If you ask people if they like advertising, chances are you’ll hear a lot more “no” than “yes”. But advertising provides more value than people give it credit for. If you watch a show on Hulu or “old-fashioned” tv, advertising makes it possible for you to do that for free. Advertising lets you read your favorite blogs for free and use Google for all your searches for free. If you’ve clicked on a sponsored link, you know that advertising not only lets you do the search for free, but helped you find what you were looking for. On the internet, people often characterize ads as an annoyance they would rather not deal with, rather than give credit to them for keeping most of our favorite services free to use.

In his recent review on Evernote, Walt Mossberg wrote:

“There are a few minor downsides to Evernote. While there’s no overall limit to the amount of data you can store, you can only upload 40 megabytes a month with the free version, attach certain types of files to notes, and you are forced to view ads.”

I’d argue that this is the upside to Evernote! Read more »