Feb 4 JDN 2460346

Have you noticed how Amazon feels a lot worse lately? Years ago, it was extremely convenient: You’d just search for what you want, it would give you good search results, you could buy what you want and be done. But now you have to slog through “sponsored results” and a bunch of random crap made by no-name companies in China before you can get to what you actually want.

Temu is even worse, and has been from the start: You can’t buy anything on Temu without first being inundated in ads. It’s honestly such an awful experience, I don’t understand why anyone is willing to buy anything from Temu.

#WelcomeToCyberpunk, I guess.

Even some video games have become like this: The free-to-play or “freemium” business model seems to be taking off, where you don’t pay money for the game itself, but then have to deal with ads inside the game trying to sell you additional content, because that’s where the developers actually make their money. And now AAA firms like EA and Ubisoft are talking about going to a subscription-based model where you don’t even own your games anymore. (Fortunately there’s been a lot of backlash against that; I hope it persists.)

Why is this happening? Isn’t capitalism supposed to make life better for consumers? Isn’t competition supposed to make products and services supposed to improve over time?

Well, first of all, these markets are clearly not as competitive as they should be. Amazon has a disturbingly large market share, and while the video game market is more competitive, it’s still dominated by a few very large firms (like EA and Ubisoft).

But I think there’s a deeper problem here, one which may be specific to media content.

What I mean by “media content” here is fairly broad: I would include art, music, writing, journalism, film, and video games.

What all of these things have in common is that they are not physical products (they’re not like a car or a phone that is a single physical object), but they are also not really services either (they aren’t something you just do as an action and it’s done, like a haircut, a surgery, or a legal defense).

Another way of thinking about this is that media content can be copied with zero marginal cost.

Because it can be copied with zero marginal cost, media content can’t simply be made and sold the way that conventional products and services are. There are a few different ways it can be monetized.

The most innocuous way is commission or patronage, where someone pays someone else to create a work because they want that work. This is totally unproblematic. You want a piece of art, you pay an artist, they make it for you; great. Maybe you share copies with the world, maybe you don’t; whatever. It’s good either way.

Unfortunately, it’s hard to sustain most artists and innovators on that model alone. (In a sense I’m using a patronage model, because I have a Patreon. But I’m not making anywhere near enough to live on that way.)

The second way is intellectual property, which I have written about before, and surely will again. If you can enforce limits on who is allowed to copy a work, then you can make a work and sell it for profit without fear of being undercut by someone else who simply copies it and sells it for cheaper. A detailed discussion of that is beyond the scope of this post, but you can read those previous posts, and I can give you the TLDR version: Some degree of intellectual property is probably necessary, but in our current society, it has clearly been taken much too far. I think artists and authors deserve to be able to copyright (or maybe copyleft) their work—but probably not for 70 years after their death.

And then there is a third way, the most insidious way: advertising. If you embed advertisements for other products and services within your content, you can then sell those ad slots for profit. This is how newspapers stay afloat, mainly; subscriptions have never been the majority of their revenue. It’s how TV was supported before cable and streaming—and cable usually has ads too, and streaming is starting to.

There is something fundamentally different about advertising as a service. Whereas most products and services you encounter in a capitalist society are made for you, designed for you to use, advertising it made at you, designed to manipulate you.

I’ve heard it put well this way:

If you’re not paying, you aren’t the customer; you’re the product.

Monetizing content by advertising effectively makes your readers (or viewers, players, etc.) into the product instead of the customer.

I call this effect adversarial design.

I chose this term because it not only conveys the right sense of being an adversary: it also includes the word ‘ad’ and the same Latin root ‘advertere‘ as ‘advertising’.

When a company designs a car or a phone, they want it to appeal to customers—they want you to like it. Yes, they want to take your money; but it’s a mutually beneficial exchange. They get money, you get a product; you’re both happier.

When a company designs an ad, they want it to affect customers—they want you to do what it says, whether you like it or not. And they wouldn’t be doing it if they thought you would buy it anyway—so they are basically trying to make you do something you wouldn’t otherwise have done.

In other words, when designing a product, corporations want to be your friend.

When designing an ad, they become your enemy.

You would absolutely prefer not to have ads. You don’t want your attention taken in this way. But they way that these corporations make money—disgustingly huge sums of money—is by forcing those ads in your face anyway.

Yes, to be fair, there might be some kinds of ads that aren’t too bad. Simple, informative, unobtrusive ads that inform you that something is available you might not otherwise have known about. Movie trailers are like this; people often enjoy watching movie trailers, and they want to see what movies are going to come out next. That’s fine. I have no objection to that.

But it should be clear to anyone who has, um, used the Internet in the past decade that we have gone far, far beyond that sort of advertising. Ads have become aggressive, manipulative, aggravating, and—above all—utterly ubiquitous. You can’t escape them. They’re everywhere. Even when you use ad-block software (which I highly recommend, particularly Adblock Plus—which is free), you still can’t completely escape them.

That’s another thing that should make it pretty clear that there’s something wrong with ads: People are willing to make efforts or even pay money to make ads go away.

Whenever there is a game I like that’s ad-supported but you can pay to make the ads go away, I always feel like I’m being extorted, even if what I have to pay would have been a totally reasonable price for the game. Come on, just sell me the game. Don’t give me the game for free and then make me pay to make it not unpleasant. Don’t add anti-features.

This is clearly not a problem that market competition alone will solve. Even in highly competitive markets, advertising is still ubiquitous, aggressive and manipulative. In fact, competition may even make it worse—a true monopoly wouldn’t need to advertise very much.

Consider Coke and Pepsi ads; they’re actually relatively pleasant, aren’t they? Because all they’re trying to do is remind you and make you thirsty so you’ll buy more of the product you were already buying. They aren’t really trying to get you to buy something you wouldn’t have otherwise. They know that their duopoly is solid, and only a true Black Swan event would unseat their hegemony.

And have you ever seen an ad for your gas company? I don’t think I have—probably because I didn’t have a choice in who my gas company was; there was only one that covered my area. So why bother advertising to me?

If competition won’t fix this, what will? Is there some regulation we could impose that would make advertising less obtrusive? People have tried, without much success. I think imposing an advertising tax would help, but even that might not do enough.

What I really think we need right now is to recognize the problem and invest in solving it. Right now we have megacorporations which are thoroughly (literally) invested in making advertising more obtrusive and more ubiquitous. We need other institutions—maybe government, maybe civil society more generally—that are similarly invested in counteracting it.

Otherwise, it’s only going to get worse.