alt Hacker NewsPeople think they should magically find out about new products without considering the macro effects of a world without advertising
Ads make the world a better place
They allow for innovation, giving new businesses a way to break in and reach customers
Lower cost to reach customers = lower product and service prices
For employees: do you think your employer has more or less budget for your salary if the cost to acquire a customer is higher?
People complain about the privacy invasion of tracking, and then in the next sentence get annoyed at the irrelevant products being pushed on them
We need better tracking! I should be able to show the exact people I built a product for that it exists
Imagine we were all able to create micro businesses for tiny markets to improve their life, and we had a cheap way to reach everyone in them
How many products or services out there could improve our experience in the world but we just don't know about them?
How is free video, written or audio content created without ads? People sure as hell hate directly paying for it
I love ads
"Lower cost to reach customers = lower product and service prices"
This is economically illiterate. Advertising is not a discount mechanism. It is a tax on the consumer. When I buy a product heavily marketed on Instagram or Google, I'm paying for the product plus the auction bid price required to acquire me plus the margin of the ad-tech middleman (which are trillion dollar companies).
You are conflating "information distribution" with "persuasive surveillance." In a world without behavioral advertising, businesses compete on quality and reputation, not on who can exploit the most psychological vulnerabilities to manufacture demand.
As for innovation: The current ad ecosystem has killed organic discovery. You can't build a "micro-business" based on merit anymore. The winner SHOULD be the engineer who solved a hard problem efficiently. But instead the winner is the dropshipper who cracked the arbitrage spread between a cheap, garbage product and a highly manipulative Facebook ad campaign.