The advertising industry comes with its own hidden costs. Thousands of extremely bright engineers are working every day on delivering a particular ad to a particular person. Optimizing the delivery for the last milliseconds or targeting the ad just right, if they had this or that data point.

Now imagine that advertising was solved. (I rather like the idea posted here of subscribing to an ad channel. It's not perfect, but a huge improvement) But just imagine that all the engineers currently employed by ad networks, are solving more acute problems of humankind? Cancer? Feeding the world? Harvesting solar power?