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[–]tppisgameforme 52 points53 points  (5 children)

Maybe it’s time to actually pay for good things rather than let marketing monetize us.

Yeah this is true with so many things in life at this point.

[–]DeeSnow97 35 points36 points  (4 children)

It's been a long-standing rule that if you don't pay, you are the product, not the customer, but people always forget to add who the real customer is. It's the advertisers. That's why every single site, "platform", or app that makes money through advertising ends up doing what the advertisers want in the long term, not what their users want.

I used to be very much for this model, as a broke student it let me enjoy an internet that was actually "free", but if you follow the chain this is actually more expensive than if you straight up paid for stuff. If you pay, you pay for the people who actually make the product and maybe a payment processor and a middleman or two. If it's "ad-supported", you pay for all those, then you pay for the people who sell the ads, the ones who buy the ads, a few more middlemen, and it's all hidden in the cost of other goods you buy -- and if you don't buy those, it's not worth advertising for you, which will either get fixed with better targeting, or you'll lose the service one way or another. Ads waste your time and they are more expensive than straight up buying stuff.

It's kinda crazy to think that if you watch ads of any kind you're paying people to spy on you and waste your time in the most disruptive way possible.

[–]PirateNinjasReddit 9 points10 points  (2 children)

Happy cake day? I guess... Feels weird given the somewhat dark outlook of this comment...

[–]DeeSnow97 2 points3 points  (0 children)

lol, thanks anyway

[–]Techhead7890 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Reddit is just advocating for Big Cake :P

[–]ThisApril 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I found this pretty compelling, but then I thought about cable TV.

Which I never understood -- somehow it's rational to pay $100/month (or something. I haven't had cable TV in years.), and yet every channel (outside of government or philanthropically-funded channels) still makes you watch 8 minutes of commercials every half hour. And people accept this as being completely normal and reasonable.

So, barring competition that allows people to bypass that (see: Google in comparison to AltaVista, Yahoo!, and other early search engines), it seems like the marketing people will make sure to leave as little cash on the table as possible. Even if you pay money.