I must disagree. Some ads do introduce me to new things that I am truly interested in.

Other than Ghostery, I guess my ad blocker is myself. If I see anything that resembles an ad, I avert my eyes.

I suppose something subliminal is at work even so, but I imagine there are many more people like who just avoid even donating their eyeballs to an advertisement.

The percentage has unfortunately decreased precipitously with the prevalence of retargeting.

There is value in advertising: as an information source and a mechanism to establish trust. The former value has been diminished by the internet (which some people call the information age). Advertising is still valuable for establishing trust between the two unknown parties though. Ads in Google work partly because of Google the brand name. Ads on Reddit r/HateSomething will not because, well, you know why. So it's in Google's interest to have good and safe ads (or the perception that they do).

There is value in advertising, but it's a very inefficient way of providing that value, because the incentives aren't aligned with that goal at all.

An independent agency is likely to provide consumers with more accurate advice, AND can more effectively establish trust in decent products. I know Which? exists in the UK, and apparently there's something called Consumer Reports in the US. Is it any good?

There is value in advertising for me when I do not know where to buy something I need, or what I need. That however is almost never true for consumer goods, only tech things we need for science. Heck, just knowing the suppliers puts you in some kind of secret club sometimes.

Trust? TRUST? I'm sorry, but are you saying that if I pay to have a claim that my product is best broadcast into everyone's eyeballs or ears, I'm establishing trust?

Allow me to repost a previous comment of mine[1]:

Whenever a debate about advertising pops up on HN, many people defend it as the necessary way for consumers to find out about good products. Healthy free markets depend on informed consumers, but to think that advertising results in informed consumers makes little sense. I find it strange that a community of logic and science oriented people can hold such a notion.

When communities were small, reputation was king. If your town had two bakers, everyone knew which one was good and which one sucked. No amount of advertising would fool the townsfolk into going to the sucky one.

But this doesn't scale to huge cities with tens, hundreds or thousands of choices. We can't know the reputation of such a wide array, and we can easily be fooled by advertising. Internet-based recommendation systems make the grapevine and reputation scalable. I hope we see more innovation. Yelp is a start, but it fails miserably because if I rate a place 5 because I love very authentic Thai food, and another person rates it a 1 because they are used to Americanized Thai, the restaurant gets a 3 (I'm simplifying for illustrative purposes). In other words, Yelp's rating is useless to both me and the other person.

I'm hoping for a future where recommendation systems and collaborative filtering get so good that they render marketing and advertising useless.

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[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10398290

My trust in a product and company is usually inversely proportional to the amount of ads they run. The more one is aggressive with their ads, the less I trust them.

While I don't doubt your analysis of yourself, you are an outlier.

I'm not an outlier, I'm just experienced in using the Internet. Something one gains with time.

People do have similar patterns of thinking in the more familiar real world. Which area in the city you think is safer, and has more honest businesses - the clean one, with occasional company name banner, or that with every square meter of vertical surface taken by an ad?

It doesn't matter what I think; I'm also an outlier. ;)

If we extrapolated the view you're describing to the world at large, someone would have already noticed the general lack of correlation between advertising and revenue and the ad industry would be decades dead. As it stands the correlation is pretty solid and advertising is still profitable to be in and sought after by those who want to grow and shape their brand image.

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/08/why-good...

>If I want something, I will get it

And what are all the ways you can discover things you want? I'd say the top two for most people are word-of-mouth and advertising.

If you shove it in my face, it's not me discovering what I want, it's you telling me what I want and hoping I go along with it. Gets really fucking old when hundreds of people do it to me every day.

Advertisers: please piss off and let me discover the world on my own.

No comment on Turing then?

Wow, I have never seen this bad a case of internet-mad. Upvote for persistence!

It's a hilarious concept that people would be interesting in discovering something they want. Need? Sure. Want? No way.

The very root of suffering is desire. -Buddha (paraphrased)

I search for reviews from people I trust, compare the results, and decide on an option. I can't think of the last time I discovered anything I wanted from advertising with the possible exception of movie trailers.

Even before the point where you look for reviews. Like the moment where you learn a product even exists, and you decide you might want to get it. That's the role advertising fills.

I agree with you on the second part. I block all ads on all computers I use, so they're pretty useless to me, but I still understand why they exist and the job they do.

For example, I turn adblock off for Penny Arcade, since they actually vet the games before they run ads for them. I've found a few games that were actually pretty fun from there.