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A comment on Amazon to Launch Mobile Ads, in a Threat to Google and Facebook. Parent comment

Re:Amazon to Launch Mobile Ads, in a Threat to Google and Fa... by manigandham on Thursday March 21, 2019 @06:48PM (#19458124)
I think you are massively underestimating just how much ads pay for, and how much economic activity they drive. If you remove ads, the prices for everything would increase massively (even after accounting for the lack of advertising costs) and even fewer people could afford it.

Sure there are definitely places that have too much, and the overall implementation and UX of ads online is poor, but advertising itself has enabled a lot of people to have access to many things they otherwise would never have.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Amazon to Launch Mobile Ads, in a Threat to Google and Fa... by maxxxxx on Thursday March 21, 2019 @07:59PM (#19458520)
“If you remove ads, the prices for everything would increase massively (even after accounting for the lack of advertising costs) and even fewer people could afford it.”

This doesn’t really make sense. Why would prices go up? The only reason i could see is that without ads people would buy less stuff

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Re:Amazon to Launch Mobile Ads, in a Threat to Google and Fa... by spunker540 on Thursday March 21, 2019 @08:40PM (#19458731)
I’m not at all confident these economics are true, but I imagine the argument is this: products like music, news, tv, Facebook, google search, YouTube (any ad-supported media) will now have to cost money. Their prices clearly have to go up without ads.

Next are all the businesses that will have a harder time attracting as many customers as they used to with ads- with fewer customers one can imagine they will have to raise prices as well to sustain their business.

Last, without advertising it will be much harder to start a new business. If you don’t have a highly visible store front it will be tough to gain traction no matter what sort of business you’re in. This leads to lower competition overall which also means higher prices.

[ Parent | on HN ]