I fully understand that advertising enables many businesses.
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.
Online advertising has leveled the playing field, allowing smaller brands to compete with big names. Platforms like Google make it easy to capture attention, which is why even giants like Nike are losing market share to newer players. This shift spans all non-regulated industries. Without online ads, launching a nationwide brand would require enormous budgets, leaving us stuck with the same old monopolies.
If you're right about that being the dominant effect we should see small businesses increase as a portion of GDP as online ads become more prevalent, but as best I can tell we aren't seeing that at all. For example this[0] chart from the US Chamber of Commerce shows their share of the economy actually shrinking significantly.
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.
> if you're right about that being the dominant effect we should see small businesses increase as a portion of GDP as online ads become more prevalent
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.)
How has it leveled the playing field? It's now become an arms race of bidding for the top ad spot, even for your own brand name. The big players can out spend the little guy and even be top ranking on searches for them.
Large companies spend quite a bit of money on online advertising, and also on research on that. They test their materials, they have data teams for comparing campaign results. And they can hijack other brand names if they pay enough. I wouldn't place my washing machine on your playing field.
After rereading a few times, I think I've parsed your argument:
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.
i know what you're saying, but really now, you know what i mean. some scribbles on a pancard or some fish monger shouting above the crowd, it's not the same as the mass media ads that find you everywhere willingly and unwillingy, 24/7. so before 1900, why not, to make it easy. let's go back there.
I'll try to explain to the young people how bad things used to be.
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!
> 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".
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.
Yes and you also don't need to reach all your customers directly. If you make a good product word of it will spread naturally. Ads actually inhibit that by taking over people's attention and pre-empting any interested customers from finding you by showing them your competitors first. So you end up paying for the reach that the advertisement industry took away from you in the first place.
Of course, word of mouth requires you to actually make a good product whereas with advertisment it's enough if your product looks good.
The old ways would have been to buy ads on warhammer.com, or the Warhammer magazine, sponsor the annual Warhammer convention, run a tournament, and so on. The money, in that case, may largely stay within the ecosystem, rather than going to some investment fund owning shares of google.
"Many" feels like it is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.
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...)
> 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
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.
In general advertising is low ROI, the tradeoff being that it's "easy."
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.
If you rely on advertising you should not be outsourcing it to google anyway. You should have more control over that part of your business which means it needs to be at least partially in house. Even if you do take some google ads, make sure you have other partners and make sure that ads meet your standards (not a scam, not for your competitors).
You don't rely on Google to handle everything, it's self-service. Whether you use Google or another platform depends entirely on where your audience is. For example, my father runs a small construction company, and 90% of his leads come from Google search. That’s where people are looking for services like his.
Emphasis on _advertising in its current form_, I think it's a valuable means to be able to a). monetize something and b). to spread awareness. But I agree with GP that as a society we're allowing companies to grossly over-engineer our lives around ads.
I started a small business selling candles during the pandemic. It's crazy how quickly you change your opinion about advertisements once you start needing to advertise your own business. All of the sudden, they're this amazing benefit for society.
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.
> All of the sudden, they're this amazing benefit for society.
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.
If you know you need something, great! You don't need advertisements. But there are a lot of things that you never would have thought of if they hadn't been advertised to you. Things that you would now consider necessities. Like toilets. You better believe it took a ton of advertising to get everybody to stop crapping in holes or buckets. I'm sure those people were annoyed by those advertisements too.
> 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.
How are ads for less relevant products better? If the user tracking data is used only for showing ads and doesn't leak I would guess 99% of people would care about getting tracked.
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.
And how is that going to work for all the non-English speaking countries? If that were the case then I could see more stringent regulations on which languages you can use for media creation depending on where the company is from.
It'll work same way browsers know what language to present their main content in: either via the Accept-Language HTTP header, or through a UI element on the website that lets the visitor choose the language.
But then they are not based on the context of the website. This is just the same tracking with another name.
>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.
People rarely have issues with advertising in general. They want to know about the special edition Coke, new bikes/guitars/phones/etc, local small businesses, whatever.
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.
> *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.
So the existence of for-pay search engines would disprove the assertion that advertisements are necessary, as there are alternate ways to find information and fund businesses that fetch you that information, without relying on ads.
The reason people turned to ad-blockers is because the ads became too intrusive. They were fine (or at least bearable) when they were just simple text boxes next to your Google search results, or maybe when they were static banner ads. But then the advertisers came up with pop-ups, pop-unders, video ads, 2-hour long ads in the middle of YouTube videos, and all kind of other nasty shenanigans that hijacked your computer and rendered it completely unusable. The advertisers have only themselves to blame for ad-blockers.
> And why do you think that vendors create search-friendly pages? Advertising!
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.
You won't be looking for a product you don't need. You will be looking for solutions if you have a need even if you don't know the specific product you need.
Sorry for the snark, but no one anywhere needs advertising. Advertising in it's current form is a plague on humanity.