Tons of small businesses rely on advertising. Tons of legit businesses only exist because online advertising became easy and widespread.
But there have been businesses based on lead pipes for drinking water plumbing, asbestos for residential insulation, and so on. You could make an argument that these technologies enabled many businesses as well. That doesn’t mean we should allow lead pipes for drinking water or to use asbestos in residential homes.
to name a few: LISEN, Qifutan, Loncaster, YKYI, Holikme and SXhyf. And who could forget VWMYQ?
And it still doesn't justify Google.
An alternative effect could be that online ads are an avenue for better resourced established companies to out compete and stifle upstarts. Startups are always pressed for resources and running an effective online ad campaign can take significant resources.
You're surely right that some small businesses have benefited from the online ad market, but I suspect that on average larger companies have benefited to a greater degree.
[0]https://www.uschamber.com/small-business/small-business-data...
Ceteris paribus. Running a small business in most states involves more rules today than it did in 2000. (Common denominator: the cost of financial transactions due to post-9/11 anti-money laundering rules.)
Put yourself in the mind of someone making a THING, how do you plan to reach your possible customers for THING?
THING is the best in class, better than the competition but how would you make the world aware of THING existing?
trade shows, trade magazines, word of mouth, window-dressing in the THING-quarter, ...
why are personalized ads on a website indispensable?
There is no before advertising
Pretty sure we have ads from Mesopotamia
Advertising (4000 BCE)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_advertising
Fact-checking is literally just a Google search away. Irony intended.
They aren't. This is exactly what I mean by modern advertising.
If ads were just contextual based on the content of the page, we wouldn't be having this conversation.
I'd still be blocking them, though.
Plumbing is good and useful. Plumbing using lead pipes is harmful.
Advertising can be good and useful. Modern advertising that requires tracking everything a user does is harmful.
They're looking for depth where there isn't any. You're attempting to prove advertising is bad by claiming it's like lead pipes, on the basis of them both being bad. It's tautology. One could similarly "prove" ad blockers or puppies by this analogy to be whatever because they, too, can be good or bad.
Modern advertising is what I'm against, not advertising as a whole.
Similarly, I'm against lead pipes for plumbing, not plumbing as a whole.
That X enables many businesses to exist doesn't mean that X is a good thing on balance, because X itself can have harmful effects that outweigh the benefits.
This is of course true, and I can look past the inelegant phrasing.
But to make this a credible argument you need to argue for why the costs of advertising outweigh the benefits.
Google ads was (and is) incredibly good for niche companies, since it makes it possible to advertise to people who are interested in your product instead of the general public.
So if you sell Warhammer paraphernalia, you can buy ads to be shown only to people who have searched for Warhammer related words, rather than "everyone in Wisconsin".
This lowers ad costs by many orders of magnitude, and makes a lot of businesses possible that simply couldn't exist before.
I'd want some damn good reasons to go back to the old ways!
Tracking people and shoving your wares in their faces is not the only way to reach interested parties. You could go to a Warhammer convention, join a Warhammer forum and offer to send members samples, or just post images of your stuff in a sharing thread, whatever. Engage with people while they're searching for the thing you're offering.
Of course, word of mouth requires you to actually make a good product whereas with advertisment it's enough if your product looks good.
I'm telling you what actually happened in the real world.
IME this is only true about drop shippers and similar business models. The vast majority of small businesses are, as a rule, awful at advertising. The few ads I see they are very poorly put together.
Even when they manage to get people to the business, small businesses are almost inevitably awful about maintaining their web presence, which makes it moot. Here's an example thread about such from the local reddit. Including some hostile responses from, charitably, overwhelmed small businesses about how you need to call to confirm a price https://old.reddit.com/r/Calgary/comments/1ewlsib/open_lette...)
I’m assuming most of the places that redditor contacted to buy UPS batteries from are B2B shops that aren’t geared to selling to people off the street.
I’m assuming this because sometimes I buy replacement UPS battery strings, and I pay with a purchase order after talking to or emailing an inside sales person, not with a credit card at a register.
Places like this don’t even need to advertise, the professionals they’re selling to know where to find what they need.
I think a lot of these businesses could succeed using alternative promotional strategies. Some of them might suffer because the owners have more money than time and advertising is a good tradeoff in that case, but overall good products are still going to do well.