I thought it’s idiotic until the first time I sent something back for a refund.

Statistically this works out pretty well.

If you spent real money on something, you're far more likely to buy it again or buy it for someone or send that link to someone than a completely new product.

Even worse. It doesn’t work. Yet, it either way requires large scale harvesting of everyone’s personal information.

If it wasn’t allowed, the value of all this personal information wouldn’t be as high.

I'd even go to banning all commercial ads, like several cities have done offline.

Reasons?

Click bait, boosts consumerism, ads imply essentially a tax for everyone (remember that ads have to be paid by the consumers), CEO spam, annoying, environmental costs

Good intentions but how well is that working out so far?

Only thing we got was annoying cookie popups everywhere, where consent is one click away and reject is three layers behind a small “learn more” button.

Because there would be no incentive to commodify user activity, bundle it up, and resell it to ever more dubious information brokers?

Ads can be targeted but not at individual.

If I am Tylor Swift fan I should get her merch advertising only when I am visiting swifties forum or group - but not when I am checking my fishing forum where I expect fishing gear ads. But nowadays I get adsg

> Why would it benefit society to get less targeted ads as opposed to more targeted ones?

Because more targeted ads require a dangerous and abusive system of pervasive surveillance while less targeted ads can still be targeted without hurting as many people in the process.

Ads would be less effective at convincing people to be unhappy.

Why not make Sales illegal too.

All advertising is a step too far, I think. But banning accepting any remuneration to deliver, display, or cause to be viewed any advertisement, and limiting physical ads in places viewable from public areas seems like it would improve things. Buildings shouldn't be covered in ads, and the internet shouldn't be largely based around scamming as much information out of people as possible to jam ads down their throat, but a business should be allowed to put up flyers on their own storefront. I mean, if you're really pedantic about banning all ads, that probably precludes restaurants posting menus out front.

Extremely limited, focused, designed to deliver facts rather than entertainment or flashy catchy content 'ads' could be informative and beneficial. The structure of the ad should be as close to sanitized textbook as possible, maybe even follow a regulated formula. Something like, "This is a thing that exists. Here's the benefit without dramatizing or 'selling' someone something they don't need. X brand can be found at Y location for Z cost."

It's easy to agree with all advertising. I think that's the quickest, easiest measure to cut that yields an outcome beneficial to society, and that more ads are nearly always worse.

I also think that sales are worse for society than every day prices that deliver value; sales do make sense for things like seasonal items which are in abundance due to just being harvested.

I’ve wondered the same thing. How much does a company have to spend on ads just to keep up with their competitors’ ad spend? I don’t know but if I had to guess I’d say most of the ad budget. Not to mention that ads are a cancer that infest and overrun anything they touch.

Would be a dream. Then a more-or-less independent entity paid by our tax money could be used to test stuff according to objective and scientific standards. I mean, stuff like TÜV certification already exists, doing a bit more work to get a reliable measure of performance, repairability, etc... like some review websites do wouldn't be that difficult.

Instead, we're forced to turn to third-party testers with dubious manufacturer relations - even when the results aren't freely available! - or technical knowledge (e.g. Consumer Reports using 1/3 octave smoothed power response for loudspeakers)...

The Internet existed before Internet ads (and particularly targeted ads) did. Personally, while I don't necessarily disagree with the point you're making, I'm curious to see what a pendulum swing in the opposite direction might look like.

> Untargeted ads pay less than 5% what targeted ones do.

Even assuming that is true, companies are bidding for user's attention and against each other. What do you think will happen to prices for context-based advertising if targeted advertising goes away?

> and the one billion YouTube viewers would likely be quite upset about it

Great example. Many of the ads that finance the YouTube ecosystem are context-based and not targeted.

If targetted ads are suddenly illegal, won't this mean the advertising market jumps 20x larger?

Either that, or we'll find out what just content based untargetted ads work pretty well.