In the current world of abundance, advertising is crucial to content and product producers. Let's say you make an application, how do you sell it if nobody knows about it? You make a nifty product, how do you make people know it exists? Advertising, in principle, is good, the way it is done currently on the Web is awful.
It is human and environmental suicide to keep supporting the advertisement industry which is one of the main driving force behind our society of excess, one that is simply not sustainable.
No matter how much we like to think otherwise, advertisement is barely ethical (it's nothing less than coercion and manipulation). It's time we catch up to it and shut it down, it's a failed experiment that only resulted in bad things, enabling that world of abundance that nobody needed.
I agree with the original commenter, let the advertising sector burn.
I used to think this but I have come around to the opposite opinion. We have tools, these days, to rate and rank products. We have tools to search for them. We have tools to get nifty new ideas out to the public as quick as you can say "gone viral". Buyers don't need advertising at all.
It's purely a system to confound rational consumer choice these days, to maintain the viability of companies that shouldn't be viable, because their product is inferior.
This can work for some products but not for all. For example I rarely do a research on what movie to go to see. If it was not advertised somewhere (e.g.: trailer before another movie, a print ad in a bus stop) then there is little chance I will decide to go and see it. Same goes for applications, yes there are channels for ranking and rating them and most of them are subpar to say the least (with the system often being gamed or skewed because of often lazy users).
I've come to know many of the services and apps I use through channels like podcast and blog advertising. When done right, ads can be enjoyable (for example they are the only thing worth reading in an in-flight magazine)
Advertising is psychological manipulation and in 99% of cases all it does is create a need for something where there was none and where there need not be one.
As a society the West is driven by an obscene need for perpetual and ever-increasing consumption and advertising is primarily responsible for this.
It's a psychological attack on millions, even billions of people that uses their fears, their neuroses and their insecurities against them to generate profits.
They say advertising affects everying whether they know it or not and I do agree with this. The simple act of being exposed to say a Coca-Cola advert is enough to put that brand in your mind.
Here's the kicker though; for many people this is having the opposite effect as intended. I see an advert, for pretty much anything and all it does it make me want to avoid that company's products.
Anything from obnoxious internet ads to cringe-worthy TV ads full of happy care-free dancing actors singing headache inducing jingles. I'll avoid the products they advertise out of pure annoyance and spite.
It seems like more and more people are starting to react this way to advertising and it's a good thing.
1) The current world of abundance has reached its peak.
2) Advertising is not crucial to producers, though for commercial producers enough customers to make money is.
3) Advertising in principle is pure evil.
Advertising is also the force that makes the current web free. There are lot of articles, especially on HN, about keeping the web decentralised, keeping it open etc. So far there has been _no_ other way to finance a website than advertising.
Granted, some blogs (stratechery comes into mind) can go behind a paywall but that is because their articles have high value. Personally I like strategies like sponsored posts and similar, however these are not scalable for small producers thus available only for high-traffic websites. I wonder how would sites like Facebook, Blogger, Disqus work if there was no advertising. Also, people clearly want these sites to exist and clearly do not want to pay to use them, what other option there might be?
Potentially, that sort of funding of creators or institutions could permit them to be truly free to create as they please - with no need to answer to corporate advertisers, or anybody else except their most dedicated fan base.
It will also spread by Amazon reviews, Google search rank, positive press, and a great many other means of communication. This is not the 20th century when it was voice, TV, print, or nothing.
As long as there is more than one product competing for the same application and a benefit for the vendor from getting their product picked, there will be a pressure to convince people to choose in a particular way, i.e. advertising.