The “ads are bad” narrative became cultural dogma, repeated so long it hardened into truth. But most people grew up with ads. They see them as the background cost of access, the stream that funds participation. If anything, people are more frustrated by paywalls than prerolls.

Honestly, I barely notice ads anymore. On platforms like Instagram, they’re half the reason I linger. They mirror what I like, what I want, what I might want to buy next. On YouTube, I pay for Premium, but not to eliminate ads,  just to stream music offline. The idea that advertising ruined the internet was never a universal truth. It was a professional grievance that feels like it's now calcified into memory. For most users, ads are invisible infrastructure, a silent exchange that keeps the web creative, open and free.

For decades, designers, journalists, and VCs framed advertising as the internet’s original sin. They turned that argument into religion, with conferences, manifestos, and essays all orbiting the belief that “good” meant ad-free. The outrage was always aesthetic and philosophical, not behavioral. And while critics mourned purity, audiences chose access. Advertising, more than any subscription or micropayment system, democratized information by externalizing the cost of creation and distribution.

The numbers prove it. Nearly 80% of global digital media revenue still comes from advertising. YouTube generated $36.1 billion in 2024, enabling billions of free hours of viewing and paying creators 55 cents of every dollar. TikTok, Instagram, and a thousand other creator platforms built entire economies around ad markets, letting millions earn without charging audiences. Even Netflix, once the face of ad-free purity,  said it had its best ad sales quarter ever in 2024, projecting a doubling of ad revenue in 2025 (via MDM):

What critics call “ad fatigue” now looks more like equilibrium. Yes, it was ugly for a while,  flashing banners, pop-ups, autoplay chaos, but the system evolved. You can always block them, by the way. All the while, most subscription churns keep climbing. The real exhaustion isn’t with ads, it’s with exclusion. People don’t want to be priced out of participation.

Advertising widened the field. It allowed anyone to reach a global audience without permission or paywalls by way of massive distribution platforms. It made creation scalable. This open layer of culture, education, and entertainment runs on ad markets, not the handful of users willing to pay $10 a month for access.

The “ads are bad” belief persists because it flatters taste. It lets critics appear principled, above commerce, nostalgic for a purity that doesn’t equate with scale. But ads are the scaffolding of a free, global web. Imperfect, yes, but still the fairest system we’ve found for distributing cost, value, and opportunity. The next era of media shouldn’t erase them. It should evolve them, make them intelligent, transparent, and worthy of the attention they command. Maybe even more beautiful, too.