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TeMPOraLyesterday at 7:50 PM1 replyview on HN

Advertising is a negative sum game[0]. Helping smaller businesses without budget compete with larger companies on advertising is just contributing to making life worse for everyone.

There's no evening the field, only deepening the muck. There's no persistent advantage possible here, because whatever new cool thing a small business can do, a large business can do more of it and better

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[0] - It's a zero-sum game in the sense that everyone's effort only serves to cancel out the effort of their competitors, but it's hugely negative to society in absolute terms, because all that effort burns labor and natural resources.


Replies

xmprtyesterday at 11:52 PM

There's an argument to be made that if everyone is doing it then it will stop being effective and brands will have to start reaching for more honest forms of marketing/advertising their product. I think we've already gone through a cycle of this with influencer marketing where a decade ago, if a Youtuber recommended a product it had a lot more weight (eg. I could actually imagine a lot of creators using Audible/Squarespace) than today where most people realize it's just a way for them to make money and doesn't really hold much weight.