Any cost required to be paid to a third party to conduct a transaction between two parties is "rent". Any entity attempting to establish or increase such a cost is "rent-seeking". Ad agencies try to encourage companies to buy more advertising. If they are successful, then other competitors will be forced to buy more advertising to maintain their existing customers. Whatever it cost before to have 5% of the market, it now costs more to maintain the same 5%. The additional advertising expenditure required because of the ad agency's actions is very much rent that was being seeked. The fact that the rent may not be paid to the same ad agency, or that ad agencies have costs themselves (such as content creators), does not change the nature of their actions.

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".

> geographic-specific publications published by the government

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.

I don't think the government would need (or even want) to limit the number of advertisers for a given product. Its more like the registry that contractors sign up to when they want government contracts. Here's me and here's what I can do.

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.

> The majority of money spend on ads ends up with content creators

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.

Sure - when you run ads on your own website with Google, you get 68% of the revenue share. (https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/180195?hl=en)

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.