Ad blocking

[tobyaw]

Years ago, when I actually bought physical paper magazines, I remember the routine of shaking a magazine in the newsagent, before buying it, to get rid of all of the advertising inserts. Pretty sure some newsagents provided a bin for that purpose. I suppose that was primitive, physical, ad blocking.

Now I can’t come to terms with buying something that will be disposed of when I’ve finished reading it. It is mad that we create so much printed material that will meet the recycling bin.

Comments

[a-cubed.livejournal.com]

The thing I find most egregious here in Japan is the copious amounts of advertising put out by printing firms for their services and dumped in ordinary people's mailboxes. We get fewer pieces now that we have a house and an individual mail box compared to before when we were in an apartment block with a single set of post boxes all in a row for something like 80 apartments - the economics of spam come into play given that for printing firms it's entirely possible that their biggest cost is the person doing the deliveries - the marginal depreciation in equipment is probably negligible and they only run them when they're not doing paying jobs so their overheads aren't a factor, just the consumables, which they buy at bulk discount rates.
I suspect this is more of a Tokyo/metropolitan issues than a Japan issue, but never having lived anywhere else in Japan I can't cmpare directly.