#don't make waves; spread the impact out; set up shell companies to obfuscate

[awkward-teabag]

It's old but here's a video from 8 years ago about one factor of it.

Some numbers from it:

The internet used 2% of the world's electricity in 2011

The internet used 91 billion kilowatt-hours in 2013 just in the US.

The internet data transfer rate was 28,000 gigabytes a second in 2013.

And those are numbers from over 10 years ago. I couldn't find any exact number but I see online advertising specifically uses the same amount of electricity as a small country these days.

And here's a study from 2018 about it if you want something long and crunchy.

From the highlight:

Online advertising consumed between 20.38 to 282.75 TWh of energy and 11.53 – 159.93 million tons of CO2e was emitted to produce the electricity consumed.

Of course there's no exact number as it's not recorded and, if it is, it's guarded (hence the wide range) but it's safe to say it uses a lot of electricity.

At least with TV commercials, they gave actors, directors, and screen writers a way into the film and TV industry and also employed a crew. There were even dedicated crews/houses for specific types of ads. They also had to be interesting or entertaining enough to draw attention given how many people used commercial breaks as bathroom/snack breaks and stopped paying attention to ads.

Sure they were trying to sell you something but at least there were others who were getting a paycheque and building up a resume from them. The more successful or viral an ad went (and going viral before the internet was a big thing), the better it was for the cast and crew and more than a few celebs got their start from a commercial or three.

Not so much now, especially when the whole ad is just CGI. They aren't interesting or entertaining and the production value is low to keep the costs down on that end. If an ad is more than lukewarm, odds are it was designed for TV first because internet advertising is all about quantity over quality.

honestly advertising is so fukcing wasteful not even just in the convincing you to buy shit you never actually wanted but like

how much electricity is wasted displaying ads that could've gone to keeping houses warm. How much paper is produced just to be turned into pamphlets and ads that will just be thrown away. how much internet bandwith is wasted just on the amount of ads that are on the internet nowadays. How many hours worth of labor went into producing ads that are going directly into my adblocker or my waste bin that could've been time spent doing literally ANYTHING useful?