Selling Your Soul Has Never Been Easier

My Medium friends can read this over on Medium.

In 2022, I removed the last AdSense code from my last blog. What I hated most, I wrote back then, was "selling my soul to Google AdSense for a few dollars."

A few dollars...

Four years later, nobody needs AdSense for that anymore. Videos turn into shops, "best of" lists are affiliate lists, and a lot of shows come with brand deals. Even the chatbot you ask for dinner ideas might show ads now.

Faust at least got 24 years of service from the devil for his soul. Today, the going rate is a few percent of an air fryer.

Links

Affiliate links turned 30 this summer. At least the Amazon kind. Amazon says it "pioneered the concept of Associates programs in July 1996." Others had tried it before. Amazon made it really stick, with more than 60,000 sites signed up by 1998.

Back then, a link to a book was a small favor to your readers, with a small thank-you attached.

Today, search for "best walking pad" or "best VPN" and count the results without a commission link.

I have one of those links myself, by the way. More on that later.

Videos

Influencer marketing is older than the internet too. In the 1760s, Queen Charlotte bought pottery from Josiah Wedgwood. He then talked her into letting him call it "Queen's Ware" and put the royal connection on everything he printed.

A queen as brand ambassador. Pretty smart.

Today, you don't need a queen. You need a phone and a ring light. TikTok Shop sold an estimated $64.3 billion worth of stuff in 2025, according to Momentum Works. Almost double the year before. TikTok doesn't publish its own numbers, so that's an estimate. Even if it's way off, that's a lot of air fryers.

And we were all impressed by that, I guess. I was. In 2021, I wrote about a TikToker from Brooklyn who turned Amazon links under her videos into a million.

Streaming

Radio and TV were built on this.

Fun fact: Soap operas got their name because soap makers paid for many of them. Ma Perkins started in 1933 and ran until 1960, and for most of those years it was sponsored by Oxydol, a Procter & Gamble detergent.

The first official TV commercial in the US ran in 1941, before a Brooklyn Dodgers game. Bulova paid $9 for it.

Nine dollars.

So brands in a Netflix show are nothing new. Season 3 of Stranger Things had 75 brand partners, New Coke included. Netflix said none of them paid for their spot on screen… Which is probably true. The deals were promotions around the show, and Coca-Cola brought New Coke back in cans for it.

Different paperwork, then.

Now there are ads on top. Netflix's ad tier reaches more than 250 million monthly viewers, Netflix says. In the 12 countries where it's available, it got more than 60 percent of new sign-ups in the first quarter. Ad revenue is on track to double to $3 billion this year.

Amazon went one step further. Since February 2024, Prime Video in Germany shows ads by default. Getting rid of them costs 2.99 euros a month. On top of Prime.

So you pay for a service. And then you pay again so it stops selling to you.

AI

In October 2024, Sam Altman said this at Harvard: "I will disclose, just as a personal bias, that I hate ads." Ads and AI together were "uniquely unsettling" to him.

In January, OpenAI announced ads in ChatGPT. Testing started in February. In late August, 31 European countries followed. By October, ChatGPT showed ads in 89 countries, to people on the free and Go plans. More than 100,000 advertisers have run campaigns. The ad business hit a $1 billion annual run rate in August.

Personal bias, I guess.

Next, OpenAI tests ads that run while ChatGPT generates your images. In the US, for now. Meta announced it would use people's chats with Meta AI for ad targeting from December 2025, with no opt-out. The EU, the UK, and South Korea are spared for the time being. And Google puts more ads into AI Mode, because AI answers make less money than the old search results.

I am guilty, of course

I sell guides on Gumroad. Many of my articles have affiliate links. I put sponsor lines on top of my old newsletter, and I had an "Advertise With Me" page, not long ago. And yes, the link I mentioned earlier is for a walking pad. On Amazon, of course.

A lot of it is gone now. AdSense in 2022. The ad slot isn't for sale anymore. I dropped a bunch of old affiliate partners, and some of my old templates left the shop too.

And a lot I said no to from the start.

If there's money behind a link, it gets an asterisk. Does that save my soul? Probably not.

To be fair

Writers, video makers, and newsletter people need to eat. Many of them don't eat well from it. And ads paid for a lot of the free internet we grew up with.

A product in a show doesn't hurt anyone. Well… depends on the product… but yeah.

An affiliate link on a tool somebody uses every day can be a fair deal for both sides. Those I like.

But the amount has changed. Dramatically. If everything sells, it gets hard to tell which list was made for you and which one for the commission.

And the exits cost money too. Ad-free Prime Video costs extra. Netflix without ads costs more. ChatGPT without ads means a paid plan. So the way out of the ads is another product you pay for.

The Bottom Line

In 1994, the first banner ad on the web asked: "Have you ever clicked your mouse right here? You will." About 44 percent of the people who saw it did. Genius.

AT&T was right back then. We clicked, and we never stopped.

I'll keep selling a few things. With asterisks. But man, has it become easy to sell our souls, right?

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