By now most of the people I know have more or less given up on Facebook. Sure, it’s still pretty good for finding a couch to crash on when your car breaks down somewhere in eastern Oregon, and I appreciate that it’s been the death knell for the 10 year high school reunion, but most millennials are shifting to other social media platforms to keep in touch day to day. The trend is increasing, too; Facebook saw a dramatic drop in teen use in 2014.

There are probably a lot of reasons for the exodus. Certainly, the baby boomer generation has embraced Facebook and made it less cool, in much the same way that no one born after 1982 can listen to the Eagles with a straight face.

To some extent, Facebook has faded in relevance because we’ve realized that we actually don’t care what the weird kid who ate whole tubes of Chapstick on the bus in 2nd grade is up to right this moment. But ultimately, the move away from Facebook (in favor of other social media platforms that are owned by Facebook) indicates discontent with the platform itself. Primarily, that the user experience feels a lot like that scene in Minority Report:

Overzealous advertising is the most annoying thing on the internet. We all hate sitting through Geico commercials before we can watch cute animal videos on YouTube, and banner ads always mess with the way pages load on my phone. The specificity of Facebook and Google’s advertising algorithms (and their collaboration with our fair NSA) is just creepy. It’s no wonder that there’s a litany of options for avoiding advertising. Free ad blocking software is available for every browser, and skipping the commercials is one of the biggest reasons for streaming TV shows illegally.

Advertising is at a fever pitch. It’s a quarter trillion dollar a year industry, which, for reference, is about as much as is spent annually by the US Military Industrial Complex. It’s a huge amount of money, and the passion and energy behind it led Gore Vidal to describe advertising as “the only art form [America] created.”

But it’s worth looking to the next most widely consumed medium of art: Journalism. Rigorous journalism is at once creative expression and public service, and it sets trends in the public mood as much as it follows them. A free and vibrant press is protected by the first amendment, but our congress doesn’t have a line item for it. Advertising has kept the lights on for hundreds of years.

A cynic might suggest that funding journalism is a tricky proposition. No entity should be excluded from oversight by the public eye, yet private funding yields a tabloid and government funding just creates a state-run newspaper that might be hesitant to look critically at the hand that feeds it. Ultimately, honest journalism serves the public, and the public is responsible for seeing it succeed. We can do this by spending $10 for every newspaper, or by turning to the free market.

In order to keep the presses running revenue comes in two forms: directly from consumers in the way of subscriptions or retail purchases, and through selling advertising. Advertisers buy exposure a certain numbers of eyeballs with the calculation that some percentage of those eyeballs will convert to sales of their product at some point down the road. It’s a sliding scale of revenue, but in the end one of four things will happen: 

1. Cover prices and subscriptions will fund the newspaper (Netflix)
2. A combination of paper sales and ad sales will fund the newspaper (NY Times)
3. Ad sales will fund the newspaper exclusively (Fox/CNN)
4. The journalists will starve to death (VICE/Huffington Post)

We’ve used journalism here as an example because it has one of the most established funding sources of revenue, but the rule stands for all forms of art. If you value something you need to expect to pay for it, whether outright or by way of prospecting ad salesmen. 

The important distinction is that real journalism benefits from an inflexible code of ethical standards to ensure that the business and the editorial interests remain separate. As the public grows more and more weary of the constant barrage of commercials and avoids exposure by streaming TV or DVRing the game, it drives the ad industry to be more compelling.

In the past decade we’ve seen the news industry fragment. Competition for audience and our reluctance to embrace traditional advertising has filled headlines with click bait and birthed “native advertising,” which disguises advertising as news and dangerously blurs the vaunted line between the newsroom and the publisher.

The free exchange of information allowed by the internet has triggered a second industrial revolution, and led to the rapid inflation in the currency of creative property. There is a tremendous amount of content and information out there. Most of it is trash, generated basically for free and only to funnel you toward an ad.

Curious about whether or not we’re about to invade Syria, but already spent your 10 monthly Times articles on articles about dessert? Locked out of a Ta-Nehisi Coates essay because you’re not a New Yorker subscriber? Just scroll down a few Google results and I’ll bet you find it for free. I just hope he hasn’t taken a job in marketing yet.