Thanks for all of the great points you brought up here. I do also love that Steemit is ad-free for now. As for the future, well, who knows?
I do feel like the biggest problem with advertising online is that ad agencies don't ask for the right to shove stuff into our faces. They assume that right. It's like because we're online, they expect we'll happily accept anything they want to throw onto our screens, which is why more people are buying ad and pop-up blockers now than ever.
I think if any platform needs to incorporate ads, it could do so ethically as long as they ask people first. People should be able to choose whether they want to see ads or not and also WHO they want to see ads from. They should be able to choose WHERE and WHEN those ads appear.
If a website needs to display ads for funding, then give the users an option to make a donation in order to turn off all the ads on their end!
Just thinking out loud here. 😎 Which is what I do when I'm not working on writing the comedy series on my blog...
Resteemed, followed and upvoted!
Perhaps opt-in advertising.
If you want to watch an ad, they have to give you some STEEM for it.
Provide incentive to you to watch it and compensate you for the intrusion.
I actually really like that model. Anytime I download a free game I understand that there will probably be ads. The developers put a lot of work in to the game and they should be compensated for their work. However, games that provide an incentive to watch the advertisement are doing it the right way in my opinion. I would love to see some statistics on advertising revenue of systems that give an incentive to users to watch ads vs. systems that force ads on their users.
The problem is though that then people will try to game the system and you will get 'professional' ad watchers, which isn't very good from the advertisers perspective.