As much as I hate ads, it's just not true that they don't offer any value. They often can and do inform consumers and businesses of products that will be of value to them. They often though advertise things that are also of the opposite (negative value) and play on human weaknesses.
"- Market failure: not the "best" product wins, but the one with the biggest advertisement budget behind it."
This is actually a beneficial outcome. Similarly to how genetic algorithms and simulated anealing require and element of randomness to avoid getting stuck in local minima, so I suspect advertising serves the purpose of preventing us getting stuck in local minima.
Equally too much randomness and the algorithms fail to converge on the global minimum and so perhaps, too much advertisement prevents us truly discovering the best products and services.
Either way though, it is in finding the balance that real value is found.
You forgot the largest plus: Ads pay for many useful and enjoyable services that are free for the consumer (or cheaper). Things like broadcast television, local news, most of the internet, games, concerts....
I don't disagree that there are many cons, but it's disingenuous not to include the services they power as one of the pluses.
But I can add another minus: ads as a monetization scheme are unnecessarily restrictive, since the only way for an organization to increase their prices is to jump from an ad-based scheme to a paid scheme, and this jump is too big in many cases. Instead, if we paid for everything with money (not with data), then pricing would be more clear and there would not be any threshold in changing prices.
I'm not sure I fully understand, this would be pay walls on everything wouldn't it? If so, I agree it greatly increases pricing clarity but I'm not convinced it's an improvement necessarily.
I'd also mention that many freemium businesses actually introduce paid models to control costs rather than improve profitability - particularly true for streaming media companies.
>> Market failure: not the "best" product wins, but the one with the biggest advertisement budget behind it
I think this is the most important point.
It changes the competitive landscape from being quality-based to being awareness-based.
By driving attention towards their own products, big companies are shifting attention away from more deserving competing products which have a smaller marketing budget.
I think this explains why big companies are so inefficient and yet still maintain their market share.
Advertising allows companies to substitute real quality with perceived quality in order to increase profit margins.
> By driving attention towards their own products, big companies are shifting attention away from more deserving competing products which have a smaller marketing budget
You think small companies would benefit from an advertising ban?
Remember that products can still be found through search. If there are no ads, there will probably be better "product discovery" websites to fill the gap if necessary. And of course there are the regular channels, i.e., recommendations by friends, forums, review sites, etc.
The problem is that many consumers might not even be aware that its a decision worth researching. For example, in some areas of the US it is cheaper and quicker to order online through Walmart than it is through Amazon. But most users order through Amazon by reflex, not even considering if there is an alternative.
Advertising helps here. It tells them "look there is an alternative. Consider it!"
People go to Amazon for online shopping because Amazon pays to have a bigger web presence through advertising than WalMart does. Had there been no advertising on either end, you'd have a level playing field where people would have to discover the best / cheapest / most efficient online shopping on their own.
Seems strange that you think advertising helps here when you also claim that people are responding to advertising with negative outcomes.
