Your reasoning is extremely fallacious because you're overlooking a lot of nuance.
Yes, it is true that in aggregate part of the advertising costs get passed on to consumers. How much exactly depends on macroeconomic factors, industry dynamics, pricing power of distributors and retailers, and hundreds other variables. But you are right that in aggregate a non-zero amount of the advertising costs get passed on to consumers.
However, advertising is valuable to advertisers because it works to some degree. And it works because people are influenced by it. Now, as an individual I have no control over what other people are doing and so I have no control over how valuable advertising is and how much is being spent on it and how much is being passed on to consumers. Therefore as an individual I look around me and prices are what they are and already have in them advertising costs which will not go up by me using service. Therefore as an individual the marginal cost of me using these services is effectively zero (imagine the ratio between the value of advertising to me and the aggregate value of advertising, that's effectively zero). As an individual those services are free.
So it depends on what your definition of "free" is. A) Would prices be lower if advertising didn't exist? Yes [0]. B) Would prices be lower to me if I didn't use these services? No. The thing is that in definition A) I don't really have a choice, so it's irrelevant. I only have a choice as an individual.
[0] And even here some people will disagree with you. What I call "free market fundamentalists" will argue that No, they wouldn't, because the advertising leads to higher sales and greater operational efficiency, so that advertising costs are exactly offset by lower per-unit costs.
The idea that corporations = people is foolish and obviously leading to a reality that doesn't fit the model.
"Oh, yes we harvested your data from all the sites you visited and used it to manipulate you in to buying stuff that harms your livelihood (gambling, say), but it's the _company_ that did it and so none of the controlling executives can be blamed!"
Which is pretty much the opposite of the insulating effect of both your description and, more to the point, the status quo corporate form.
This seems to, at best, reside outside of practical application.
>The main target of the corporations-are-not-people crowd is the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United ruling striking down limits on independent corporate spending in elections. After that case, groups sprang up to fight corporate personhood. Others rebranded themselves by newly taking aim at it. But they do not limit themselves to attacking the Court’s campaign finance jurisprudence. Most groups make a broader attack on corporations being able to assert any First Amendment speech rights at all; and some have called for disabusing all corporations or businesses of any constitutional right.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/02/if-corp...
I don't believe yours is a valid concern.
Define evil please, because I'm of the opinion that the idea that they are people leads to serious unpleasantness all round.
Can you tell me who else will pay my advertising bill, because it can be a complete money pit and getting someone to pay for it without using revenue from customers would be great. Let me know bub.
Not sure if your question is rhetorical or what. When you say "who else will pay "my" advertising bill". Who's "you" in this context? Are you a company, and consumer, what?
If a company's only source of revenue is customers, then, by definition, customers are paying for all of advertising.
> As an individual those services are free.
Perhaps those are free to you, personally.
Yet, on a global scale the sum is zero. If a company spends $$$ on advertising I'll eventually pay a fraction of it, directly or indirectly.
> If a company's only source of revenue is customers, then, by definition, customers are paying for all of advertising.
> > As an individual those services are free.
> Perhaps those are free to you, personally.
> Yet, on a global scale the sum is zero. If a company spends $$$ on advertising I'll eventually pay a fraction of it, directly or indirectly.
So you just repeated my points, but worse. For example, it is not true that the customers are paying for all of the advertising. The way to determine what customers are paying for is to see how the world with advertiising compares with the world without advertising, and there's many possibilities. A) with advertising the company revenues are higher by the same amount on a per-unit basis (companies pass all cost to consumers), B) with advertising company costs are higher by the same amount on a per-unit basis (meaning the companies pass all cost to shareholders in the form of lower margins and lower return on equity, or related metric), C) something in between. So it's not true that necessarily customers are paying for all of the advertising.
If we are speaking about a service provided at no cost to me and the provider makes money off advertising, then I will end up paying some share of that if and only if my access to said service is charged by a 3rd party, eg a phone company that charges me for traffic, vs my home connection which is a flat rate, regardless if I use it or not.
> You pay for them in high prices for good and services. Those companies pay advertising which increase prices plus their tech size profits.
I don't think this is falsifiable. It sounds sort of feasible in the abstract, but how can we empirically measure that effect? As it stands, I could just as easily respond that, no, these companies make prices more efficient, because their advertising methodologies are more effective so companies spend less on their platforms than they would for equivalent ad campaigns elsewhere. Then we'd have to figure out how to investigate whether modern companies advertise more due to growth of the market, or because they have to due to catch up with everyone else using the tech advertising platforms. Narrowing down the answer, if there is one, would be nontrivial. Then I could also say that advertising makes tech services cheaper, because Facebook and Google earn more from user data than they would if they forced everyone to pay $20/month.
Which of us is right? We can't really say, it's effectively an opinion because, even if technically falsifiable, these claims are far from being empirically demonstrable.
Companies use advertising to increase their sales, either from 0 to something or from something to something more. Along with R&D, production costs, running costs and profit, the advertising cost is part of the planning from the start.
This is not how the stock market works. Where did you get this idea?