Here’s my tiny theory, in a word. Abuse. And further, I’m going to suggest in this short essay that abuse — not making money — is the great problem tech and media have. The problem of abuse is the greatest challenge the web faces today. It is greater than censorship, regulation, or (ugh) monetization. It is a problem of staggering magnitude and epic scale, and worse still, it is expensive: it is a problem that can’t be fixed with the cheap, simple fixes beloved by tech: patching up code, pushing out updates.

To explain, let me be clear what I mean by abuse. I don’t just mean the obvious: violent threats. I also mean the endless bickering, the predictable snark, the general atmosphere of little violences that permeate the social web…and the fact that the average person can’t do anything about it.

— Why Twitter’s Dying (And What You Can Learn From It) — Bad Words

This rings so, painfully true. I have a decent Twitter experience because I aggressively curated follow list paired with massive mute filters and blocklists. Most people aren’t going to put that much work into a service, nor will they want to. What good is a global agora where nobody listens, but everyone yells? Or throws fists?

It’s that time again. Another set of complaints about the price of apps, and the difficulty of making money in the iOS App Store. I’ll spare everyone the reasons behind the most recent kerfuffle. It doesn’t matter, since we’re likely to have this same, tired discussion in the next six to twelve months. The people and apps involved might change, but the fundamental points remain: people don’t like to pay for apps, it’s hard to make money on the App Store—let alone consistent money.

When the App Store launched seven years ago, there was a gold rush of developers staking claims on the new platform in hopes of getting rich. There was a brief, shining moment, where indie developers and established software houses had an equal chance of making a mint by selling an iPhone app. Indeed, there were a few people who became millionaires, seemingly overnight, but after a while, the only people really striking it rich were the ones selling how-to guides for building apps and optimizing placement in the App Store. And the chorus began: “Nobody pays for apps! In-App purchases suck! Nobody pays for upgrades! You can’t compete with free!” cried the developers.

In 2015, the playing field of app development is no longer flat—if it ever really was. Now it’s tilted, strongly, in favor of established companies both big and small, and large indie developers who staked their claims in the short-lived Wild West of the App Store. The days where it was theoretically possible to strike it rich by making one or two apps, and without using In-App Purchases, are over. They’ve been over for a while. It’s easier to get your app noticed, made a top pick, and get press, when you’ve had a couple other successful app launches under your belt. Nobody will deny that. For a new, independent developer, reaching the heights of the top selling and top grossing charts is difficult. Making a sustainable business out of it? That is very difficult.

But not impossible. To quote Lou Reed, “Very difficult is winning the Nobel Prize. Impossible is eating the sun.”

New indie app developers do not have to eat the sun.

On Twitter, I made an analogy comparing selling apps in the App Store to selling refrigerators. Even the best refrigerator startup is unlikely to outsell GE without a lot of time in the business. It’s accurate, but thinking about it more, the App Store model is closer to the world of music. You’re not going to go from playing in a garage from playing a stadium overnight. You gotta work your way there. And just because Taylor Swift sold 8.6 million copies of 1989 doesn’t mean that your record won’t sell enough copies to pay for the next album, one way or the other.

The music industry is tough to make it in, but I’ve never wanted for really good music to listen to, even new music, and I’ve never wanted for really good iOS apps. I may have wanted for specific apps, but there is no shortage of really good iOS software out there, put out by independent developers, at a myriad of price points. OmniFocus for iOS costs $39.99, and I use it every day. I could probably get by with the stock Reminders app, but OmniFocus is better for what I need, and the price was well worth it. I also use Cesium every day as a replacement for the stock Music app, and it might be the best $1.99 I ever spent on the App Store.

Are these apps sustainable? I don’t know. One can’t generalize on this sort of thing. The economics of app development are complex, and when faced with complex systems, we love to make generalizations to help us grasp it. I think we can agree that a developer doesn’t need to sell huge numbers of a product to be successful. Problem is, “Success” is a bothersomely relative metric, really. For one developer, “success” might be making enough money that they can go live in a private island in the Bahamas, and drink Mai Tais served by monkey butlers. For another, “success” might be showing they have the development chops to get hired by a firm that builds iOS apps for other companies.

What does a “successful app” even look like in 2015? I’m not an app developer. I can’t answer that question. It’s up to each individual developer to decide on their metric to define success, whether it’s knocking Kim Kardashian’s app off the Top Grossing list, or just making beer money. Before we start raising our hackles about developers who price their apps too high—or too low—we need to step back and see the bigger picture. A price change for one app, no matter how popular it may be among an audience of tech nerds, is no bellwether of the fortunes of developers as a whole. One person’s success is not a guarantee of another’s failure, and one new business model does not preclude the success of another.

Try to remember this when the perfect storm of app pricing comes around again next year.

“As an advertiser we were paying for eyeballs and thought that we were buying views. But in the digital world, you’re just paying for the ad to be served, and there’s no guarantee who will see it, or whether a human will see it at all.”

— The Fake Traffic Schemes That Are Rotting the Internet – Bloomberg Business

If you want more evidence that online advertising is heading for a reckoning of biblical proportions, read this. What good is a directly targeted ad when the only person that will “see” it is an AI? That is, if anyone sees it at all.

My Apple Music trial ends today, and—to the surprise of nobody who reads my work regularly—I will not be signing up as a paid customer. Why? Well, aside from the one feature of Apple Music I wanted most, iCloud Music Library, eating my library for lunch, and demanding seconds, streaming music is antithetical to the way I relate to music.

Maybe I’m just preternaturally old. I’m approaching 32 years old, after all, and for most of my life, music has been a physical thing. I owned an LP, Pac-Man Fever (don’t judge me) when I was barely old enough to know what a record was. I would listen to CDs on my parents sound system as a kid, typically movie soundtracks. Ghostbusters and Ghostbusters II were favorites, but I also had thing as a child for the Dirty Dancing soundtrack. Go figure. As a teenager, I would buy CDs, when I could, but I also embraced the world of Napster and piracy. I’m not proud of it, but so much of the music I know and love, I discovered because I downloaded it illegally.

I buy most of the music I listen to now. I prefer to buy direct from the artist, when available, typically on physical media. So far this year, I’ve bought albums from Holly Herndon, Eskimeaux, DEVO, Dweezil Zappa, Listening Center, and CHVRCHES on a variety of formats: vinyl LP, CD, and even a cassette tape. I don’t even own a cassette player! I wanted a physical artifact of the music, and cassette was the only way to get it. But even the music I buy digitally has a certain physicality to it. There is an external hard drive on my desk that holds my 200GB-plus iTunes library. I sync a portion to my iPhone. Back when I started downloading music, I would burn albums and custom mixes to audio CD, and even burned MP3 CDs to play in a pre-iPod MP3 CD Player. The music may exist as zeros and ones, but they have a physical container.

The thing about files from the iTunes Music Store, about LPs, ripped CDs, and downloaded music—legal and otherwise—is that they are mine. I can do what I choose with them, maybe not legally, but there’s no easily enforceable restrictions on what I do with the copies of the music I own, regardless of format. [1] They won’t go away (assuming I back the files up, which I do. Religiously.) Streaming is ephemeral, and that worries me. If an artist or a label decides it doesn’t like the deal Apple is playing, what’s to stop them from pulling their music? Remember Taylor Swift and Spotify? Prince pulled his music from everything but TIDAL. They won’t be the last ones. Anyone who grumbles about needing membership to a bunch of different video streaming services to watch the shows they want, yet is happy to sign up for a streaming music service, is just asking for the same pain down the line.

I would pay to keep all the music I own in a place where I could be sure I can listen from anywhere I have connectivity. This seems fair, but unless Apple raises the limit on iTunes Match (or, for that matter iCloud Music Library), and ensures that I when I listen to the live concert recording of DEVO from 1977 that I bought on CD, legally, [2] and ripped to my iTunes Library, I won’t get studio tracks instead, I’ll suffer with having to sync the files to my iPhone. The cost of ownership is a small amount of inconvenience and a huge degree of freedom. It’s worth the price. If you value music, don’t won’t stream it—buy it.

The sky is not falling, at least not yet. That seems to be the takeaway from most of the pieces, for and against, I’ve read on ad blocking in the wake of iOS 9, and the Content Blocker drizzle. [1] It’s something I’ve watch with interest as both a dedicated ad blocker, and an employee in the world of ad-supported digital publishing. As a consumer of content, I don’t want my data tracked and sold, and I don’t want ads to interrupt what I’m reading or watching. As a guy with $36,000 in student loan debt, who also needs to pay rent and eat, I want to make sure I still have a job.

There’s a balance to be struck, for sure. Advertising is a necessity in a society where people have things to sell, and other people have things they need to buy. It’s that simple. We will never live in a world that is free of advertising, and I am fine with this. What I, and so many others, are not fine with, are ads that keep us from doing whatever it is we set out to do, and ads that follow us around on our travels across the web. In my digital publishing role, I get to see some incredibly detailed information about the audience for target advertisements.

I’m forced to be vague here, and this level of details is partially a function of pulling publicly available data sources for the information on a class of professionals, and paying handsomely for the privilege. With all the information everyone is feeding to social networks, which also work as ad networks, data brokers, and track us across the web, it’s not a leap to assume some office drone is able to pore through my personal information collected for the purposes of ad tracking, as well. Ad and tracker blocking software is the only tool most of us have to change that balance. It’s possible to opt-out of a lot of social and ad tracking and data collection, but it’s a huge pain to do so.

For this reason, among others, I am not willing to join ranks with publishers who rage and bluster against ad blocking as if the users were amoral thieves. If anything, it’s the ad networks who collect our data who are the thieves, because we never explicitly consented to giving them our data in the first place. We put our information out there into the aether, and they suck it down and spit it back in our faces with badly targeted ads that follow us wherever we click to next. But that targeting is getting better by the day.

This is pure avarice on the side of the advertisers—their dream of a day of one-to-one targeted ads that offer us exactly what we want, exactly when we want it requires massive data collection, to make happen. The idea of an advertiser knowing exactly what I want and showing it to me gives me the willies. It should give you the willies too for the reasons I outlined above: if the advertiser, their network, or their algorithm has that much data, who else does? What protections exist? Why should we trust advertisers to use our data ethically?

The answers: everyone with database access—authorized and otherwise, none, and we shouldn’t.

Yet, not all advertisers behave this way. The Deck, which advertises on a number of sites run by people I respect and admire, released a privacy statement explaining their disinterest in tracking users. I’m happy, when I visit a site with Deck ads, to whitelist them in my ad blocker. Their ads respect me, and in turn, I will respect them back. This is a fair exchange. The Deck only knows that someone saw the ad, and that’s all the information I think it is fair to give to an advertiser, or the network it runs on. I also think it’s fair for a website owner to know that I visited their site, and even what platform and browser I used to do so. Anything beyond that is too far.

I’m also not a fan of the idea of Facebook, Google, Snapchat, or even Apple being the primary distribution points for content. It gives too much power to companies that have too much control over what we see and do already. Independence is essential for good journalism, for free expression, and I’ll remain suspicious of anything that risks violating that. This suspicion even extends towards Native Advertising, the practice of advertisers sponsoring and even providing, content for websites—though I’m more open to it than Ben Brooks. [2] The acceptability of Native Advertising is based on our trust of the publisher to choose sponsors in an ethical way, but all too often money will trump ethics any day of the week, especially for larger publishers.

At least we’re talking about solutions. I might be willing to drop my ad blocker and my tracking script blocker if, say, Maciej Cegłowski’s “Six Fixes” were implemented across the web. Ad blockers that make judgment calls about what ad networks and advertisers are behaving ethically, such as Dean Murphy’s Crystal app are another option. As networks and sites learn to behave and treat audiences with respect, it can be easier to whitelist them.

I don’t know how this will shake out, though research suggests that it certainly won’t be the bloodbath that online publisher’s assume it to be. There will be shifts, and there will be pain for any number of online publishers. If you get any emails from a publisher, expect to see more ads there—iOS Content Blockers don’t work in the Mail app. Expect more “Native Advertising,” and expect companies pushing you disable your ad blocker, or pull other tricks. Once it all shakes out, it’ll be something like the war on pop-up ads, and, for a while, the pendulum will shift to a calmer, quieter web with more respectful ads that we won’t mind seeing. Wouldn’t that be nice?

Note: An earlier version of this piece linked to an interview with Dean Murphy. The interview is good, but the interviewer was operating under false pretenses, and for the sake of the tech blogging community at large, I have removed the link.