printWhat Am I Worth to Advertisers? My Obsessive Quest to Put a Price on My Attention
by francopoli
More than anything else, trudging through the numbers on these various campaigns got me thinking about information pollution, and the sheer amount of space in our day that’s monetized. Introducing limits sounds pleasant enough—who wouldn’t want fewer ads?—but that might also tip the balance even further in favor of huge brands with budgets to burn on the ad spaces that would become costlier through artificial scarcity. Maybe aggressive ad density could be taxed like cigarettes, air pollution, or anything else with negative externalities. I’m not the first or last person to see the reliance on advertising—especially online—as flawed, and we should all be deeply concerned by the way it incentivizes the sort of mass data collection Facebook and Google do.