Your Market Choice
Or, why everything free sucks
When you are receiving a product or service from some provider, somebody has to pay the provider. There are two choices there.
You pay the provider, for providing what you want.
Someone else pays the provider, for providing what they want.
In either case, what’s being provided is being provided to you, and you’re getting what the provider is providing. The provider has to provide something you want, or you won’t be there at all. But if someone else is paying them, to provide what they want, it is necessarily something you don’t want.
If you did want it, the person paying the provider could instead just provide it for free. Because you want it, and it’s free, you would go get it. A YouTube channel is a great example. If you want to watch someone’s videos, they can simply upload them to YouTube and you will watch them.
But instead, they will upload the video to YouTube and pay YouTube to make you watch them. They don’t have to do this if you want to watch the video. They only have to do this when you don’t want to watch the video.
When they have a video you wouldn’t watch even if they paid you.
Lots of people have ad blockers now. It’s not as many as they want you to believe - about 35% of people actively run an ad blocker - but ad blockers work in different ways and it’s hard to know whether you’ve accurately tracked them. Some ad blockers prevent the ad from running altogether, obtaining the ad-supported content without the provider getting paid for it. Some let the ad run, but don’t show it to you; they simply prevent the advertiser from getting the benefit of showing you the ad, while still counting as an ad view so the advertiser has to pay for it.
It’s important to understand that both of these are stealing. You are either getting something that is supposed to be paid for without anyone paying for it, or you are preventing someone else from getting something they have paid for. Instead of using an ad blocker on the site, you are supposed to not go to the site. You are supposed to not get the thing that is not getting paid for. That is how things are supposed to work.
The market forces that operate on a platform where you keep stealing shit are not forces you are going to like. The more you steal from the platform,
Basically, either the platform says “we are not being paid for enough ads” and runs more ads, or the advertiser says “we are not getting enough results from our ads” and demands lower prices — which makes the platform say the subtly different “we are not being paid enough for ads” and run more ads. Either way they run more ads. Running an ad blocker essentially redirects your ads to someone else.
The platform, after all, still needs to be paid for the service they provide. It costs money to provide it, and they need to get that money back. They also need to make some amount of profit, or they won’t be able to keep providing the service — the people who work there will have to go get real jobs, instead of providing the service.
So when you steal the service, you’re not actually depriving the provider of the service, you are simply depriving them of the money they would ordinarily receive for providing it. This isn’t theft, because you don’t get the money. But you do get something. And since the provider wasn’t paid for it, that something is stolen.
The provider will still manage to get paid, by showing more ads to other people, but making other people pay for your shit that you stole is a dick move. You are making honest people bear the cost of your dishonest consumption.
The way we resolve this, of course, is with a paywall. You put up a barrier, so instead of getting ad-supported access to the provider’s service, you have to pay for it whether you use it or not. If you think you are going to use this service within the next month, you pay a fairly small fee; if you don’t, tough shit, you pay the same fee anyway.
Of course, people tend to share accounts, but all that means is that the cost of providing service to the average account goes up. The provider just raises the cost of the account. You’re still a dick, because you are redirecting the cost of service provided for you to other people who are paying for it.
Which leads us to the problem all these lying sacks of shit pull out of their arse whenever you tell them to their face that they are stealing and it is dishonest and they should stop it because they are ruining everything.
“There are too many things that expect to be paid.”
This is not the actual problem. The problem is “I want to have more shit than I can afford to pay for.” The problem is that you are an entitled little fuckwad who stamps their feet and throws a tantrum when the store doesn’t have your favourite fruit snacks.
You do not have to subscribe to Netflix. All you have to do is say “I am not going to use the Netflix service,” and now you don’t have to. You don’t need to pay for something you don’t have. And when Netflix announces they are the only place you can watch the latest whatever, you can go “aww, man” and not fucking watch it.
I subscribe to Crunchyroll. I do not also subscribe to HiDive because I have more than enough to watch on CR. I don’t need HiDive. I sure would like to watch “Call of the Night,” but do you know what happens when I don’t?
Nothing!
Meanwhile, do you know what happens when I pirate the anime I want, or share someone else’s account, or run an ad blocker so I don’t have to see the ads? The money HiDive would have been paid for me to watch the anime just gets charged to someone else.
And that’s bullshit. If you’re not willing to pay the cost of what you want, it is morally wrong to make someone else do it instead. The moral thing to do is to not have the thing you want. It is okay to not have everything. It is good for you not to have everything.
This should not be a radical idea.