Edit: I ask that because I use an ad blocker, as does everyone that I know. And I can’t think of a way to reconcile blocking ads with truly believing that ads are good for me.

I am strongly anti-advertising, but I always like to hear from people with an opposite point of view.

I'm talking about positive effects to "the world" / society / the public at large. Obviously not to the people getting their pockets filled.

2. Ad Tech is trying to make advertising experience better

No, they're trying to make more money. Whether they do so by making the advertising "experience" (I loathe that freaking word) better or worse it's irrelevant.

3. AdTech (which GP kinda mentioned) pays for a lot of things that are available for free and likely wouldn’t be otherwise

Slavery pays for a lot of cheap or free things as well, so that's not a really good argument in of itself, is it?

You know what kind of ads no one has ever ever ever liked? Web ads. Banner ads. Pop ups, pop unders, takeovers. They’re all shit, consumers hate them, and consumers love ads in general. It’s a failed business model that has never been viable for publishers.

Oh my.

Youtube's current business model essentially breaks all ad-supported classical music content on the site. It does this by interrupting the music in the middle of a piece to insert an add. That means a long piece like a Wagner opera is littered with tens or perhaps even a hundred tiny adds that cut jarringly into the piece in the middle of acts, sections, and even phrases. It's not possible to concentrate on a piece of classical music that way. Your ad tech industry has destroyed whatever segment of content ad-supported classical music on youtube represents.[1]

But that's not my complaint.

I'm watching television the other day and I come upon some classic movie that I hadn't seen in awhile. I start to watch for about five minutes; then, in the middle of a scene, the movie switches to a loud, short commercial. In the middle of a scene! I thought maybe the channel got changed by accident. But no-- this was a youtube-sized commercial doing a youtube-sized jump-cut into a television program.

I kept watching and sure enough, every subsequent commercial used a jump cut in the very middle of dialogue, and every commercial was as short as the ones on Youtube. Now this movie was almost as unwatchable as youtube classical music is unlistenable.

So your ad tech has managed to do something I didn't think was possible-- become a big enough influence on commercial television programming so as to make it even more painful to watch. That's much worse than just "failing at the moment."

[1] Sometimes it appears that the ad-placement algo inserts ads at the next available silence. But that still destroys all kinds of music. For example, many long classical pieces are made up of short-- yet related-- variations separated by silence. Inserted loud, obnoxious sounds between every single variation is no more acceptable than blaring an air horn between each move in a chess game. Edit: on the Brahms Paganini variations I listened to the algo seemed to be every other variation. But that hardly matters.

1) An appeal to the popularity of ad tech is not a sufficient argument in this case. First, it is tautological: At issue from my original comment is the sheet volume of talent it has attracted. Implicit within that is popularity. As such, you cannot use popularity to justify the phenomena.

2) Nor is the belief of people working in the field that it is useful a compelling argument. And of course it is trying to make advertising a better experience etc. But that just says "if it has to exist, it might as well be good at its job" and doesn't provide show a prima facie argument for it to begin with.

For both 1 & 2, you could easily replace Ad Tech with military equipment and arms dealers. I'm not saying one is as bad as the other. I'm saying the flaws in the arguments become more apparent.

3) This, I think, is where we agree. But I think alternate business models, had they rose to prominence instead, might have been better for society. But counter-factuals are inherently difficult to prove, and it's certainly possible we'd be in a worse state had things worked out differently.

A truly good product sells itself. All advertising is just manipulation.