Added to that: it's in the middleman's interest to blur this distinction. You can sell a lot more "may or may not be rich enough to buy your product" adverts than you can "definitely rich enough" adverts. Even if the rate per advert is slightly lower, it probably makes the middleman (Uber in this case) more money. (And the rate per advert probably won't be a lot lower because companies have fixed advertising budgets.)

So now, to justify removing someone from your pool of advertisees, they don't just need to pay what could be made by advertising to them; they need to pay for what could be made to advertise to them and (unwittingly) several poorer people.

I get a lot of private aviation ads. I certainly can’t and will not be flying private anytime soon, but I assume I get fed these expensive ad buys because I do have an ADSB radio hobby.

I also click them often. $$$$

Yep. People are paying for the privilege of segmenting themselves into the high disposable income categories of the market. They're paying to do the corporation's market segmentation for them.

So it’s not

“If you don’t pay for a product, you are the product”

It’s

“If you don’t pay for a product, you are a less valuable product than if you’d pay for the product”

I don't know about "always", but the general correlation of interest in "paying to not have ads" and interest of advertising dollars in "paying to get to you" rings true and is often overlooked.

I think the general correlation is that corps will find ways to make more money than they are now while they will all eventually realize data aggregation can be monetized

I'm not sure this is true, the people who would pay to not have non-distracting ads are likely a demographic that does not convert very well.

If they're half as likely to convert but four times wealthier, does it matter?

Four times wealthier does not mean they'll spend four times more on your products.

The answer here isn't really obvious, but I'd suspect that in many cases this is not a very attractive demographic to advertise to.

Fair enough, but keep in mind that many Americans are just not wealthy enough for a lot of advertised products; a luxury car ad, for example, is mostly useless if it's shown to people making < $60k a year.

This demographic is inherently attractive simply because they can spend money.

They should have used the term more valuable not more wealthy, their point is generally cogent.

On the wealthy side, you don't need to be that rich to pay not to get ads.

> If you have the disposable income to pay to remove advertising

So a fancy way to say that if you have 10 dollars?

I’m describing the general principle. If x + x = 2x, then it already follows that 1 + 1 = 2.

You could just as logically say that if the user has spent money to remove advertising, then they now have less money and are less valuable to advertise for.

> You could just as logically say that if the user has spent money to remove advertising, then they now have less money and are less valuable to advertise for.

Thank you for the laugh.

While this may be true on an individual level, it’s wildly not true in aggregate.

The first dollar is hardest to get. Once someone has shown a propensity to spend on pretty much anything, they become much more valuable as an advertising target.

I can't understand why you're so sure about that. First of all, every person in the world spends money. The first dollar identifies a customer interested in your product, absolutely. But that means your product, not any random product in the world. So it's not a signal at all for being a good advertising target.

That's like thinking that a girl is likely to sleep with everybody because she has a boyfriend. "She's already sleeping with one guy, so why shouldn't she sleep with everybody?".

Of course your current customers are excellent targets for your own upsells and your other products. But not much else.

This is very insightful

Just to give you another little titbit if you're interested. I work in go to market, and part of that is awareness, and part of that is advertising. Where people use the platform has a huge impact on the prices you pay to advertise on the platform, for example reddit is very expensive because they have a very high mobile traffic population, and the ads can't be blocked, advertising on X is hard because the people I want to reach all pay for premium, so the traffic you get from it now is basically useless, linkedin skews towards desktop, but their targeting is amazing, but because they skew towards desktop people run ad blocks, some platforms let you pick the devices you serve to, some don't, all of it impacts the price you pay to serve the ads.

So, don't do targeted advertising then?

Well, it doesn't really matter that it's expensive or hard: that's what we have VCs for. More money you can raise, better targeting you can pay up for. You'd be amazed at how much oxygen you can suck out of a market for a million bucks.

I started to rebut this with the expected value of the bid... but if you're advertising a sports car, it's worth paying $100/impression even if your conversion rate is 1%.

If the ad impression is worth that much (which seems extremely rare), then there's a profitable trade to be had, where I'm paid to see the ad and the platform is paid to provide the ad. Then all parties are happy.

Anyway, the devil is in the implementation details here, but this doesn't strike me as a common case.

For ads I see in places I paid not to see them, I add all the vendors to my "never buy from" list when this happens.

Isn't it fun when monopolies show you ads.