Tons of companies rely on ad revenue. Netflix, Google etc will go under.
this post was submitted on 06 Apr 2025
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Advertising is too big of an industry to ever be banned. It also keeps lots of other sectors on life support, like sports and free online content. It's also extremely important to keep services like search engines free. Unless we transition away from capitalism ads are pretty much mandatory to keep the economy afloat. I agree they suck though. uBlock Origin until I die.
The idea that advertising is a new invention is nonsense.
Yes, it had different forms but it was there.
Eg: What are the priests if not sales people and what are the Sunday bells if not calls to action, and what are the icons and statues if not aspirational advertising and fomo?
What are shop windows? What are branding marks?
Here is advertising in Ancient Rome
The word "new" is a relative term. Humans evolved around 300,000 BCE, and ancient Rome (founded in 753 BCE) is pretty "new" by that metric. You're not wrong that people found ways to "advertise" to each other throughout recorded history, but when it comes to prehistory (or as the article states, "99.9% of [humanity's] existence"), life was very different. There can't have been much to advertise before people developed tradable goods.
With that said, I'm intrigued by your comprehensive interpretation of "advertising." Now I'm wondering about things that would not have been written down/recorded, like things a town crier might have been incentivized to add to their announcements.
"Hear ye, hear ye! A joust is to be held tomorrow evening in the royal courtyard, in the King's honor. Sir and Lady Abbington announce the birth of their new son, to be baptized at the Lord's church this Saturday. In celebration, Mavis the Fishmonger is offering a buy-one-get-one deal on all flounder! Come on down to the market square for fantastic deals on all your seafood goods - just look for the stall with the yellow awning. Get your catch of the day at Mavis's!"
Haha! New is a relative term but really? 300k BCE? Reverting to pre organised society to avoid advertising?
Maybe we should go to pre human times, oh wait, walk through a forest and all you see is flowers advertising themselves to insects and birds advertising their singing abilities to each other.
So long as there’s competition for resources and attention plays a role in that distribution something will find a way to attract that attention.
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The problem is: Where does advertising start. Is mentioning a brand name somewhere already advertising? If I have a brand, call it GLURP, am I allowed to print GLURP on the product, on the box, on the instructions? Am I allowed to have a website called GLURP.com, and what would be allowed to be shown there? Can I open a shop and have a sign "GLURP" over the window? Can I really exhibit my products there?
Because all of this is advertising.
I think we can all agree that 99.99% at least of intruding ads on the net, billboards, TV, radio, whatever, are annoying and should go away. But any ruling trying to reign this in needs to set 100% clear and undisputable limits, because they will sacrifice their own kids to somehow skirt such a law. If you don't believe me, look at tax laws and how the rich don't pay taxes (despite frequent bouts of crying over the 37% they never pay).
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Then we’d have a centrally-planned economy I guess. I don’t really see how a free market would work without advertising.
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Ideally, I'd love for it to work, but realistically it would devastate the current ecosystem if implemented naively.
Full stop.
This is where I stopped reading the article. It's such a red-flag.
What I was thinking up to that point, though, was
- some ads do inform about new products (Swiffer) at launch
- some ads actually demonstrate proper use of a product. None come to mind in the moment. But I have distinct memories of saying to myself, "oh! That's how that works!"
- ad breaks educate when a broadcaster is forced to include them. How would I know about the brown bear, the ptarmigan or the crack spider without Hinterland Who's Who? Body Break? "I'm just a bill, on Capitol Hill," anyone?
I'm sure we could brainstorm one or two more thin positives that ads provide, but those are weak enough already. Just, non-zero.
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