[georgelyon]

The idea of product discovery has value. Advertising funds product discovery by taking some of the funds that you pay for goods, and funneling that money to platforms and creators that are willing to help others discover that product.

There is an alternative model where we simply pay professional product discoverers. Think influencers, but whose customer is the fan not the sponsor. It would be a massive cultural shift, but doesn’t seem so crazy to me.

[massysett]

Businesses will then send the discoverers free samples, provide literature, and send “advisers” to talk with the discoverers, and you’ll be right back where you started.

[YurgenJurgensen]

Is it a consideration with monetary value? Then it’s advertising, much like how bribing public official is still (theoretically) illegal even if you don’t do it in cash. If it’s not, then the discoverer has no incentive to act according to the business’s demand.

[massysett]

I’m not understanding why this is a good standard: right now, anyone who sees a billboard or a TV ad has no incentive to act according to the business’s demand, yet you want to ban those. So you think it would be OK to advertise to discoverers, but not to final purchasers.

[georgelyon]

For the record, I’m not saying this is the perfect model and we should move to it immediately. My only claim is that it isn’t crazy.

I think the fundamental difference between advertising to discoverers vs advertising to consumers is that currently “discoverers” (platforms, content creators, billboard owners, etc.) make money directly from advertisers. Success as a “discoverer” is at least somewhat correlated to income (with more money, platforms can be more successful; content creators can create more compelling content; landowners can buy more billboards). If that money is coming from advertisers, you are biasing the market to prefer discoverers that can secure the most advertiser funding, which in turn preferences advertisers that can spend the most on advertising. This isn’t fundamentally bad, since a compelling product can make a lot of money that can then be spend on advertising, but it also creates anti-consumer incentives (like marketing something that is just good enough not to return as the next best thing). On the other hand, if discoverers are paid directly by consumers, that biases the market to prefer discoverers who identify products that bring the most value to consumers for their money.

[YurgenJurgensen]

In the billboard case, the consideration is not between the viewer and the advertiser, it’s between the advertiser and the landowner.

[YurgenJurgensen]

Those existed once. They were called ‘magazines’. But they mostly became ad-supported, and then got killed by the Internet.