[ianai]

If advertising aids your revenue then you're operating as a monopolist or oligopolistic. In either situation you're outputting less than optimal, extracting rent, and society loses out through waste. Billionaires have accumulated a lot of inefficient rent.

[vixen99]

How is it possible to do the math on the loss to society? Assuming a level playing field, how does society lose out from a monopolistic business that provides something no one else offers for which customers are of their own free will, prepared to hand over their cash? And why should those buyers be the only people to benefit because they happened to hear about the product or service in the absence of advertising? Monopolies are always temporary affairs with unpredictable life spans.