Okay fine but the alternative is working longer hours to produce the money to pay for your consumption. Which is as much robbing you of you as advertising is with the disadvantage that you can't consume concurrently.
If that's true, I think I'm willing to accept it. I'm much more capable of evaluating how much to consume vs how much to work than I am of evaluating advertising.
I'm not sure it's true, though. Advertisers are confident they make money from me by taking my attention. Like everyone else, I don't directly perceive that to be true -- but, amazingly, it is.*
Advertisers split those profits with the content creators/distributors.
I'd rather that money come directly from a conscious, informed choice on my part rather than by intentionally manipulated behaviors. That does mean I'll consume different things than I do when I'm advertised to, but it also frees up money. I believe this just from looking at "sinks and sources" -- removing advertiser profits is removing a big sink (and a small source of informational value, which I've mentioned I'd rather get elsewhere.)
I don't know what the solution is for getting that money into the hands of content creators and distributors, but I'm sure there is one.
* And this apparent contradiction, where basically nobody directly perceives the cost, but advertisers realize the value anyway, is consistent with everything psychology tells us about the myriad of systematic human bias, and is a big part of the reason I say the cost of advertising is difficult/impossible to evaluate from an experiential perspective.
>Okay fine but the alternative is working longer hours to produce the money to pay for your consumption. Which is as much robbing you of you as advertising is with the disadvantage that you can't consume concurrently.
I already pay much more for my consumption than I did 20-30 years ago (adjusted for inflation), in all kinds of direct, round-about and sneaky ways (e.g. diluted news value from infomercials and paid posts posing as content). Stopping all these BS and paying a normal rate for consumption again would be fine.
You also forgot that 10-20% of a product is often advertising costs. If without ads the products had their prices lowered accordingly, then that's more than enough to cover my consumption...
That's one alternative, but by no means the only one. You could:
- reduce consumption
- consume the same or more, but of content that costs less to produce (say modern day dramas with fewer special effects and less well-known actors instead of high-end special fx driven or period-driven narratives)
- reduce consumption of something else to make up the difference and consume the same amount of media for a higher cost
Okay fine but the alternative is working longer hours to produce the money to pay for your consumption. Which is as much robbing you of you as advertising is with the disadvantage that you can't consume concurrently.