There is no competition in the ad space, so those companies can continue to just parasite their way to record earnings by stealing every other businesses profits. They create almost nothing of actual value, they are just heads of an ecosystem they totally control. Parasitism as a business model.
They have all the control and no competition. The time for breaking these companies up or hamstringing them at least a little bit is many years past due.
The problem is that monopolies are extremely profitable and are as "American as apple pie," despite the prevailing healthy competition myth that goes alongside it.
I'm baffled that so many people think advertising is a recent invention.
Do you genuinely believe there were economies anything like the modern luxuries we enjoy that also didn't have advertising? That advertising was an add-on that appeared at a later date?
We have plenty of archaeological evidence of advertising in ancient civilizations.
I didn't mean to imply it was a recent invention. However, the almost total centralization of advertising in a few companies on the internet IS new. Their parasitism and malevolent monopolistic omnipotence is pretty obvious to anyone who runs any kind of business with an internet presence. This severely inflates advertising costs and transfers profit that should be going to businesses who actually add value to companies that simply exploit their control of the platforms. Competition being introduced into this space, which at this point is only possible via government force, would make advertising cheaper and bring more exposure to companies and their products, which I fail to see as anything but a good thing for the economy.
Possibly? There have been advertisements for at least 2500 years. It's very likely that as long as there has been an economy as such, there have been business owners promoting themselves.
Right, but the unprecedented control of the public discourse on the internet by just a couple megacorps PREVENTS businesses from promoting themselves, unless they pay through the nose for the privilege. This destroys small competitors by design and leads to more and more monopolization of every industry, which is an absolute nightmare scenario for everyone involved in the economy but a tiny handful of people.
Yeah they probably had fewer advertisements back in the good old days, but they also had a much smaller economy, producing a whole lot less than we produce today. [1]
And you might not like everything about the world today, but living in a vibrant economy where people create wealth by building new businesses has led to more comfortable lives for the large majority of humanity.
All these hyperscalers do is control the internet and suck money from companies that actually add value via that control. I can name on one hand the amount of successful products GOOGLE has natively launched (without acquisition). This predatory behavior has the opposite effect on the economy you're claiming here.
Is there RoI for this advertising spend or isn't there? If there is, what are we talking about here? If there isn't, then why would people spend on something not giving a positive RoI?
We're talking about it because quantifiable variables aren't the only aspects of reality that matter. If a company does something profitable but it makes everyone but them worse off, there's an argument they shouldn't be allowed to do it.
I don't think that's how it works. These companies have all the visibility control and make you invisible by default unless you pay them. It has very little to do with quality, demand, or any of the rest.
The solution is to prevent the privatization and wealth accumulation that flows from control of infrastructural technology platforms. Netscape, google, computer os, machine learning were all public or university research projects until the first movers (andreeson, brin/page, Ellison, gates) stole them, gatekept and IPed them, and then exploited wide user base to accumulate absurd amounts of wealth for just themselves. These people either didn't create anything at all or made very slight variations before deploying them. They were smart in seeing the trends before they happened, but should they really be entitled to 50% of a countries wealth just because they were lucky enough to be first? Especially now that we see how they behave once they get that control?
There is no reason at all why the US govt. can't control this better, they just refuse to do so.
See the same thing in the bitcoin space. If you ask them to explain the value to you, you're a moronic, behind-the-times, luddite boomer who just doesn't understand. Not to mention poor!
I'll remain skeptical and let the technology speak for itself, if it ever does.
It’s different in that Bitcoin was never useful in any capacity when it was new. AI is at least useful right now and it’s improved considerably in the last few years.
