It would at the very least reduce the amount of it and select for advertising of a higher quality, cutting the noise a little.
If it does increase spending on things being advertised, the absence leaves us with more money for all those other things that are currently ad-supported.
If it doesn't, it's a scam.
If those things supported by ads would be literally unaffordable by the consumers if not for those ads, because the consumers are so poor they have no money to spend, the fork is still true; it's just that if those ads work then they push those already-poor consumers into debt for things they'd otherwise not buy because they couldn't afford, making them even poorer.
By definition it shows an issue where we have a process that tricks human minds into thinking they aren't paying for something, when as a collective, we pay more for a worse service than we would have if it existed in a alternate framework.
it’s always really jarring when I visit my parents and I’m forced to watch cable TV. It’s like being assaulted.
Ironic, as most of the furries I know hate GenAI with a passion.
I have no idea how this is still a viable product. Coasting off Boomer's 50+ year old habits I guess?
Making as much money as possible off consumers is considered the highest business goal. Of course that leads to developing expertise in manipulating them.
A cursory search shows that the average person is exposed to ~5000 ads a day in the US. Everyone is screaming for your attention. It's not healthy.
People have plenty of other ways of finding out about useful products and services. You can talk to your friends and family, or go to a store and talk to a salesperson, or look up product reviews online, or even pay for something like a Consumer Reports subscription.
How often does an actual random advertisement shown on a billboard or a preroll youtube ad actually lead to a quality product? I think it is fairly common for people who are acquiring the best versions of things to do so primarily through research in forums or reviews, which is coming from the user looking from the product, rather than the product forcing itself into the mind of a given user to convince them to consume it.
But the truth is most modern products aren't good enough to earn word of mouth.
A good example of how to work it right is Steam: while it is not perfect, most discussions give them benefit of doubt because most of the time they do work for the best interest of their customers, not just themselves.
In my opinion, it would take quite a lack of imagination to ask such a question.
There's many many ways to reach people who want your product. Industry-relevant news publishers and conferences, professional/personal anecdotes (eg, blogs and recommendations), demonstrations and training offers, etc.
A different question would be: by what other means would businesses force their products on people who don't want them? Hopefully the answer is: none.
Certainly we wouldn't be better off if advertising were beamed 24/7 at full blast into your ears and eyes the second you step out into any public space.
About 5% of its current proliferation would be a nice target to aim for - maybe a maximum of 200 ads a day[1] - but if that still proves to be an issue, we could always go lower.
---
[1] With maybe five rising to the level of notice.
Western society would cease to exist if it didn't continue its diabolical lies, falsehoods and abuse. The lies are not optional.
It is because of pragmatic regard for survival of the status quo that the lies do continue. That word 'pragmatic' is what keeps diabolical people from seeing themselves for what they are.
Scarcity advertising is, for example, "Joe's grocery now has cantaloupes" (back in the day when cantaloupes were not available all year). It's information - something is now available that wasn't available before.
Abundance advertising is, for example, "The Chevrolet SomeHotCar will give you an exciting life like the people in this ad. Don't you want that?" As someone put it (wish I remember who, I would give credit): "[This kind of] advertising attempts to make the person you are envy the person you could be with their product. In other words, it attempts to steal your satisfaction and then offers to sell it back to you."
The first kind of advertising is useful. The second is abusive.
What can we as individuals do about it? Recognize advertising as hostile and banish it. Most of us, instead, are trying to assemble a worldview out of mismatched pieces of advertising, which is not working out very well. When we write and think, we are often thinking in units of advertising, which is a horrifying realization.
Even the fact that this discussion is being framed in terms of Happiness and Satisfaction is downstream of those qualities being centered by the consumer value system. Previous societies might have considered integrity or duty primary.
Newspapers & magazines drive the negative link. TV/radio/film ads show no clear effect
some evidence of the contrary: DTC pharmaceutical ads about Zoloft, a depression medication, cause better health outcomes
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/695475
not merely correlation but causation. the approach used here was part of a family of approaches that won the Nobel in 2012
another good one: advertising caused increases in treatment and adherence to medicine
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37275770/
there is also a great paper that scary lawyer ads about statins CAUSE lower adherence to statins, so negative advertising causes negative outcomes. unsurprising.
i'm not saying that these two papers generalize to the whole of digital advertising. it is as difficult to generalize about global digital advertising at it is to generalize about the US defense budget - they are comparable in size (about $800b/y both) and complexity of missions. it does feel good though. i'm glad this comment will get downvoted by people who are not interested in actually discussing the merits of the paper versus their vibes.
instead you could look at it as a victory for the FDA, it has done a great job at regulating drugs (at least since 1965 when the SSA created medicare and the regulations started to matter) such that advertising them is mostly a good thing. You can extrapolate from there to say, well we should regulate what you can advertise instead of delegating it out to upvotes and downvotes on Facebook, which is really how bad and good ads are controlled.
How can you get a reputation for a high-quality well-researched podcast(/youtuber) when your voice(/face) can be cloned by the advertiser who buys a slot somewhere in your podcast(/video) to sell some snakeoil?
Are those your friends you're seeing on social media enjoying ${brand} or supporting ${politician}? Or did your friends all leave the site years ago, and these are just fakes, legally licenced by the advertisers from the social media firm thanks to a clause in the TOS that's hard for non-lawyers to comprehend the consequences of?
Companies based around advertising would die, yes, but they only exist in the first place because of how lucrative the activity is. Nobody is sitting around dreaming of how they could sell ads better than anyone else while not thinking of the financial compensation. At least I hope they aren't.
If someone was saying "many people have jobs in running offshore internet sports betting companies, if we put regulations on offshore internet sports betting, it would remove jobs" wouldn't the natural question be whether those industries are actually productive to have people employed in, or if it's a harmful industry overall? Generally in my view its somewhat sad that the system as a whole optimizes for advertising work rather than orienting in a way that everyone could be putting their work towards something they see as more fulfilling.
There is certainly more need for product discoverability broadly than something like online gambling, but I think the more relevant conversation is if the current advertising model is more like a local minima preventing progress towards a more economically viable method of handling product discoverability.
So far there are a few known theoretical approaches to reward content-creators:
* subscriptions/paywalls
* advertising
* micro-transactions
Paywalls work if you have a high brand value with a relatively fixed audience that will accept a steady stream of content. The WSJ, NYT, etc. can command these. Even Slow Boring et al. can do that. But the majority of smaller brand value content creators face the terrible fact that brands have a Pareto property: the top few ones occupy almost all of customers' minds and then you're battling for a tiny portion of their attention. The subscription revenue is similar to a patronage model, and information in general has to be like this because replicating it is zero cost but obtaining it is high-cost. This means that you can easily be out-competed by the guy who just copies your stuff and posts it. You have to somehow convince your audience that it's worth paying for your next stuff.
Micro-transactions are the weakest model. They are infeasible and socially unacceptable because consumers expect the full range of financial protection they have on 'macro'-transactions - and that cannot come for free. This sets a floor on micro-transactions and the overhead makes that not worth it. To make it worse, a micro-transaction-based economy has the problem that you don't really incentivize the content creator. You incentivize the guy who can best capture your attention. Either SEO or submarine Word-of-Mouth or native advertising. It doesn't matter which. That guy can always undercut the creator because he's not producing the thing he's selling. It's worse for information-things like Slow Boring etc. Matt Yglesias cannot stop someone from copy-pasting his stuff.
For the vast majority of content creators, advertising is a fantastic thing. It allows this massive three-sided marketplace between consumers, content creators, and brands. It lowers the marketing effort so more creators can participate. It allows consumers to pay for content by getting things they want. It allows brands to reach consumers they want.
To be honest, I think Internet Advertising and especially the real-time bidding approach is as good as one can imagine for the vast majority of people to be able to consume all the content they want. It's led to this absolute explosion of services and information that no one could ever have imagined.
And the low barrier on running targeted ads has meant that even small indie bands can survive with a good marketing effort. Gone are the days when only the big multinationals were taste-makers. Now you have micro-audiences that smaller creators can reach and for whom it's worth them producing content for.
Honestly, it's fantastic to see. I'm a huge fan of advertising for what it's enabled. I prefer to use YouTube Premium, and I have my subscriptions, but when I didn't have as much money it was much nicer to be able to trade by allowing brands to be seen by me. So yes, there are the shady football streaming sites that will shove porno into your face, but you know the game going there. For the rest of the world, I think the websites are correctly on the frontier of value vs. annoyance.
Also, is it just me or are the results mostly statistically insignificant here? It seems like a grand claim with very weak evidence.
When they stretch the p-value threshold for significance to p<0.1, they claim magazine advertising expenditure reached that threshold.
TV, Radio, and Cinema advertising did not reach significance even at the expanded p<0.1 threshold.
The methodology of the paper is also not great at all. They looked at changes in advertising expenditure and changes in happiness measures and then tried to correlate the two.
mrdevlar•44m ago
sharkweek•20m ago
As someone who used to think I was generally “immune” to advertising, I have come to realize the influence goes so much deeper than “see ad on TV, go buy product” and is instead a much, much darker sense of “the only way to get rid of this anxiety is to Buy More Stuff.”
His more recent Can’t Get You Out of My Head is also fantastic about how we got from There to Here from WWII to present day.