Tension

March 12, 2025

I hate ads on websites. I hate their invasiveness. I hate the way it eats bandwidth and clutters pages. I hate all the tracking and spying done by and for ads. I hate the incentives they create and how that has shaped the internet.

But ads are not going away and no amount of whining from me is going to change that. Internet ads do not, in fact, exist solely to spite me. They don’t even exist and persist solely due to the machinations of Alphabet and Meta et al.

They exist to solve a deep rooted problem with the internet. One that is both technical and cultural.

The problem is the tension between the following two facts:

1. We expect websites to be free to access and use.

2. Websites cost money to operate.

Some websites—such as this one—are small enough to simply absorb the costs¹. Some are stores and don’t need ads because they’re just selling stuff and make there money that way (in theory, at least). But that still leaves a large segment of the web that needs to pay the bills somehow. And subscriptions are not going to cut it. You’re also not going to suddenly convince hundreds of millions of people to start opening their wallets for something they’re not used to doing that for.

It wouldn’t be easy to make that change even if people were willing. You would not want to trust every single site you visit with your credit card, and even if you did, there are transaction fees that make small, per-page charges untenable. Cryptocurrency, as promised had some potential as an alternative, but in reality has turned into a mere vehicle for speculation rather than currency. Also many cryptocurrencies still have untenable transaction fees for small transfers.

And now it is too late. These are technical problems; they are not insoluble. Even if the financial system fixed them, people now have the expectation of getting things for free—good luck changing that!

It’s not hopeless. It’s not impossible. It is important to remember that nothing about how the internet works is inevitable. But finding and reaching a better solution than what we have is genuinely very hard.

I don’t have a solution to propose here. I wish I did. Sometimes all you can do is try to start a conversation.