Note that it is "if", and not "if and only if". Basically, if you can be tracked or advertised to ("advertracked"), you ARE the product whether you pay or not.
Money has to come from somewhere; if it is not from you, it is by monetizing you. But ... why not monetize the user even when they did pay? It's a whole new revenue stream, that's often orthogonal to the payment stream.
Paid Hulu has ads. Windows Solitaire has ads now. Movie theatres have been showing ads since forever. Cable TV is showing ads.
And now, thanks to the hobby of one developer, my phone blocks ads in /etc/hosts, preventing even in-app ads from appearing. My web browser on my laptop does just as well with a plugin.
All that's left in my browsing experience to hint that sites are trying to maintain themselves on advertising are reels of clickbait stories that come at the side and bottom of every traditional media article. I can't help but hope they are only a technocultural shift away from the abyss of anachronism.
The technology can be used to target us, but in the end machines do the work and they are very predictable. We also have machines, and knowledge, and can stand up against the bullshit.
> Paid Hulu has ads. Windows Solitaire has ads now. Movie theatres have been showing ads since forever. Cable TV is showing ads.
The problem with my idealistic vision of the near future is that we are just as likely to accept this as normal. We habitually pay for stuff and still get ads. We have the tools to block the crap but it's much more important that we decide to.
Millions of people gave up eating gluten because they learned about celiac disease. I'd like to imagine that we are just a few headline-grabbing research papers away from swaying the public about the healthiness of exposing ourselves to psychological bombardment.
Most apps use 3rd-party libraries and servers to show those ads, so they can be blocked at the network connection level (e.g. the hosts file) if you have control over your phone's OS. Having Android helps with that.
The apps need to handle it gracefully because they can't tell whether the ad server is legitimately down or just blocked. I've never had an app work any worse with blocked ads.
Windows Solitaire has ads now. Movie theatres have been showing ads since forever. Cable TV is showing ads.
Although if I were trying to think of business models that seem to be struggling, those would probably have been among the first examples that came to mind. Windows 10 so far appears to be another Windows Vista/8. The movie theatres around here seem to operate under constant fear of closure. We don't have a complete equivalent of US cable TV here, but I get the feeling that on-line, on-demand services are threatening that model as well. In each case, I can't help suspecting that the degree of customer exploitation/price gouging has a lot to do with the waning popularity.
> There's a popular meme "If you're not paying, then you're the product".
Popular and irritating since (a) it's incomplete (if you're paying, you're increasingly product, too, since companies aren't going to leave rifling through your data as a way of making money alone), and (b) it's become a kind of astroturf ad campaign for certain companies.
