Why you will never escape ads by paying for content

The Internet is full of ads. More than ever. So much so that the actual information the Internet was meant to exchange–news, articles, posts, books, lessons, conversations, data–are collectively called “content”, a word that, when used by advertisers, almost means “filler”.

Here’s why I believe you will not escape ads by paying for your content: people who can afford to pay for content are people with money, or people with buying power, in other words, the exact same people advertisers look to target. The more buying power you demonstrate, the more advertisers will target you. So the more you pay to keep ads away, the more advertisers will pay to put them back in. With the way the world currently works, selling ads, it seems, will always be more profitable than selling content.

Consider the recent opinion piece by Thomas Wells, Is Advertising Morally Justifiable? The Importance of Protecting Our Attention ¹. Most modern advertising has gone well beyond advertising a product and into the territory of hacking people’s minds into wanting things that are of questionable value to them. Perhaps, in the future, it will be just as illegal to broadcast this type of material as it is to mass distribute malware.