Comment by realusername
1 month ago
Even if you would never see an ad in your life somehow, you would still have to pay for it on the products you buy.
The advertising industry is so large that it's basically private taxation, except that you get nothing in return from it.
The best concert I ever saw was one I only knew was in town because of an ad.
My interests align with advertisers to an extent. I do want to know what products are out there. I'm an adult, I won't forget that their descriptions of their products are biased.
Surveillance advertising is a bad thing, but it doesn't help to take the most extremist position possible. Advertising is information, and it's not difficult to use that information to your benefit.
That kind of old-school vision of advertising is a vision from the 80s, it's been a long time that advertising isn't about information anymore.
The big spenders are in the game for brand awareness (there's not even a product being shown sometimes) and then there's a parallel world of which I would call scams which went on top of it (less than half of the Youtube ads I see look legal)
If you remove those two, I'm not sure how long the advertising industry would survive.
I follow the bands I care about seeing. There are other, less intrusive modalities for communication than advertising.
Billboard ads don't yell as you at least. They are like two orders of magnitute less annoying than video ads