Tragedy of the commons. That idea was OK when the state of technology placed a limit on the amount of advertising, on its psychological impact, and on its externalities such as erosion of privacy and malware.
I discover new things all the time without being exposed to ads. I also have a modestly successful side business. Its advertising is limited to identifying my business when I participate in certain web forums, and maintaining a frightfully ugly web page.
Plus you'd have more word of mouth and thought leaders.
Perhaps we'd even start expecting our friends and family to routinely talk about products they like. We'd develop new customs living in an ad vacuum?
I.e. the exact same way I heard about 99.9% of products I actually use today.
> What happened with the idea that ads were a means you had to get to know useful products?
> If all ads were banned forever from existence, how would anyone discover anything new?
[0] Okay, maybe not Google, but a hypothetical search engine with a different business model
[1] They may not like wirecutter's affiliate links either
People who go to that site to research a product want to be sold to. They want to give their attention and money up for a product. Advertisements on websites are completely backwards from that model.
Affiliate marketing is a niche and bigger joke than traditional ads when content depends on it. Wirecutter just happens to be really good at what they do, but their business model can't be used by most of the web, not to mention ad blockers often block affiliate links too.
> Wirecutter just happens to be really good at what they do
By having automated software to block the bullshit, we might end up with an Internet where the people who are "really good at what they do" get more attention.
On the other hand, sites whose content doesn't work well with affiliate links are getting screwed by people blocking their only source of revenue, which is ads.
I'm not claiming that there is software for that. But if it becomes annoying enough I think there will be software written to filter it. Even if it needs to make use of deep learning or some other more advanced mechanism just to detect.
> On the other hand, sites whose content doesn't work well with affiliate links are getting screwed by people blocking their only source of revenue, which is ads.
This is short-term thinking. The people who block ads will not be making purchasing decisions based on ads they don't want to see. So by showing ads to them all you are doing is devaluing advertisements and driving down the cost of advertising placement in the long term.
The only way around this is to make people enjoy ads. This is possible, but it requires work to integrate them with the content and you need the content creators actually making the ads, and they need to enjoy doing it.
No, that won't be possible. You can't make a bot that discerns between "good" content like the Wirecutter and a site that's exactly the same, except with top 10s that are paid for.
> This is short-term thinking. The people who block ads will not be making purchasing decisions based on ads they don't want to see. So by showing ads to them all you are doing is devaluing advertisements and driving down the cost of advertising placement in the long term.
That's not how advertising works and the concept that freeloaders who block ads would somehow be more immune to advertising that people who don't is laughable.
> The only way around this is to make people enjoy ads. This is possible, but it requires work to integrate them with the content and you need the content creators actually making the ads, and they need to enjoy doing it.
Let's make content tailored around advertising, that's quite the way to make the web a useless place where there's no place for content that can't be used to sell something.
We have computers automatically labelling complex images, deep learning is doing all sorts of things we once thought only humans could do. Detecting shitty websites seems pretty trivial by comparison. If I can easily see the difference, I bet we can train a network to detect the same.
> That's not how advertising works and the concept that freeloaders who block ads would somehow be more immune to advertising that people who don't is laughable.
Nonsense. Even my kids know to avoid advertising when it inadvertently pops up on YouTube. They mute the audio and go do something else while the ad runs. People develop an ability to ignore banner ads on websites, the impact of advertising lessens over time, which leads advertisers to try more and more invasive and repulsive techniques.
> Let's make content tailored around advertising, that's quite the way to make the web a useless place where there's no place for content that can't be used to sell something.
You misunderstand my point.
Tailored advertising is fantastic. Listen to a Podcast. 95% of the Podcast is still original, non-advertisement content. The 5% lead-in advert is original, funny, and read by the creators of the show that I want to listen to.
More advertising should be vetted and created by the content creators who want the support of those advertisers. It makes better advertisements, it increases trust, and it's far more pleasant to read, hear or watch.
It died a long, long time ago.
This guy, Freud's nephew, is what happened: Edward Bernays [1]. As covered in Adam Curtis excellent documentary on the subject of the history of propaganda and advertising "The Century Of The Self" [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Century_of_the_Self
> If all ads were banned forever from existence, how would anyone discover anything new?
By word of mouth. I know, not a novel idea, but it seems to work quite well on this very website!
The fallacy is that ads were never informative anyway.
Advertising can and regularly is done well; Giant Bomb, a CBSi joint, never takes ads for games or game-related accessories on their podcasts and the hosts don't endorse the product when they do the ad. I don't think an astroturfed universe (which is the inevitable end result of "oh, no advertising"--see the profusion of "native advertising" for similar) is a better universe.
It's true that companies won't be able to saturate markets quickly without ads, but I'm not sure why we want that. I'd rather see small businesses grow slowly based on the quality of their products than see companies with the best advertising grow, crushing competitors with better products. Every dollar spent on advertising is a dollar not spent on developing a good product.
If all ads were banned forever from existence, how would anyone discover anything new?