>You'd have to include the servers doing the auctions, sentiment analysis, profiling,... into it as well.

Feel free to put up an estimate then.

>I don't think you can actually put a number on this waste.

Well that just makes it clear you're only interested in your feelings/vibes as opposed to anything objective.

> I don't think you can actually put a number on this waste.

To give a really simple upper limit: 36.8 billion tonnes per year. Because that's the current total global CO2 emissions per year. And we can be pretty sure that ads are less than that, or at least not more.

I agree with your assessment of the grandparent comment.

You have to include the fact that the very clear objective of advertising is to make you consume more. Thus producing more pollution than if there were no ads.

So, even if advertising was technically neutral (which is clearly not the case), it would still be an ecological cataclysm.

One would even argue that the whole climate emergency is created by our advertise/consume culture.

careful now, you can't make cents without advertising dollars. (pun)

That, plus the industry exists to support a negative-sum game. Past some degree of market or channel or target saturation, the only thing your ad spend does is cancels out the ad spend of your competitors. That, and it fuels the growth of an industry that's happy to enjoy the infinite money printer.

And the services needed to consume said money printer. GCP wouldn’t exist. To be fair, a lot of it runs on AWS so AWS’ business would take a serious hit as well.

>Well that just makes it clear you're only interested in your feelings/vibes as opposed to anything objective.

Pulling an "estimate" out of your ass isn't exactly any more objective than admitting that attempting to estimate it is futile.

"I know that I know nothing" and all that.