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Comment by grumpy8 | Hacker News Reader

Viewed from a different angle "Advertising powers every medium it ever touches."

Viewed from yet another angle "Advertising forms parasitic bonds and makes whatever it attaches to dependent on it for survival"

I guess. But advertising also substantially reduces the quality of the media that it touches.

...when the medium should have been powered by the content and desire to spread it...

But nobody likes advertising. People like that the product is free, and advertising is merely an unpleasant side effect.

Your statement sounds to me about like saying “Exhaust fumes power cars”.

I like advertising. I don't like distractions and I don't like being tracked but I enjoy seeing ads for products in fields I like. I'm old though and throughout the 80s and early 90s subscribed to several magazines in large part to read the ads. I loved the ads in Byte, Creative Computing, Compute!, Wired, the Game Developer Magazine. I learned about all kinds of products I wanted. If all ads on the net somehow were (a) related to the content and (b) no more than static pictures and a link with no tracking I'd still enjoy them.

I agree, to an extent. Advertising can be overdone, of course.

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.

Let’s not forget that back in the day, geeks use to buy Computer Shopper for the ads. I know I subscribed to InCider and later MacWorld for the ads and would mail out the cards in the back for more information. How else were we going to find out about products we wanted?

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.

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