According to Meta, their personalized advertising alone generates over $0.5 trillion of economic activity per year.
As much as the Hacker News crowd hates on ads, it's indisputable that it's good for businesses and the broad economy.
I dispute this. Therefore it is not indisputable.
I support my dispute thusly: imagine a world where there were no ads. All the money spent on ads would be spent on other things. Those other things would, I assert, be better for everyone involved than ads. The world would be a better place.
I support my assertion that anything else would be better than ads by pointing out that for businesses advertising is an arms race, all your competition and you are in an auction for customer attention in which the winner is one of the duopoly that control all internet advertising. And for users I just point to waves hands at everything we hate about the modern internet all that. QED.
It's not "look at all the money they made, this service must be valuable", it's "is the money they made the best possible use of those resources?" and my answer is "definitely not"
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
Why should I care that they make a boatload of money while making the life of everyone else crappier? Advertising turns everything into shit.
Crapware pre-installed onto your brand-new phone or laptop [1]? Advertising. Pervasive tracking added to Windows? Generating profiles for advertising. Smart TVs sending regular screengrabs to Samba TV? Analytics for advertising. Like your $2000 smart fridge? It's going to be much worse because Samsung is piloting advertising. Every tech product is getting infected by this disease, both shoving unwanted ads into your face and tracking your pervasively.
Of course, someone is going to argue that we cannot have 'free' products without advertising. In the end the consumer is paying for advertising as part of (increased) product prices.
E.g. if I'm on a pages looking at watches, should I get ads for watches, or would it be better to show ads for the washing machine I was looking up last night? Google, the search engine, clearly thinks it's better to show ads relevant to my search term, but they are also in a special position that's not applicable to a news website.
People working in the field has also previously commented, here on HN, that the ad networks are basically hustling the advertisers, selling them ad space / users that they know will perform badly, to move more "inventory". That generates economical activity, but does that benefit anyone beyond the ad networks?
By your logic, that makes it a good business. I dispute that.
Oh, but they shuffled some money around the economy (mostly into their coffers), so it was all worth it in the end, because as we all know the magic economy is the only thing that matters.