No, the downside is constantly being monitored. It doesn't matter whether there's actual real-life consequences. It makes me feel watched and change my behaviour. If someone follows you on the street and writes everything you do and look at down, you would mind too even if he doesn't do anything with that info.
And whether I'm "paying into the system" by buying stuff I didn't need, that's a really shady and wasteful business model we shouldn't encourage in these times of environmental disaster.
You have to account for the massive amount of money google and the rest of the advertising industry makes. It's NOT companies lighting money on fire irrationally, and it does have to be paid for.
So it feels free because we all pay for it already. There's no agency. Adding micropayments or ad-free premium services aren't alternatives, they are an additional cost.
Sometimes I think the ad market is just an emperors new clothes situation. Where really it doesn’t move the needle much but the implication it does is profitable and then both sides of the deal are incentivized in their own way to upkeep the Big Lie. The ad companies make their money collecting money from ad spend. The people in charge of ad spend justify their jobs by spending money in ads and showing comparable rates of ad spend among their competing companies in their industry. The investors prefer to see a company spending on ads like other comparable companies in the sector such as to not devalue its stock price.
But does it work? Ask anyone if ads work on them they say no. You have to get a psychologist to do some unreproducible study to prove that it works at all. And given the perverse incentives above, it just doesn’t matter if it works. The beast exists and that justifies itself.
My girlfriend works in the beauty industry on the product side. Even more important that having a good product, is having a good marketing campaign. Products live and die by their advertising. And believe it or not, lots of people click on ads.
Step back and evaluate the situation considering your thoughts on the whole population, people in general, not looking at it from your perspective with people you associate with.
Many people, even having viewed ads, never really paid anything into the system. They just ignore the ads regardless of how perfectly tailored they are. Maybe we can say something about sub conscious influence or the like, but on the surface the internet is just a huge free playground for them.
Or perhaps they bought products from ads, but it was just stuff they were looking to buy anyway. So they effectively get "free internet" just for buying a school laptop or power tool set.
The downside to the ad model is all the privacy invasion, but being real for a second, the privacy invasion so far is scary because of hypothetical threats, not realized ones.
For the vast majority of people who are tracked to hell and back, their is zero perceptible impact on their day to day life, while they get a bunch of free stuff for it.
This is why the ad model will be near impossible to kill.