The (Real) Truth on Advertising

Coming from RightMedia, and then working at Yahoo and now the video game industry, I am still consistently amazed as to how much effort people take in order to avoid advertising or vocally complain about advertising in-general.

Let me clear it up.

Advertising gives you stuff for free

TV does this. The internet does this. Without advertising, you would have to subscribe to every service to enjoy it.

And if you really enjoy a site or service that is providing you something for free, then help them out. Leave your cookies alone. Seriously. Nobody can identify you from a cookie and honestly, you think too highly of yourself if you think that's true. All it does is allow ads to be served to be more expensive, and that means more money for the people who are giving you stuff.

On the flip side, keep the pop-up blockers and stuff. Sending a clear message to site owners and advertisers that this is not effective will just mean you'll get the advertisements on your own terms, not theirs.

Advertising subsidizes things that would be more expensive.

This is the murky grey area that seems to set people off. The mentality is "hey, I paid for this, why am I getting advertising?".

This short sighted statement is the result of users who have accepted that advertising is for free products, but the second is products that allow you to pay to remove advertising.

The reality is, advertising isn't always used in this way. This is how magazines and newspaper work. This is why you'll see dynamic ads on Burnout Paradise and UFC 2009 Undisputed.

In the case of newspapers and magazines, this allows them to provide you the product as a highly reduced rate, or else you'd be paying a ton more than 50 cents for the daily or 4.99 for a magazine. In the case of video games, the cost of running servers for you, even though you paid for the game is expensive. They are just trying to reduce some of the costs. And if they make money off of it, you should be happy, because once an idea becomes profitable, it just means more goods and services of that quality level will be provided.