advertising would just shift to product placement in the news you get and affiliate links everywhere. not better. people tend to forget that advertising covers a real need.
If all advertising disappeared tomorrow, the world would function better. Consumers would not have advertisers trying to manipulate them, and they would more rationally allocate their resources.
Advertising is a tax placed on people who have already bought a product, which made it more expensive, to manipulate other people into also buying that same product.
Without it, good products would succeed on merit / independent reviews / word of mouth.
* The one exception I can think of is possibly during the scale period of startups, helping them scale faster (artificially) than if they just followed the "be the best and it will catch on" approach.
I'd love to not play the advertising game, but marketing seems to be one of the most important parts of running a business, if not the most important part, and it'll get its grimy hands on anything to acquire users. I'd prefer to avoid the world where they pay people to post rave reviews in HN comments to hype products.
I don't buy it. Advertising is not going to provide me with the service that is the most suited to my need, or with the best value. In fact, quite the opposite: the advertisement that's the most likely to reach me comes from the company with the largest budget for advertisement. That budget eats into either the profit of the company or into the quality of service delivered.
In short, there’s nothing inevitable about advertising models as they exist today, and people who try to convince of you that they are inevitable are peobsbly trying to sow apathy.
This is of course selection buas.