I see this pro-ads argument all the time and it’s so obviously-stupid that I’m truly baffled. Is this the kind of lie ad folks tell themselves so they can sleep at night?
Also, I'm not sure we want a world where only the largest corporations get to sell things. That's what would happen if people could only find things through stores and catalogs, especially pre-internet.
I definitely don’t want that directory to be skewed with ads in favor of those with the most money, or who have decided to burn the most of their limited resources on ads instead of improving their services, lowering their prices, or hell, just taking more profit. The ads were the biggest problem with the good ol’ yellow pages.
Paying for placement is what makes an ad. And that’s what would have to be prohibited.
You see the contradiction.
You’re essentially saying no bad ads, only good ads, without defunding the difference. (Anyone can afford a Google or Meta ad in the way they could a White Pages listing.)
1. No non-invited display of paid messaging, period. If you go to a directory and ask for a list of people who paid to be part of that directory, it can show it. If you play a game, watch a movie, take the bus, or search a non-paid directory of sites they simply cannot show you things they were paid to show you. I think I'd call this making attention-theft a crime.
2. No payment for priority placement in paid directories. A paid directory has to charge the same (small, nominal) fee to everyone involved.
How would you distinguish someone asking for the directory versus asking for something else with said directory (which are totally not ads, pinky promise) displayed alongside?
> I'd call this making attention-theft a crime
Someone standing up to make a political speech in a public square is now a criminal?
> A paid directory has to charge the same (small, nominal) fee to everyone involved
This is just ads with a uniform, "small, nominal" fee. Uniformity is objectively measurable. Smallness and nominalness is not. Presumably you mean these directories have to be published at cost?
You making sending the directory with something else unconditionally illegal, you either get the directory or the something else, not both at once. This is also necessary for the second part where you require everything in the directory paid the same amount.
> Someone standing up to make a political speech in a public square is now a criminal?
Only if they were paid to do so.
> This is just ads with a uniform, "small, nominal" fee. Uniformity is objectively measurable. Smallness and nominalness is not. Presumably you mean these directories have to be published at cost?
Personally I think uniform is more important than either small or nominal. It means that the person creating the directory can't be bribed to direct your attention to certain parts of the directory - i.e. steal it. Rather it's your choice to get the directory in the first place and pay attention to it, and everything inside it is at an equal playing level. I don't really care if it's at cost or if making directories is a profit making venture.
I'm not entirely sure what the original proposers intent was with the "small and nominal" part though. They might have wanted something more like "at cost".
The purpose being that because every item in any paid directory has paid the directory the same, the directory has no (monetary, at least) incentive to direct your attention towards sub-optimal listings. As an attempt at forcing the directory to sell itself as a useful directory of services, rather than as an object which sells its users attention to the highest bidder.
If I go buy a Google or Meta ad with the same negligible budget, I can get my product shown to 50 people and then the money runs out.
That's completely different from getting onto a phonebook-like list where everyone that visits can see my company's offer.
Rather than coverage being spend based, it’s a low, static price to be listed in the directory, with near zero extra differentiation other than what you choose to put in your little square/rectangle.
What a sad comment.
It's not society's problem to ensure corporations are able to take prime real estate by abusing their customers.
They can meet with every shop owner and argue why their products should be sold, although if you ask me I bet the shop owner knows exactly what their customers want so once again where is the benefit for society here? That some greedy people aren't able to make a buck abusing human psychology?
Once again, what is the benefit for society here?
Ever notice that there used to be a lot of businesses with names like "A+ Heating and Cooling" or "AAA Chimney Sweeps"? That was because being at the top of the phone book's alphabetical listing was more likely to get you business since a lot of people would open to a section, start at the top and start calling.
There's only so much shelf space to go around, eventually decisions will be made about who can put their products on a given shelf.
Any large business with the ability to produce multiple different products will inherently have the advantage of getting more shelf space assuming you want to display all products.
But even assuming you just wanted your shelf space to be a bunch of "per company" catalogs, businesses with more money to spend on glossier catalogs, or brighter inks, or more variations so thicker catalogs will have an advantage.
Then there's names and numbers. Hooked on Phonics gets a leg up on every other competing reading program because they got the phone number that is 1-800-ABC-DEFG, no one else can have that number. The lawyer who gets 1-800-555-5555 (or other similarly easy to remember number) has a leg up on anyone with a random number out of the phone company's inventory.
But I'm curious, what would this perfectly level field you envision look like? How would these sorts of problems be solved?
If people are using their advertising budget unethically, you should expect them to find new unethical ways to use their advertising budget once you've eliminated the existing ones. Rather than playing whack-a-mole, take a step back, and see if you can fundamentally change the rules of the game. Why is advertising bad? What do you want to happen? Fixing the "how" too firmly, too soon, is an effective way to produce bad policy, no matter how good your intentions.
And if you're going to charge on a per-query basis, I note that Kagi isn't nearly as well funded or well known as Google, and that's with them offering an "unlimited" tier. And a per-query model disincentivizes me from using the service in the first place. The more digging I do, the more it costs me, so the more likely I am to take the first result I get back.
Even the most classic "direct to the people who are most interested" advertising model where the consumer pays money for the ads (magazine ads) still is almost entirely subsidized by the advertisers, not the consumer.
Word of mouth also requires a high degree of trust in the person spreading the word. Otherwise you get things like youtube "review" channels that are just paid reviews. Or the reddit bot farms where suddenly everyone in a given part of the web is suddenly dropping references to their new Bachelor Chow™ recipes. You can't even trust the news. We all know about submarine ads, but even without that, you can't ever be sure if you're hearing about some new thing on the news because it's really the best/popular, or because they just happen to know a lot of the reporters.
Weren't those better before ads got involved?
> Web rings were a thing
Aren't those literally word of mouth?
> Otherwise you get things like youtube "review" channels that are just paid reviews.
That would be illegal under the laws we are discussing, presumably.
The directories? Ads were part of those pretty early given that they were modeled on real world directories like the Yellow Pages in the first place. Here's a webarchive of yahoo from 1996[1]. Note the big broken banner at the top with the link text "Click here for the Net Radio Promotion". AOL was pretty much always full of ads, and don't forget the old AOL "keyword" searches which were ads by another name.
> Aren't those literally word of mouth?
Sure, and they were pretty lousy at helping you find information, which is why people stopped using them in preference to search engines, even though search engines had ads. Heck one of the selling points of Google originally was that their ads would actually be relevant to you and the things you were searching for.
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/19961022175643/http://www10.yaho...
Retail stores are basically rooms full of ads. Those end isle displays? How much shelf space allotted? Eye level shelf or bottom shelf? Distributors pay for that. The whole damn store is advertising!
You mentioned catalogs above... catalogs are almost pure advertising.
Looking for a directory of [service, in my area] ... you mean like the yellow pages? That were a literal giant book of advertising that companies paid for?
Spend some time in retail technology. The world does not work the way you think.
Banning advertising could actually make it easier for new entrants.
It's the big players who have the most money for ads, buy up all billboards, internet and TV ads, etc. A small shop can't afford to do that. If ads were completely banned (in all forms including the bulletin boards) then everyone would have to rely on the word of mouth not just small businesses.
I also think that fields like photography are just highly competitive regardless of ads so it's then mostly a networking game.
Ads are a necessary evil for effective market discovery. They should be heavily regulated but you can't effectively operate a market economy without one.
There are no successful economies without information exchange. Discovery can happen without advertising -- if you consider that the main feature of ads is that it's unwanted information distribution.
Even thousands of years ago in illiterate societies people would advertise their goods/services via verbal campaigns, drawn pictures, songs, etc.
There is this capitalist lie that money is a stand-in for "value provided to society". So, when you provide value, society gives you money, and you can use this money to ask society for value back.
Which sounds great. And truly, I do believe that people should have to contribute to society if they expect society to support them, but the problem with this lie is that, despite how capitalists make it sound, the market was not designed with this ideal in mind, instead we have imposed it onto the market after-the-fact in order to justify why the market is good and worth keeping around.
But the real truth is that money does not reward the person who contributes the most value, it simply rewards the person who makes the most money. Money is not "value", money is power. And the system rewards profit no matter how it's acquired.
This means that you can provide a good service that people want, but you still need to advertise and compete in order to be rewarded for your contribution.
It also means that you can do something valuable, like cleaning up all the trash off of a beach, but that doesn't mean that the market will reward you for your contribution.
And it also means that if you have a thing and you want to make profit selling it, you can run a manipulative ad campaign that convinces people that they truly need it, and the market will reward you.
Not sure about that, markets existed since forever and are still useful even without ads.
And even if they're necessary at some level, what if the US had 90% less ads, etc.
I don't think that is true. The oldest known mass printed advertising is about 2000 years older than the oldest known blue pigment.
> As far as I'm aware, there hasn't been enough testing to say much about the importance of ads.
I think if you look at some early advertising (e.g. BCE), you'll see that most have a painfully obvious functional form of just simply announcing the existence of a product/service for the world to observe.
> I think if you look at some early advertising (e.g. BCE), you'll see that most have a painfully obvious functional form of just simply announcing the existence of a product/service for the world to observe.
That doesn't tell us how important it is to have advertising.
And it doesn't tell us how important it is to have advertising anywhere near current levels.
I recently got a catalog where everything was on pretty even footing. There was the occasional photo with someone wearing stuff, but it was a smattering of random brands, big and small. Nothing in it looked paid for. It was a catalog of stuff made in the US. The meat of the catalog was text that listed 1 item in a category per brand, when the brand may have had hundreds. A brand with literally one product was indistinguishable from a major brand. I actually found this quite frustrating as a potential buyer. If I was interested in a category I had to manually go to every single website to see what they actually had and if it was something I was interested in. There was no way to cut through the noise, other than my own past experience with companies that had some brand recognition (from advertising elsewhere).
The issue is that anti-ad zealots won’t acknowledge that advertising is a spectrum. You can go full blown horrendous dystopia or enter into a commerce-free hermit kingdom where private property is banned and resources aren’t traded efficiently, with the end result being that everyone is poor because nobody trades anything with anyone.
A sign for your store that identifies you is technically an ad. A brand logo printed on your product is technically an ad. A positive review is basically an ad. What lengths are we going to go to ban ads?
Be honest: you’ve never bought a single useful thing that you found out about via an ad and ended up glad you saw an ad for?
That is important because the wealth of nations is often predicated on the populace being able to trade their labor.
For example, in recent years North Korea has developed their own Amazon-like delivery website for food and goods and has expanded intranet smartphone service because, obviously, fast communication and ease of transmitting a desire to buy or sell is helpful for growing an economy and keeping the nation from starving. Otherwise, why would they adopt an imperial capitalist concept like that?
It's important to strike a healthy balance, even if it inconveniences some honest people (although we're talking about people who work in advertising...). I don't think you can claim we have a healthy balance currently.
ETA: catalogs are not ads in this context; people seek out catalogs when they want to find something, which already makes a huge difference
You say “that is what a store is for”… well, how would you even know a store exists to go check it out? In the physical world, you would walk by and see the store and be curious to check it out… well, what is a store front other than an ad for the store? Putting your name, product, and reasons you will want their product on the store front IS AN AD. You wouldn’t walk into a store front that was completely blank, with no information about what they are selling.
And even that simple advertising is impossible online. If I create a new online store, how will people ever know it exists? There is simply no answer that doesn’t in some way act as an ad. I would love to hear how you would let people know your store exists in a way that isn’t just an ad in another form.
If you're truly baffled by a view that many people share, you're probably missing something.
How do you solve discoverability, especially of a new type of product or category? I invented this new gadget call "luminexel". People don't know what it is yet, because it's new. How do people find it in a catalog?
Or the thing I sell is fairly technical and needs more space for descriptions / photos to communicate what it is. Do I get more space in the catalog?
So your question seems like pure fantasy to me — like asking how we’ll slay dragons without ads. I don’t know, but I don’t think that’s a thing which actually needs doing, either.
New products within an existing category show up in catalogs, review articles, etc just fine without ads. As does your highly technical product, for which people in the relevant industry already know the information and/or are already used to narrowing their search to a few products and then requesting additional information.
Your pro-ad arguments seem to be solving problems that don’t actually exist.
You make a post on Hacker News titled “Show HN: I made this cool thing called Luminexel, check it out!” Some people will think it’s really cool and tell their friends about it. Eventually it will end up on some “curated list of awesome things” website.
So, place an ad in other words.
Many posts on HN are ads. We’ve just collectively decided that some of them are OK
I grew up 1,000 km+ from any significant stores and shopping - everything we wanted we got via browsing catalogs, building order lists, and either ordering in via road train or taking a few days off to travel > 2,000 km with car and double axle multi tonne capacity trailer.
Making all ads only legal in bazar-like environments, banning all other forms of "forced" ad viewing, and also banning personalized ads completely, would go a very long way to fixing the issues. Hell, we can start with simply banning personalized ads, that alone would effectively destroy the surveillance economy by making it illegal to use that data for anything other than providing the service the customer purchases.
Also, ad bazaars sound great until you realize that every locality needs to have their own bazaar. Seeing ads for New York barbers is kind of useless when you're in Los Angeles. Now you have a million ad bazaars and that's the only advertisement allowed. A little bit of corruption and your ads outshine all your competitors in that locality and they go out of business, since signs are an ad too.
Also also non-personalized ads mean that the only things that can be advertised online are digital goods or things that are available globally. Basically, it will work for Amazon and AliExpress but that's about it. And adsls in Russian or Japanese or Korean or German or French or Swedish or Portuguese aren't going to be that useful for you, are they? Ads in English but for a product in another country might be even worse.
Turns out that products that work well tend to get remembered, and ones that don't get forgotten.
Yellow pages (phone books) were essentially entirely advertising. They didn't just list businesses out of the goodness of their heart, they took listing fees. This is a form of advertising!
You say products that work tend to get remembered, and sure, for existing products with a market you might be right… people would continue buying those things even with no advertising.
But how did the FIRST person who bought the product find out about it? Someone has to try it once before you can even know the product works. How would a new product enter the market?
Maps exist. Search engines exist. Have you been stuck in a cave the last 50 years?
Sometimes the ad lets me know about an entire type of product that I didn't know existed but found very useful, and I probably didn't even by the actual brand that was advertised.
If you consider the general concept of "letting people know what products are available for purchase", I think it's hard to disagree that it's a reasonable thing to do. That doesn't excuse the manner in which it is done today, of course, but that core functionality is not fundamentally evil.
I do have some very high quality products that were recommended to me through friends. Like one local lady that makes really quality outfits. She doesn't advertise at all because she's already overwhelmed with orders as she's so good.
Why? If I need something I search for available options and find them e.g. on the producers web presence. Then I buy one or more and review them.
I'd boil it down to: if you added a "don't show this" option, would anyone use it?
A catalog that comes in the mail because you requested it is not advertising, since you requested it. Products mentioned on the front page of this site aren't advertising, because they're organic, and it's part of what I'm here for. Classified ads, despite the name, don't really qualify since they're in a separate section that nobody reads unless they're specifically seeking out those ads.
A useful product doesn't have "don't show this" buttons because it would be completely pointless. I seek it out because I want it. I don't get upset at the company that made my office chair foisting it on me, because they didn't. I ordered the chair and got what I wanted.
But ad companies don't resist "skip" buttons because they think they're pointless because everyone loves their products. They resist "skip" buttons because they know people don't want to see their shit. Their entire business model is based around forcing people to see things they don't want to see, but might accept as part of a package deal for seeing the stuff they do want to see.
That is the stuff that should be completely destroyed.
So, do superbowl ads not count as ads because a non-negligible portion of the viewership wants to see them? Or are you saying that there needs to be a non-negligible fraction of the viewers who don’t want to see it for it to be an ad?
There are probably a decent number of football fans who would use a "skip ads" button if they had one for the Super Bowl, so they're still some way toward the "ads" end of the spectrum. But they're certainly less objectionable than most TV ads.
(Though, that doesn’t imply that the best available definition won’t have any edge cases like this.)
I think it works better to define whether or not something is advertising based on, rather than whether the viewer wants to see it, instead by whether those putting the media where it is intend for viewing it to be (as far as they can make it) a requirement for something else.
Though, I’m not sure that even that should be considered a requirement. It seems to me like the things businesses paid money to get put on the million dollar website, should count as “ads”. I don’t see why we should define “ads” to refer exclusively to objectionable ads.
A good (but not perfect) guideline is that voluntary transactions are beneficial to both parties because otherwise they wouldn't participate, and transactions where one party doesn't actively agree to it are often bad because the other party has no incentive to make it otherwise.
That's why I focused on whether the viewer actually wants it. If I seek it out, then it's useful or at least entertaining. If I don't, then it's probably a net negative for me.
And, while definitions may not be super important (as you say), and while it is often fine to redefine a word within some context, I do think the definition I gave is probably closer to how people usually use the word “advertisement”.
My inclination is to stick on an adjective though, and refer to, say, “unwanted ads”, rather than say that the ads in a classified section “aren’t ads”.
There simply isn't enough ads for soft drinks, supermarkets or cars to reasonably fund the tech industry as it currently exists. Ad funded Facebook, perfectly fine, but that's not a $200B company, not without questionable ads for gambling, scams and shitty China plastic products.
Platforms should have higher standards, accept lower profit margins and charge users if needed, rather than resort to running ads for stuff we all now is garbage.
It is extremely common in the science/technology sector that buyers aren't looking for a solution to a problem they have because they are under the impression that a solution doesn't exist.
The archetypal business-school case study for this is the story of Viagra. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2025/03/27/viagra...
But it applies to most new technology in a less dramatic sense.
The entire point of the ad industry is to muddy the waters and psychologically manipulate consumers. It's not even remotely interested in informing, it's interested in propagandizing.
There are also many reasons that the ad industry needs to be tightly regulated, of which your point is one.
This is solved by 5 minute of searches on the web in 99% of cases really. I never in my life bought something because I've seen an ad about it, meanwhile I solved countless of my problems by thinking about the issue and looking for a solution online or talking to people about it
That’s a very weak argument that can justify anything. Why do you need electricity, a car, a fridge? There have been people living without these for thousands of years. Of course there are bad ads and useless products (probably 99% of them), but not all ads are useless.
I occasionally get the hiccups. When it happens, it’s a problem. There are many home remedies that exist, but nothing has ever actually worked. I was watching Shark Tank one day, which is basically a bunch of ads, and there was a guy selling the Hiccaway. Several years after seeing this, I decided to give it a shot. I’ve used it 2 or 3 times now and it’s instantly stopped my hiccups. I feel a little weird for a while afterward, but at least the hiccups stop.
This was a legitimate problem and I waited for an ad to solve my problem, because nothing else I tried worked, and I didn’t know this thing existed until I saw the ad. I’ve also never heard anyone talk about it outside of Shark Tank, so word of mouth clearly isn’t doing much either (at least in my circles). The topic of hiccups doesn’t come up that often. Everyone gets hiccups, but they aren’t out there actively looking for solutions. It’s just something that happens, and it sucks.
btw you can also try looking for solutions on your own, like going to a doctor, searching online ? type "hiccups solution" online and hiccaway is on the front page.
It has been this finding and solving of problems that led to our standards for what solves a problem increasing as well, for better or worse again.
I think everyone has looked for hiccups solutions at some point in their life, found them not to work, and gave up. That’s why I think this is a decent example. Adults aren’t actively searching for hiccup solutions. They gave up long ago, and most of the time, it isn’t something they think about. But when they happen, they kind of suck. Depending on when they happen, like before a big presentation, they can also be a major problem. People tend to overlook it, because they know there isn’t a real cure.
I’m not arguing for more advertisements or hiccup commercials 24x7. But there is value to some way of creating awareness of new things that are actually useful. Most advertising is trying to manufacture problems or just keep a product you already know about in the front of your mind. This is probably 95% of advertising. My argument is for a way to surface that 5%.
I've definitely investigated and eventually purchased things I first learned about through an advertisement.
Mind, usually that was from print ads in things like magazines/newspapers, the occasional direct mail ad like the old Fry's electronics mailer or movie trailers. Online ads are overwhelmingly ugly attention grabbers for things I have zero interest in or no time for when displayed.
I myself usually choose to watch trailers for movies, look at job ads and housing ads when I actually want to watch a movie, change job or move house. What pisses me off is the 99% of ads in my life that are just blasted in front of me online and in public.
It's probably silly and the answer is just that they are, but they at least meet two different types of advert to me, personally.
I would partially agree with OP in that I can't believe any adverts I've ever seen have influence a purchase from me. I actually quite often blacklist brands and products for aggressively marketing to me.
Look I'm not saying you can't live a low ad lifestyle. I don't have cable or network TV and run ad-blockers on every device I own. And yet I can look around my home and see numerous products purchased at least in part due to an ad. The Retroid Pocket sitting on my table, the M series laptop sitting in front of me. The Sony TV across the room, the game consoles under it. Heck the dog at my feet was the one I adopted because I went to an adoption event being sponsored at a local business. Even when I'm seeking a specific product out and then seeking out information, I'm looking for reviews and a lot of those reviews are given sample/free product for the purposes of making their review. That's an ad. I might be able to place more trust in that review if the reviewer doesn't give the product manufacturer editorial control they way they'd have in a sponsorship, but you can be damn sure if sending free product to independent reviewers wasn't paying off in terms of higher sales, the manufacturer wouldn't be doing it.
I interned at an ad agency once, and I really enjoy creative advertising, but frankly there's just way too much advertising in this world.
I'm curious how does this account for "town criers" and the like? And there seems to be quite a few examples of less "information dense textual statement" in some of the articles on Wikipedia about advertising [1] [2].
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_advertising [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_card
The closest experience I have had was with ads for new restaurants, of which two turned out good and one - not good. Also, twice last year, I saw trailers of new movies I wasn't aware of at the moment. However, I am sure I would later discover it via reviews or word of mouth.
And mind that it was not problem solving, just an entertainment suggestion. I can live comfortably without new restaurants, or I will eventually discover them via other channels.
There are products that do solve legitimate problems people have. Maybe there is less of that now, but in this past this was very true, and advertising helped make people aware that solutions to their problems have been developed. The first washing machine, for example.
The problem comes when the advertisement manufacturers problems that didn’t previously exist.