I'm already paying that? I would never opt into advertising like that were it available. Most of the sites on the internet can just die for all I care. I'd still do online banking, buy stuff from amazon, read news on the BBC's sites. I don't mind paying individual sites if they ever wake up and offer that possibility but i'm not holding my breath. But as long as the choice is "streaming video/running javascript/annoying popups/privacy violation" vs that site going away, well...bye bye.
My "you" is statistical, but yes, generally, of the $500 billion spent on ads worldwide, the industrialised world, about 1 billion people, pay for it. If my maths check out, that's $500/year.
Amazon is Google's largest single advertiser.
I'll see if I cant find an excellent HN comment made a ways back (and not by me).
Thank you for taking the trouble to find and post it, but I don't agree with hardly any of it. Facebook is free and so even if it were true that it would be of higher quality if there was a cost associated with it, i'm happy with it the way it is. (The great is the enemy of the good and all that). I have a very minimal use of facebook; just Messenger, and that's a great little app. If my usage of Facebook is paying for the infrastructure (and for Whatsapp, which I prefer because of the encryption) then so be it. I'm glad to be a part of it; I don't feel used or violated at all. They're welcome to whatever data they can clean from me; very little, I suspect. I don't see the ads, of course, because I use ad-blockers. The arguments about the best minds making people click on ads; well, at least the ads pay for services like google, facebook etc. A lot of very smart people are creating games, or writing blogs, or whatever. Utterly artless (most games are not art using any meaningful definition of the word) distractions from life. But that's their choice, and the consumers who use them. I'm not going to start paying for search engines or facebook or email etc any time soon.
The bit about advertising and its effects on society at the end is the bit I come closest to agreeing with, and it's a shame that the author of that past thought to start it with a quote from a terrible book and not, say, Noam Chomsky. I have no problem with advertising in principle; just the way it's been co-opted to sell lies and dreams. Ads on the web - in contrast to the sorts of ads you get offline - seem to be old fashioned, telling you about specific products and services, rather than showing you what your life could be like if only you owned this or that brand of fridge.
$100/year will cover all Internet ads.
$500/year will cover all advertising. Period.
That's money you're already paying.
Oh, and that's Europe, North America, Japan, and Australia, pretty much. The rest of the world gets awesome content for no charge.