What if we just got rid of digital advertising altogether in the US? How many issues of privacy, health and personal finance would disappear or be greatly reduced?
It’s hard for me to imagine what that would look like or the downsides other than to the digital advertising industry itself.
Advertising plays an important role in the sale of digital goods and the physical sale of goods through digital means. It’s the only way you can really drive traffic to unknown markets.
Without advertising You’re going to be relying on YouTube videos or Google Play store or Apple store to get any sales. Any free online services would probably be a thing of the past. Small businesses would have trouble competing with larger entities can already put products in your face.
It’s not impossible to remove digital advertising and replace it with something else but I’m pretty sure the something else would be worse than what we have already
Targeted advertising, which requires collecting personal information without people’s knowledge, is what makes online advertising the absolute worst kind of advertising. That could be addressed on a way that could allow other less malicious forms to exist.
Opie did not say targeted advertising OP said get rid of all advertising I was responding to that
You’re going to find that the appetite for un-targeted advertising to be much lower than that of targeted. The ROI for un-targeted blast is much lower than a smaller more focused targeted campaign.
As such, you’ll either see even more ads on the same content (in order to obtain similar level of revenue for the publisher), or, as the other user suggested, free ad supported service be a thing of the past.
Neither of which are good for the mass audience. People already aren’t willing to pay $1 to remove ads on most free ad supported apps, you’re going to find small businesses collapse left right and centre as result of the change.
I go through significant efforts to block digital advertising at multiple levels. Yet, I do not find it difficult to discover new things to buy (from both small and large businesses).
For myself, I suspect most of that is supported through online communities related to my interests and hobbies. Those purchases feel more informed and often more intentional too.
That is a very well placed observation from a consumer standpoint. Now consider it from a flower shop in your neighborhood trying to compete with the grocery store and FTD.com
How are you going to get your foot traffic other than word of mouth and people seeing you in a stripmall?
Targeted digital ads let you get in front of people in your area. There are very very few local websites anymore.
I block most ads too, but there’s no denying that occasionally on facebook, some semi-local brewpub goes hey, check out our new menu items and it turns out to be a win for them and for me.
Advertising is dicey, in a lot of cases, it’s in the hands of the enemy but the economy, especially small business doesn’t float without it.
No, advertising is not necessary when a user can search a catalogue with multiple optional constraints, as we did in the olden days of printed catalogues.
Advertising is harmful - it’s somebody trying to persuade you that you need to buy a thing. First, you’ll usually know when you need something. Second, the salesman is not someone you’d believe normally.
It’s an interaction which normally should be initiated by you, not by sellers. Which makes advertising utterly useless immediately.
I’d argue the catalog could be seen as advertising though.
“This is what you can buy from us” and the language in those catalogs presents everything in the best possible light.
Catalogs were almost always free, because it marketed products to consumers… Aka advertising.
Not only that, but advertising pays the bills for the majority of websites. It’s a necessary evil unless people want to pay every website host to see their content.
I’m not sure how true this perception is in more recent years. Many popular sites, with enormous traffic volumes that could drive digital impression ad revenue, are instead pushing subscriptions or other monetization models.
For instance, the New York Times makes — by far — more money on digital subscriptions than digital advertising. Digital advertising revenues are also declining for them.
Another example is Spotify, where ad revenue from their ad-supported tier did not cover their operational costs and now represents around only a tenth of their revenue compared to subscriptions.
The exceptions to this are generally search and social media sites, where the product for sale on these sites are the users themselves. They’re just advertising platforms, which of course make their money from digital advertising.
So I’d say one issue with digital advertising is that it often does not pay the bills for the site owner. Its value is tied to its ability to convert visitors to buyers, but it has to be ramped up to such an extreme level it instead only creates bad experiences.
I wonder how many sales really go down just driven by the dystopian internet ads that pop up into your face or hide half the screen…
Not all ads are like that. I work for a small company that needs targeted advertising, we don’t spend for a couple of months out of the year when things just become insanely expensive I’m trying to rely on organics. It’s a significant drop when you turn off that UA spend. For advertising budget pays for itself many times over
No one is forced to use our advertising technologies – they choose to use them because they’re effective.
Like an antlion saying “ants aren’t forced to fall into my trap! They choose to!”.
Google’s advertisement monopoly is directly associated with its other monopolies: browser monopoly, search, mobile OS, video sharing. It can use each of those monopolies to change the rules of the game ever slightly, to prevent competitors from entering or remaining into the market.
“You don’t have to add ads to your webpage, but if you don’t nobody will find you using our search engine”
They be making everyone “choose” to add their ads/trackers to their website
And now they are also making everyone agree to having their data splurged up by the giant monstrosity that is now google: share or die.
All disguised as real choices 😁
This will be interesting to watch and I’m not against it. I just wish they were investigating Royal Dutch Shell, Phillip Morris, Koch Industries, or Goldman Sachs with the same fervor. While Google has certainly done some evil, they aren’t even in my top 100 for evil actors that are exploiting us all to enrich themselves.
I’d argue they’re in the top 2 or 3.
What they’ve done is far more insidious than anyone else - much of the world willingly gives everything about their lives to Google, who uses that information (and provides it to whoever they choose) in all sorts of ways.
We know they’ve given data to the police which has affected innocent people.
There’s also a question about it’s origin possibly being from the NSA, etc.
This poses as much a threat as anything, and yet most people are completely unaware (and even when they are aware they don’t seem to mind because “convenience”), whereas most people have some awareness of the modern-day version of Dutch East Indies company, they just don’t think they can do anything about it (unlike Google and the rest of FAANG)
Don’t threaten us with a good time
“> driving out rivals, diminishing competition, inflating advertising costs, reducing revenues for news publishers and content creators, snuffing out innovation, and harming the exchange of information and ideas in the public sphere.”
I feel like it is going to be hard to prove that Google’s anti-competitive actions have inflated advertising costs. Also, did news publishers lose revenue because of Google or was it Craigslist and jobs sites that killed their classified business?
Google is definitely a monopoly and has acted badly, but proving the harm in this way is going to be tricky. The government should go after them for privacy, the place where they have clearly abused their relationship with the public. Google normalizing spying on users has created the data economy that has resulted in us being spied upon us all the time and having all of our personal data being leaked over and over again.
