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That's a false comparison, because there's a huge difference between ads-as-information and ads-as-empty-noise.

If you buy a trade magazine it's a given the ads will be targeted to a specific area of interest. The bad ads are simply not very interesting, and the good ads add real value to the experience by giving you useful information and/or entertaining you.

But when you turn the page, they're gone. Print ads leave you with some agency.

Most ads on the web seem to be completely untargeted. And when they are targeted, they're not targeted very well. And even if they are targeted well, they're incredibly repetitive.

Web ads don't give you agency. They treat you as a passive consumer who needs to be forced to see the same stupid banners over and over. Most of the time the banners are simply annoying. Even when they're not, they have a much lower information content than a print ad.

So unlike a print ad, which will be some combination of irrelevant, beautiful, sparsely presented, and informative, they carpet bomb your browsing experience with noisy low-value distractions.

Instead of adding to the experience, they take away from it.

And from the seller's point of view, it's damn near impossible to work out the ROI. You can't assume that view-click-sale works, because often people will research a product before buying. So you don't know if they've seen the ad once, or fifty times, or been persuaded to buy in some other way.

There certainly is an arms race, but it's gone in a completely ineffective direction.

IMO there's a lot of money to be made by bringing some intelligence back into web marketing. Instead of just spurting banners everywhere or using not-so-bright algos to do poor targeting, the ad industry might want to consider going back to ads that add value, instead of treating customers like not very intelligent prey that has to be herded down a funnel.

They are supposed to be programmatically targeted, but programmatic is not as accurate as it's billed as. They do get targeted, but a lot of the traffic that they go after is spoofed somehow or otherwise inaccurate. Models of web traffic are much less accurate than unmodeled subscriber rolls.

Lots of high end people pay out the nose for information collection and shaping. They're called assistants. Others pay for specialized newspapers and magazines for their profession. There is no such thing as 'free' media because time and attention have value. If the information is more important than the entertainment value, then you can pay someone $10-15 an hour part time to read everything that you need read and give you a digest.

You can also have an ad-free life by paying someone else to read the news for you and moving to a rural area, where there are few billboards.

Print ads tend to have better targeting because the subscriber rolls get backed up with credit card numbers in most cases. This is a case in which early 20th century technology is a lot more reliable than 21st century programmatic advertising.

>And from the seller's point of view, it's damn near impossible to work out the ROI. You can't assume that view-click-sale works, because often people will research a product before buying. So you don't know if they've seen the ad once, or fifty times, or been persuaded to buy in some other way.

Actually, you can, at a certain level of scale and spending on many platforms. That requires the user fingerprinting that bugs privacy advocates so much. It's called 'cross-channel attribution,' and there's a lot of material out there about it.

Also, it's not that users aren't intelligent. Most people are pretty dumb, but few of the people with disposable income are dumb. You use repetition because you're only getting a fragment of someone's attention, and a fragment of someone's cognition is pretty 'stupid.'

I don't need to know there's a new Star Wars movie coming out.

Scarcity seems to breed innovation, so maybe cutting the cord and creating a financial incentive will have some brilliant people come up with better models than I can for free on my spare time.

Maybe after a period of downtime, we'll all reminisce about the good old days and vote in some kind of universal internet-real-estate tax, allowing people to pledge bandwidth to people whose content they enjoy to aid in its dissemination, on a "one-person-one-attention-unit" basis. Who even knows?

>Advertising is the method most people use to discover new products/services.

Do you have a source for that?

>How would you know there's a star wars movie coming out?

By being interested in science fiction movies, being part of a community of people with like interests, theater showtimes, etc.

Why do i need to know 6 months beforehand that a star wars movie will eventually come out?

Why would i need to know any sooner than a week before the release date?

>How would you know about new products and services you might be interested in buying.

By having an interest in buying them, and then doing research regarding which product will best fit my needs.

>which tell me about companies who provide things I might be interested in

Or do the advertisements give you an itch and a tool to scratch it?

>which has many adverts related to bee-keeping. That's valuable

In what way?

Are you incapable of finding a new bee-keeping related product without first seeing an advertisement?

Can you not google the item you need and then compare the options amongst each other?

Can you not simply search on amazon or some bee-keeping friendly retailer?

Are you not part of a community of bee-keepers who you can ask for recommendations about products?

If you've ever heard of:

Costco

Krispy Kreme

Kiehls

Spanx

Lululemon

Rolls Royce

Zara

Jiffy muffin mix

NO-AD sunscreen

Then you've disproven you're entire argument, as those are all brands that have $0 advertising budget, and do no advertising.

In my industry advertising is indeed a key way in which office designers find out about new products.

One form of advertising which is commonly utilized is a yearly trade show where manufacturers rent showroom space to show off their products to prospective buyers. This model makes sense because it gets 60,000 people with purchasing power into the same building to see what products are new and what the latest design ideas are. There is no hidden agenda here and everyone knows what is going on.

This is the same basic concept as a magazine or website advertisement where you try to get a bunch of likeminded people in one industry with purchasing power to subscribe and read the magazine or website. The advertisements (paper showrooms space) are used to show cool pictures of new products companies are selling and now one is fooled by that.

In this industry, manufacturers have brand recognition and a reputation so seeing an ad for a new office chair by X company is an effective way to announce to people who already know of and like your brand that you have a new product.

Hacker News leverages its niche audience to 'advertise' job listings for Y Combinator funded companies. I could probably find out about those jobs elsewhere if I were currently looking for a job, but I'm willing to trade seeing them for using this site. I expect many other people don't mind advertising when it is tastefully done and on-topic with the website or magazine they read or are subscribed to.

Personally, I had never heard of Kiehls, Spanx, Lululemon, Zara, Jiffy muffin mix, or NO-AD sunscreen. However, I don't know if advertising would help me remember these brands better, as I don't buy their class of products often.

> Just because there's some bad advertising on the internet, it doesn't mean all advertising is useless.

The problem is it's not just some. At first, there was bounds of worthless advertising. Classical random banner ads have about zero revenue, and have had for over a decade. Instead of good advertisements, we got pop-up ads, pop-under ads, flashing animated gif ads, autoplay video ads, autoplay audio ads, ads that pretended to be native OS dialogs, link ads, … just to grab the users' attention anyway, and trick a few into buying absolute crap they didn't want. Ad networks getting used as vectors to infect computers (cf. latest Firefox/pdfjs exploit) are just the final nail in the coffin.

Print magazine ads work well because they don't try to infect me with viruses, don't try to trick me, don't make my fan run at 100%, don't drain my monthly data plan in a day (or battery in an hour), and don't keep me from reading the rest of the magazine. Had web advertisement stayed that same, I doubt we would ever have seen adblockers gain a substantial marketshare – nobody would use them if installing them was more of a hassle than just ignoring adverts.

I'd...search for things I need? Or rely on word-of-mouth via people I actually care about? (Of course, you could argue that these are also forms of advertising, in which case this argument ultimately devolves to "people hear about things most often by hearing about them".)

Or: even though it might be possible to interest me in buying said products and services, maybe I don't need/want them enough to justify the purchase, and so reducing/eliminating pervasive psychological coercion is in fact helping me to act in my rational self-interest?

Also: "most businesses are supported by X, therefore X is good and/or there is no viable alternative to X" just doesn't hold water as an argument. For instance: "most businesses are supported by chattel slavery..."; "most businesses are supported by the local feudal warlord..."; "most businesses are supported by the infinite benevolence of the Church...", and so on - failure to imagine a different model is a failure of imagination and/or historical perspective, not of existence.

A contrary (and more accurate view) is that advertising suggests things that people don't really need.

Here's a "magical alternative": if you make something the least bit good/useful, people don'e need to be beat over the head with it - they'll find it.

Advertising is vapid, inaccurate, and a blight.

> Advertising is the method most people use to discover new products/services.

Prove it. I can just as easily pull out my ass "Word of mouth and browsing in-store or online is the method most people use to discover new products/services."