Episode Summary

01:10 | Why do ads exist?

To keep content free
Free is especially important on the web, because sharing stuff on social media is where the majority of traffic comes from; if your site has a paywall, you are missing out on a ton of readers

Inverts the customer: The consumer is no longer the customer, and the content is no longer the product; the product is the consumer’s attention, and the advertisers are the customers
Ad networks have to gather as much information on a person as possible so they can create targeted ads
Resort to obtrusive methods to get the reader’s attention
- Pop-ups
- Pop-unders
- Huge banners
Resort to deceitful methods to get clicks
- “Download now!”
- “Your computer is at risk!”
- Ads that are meant to look like part of the page

Contributes to a cycle of advertisers trying to find ways to get around it, making more intrusive ads
- Technological solutions to disguise ads from blockers
- “Native advertising”
Morally ambiguous
- “Implied contract”
- Some ad blockers accept money from advertisers to let their ads through

Readability
- Users pay a subscription for a product that strips away everything but the content, including formatting
Brave
- Removes ads and trackers, replaces them with ads that do not track the user
- Revenue from the new ads is shared between Brave, the publisher, and the user
RSS
- Most feeds do not include ads
- Publishers choose what to put in the feeds, so this doesn’t have moral issues

The Extra Dimension is released under a Creative Commons — Attribution 4.0 International license. Feel free to use any or all of it as long as you link back to http://thenexus.tv/ted11.