i try not to think about how much stuff is put on the internet solely to get you to see some advertisements. maybe 50? 60%? of youtube at this point is content slop made purely to get ad revenue. everything is ads. it makes me miserable and i can't wait for the collapse of the ad industry

I just wonder how thinly spread ads can get. Like, at the end of the day, there's a limit to how many actual products are being purchased. Everyone's fighting over a finite and slow-growing pool of disposable income, and meanwhile the number of places online serving ads is skyrocketing. I'm no economologist but it seems like the natural consequence of this is that ad prices on everything short of the Superbowl fall to $0.000000001 per million impressions.

Producing and serving slop these days is cheap, but it's not free. There has to be a tipping point at which "sure, the margins are low, but the quantity is unlimited" breaks and it's no longer worth even the very small effort it takes to put shock images on a Taboola feed.

(Also, generative AI is artificially underpriced right now. That will not last forever. It's going to be a lot harder for people to flood the Web with slop if the slop machine costs five cents per query.)

We're not getting the Old Internet back, but I have hope we're going to get something besides a world wallpapered with ads, if only because wallpaper isn't free.

This reminds me of how Sarah taber said that when corn prices are high enough, famers will fill their corn (or whatever crop it was) with as much dirt/gravel as possible. But normally, they don't, because it's not cost efficient. Because despite the saying 'cheaper than dirt', dirt does, in fact, cost money. So usually it's not worth it to adulterate your product, unless parket conditions are just right.