This touches on something I've been thinking about. I'm making an ad blocker that tries to replace native ads with ads that actually add value to the viewer's life. In the public version, I'd like to offer some of the profits to the web hosts even if they haven't heard of it. Do you have any thoughts on how it would be best to go about that?
To engage with your question, the only way to truly, objectively ‘add value to one’s life’ is to become intimately familiar with them, their habits and everything they do on- and offline to understand what they need. This is the entire modus operandi of the current ad industry.
I agree. Thing is, Google and meta could do that today, if after getting a sense of what people need they actually showed them ads that helped with whatever that is. Instead they show whatever ad will make the most money immediately, which is only very rarely the same ad. The result is an erosion of trust that reduces their long term maximum potential. It's like they're stuck in scarcity mindset even after getting more money than Exxon.
I don't want your product, and I don't want ads. "But ads are what supports XYZ!" I don't care. I don't want it. Whatever you think will crumble away without advertisements, let it all fade away into nothing.
Something I was thinking about was a simple tip jar system. You can add credits to a tipjar system, and if you like a post, site, or whatever you can gift credits.
Completely gets rid of ads that nobody likes anyway.
You could maybe automate it say “if I spend more than 30 seconds on page, pay x credits”
Short answer, any ad that leads to a non regretted purchase the viewer wouldn't have otherwise made.
The instantiation I'm working on is to track the viewer's long term goals and the habits they're trying to form, then only show ads relevant to those. Ads today are shitty because people with products that add no value to anyone's life can somewhat overcome that disadvantage by bidding more on ad space, so that's what we see. But there are plenty of products that would actually add net value which it doesn't occur to us to look for, and insofar as ads exist, they should help us find them.
This project (my working title is eudaimonia) aims to let the user essentially aikido the attention economy arms race by saying "here's what I think would add value in my life, you may pitch your product iff it's actually relevant to that".
To me, that doesn't seem hugely different than current advertising. "non-regret" is a low bar. It's still, of course, treating increased purchasing/consumption as a good thing. And it still has the same characteristic of pushing users toward inferior, more expensive items because it makes someone more money that way. As in, if you have items A and B, and a user gains 1 value from A at a cost of 100, but would gain 10 value from B at a cost of 50, a "good ad" could make the user purchase A instead of B, which is a relative negative impact on their life. Additionally, it doesn't address the harms caused by "track[ing] the viewer"
I have no counterargument to your first point, but to your second, an ad for product A is "good" only for the person selling A, it's bad for the person buying (assuming a and b are in the same product category). Since the person buying a or b presumably has an ongoing relationship with the content creator being paid to show the ad, showing a "bad" ad is also bad for the host because it reduces the odds the customer will follow another ad on their network n the future. The catch is that the person selling A can outspend the person selling B, but there's an obvious solution: don't auction ad spaces. If vendor A and B are paying the same fixed amount per impression, B's superior offer is going to take over the market pretty quickly, and the content creator hosting ads will be naturally incentivised to show B's ads.
To your third point, I don't think all tracking is created equal - if it were, there'd be no instinct to post on social media at all, but in fact privacy and publicity are complex things with overlapping sets of advantages and disadvantages. Tracking probably feels purely disadvantageous because the people doing the tracking are in thrall to "A vendors", but if the tracker is incentivised to work with "B vendors" instead it becomes a much more nuanced issue.
That gives me an start of an idea for a feature. It might be useful to have it timing based. The thing I'd disagree with about how you frame it is, if you're searching for e.g. "soccer coaches near me", an ad actually distorts the signal of just searching by price of reviews or what have you. Where an ad can add value is if you're searching for "watch soccer matches online" and it says "you said you want to get in shape, here's a beginner friendly soccer coach in your area".
I agree if you're in production mode, all ads are unwelcome, but most of us spend a lot of time in consumption mode too, and that's where unlooked for opportunities are really welcome. If the system could distinguish between when the user is in production vs consumption mode it would reduce friction even more over the initial vision. Not sure how to distinguish that though, most of us can't even tell it about ourselves, let alone want to tell a browser extension about it. Maybe a 'production time' setting that forces a wait time on social media sites and doesn't show replacement ads at all while on?
