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Comment by askafriend | Hacker News Reader

Targeted ads have helped small businesses and indie brands thrive.

Previously, only large brands and national/multi-national corporations could afford to advertise at scale and reach customers through TV/Radio/Newspapers (that too with a high minimum spend).

Now your local mom and pop bakery could have a spend as low as $100 a month to reach their customers and help drive their business.

The world is not black and white, and neither is the morality of advertising.

I hope this perspective was useful to you.

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Even ignoring the morality, this is all ultimately driving the adoption of ad blocking. Advertising online is an industry digging its own grave, which would be fine except they’re going to bury a lot of those small and indie sites with them.

I don't think ads inherently promote ad blocking, but you're right: this specific instance of an ad breaking links and lowering the quality of other sites does indeed promote a culture of ad blocking (if they can remove the fbclid param?).

I don't see any indication that advertising online is an industry digging its own grave. On the contrary, the increase in quality of ads over the past 10+ years (especially in terms of unobtrusiveness and relevance) would suggest to me that online advertising is digging its way _out_ of the grave it dug itself with flashy, irrelevant ads throughout the 90s and early 00s.

While this is completely true, it is worth noting that a huge majority of the $100 ads that are marketed as the channel that enable small businesses to "thrive" are Facebook or Google ads, and they are professionals at confusing these business owners with vanity metrics, payment / pricing models, constraints on packages, etc (and this is just from the buyers side, these cos have massive leverage on the publishers' end as well).

Until the 100$ run out and the ad service starts marketing the competition.

it was, and thank you for sharing it.

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