We absolutely should not. Advertising is almost pure rent-seeking; it's a horribly inefficient solution for the actual utility component it provides society.
I think this is one of those situations where an inferior mechanism has won (at least in this phase of history) because it disproportionately benefits power holders and platform operators.
Advertising is sanctioned manipulation and lying. It matches customers to products, but does so by focusing on lies, mind tricks and human hacks rather than desired customer outcome. It's broken at its core as a concept.
> Advertising is almost pure rent-seeking; it's a horribly inefficient solution for the actual utility component it provides society.
disagree. as much as it pains me to admit it, I do actually think advertising benefits society. imo it's kind of like democracy in that it's the least shitty system we've devised so far.
there's a lot about it that seems suboptimal, but what alternatives do we have? people can't be seriously expected to read third-party reviews for every single product they buy; it simply takes too much time. plus, depending on the product, there may not be any reputable reviewers, or the reviewers could be getting paid behind the scenes anyway.
ultimately it's a lot better to walk into the store at least knowing what the different brands are supposed to mean. if I go to whole foods, I can be pretty confident that the food will be better than what I can get at walmart. if I want the cheapest food, I can expect to find it at walmart. when a choice between products is of low-moderate importance, advertising/branding saves us a lot of research.
It would be nice if they just went back to before the whole "sell people a fantasy of what their life would be like with the product" but don't focus on the product at all.
I don't need an ad to know if my life will improve after buying something. Just tell me what the thing is and if its a good price and I want it I'll buy it. Leave the subliminal stuff out.
Buying and selling stuff we don’t need is not good for the economy.
Is that true? It seems that the entire economy is based on people buying stuff they don't need.
Does anyone really "need" a 60 inch 4K HDTV? The average car costs $33K -- do people really need a $33K car, or could they get by on a $12K economy car? Do people need a 2500 sq ft luxury house, or could they get by on a 600 sq ft spartanly furnished shack?
If you ignore food, housing, healthcare, transportation, energy and the government & security sector, sure. But then you're ignoring most of the economy.
The majority of money spend on ads ends up with content creators, who, in turn, use it to produce the information their visitors value. It is therefore not "rent seeking" under any definition of the term.
Any cost required to be paid to a third party to conduct a transaction between two parties is "rent". Any entity attempting to establish or increase such a cost is "rent-seeking". Ad agencies try to encourage companies to buy more advertising. If they are successful, then other competitors will be forced to buy more advertising to maintain their existing customers. Whatever it cost before to have 5% of the market, it now costs more to maintain the same 5%. The additional advertising expenditure required because of the ad agency's actions is very much rent that was being seeked. The fact that the rent may not be paid to the same ad agency, or that ad agencies have costs themselves (such as content creators), does not change the nature of their actions.
Personally, I would like to live in a world where advertising was limited to industry/geographic-specific publications published by the government. A generic list of products, randomized once a day. Listings have a fixed fee and identical formats. Each listing has a description of the product, its price, and one or two photos. You can show people using the product but no faces. No other products/aspirational imagery/language unless it is required to demonstrate the use of the product. Plus curated confirmed reviews.
Or just a law that said that ad-supported business models were illegal. You can sell a product or a service but that's it. No "give it away for free and sell ads".
> geographic-specific publications published by the government
Sounds like product advertising under totalitarian regimes. It goes like: "Register to purchase the national car!” as if you had a choice. Sometimes the choice was between two equally crappy national products.
I don't have a solution to fix advertising, but government published ads are only going to fuel corruption. Maybe regulation of advertising would work, such as the EU's GDPR, maybe not. Government regulation is too slow to react to market challenges and there's always an agenda behind it.
I don't think the government would need (or even want) to limit the number of advertisers for a given product. Its more like the registry that contractors sign up to when they want government contracts. Here's me and here's what I can do.
Having the government control it would at least remove the profit motive behind the advertising service itself. A non-profit could potentially play the same role if having a government do so caused problems.
> The majority of money spend on ads ends up with content creators
Do you happen to have good data on this? I've been wondering how much ends up with various middlemen (including Google) and how much ends up with content creators.
Cross-checking the advertising number is harder; I see numbers around $70b for 2016 from the IAB, but maybe those are US-only.
In any case, just the revenue for Facebook and Google is already 60% of the total ad spend if the numbers above are right. And that assumes there are no other middlemen. So I don't see how the content creators can be ending up with anything like a "majority" of the ad spend.
It's harder to say with forms of advertising like referral links, since many of those are negotiated directly between the website and someone like Amazon, but others go through middlemen that probably take 20-30%, as Google does for AdSense.
(source: I run ads, and have referral links, on the Pi Searcher for fun, and to pay the hosting bills. And some coffee money. I get paid by Google part-time, but this is based upon my experience as an ad hoster, nothing else.)
But remember that a lot of advertising out there is search advertising (google, bing, baidu, etc.). In which case, Google/Bing/etc. are the content creators -- their content is a search engine -- and they monetize it by advertising.
It's not. Advertising is the result of imperfect, asymmetric markets. The person you replied to conflating dark patterns from bad actors to equal all of advertising.
If buyers had perfect knowledge of products/services, then they would instantly know what they were going to purchase. Seeing as they don't, there is demand for distributing market information for products/services to buyers. When there are substitute products/services, the demand is increased further.
Most professionally-produced content on the web is ad-fianced. Quality journalism, for example, is necessary for a functioning democracy. And no, bloggers and other hobbyist cannot replace The New York Times.
While (some) publishers may be able to survive behind a paywall, the average citizen is unlikely to subscribe to more than maybe one or two. Where currently they may get their news from dozens of independent outlets, they will inevitably be restricted to far less diverse set.
You can easily do the following experiment: try not visiting any websites that have advertising for a month or so. Almost by definition, this is will be a loss for you (because otherwise you would not visit any such sites now).
Now, some people will argue that all these creates should simply adopt some other business model. I think that's obviously foolish, considering the sizeable number of failed attempts. But if you believe that, say, half of all publishers can somehow pull it off, the question becomes: Is avoiding ads worth cutting the amount of professionally-produced content in half?
And, if you are wrong and 90%+ of newspapers, literary platforms, trade publications etc. actually die in the process: would we not lose something far more essential than what we gained?
Your response says nothing about the advertisers themselves, which is who the original question is being asked of. We have all heard this explanation countless times, and repeatedly the answer is NOT a nice analogy about how businesses I know and love absolutely must use advertising to survive.
The problem is with the advertisers, and the rotten business culture that has developed around that field. A culture of rent-seeking, as another comment alluded, that cares little for how much it may bother, annoy, rankle, fuck with, or otherwise manipulate the people it seeks to spread its message to.
And it truly is rotten culture: marketeers liken to these daily, unending intrusions as storytelling, and then they couch it in 'love' and 'empathy' not because the message actually contains or needs that, but because it affects viewers' emotional states in a way that makes them more suggestive to 'storytelling'. And this is to say nothing of all the other nefarious things we all know they do!
How can you possibly support such a rotten and corrupt collective of individuals and organizations? Today's marketing gospel/culture/practitioners are one of those things that not only needs the baby thrown out with the bathwater, but also the bathtub, the sink, the toilet -- and everything else 'digital advertising' may have touched.
It's not like I enjoy advertisement. But this description seems extremely hyperbolic.
It's a few images. Some of them move, which is annoying.
Rarely, they have sound, which is unacceptable.
There's apparently a lot of tracking going on in the background, yet I haven't seen any creepy personal ads, nor do I know of any effects outside of the ads themselves this tracking could have on my life.
People often mention security problems, and those may sometimes have occurred. Yet I haven't had any malware infection in 15 years+, and have never installed any antivirus software that didn't come with the OS.
If advertisement is nefariously "manipulating our emotions" I guess we're lucky in that they suck at it.
Personally, I'm far more annoyed by TV advertisement.
It's also nothing like "rent seeking", as I pointed out in a reply to that comment. "Rent seeking" doesn't just mean "economic activity I don't like".
I'm not denying that I would enjoy the world slightly more without ads, all other things being equal. But denying that there's something of a trade-off to be considered is simply intellectually dishonest.
And once you take stock of these competing interests, I believe there's a "bad case scenario" that is more likely than not to become reality, in which the loss far outweighs any gains.
I'm not sure that diversity is what we should be striving for in our reporting. Right now, you can get 50 hot takes from a million different outlets. The vast majority are optimizing their headlines and writing for clicks. They manufacture outrage because it is what will bring people to their site. You can easily find an article to confirm whatever views you have on a particular news event. I'm not sure this is a good thing. There is nothing that requires a digital news outlet to have any journalistic integrity. There are plenty that have had stories thoroughly discredited but are still spread around on social media.
I'm not saying that centralized news is better. I don't remember much of that. I am saying that people have a very difficult time determining what is factual and what is not. Diversity in news may not be a good thing for democracy when we bombard people with information and options and tell them to sort it out.
It’s not possible to survive behind a paywall because the next site provides similar content “for free”. I think it’s hard to say how the competitive landscape in e.g news would look if ad revenue was drastically cut online.
If ads don’t pay the next site’s bills either, then sites would have to compete for paywall customers with quality. Even if a large fraction of news sites died I don’t see a big problem since the quality of the remaining outlets would be higher, and prices lower as more customers choose among more paid services. Clickbait would almost completely be a thing of the past, if there as no revenue in ads, for example.
If Apple user visits contribute less to the earnings of a certain class of websites (news sites, for example), then these could lose interest in the visitors and not optimize content for them. This could e.g. lead to websites breaking when visited by Safari.
I believe similar reasons led Firefox to formerly only offer their tracking protection feature in privacy browsing mode. Possibly their analytics showed that it turns out that most people don't activate that feature, so they now offer it in all modes. Privacy-conscious FF users in a way free-ride on the masses who use FF without knowing / caring about the feature.
It will probably go similar for Apple: They make the feature opt-in, most people don't care and leave it off, nobody gets hurt.
