The problem with ads is that they destroy value, which I think is what you are getting at. If you are an ad-dependent website, you are incentivized to fill your site with so many ads until it becomes just barely tolerable for the marginal reader. E.g. if your site as V viewers, and N ads, with L(N) being the number of viewers who turn off in disgust at seeing the N-th ad, then the equilibrium condition is L(N) = V/(N+1). A website with 10 ads displayed would suffer a 10% drop in readership if it added an 11th ad. That's the only condition whereby they don't ad that 11th ad. And you only added 10 ads because the number of readers you lost with the 10th was less than 1/10 of your total.
That is, you are incentivized to significantly reduce the pleasure obtained from your product, as the attention demanded by ads competes with the attention of your readers/viewers.
But if you are selling a good for money, while you are also incentivized to keep raising prices until the marginal cost of the product is equal to the marginal benefit, the money you charge doesn't reduce the quality of the product. A beautiful car may be painful to buy, but it's still a beautiful car. There is no such thing as a beautiful website with ads, the product is intentionally made awful.
And that situation of destroying value creates really weird long and short-run equilibria. For example, ads incentivize the kind of products for which attention is more easily shared: you wont find a lot of deep-think pieces that are ad-supported because the ads are too distracting. Instead, you find a lot of short-attention span pieces as these work better with ads. Thus the staccatto assaults of 9 weird tricks to do X, where you read a weird trick and then look at a couple of ads and go to the next weird trick. You can feel the presence of the ads in the work itself. In the Old TV era, episodes would encounter these cliff-hangers when the detective walks into a room, points a gun, you hear the sound of a woman screaming, and then it cuts to a commercial. They needed to create this peak of interest so you'd stick around to see what was in the room. But that peak also artificially disrupted the story. Online, all that is compressed into a few seconds of recognition, it is constant disruption.
In terms of long-run equilibria, there is this ratchet effect: As people flee the ad-sponsored world the ones who remain are more insentitive to ads and so the number of ads increases. In other words, the quality of the writing gets worse over time, in an ad-supported eco-system.
So no, ads are not just an alternate way of paying for content, they are a way of shaping content, and for the worse.
That is, you are incentivized to significantly reduce the pleasure obtained from your product, as the attention demanded by ads competes with the attention of your readers/viewers.
But if you are selling a good for money, while you are also incentivized to keep raising prices until the marginal cost of the product is equal to the marginal benefit, the money you charge doesn't reduce the quality of the product. A beautiful car may be painful to buy, but it's still a beautiful car. There is no such thing as a beautiful website with ads, the product is intentionally made awful.
And that situation of destroying value creates really weird long and short-run equilibria. For example, ads incentivize the kind of products for which attention is more easily shared: you wont find a lot of deep-think pieces that are ad-supported because the ads are too distracting. Instead, you find a lot of short-attention span pieces as these work better with ads. Thus the staccatto assaults of 9 weird tricks to do X, where you read a weird trick and then look at a couple of ads and go to the next weird trick. You can feel the presence of the ads in the work itself. In the Old TV era, episodes would encounter these cliff-hangers when the detective walks into a room, points a gun, you hear the sound of a woman screaming, and then it cuts to a commercial. They needed to create this peak of interest so you'd stick around to see what was in the room. But that peak also artificially disrupted the story. Online, all that is compressed into a few seconds of recognition, it is constant disruption.
In terms of long-run equilibria, there is this ratchet effect: As people flee the ad-sponsored world the ones who remain are more insentitive to ads and so the number of ads increases. In other words, the quality of the writing gets worse over time, in an ad-supported eco-system.
So no, ads are not just an alternate way of paying for content, they are a way of shaping content, and for the worse.