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Comment by nitwit005 | Hacker News Reader

Imagine two models for a moment. In one, everyone is free to advertise, and in the other, no marketing of any kind is possible (magically enforced somehow).

What's the difference between those two? Competing companies will occasionally edge ahead with clever ads, but in general they just cancel one another out. Having marketing exist isn't a "win" for companies, unless they have no serious competitors, because their competitors also have them.

One difference, perhaps, is that consumers probably get worse products due to ads existing. Ads create an additional path business success, even with lower product quality.

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A major component to modern advertising is educating people that options exist.

In the no advertising model things simply wither on the vine with no support to keep them going.

Smart phones are an obvious example. They existed for ages before a powerful marketing company pushed them to the mainstream (plus the usability improvements). That sparked a technical revolution...

That imagines there's no other way of people being informed. People would simply subscribe to some sort of service that reviews things. As it is, newspapers and magazines have reviews of most of the items normal people care about.

Where is that service if it's so valuable?

It exists (e.g. Which? in the UK), it's just undervalued because advertising already provides a low quality but free source of information.

That doesn't seem very logical.

First, I think you mean "less valued". That's generally what happens when there's little demand for something, or when there's a good substitute at a cheaper price.

Second, if all the free, evil ad-sponsored content on the internet is of such "low quality", it certainly would make such services more valuable, as it would offer something scarce. Their conspicuous absence seems to indicate something is amiss with this analysis.

>Their conspicuous absence seems to indicate something is amiss with this analysis.

As I said, these services exist, they're just not very prominent.

That doesn't mean they're not valuable, it just means people don't think they're valuable, and I'm not certain that's a rational decision.

I think if you asked people whether they'd pay say £10 extra on a £300 appliance to be reasonably sure it doesn't have a hugely annoying design flaw, a lot of people would pay.

But if you ask them to pay £10/month for access to a website that gives them that kind of information (even if they can cancel it after one month), they feel like it's a waste of money.

>if all the free, evil ad-sponsored content on the internet is of such "low quality"

I'm not saying the content is low quality, I'm saying the advertising itself is a low quality form of product information.

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