Advertising plays an important role in the sale of digital goods and the physical sale of goods through digital means. It’s the only way you can really drive traffic to unknown markets.
Without advertising You’re going to be relying on YouTube videos or Google Play store or Apple store to get any sales. Any free online services would probably be a thing of the past. Small businesses would have trouble competing with larger entities can already put products in your face.
It’s not impossible to remove digital advertising and replace it with something else but I’m pretty sure the something else would be worse than what we have already
No, advertising is not necessary when a user can search a catalogue with multiple optional constraints, as we did in the olden days of printed catalogues.
Advertising is harmful - it’s somebody trying to persuade you that you need to buy a thing. First, you’ll usually know when you need something. Second, the salesman is not someone you’d believe normally.
It’s an interaction which normally should be initiated by you, not by sellers. Which makes advertising utterly useless immediately.
I’d argue the catalog could be seen as advertising though.
“This is what you can buy from us” and the language in those catalogs presents everything in the best possible light.
You’d open one only when you wanted it.
A database with various characteristics being the main component and the advertising text not being that is better, yes.
To put it another way, the difference is push vs. pull. A catalogue is a pull offering: the person looking at it is doing so by choice, because they’re interested in what it offers and want to buy something (or at least window shop). An online ad is a push offering: it’s presented to people who did not choose to see it, are not interested in it, and just wish it would go away and let them get on with what they’re actually trying to do. Pull advertising is (usually) acceptable. Push advertising is not.
I go through significant efforts to block digital advertising at multiple levels. Yet, I do not find it difficult to discover new things to buy (from both small and large businesses).
For myself, I suspect most of that is supported through online communities related to my interests and hobbies. Those purchases feel more informed and often more intentional too.
That is a very well placed observation from a consumer standpoint. Now consider it from a flower shop in your neighborhood trying to compete with the grocery store and FTD.com
How are you going to get your foot traffic other than word of mouth and people seeing you in a stripmall?
Targeted digital ads let you get in front of people in your area. There are very very few local websites anymore.
I block most ads too, but there’s no denying that occasionally on facebook, some semi-local brewpub goes hey, check out our new menu items and it turns out to be a win for them and for me.
Advertising is dicey, in a lot of cases, it’s in the hands of the enemy but the economy, especially small business doesn’t float without it.
Don’t threaten me with a good time
Nit only that, but advertising pays the bills for the majority of websites. It’s a necessary evil unless people want to pay every website host to see their content.
I’m not sure how true this perception is in more recent years. Many popular sites, with enormous traffic volumes that could drive digital impression ad revenue, are instead pushing subscriptions or other monetization models.
For instance, the New York Times makes — by far — more money on digital subscriptions than digital advertising. Digital advertising revenues are also declining for them.
Another example is Spotify, where ad revenue from their ad-supported tier did not cover their operational costs and now represents around only a tenth of their revenue compared to subscriptions.
The exceptions to this are generally search and social media sites, where the product for sale on these sites are the users themselves. They’re just advertising platforms, which of course make their money from digital advertising.
So I’d say one issue with digital advertising is that it often does not pay the bills for the site owner. Its value is tied to its ability to convert visitors to buyers, but it has to be ramped up to such an extreme level it instead only creates bad experiences.
I should have phrased it, helps pay the bills. For the end user if you don’t want to pay a monetary fee, then ads are the option. I would never go to some pages if I had to have a subscription to view content, and i assume many others wouldn’t either. Ads, as gross as they are, keep the Internet running for now
snooggums@midwest.social 2 months ago
Targeted advertising, which requires collecting personal information without people’s knowledge, is what makes online advertising the absolute worst kind of advertising. That could be addressed on a way that could allow other less malicious forms to exist.
linearchaos@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Opie did not say targeted advertising OP said get rid of all advertising I was responding to that
snooggums@midwest.social 2 months ago
Yes, OP said all advertising. You mentioned the main problems with ditching all advertising. I added to the conversation with a poasible middle ground that addressed the worst parts.
chiisana@lemmy.chiisana.net 2 months ago
You’re going to find that the appetite for un-targeted advertising to be much lower than that of targeted. The ROI for un-targeted blast is much lower than a smaller more focused targeted campaign.
As such, you’ll either see even more ads on the same content (in order to obtain similar level of revenue for the publisher), or, as the other user suggested, free ad supported service be a thing of the past.
Neither of which are good for the mass audience. People already aren’t willing to pay $1 to remove ads on most free ad supported apps, you’re going to find small businesses collapse left right and centre as result of the change.
snooggums@midwest.social 2 months ago
That’s fine. I will either continue to use adblockers, pay, or stop using the internet outside of what is required to function in society. I already refuse to use anything that has decided to go ad supported without the ability to block ads and has a price I’m not willing to pay.
If small (or large) businesses require the mass collection of personal information by malicious advertisers to exist, then they don’t derserve to exist.
lvxferre@mander.xyz 2 months ago
My prediction is different: I think that, in the long term, banning targetted ads will have almost no impact on the viability of ad-supported services, or the amount of ads per page.
Advertisement is an arms race; everyone needs to use the most efficient technique available, not just to increase their sales but to prevent them from decreasing - as your competitor using that technique will get the sales instead.
But once a certain technique is banned, you aren’t the only one who can’t use it; your competitors can’t either.
And the price of the ad slot is intrinsically tied to that. When targetted ads were introduced, advertisers became less willing to pay for non-targetted ads; decreased demand led to lower prices, and thus lower revenue to people offering those ad slots on their pages, forcing those people to offer ad slots with targetted advertisement instead. Banning targetted ads will simply revert this process, placing the market value of non-targetted ad slots back where it used to be.