I've never bought anything from an ad, never intentionally clicked one or visited a link from a podcast ad. There's truly no difference for me. Their revenue stream will remain intact, the kind of people who do that will keep doing that.
There's no way to spin this around: this reduces revenue for the creator of the free content you're consuming (and for all other creators).
Everyone loses, except for the app maker, that makes money (if they are selling the app) by sucking it out of the content creators.
But if you do happen to be right and the model falls apart, that's even better. I'll gladly chip a bit of money to creators who are worth it, but right now there's no easy and affordable way to do that. I actively want to see advertising based business models fail so we can see those systems evolve. I hate ads.
The advertising industry has repeatedly shown itself to be sleazy and underhanded and willing to throw everybody under the bus to make money for themselves. Spam, malware, pop-up ads, tracking cookies, extra loud volume commercials, etc. They can't go out of business fast enough, IMO.
You probably wouldn't defend a pay-day loan business, so why defend advertisers?
A lot of media is designed to be addictive, hooking the consumer in order to create a captive audience for ad delivery. I'm no longer sure the ads themselves, or even the tracking they often entail, are the worst thing about the whole system. That's why I'm not too bothered about giving people the tools to not see or hear ads if they so choose.
They are not, advertisement never creates value for the society, it's a 0-sum game. They never add value they only shift the stream of money from a producer which makes a good product which would sell without ads to a producer which has money to invest in ads to trick people to buy the worse product.
You're plainly, absolutely, completely, wrong. But, as you made the claim, I'll wait for your burden of proof.
> They never add value they only shift the stream of money from a producer which makes a good product which would sell without ads to a producer which has money to invest in ads to trick people to buy the worse product.
You just stated a very narrow case, as if it represented the whole.
Your argument is essentially "if you're selling well without ads, then ads will not add value", which is self-evident, but irrelevant.
Putting up a sign in front of your shop saying "New Mousetrap - Improved Design" is advertising.
If you make a better mousetrap and nobody knows about it, your mousetrap is irrelevant.
Sure, not all advertising generates benefits to society, just as not all products do.
What advertising does is a push mechanism, where they try to flood my brain with nonsense so that I get confused and don't buy the best product for me, but instead buy something the advertiser sells.
Product and price discovery can be done by me doing research, so saying that it's advertising enabling that is just dishonest.
Advertising is communication, you might not like it, but it is communication. It is product and price discovery.
That would only be true if everybody hearing the ad responded to it. Obviously that doesn't happen, and there's an implicit assumption in advertising models that only some percentage of the listeners/viewers will respond to the ads. People blocking the ads are unlikely to respond anyway, so whether they block the ads or not doesn't make much difference in the long run.
This is a good thing.
>and reducing the revenue for content producers.
They'll just have to be creative in finding ways to monetize.
Do you mean any ad ever, or just a podcast ad? If it's the former that is a pretty bold claim.