Back in the twentieth century, people were roughly equal in their power to avoid advertising. Only desert hermits and commune dwellers could truly live ad-free. But today, many people cheerfully claim to be total ad-avoiders, and it has become possible (if not always easy) to have normal media-consumption habits and avoid most, if not all, forms of advertising. You can watch movies through Netflix, use your TiVo, get friendly with Bittorent, or learn the art of averting your gaze. Following these techniques, in the same way a vegan avoids milk and meat, the ad-avoider may maintain a nearly ad-free diet.

The individual benefits are obvious. But is avoiding ads responsible or sustainable? It makes the advertising industry nervous, and many in the content industry, joined by some academics, see ad-avoiders as content-killers. The argument is pretty simple: if you destroy the advertising revenue that content depends on, we’ll end up in a cultural wasteland, or, worse, a culture plagued by advertising that masquerades as content. But things are more complex than they may at first appear.

For starters, we should set aside the popular theory that advertisers can always reach people, even if they don’t know it. Sure, our brains can suck up brands and slogans unexpectedly: M&M’s mascots may dance in the subconscious of even a hardcore avoider. It may be nearly impossible to avoid all ads. But that’s not the point—the relevant difference is between seeing more or fewer. Studies by academics and industry specialists suggest that somewhere between ten and twenty per cent of the population is either actively or passively avoiding ads. These are rough measures, but there’s every reason to think the avoidance numbers are growing, roughly dividing the population into high- and low-ad lifestyles.

But the funny thing is that advertising spending is actually increasing, both in the United States and globally. Moreover, it has grown three years in a row, reaching more than half a trillion dollars in 2012. This is true even of live-television ads, which are the most intrusive and the easiest to avoid, yet are nonetheless growing at a healthy pace—by eight per cent last year in the United States.

Meanwhile, it’s obviously not true that ad-avoidance is creating a cultural wasteland. Our generally acknowledged golden age of television happens to also be the heyday of avoidance. If you’re looking for a vast wasteland, try early-nineteen-sixties television, a period when advertising-supported content ruled supreme, aided by a lack of alternatives and the scarcity of remote controls. It is true that the media, especially local journalism, has been hit hard over the past decade, but it is difficult to argue that there is a paucity of good writing available in our times. Instead, for most people, there’s more good stuff to read than time to read it.

More than one thing explains what’s going on here. Some of what’s called ad-avoidance might be better termed “paying for stuff.” Netflix, Amazon, HBO Go, and other subscription services are direct beneficiaries of people who hate ads. While not ad-free, the New York Times, reversing a trend that began in the eighteen-thirties, now makes more money from its subscribers than its advertisers. Somewhere along the line, it and others figured out how to successfully sell monthly subscriptions—the reason the Times is once again profitable is that it has more than seven hundred thousand paid digital subscribers.

More subtly, ad-avoidance may actually be good for the advertising industry. It may seem strange for anyone to spend more when fewer people are paying attention, but that’s the direct implication of the law of supply and demand. Companies with stuff to sell still want to reach consumers to create demand, and since advertisers are ultimately brokers of human attention they stand to benefit from scarcity, in the same way rents increase when housing is scarce. For example, if sports events are the only time anyone actually watches live-television ads, then logically those advertisements become more valuable.

This point becomes more interesting when we consider demographic and media differences in ad-avoidance. Certain groups, such as young people, the tech-savvy, and the wealthy, surely avoid more advertisements than others, and that gap will likely widen. Some cohorts’ main exposure to advertising may be online magazine Web sites. As for television, if you want to reach, say, eighteen- to twenty-four-year-olds who rely entirely on Netflix or pirated shows, you’ll have to capitalize on whatever can actually reach that group, which may stimulate spending on different media, like mobile ads. Anyone who can reach the unreachable for even a moment has their hands on gold.

As consumers, we should understand ad-avoidance as a way of setting a price on our time and attention. For the past century, we’ve arguably been selling it too cheap, trading it all for a few decent sitcoms and sports programming. The rise of ad-avoidance is a way of putting a higher price on the privilege of doing what ads do—make brands more valuable and convince us to spend money. Just as we don’t let every salesman into our home, there’re no reason to let every advertisement into our life.

Photograph by Emmanuel Dunand/AFP/Getty.