It’s Time for a Digital Advertising Tax

Companies are using social media, websites, and digital TV to serve us all a massive amount of ads. Whether it’s an ad in a Google search result, a sponsored “Story” on Instagram, an ad served via your cable box, or a Hulu TV ad, we are being served digital ads constantly and no one appears to be paying taxes on them.

• Companies should have to pay for the privilege to serve us ads.
• Ads should not be served to children
• Ads should be clearly labeled.

Digital Advertising revenue is anticipated to be $129b in 2019 according to emarketer.

I propose we tax both total ‘ad impressions’ this is the number of people ads are served to – this would be paid for by companies that choose to run ads, and to have a direct tax on ad revenue.

The beauty of taxing advertisers on total impressions is that it encourages the people buying ads to serve better ads and to demand that the big ad networks like Google and Facebook only serve ads to relevant audiences rather than doing mass campaigns.

A digital advertising tax could be paired nicely with a right to the ownership of our data, similar to what US presidential candidate Andrew Yang is proposing as part of his 2020 campaign bid.

A digital advertising tax will bring in revenue to our coffers and also encourage advertisers to get even smarter with their ads both in targeting and quality.

Please let me know what you think of this ad tax in the comments or on Twitter.

If you enjoyed this article, please subscribe below, and share it with friends.