Let us remember how the press evolved. First were printed broadsheets, pamphlets, letters, screeds, books, etc. All were funded by charging for purchase. That is, one bought the paper or pamphlet, and read it.

Certainly the popular papers were discovered as venues for advertising, but even now the main purpose of a newspaper, I would argue, is to deliver news and for people to buy it to read that news. The ads are a second source of income, but are growing to dominate the bottom line. And now that papers are available free on the web ads are essential.

Radio was discovered by ad agencies, most famously by Benton and Bowles, who ran the Pepsodent ads. There were sponsors already, as in "This program is brought to you by...", but Pepsodent was a scripted and recorded ad, "You'll wonder where the yellow went..."

Still, radio was fairly low-cost and could have a product that was its own animal. Then there was TV.

The higher costs of TV production required ad revenue immediately. It therefore was from its inception a vehicle for delivering an audience for advertisers. This affects the product at the deepest level. Unlike a book or movie, which earn money through direct sales, TV has to tailor the product to deliver the desired type of audience.

Thus we had, until cable, the familiar rhythm of segments being interrupted by ads. Shows had to fit in the narrow timing slots, and match the demographic values desired. The programming is denied its own identity, since it would not be found elsewhere. (Changes came with recording, and one could watch later, skipping ads, but that is a bother and one likes to be up-tp-date, so there was still plenty of revenue.)

But the money advertisers are willing to spend corrupts everything. We have ads on buses and baseball fields. We have ads in movies before the previews (which are also ads, from inside the industry). We have ads on public television. It is espeically galling to pay a subscription service, like cable, and see ads anyway.

And we have ads on the web. Blogs and other web sites that become popular attract advertisers. It is apparently impossible for anyone to resist the income from ads. When a wonky idea like a search engine (AltaVista, ect.) becomes the behemoth of Google, when a goofy fun site like YouTube is a huge phenomenon, when what everyone wants is a high Google ranking and lots of traffic, content becomes compromised.

How about this: the ripoff artists of Scientology are paying this site, indirectly. The despicable Ann Coulter is paying  money to Josh et al (indirectly). Certainly the news here is so far independent. But how will the site resist the blandishment of more income, as it grows?

A few years ago I wrote to the NY Times and suggested I would gladly pay a subscription to read it. I never minded the modest cost of having a newspaper delivered; I just hated having to get rid of all that paper. They did institute a subscription, but only for a few more popular writers. And many people felt this was somehow immoral, just wrong in some way.

But they dropped it, and the tradeoff is ads that choke my computer, clog the bandwidth, clutter my visual space with cheezy animations, and generally piss me off. A major issue for TPM Cafe, I think, was the incompatibility of Dupal software and GoogleAds or other adservers. They don't deliver static image files that TPM posts, instead, it seems a link brings up whatever is the current paid-up ad. So when a page loads, it also has to get ads from some other server somewhere.

I'm an outlier, statistically, in that I don't watch TV, cable or otherwise. But the web is now TV, in most ways. And it's not free; one has to subscribe for access in most areas. We pay twice. And of course I'm hoping for multiple comments on this blog, but the beneficiaries are the advertisers and TPM.  Fortunately, at least a couple advertisers (RW wackos, etc.) are being utterly defrauded if their adservers are paying for placement here.