> Let's say everyone get their wish and ads go away. Everything will require a purchase.

No, it won't. There was plenty of high quality stuff on the internet before ads or payment was even possible, and there's plenty of high quality stuff that don't track you or require payment right now. There's no reason to think that would all evaporate.

We will see plenty of high quality stuff still I agree. But much of the free stuff will be about converting you to the paid stuff.

With ads or not you are still the product. You will still be tracked because people want you to spend money on their service. People will sell that information. Companies will use it.

Sure, much of it will. But certainly not all of it. The amount of actually free content will certainly not decrease, and it would probably increase, even if by only a little.

> With ads or not you are still the product.

It depends on the site. There are lots of sites where the site operator has no interest in it generating an income, let alone a profit. You are not the product there.

Ads have bloated the useful internet to the point that it is more expensive and less functional. We have 8,000 websites trying to show me a recipe for chicken parm, most of them with pages of family history and backstory, because they are all trying to get me to see their ads. A lightweight Wikipedia for recipes and a few high value added websites charging a trivial amount for access to their recipe catalog would be highly value added for me, and run on a fraction of the infrastructure.

Ads obscure solutions, and add redundancy and complexity with zero value added, because solving a problem means you no longer are on the page seeing ads. Simplifying or automating a process means you are clicking less pages less often and not seeing ads. If you automate something to directly connect users with what they need, then they don’t need to come back and see your ads. So we have automations they bring us to some middle man that can show us some ads before we can get to what we need.

Ads mean that maximizing the time your attention is held is the core value. High quality content that leaves you informed/satisfied/fulfilled is worthless compared to low quality content that is just good enough to keep you from leaving, without being having enough substance to actual fulfill you, because then you might leave and not see the ads we have to show you.

Podcasts show us that a tiny minority of users able to pay for content subsidize an incredible amount of added value content for everyone, whether they can pay or not.

Ads don’t level the playing field. Ads are an ever growing tumor, sapping resources and weighing everything down in a mindless effort to replicate.

While that speculation is plausible, another view would be that companies would offer quality content without tracking users and invading their privacy (how many paid services still flood you with ads?), and possibly free alternatives would start to come up.

From your point of view, free open source is something that wouldn't exist

The hobbiest websites will not go away. Open source existed long before the internet.

What you are left with is the hobbiest websites or the mega brands that want to funnel you into their ecosystem. To offer anything that cost resources that you are willing to spend you must be a megabrand using this as a loss leader opportunity.

I don't think we want that world. We may think we do but look at what happened in Mr. Robot.

> I don't think we want that world.

That's the world we have right now, though, just with the addition of the spying that advertising brings.

The spying still happens regardless. We just don't have advertising (benefits and drawbacks)

I don't think the playing field is disleveled without ads. Wikipedia has no ads.

If you're willing to handle ads, they should at the least be untargetted.

Agreed.

The last time I worked in adtech was 2012.