[thematrixturtle]

I'm no fan of ads, but I would still contest that. The pre-Internet advertising arsenal was all remarkably blunt weapons (newspaper ads, TV, radio, direct mail) that made targeting very difficult and were out of reach or not economic for countless businesses. Now anybody can buy precisely targeted impressions for any keyword under the sun and very closely track their performance, opening up entirely new markets.

[nulbyte]

I'm not a fan of these new markets. We got by just fine with simple, static ads that weren't spying on everyone. It gave rise to local, niche publications that were a heck of a lot more interesting than today's one-size-fits-all social media junk.

[ajsnigrutin]

And with that, millions and billions of users get profiled, their private information taken away and processed by those two companies, as ads get embedded into everything (even lockscreens it seems)

[seydor]

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Rachel-Soloveichik/publ...

There is no such thing as 'blunt' or sharp weapon, the market shows that all advertising has some efficacy (around 1% but nobody knows how much precisely). Internet advertising did not increase overall consumption, thus it is not more effective than the sum of previous media.

Anyway the biggest trick BigTech played was not that it hypnotized the masses, but that they convinced advertisers that they are better than everyone

[narag]

Internet advertising did not increase overall consumption...

Genuine questions: how do we know that? how do we measure that?

My own anecdotical evidence is that I consume different things. Anyway, would more effective advertising increase overall consumption? I would expect that it increases consumption of specific, tailored, targetted in detriment of generic.

[lesam]

My model is advertising is roughly zero sum - there’s only so much disposable income for advertisers to chase.

So it doesn’t seem contradictory that overall consumption stayed constant while the advertising arms race advanced significantly.

[naravara]

> opening up entirely new markets.

Before deciding if "opening up new markets" is necessarily good we'd need to ask what kinds of markets it opened up. Most of what I see are content farms flooding search engines with SEO garbage, scammy businesses that sell poor knock-off products, and predatory ad tech. I'd prefer it if those markets had never been opened.