disagree. as much as it pains me to admit it, I do actually think advertising benefits society. imo it's kind of like democracy in that it's the least shitty system we've devised so far.

there's a lot about it that seems suboptimal, but what alternatives do we have? people can't be seriously expected to read third-party reviews for every single product they buy; it simply takes too much time. plus, depending on the product, there may not be any reputable reviewers, or the reviewers could be getting paid behind the scenes anyway.

ultimately it's a lot better to walk into the store at least knowing what the different brands are supposed to mean. if I go to whole foods, I can be pretty confident that the food will be better than what I can get at walmart. if I want the cheapest food, I can expect to find it at walmart. when a choice between products is of low-moderate importance, advertising/branding saves us a lot of research.

I don't need an ad to know if my life will improve after buying something. Just tell me what the thing is and if its a good price and I want it I'll buy it. Leave the subliminal stuff out.

Only now products would have to compete on their own merit instead of billions in brainwashing. No more brand power.

Buying and selling stuff we don’t need is not good for the economy.

Is that true? It seems that the entire economy is based on people buying stuff they don't need.

Does anyone really "need" a 60 inch 4K HDTV? The average car costs $33K -- do people really need a $33K car, or could they get by on a $12K economy car? Do people need a 2500 sq ft luxury house, or could they get by on a 600 sq ft spartanly furnished shack?

Personally, I would like to live in a world where advertising was limited to industry/geographic-specific publications published by the government. A generic list of products, randomized once a day. Listings have a fixed fee and identical formats. Each listing has a description of the product, its price, and one or two photos. You can show people using the product but no faces. No other products/aspirational imagery/language unless it is required to demonstrate the use of the product. Plus curated confirmed reviews.

Or just a law that said that ad-supported business models were illegal. You can sell a product or a service but that's it. No "give it away for free and sell ads".

Sounds like product advertising under totalitarian regimes. It goes like: "Register to purchase the national car!” as if you had a choice. Sometimes the choice was between two equally crappy national products.

I don't have a solution to fix advertising, but government published ads are only going to fuel corruption. Maybe regulation of advertising would work, such as the EU's GDPR, maybe not. Government regulation is too slow to react to market challenges and there's always an agenda behind it.

Having the government control it would at least remove the profit motive behind the advertising service itself. A non-profit could potentially play the same role if having a government do so caused problems.

Do you happen to have good data on this? I've been wondering how much ends up with various middlemen (including Google) and how much ends up with content creators.

To put numbers to this, according to https://www.statista.com/statistics/237974/online-advertisin... about $194 billion was spent on internet advertising in 2016. Google's revenue in 2016 (not all from ads, but mostly) was ~$89 billion according to https://www.statista.com/statistics/266206/googles-annual-gl... while Facebook's was ~$27 billion according to https://www.statista.com/statistics/277229/facebooks-annual-...

I did check a few other sources and https://investor.fb.com/investor-news/press-release-details/... gives about the same $27b number for Facebook and https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000165204418... lists ~$90b total revenues for Alphabet.

Cross-checking the advertising number is harder; I see numbers around $70b for 2016 from the IAB, but maybe those are US-only.

In any case, just the revenue for Facebook and Google is already 60% of the total ad spend if the numbers above are right. And that assumes there are no other middlemen. So I don't see how the content creators can be ending up with anything like a "majority" of the ad spend.

It's harder to say with forms of advertising like referral links, since many of those are negotiated directly between the website and someone like Amazon, but others go through middlemen that probably take 20-30%, as Google does for AdSense.

(source: I run ads, and have referral links, on the Pi Searcher for fun, and to pay the hosting bills. And some coffee money. I get paid by Google part-time, but this is based upon my experience as an ad hoster, nothing else.)

But remember that a lot of advertising out there is search advertising (google, bing, baidu, etc.). In which case, Google/Bing/etc. are the content creators -- their content is a search engine -- and they monetize it by advertising.

If buyers had perfect knowledge of products/services, then they would instantly know what they were going to purchase. Seeing as they don't, there is demand for distributing market information for products/services to buyers. When there are substitute products/services, the demand is increased further.