Devil's advocate / on the other hand: there's so much potential lost with all the effort going into producing products that make the world better, but which fall flat due to a lack of or poor advertising.
We can keep flipping this as long as we want. At the end of the day, it sucks that companies get a bigger (short-term) reward by dumping more into advertising and marketing than into the product itself.
I’m curious about all these world changing wonder products that just aren’t popular because a marketing agency wasn’t involved in manipulating... I mean educating the public.
Edit: This regards all forms of product promotion, not just paid ads.
It's like how advertisers often claim "the internet wouldn't exist without advertising".
What they really mean is all the sites (composing the majority of the internet now it seems) which have such little or negative instrinsic value that they must rely on click baiting, psychological manipulation, and selling out to advertisers would die out -- leaving only those sites which provide enough value that people care to pay for themselves, like it used to be in the "good old days"
And if the targeted advertising isn’t detected? Isn’t the whole topic here to advertise in a way that doesn’t seem like a website banner ad?
It's probably best not to discuss crypto-coinage in this context.
They are working very hard on building up the infrastructure and technology needed for total population control. The needs of an advertising company and an authoritarian government are very similar.
It's definitely a nuisance, and left unchecked can become a Black Mirror or Maniac-esque nightmare. But in it's current format it still feels like a worthwhile exchange.
The internet services themselves are almost completely nonsense that we could do without. It's difficult for me to think of a single ad-based website or application that serves a purpose outside of its' own self propagation.
The knock-on effects of circulating money for development work into new languages/libraries/frameworks might well be.
I'm rather glad I could skype my brother in Japan even when I couldn't afford international call rates.
And so on...
In my experience the sites which you pay a small monthly fee ($5-10) to are far superior
If you have literally zero money, even to spend on activities with high expected future return, your value to an advertiser is zero, and eventually they'll figure out how to not waste resources on you.
The correct answer to poverty is not 'make the world a bit shittier for everyone and hope it balances out'.
(As an aside, I also used to have ~no money, and can't really say I required ad-based sites to learn. I just pirated it all, used sites without advertising, used IRC, etc. I think this idea that everything has to be ad-supported is quite a modern phenomenon.)
A lot of the best content on the Internet is hosted by its own creators, paid out of their own pocket, out of willingness to share the knowledge.
I run a collaborative writing forum for mostly a pre-teen and teen demographic. It's the ilk of what got me into writing as a young one. They don't have money to spend, but ads keep the forum alive.
It would be extreme to say my forum has nothing to offer these youngsters, or that my lone banner-ad eclipses any good my forum may be doing.
As ads die, we're just going to continue witnessing the centralization of the internet which surely isn't all that great, either.
It's hard for me to get a sense of scale here, I wouldn't have thought that this sort of thing would require more than a token level of resources.
Everyone's charity has a limit. I consider shutting it down all the time but it becomes hard when I browse my own forum watching people connecting and writing. And losing money on this forum over the years is one of the sacrifices I've made which accelerated my return from the beaches of Thailand. Sometimes I look at that with regret. The forum cost more than my rent.
Using off-the-shelf software like vBulletin/Xenforo is expensive. You end up throwing money at scaling issues because it's essentially a black box.
I ended up migrating to my own software to wrestle control over costs. But it was an incredible amount of work to rebuild a popular forum from scratch. I could do it because I was in my mid-20s living off savings in Thailand. But I'm not, anymore, and I'm left throwing money at scaling issues again because it's hard to commit serious engineering work to something that isn't a profitable venture. The opportunity cost is huge.
I wish you the best of luck.
Such as? I can’t seem to think of any examples.
I think most of us expect that on the "Most Admired/Least Admired Scale" marketers clump towards the bottom, not the top.
There are plenty of failed KickStarters/GoFundMe's to peruse, but this is endemic among non-profits. While many do NOT offer services that could be self-supporting, many others could be, but there is insufficient business or advertising understanding to pursue being successfully self-supporting.
Among inventors, many pursue licensing or finding large partners (a reasonable idea, as far as it goes), but I've seen some pretty ridiculous advertising attempts.
But the real gold mine is from the files of marketing consultants working with teachers/service providers. Only some clients are in the "trying to make the world a better place" category, but many overlap that. Here's where you really find the greatest numbers of admirable folks very out of their depth at marketing.
From what I've observed, working to make the world better isn't mutually exclusive with understanding advertising, but is strongly anticorrelated with wanting to do it. People who think about making the world better tend to understand that advertising is a cancer on society.