play chess against a rando at a park and lose, I lost.
If I go play chess against someone who spent 150,000 human years studying how to beat me, to say 'well, it was all up to your mental strength, same as it's always been forever, and you just weren't strong enough' is BS.
In the last 40 years (which equate to 80 billion human years of output) there has been hundreds of thousands if not millions of human years of effort put into tearing down peoples' barriers, implanting ideas, etc. This isn't 1960 madmen advertising, this is something different from all of human history. Never before have hundreds of thousands to millions of human years been dedicated to manipulating humans in such a continuous, scientifically approached way and on such ever present/connected platforms with the synchronization of message/manipulation across contexts/mediums.
Edit: Changed from using 'man years' to 'human years'.
Is it though? Amazon knows my entire 22 year purchase history and could probably write down a broadly accurate history of my weight, disposable income, mental health, and how busy I was.
And yet it seems that entirely random ads would have a better chance of catching my interest than whatever super smart master mind strategy they are doing after spending thousands of years on that problem.
Amazon knows my entire purchase history too: it's nothing. In have never shopped at Amazon.
Went to an undergraduate library to surf, and low and behold: women's underwear, and I am not a cross dresser. If you do not identify yourself you get the default.
It's almost all "AI" driven. Yes the halcinating kind.
Is that limited to ads? If someone buys a car because it looks sporty and powerful which speaks to his subconscious, was he not manipulated? Was he able to give consent to trade money for that car?
I understand where you're coming from, but psychological manipulation is everywhere and committed by everyone all the time and defining its use as voiding consent seems very problematic.
Yes it is very problematic. Im more concerned about political and sociological manipulation where lies and deceit are used to convince people to support agendas which go against there own best interests.
I'm capable of understanding humanity shares best interests and using lies and deceit to manipulate is harmful to society. It sad you have chosen to believe otherwise. So no I don't agree.
There's no clearer lack of consent than attempts by advertisers to circumvent, block, or ban ad-blockers.
These advertisers could choose to put up paywalls but that would harm their search rankings, so they don't. Instead, they play games with cloaking [1] and other SEO techniques in order to bypass the user's wishes and show them ads (or even ads + cloaked paywalls).
At least YouTube offers a paid premium service which remains ad-free.
> There's no clearer lack of consent than attempts by advertisers to circumvent, block, or ban ad-blockers.
There is consent (otherwise you wouldn't visit the website in the first place), users with adblock are just trying to minimize their exposure. Totally reasonable (I do it too), but nobody is forcing them.
That may be true for e.g. a malicious software on your computer that force-redirects your regular browsing activity to some evil site, but that's not what we're discussing.
There is consent (otherwise you wouldn't visit the website in the first place)
Clicking a link is not consent. I have no idea what I am going to see until I reach the website. My browser has rendered the website and executed their JavaScript long before I've had any chance to even process what I'm seeing, let alone consent to it.
Clicking a link is equivalent to walking into a tattoo parlour. We don't infer that I consent to receiving a tattoo just by walking through the doorway. Stealing my attention with ads is less extreme of an intrusion onto my person than a tattoo, obviously, but it is still an intrusion.
I'd say the intrusion is similar to you seeing tattoo designs after walking into a tattoo studio - it's expected and accepted, you consent by entering.
I believe that would be very difficult, it would likely create some additional interesting cases (are adblockers now fraud?), I'd be somewhat concerned of forcing that upon companies (would benefit larger companies by making the barrier to entry higher), but I don't see it causing problems at the same scale of banning all advertising.
> I believe that would be very difficult, it would likely create some additional interesting cases (are adblockers now fraud?)
I don't know if companies consider it fraud, but for example Telly is giving away a TV as long as you let it eat your data and serve you ads, and if they figure out you're preventing that somehow they want the TV back [0]. So models like this countenance some kind of evasion at least a little.
I've asked other people this same question because most of the time platforms don't make advertising opt-in/out, basically for any amount of money. The best answer I've gotten--which I buy--is that the value in ads/marketing/data isn't 1 person, it's the aggregate. So like, if you have 1M users generating $100k, but then 500k of those users opt-out each for a dollar, ostensibly it seems like this is equivalent but the value of data on 500k users isn't $500k, it's substantially less, so the opt-out isn't a dollar, it's more like $5 or something, which makes this a non-option. So conceiving of this business model as a kind of "advertising lets you have this 'for free'" is only true in the most literal sense, as long as you don't think your individual data or privacy has any value or you ignore the implication that you could opt-out for whatever that value is.
Beyond that, it creates perverse incentives. We don't think that advertising benefits people, we have a whole other category called "Public Service Announcements" that kind of benefits people, and represents a sliver of actual "advertising". Say what you want about ads for diabetes meds or whatever, but they're not PSAs. The value to the consumer isn't the ad but what the ad funds, which makes platforms (tv stations, social media network, whatever) very interested in finding the exact line where you have both maximum advertising revenue and maximum engagement... which is a euphemistic way of saying "we want to trap you in our platform for as long as possible so we can make as many ad dollars on you as possible". That's bad! Even the value you're supposedly getting--the content--is now geared towards making you watch more ads instead of whatever you thought you were getting (sober political commentary, funny dance videos, makeup tips, whatever). This perfectly diagnoses the slop of media these days; I think there's no real disagreement here.
Finally, I think advertising is just 100% weird on its own. It sounds innocuous, but the business of advertising is persuasion: fine at the "marketing grad out of uni" level, real terrifying at the "billions of dollars convincing people to buy things they don't need and feel things they wouldn't otherwise feel about 'brands' or issues" level. There is no real regulation of this either; companies can spend as much money as they want literally blanketing our buildings, skies, cars, and media broadly with their message, which can be things like, "Happy Mother's Day" or "don't be a sucker: buy Bitcoin". This is also pretty bad.
Maybe jumping right to "let's ban all advertising" isn't the right way to start this conversation. Fair enough. But I do think we're starting to come around to the notion that advertising as we know it today isn't a good idea and we should do something about it.
I think the aggregate is one thing, the other is that it's _much_ simpler dealing with one or 100 advertisers (or a network or three) to monetize than it is dealing with thousands or millions of users, facilitating payments, dealing with charge-backs, storing sensitive data etc. I can start a blog today and slap ads on it, it's easy. Doing the same and having to offer the full option to opt-out for payment is months of work.
Not to mention the interesting question of what happens if you're just starting out and you aren't making FAANG-levels of money yet? Is your content free? Should there be some big pool where this is being paid out of?
Germany has VG-Wort, which is private entity that collectively handles licensing-payments for authors. If you sell a printer, you could potentially print out copyrighted materials with it, so the law demands you to pay them some tiny amount for the possible infraction, and they will distribute it among their members according to the type and reach of their texts. That could work, but it doesn't make things simple.
Then there's things like content-pass which offer this model. They are integrated into the GDPR-consent, and you can pay 2.99 (or so) a month to bypass ads & tracking on sites that use it. I work in affiliation, and everyone I know who uses it only does so because it's a convenient way to enforce consent on GDPR banners because you're technically offering an alternative. If lots of people were to go that route, they'd have to increase the monthly price to make it unattractive. I know one site who built it themselves and set the price to $99/m, and had some stressful evenings when they actually got a person to buy to it, because they didn't consider that someone would. That person is still paying for their content as far as I'm aware.
The media-consumption-increase incentive you mention is definitely a problem - but is it new? I'm not sure. Even if you pay for a magazine which has no ads (I do!), if they are driven by commercial interest (the one I subscribe to isn't really), they'll try to make sure that you're deriving as much value from it as possible so you don't question your subscription - and the best way to ensure that is probably to make sure you read it front to back. At the same time, if you read it front to back, it did give you something, right?
I definitely see the point with Youtube & similar where they might figure out the minimum quality required for you to keep watching and aim barely above it, never really satisfying you, but keeping you entertained just enough so you don't leave. In the end, I think you'd still derive value from it, or you'd quit it - even if that value is small -- an sometimes, someone's life might leave them in a place where mindless distraction is valuable enough to them.
> There is no real regulation of this either; companies can spend as much money as they want literally blanketing our buildings, skies, cars, and media broadly with their message
Why don't they? If it was a clear way into peoples minds, I'm sure they would. But maybe it's more of a sustainability issue -- if you overdo, you'll turn people away (who wants to go into an inner city where you're screamed at from all sides?), if you underdo it, you're not maximizing your messaging potential. So I'm not sure they can increase it without limit - not to mention that they'd need to pay _a lot_, and there's no guarantee they'd make that money back.
> But I do think we're starting to come around to the notion that advertising as we know it today isn't a good idea and we should do something about it.
Maybe, I'm not sure. I'm probably less affected by it than most, because I do use an adblocker, I do use sponsorblock, and I avoid places where ads make economic sense (lots of people to see them). I'm probably still getting some of it, but I'm largely not being targeted because I'm part of very small subset of the population that is weird and there's much more to gain from targeting the rest.
Ultimately, the line between product information (30 years ago the ads in an IT magazine I read were often just price lists of available products; very useful to me, but undoubtedly an ad) and advertisements is very fuzzy. I think you'd have a much easier time regulating away unwanted behaviors in ads like we do for some industries (e.g. pharma, or finance, you can't imply that there's no risk), which doesn't automatically kill the useful bits but can still curtail the unwanted stuff.
Ultimately, limiting screen time for children and others who find themselves unable to control their use is probably more helpful, because most ads today are on screens. Who sees those billboards while staring at the cell phone?
In practical terms there isn't an alternative. Sure there are websites without ads, but they won't tell me about what happens in my community. Sure, I could go to the town hall and watch sessions, but it's not practical.
Also: Even alternatives to YouTube will end up in the ad market. Just see the different streaming services where one already pays and who are rolling out ads. And well, YouTube still is the central place with all the videos. The only choice I have is using an ad blocker, which could be seen as amoral.
I hate ads as much as anyone (full disclosure, I use an ad blocker), but with all due respect, the reason there is no “practical” alternative to a service displaying ads is – someone has to pay for it. And before you say “I am paying or I am willing to pay”, it often costs more than you are willing to pay to run these services.
When you say it is “not practical” to go to the town hall, what you are really saying is “my time is valuable and I want someone else to expend their valuable time recording that information and disseminating it to me at low or no cost to me”. Believe me, I understand the desire. But if we were all honest, someone has to pay for this and capitalism has decided that this is the “best” way to do that.
Of course, but there are other ways to finance the news site. But ads are easy and lucrative, thus nobody (with exceptions) bothers to implement them. It's even worse: I pay for my local newspaper subscription and they still serve tracking ads.
There are alternatives, but most people choose to pay with attention, so that's where creators are being pulled to. But that doesn't mean that you're forced to consume it.