These big tech companies are so frustrating. Why does every single aspect of our digital lives need to be monitored? It’s like whack a mole trying to get the most basic of privacy.
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Contrast that certain TV dayparts saturated with subprime ads promoting Medicare scams and other offerings for people who can’t spend their own money on things except for an occasional ad for a car dealer because if people weren’t driving you’d have much less reason to call a personal injury lawyer.
Ad free tiers for Netflix and whatnot have the problem that people who won’t pay for ad free aren’t really worth advertising to.
It's almost as if you don't remember the good old days when the NY Times sold you a physical newspaper...that was (and still is) stuffed with ads.
Lately the folks at my gas station have hit me up for a conversation whenever I was looking at newspapers, usually it is about how shocking it is how little paper you get in local papers for $2.50 or more. There are the funnies and the DBA listings and front-page articles about some chain store that isn't in our town going out of business. They don't bother to send reporters to public meetings like they did 25 years ago, and if there is a local election you might have to wait 36 hours after the results are posted by the board of elections. (Used to be a reason why I bought a paper)
Contrast that to the N.Y. Times which costs $6 or so but is a beast in terms of size (small print too!) although I'd say a lot of the content is vacuous.
Printed newspaper ads were only the former (and an easily skippable version compared to tv), while this topic is mainly about the latter.
On the computer attached to my stereo YouTube offers recommendations for music videos from the likes of the Super Furry Animals [1], Kanye West [2], Brothers Johnson and such. Nice stuff, with solid support that I like it, never challenging, unlike the recommendations from my Plex server.
On another computer YouTube shows me videos about stereo equipment, sometimes video game music [3], and also of the genre "Why X sucks" where X could be private equity, "the economy", a movie studio, a video game studio, a fast food restaurant, a clothing brand, etc. I wonder why public sentiment about the economy is so bad despite inflation and unemployment numbers that aren't so bad and think, "How many people are watching these videos?"
Other people get nothing but blackpill incel hell.
Ben Bagdikian wrote a book The Information Machines in 1970 about how personalized news would be possible by 1980 that was quite prophetic and was influential to me when I found it almost 20 years ago. Only recently did I find The Effete Conspiracy, his next book, where he reveals how angry and bitter he was that the work that the media industry sponsored him to do for the RAND corporation was roundly rejected by media owners uninterested in investing in the future and introduced the true but unpopular model that newspapers have a left-wing bias because reporters are left-wing and a right-wing bias because the owners are right-wing.
[1] I get accused of being a furry but I'm not, really
[2] pre-Nazi