Advertising can make apps free. It can introduce us to useful products. It can help businesses survive. But when an app interrupts you for the tenth time today, there is another question worth asking: how much did that advertisement actually contribute to your life?

At MYK, this question influences the kind of applications we want to build.

We are not trying to prove that every advertisement is bad.

We are asking something more fundamental:

What should technology take from a person in exchange for being useful?

Your money?

Your data?

Your attention?

Your time?

Your ability to make decisions without being constantly influenced?

Our answer is simple:

As little as reasonably possible.

And that is why we are choosing a different way to build apps.

Ads are not free

We often describe an app as "free" when it doesn't require money.

But money is only one thing a person can give.

Imagine opening a simple application because you want to complete a task.

You spend five seconds doing what you came to do.

Then an advertisement appears.

Perhaps you wait five more seconds.

Perhaps you have to find the tiny × button.

Perhaps you accidentally touch the advertisement.

Perhaps another screen opens.

Perhaps the next time you use the application, another advertisement appears.

You haven't paid the developer with money.

But something was exchanged.

You paid with attention.

And attention is a strange currency because, unlike money, you cannot earn yesterday's attention back.

So, how much does an ad contribute to your life?

Sometimes, the honest answer is:

something.

Advertising is not inherently useless.

An advertisement may introduce you to a restaurant you enjoy, software that solves a real problem, a book you eventually love, or a service you genuinely needed.

Advertising also finances enormous amounts of content and software that people can access without paying directly. The OECD, for example, has recognized both sides of this model: online advertising can help consumers discover relevant products and helps finance many services offered without a direct monetary price, while also creating important consumer-protection and privacy concerns. OECD

That distinction matters.

We don't believe ethical technology requires pretending that advertising has zero value.

The more interesting question is:

Does the value you receive justify what is being taken from you?

That calculation is rarely presented to the user.

The developer sees an impression. You experience an interruption.

Consider the same advertisement from two perspectives.

For an advertising system, you may represent:

These concepts are useful. Businesses need measurements.

But there is another way to describe the same event.

You were doing something.

Then something else requested your attention.

That difference is central to how we think about software.

Behind every impression is a person.

Behind every session is a portion of someone's day.

Behind every conversion is somebody spending actual money.

Behind every retention metric is somebody returning and giving the product another piece of their time.

Metrics are abstractions. Human experience is not.

The problem is not advertising. The problem is incentives.

Suppose we build a simple application.

Our goal could be:

Help the user accomplish something as quickly and pleasantly as possible.

Now imagine our primary source of income is advertising.

Our business begins benefiting from additional advertising opportunities.

More sessions can mean more advertisements.

Longer sessions can mean more advertisements.

More screens can mean more advertising inventory.

More frequent returns can mean more advertisements.

That creates a potential conflict between two objectives.

The user's objective

Help me accomplish what I came here to accomplish.

The advertising model's objective

Create opportunities to monetize my presence.

Those objectives can coexist.

But they aren't automatically aligned.

And that distinction is important.

Economic research does not suggest that every advertisement necessarily makes users worse off. A long-running Facebook experiment involving more than 53,000 participants found no statistically significant difference in the measured welfare value users received from Facebook between groups exposed to ads and groups that had not been exposed to them. The researchers suggested that annoyance from advertising may be relatively modest or may sometimes be offset by useful product discovery. The study also disclosed that several authors were Meta employees or had financial connections to Meta, which is relevant context when interpreting the work. National Bureau of Economic Research

So the intellectually serious position cannot be:

Advertising always harms everyone.

It doesn't.

Our position is different:

We don't want our business to become more successful simply because we captured more of your attention.

That's a choice about incentives.

Your attention has value precisely because companies compete for it

Advertising would not be a major industry if human attention had no economic value.

Businesses spend money to get in front of you because changing what you notice can influence what you remember, consider, click and eventually buy.

Research has even found that digital advertising can affect brand consideration and choice under relatively low levels of conscious attention. European Journal of Marketing

That doesn't mean advertisements control us.

People aren't robots.

Seeing an advertisement doesn't eliminate free will.

But advertising would have little commercial purpose if it never influenced behaviour.

That is the bargain.

The advertiser pays because your attention has potential economic value.

Which leads to an interesting question:

If your attention has financial value to everyone else, shouldn't it have value to you too?

Five seconds is still part of your life

Five seconds sounds insignificant.

Often, it is.

But technology operates through repetition.

Five seconds here.

Eight seconds there.

Another notification.

Another promotion.

Another sponsored result.

Another video you didn't ask to watch.

Another popup.

Another button intentionally positioned to make the commercial option easier than the non-commercial one.

No individual interaction has to be catastrophic.

The concern is cumulative.

Your day is simply thousands of small pieces of attention.

And each piece can only be spent once.

This is why we think good software should be comfortable saying:

You finished. You can leave now.

A good utility should not be disappointed when you stop using it

Imagine a calculator that became worried because you only spent 14 seconds using it.

Imagine your flashlight trying to increase weekly engagement.

Imagine your ruler sending a notification:

We haven't measured anything together today!

It sounds absurd.

Yet digital products are sometimes evaluated using exactly these kinds of engagement assumptions.

More time.

More sessions.

Higher retention.

More interaction.

Those metrics can be valuable. Sometimes they genuinely indicate that people love a product.

But they should not automatically be treated as synonymous with user benefit.

For many utility applications, the ideal interaction may be extremely short.

Open.

Solve the problem.

Close.

That can be excellent product design.

What happens when software starts optimizing for your behaviour?

Advertising is only part of a larger issue.

Once products become heavily optimized around engagement and conversion, interfaces themselves can become tools for influencing behaviour.

Regulators even have a term for some of the more problematic techniques:

dark patterns.

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission describes dark patterns as interface techniques that can obscure, subvert or impair people's choices. Examples identified by the FTC include disguised advertising, misleading countdown timers, hidden charges, difficult cancellation processes and interfaces that steer people toward sharing more personal information. Federal Trade Commission

In an international review announced in 2024, consumer-protection authorities examined 642 websites and apps offering subscriptions. Nearly 76% displayed at least one potential dark pattern, while almost 67% displayed multiple potential dark patterns. The review did not determine that every identified practice was illegal, but the prevalence itself is worth considering. Federal Trade Commission

This isn't an argument against good marketing.

A company should be allowed to explain why its product is useful.

It should be allowed to persuade.

It should be allowed to charge money.

Our line is different:

Persuasion should not become manipulation.

Respecting intelligence means allowing someone to say no

We think respectful software should be comfortable with several answers:

Yes.

No.

Not now.

I don't need this.

I don't want premium.

I don't want notifications.

I don't want an account.

I want to leave.

A company shouldn't have to punish the wrong answer.

That's what respecting intelligence means to us.

The user doesn't need to be tricked into understanding what is supposedly best for them.

Explain the value.

Explain the price.

Make the choice clear.

Then respect the answer.

Advertising also changes the product itself

One of the less obvious consequences of advertising is architectural.

Adding advertisements to an application isn't simply putting a rectangle somewhere on the screen.

Advertising can introduce:

Research comparing apps with and without advertising has found measurable performance costs, with users particularly sensitive to battery-related costs. Information and Software Technology

Another large-scale study examined more than 36,000 ad-related app-store reviews. Among the issues researchers identified, users were particularly concerned about advertising frequency and the number of distinct advertisements they encountered. Information and Software Technology

So advertising isn't merely a financial decision.

It can become a product-design decision, privacy decision, engineering decision and UX decision simultaneously.

What about privacy?

Privacy deserves its own distinction.

Advertising does not automatically require invasive tracking.

Contextual advertising can exist without constructing detailed behavioural profiles.

Privacy-preserving advertising technologies can also reduce data collection.

Our concern is therefore not:

Advertising always equals surveillance.

That would be inaccurate.

Our principle is simpler:

If an application doesn't need information about you, we would rather not collect it.

Not collecting information is fundamentally different from collecting enormous quantities of information and promising to protect it perfectly.

The safest unnecessary database is often the database that never existed.

The safest unnecessary personal identifier may be the one the application never requested.

Privacy by design sometimes means sophisticated encryption.

But sometimes privacy by design is wonderfully boring:

We never needed that information in the first place.

What if advertising helps someone discover something useful?

Then it contributed something.

And that should be acknowledged.

Perhaps an advertisement introduces someone to a small business they would otherwise never discover.

Perhaps a developer finances a genuinely valuable free product using modest contextual advertising.

Perhaps someone cannot afford premium software and advertisements provide access that would otherwise be impossible.

These are legitimate benefits.

We aren't trying to turn a business-model preference into a universal moral law.

We are making a narrower commitment about our own products.

At MYK, we don't want to fund simple applications by selling access to the user's attention.

There are other ways to build.

Free should mean free

There's a strange phrase we have become accustomed to:

“Free with ads.”

Economically, it makes sense.

Philosophically, though, it exposes something important.

The product isn't necessarily free.

The currency simply changed.

Instead of paying €2, perhaps you paid with:

attention,

behavioural information,

screen space,

interruptions,

or exposure to commercial persuasion.

Sometimes that exchange is completely reasonable.

But we want the word free to mean something simpler in our products.

Free means free.

If we create a basic free application, our goal is for you to use it without advertisements.

No advertising countdown.

No rewarded video required to unlock the feature you came for.

No banner competing with the interface.

No artificial frustration intended to push you somewhere else.

Just the application.

And premium should mean something too

Developers have to eat.

Designers need to be paid.

Software takes time to build.

Applications require maintenance.

Companies that cannot generate revenue eventually disappear.

Ethical software cannot mean pretending economics doesn't exist.

So our philosophy is not:

Everything should cost nothing.

It is:

The exchange should be understandable and proportionate.

When an application has premium features and does not impose meaningful ongoing costs on us, we prefer something remarkably old-fashioned:

You pay.

We give you the product.

You keep it.

Premium means pay once.

Not because subscriptions are inherently unethical.

Some products have genuine recurring costs.

Cloud storage costs money every month.

Servers cost money.

AI inference costs money.

Streaming content costs money.

Synchronization infrastructure costs money.

Customer service costs money.

A recurring service can reasonably have a recurring price.

But we don't believe every calculator, utility, timer, decision tool or simple offline application automatically needs to become a permanent monthly relationship.

Recurring costs may justify recurring prices.

Recurring revenue alone does not.

We want to build tools, not dependencies

This might be the simplest description of what we're trying to do.

A good tool extends your abilities.

It doesn't need to become part of your identity.

It doesn't need you thinking about it constantly.

It doesn't need to remind you every afternoon that it exists.

Sometimes the greatest compliment you can give software is:

I used it, it worked, and then I forgot about it.

We like that.

Could an ethical app still make money?

Of course.

Ethics and profitability are not opposites.

Someone can create something genuinely useful and ask to be compensated for creating it.

The question is how.

Our preferred model is straightforward:

If something simple can be free, make it genuinely free.

If additional functionality is worth paying for, state the price clearly.

If there are no significant ongoing costs, prefer a one-time purchase.

If recurring costs genuinely exist, explain them honestly.

Collect as little personal information as practical.

Don't manufacture addiction simply because engagement graphs look better when people cannot put the product down.

And don't deliberately make the free experience miserable to force an upgrade.

Perhaps this model produces less revenue than certain alternatives.

That's possible.

We're willing to accept that possibility.

Maximizing revenue and building something we are proud of are not necessarily the same objective.

The real question: what did the technology add?

When evaluating software, we have become accustomed to asking:

How many features?

How many downloads?

How many users?

How much engagement?

How much revenue?

How advanced is the technology?

Perhaps we should occasionally ask another question:

What did this add to someone's life?

Did it save time?

Did it remove frustration?

Did it help someone create something?

Did it solve a problem?

Did it make someone smile?

Did it improve a decision?

Did it make something complicated simpler?

Did it teach something?

Did it give someone more control?

Those are difficult things to put on a growth dashboard.

But they matter.

Every product leaves a small taste behind

We spend enormous portions of our lives interacting with things other people have designed.

Doors.

Cars.

Websites.

Forms.

Phones.

Government services.

Restaurants.

Applications.

Some interactions leave irritation behind.

Others almost disappear because they simply work.

And occasionally, something leaves the small feeling:

Someone actually thought about me when they made this.

That's the feeling we would like our software to leave behind.

We're not claiming we will always succeed.

We're not claiming every decision we make will be perfect.

We're not declaring ourselves more ethical than everyone else.

We're simply choosing principles we want to be held accountable to.

What we are trying to build

At MYK, we want to make applications that respect four things.

Your attention

We don't want revenue to depend on interrupting you more often.

Your privacy

We prefer collecting less rather than collecting everything and promising to protect it.

Your intelligence

We want choices to be understandable, without dark patterns or deliberate confusion.

Your money

Free should actually mean free, and when practical, premium should mean one straightforward payment rather than another permanent subscription.

These aren't revolutionary technologies.

They're constraints.

And sometimes good design begins with deciding what not to build.

So, how much will an ad contribute to your life?

Maybe a lot.

Maybe it will introduce you to exactly what you were looking for.

Maybe it will help fund something you couldn't otherwise use.

And sometimes:

almost nothing.

Perhaps it simply interrupted something you actually wanted to do.

That is the distinction we want to keep asking ourselves whenever we build something.

Not:

How much additional attention can we capture?

But:

How much value can we return for the attention someone trusted us with?

Because a person's attention is not an infinite resource.

A minute of someone's life should not be treated as worthless simply because no money changed hands.

Technology should take as little from people as necessary to give them something useful in return.

That's the kind of software we are trying to make.

Not perfect software.

Not morally superior software.

Just software we would be comfortable recommending to our families, using ourselves, and putting our name on.

Useful over addictive.

Private over extractive.

Clear over manipulative.

Ownership over unnecessary renting.

People over engagement.

That is what we're trying to build.

— MYK

Made for people, not engagement.

Sources