Newspapers. Billboards. Magazines. Radio. TV. Cable TV. VHS / DVD. Usenet. Email. The Web. Online news. Smart phones. Streaming video.
It is a watershed decision to have ads or a subscription model. Ads will doom your platform / media. A subscription can create high quality content, if there is market demand for your content. Do not do both subscription AND ads. That devolves quickly.
Just IMO.
And many which are just thin excuses for the promotional break...
There are also many good quality podcasts that don't use advertising.
An excellent ongoing example is Cable TV. Content is now about 50 % of the time. When a long string of ads are completed, then characters and other bugs and gizmos walk out onto the screen, on top of the content, obscuring the content, sometimes even important plot elements.
Or remember how BYTE magazine gradually became pregnant with ads, then eventually became what I would call the forerunner of Computer Shopper. All ads, no content.
And the web. Sites now have more ads than content. Especially some "news" sites. And the ads are obnoxious. Pop up, flashing, blinking, jumping, scrolling, in your face, making the content impossible to read.
We're slowly seeing that happen today.
Yes, advertising might be a net negative, but it's not a pure negative. It is important to help sellers connect with buyers. In a lot of ways it's like finance, which can also help lubricate the gears of commerce, but both it and advertising should be adjuncts to commerce. They shouldn't be these swollen behemoths that dwarf other industries. IMO taxes are the way to account for their externalities, and also reduce them to their economically optimal levels.
1. advertising is all about externalities
2. advertising's cost is relative. It matters more how much Coke spends on advertising relative to Pepsi and less the absolute amount that Coke spends. So if half of both Coke & Pepsi's advertising budget are taxed away neither Coke nor Pepsi lose much. But citizens gain due to both reduced ads and services provided with the state tax revenue gained.
That was eventually repealed, which now seems a poor decision.
Your statement sounds to me about like saying “Exhaust fumes power cars”.
My problem is mostly the tracking, but even if I ignore the privacy issue, I've found that targeted advertising has seriously reduced the value of advertising to me.
Even today, I find a lot of the ads for tech podcasts informative the first time I hear them. I would have never known about BackBlaze, Hover or SquareSpace if it weren’t for podcast ads.
This approach does work with how-to books (how to program X language), but not with news.
See Mssrs. Barnum and Mencken.