> Totally agreed. We ended up funding the web with an attention/gullibility tax not because of an careful planning, but because the technology wasn't there for anything else.

That implies it was even needed. It wasn't the same people either, the online ad industry is a bunch of greedy fucks with dollars in their eyes, they came to the web like a swarm of locusts.

What should the people who have nothing of value to exchange but their attention use for currency?

The marginal cost of rendering another web page is zero, so economically there's no reason for them to pay anything.

Further, the attention of a perfectly broke version has a value of zero. Since advertisers are still paying for it, you could argue those hypothetical people are harming a website by viewing it: they bring the yield of ads down, encouraging advertisers to only support things for rich people.

> The marginal cost of rendering another web page is zero, so economically there's no reason for them to pay anything.

Tragedy of the commons. The marginal cost to render another page is zero, but if 100% of pages pay nothing, the server is run at a loss. As a result, only pages that can get "stuck in" alongside revenue-positive content (or pages on a whole server operating at a loss with revenue generated via some other source) can survive (i.e. a patronage model).

> Further, the attention of a perfectly broke [person] has a value of zero

In addition to direct encouragement for consumers to buy something (what is called "conversion"), advertising is also used to shape public perception and garner general interest. Coke doesn't consider an ad vended to a broke person to have zero value, because their product becomes the thing that person will ask for if someone offers them a free beverage of their choice, and it becomes the thing they'll generally recognize as "a soda" over alternatives when the topic comes up at all. The Ad Council's products are generally not about getting a broke person to spend money, but to shape their behavior ("this is your brain on drugs," "#DanceLikeaDad," etc.).

> Tragedy of the commons.

Possibly, but not necessarily. The tragedy of the commons applies when there's a non-zero marginal cost. But with zero marginal cost, you have have to find some way to cover your expenses, and then you can give away the rest as a public good. E.g., the NYT can happily give away a ton of pageviews to non-subscribers as long as they keep their subscriber base up. Public radio, another medium with zero marginal cost, has been giving away their content for decades.

> Coke doesn't consider an ad vended to a broke person to have zero value

[citation needed]

I highly doubt Coke thinks that way. There is approximately nobody who sees their ads that is so permanently destitute that they will never have the opportunity to buy a soda. Indeed, at least in the US, the poor are better customers than the well off. About 2/3rds of people below $30k in income drink soda, while only about half of people over $75k do. https://news.gallup.com/poll/163997/regular-soda-popular-you...

It's unclear to me if we are disagreeing on anything or merely stating the same things slightly differently.

> The tragedy of the commons applies when there's a non-zero marginal cost. But with zero marginal cost, you have have to find some way to cover your expenses, and then you can give away the rest as a public good

So a web page isn't zero marginal cost, it's nearly-zero. Servers require occasional maintenance and continuously consume electricity (to say nothing of the rent / peering arrangement that is usually part of gaining access to someone else's network). Even though a server can host a million individual pages at near-zero marginal cost for each, the original point still stands that if nobody is paying for that server and nobody finds "some way to cover your expenses," the electricity will stop flowing or it will break down and nobody will repair it. So everyone hosting on that server is doing so at the mercy and pleasure of the org or individual paying for the server's continued existence (i.e. a patronage arrangement). Your specific examples (NYT giving some content away and public broadcasting giving all of it away) are examples of patronage models in action (NYT non-subscribers are patrons of NYT, and public broadcasting itself is a patron of its sponsor base).

> [citation needed]

I believe you gave a fair explanation of why Coke doesn't consider an ad vended to a broke person to have zero value immediately after that request for citation, so I will cite your logic. In addition to your observations, the points about brand stickiness (that "when someone offers you a soda, they want you to ask for Coke" bit) and behavior shaping still apply (source: I worked in advertising, this is common knowledge in the industry, but if you want concrete sources I can hit the Google and try to dig up a primer on the industry philosophy; it's so bedrock-knowledge that I can't remember precisely where I learned it). But you're right; even absent those effects, Coke assumes that people who are broke right this moment aren't broke tomorrow and still want you thinking about buying their beverage. "Coke doesn't consider an ad vended to a broke person to have zero value."

I'm glad to hear we agree on Coke's behavior.

As to marginal cost, I don't think you quite understand the term. Web servers are fixed costs. Hardware, setting up pages, electricity: all of that is considered a fixed cost. The marginal cost is the additional cost of producing one more unit of product. In this case, the actual cost difference between serving page 1,000,000 and 1,000,001. So, say 0.0007¢ in bandwidth for a modern, too-heavy page. Too cheap to meter.

It's true that the fixed costs have to get paid for, but there are plenty of ways to do that. And once that's covered, there is no tragedy of the commons. As long as the NYT has enough subscribers to pay their fixed costs and produce a reasonable ROI for their investors, they're golden.

Agreed, but "And once that's covered" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that story. And if those pages that cost $0.000007 to run are contributing $0 to that cost, they are at the mercy of their patron and in no way in control of their own fate.

It's a tragedy of the commons if 100% of those pages think someone else is going to foot the bill and one day the system that is actually footing the bill for those pages changes.

> In addition to direct encouragement for consumers to buy something (what is called "conversion"), advertising is also used to shape public perception and garner general interest. Coke doesn't consider an ad vended to a broke person to have zero value, because their (..)

Except that it's completely utterly wrong to milk broke people like that.

Oh it happens, but advertising trying to influence you to have thoughts that you would otherwise not have, is actually something that most people disapprove of.

It's not really a good argument to say "just because you don't have money to buy our stuff, doesn't mean we can't control your brain in other ways".

THINK for one moment: If you have nothing to give, or nothing you WANT to give, what on EARTH gives them the right to take something else from you anyway?!!?!

It's a transaction. If you don't want to be influenced by website advertising, feel free to avoid the website. If you hate online advertising as a whole, feel free to go to the library.

... where you'll only be advertised at to READ and told about local community events. "Advertising" is really just the structural term for "People communicating things at each other." It's pretty inimical to human interaction in any common human space since we developed the capacity to communicate, and it's pretty unavoidable. We have some laws constraining the sorts of things we can advertise at each other, but advertising itself is extremely core to the experience of living in a human society.

I'm not sure where one draws the line between a Coke ad and a blacksmith's shingle, or between brand-recognition ads and towns putting up hisotrical markers indicating why the town is special. It's all on a common spectrum of information exchange.

> What should the people who have nothing of value to exchange but their attention use for currency?

Doesn't matter. What matters is everybody else is not given any choice about it.

I agree; that's a structural problem I'd like to see improved. Google used to have a Contributor program where you could pay directly to not see ads, but it was shut down at some point it seems. Some websites offer you the opportunity to pay a subscription fee to avoid ads, but it's very ad-hoc (no pun intended).

A general solution for that where people could avoid ads by direct-paying publishers would be nice to have. As it stands, we're left with not-so-great options for the consumer where we either just deal with the annoyance of ads, choose to consume advertising-free content at a premium (that differs from the ad-supported content), or try to cheat the system by getting ad-supported content without ads.

Scroll is looking interesting – reminds me a bit of Brave, but with a more specialized “websites renderer”, so to say.

Is there a list of sites they support available somewhere, so that I can see if it's useful to me?

Digging around on their website got me to: https://scroll.com/sites

Don't personally read any of these, but still seems like a promising idea.

They support Clickhole? I'm in.

Vast majority of the world can't afford paying for every website

Sure. Which means we'll end up with some sort of system where that's not necessary. Remember, the marginal cost of production for a web site visit is zero.

It's also important to remember that the vast majority of journalists and would-be journalists currently can't afford to do journalism. We need to solve both the consumer and producer problems.

90% of everything is crap, and websites are a thing so 90% of them are crap. So its ok if they die.

Then again, neither wikipedia nor <s>youtubr</s>hacker news have ads and that's like half of what i read on the internet right there.

Edit: this is what happens when i try to post while falling asleep. Meant to say hn not youtube. Youtube definitely has ads

HN has ads: they're the job posts that appear on the front page without voting buttons

But not 3rd party tracking ads. HN's "ads" don't get blocked by uBlock either.

> Then again, neither wikipedia nor youtubr have ads and that's like half of what i read on the internet right there.

Don't know which YouTube you use, but the one I do does have ads.

uBlock Origin seems to block all advertising on Youtube for me, including pre-roll and intermission ads in the videos. The only advertising I see on youtube these days is the sponsored sections inserted by the video creators.

I don't really watch that much youtube but now that my son watches some cartoons on it I've subscribed to premium so he doesn't see any ads. I think it's ok to pay for youtube as it arguably provides a useful service. I also know that I'm in a privileged position to be able to pay for youtube premium, so my comment is not about whether ads are inherently bad or not, just that you can watch youtube without ads if you pay for it.

I also don't ever have to deal with ads - perhaps because I also have a (seldom used or visited) channel?

Websites existed before online ads were a thing.

yes, but the current penetration didn't.

if you think the future is asking people from Rwanda to pay 5 bucks a month to read a single online newspaper, or get access to Reddit then I guess you're in for a rude awakening.

1) How will it cost to read the newspaper 5$ in Rwanda? That's the price of a monthly subscription in Germany.

2) If said people can't afford 5$/month how will they afford the stuff ads are targeting them to buy?

This is what concerns me most about ad blocking.

"In a world without ads, people will just pay their own way" is elitist thinking. Most people online have nothing of value to exchange except their attention.