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Comment by dwild | Hacker News Reader

I would have agreed in the past but now that my SO has started an escape room, if your ideal world existed, she would be bankrupt right now.

Most ads isn't about manipulation, it's just about getting your attention and reminding you that this product exists.

Ads are the only way to reach her market. You could argue that search is a good one too (which is true), but sadly people have trouble paying to watch videos online, there's no way they would pay for a search engine. We are still not really high in the search result after a year of existence either and paying for ads is a good way to get people on the website (which I'm sure will help our position in search results).

EDIT: In case it's not clear, I don't believe she deserve to be higher than other escape room in the search result, we have actually almost no competition close to us and it's pretty much why she started that business. Simply that Google have no metric to know that her website has to be higher than another one, so clicks are needed to provide some.

She always asks people what they think of the experience once they are done and recently one even said that we are not visible enough. It's a pretty great feedback, we are lucky that's our main issue, but sadly ads are the only way to become visible to others.

Ads are almost amazing by allowing investment into market that people aren't ready to pay for but yet provide great entertainment, learning experience or a great service. Without ads, I probably wouldn't be the developper that I am today because the guy that did the great tutorial that create the passion in me wouldn't have time to works full time on them.

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Yes, you are right, there are (at least) two effects of advertising:

1. Education (let people know a company/product exists)

2. Manipulation (by various means)

From a moral point of view, the first effect is not bad. It actually helps people to make better decisions and extend their knowledge about available products and services.

However, the second effect is the harmful one. Since companies are trying to make money, they want as many people as possible to buy their products. So they start lying, leaving the negative aspects of their products out, use visual material that creates yearning contexts, present the information at a higher frequency than relevant and so on. So saying it is just about getting your attention is a huge understatement.

Simply put, the advertising industry tries to find human vulnerabilities on a daily basis. Sadly, not to inform and help protect us, but to exploit them. If advertising was actually about helping society, the spending would be more like a tax (independent from the effect), the visual appearance would be standardized and the process of presenting ads would be strictly controlled by a neutral entity. Furthermore, everybody would be allowed to not participate. Maybe the receivers of that valuable, educating information should even pay to have access to it.

And I am sure, at this point you are with me, that the majority of ads aren't about educating people but about placing information in their heads.

Agreed. A couple of exercises I recommend to everybody:

1) Take a day and for each ad you see note how much novel, useful information you receive from it.

2) For any ad that had significant novel, useful information, redesign it in a format that is optimized to be informative, with any manipulation subtracted. (E.g., imagine it written in the style of the best encyclopedia articles.)

Doing this makes it pretty clear that pure information is a very, very small portion of what's going on with advertising.

> if your ideal world existed, she would be bankrupt right now

[citation needed]

You're making a couple of mistakes here. One is imagining that in a world without ads, her experience would be the same as her not advertising. The other is that something that is bad for a given business is something that's bad for society. Both of these are at best unproven.

> Most ads isn't about manipulation

For every ad you see today, ask yourself how much useful new information you have gained from it. I've done that a few times and it's pretty close to zero. Note that the biggest spenders on ads are brands you've already heard of, suggesting that your theory needs some revision.

> [citation needed]

I can't really give financial, but believe me, after having to spend 30k$ more because of some problems, we only had about 6k$ to pay for 5k$ a month of expense. After a year, in a location surrounded by restaurants (more than a dozen), with quite a bit of event closeby, with quite a bit of people going around, the amount of people that found out about us outside of ads, is barely a handful.

After a full year, even while spending for ads, even if we can count on 1 hand the number of people that had a bad experience, we are still barely profitable and still, almost everyone only finds us with ads and not word of mouth. We still have a pretty big list of people that wait after our third room impatiently, I think there's not a day where there's not someone that mentions it.

The thing is, even if an escape room is fun, even if I think that anyone can enjoy them, sadly our public is a tiny fraction of the population and even if theses enthusiast talks about it to others, it just doesn't reach enough other enthusiast people.

> One is imagining that in a world without ads, her experience would be the same as her not advertising.

Then you would have to explain to me how she could reach people between 10 km to 300 km aways without ads in the first 6 months of existence.

> The other is that something that is bad for a given business is something that's bad for society.

Her business is great, people are all crazy about the experience, that's a few thousands of peoples that wouldn't have that experience that they enjoyed quite a bit, simply because they are too few in a huge market.

> For every ad you see today, ask yourself how much useful new information you have gained from it.

From the ads itself? More than 0. From the content that has been paid from it? More than thousands actually. I wouldn't have read your comment, simply because Hacker News is a place that advertize ycombinator startup.

> Note that the biggest spenders on ads are brands you've already heard of, suggesting that your theory needs some revision.

It's actually exactly what I'm talking about. You think about Coke regularly? I'm pretty sure you don't.

It's sad but in this world of so many choice, you need to keep reminding people you exist or else they may switch to another choice they may see more (doesn't even have to be ads related, could be just more people that consume it at that moment, could be a location that have a contract with that brand, etc..).

So both in a world where you are known or not, you need to remind people that you are a possibility to even be considered.

Even in the amazing marketing space that is a supermarket where you can extremly easily browse a good amount of choice, brands pay for the right of a specific shelf because that will sell more.

Imagine how much worse it is when you don't even have all the choices in front of you.

Again, you are extremely fixated on her specific case in the current environment. I get it, it's your girlfriend, you're protective and defensive. You seem entirely unable/unwilling to see beyond that situation, which I get, but that means I don't see further explanations as likely to change anything.

I don't have a dog in this hunt, but perhaps one problem is assuming that people know what an escape room is?

I certainly don't, and if that's all it said on the door as I was walking to a restaurant, I certainly would not stop in.

Maybe the benefit of online advertising is simply making people who know what it is aware that there is one in their zip code. (Option awareness for the primed is a thing.)

> I don't have a dog in this hunt, but perhaps one problem is assuming that people know what an escape room is?

Oh yeah definitely, that's something that we will need to do in our city because the concept is too new. We just don't have too much time and money to invest in that. We were going to do that recently in a festival, but we learned too late that it wasn't going to happen in an adjacent park ^^' like it always did in the past.

> Maybe the benefit of online advertising is simply making people who know what it is aware that there is one in their zip code.

Yeah that what ads does in our case. We hope that word of mouth will help show more people it's fun.

Thanks.

I guess also embedded in my comment was a question: what is an escape room business?

It appears to be a game?

How long does it take?

How much does it cost per encounter?

Can one do it with friends (like lazer-tag) or is it a single-person encounter?

How much space does the facility require to process how many customers per hour?

The world would certainly be a worse place without escape rooms existing too :|

Many people seem unwilling to admit what they do is bullshit. Not judging that at all, virtually most jobs are bullshit, I've done far more useless things for big companies earning good money too. Yeah it offers entertainment value but were it to disappear humanity would not suffer for it.

I'm honestly amazed at the number of people who truly believe what they do offers value, long lasting, real value to society. Have quite a few friends in advertising/marketing and they've drunk the kool-aid thinking that because they bring in X amount for bigcorp their existence is justified and if they didn't someone else would. Without this delusion it's likely not an easy thing to live with.

Do you know how to tell whether a transaction is beneficial to both parties? It’s mutually voluntary. Some third party thinking it’s bullshit is just meaningless noise.

> Yeah it offers entertainment value but were it to disappear humanity would not suffer for it.

You underestimate quite a bit the value of entertainment, but that's your right.

In my case, it was a single example for which I have information about and can talk about. The same will apply to anything which is niche. You can't constantly search for things that fix your problem, even if you know exactly what is required to fix it, and you can't be aware of everything that could fix your problem. Ads are the only ways for theses niches problem to be fixed.

If you think you can do it more efficiently than ads, go for it, you'll be amazingly rich.

I would disagree with the proposition that "most ads [aren't] about manipulation" (especially if we are talking about "most exposure time" rather than majority of ads being created regardless of the number of times they've been viewed).

Of course, I don't have data to prove my statement, but I doubt you have any to prove yours either.

And without ads and that "great tutorial", maybe you'd be something of greater value to society rather than the "developer you are today". (Just saying that what-ifs are even less of a support for any thesis)

Note that the original article does not complain about informative ads, but about manipulative ones.

> Note that the original article does not complain about informative ads, but about manipulative ones.

It’s funny because the title would suggest that “all ads are one of the worst things that happened to humanity”. So it’s a click bait headline = manipulative ad. Maybe without a different title nobody would read the article.

The entire article argues how advertising parallels cancer: as such, title is appropriate.

As I said in another comment, I am not a big fan of the analogy because it's unclear: you have to work backwards to reconfirm it.

> maybe you'd be something of greater value to society rather than the "developer you are today"

I'm a pretty great value for my works actually. Could do more? I don't actually believe it. I learned what I'm doing since I was 8. There's no way anyone would have paid for theses learning experience for me except advertisers.

You could certainly argue that I could have a more fun childhood if I didn't dedicate so much of it to learning. That could certainly be true, but I still enjoyed quite a bit my childhood doing theses crazy projects.

> Note that the original article does not complain about informative ads, but about manipulative ones.

> Advertising Is a Cancer on Society

Sure he talk against manipulative ones, but he fight against the whole advertising industry.

I thought about being explicit: I am not questioning your work or your worthiness or your satisfaction with life. But nobody knows if different circumstances would have led to a life more valuable to society. I am surprised you don't think there was anything better you could have done in your life, but to each their own.

It's like saying maybe with the light off you could have done better navigating through theses rooms. Free learning experiences was available pretty early in my life because of ad suported content.

Maybe I could have done better in something else, who knows, what I do know is more learning experience is ALWAYS better.

You are repeating one logical fallacy: the fact that you perused ad-supported "free" content does not mean that there wouldn't be non-ad-supported "free" content without the internet turning into an advertising mess.

I've grew up on the free Internet resources without ads (banner ads just came to be). I've read free books on highly technical topics, on Mathematics...

> there wouldn't be non-ad-supported "free" content

I'm not arguing that at all. I was pretty specific saying that the one that provided my learning experience couldn't have done it full time.

There wouldn't be as many learning opportunities. I also consider that I can't expect others to do work for me for free, that's just wrong.

> Most ads isn't about manipulation, it's just about getting your attention and reminding you that this product exists.

That is manipulation. If they weren't actively thinking about visiting one or actively looking for things to do and your advertising convinced them to do it then you've manipulated them into doing something the otherwise wouldn't have.

I think the other user here had a great example with his sister’s escape room. If you want to visit one how would you find it if it’s not on your way to work?

The traditional solution to this is the Yellow Pages. The business owner would pay a small fee to be listed. In the internet age, Yellow-Pages-like directories of business do not need a publishing house generating them. You can basically build one yourself from OpenStreetMap data, and if it gains traction in the community, you could turn it into a side business by taking a small fee from businesses, say 10$/yr, to offer them "OpenStreetMap update as a service" for their business's POI.

> The business owner would pay a small fee to be listed.

I don't understand how you could do that without being an advertisement. How can you make a few businesses pay a fee without being advantaged against a business that doesn't pay that fee.

You do bring an interesting idea, if it's a directory financed by the government, which is neutral and randomize results (or else we would see much more A* companies ;) ), that could works in a way.

It may become an administrative nightmare to manage though with categories and stuff.

> If they weren't actively thinking about visiting one or actively looking for things to do and your advertising convinced them to do it

... which is exactly what our ads are doing. None of the targetting that we do is related to anything else than entertainment, or activities to do. I even had to black list plenty of keywords that triggered our ads, some for prostitution service even.

Believe me, if we weren't targetting like that, it would cost WAY TOO MUCH. I'm pretty happy right now with an average 4.95% of CTR for the past 2 weeks.

I don't think that is true at all. Without advertising you would just have the information elsewhere. Let's take an example similar to your girlfriend's case: entertainment. In Paris you have plenty of events, of all kinds. And that did not start with the internet. And promoters can be very small and have a marketing budget of around 0. Now how did they get people without advertising? You had a collaborative newspaper every week showing all the events with a small comment. Everyone interested in going out had access to it, either because they bought it or read it at school/work/library/press stand. You also have informative stands for small theaters in the metro. No advertising does not mean no information. At last, the majority of ads budget is taken by huge corporations with famous products, like Unilever, and really don't bring anything to society, not even information.

If the current ad model of the popular search engine(s) was made extinct by law. I would be extremely surprised if search simply disappeared rather than move to a paid model. Who wouldn't pay to have any information in the world reachable in the 30 seconds it takes to craft a query and scan the first page of results? It is a huge competitive advantage.

My guess is that the vast majority of people wouldn't pay. Firstly, because it's notoriously difficult to get people to pay for something that used to be free. Lack of tracking and respect for privacy is not something most people would recognize as an obvious upgrade - hence the need for legislation in the first place. So the public will see it as paying for the exact thing that used to be free, and just won't do it. If Google won't find a loophole to bring marketing, paid results or some other monetization back in such a legislative environment, someone else will. You'll end up with something that's won't necessarily be better for consumers than the advertising model.

Nobody ever paid for something like that. If there is anything on the internet people assume it should be free. Taking example of the HN crowd, every time there is a pay walled article people ask for web links, praise outline links and generally complain.

This is because there are free alternatives. When 99% of the articles on the frontpage are freely accessible, it feels "wrong" to find an article that requires you to cough up money first, especially when it does not hold up to the insane quality level implied by that price difference.

If there were no free search engines, I can see people paying a few bucks a month for Google. Even more so if Google would then again make their results as useful to users as they once were.

A practical example: I'm incredibly price-sensitive wrt productivity applications because there are many great such applications available as open source. I'm much less price-sensitive when it comes to video games (e.g. I spent 300€ on Breath of the Wild since it required buying a Switch) because the selection of open source video games is very limited.

I would gladly pay, say $2-8 a month, for a search engine that actually delivered good results. Nowadays it's just SEO garbage and blog spam.

Try searching for product reviews for example. It's almost impossible to find good, honest review sites via a search engine (they definitely exist though). Most are shopping sites or fake reviews that just list scraped product information.

> Nobody ever paid for something like that.

Sure, because the web was ad-funded from the early days. People have an irrationally strong preference for "free". Even though in this case "free" really means "paid for by people manipulating how you spend your money".

But I think it's implausible that if ads didn't happen the web would just be an empty wasteland. Up until the web existed, people paid for all sorts of information and informational services. And plenty of people still do. I spend maybe $1k/year on journalism.

> I would be extremely surprised if search simply disappeared rather than move to a paid model.

Sure, but that would be available to the ones that can profit from it directly, not the mass population that would have an hard time seeing value created from it.

Instead they would expect word of mouth to be sufficent, and in a way they wouldn't be wrong in that world because in that world everything would depends from it. They just wouldn't have the luxury of having all theses others experience that depends on ads to exist, simply because ads wouldn't be there to allow them to exist.

> Most ads isn't about manipulation, it's just about getting your attention and reminding you that this product exists.

I'd wager you're wrong, unless of course you are an ad executive which it doesn't sound like you are?

Maybe, maybe, most ads by dollar spent is about brand awareness.

But for sure, most ads by quantity are about manipulation.

I would pay for the search and to watch videos as long as the price were reasonable. I already pay for SlingTV and Netflix for example. Yet there is free to watch PlutoTV, filled with annoying ads. There should at least be an option to pay for ad-free, tracking-free, service.

> I would pay for the search and to watch videos

We are sadly a tiny minority. I keep seeing people talking against Youtube Premium.

> There should at least be an option to pay for ad-free, tracking-free, service.

Agree completely, but the existence of ads isn't what stops that sadly.

The existence of ads definitely stops that. People were happy to pay for newspapers for decades before they appeared for free on the internet. They are still happy to pay for news that isn't available for free, as Bloomberg, the WSJ, etc show. It's only when there are "free" alternatives that people flock in droves to the "free" options.

> It's only when there are "free" alternatives that people flock in droves to the "free" options.

People were happy to pay 10$ for something until there was the same thing for 5$ and theses peoples thus flock to the "5$" options. This is why we should stop the 5$ option because it hurt the 10$ one!

People that paid more, just did because they had no alternative to get that. In that amount, there was some that couldn't pay that and didn't, and maybe you don't know them, but they exist. The cheaper option still provide enough value, or else why would the one that paid more move to the cheaper one? It also allowed the one that couldn't afford the previous price, to afford it and get that value too.

It's even possible that it was in aggregate delivering more value in total when the people that wanted the 5$ options were paying 10$ for the one with more things in it, but is it ethically right to force them to pay 5$ more for something they don't care about? Isn't it one of the important point here in this discussion manipulating people to pay for something they didn't want?

> The existence of ads definitely stops that.

It thus doesn't stop that, it only show that people were forced to pay more for value they didn't care for.

The people that want more and can afford it are still there. Like you said, they are still happily paying for Bloomberg and WSJ.

Talking about that, I don't read theses newspaper, yet they are annoying me enough that I may pay for it one day just because I keep getting linked to their article on Hacker News. It's weird how the paying one is giving me worse experience than ads ever did in my case, but I still believe that option is needed.

If you have to tell people they need something then they don't need it. Escape rooms are an entertainment luxury. When there is essential work that needs to be done (infrastructure, healthcare, education, &c.), it makes sense that it takes psychological manipulation to convince people that what they really need to do with their time and effort is temporary entertainment. If you want more customers, provide something that people find more necessary, like childcare.

But we live in a culture that can afford entertainment luxury, if people don't find this gals business, they will spend that time on Netflix or at a bar instead.. The zero-sum game you propose is not really close to what would happen without advertising imo.

We only tell our selves we can afford. The truth is we are constantly putting off work that needs to be done as if some future generation will fix all these problems.

There are tens of millions of Americans living in homelessness, shanty towns, and trailer parks. We need to build housing (apartments, homes) for them. No individual person can do that. We have to organize ourselves to tackle these kinds of problems cooperatively. However, our society insists that we allow the market to organize our activities.

The market is controlled by exchange, and people who can afford to exchange more than anyone else can control the market. The majority of our wealth is concentrated in the hands of a minority of people. Thus the market mostly organizes people to solve their concerns while paying no mind to people who cannot afford to engage with it.

Either you can fix the market (something arguably impossible to do) or you can use a different method of organizing humans into cooperative efforts.

Even with absolutely 0 advertising I probably wouldn't be working to build apartments for the homeless. Sure maybe I'm not seeing some movie, or buying some piece of chocolate I heard discovered through advertising but in that case I'm going to be spending my time watching/reading/playing/indulging in various other hobbies and vices and any money I would otherwise have spent I'd be saving.

Absolutely no benefit to future generations or my fellow man, and I'd assume the case to be true of most people. It isn't as if advertising has made me more callous or lazy.

Unless your point is that companies could be doing those things instead of spending ad dollars, but that is a ridiculous proposition because they'd be using it to make more capital in some other way

You believe these things about yourself, but it's not like you have much evidence, so maybe consider the alternatives.

One function of advertising is demand generation. It makes people believe they need things they don't. The broad message of most ads is "spend more money to be successful/popular/happy". Is it really impossible to think that if people stopped getting told that all day long they'd focus less on spending/consumption and more on other things?

Well yes, but that doesn't mean those "other things" are not entertainment related. I am not a very lavish spender myself. I rarely buy things and have ad-block on every platform I use. However, I read books, or exercise, or hangout with friends and discuss theoretical topics. My lack of major participation in consumerism, doesn't de facto lead me to become a saintful servant. Everyone is different, but one of my key drivers is mental stimulation; this is a big reason I read so much and advertising has nothing to do with that.

Entertainment and relaxation are not unnecessary. Especially in our late capitalist civilizations.

Entertainment and relaxation are necessary, you are right. However, both can be done in ways that are at best productive and at least not-counterproductive.

Entertainment does not have to unproductive. People who play sports or do other recreational activities are working to maintain their physical health while having fun. There are games of all sorts you can play to help you improve life skills or even physical and mental abilities.

If your relaxation requires someone else's work, it is counter productive (think resort-type venues that need staff to operate). There are plenty of ways to relax and unwind that don't take away from other people's efforts. Visiting a nature park or a museum, for example. The work to maintain natural resources or to educate and inspire people is necessary beyond simply pleasing people.

All entertainment must be productive? That's what you would decree? Ugh, very free people would want to live in your horrible nanny state.

It's not my decree, it's nature's. The world does not have infinite resources. We have to be careful how we use them.

If you cannot live efficiently, you will exhaust your available resources and your lifestyle will die out. Humans have put in a great amount of effort in the last few hundred years to make as many resources as possible available to use, but this only encouraged us to use more. If you want to see how to live life efficiently, look at present and past cultures that do. They seem to be plenty happy living on much less than the average person in the first world.

You don't exist to be happy, you exist to survive. What would we have accomplished as humans if after thousands of generations of working to build a world with more possibility if all that work is dashed by a bunch of greedy, selfish idiots who think pleasure is more important than the sustainability of human life?

You don't exist to be happy, you exist to survive

Speak for yourself. You exist to survive apparently, and what a meager and sad existence that seems to me. Good thing there's no authority telling us why we exist and we're each free to decide for ourselves.

What would we have accomplished as humans if...

What would we have accomplished if we survive until eternity without being happy?

The world does not have infinite resources. We have to be careful how we use them

"All fun must be productive" doesn't follow from that.

> Good thing there's no authority telling us why we exist and we're each free to decide for ourselves.

You aren't. Everything you do, even doing nothing, has consequences that are beyond your control. Even worse, your actions have consequences not just for you but for others, even people who don't yet exist. We only exist today because generation after generation of the people that came before us have worked together to survive. You absolutely can choose to be a selfish idiot, but selfish idiots go extinct very quickly because they greedily consume the resources they depend on. There are also people who recognize the threat selfish idiots pose to themselves and others and may intervene to stop them from mucking things up not just for themselves but for others. Remember, you yourself took the effort and resources of the human race to get you where you are. Your life is on loan to you from the universe.

Just like the cells in your body, humans work together to make things more capable than themselves individually. Just like the cells in your body, humans are constantly replaced by a new generation that takes our place. If you want to live life as a cancer cell on the human race, you can expect it will react the same way we react to cancer in our own bodies.

This article is about this very problem. Advertisers are abusing the fact that our brains have not adapted to their schemes to trick people into spending their effort supporting not just the advertisers but the enterprises that advertise through them. They climb over the backs of their fellow man to selfishly guarantee their own survival, paying no mind to the consequences their actions bear for others and for the generations that follow us.

> What would we have accomplished if we survive until eternity without being happy?

Doing what we are here to do. Life exists because the universe had latent potential that unthinking matter could not release. The whole universe is working to exhaust its potential. Intelligent life is just another step in that process.

You also don't seem to get what happiness is. Happiness is not a state of ecstatic joy, it's a state of contentment, free of threats and concerns, when you can be at peace. Like all emotion and sensation, we have them because they were useful to our survival. Mental reward mechanisms don't exist because you can't be conscious without them, they exist because without them survival is more difficult. Happiness is always a temporary, illusory, and fleeting feeling. There will always be more mountains to climb, happiness just rewards us for getting to the next peak.

You can choose to live a willfully ignorant life and pretend to be confused just to feel better, or you can see what the world is telling you and listen to it.

Haha... yeah ok. I know better than to try to convince religious people that their irrational views are baseless. It never gets anywhere. But you snuck by my guard because your religion is somewhat non-traditional.

Let's go our separate ways, you believe whatever you want :)

I'm not sure what you think religion is. But this is not religion, nor is it baseless. In fact, the opposite. This is ordinary, empirical science.

Gotta admit is sounds like pretty spooky-lukey crystal pyramid stuff. Stringing sciency words together doesn't qualify as real science.

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." ―Arthur C. Clarke

Wikipedia has several articles about these phenomena (e.g., information theory, thermodynamics):

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_level

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metastability

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_vacuum

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_in_thermodynamics_and_...

PBS Space Time has some great videos on the cosmological side of all this. Their video "Are You a Boltzmann Brain?" does a great job of explaining entropy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhy4Z_32kQo

Kurzgesagt has some entertaining videos on the subject, too:

* The Most Dangerous Stuff in the Universe - Strange Stars Explained: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_8yK2kmxoo

* The Most Efficient Way to Destroy the Universe – False Vacuum: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijFm6DxNVyI

Most of this is unnecessary for the subject of this thread, which is more about biology, ecology, and evolution than physics.

True, but because all ads are spread via media, and interrupt the experience of enjoying that movie, song, paper or magazine or book, the delivery of every ad inevitably lessens your enjoyment of whatever activity they interrupt.

Nobody chooses to watch a TV or radio show that's all ads. Ads are the opposite of entertainment, otherwise we'd tune in Wednesday at 8 PM to watch our favorite ads.

Your argument sounds an awful lot like "how dare you do anything escapist when there are big problems in the world."

No it's more that I'd your product fulfills a real need, people will find you. The fact that people don't without advertising says it isn't a real need.

There's just a lot of presumptions buried in statements like this that I have trouble getting past. What criteria do we use to establish a need is "real" once we get past life requirements? Do I need a better chair? A better keyboard? A more efficient car? A monthly rail pass? The criteria you and several other comments in this thread use seems to include "if you found out about it through an ad, it's not a real need," which is the original canonical definition of "begging the question."

If nothing else in your life gave you the idea to buy something but an advertisement did, it's not your idea to buy the thing. I needed a new chair because the one I used to have gave me back pain. I went on Amazon to look for a replacement chair, and because I use an ad-blocker (uBlock Origin), I didn't see any advertisements for chairs (whether there are other features of Amazon that could count as advertising, like the Amazon's Choice branding is, sure, debatable but also besides the point). Instead, I saw a list of chairs with information about them. I looked through the list and found the one I thought would best suit me and bought it. Why did I buy it? Because I felt I needed it since I was concerned that my old chair might have caused back problems if I kept using it.

Since I bought the chair on Amazon, when I don't have an ad-blocker on, like on other people's computers, I can see Amazon showing me advertisements for other chairs. Why? They are trying to convince me, because I showed a willingness to buy chairs, that I need more chairs. There are all sorts of flashy listings showing off the neat gimmicks their chairs are capable of, all to convince customers like me that what we have isn't good enough.

They can't make money if they solved people's problems, so either they design things to break (like planned obsolescence) or they psychologically manipulate people into thinking they have problems they don't have and sell them the solution (InfoWars is this taken to the extreme).

There is a difference between putting information out there for people who want to find it and blasting information at them to get in someone's head and convince them they need to do something for your own benefit.

There are so many other ways to escape, something virtually everyone needs to do at some point, that don't require someone else's time and effort to do. There are even productive ways to escape, like sports (can keep you healthy). If your escape detracts from essential efforts, it is counter-productive.

> If you have to tell people they need something then they don't need it.

None of the ads we got say to anyone that they need it. No one thinks that they need it when they see it.

What the ads say is that we exist. When they look for entertainment, and the debate isn't about whether entertainment should or not exist, they see us in the search engine (which is ads financed). When they search for movie theater (which is not related to our business, so it's fair that Google doesn't show our business in the results), they see us.

Actually, it's not even possible trying to convince people that they need us, even if we would want to. We NEED to target people that want entertainment because that's already pretty expensive for us to do.

You're not describing an advertisement, you're describing a listing in a business index like a phonebook or a classifieds section. You don't have to buy ads to show up in a Google search. You buy ads to float your Google search entry to the top so it's right in people's line of sight. If you want people who are looking for entertainment to find you, give pamphlets to your local tourism bureau or travel agencies and hotels to put in their lobbies so that when people are looking for things to do they find you. Advertisements don't provide information to people seeking it, they shove information down people's throats and try to convince them with messaging that people need what is being advertised.

> I would have agreed in the past but now that my SO has started an escape room, if your ideal world existed, she would be bankrupt right now.

In the old days, if her product -in this case escape room- would be good, she'd get enough customers by word of mouth alone.

Why is that necessarily so? Maybe some products inherently can't be sustained by word of mouth, and in a world without widespread commercial advertising they wouldn't exist at all.

>Maybe some products inherently can't be sustained by word of mouth, and in a world without widespread commercial advertising they wouldn't exist at all.

Maybe those products shouldn't exist, then. Just because someone has an idea or wants to sell yet another iteration on an existing product or service, doesn't mean they deserve to. Maybe advertising allows markets to be far more diverse and saturated than they should be?

Also, maybe advertising isn't as necessary as it once was in a world where search engines and online stores exist and you can literally see a product and its competition all listed in one place if you're looking for something.

Don't be so reductionist. Someone could find this escape room via a search ad, have a blast and tell all of her friends and none of them may never choose to do the same. And an escape room experience isn't something you can easily bring people back for - you need to find new customers every single time.

I suppose a good way that could make word of mouth work is to create two experiences and recommend the other in an email afterwards.

Advertising has made the internet a bit shit, yes. But let's not pretend it has it's upsides because it really does. That's why people pay for it. Now I'll grant that old school banner ads aren't worth much and we'd probably be better off without them. Most of what they're funding is garbage, not independent bloggers like I'd want to be funding.

Disclaimer: Small Google Ads customer.

Maybe there could be a middle ground: keep most of the internet ad-free, but allow users to do explicit "commercial searches" for e.g. vacuum cleaners, or hotels, or fun things to do in their area. Then the escape room would show up there.

You would need to pay for such an ad-free internet in some way, other than being an ad target. This is a critical point of you expect the variety and quality of this ad-free internet to approach what we have now.

The first spam on Usenet was by a company called DEC. DEC was known for its great products (VAX, OpenVMS, Alpha) but for shitty management and marketing.

I've witnessed the Internet before Web 2.0. Yes I received Viagra spam on my mailbox as well. Amount bought thanks to all of that spam: zero. The marketeer does not care about any second in my life I wasted thanks to their spam. Neither do the assholes who hosted them. And still, that Internet functioned. Of course the bills for the IRC server and Usenet server need to be paid. Usenet access was just part of my monthly dial-up subscription though.

As far as I am concerned the invention of high quality (relatively) search engines and high quality (relatively) fact sources such as Wikipedia as well as high quality, honest reviewers could easily make up for advertising. How is such paid for? Donations and credit card.

I’d like to see the outrage if google and Facebook were added to the internet bill of everyone around.

That's only because the current business model is very closed source (proprietary) a danger RMS warned about decades ago. The original GPLv3 was meant to address that, and websites such as Wikipedia and I suppose OpenAI don't work that way.

If we were used to no advertising and paying for services, we'd be outraged by if there was advertising. Ironically, that way is more efficient. The ideal model for data is a Patreon/Kickstarter/Indiegogo-esque project where people are able to offer bounties. This way you could pick a journalist (who's self-employed) and pay them to write an article to research a subject. Such research could then save other people time and money. I mean, if only 100 people in the world pay 10 EUR each then you already got firepower to do some research already.

Advertising and 'free' (where you're the product) is a race to the bottom, and ultimately a product for the poor.

Podcast hosts (at least those I listen to) are often asked to provide a paid version of their content without ads. The answer is always the same: ads bring way more money in that a subscription would.

There are examples where subscriptions work perfectly well. Is the model perfect? No.

Podcast hosts are biased either way. Ads waste people's time while a subscription doesn't. The subscriber amount is inflated, and the quality of content is lower than it could be because of clickbait and other non-content.

One subscription-based model for news I'm looking forward to gaining adoption is essentially a Spotify for news, called Blendle. I also believe we focus too much on news, and not enough on in depth articles which is a model De Correspondent pursues.

I've actually thought about that model a lot recently. If Google does this then it's one more step towards their goal of getting somebody what they want. Ads usually only show when you're typing a phrase which correlates with a product. Whenever you type "vacuum cleaners", that's you signalling you're likely searching for a commercial product. If not, ignore the ad.

But let's be honest, search ads are not the problem here, toxic banner ads across the web are.

Yeah, I've been saying for years that someone should make a search engine for the ad-free segment of the internet :-) Then we could use it most of the time, and fall back to Google explicitly when doing queries with commercial intent.

How much per month would you pay for such a service?

Advertisement-bugged content is indeed essentially content for the poor. The rich just buy an iPhone and buy the apps they use on it so they don't see advertisements.

I'm willing to pay for Mozilla Firefox and Duck Duck Go and Wikipedia. I'm not sure it should be paid in month or by amount of usage. The beauty of Wikipedia is that it is open source, same with Firefox. Not sure about DDG.

>Someone could find this escape room via a search ad, have a blast and tell all of her friends and none of them may never choose to do the same.

And they could ignore the ads, too, which most people probably will because it's not that common a thing to want to do. But at least word of mouth can be expected to be reasonably accurate. If this escape room were terrible, the word of mouth would be terrible, but the advertising for it would never reflect that.

>And an escape room experience isn't something you can easily bring people back for - you need to find new customers every single time.

Maybe that makes it a bad business model?

>Now I'll grant that old school banner ads aren't worth much and we'd probably be better off without them.

I'll be honest, if I had to choose, I'd prefer old school banner ads. Get rid of modals, pop-ups, ads in video, javascript tracking, and just give me a banner with a link, or even just text. Something that doesn't intrude on the content.

> Maybe that makes it a bad business model?

Maybe it is. But I'd argue having something is better than not having it.

Here's an alternative. All escape rooms need a steady stream of new visitors, so they have a good incentive to cross-promote. Hang a "if you've liked this room, you might enjoy" board by the exit, filled with flyers for other escape rooms in the area, and ask those other escape rooms to put your flyers on their "escape-room-ring" boards.

Funny, such webrings used to exist in Web 1.0 as well. You could even argue this is the point of a franchise. Need a McDonald's (not my cup of tea but a known international subject)? You know what they got, you know the price. There's some culture-specific deviations, too.

> independent bloggers

Aka "influencers". Our children are growing up with YouTube idols who don't have integrity. It is even illegal here to focus on children with advertising (which these buggers do).

If a product can't be sustained by word of mouth, it's because it doesn't fill a need that wasn't artificially created by advertising. These products shouldn't exist.

I don't think that's necessarily true. If you and I both enjoy escape rooms, but we aren't friends/don't have a way of contacting each other about it, one of us won't hear about something that would bring us value. Good advertising would take out the roll of the dice that comes with social networks.

Advertising is not information. If i like invite rooms I can search for <myplace> in best escape rooms.com and find what other people are saying on this forum. Has worked before, can work. Hosting prices for those can be low.

It can easily be a matter of timing/bootstrapping. Great idea, great service, not enough word of mouth initially, business burns through cash and fails. Who's better off? Established incumbents, of course. This would create a completely artificial disadvantage for new businesses.

Certain medical products, various hygiene supplies, or other things that cannot be talked about in 'polite society' would fall into the realm of things that are very hard to spread by word of mouth. Additionally, things that are rarely used by a person but are widely used by society, like stump removal services, plumbers, etc.

All of those can do just fine with a general search engine.

You just need to know that removing a stump is generally possible. That fact itself can be advertised by a the guild of stump removers if it is obscure enough. "Tired of hitting your toe on the stump in your backyard? Ask you doctor for an eye check!"

> the guild of stump removers

What?

Also, plenty of useless junk is peddled through "word of mouth" (MLM, anyone?). Fake reviews, paid word of mouth - banning ads won't ban marketing, it will just force marketers to change tactics to ones that aren't clearly better for customers/consumers. Maybe much worse.

Its a cat and mouse game but easy fact checking is the enemy of all the marketing examples you gave, including MLM. If I learn that MLM is a pyramid scheme where the word ethics does not exist, I look up the company name and run away.

You're describing a commodity. So what's an example of a popular product that no longer differentiates on features/quality yet exists solely due to advertising? ... Actually I'm having a hard time thinking of mature products that DON'T meet that description.

Soft drinks, insurance companies, investment advisors, pretty much all prepared foods, all over-the-counter drugs, shampoo, deodorant, desktop computers, etc, etc -- these are the sources of 95% of ads. Yet the difference among them is almost nonexistent.

The ads for these products don't inform the consumer; they exist only to push the brand into consumer consciousness, a necessary evil because otherwise your company's commodity won't survive competition with other companies's commodity products without fabricating mindshare via by constant repetition of media promotions.

Branded commodities exist at all because advertising has constructed a fantasy around them intended to give consumers a sense of identity, and ultimately, meaning in their lives. Buy this slightly tweaked commodity to become smarter or sexier.

Without ads, 95% of everything we guy will quickly drop by at least 50% to match that of the nameless generic commodity that it is.

> Soft drinks, insurance companies, investment advisors, pretty much all prepared foods, all over-the-counter drugs, shampoo, deodorant, desktop computers

Soft drinks / prepared food / shampoo / deodorant I never buy due to ads. Heck, I never buy soft drinks. I drink a beer once a week, usually a special one. I find it by looking around at the liquor store dept. of the grocery store. I have zero brand loyalty in this regard (the amount of choice is a fata morgana anyway). I have a sensitive skin as well, so I can't stand a lot of these deodorant / shampoo.

I go to the grocery store to buy my food. The only time I may differentiate is when something is on discount. Which, true, is advertising, but its a clear deal. I don't follow the "saving" deals where you need stamps or whatever because it creates artificial brand loyalty / expenses.

OTC drugs I only buy when I need them. I'd buy the cheapest of active substance. I don't give a rat about which brand. If its insured, I get the cheapest one automatically cause otherwise I can't get it back.

Insurance, water, electricity, I go with the cheapest I can find. No commercial is going to tell me about which one's the cheapest. Comparison websites will, and there are good ones. My favourite one is the national equivalent to US Consumer Reports. To which I'm also an active subscriber.

Quite frankly, all I get from your post is that advertising is pushing crap we don't need. Cause we don't need to buy the branded versions.

If you want an example of a website which is doing great yet doesn't advertise nor contain advertisements then you're currently visiting it.

We may assume there are fansites for escape rooms available. Such serve as word of mouth advertising, just like reviews do. There is more focus on facts, and the user voluntarily participates (in contrast to all the billboards, online advertising, useless pages in magazines)

A great many potential escape room customers are not looking specifically for escape rooms, they're looking for something fun to do in the area. So, again, no ability to advertise would be a gigantic advantage to established incumbents in the "something fun to do with friends" category of businesses.

So you start Apple Maps and look for fun to do. You know the data in Apple Maps does not contain spam. Even the local tourist center might have information available. Or you ask around on an escape room subreddit or escape room community forum.

What city doesn't have brochures of fun things to do, community newspapers where new things like this can be announced or meetup groups for people that like activities like this? There are a lot of ways potential customers can actively find you without manipulating random people who weren't looking.

Those brochures are literally ads.

Maybe technically, and mostly because of how they're typically implemented. I'd call providing brochures to people that explicitly request them information not advertising.

What old days are you talking about, exactly? That's a pretty nebulous term. Before advertising? That's a few thousand years ago, so maybe?

When I grew up football (soccer) matches had virtually no advertising. Driving around, virtually no advertising (you gotta be kidding me regarding safety). Magazines had barely any (pages of ads is my last memory). The internet when I joined had barely any. All the free shit existing thanks to advertising is a race to the bottom. Premium brands can sneakily do such too, all in the name of profit; not the customers interest. And it's worse. Clickbait is a byproduct of it because journalism is no longer about observing, research, hear multiple angles which is all too expensive; it is about page views. Which you can observe here in linked items as well as in YouTube videos. How often do you have the phenomenon where you feel you could have summarized it shorter? Where you feel come on, get to the point. Or where you feel deceived after reading the article? All because of page views.

As soon as I got to play with AR (such as Google Glass) the first thing I will look into is filter out the shit I don'tn need.

How old are the days you're talking about? Archeologists have found commercial messages going back to ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome. According to some historians, the first printed advertisements go back to the Song dynasty a thousand years ago.

I just don't buy the argument that all kinds of advertising for anything at any time are intrinsically evil and must be stamped out. Even in a post-scarcity utopia, writers, artists and other creators would very likely be promoting their creations in an effort to reach people who might not otherwise hear about them.

> In the old days, if her product -in this case escape room- would be good, she'd get enough customers by word of mouth alone.

We get clients from 5 m away to 300 km away. The product is great, on a few thousand client, only an handful weren't happy.

> she'd get enough customers by word of mouth alone.

Word of mouth works when there are enough people to listen to it that may be interested in the experience. I'm a fervent believer that anyone can enjoy it, but let be honest, not everyone believes that being locked somewhere is fun ;). Believe me, it's a complaint that we hear often from our client that they weren't able to convince people around them about how awesome escape rooms are.

There's actually money to be made in something that could allow people to find others people to do escape room together, it's something that I often see people asking for in escape room communities.

My SO has claustrophobia. I'm pretty sure she won't enjoy it. I've never done it, but I like the challenge of a puzzle element combined with working together. I don't think such is for everyone. What I've learned from gaming is that a lot of people (most) don't want to be challenged, and M&S (morons & slackers) tend to get away in groups. In general, people just want to be entertained.

> [...]

> There's actually money to be made in something that could allow people to find others people to do escape room together, it's something that I often see people asking for in escape room communities.

Especially something with a small community could use this exposure of word of mouth, or having a platform for their community. You could also be part of the things to do list with the local tourism bureau.

The problem is a lack of standardization/consensus on communication method. You could use Facebook for this, or Mastodon, or Discord, or Slack, or Discourse, or Subreddit, or ... someone with authority just has to pick one, make it half decent, spread it by word of mouth, and you're done. If you can find volunteers for this, great. Otherwise, escape rooms could make a non-profit for this to maintain it. Of course, an escape room in Poland can afford to pay less for membership than one in San Francisco.

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