A lot of online advertising is free for the advertiser unless someone clicks on their ad.
this post was submitted on 07 Oct 2025
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I have always had the idea that advertisement had little to do with promoting a product, but with owning the media.
If you are the source of income of a business you can have a say in what that business do.
Ads are the worst thing to come out of the internet. But it never would have taken off the way it did if it wasn't "free".
They should pay me to use their products, too.
My mom always said when she had to see unavoidable ads:
"The money they spent making those ads, they could have used to reduce the prices instead!"
It's funny to see her getting angry and reacting like that every time
Any ads that aren't "this product is available" and designed to get you to do things against your best interest.
"Use us instead of a competitor"
"Please associate this product with this idealised version of yourself (or your life)"
Maybe this is just me projecting my trauma after finishing Mad Men.
Bu also maybe not.
Ironically ads exist almost exclusively to raise prices.
Anyone can buy corn, but to purchase premium corn you need to have the value communicated too you. Maybe the corn comes from a riverbank somewhere, maybe it's been infused with peppercorns.
But to charge more for that corn you need to convince people to spend more on it. The more "reasons" you have to buy it ie. Peppercorns. The more you can charge
Ad companies should just fuck off and die.
Problem is they work. We can say all we want that it doesn't but that isn't the reality.
And insurance companies
Insurance companies, yes. But we should replace them with some sort of social safety net so people quit being fucked over by random chance. Risk management spread out over a large population is a good thing.
There used to be a thing called ‘mutual insurance’ as in ‘Mutual of Omaha’. (They did a nature show called Wild Kingdom back in the before-time)
It’s basically an insurance run like a co-op, not as an arm of some other money-laundering corporate giant.
Some mutual insurances would balance their books periodically and refund a portion of premiums if the claims paid was less than what premiums brought in.
I still remember the jingle.
“Mutual of Omaha …. is people …. you can count on when the going is rough!!”
Some sort of risk management and investment pool that you could draw from when legimately needed. Establishing the legitimacy is one of the hard parts.
And ... company companies.
Like holding companies?
Idk if my hands are that big
If you make a product that you have to manipulate people into buying, maybe it's a piece of shit and you're and even bigger piece of shit. Your boss is probably a fetid old piece of shit which has dried and stuck to the side of the bowl for decades - the morbid husk of a once human thing that exists only to steal the fruits of Labor. Yet even the boss covets the power of the Great Rich Ones whom they serve in the hopes that they will be elevated to their number. The Great Rich Ones, possessed of insatiable greed and unfathomable indifference, travelling in relative silence behind the shadows cast by our world like titanic fecaliths unlit by the sun, pulling smaller objects into their crushing embrace. At the center of this madness is Assathoth, the blind idiot God, whose benighted diarrhea-dipped tentacles guide the Market from angles beyond perception and weave the waking nightmare of our capitalist reality.
Uh anyways fuck ads.
2003-you installs three browser toolbars to get paid for watching and clicking ad banners (spoiler: you'll never reach the threshold for the payout)
oh I did,, it was a banner maybe 100 pixels height. I had a small app to make window transparent by clicking on them, so I started the bar, started the app, click the bar, it dissapeared but still registered viewing. I got maybe 25$ after a couple of months
This was the best time... And then they made afk checks every 10mins
xdotool - write a little bash script. Also keeps you as showing online on slack.
Well, that was a windows only thingy.
And you have not just to wiggle around you have to press the one word which was green, and the position changed every time.
But mostly, it was windows time
I haven’t written windows code in like 25 years, but I think you could do the same thing with the MFC / Win APIs.
I think I did something similar in Java to script RuneScape clicks. Man people would get pissed when I kept thieving on that chest upstairs from the cake stalls.
You'd be surprised at how little they paid to annoy specifically you that one time. And each time.
Closest I ever came was trying brave browser for a couple months a few years ago and I made a cool $0.83 in digital Monopoly money 💅
I think I made about $15, but admittedly it was over the course of like 2 years
Well, ads are just a middle man for increasing desire to buy a product. So you could just cut out the ad middle man as well and just buy the products you want.
This was the idea behind Basic Attention Token, the people who made the Brave Browser
I think we should simply bring back Pogs. Every time you watch an ad, you get a Pog. You can collect them, trade them, and even redeem them for mystery prizes. This will become the foundation for a new American economy.
I was just talking about the make your own pog machine the other day lol
“what if instead of a wine and art class there was a place you just go with your friends, make a bunch of pogs, drink beer and play pogs again.“
I knew I was saving my pogs for a good reason!
Shit, I donated mine a few years ago!
Like pog NFTs…
This, but instead of pogs, it's five dollar bills.
Or you could condition yourself to have a negative reaction to all advertised products, then charge the ad companies a fee to block their ads.
No idea if they're still around but that was the basis behind Swagbucks and AppTrailers back in the day. Bought a shitty $25 android phone that I just babysat at my desk running those all day long just hitting the next button when it showed up every couple of hours. Wasn't a massive payout by any means nor fast, but I racked up multiple $25 payouts that way. Still free money for minimal work. As a broke college student sitting at his desk most of the day anyways, that was solid
There was a number of companies that did this in the late 90s/early 2000s. None survived the dot com bubble.
Why stop there? Just have the companies taking out ads send random people their products!
Honestly, that's probably cheaper than an ad campaign.
I'm waiting for free phones / tv with split screen 50% AD 50% your content but only AI generated.
A web TV would suffice for this, given the current state of what remains of the ‘Web’.
web TV ads can be easily blocked but recent advancements in hardware locking added cryptography chip so I imagine it would be some hardware chip you have to remove to get rid of ads that will overlay half of the screen
Counter-proposal: you get to opt-out of advertising by signing up to automatically buy all the products they advertise.
But then who would collect all your data to eventually sell it to the government to bypass the 4th amendment????
Yeah idk why this model never took off, I’m guessing cause of greed.
Give me a wallet, I can fill it with watching ads and then use it for your service.
I think the reason why it doesn’t work is because it allows the user to minimize their ad exposure, not maximize.
I think the reason why it doesn’t work is because it allows the user to minimize their ad exposure, not maximize.
I'd think the opposite is also true. If you're trying to maximize your exposure to ads and increase your income, you're probably not the target audience for the advertised products. If you're relying on fractions of a penny per ad viewed, you're not likely to be able to afford the product they're hocking
That makes sense, they want to show ads to people who don’t want to see ads and don’t have time to see many.
IMO it just means advertisement is self defeating in the long run.
And the Internet comes to a halt as every company around fights to develop an install base with the span of the current major players.
Not that I'm a fan of the mass surveillance system our current internet entails, but having a major influx of less technically competent companies creating their own networks and site plugins is just asking for an even more chaotic security landscape.