That doesn’t make advertising evil, or platforms that rely on it untrustworthy. In important ways, advertisers are the ideal sponsors for information. There are many of them, so no individual advertiser wields total power. They are, themselves, trying to convey information that consumers often find useful. And their interests are sufficiently narrow that it’s rare for the information they’re sponsoring to truly pose a problem for them — Macy’s, for instance, has few opinions on defense policy.
They blend into the background so well that we can occasionally forget that they are there. Technology optimists like to say that “information wants to be free.” Perhaps the truer way to put it is that consumers want information to be free. And advertising makes it look free. But being free and looking free are not the same thing. In fact, they can be even more different than being free and being expensive, because at least in that comparison, the difference is obvious and easy to evaluate.
Ezra Klein
Ezra Klein is the editor of Wonkblog and a columnist at the Washington Post, as well as a contributor to MSNBC and Bloomberg. His work focuses on domestic and economic policymaking, as well as the political system that’s constantly screwing it up. He really likes graphs, and is on Twitter, Google+ and Facebook. E-mail him here.
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This is truer on the Internet than it ever was in newspapers or on television. At least with newspapers and television, the advertising was directly in front of you, and your interaction with it was straightforward. In the case of newspapers and, later, cable television, you were paying something — you knew the information wasn’t free.
Online, you not only are exposed to advertisements, but the data on what you search, where you go and what you do are fed to advertisers so they can better target their appeals. You’re often paying nothing for the experience, at work or in a cafe. As the information appears ever more free, the hidden costs are growing correspondingly greater.
The point of this column is not to warn against the dangers of advertising. It’s that our informational commons, or what we think of as our informational commons, is, for the most part, built atop a latticework of advertising platforms. In that way, it’s possible that no single industry — not newspapers nor search engines nor anything else — has done as much to advance the storehouse of accessible human knowledge in the 20th century as advertisers. They didn’t do it because they are philanthropists, and they didn’t do it because they love information. But they did it nevertheless.
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