But there have been businesses based on lead pipes for drinking water plumbing, asbestos for residential insulation, and so on. You could make an argument that these technologies enabled many businesses as well. That doesn’t mean we should allow lead pipes for drinking water or to use asbestos in residential homes.
to name a few: LISEN, Qifutan, Loncaster, YKYI, Holikme and SXhyf. And who could forget VWMYQ?
And it still doesn't justify Google.
An alternative effect could be that online ads are an avenue for better resourced established companies to out compete and stifle upstarts. Startups are always pressed for resources and running an effective online ad campaign can take significant resources.
You're surely right that some small businesses have benefited from the online ad market, but I suspect that on average larger companies have benefited to a greater degree.
[0]https://www.uschamber.com/small-business/small-business-data...
Ceteris paribus. Running a small business in most states involves more rules today than it did in 2000. (Common denominator: the cost of financial transactions due to post-9/11 anti-money laundering rules.)
Put yourself in the mind of someone making a THING, how do you plan to reach your possible customers for THING?
THING is the best in class, better than the competition but how would you make the world aware of THING existing?
trade shows, trade magazines, word of mouth, window-dressing in the THING-quarter, ...
why are personalized ads on a website indispensable?
They aren't. This is exactly what I mean by modern advertising.
If ads were just contextual based on the content of the page, we wouldn't be having this conversation.
I'd still be blocking them, though.
There is no before advertising
Pretty sure we have ads from Mesopotamia
Advertising (4000 BCE)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_advertising
Fact-checking is literally just a Google search away. Irony intended.
Plumbing is good and useful. Plumbing using lead pipes is harmful.
Advertising can be good and useful. Modern advertising that requires tracking everything a user does is harmful.
That X enables many businesses to exist doesn't mean that X is a good thing on balance, because X itself can have harmful effects that outweigh the benefits.
This is of course true, and I can look past the inelegant phrasing.
But to make this a credible argument you need to argue for why the costs of advertising outweigh the benefits.
They're looking for depth where there isn't any. You're attempting to prove advertising is bad by claiming it's like lead pipes, on the basis of them both being bad. It's tautology. One could similarly "prove" ad blockers or puppies by this analogy to be whatever because they, too, can be good or bad.
Modern advertising is what I'm against, not advertising as a whole.
Similarly, I'm against lead pipes for plumbing, not plumbing as a whole.
IME this is only true about drop shippers and similar business models. The vast majority of small businesses are, as a rule, awful at advertising. The few ads I see they are very poorly put together.
Even when they manage to get people to the business, small businesses are almost inevitably awful about maintaining their web presence, which makes it moot. Here's an example thread about such from the local reddit. Including some hostile responses from, charitably, overwhelmed small businesses about how you need to call to confirm a price https://old.reddit.com/r/Calgary/comments/1ewlsib/open_lette...)
I’m assuming most of the places that redditor contacted to buy UPS batteries from are B2B shops that aren’t geared to selling to people off the street.
I’m assuming this because sometimes I buy replacement UPS battery strings, and I pay with a purchase order after talking to or emailing an inside sales person, not with a credit card at a register.
Places like this don’t even need to advertise, the professionals they’re selling to know where to find what they need.
I think a lot of these businesses could succeed using alternative promotional strategies. Some of them might suffer because the owners have more money than time and advertising is a good tradeoff in that case, but overall good products are still going to do well.
Google ads was (and is) incredibly good for niche companies, since it makes it possible to advertise to people who are interested in your product instead of the general public.
So if you sell Warhammer paraphernalia, you can buy ads to be shown only to people who have searched for Warhammer related words, rather than "everyone in Wisconsin".
This lowers ad costs by many orders of magnitude, and makes a lot of businesses possible that simply couldn't exist before.
I'd want some damn good reasons to go back to the old ways!
Tracking people and shoving your wares in their faces is not the only way to reach interested parties. You could go to a Warhammer convention, join a Warhammer forum and offer to send members samples, or just post images of your stuff in a sharing thread, whatever. Engage with people while they're searching for the thing you're offering.
Of course, word of mouth requires you to actually make a good product whereas with advertisment it's enough if your product looks good.
I'm telling you what actually happened in the real world.
BTW, back in the olden days, magazines were sold, but the bulk of the magazine revenue came from advertising.
Without advertising, the magazines would have cost the consumer quite a bit more.
And, as someone who paid for ad placement in computer magazines, the sales directly corresponded to the advertising.
Why do you think Google provides you with free searches? It isn't because they are altruistic. It's because companies pay to advertise on it. If everybody installed an ad blocker like you, you'd find yourself having to pay for search.
> *Advertising in it's current form* is a plague on humanity.
Magazine ads were not highly targeted towards every user that bought one. We liked magazine ads, they were high quality and usually contextually relevant.
Modern advertising is nothing like magazine ads. We don't take screenshots of ads on webpages, print them out, and hang them on our walls like we did with magazine ads.
> Why do you think Google provides you with free searches?
To deliver ads. The same reason Google does everything else.
Who pays for it? Not my problem. I'll use whatever free service exists, there will always be one.
Without a search engine? The internet would fail and targeted ads would cease to exist.
You'll get advertisements, then.
I.e. if you don't want ads, you'll need to pay.
No, Marketing. Advertising is only one form and the most antisocial one. There is a huge difference between making it possible for people interested in your product to find you versus going out of your way to shove your product in front of the eyes of people who are doing something at best tangentially related.
Advertisements can be good (when the business is good and genuinely wants you to know about good new product), and they can be bad (when the business if bad / misleading / scammy). An optimist would say there are more good than bad. I suppose you wouldn't consider yourself an optimist.
With regard to modern advertising, you are absolutely correct!
That said, I fully understand and agree with the usefulness of advertising. What I'm against is the modern state of advertising. If all ads were simply contextual based on the content being shown and not the user, I don't think many of us would have problems with the ads industry.
If I were browsing a mountain biking forum, I'd see ads for mountain bikes and other related services. They would be MORE relevant, rather than the current ads I get for the product I bought 2 months ago.
>or through a UI element on the website that lets the visitor choose the language.
This is nonsensical too. People don't just speak only one language. If I'm going into an English website and you're giving me a language pop up I'm going to pick English. But ads that are in English are not relevant to me whatsoever.
Also, I would like to note that language redirects are, in my experience, absolute trash. It makes using sites like Adobe awful.
Even the language settings in windows lead to a bad user experience. I have to keep English as my first keyboard language and locale to make sure that websites don't default to other languages for me.
I have zero faith that they would get this right.
What people don't like is the current advertising business, which is intrusive, a blackhole of privacy concerns, rarely useful, and full of abusive companies (clickbait sites, for instance) that exist on the back of scummy behavior that hurts the advertiser (costing them money) and annoys/infuriates the consumer.
They don't like having an ad-free 7usd Netflix/Amazon/etc account that is now 12usd with ads, or 22usd without ads and the same privileges.
I utterly despise how so much of the Internet has been gentrified and sanitized to appeal to advertisers at the expense of communities and culture.
No, they're an amazing benefit to your business. I'm sure your candles are great, but society doesn't need them (your candles, specifically) to survive. People would continue to find candles without your advertisements. Maybe candles that aren't as nice as yours, but people will get by just fine, and wouldn't know (or care) what they were missing.
> Advertisements can be good (when the business is good and genuinely wants you to know about good new product)
Advertising is emotional manipulation. Why do I need to know about good products, even genuinely good ones? If I have an actual, articulated need for something, I can go out and look for it. But if I'm not actually looking for something, but someone advertises to me and convinces me to buy their thing, likely I would have gotten along just fine without it.
> An optimist would say there are more good than bad. I suppose you wouldn't consider yourself an optimist.
False dichotomy. Whether there are more good companies that honestly try to hawk their wares, or more bad companies that try to trick people into buying their garbage, is irrelevant. Advertising is a blight on society.
The thing that really makes my stomach churn, though, is that if I ran a company, I'd absolutely advertise. It's the prisoner's dilemma. Because advertising exists and others will use it, I can't opt out of using it myself. I feel super gross about this fact.
Sorry for the snark, but no one anywhere needs advertising. Advertising in it's current form is a plague on humanity.