Nobody deserves ads

Advertisements are ubiquitous in those days—it seems like every "free" website and application (and their dog) is running some kind of ads, ostensively for a piece of advertisement money.

It's so bad, that it feels like every time you go somewhere to learn something new, see something amusing, arrange a business deal, or even just sit down to do a quick task, there's a person following you around, shouting:

"HEY YOU! YES, YOU! Hear about this NEW way of spending money! Complete money-spending satisfaction guaranteed! Nowhere else would you enjoy spending your money and time as much as here! Why, of course, I'm talking about the THING 5000 that everyone else is using! Even your friend, John is using it! Don't get left behind!"

Of course, it is annoying. It's repetitive. Even if everyone is excusing that person by saying that it's the only way for them to make money, you can't help but wonder—with the amount of low-quality advertising around, is even worth it?

So, hear me out:

It's not worth it. Nobody deserves to be exposed to that many ads, everywhere.

Children don't deserve ads

"Won't somebody please think of the children" is a popular meme, and a common tactic to advocate for sometimes quite heinous policies. That said, I think some reluctance to exposing children to advertisements can be quite healthy...

For one, we can't vouch for the effects of advertisements on children who are growing up. Clearly, looking at the few generations who've grown up with advertisements, watching advertisements as a child doesn't completely cripple a person. But still, research² would suggest that children are quite receptive to advertisements, and tend to develop preferences for brands and consumption based on those advertisements. That's amazing news for the advertisers, but perhaps less amazing for the children themselves, that are now robbed of developing preferences based on their own taste?

Furthermore, we know that children are among the most trusting groups of people out there. And advertisements are easily among the most deceptive content out there, even if some advertisements are honest. It doesn't take a lot to hypothesize that children, out of all people, are going to be the most convinced by advertisers, and among the most misled by the lies of the dishonest advertising out there.

Thankfully, children tend to be shielded from the worst of dishonest ads, e.g. get-rich-quick schemes, by virtue of having some parental/guardian oversight and limited resources overall. Yet, that brings me to my third point:

I don't think parents/guardians would quite approve of the quantity and quality of advertisements their children are getting on the modern web. Except perhaps for the "they need to experience the fullness of the real world" argument, I doubt that parents want their kids to read and watch every single thing some random person paid to be delivered to kids - if they did want that, there would be a large market for constantly-on rotating banner advertisements. (But, oh wait, people buy phones, don't they... Surely not for the ads, right?)

So, in short: I think children, all children deserve something better than to be constantly the target of advertisers. They don't need a hypothetical sleuth following them, shouting and showing them targeted distraction wherever they go; it's hard enough to form and focus on life goals without that.

Working people don't deserve ads

But the world is not all children and teenagers, of course. Children eventually grow up and mature to become working adults in a society that, hopefully, rewards their effort and passion well.

What is the effect of advertisement on those? Research³ would again suggest that working people are affected by advertisements—and the amount of resources that companies are sinking into advertising to working people suggests that this is very much true.

However, all adults, even the best multi-taskers out there, have limited amounts of time and focus to spend.

And while they are working towards a worthy goal, any advertisements unrelated to what they are working on are actively harmful—they take away from that limited focus and time, redirecting some of it towards less productive ends—say, mentally blocking out the distraction. As such, eliminating advertisement should intuitively have a positive effect on productivity; and it comes at no surprise that many tech-savvy people install ad-blockers (say, uBlock Origin) on all devices they can.

Furthermore, even when adults are not actively working on a goal, but are instead spending some bit of their limited free time, they still don't need unsolicited advertisements. Consider this: as a working adult, one of the scarcest things you have available is free time; and it is pretty valuable to you, since otherwise you would be finding ways to use (sell, work on a hobby, etc.) it like the rest of your time. As such, any advertisement pushed into your free time is taking some bit of that away.

Again, working-age adults, whether relaxing or working, don't deserve to have their time eaten up by advertisements. Even if discovering new products is a valuable function of advertisements, there are better ways to do that.

Retired people don't deserve ads

But of course, advertisements don't end when work ends. Even when one retires, one continues to see and hear advertisements everywhere.

Instead of impassioned arguments, I'd like to share two anecdotes here.

One is of my grandma. She tends to have her TV set on for most of the day—it's a way to fill up the silence, plus a way to stay current with news and watch the occasional movie. But, whenever I am over at her place, I notice the exact same TV advertisements running multiple times every hour of the day; and I can't help but think that perhaps those repeated advertisements are more memorable than whatever else she watches.
And it's not like they are extremely high-quality advertisements either; the vast majority are sales by stores (on products of uncertain quality), various medication for various ills (that you should probably consult a doctor on first), plus the occasional gambling-related advertisement (that is just misplacing people's hope).
And that is sad; and I wish there were better options for news and movies/entertainment so that she wouldn't have to suffer all the extra junk. (There are subscription services and subscription-based news sites; perhaps I should set one of those up for her...)

The other story is about my grandfather. He tends to suffer from memory loss, so we thought it would be prudent to get him to play Memory/Concentration, the game where you pair up matching cards—but unfortunately, he tends to "cheat" when playing with physical cards and leave unmatched cards open. However, for as much as my family scoured Google's Play Store, all the free apps were full with advertisements—and those are a problem, since he would end up tapping an advertisement and failing to navigate back to the application.
So, it had to fall down to my faint memory of GCompris from a Linux-filled childhood to even find something without ads, and even then, I ended up having to implement a quick-and-dirty Android Memory game, just to get card sizes and layout perfect for him.
A memory game is among the simplest games to program, and something many programming students would do as homework... so there should be many, many free, ad-less versions of such applications. Yet Google insists on surfacing the advertisement-ridden versions on top, and that's saddening.

Elderly users deserve better treatment than that. They don't need the constant exposure to scams to be valuable members of society; their wisdom would be put to better use without advertisements competing for their attention.

In conclusion, a syllogism

People of all ages and backgrounds have limited time, focus and energy.

Advertisements waste time, energy, and focus.

People being more effective in how they use their limited resources is a worthy goal.

Therefore, reducing advertisements is worthwhile.

But what about marketing? Classified ads?

Someone will surely interject at some point during this article, and say that marketing fills a very important function in society, namely getting people to know about services they could use in the future. In fact, one could say that say that classified advertisements in newspapers fill that very important function, so... advertisements are good?

And I'd agree—there is something quaint in checking the classified section when looking for a specific kind of plumber, roof tiler, electrician, or such. However, in that case, classified advertisements in a newspaper function a lot more like a search engine than they serve as a modern advertisement channel. And, in today's age, we have plenty of better ways to organizing search engines—so perhaps classified sections can be replaced by those?

As for marketing, finding and engaging with people who need what one offers outside of one's immediate circle of contacts is important. And advertisements... do help with that.

Yet, there are other ways of marketing out there. There is word of mouth, of course, but also, engaging with communities in need of a service can be a great way of finding customers (especially considering that many such communities won't mind setting up a "classified" directory of businesses providing quality services), doing product placements is almost like sponsoring artistic works, and one can always make use of various listings and directories of businesses that already exist. All of those can provide advertisement-like value, with a lot less of the negatives of today's advertisements.

Sure, it takes more effort to advertise by intentionally engaging with specific, niche communities, but when a lot of modern advertisements are just spots for questionable products, shady companies, or even outright scams, perhaps a requiring a bit more effort and doing somewhat more a distributed supervision of advertisements is worth it.

But how would "content creators" be financed then?

This has to be the hardest question to answer—given that advertising revenue seems to be at the core of most content creators' business strategies.

In my personal opinion, we should be working towards establishing a culture of people who actively contribute to the creators and websites they read and engage with. The current culture of consumers free-riding on content creator's freely available content, while content creators free-ride on consumers' attention for advertising is a bit sketchy, overall, and doesn't provide all that much for content creators anyway.

The good news is that we can start working towards such a culture right now, right here—just pick your favorite creator you are not already sponsoring in some way, and find a way to sponsor them!
The bad news is that culture takes time and effort to build, and the slowness of that can be quite discouraging—yet, I have hope that some day, society would get there, despite the advertising efforts to the contrary.

Really, we consumers deserve better than advertisements. And so do creators.

This has been my third post of #100DaysToOffload. Stick around for more rambling opinion essays like this one, plus plenty of tech-y and in-the-life posts—the Atom feed is right over there, in the sidebar!

I'll never host advertisements on this site. It's my personal space, and it doesn't need the extra noises of paid voices. 😁