> No money is exchanged when I promote my own product through my own channels
This is not really advertising, but it’s not really a problem either. People expect you to promote your own products and take it with the grain of salt they should. Besides, there are only so many channels you can possibly control.
> nor when I promote my friends products, whether I disclose it as promotion, or disguise it as my genuine unaffiliated opinion. Sometimes it really is a genuine opinion!
Sure. Maybe this is advertising that slips through. If all were down to is people advertising their friends’s products for no money then we would have eliminated 99.99% of the problem.
Further, if you have a highly influential channel, the cost of promoting a non genuine opinion about a friend’s product would almost certainly hurt your reputation, providing a strong disincentive to do such a thing.
> People expect you to promote your own products and take it with the grain of salt they should.
Similar thing happened with Amazon recently. They copied bestsellers and promoted their own products in their store leading to death of other companies. Now you are just making this loop in steroids. All the small companies would be forced to be sold to companies with eyeballs like Meta and Google.
This is not really advertising, but it’s not really a problem either. People expect you to promote your own products and take it with the grain of salt they should. Besides, there are only so many channels you can possibly control.
> nor when I promote my friends products, whether I disclose it as promotion, or disguise it as my genuine unaffiliated opinion. Sometimes it really is a genuine opinion!
Sure. Maybe this is advertising that slips through. If all were down to is people advertising their friends’s products for no money then we would have eliminated 99.99% of the problem.
Further, if you have a highly influential channel, the cost of promoting a non genuine opinion about a friend’s product would almost certainly hurt your reputation, providing a strong disincentive to do such a thing.