[throwuxiytayq]

I tend to view ads as the perfect opposite of what you mentioned; it’s an enormous waste of money and resources on a global scale that provides no tangible benefit for anyone that isn’t easily and cheaply replaced by vastly superior options.

If people valued ad viewing (e.g. for product decisions), we’d have popular websites dedicated to ad viewing. What we have instead is an industry dedicated to the idea of forcefully displaying ads to users in the least convenient places possible, and we still all go to reddit to decide what to buy.

[autoexec]

> If people valued ad viewing (e.g. for product decisions), we’d have popular websites dedicated to ad viewing.

There was a site dedicated to ad viewing once (adcritic.com maybe?) and it was great! People just viewed, voted, and commented on ads. Even though it was about the entertainment/artistic value of advertising and not about making product decisions.

Although the situation is likely to change somewhat in the near future, advertising has been one of the few ways that many artists have been able to make a comfortable living. Lying to and manipulating people in order to take more of their money or influence their opinions isn't exactly honorable work, but it has resulted in a lot of art that would not have happened otherwise.

Sadly the website was plagued by legal complaints from extremely shortsighted companies who should have been delighted to see their ads reach more people, and it eventually was forced to shutdown after it got too expensive to run (streaming video in those days was rare, low quality, and costly) although I have to wonder how much of that came from poor choices (like paying for insanely expensive superbowl ads). The website was bought up and came back requiring a subscription at which point I stopped paying any attention to it.

[IggleSniggle]

We do have such sites though, like Tom's Hardware or Consumer Reports or Wirecutter or what have you. Consumers pay money for these ads to reduce the conflict of interest, but companies still need to get their products chosen for these review pipelines.

[autoexec]

Tom's Hardware and Consumer Reports aren't really about ads (or at least that's not what made them popular). they were about trying to determine the truth about products and see past the lies told about them by advertising.

[duckmysick]

Strictly speaking, isn't advertising any action that calls attention to a particular product over another? It doesn't have to be directly funded by a manufacturer or a distributor.

I'd consider word-of-mouth a type of advertising as well.

[autoexec]

To me advertising isn't just calling attention to something, it's doing so with the intent to sell something or to manipulate.

When it's totally organic the person doing the promotion doesn't stand to gain anything. It less about trying to get you to buy something and usually just people sharing what they enjoy/has worked for them, or what they think you'd enjoy/would work for you. It's the intent behind the promotion and who is intended to benefit from it that makes the difference between friendly/helpful promotion and adversarial/harmful promotion.

Word of mouth can be a form of advertising that is directly funded by a manufacturer or a distributor too though. Social media influencers are one example, but companies will pay people to pretend to casually/organically talk up their products/services to strangers at bars/nightclubs, conferences, events, etc. just to take advantage of the increased level trust we put in word of mouth promotion exactly because of the assumption that the intent is to be helpful vs to sell.