There were ads in ancient Rome, just to show how deep the rot goes.
this post was submitted on 06 Apr 2025
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considering tons of free services are paid for with advertising, a lot of such services would cease to exist/be free.
be it websites such as youtube and streaming sites like twitch, or almost any website for that matter.
someone made a brand of water thats free and is entirely paid by advertising printed on the bottle, that would be gone too.
hell, i hate ads, but considering i use ublock, i havent seen any in years, and in real life you can just not look at them.
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As much as I'd be down with this I don't see it happening considering no one wants to pay for the services they use that are ad supported. For example everyone always seems to shit on YouTube premium but that is a currently existing way to get rid of ads on the service. Every time there's an option between ad supported and ad free but paid people tend to just pick ad free. So while I think outlawing ads would be good at least with the current state of the world it would only be a net negative, killing off a bunch of small and big websites that rely on ads.
Youtube spends a tiny fraction of its revenue on bandwidth. It gets way more than it needs from ads and premium subscriptions. Hardly any of that revenue goes to the content creators either.
I generally agree but I think you have to acknowledge if you got rid of ads then best case scenario YouTube either limits more features like uploading or HD video behind paying or worst case scenario the platform collapses and there is nothing to replace it. For the longest time they weren't profitable and it wasn't until they pushed hard with ads and premium that they started to be profitable. So as much as I wish we could get rid of ads unless you wanna accept moving back technologically and losing a bunch of these online services people rely on I think ads are a needed evil for the time being. Especially when a lot of services already have ways to pay to get around ads. As at the end of the day if you don't have ads you're gonna have a subscription you have to pay for every major website you wanna use as they have to make money some way.
My internet connection would sure improve if they got rid of HD.
Those who take issue with loss of profits without ads must take it up with big tech. They've have literal trillions of dollars from dominating the ad industry. They have your money. Nobody else.