I’d love to live in a world where creating something of real value to average humans outweighs what advertising has been appraised at - which id describe primarily as offering value to businesses looking to acquire customers. Yes, there is some value offered to those customers by an efficient advertising system, but the lions share of value lives with the businesses here.
I’d look to the brief postwar period where inequality was a bit lower as a great example of an era where massive value was captured by those who invented and produced new goods and services improving the lives of everyday people.
Digital ads, like it or not, are one of the only ways to reach your total/potential market.
I asked some magazines for print ads and one issue is 60-150€ in my niche. That’s not bad, I think I’ve blown twice that in digital ads before to help a friend and we got a 2 conversions to a paying customer.
Dunno. Maybe at a large scale digital advertising is where you have to go, but small businesses might actually benefit from… small advertising.
If I search for "how do I fix a shower that won't drain?" then you will get a mix of results that will include articles, Youtube videos, etc. But also links to plumbers in your area seem entirely relevant to that query, no? I find it strange how many of the most militant anti-advertising purists ignore this completely.
As for creating things of value, there's a problem: housing has become the best performing asset in many developed economies and it is fundamentally parasitic and destructive. As an example, the Reserve Bank of New Zealand analytically created the best-performing portoflio and it was... 100% housing [1].
Demand for housing in many places is inelastic. It enjoys huge tax benefits. And you can leverage it better than most asset classes. Plus it's become a political goal of many governments to have ever-increasing house prices.
So if you want to build a factory that makes widgets that you want to sell, that involves a lot of risks. Why would you when you get a better, easier and safer return from just buying more housing?
If you want a healthier, more equitable economy you absolutely have to decommodify housing. There's simply no other way.
[1]: https://www.rbnz.govt.nz/-/media/fd9fa649c29340d7b9f466ba41b...
They take issue with Google grabbing and compiling every piece of data it can get on you into a profile, keeping that forever, and selling that targeting to advertisers.
[1]: https://benjaminrosshoffman.com/the-debtors-revolt/
[2]: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tihhx7iy8C6yyHaC2/the-corner...