I know I'm dreaming and it will never happen, but still... let me dream.
The problem isn't the existence of advertising, it is that there is so much of the crap advertising. Taxing ads would raise the price of advertising, which would lower the ROI on advertising and force ad buyers to be more careful about which ads they buy. Crappy advertisers who are not actually connecting buyers with sellers would tend to go out of business, shrinking the industry. The remaining ad industry would have to create less ads with higher quality to compete in the newer high cost marketplace.
Basically, the idea is to move the supply curve on the (on the supply and demand curves) to a place where they meet at a higher price and a lower quantity. See for example, https://www.economicshelp.org/microessays/equilibrium/price-... (scroll down to Tax Incidence). Note that for advertising the 'producer' on this graph is the company making the ads and the 'consumer' is the company buying an ad for their product. The part about moving the curve to a lower quantity is the key! The goal here being to reduce the ratio of 'attention used' to 'product-consumer fit created'. We would have a smaller, better ad industry. We can't have that with current market conditions; competition won't allow it.
The nice thing about a tax plan is that it is pretty easy to sell people on the idea of 'take money away from these people who annoy all of us and give it to [insert social good here]' . The best people in advertising would likely benefit from it as well, as they would likely stay in business and have better margins in a smaller industry with less competition.
So, keep dreaming, but feel free to spread this idea around. Maybe it will grow by word-of-mouth.
I agree there is lots of wasted time out there. But the advertising paid for Google, Facebook etc. It pays for Chrome, Android, React, PyTorch etc.
Can we see your list? Is it in Git somewhere?
Same, I don't recall a single time an ad made me want to buy something, if anything I think "if they have to shove this in front of my eyes and I don't already know the product it probably is bad or useless to me"
How do you primarily discover businesses and products?
Let FAANGs fail. Let them try to disguise ads into content, fail and go off the deep end. What is there to lose, really? Search? Someone will take their place. Instant gratification online ordering (not funded by ads but fuck it) orchestrating modern slavery? We'l be fine. Facebook products? Might be a bit of a panic as chat for 50% of the world population goes down, but we'll manage. RCS is good now, matrix is right there, we'll manage. TikTok? We'l be fine.
Pretty much any thing funded by advertising is not vital to society (otherwise they could make you pay for it) and like half of it is parasitic.
>social platforms have a utility for most people
Hard to tell if you're serious!
I quit all social media and gave up my smartphone. I don't miss that brief "huh, that's nice" moment when being seeing an acquaintance's random photo they felt they had to share, and moments when visual imagery are shared now feel much more special.
The thing is Alphabet and Meta revenues are 95% ads. All the big players are either products to show ads or products to gather data to show more ads
I have spoken with many of them and they come up with ideas regarding gamification, retention and acquisition being far superior to the ad networks.
They have a community and I would hire some of them on the spot, no need, though, some of them earn my salary many times over.
The ad networks might be ok for flight by night ops like selling viagra copies on porn websites, but they will always be that annoying pop up, I am not sure it they count towards the result if people have ad blockers.
Or let me ask, which businesses can actually convert measurably from ad networks? Assuming life time value of customers being more than 50 usd.
Its always sold as for "brand propagation", an excuse to inform you ahead that no conversion at all will happen.
If you have a fast paces business which relies on large throughput and a constantl flow of new customers it is not very useful.
I know facebook could convert very well, but they will not allow any product.