



Ads are a necessary evil. Digital content such as web services and phone apps provide a helpful service to the consumer, and in return the consumer provides an equally valuable service to the developer: viewing advertisement.





Viewing Advertisement is Paying Money

The benefits of advertisement are complex; even if ads don't correlate to direct sales, it increases brand awareness. It's difficult to put a price on viewing ads, but some companies already have. Often products will offer an ad-free experience if the user is willing to pay a fee. For example, pandora.com allows the user to listen to music free of ads by paying for a monthly subscription. Amazon provides an ad-free kindle device if the consumer is willing to pay an extra $20. The amount of money that the service should charge you to remove advertisement should be the amount of profit that they can make off of you viewing that advertisement. This means that there is an exchange rate between the viewing of advertisement and currency. Viewing ads follows the same economic laws as regular currency. In the case that a service requires us to view too many ads, we quickly switch to a service which provides the same benefits but with less advertisement. Without monopolies, the ad viewing conversion rate will reach an equilibrium state.





Ad Viewing as a Service (AVaaS)

The service of viewing an ad is no different than any other service that you can provide to earn a profit. A consumer and service provider agree to make a trade of services; one provides the ability to listen to music, and the other provides the service of viewing advertisement. Replace "viewing advertisement" with "building a chair". Pandora.com will allow you to access their content, if you build them a chair every month. In the case that you don't want to build a chair every month, you can instead give pandora.com the amount of money that they could have sold that chair for.





AVaaS Theft

Since viewing an ad is your way of paying money, forcing you to view an ad without providing a service in return is morally equivalent to stealing from you. In the case that Geico flies a banner behind an airplane through your city, each citizen that views this ad is paying some currency with absolutely no service provided in return. It may not seem like much out of your pocket, but it adds up when multiplied by each citizen. If the revenue generated from the ad is not feeding back into providing you a service or reducing the price you pay for a service, you're probably getting cheated. The next time you see an advertisement, think about the service that the company is providing you in return.