>there's nothing inherently wrong with advertising in an academic sense.

There is so much wrong with advertising in an academic sense.

- They distort the product market as they favour those players with the highest marketing budget, rather than with the best product.

- They distort the media market as getting people to look in your direction is the only thing that has value. Clickbait and fake-news are a direct result of advertising, and wouldn't exist without it.

- They are an attempt at manipulation. People have to constantly expend the energy to counteract that manipulation. I also believe this to be a big factor in the decrease in trust in media. Since the stuff that is meant to inform you is always surrounded by stuff trying to manipulate you, how could you ever build trust to it?

I'm talking about the basic principles of advertising. A simple sign in the street is advertising, as is a static graphic on a niche hobby website advertising products from a company people within that community respect. There's nothing wrong with letting people know your products exist. The problem is always in the execution.

> They distort the product market as they favour those players with the highest marketing budget, rather than with the best product.

I don't see any alternative to letting people make claims and making laws to stop them blatantly lying. What is the "best" product in any category? How does the best product surface in front of me without advertising in any context?

> Clickbait and fake-news are a direct result of advertising

Advertising is a part of it, sure, but it's not the whole picture.

> They are an attempt at manipulation. People have to constantly expend the energy to counteract that manipulation

100% agree, which is why I promote adblockers. But I don't think this is a problem with the principle of advertising, it's an execution problem. Like many others mention if a website had a small sidebar with static graphic ads that weren't invasive I wouldn't block them as they wouldn't be requiring me to expend energy to counteract them and I would still think it would be ethical to block them if someone wished to. It's never unethical to choose what code runs on my machine after being sent to me, if you don't want me to have free content then don't send me content for free.

I think we're mostly on the same page, I just don't have a problem with ads at the bottom end of the manipulation and annoyance scale.

>I don't see any alternative to letting people make claims and making laws to stop them blatantly lying. What is the "best" product in any category? How does the best product surface in front of me without advertising in any context?

Are you aware of the concept of independent product reviews that you can build trust to and seek out on your own if you are interested in them?

>Advertising is a part of it, sure, but it's not the whole picture.

There is no direct financial incentive for them without advertising.

A political actor might sponsor fake news, so it wouldn't disappear, but most of it gets made because it's a cheap way to generate highly engaging content that gets shared a lot.

> concept of independent product reviews

How did these original purchasers find out about these products in order to buy and review them? How do I know they aren't receiving products for free or more subtly being specific in what products they will or won't review in order to spin a narrative. I'm a big fan of good product reviews but this doesn't solve advertisings problems it just introduces new ones.

I'm not really sure how businesses survive in a world where they are not allowed to advertise their products or where they are located? It feels very artificially prescribed in how you think people should discover something.

Like you I don't even like ads, and I would rather not see them but I don't advocate for them not to be able to exist, just for my right to block them or in the real world for them to no intrude unnecessarily.

What solution do you envisage to the problem of ads as you see it? to ban them entirely?

>How did these original purchasers find out about these products in order to buy and review them?

Professional reviewers already find out directly fron the product creators. They want to be contacted by them and even seek out contact. This problem is already solved. In general, they certainly don't learn about products from advertising.

>How do I know they aren't receiving products for free or more subtly being specific in what products they will or won't review in order to spin a narrative. I'm a big fan of good product reviews but this doesn't solve advertisings problems it just introduces new ones.

I generally don't have a problem with professional reviewers recieving products for free to review them. If they get paid to push a certain product, while pretending they are a neutral source of information, I would consider this fraud.

>What solution do you envisage to the problem of ads as you see it? to ban them entirely?

Yes, I advocate banning advertising and I hope to contribute to support to put that measure into place.

> quality that people are willing to pay for though

You 're only talking about news sites. While they are the loudest to complain, most of the web traffic is not news sites, but sites with immense amounts of valuable information, most of which is not compensated well. The only one who gets compensated well is Google, and we should change that.

Businesses are constantly willing to give money for advertising, and they will do that even if 100% of users use adblocking. That is a 0.5 trillion industry which is a great fit for attention-grabbing media, from printed press to the internet. It's not going away. It's just broken, largely because of centralized tracking, and we have to fix that.

I didn't just mean news sites, they are a good example though.

There is a lot of sites out there with very valuable information, I'm not convinced that they inherently need compensating though? but I might be mis-interpreting what you mean. More specifically I don't think encouraging these valuable sites to survive on new ad driven or donation modals is pragmatic, especially one backed by a crypto like BAT.

If I create high value content and put it online for free I don't think it's fair I then complain that it doesn't generate enough revenue through ads. I would rather the content not be given to me for free in the first place.

> I'm not convinced that they inherently need compensating though?

I am. I find some excellent Youtube channels, and i m sure google is not compensating them enough. I find interesting comments here or on reddit which are never compensated. For small audiences, there is just no way to be compensated. IF people take the time to provide value to me, simple logic says there should be a way to compensate them (but there isn't). It seems like we have the technology to transform the way we live and we don't use it.

> create high value content and put it online for free

Most people do that with the expectation that once they hit a popularity threshold, they 'll be able to monetize it. At least that's what Google promises them (thats how blogs and youtube took off), and after they bait they switch and start starving creators of income. We can do better than that, imho

> I am. I find some excellent Youtube channels, and i m sure google is not compensating them enough.

Depending upon youtube ads for your revenue is not a good model anyway. Many channel owners have their own monetization through sponsors ("this video was sponsored by..."), patreon, affiliate links, merchandise, etc.

For others, they may either produce the content for pleasure (i.e. without intent to monetize) or as a way of driving attention toward their real business (e.g. if they are a consultant or book author).

> I find interesting comments here or on reddit which are never compensated. For small audiences, there is just no way to be compensated. IF people take the time to provide value to me, simple logic says there should be a way to compensate them (but there isn't).

There are incentives that motivate people aside from money, such as reputation. That aside, I think the reason many participate in sites like this is that ultimately they intend to gain knowledge as well. There's not an explicit exchange, but by all of us willing to share our knowledge and experience, we all end up more educated than we started out.

> Most people do that with the expectation that once they hit a popularity threshold, they 'll be able to monetize it. At least that's what Google promises them (thats how blogs and youtube took off), and after they bait they switch and start starving creators of income. We can do better than that, imho

Again, depending upon a platform provider (and one that is often secretive and unaccountable with it's decisions) for your main source of income is a bad bet. For content creators, the hard truth is that you have to put a lot of work into connecting directly with your customers and finding ways to disintermediate the publishing platforms and diversify your revenue streams.

> aside from money

obviously people do, but considering that the tech exists, why not have an option? Also, consider that many blog posts are essentially blogvertisements anyway, and there is apparenty a market for buying upvotes here.

> you have to put a lot of work into connecting directly

That is a lot harder because people's attention is limited and the big tech cos have a stronghold on it. E.g. it's very hard to pull people away from youtube.

> I find some excellent Youtube channels, and i m sure google is not compensating them enough.

What is "enough" if not determined by the market?

Presumably these channel creators could leave YouTube and create their own websites and sell their own ads. If they're being grossly underpaid vs. the value that YouTube provides (largely in distribution and monetization) presumably they'd be doing that, but they're not. Why not?

> if not determined by the market?

Exactly that, the market is skewed by monopolies. You can easily setup an ad server, but good luck getting the attention of an advertiser. Google has a stronghold on display ads, almost a monopoly.

That's a demand problem not a monopoly problem. You can't get advertiser attention because advertisers have limited interest in advertising on small scale properties because it's not a scalable way to do business.

If anything Google provides more opportunity because the alternative to AdSense existing would probably be no revenue at all for small web properties.