While I applaud the author for giving a chunk of his income to charity, to me it just feels like paying a penance for doing something bad.
I may be in the minority on this belief, but I think advertising -- any kind of advertising -- is inherently bad. To me, it's just psychological manipulation. I never want to see any ads, ever. If I could wear a pair of contact lenses that removed things like billboards from my vision, I would wear them in a heartbeat, even though billboards are far less harmful than internet-based ads.
I sometimes hear arguments that advertising isn't all bad because when someone actually is planning to make a particular kind of purchase, advertising can help them figure out which brand/model/etc. to buy. The problem with that is that the ads have no interest in satisfying anyone's particular needs in the best way. Someone could easily be swayed by a slick ad for a product that is not as good for their use as another product that had a less-engaging/less-manipulative ad.
The worst thing about internet advertising is of course the erosion of privacy. If ad networks were merely paying for people's eyeballs, that might not be too nefarious. But they're paying to track people and build intimate profiles about them, and that's not ok. I have very little faith that any of these initiatives that will supposedly make ad targeting privacy-preserving will actually work. All they do is make it appear that a company is doing something, so they can point to it when they get in trouble, claiming that they tried really hard to help preserve privacy, but it just didn't work out.
I'm just not interested in any of this crap. I know micropayments and pay-per-article and such are really hard to do, and really hard to get adopted, but that is the only model I will accept if people want me to pay in some way for web content. Making me pay for a $30/month subscription for the three or four articles I'll end up reading on your site per month is not something I'm interested in doing. And I will not pay through psychological manipulation and erosion of privacy.
I may be in the minority on this belief, but I think advertising -- any kind of advertising -- is inherently bad. To me, it's just psychological manipulation. I never want to see any ads, ever. If I could wear a pair of contact lenses that removed things like billboards from my vision, I would wear them in a heartbeat, even though billboards are far less harmful than internet-based ads.
I sometimes hear arguments that advertising isn't all bad because when someone actually is planning to make a particular kind of purchase, advertising can help them figure out which brand/model/etc. to buy. The problem with that is that the ads have no interest in satisfying anyone's particular needs in the best way. Someone could easily be swayed by a slick ad for a product that is not as good for their use as another product that had a less-engaging/less-manipulative ad.
The worst thing about internet advertising is of course the erosion of privacy. If ad networks were merely paying for people's eyeballs, that might not be too nefarious. But they're paying to track people and build intimate profiles about them, and that's not ok. I have very little faith that any of these initiatives that will supposedly make ad targeting privacy-preserving will actually work. All they do is make it appear that a company is doing something, so they can point to it when they get in trouble, claiming that they tried really hard to help preserve privacy, but it just didn't work out.
I'm just not interested in any of this crap. I know micropayments and pay-per-article and such are really hard to do, and really hard to get adopted, but that is the only model I will accept if people want me to pay in some way for web content. Making me pay for a $30/month subscription for the three or four articles I'll end up reading on your site per month is not something I'm interested in doing. And I will not pay through psychological manipulation and erosion of privacy.