> You pay with attention, and the service trades some of that attention to an advertiser in exchange for regular currency.
This is a very superficial take. You obviously don't just pay with attention. You also pay with actual money -- you do, or the friends or family you talk about the product with do. And you don't necessarily do it completely consciously, because one of the effects of "raise awareness" advertising is to make things that are familiar to you seem more attractive. Given three equivalent options, one of which you vaguely remember from somewhere, you're more likely to pick that option.
One could of course argue about whether this payment (using actual money) is good or not, and whether using advertising in this way is ethical, but extracting money from you or your social network is the end goal.
Somewhat-unbelievable arguments about advertising as a whole being a con aside, if people weren't responding to advertising by increasing advertisers' revenues, then nobody would advertise.
Right, the attention is only valuable as a way to get to your money. If we somehow eliminate all of the cognitive biases, it would seem to be better[0] to just pay with the same amount of money. That would free up a bunch of attention that was being destroyed to redirect the flow of money. That attention could be used to do self-directed research into products and services that you might value ("pull advertising"). On net, this would be far less predatory and more pleasant.
Of course, we can't somehow eliminate all of the cognitive biases involved. Pretending we can leads to ludicrous conclusions like mine here: obviously the world is never actually going to work in this way. I think the closest we might get would be to clean up certain types of predatory advertising, maybe starting with anything aimed at young children. Which is of course what most of the world has been trying (and, to a limited extent, succeeding at) for decades.
[0]- There is a credible argument here that the advertising model allows people with more money to subsidize people with less money, but since we have a magic bias-removal wand in this hypothetical, it's still more efficient to just do that directly.
Nobody ever pays with attention. This is a total nonsense idea created by the advertisers to justify their own existence and guilt people who don't accept their noise. It's an attempt to frame us as thiefs and just as dishonest as the copyright industry comparing infringement to high seas piracy.
Payment is when we exchange money for something else. It's a transaction: can't have one without the other. Advertising is when the company sends us stuff for free while hoping that we'll see the noise they bundled alongside it. Absolutely nothing stops us from just filtering that noise. They were hoping to inject some brands into our minds but their attempt failed. Too bad, they need to suck it up and stop whining. Nowhere is it written that we must bend over backwards to make that happen. They don't get to complain about it because nobody owes them a single thing.
This is a really good point. The only reason your attention is valuable is because it is (on average) going to cause you to spend enough money to actually pay for the product, but in a sneaky way you won't quite notice and won't associate with the product itself.
Paying with attention also means paying with time, which is arguably worse than money because time is lost forever. Also, having to pay attention to an ad breaks your focus and flow, and therefore adversely affects what you actually want to do.
> if people weren't responding to advertising by increasing advertisers' revenues, then nobody would advertise.
Not necessarily, it could also be a red queen's race. But that also is a net-negative since money gets spent on advertising instead of passing the savings through to the consumer.
This is a very superficial take. You obviously don't just pay with attention. You also pay with actual money -- you do, or the friends or family you talk about the product with do. And you don't necessarily do it completely consciously, because one of the effects of "raise awareness" advertising is to make things that are familiar to you seem more attractive. Given three equivalent options, one of which you vaguely remember from somewhere, you're more likely to pick that option.
One could of course argue about whether this payment (using actual money) is good or not, and whether using advertising in this way is ethical, but extracting money from you or your social network is the end goal.
Somewhat-unbelievable arguments about advertising as a whole being a con aside, if people weren't responding to advertising by increasing advertisers' revenues, then nobody would advertise.