Futurama - S01E06 - Didn't you have ads in the 20th century?

Google and Meta seem to have no idea what's going on within their own advertising networks. Similarly to all the stories (with two currently in the front page of HN, eBay and PayPal) about algorithms that are just insufficient for the range of realistic scenarios these companies must deal with on a regular basis. It's merely the equation of profit outweighing customer service. Admittedly, they're working on a scale that's difficult to comprehend, but that shouldn't absolve them of aiding and abetting criminal use of their systems. Google's and Meta's profit motives are the base cause of this continuing escalation of the ubiquity and user-hostility (to put it mildly) of internet advertising. It's only been predictable for the last 20 years... [link] (first aired in March 2000) [this video] (April 1999)

Double dipping with adverts is the way. Amazon, Spotify, dropped them all after they started pushing adverts as well as getting their monthly cost. It's not new -- cable/sky TV was exactly the same (although sky one was the other way round - started with adverts, then added a subscription fee in 1993 [0]) The far bigger problem is that the majority of people accept adverts. They don't consider them a cost. Last time I got a yellow cab in New York it was adverts on a TV screen in the back. I get ubers if I need a cab now. The future of adverts was accurately predicted in idiocracy [1], and of course Futurama had comentary on this a quarter of a century ago [2] [0] [link] [1] [link] [2] [this video]

Advertising is potentially useful, it's the scale that's a problem. [this video] Like, "Every inch of the new park is covered in sponsor branding" is a problem, but "I had no idea that a store selling towels opened in our town" is also a problem. These are both advertising, at some point you cross from "I didn't know about that, thanks" to "Just fuck off already" and that's too much advertising. Dispepsi for example, the Negativland album, is premised on the idea that everybody on the entire planet already knows about Coca-Cola and Pepsi, so their continued advertising is entirely futile. Nobody who wants a brown fizzy beverage is unsure whether they could obtain such a thing or what it might be called. So all they're doing is annoying us.