But online advertisement is what drives sales of the companies which produce products. You won't sell your product if you don't advertise them. Especially for new businesses that sell products it's almost impossible to get noticed unless you advertise
Naw, we have an attention economy here. This is a zero-sum situation. Newcomers have to compete on the same terms specifically because all the advertising noise from others drowns them out unless they advertise too.
Google lists plain facts like the existence of a business without any advertising even. If all the restaurants in a town decided in solidarity to never advertise on Google, people could still look up the restaurant directory and learn about the options. All the restaurants would save money. But when some advertise at Google and got prominence, they capture more of the market, which forces others to do more advertising in order to not lose market share.
And a restaurant having their own website is informational, but that's not what we mean by online advertising. We mean when third parties pay to have their ad promoted to people who aren't directly connecting with their business.
If all third-party advertising went away, it would be such a shock to the internet economy that it's hard to describe. But ignoring that aspect, we would see net GAINS in new businesses being able to have people notice their products or in customers being able to find the products and resources they want.
> people could still look up the restaurant directory and learn about the options.
Then you will have premium listings in the directory. Businesses will always try to increase their revenue and advertising is and will be a tempting option for them.
Yeah, but maybe you missed my point. In principle, like a union / cartel, a whole sector of businesses in a market could decide together to never advertise, and the reduced overhead for everyone would mean more profit. In practice, it just takes a few deviators / scabs etc. to undermine this for everyone.
Reality is more complex. Organizing in solidarity is hard, deviation is easy… the whole non-cooperative games theories etc. Markets aren't all zero-sum.
But a bunch of restaurants in a town could all just promote the idea of eating out and promote their directory, and if no premium access or other advertising happens, then it will be best for everyone.
The core point is to reject the simplistic argument that ads are all just information and somehow fine and productive. Maybe you just meant that, in practice, businesses need to advertise. But if we get rid of a whole form of advertising, it can just help businesses rather than harm them. Each additional means to advertise creates yet more burden in a zero-sum race-to-the-bottom fashion.
My original comment was an argument for the parent thread which said "The value of online advertising is massively inflated." I was not saying that ads are good.
Okay, sorry for the confusion. Your response didn't seem pro-advertising per se, but it seemed to suggest that advertising was a necessary evil maybe. I wanted to clarify that it isn't actually necessary systematically, it's just necessary in a race-to-the-bottom zero-sum game where each player has to accept the necessary evil given the assumption that others are doing it.
