marcoarment
100+ Head-Fier
- Joined
- Feb 15, 2014
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IF Advertising were outlawed (as fraud), then 1) products would be evaluated solely by word of mouth (as works fine for Schiit), 2) journalists would be free to investigate corporations, instead of being muzzled by ad dollars, 3) media would be consumed by subscription only - the HBO model - which would improve the quality of media.
But:
1) Word of mouth is limited and unreliable (cf. Yelp, Amazon reviewers), and is easily corrupted by spam, affiliate marketers, and under-the-table paid recommendations. And if you were starting a new company and had no established reputation before, the only way to get going would be to send a bunch of free demo products to influential people in hopes that they talk about you (fortunately, they usually do in that scenario), which can be objective but too often subtly corrupts their public statements about your products. There's no such thing as organic word of mouth at scale.
2) Journalists would mostly be laid off or forced to write Buzzfeed clickbait headlines about 17 Sexy Discount Mattresses To Boost Your Libido With This One Trick The Scientists Don't Want You To Know [Slideshow], because...
3) Media is so abundant today that its value is effectively $0 and nobody pays for anything, except with their attention, which is far more easily and profitably drawn by One Weird Trick Slideshow Headlines than boring, expensive investigative reporting. And without ad-supported free media, it's also very hard to grow an audience for something that's historically free like websites or podcasts, because each new person is forced to pay before they can even tell if they're going to like you, and it's easier to just abandon the attempt and go back to what they know.
I've bought and sold ads, I run ads on my blog and podcast, and I've done ad-free apps and even an ad-free iPad magazine. As ideologically questionable as ads are, they do provide important value to a lot of people that isn't easily replaced. They help new products get established, they let ad-supported publishers get large audiences, and they let you try, find, use, read, browse, and hear a bunch of stuff online for free. (Like this site.)
Ads have persisted for this long because the alternatives are mostly worse.