alt Hacker NewsI've often wondered whether the world would be better without ads. The incentive to create services (especially in social media) that strive to addict their users feels toxic to society. Often, it feels uncertain whether these services are providing actual value, and I suspect that whether a user would pay for a service in lieu of watching ads is incidentally a good barometer for whether real value is present.
Don't get me wrong, I'm well aware this is impractical. But it's fun to think about sometimes.
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I think it would have been a better world without ads. There would be more competition which would improve products and thus outcome for customers.
Also most of the demand of goods is artificially created by ads, so there would be less production of crap and thus less resources wasted.
It would also mean a whole industry of people would do something else that is potentially not as detrimental to society.
The money spend on the digital marketing industry was estimated at 650 billion USD 2025. For comparison that is equivalent to the whole GDP of countries like Sweden or Israel.
People don't care. Youtube has an option to watch it without ads, most people don't. I refuse to watch ads and pay for the ad-free versions of the streamers. Lots people won't pay. Would the average person pay $10/m for ad free social media? Or pay for add free search? Pretty sure there are search engines that you can pay that are ad free.
What needs to be regulated is ads that you can't avoid. You can avoid online ads by paying ad free versions or not browsing certain sites(eg: instagram, FB). Billboards need to go away, and some cities have outlawed them.
When crypto was genuinely new, and I was young, I had hope that one day we might actually embrace micropayments. Turns out I was not only young, but stupid.
You're dead right, it would be the one killer move to remove a lot of perverse incentives, fix the internet, possibly even social media, and all live in a happier world. The whole economy would stop paying the ad tax to Google and Meta.
And it's not that impractical : just make a consumer-run search engine for products and services.
I pay for YouTube Premium, which would in theory pull me out of the perverse incentive structure around an ad-based model. Yet I feel like I still get pushed toward all the same “features” of ad-funded accounts. I find it incredibly frustrating and keep sending feature requests and reporting site issues as a result.
> often wondered whether the world would be better without ads
You’d probably have to compromise on free speech, since the line between ads and public persuasion is ambiguous to the point of non-existence.
Better middle steps: ban on public advertising (e.g. no billboards, first-party-only signage). Ban on targeted digital advertising. Ban on bulk unsolicited mail or e-mail.
Maybe, but on the otherside, ads make available a huge amount of media and services to people who would otherwise be unable to afford it. Like, I suspect a non-trivial percentage of people wouldn't have email if it weren't for gmail and other free w/ads services.
Nice linguistic explanation of social media just been coined as ‘ultra processed language’
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DQh50UKkt10/?igsh=MWx6ZW41ZHV...
> Lei Cidade Limpa (Portuguese for clean city law) is a law of the city of São Paulo, Brazil, put into law by proclamation in 2006 that prohibits advertising such as outdoor posters.
I don't think that's impractical - isn't it exactly what YouTube Premium offers, ad free viewing for £12.99 a month.
I watch quite a lot of content on YouTube and really should sign up for Premium but I feel that the shockingly irrelevant ads I get presented with on YouTube are trying to drive me to sign for it - they're certainly not going to get me to buy anything!
Better from whom? As a user, maybe. But if you're trying to compete, it's incredibly useful to get exposure. For instance, suppose you run a competitor to Salesforce and you want to buy the Salesforce keyword because you provide a better product. I don't know how you would bootstrap that otherwise.
If anything the big businesses use advertising as a protection moat. As a small business, I would def prefer to be in a world that allows me to advertise, even if I have to compete for things like my own name
When I first visited Latvia, I thought it was a charming side effect of communism that store names were quite small on the façades. Was there an ethic of abjuring crass commercialism? Then I noticed the shadows left by larger store names above the small Latvian store names. It wasn't that Marxism Leninism called for demure commercial logos. The Latvians had just taken down the Russian signs. Commercial promotion is, I suppose, a condition of life,
I've often wondered what would happen if we _taxed_ advertising [0]. The same rationale applies: it'll never work, and it'll never even be tested, but I agree, it was fun to think about.
[0]: https://matthewsinclair.com/blog/0177-what-if-we-taxed-adver...
No need to wonder: the world would certainly be better without ads. Advertising is psychological manipulation. They should be illegal.
And don't whine about "how will new companies find customers?" They'll figure it out. Capitalism always finds a way. Business interests should always be secondary to the needs and safety of real people.
As an experiment, think of a space that is improved by ads.
It's not ads IMO, it's just reality. Remove the ads, people (instagram/tiktok/youtube) still get influence by "strive to addict their users"
I think my tolerance for ads would be higher if algos stop showing repeat ads, or limit same ad from playing more than X times to user.
> I've often wondered whether the world would be better without ads.
Of course. Ads make us buy more things. Things we don't need most of the time.
Think of the environmental win if we banned ads tomorrow!
I mean, infinitely so. I don't give a shit that you (the royal you, not literally you :p) and your business can't find their target demographic without ads, they are psychological manipulation of the worst kind and they should be eradicated from existence with prejudice. There is NO type of advertisement that is okay in my mind, whether it be a 5x5cm image in a black and white newspaper or the ubiquitous cancer that we're inundated with daily on the internet, none of it should exist. Moreover, if your business isn't possible without ads, then good riddance. Maybe at some point in the past I would've been okay with the "innocuous" ones like the newspaper ones, but the advertising industry and the psychotic, soulless ghouls that inhabit it have changed my opinion forever on it.
For every "innocent" and well intentioned ad out there, there are quite literally a billion cancerous ones that rely on pure deception to make the biggest buck out of you. Ads are the driving force behind the cancerous entity that is Meta and all the ills that they've brought upon the world such as actual fucking genocides. The "people" I've had the displeasure of meeting that come from advertising backgrounds have all been soulless psychopaths who would sell their own family for a bit of cash.
I mean just look at the type of shit they come up with in this very thread. It's all just games on how they can circumvent these kinda rules. "Oh you'll force me to let people skip my brainwashing? I'll just put up 20x more ads to make up for it!" Who even talks and thinks like this other than ghouls?
People won't pay a few bucks a month for YouTube. They won't pay to keep their favorite sites online. They won't pay for their news. Without ads, a lot of things wouldn't exist.
Instead of ads, we could have websites mine bitcoin in javascript. I feel like this would be better for everyone, especially in a world of AI agents.
Billboards are outlawed in Alaska.
> whether the world would be better without ads
What if we made advertising illegal? (simone.org)
1975 points by smnrg 9 months ago | 1409 comments
Of course it would be better.
There is a huge chunk of companies who do not pay to advertise their products or services, because their value offering is good enough to not need to. And a huge chunk who does very little advertisement for the very same reason.
For example, when was the last time you saw a TV or YouTube ad for a motorcycle from any of the big Japanese brands? The products are so mature and the value proposition is so good that they don't need to. And that's a 70 billion dollar annual market.
The problem isn't fundamentally advertising - it's stuff like toxic and anti-user advertisements, and the ad industry not knowing what the word "privacy" means.
How about a world without money?
My experience is that people who make sweeping claims like "all advertising should be banned" have never run or managed a small business. There is simply no way to survive as one of the little guys without some kind of marketing.
It’s a well-established fact that my world would be much better without ads.
It would be much, much better:
- Improved incentive for the IT and medias industry. Users and viewers are the customers again.
- Removal of the culture of normalized lying that infects everyone to the point people don't see it anymore.
- Natural selection of product by actually asking people for money. Can't pay 2 euros / month for facebook? It deserves to die.
- Redirection of resources from marketing to useful things. Billions going back to R&D, quality control, etc.
- Brand forced to rely on quality and word of mouth again. No more temporary product trick. No more "one month brand lifetime" hack. No more "PR will save this disaster".
- Improved skin in the game. And you will see less reputation-damaging behavior because of this. Think twice about doing A/B testing, fake sales, use too many notifications. You need those saavy power users to spread the word now.
- Disappearance of old and new artificial social norms solely created by marketing firms to sell stuff that parasites our reality. No need for everybody to look the same, no need for diamonds for engagement rings, no "whole white family having breakfirst in a big house and everything is clean and they are all happy and hot" to sell coffee, no "big red guy with a beard" created by coca cola.
- Getting back on specs. You can't sell perfume and cars on an vague idea anymore.
- Children won't get conditioned from a young age to want stuff they don't need, think ideas they don't really have, and adopt behaviors that are harmful for them just so that a marketer can get 3% more engagement.
- Creating massive volume of bad content will not be a successful strategies anymore, since it's not about displaying ads. So content quality go up.
- Streets get nicer, with no more ads display. Clothes as well, with no more big logo making you look like a billboard.
- No more ads in your mail box! And you can redirect the money from the gov marketing budget to actually find email spammers as well.
- Removal of a huge means of accumulation and centralization of power. Right now, it's pay to win, and the more money you have, the more you can run ads, the more you can sell. Which means a small local shop cannot easily compete with a big one. But without ads, it's actually close to its own clients, and has an advantage to get their attention organically.
- People get back some part of their attention span.
The benefits are not superficial; they are immense!
Ads are a plague on our societies.
Evolving as humans requires us to find a way to ban them.
I doubt I will see it in my lifestyle, but we need to get rid of this parasite if we want to go to the next level.
New businesses would never get off the ground. Advertising is probably one of the things that will never go away in a capitalist society.
Why not. Just run with it sometimes. Get people to argue for ads.
> Don't get me wrong, I'm well aware this is impractical. But it's fun to think about sometimes.
Yeah, sure. Get them to convince you how impractical it is. How the economy relies on it. How things “wouldn’t work” without it. Then you/they have just argued themselves into the position that society relies on this shitty practice to sustain itself. Then in turn: why ought we live like this?
Absolutely. The world would be vastly better off without 2 things:
- Ads. Lower quality products/services perform better with more/better ads.
- Venture Capital. Services out-compete others by using free money early on, killing the free market.
The world would definitely be better without ads. All ads are poisonous. All of them first convince you that you and your life as it is is not good enough, and that in order to be happy again you need to spend money to buy a $product.