I've always been fascinated by marketing and the advertising industry. I don't begrudge advertising as it provides several useful benefits. For one, it can make you aware of new products. And it helps pay for things that we can receive free or very inexpensively. Newspapers, for example, for decades have survived on advertising. Classified ads were vital and the advent of the internet and services like Craigslist hurt newspaper revenue immensely.
Television programming, as well, was made available at no cost, other than your time that you were obligated to sit through a commercial. This model, of course, is being upended by streaming services which require payment to minimize or eliminate advertising.
Again, I have no problem with any of this. This is a part of the free market economy that provides goods and services.
But there are times when I think that producers of a product misuse advertising. For example, I have a particular Android app that I have been enjoying for years that has recently begun including ads. I have no problem with that, as they want to monetize their product to continue to develop it. But the way it has been implemented is in a very intrusive way, and your encouraged each time to pay for the product to get rid of the advertising.
In this case, I think they are being extremely unfair to the advertiser. After all, who wants their advertising to be considered an intrusive nuisance that is holding the user hostage but which can be eliminated if you pay the ransom demand? I wouldn't want to be one of their advertisers.
Why not rather help the advertisers by presenting them as a service ("here's something you might not be aware of that will help you!")? Of course that would require some curating of the advertisers and intentionality on the part of the app developers. Much easier to simply put some code in there and nag your users until they pay up.
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