> Yeah, it's even got a name: shopping.

So, for direct to consumer companies who only ship online, SEO?

Here's the thing: ads can be useful.

Awhile back I got a, highly targeted, ad for high protein sugar free cereal. That's awesome! I am 100% the target audience for that product, and until I saw that ad I had no clue it existed! To find a product like that I'd have to search for it, but I would never search for an entire new category of product that I didn't know about.

Same thing for the fitness app I am using (BodBot, it is amazing!). I am quite literally healthier right now because of a targeted advertisement.

Was I aware of fitness apps before then? Sure. But the ad for BodBot was informative about what features differentiated it from the literally hundreds, if not thousands, of other competing apps.

Do most ads suck? Sure. Should ads be highly invasive? Nope. But interest tracking and basic targeting actually help me find products and services that I want to buy!

Facebook in particular, for all the things wrong with it (long list!) has some amazingly relevant ads that inform me of products that I never knew about.

So let's designate .biz as the place where advertisements live, and turn it into the online yellow pages (plus all the other scum to be expected) and ban anything resembling advertising from every other TLD.

Those who want to shop know where to go. Those who don't, know where to avoid.

hey man, that's great and i'm happy you're healthier because of advertising. My experience has been the opposite (yes, advertising making me and my family UNhealthier -- mentally and emotionally). I don't want targeted ads, but I can understand that you do.

Perhaps there is a way we can both enjoy the internet in our preferred ways. Perhaps not, I don't know.

And how do you know about the existence of a product to go shop for in the first place, if not through advertising and promotion?

Or do you have infinite time to go browse every single store in your city on the odd chance that you'll see something you want?

There are these wonderful things now called search engines. And they existed before online advertising was tied to search, so before you say search engines would not exist without advertising attached to search queries, think again.

How do you know to search for something if you haven't heard about it before... via some kind of... promotion?

I get the point you're making, but I hope you realize you're just backpedaling from your original "no advertisements ever!" statement.

I believe in giving people better control over how they receive ads (I personally run an ad blocker in my browsers and a Pi Hole on my network), but you position that there should be no advertising at all, and that all ads are unethical is just silly, and you're proving that point yourself here..

It must be hard to be this naive ^^

I assume you meant to reply to sbarre

You’re proving my point.