Many of those can include advertising, such as Amazon placement and reviews, media reports (many PR firms exist to push your product onto media outlets), personal recommendations, and even independent comparison tests (people see an ad, and research it more thoroughly including seeing how it fares on comparison tests, and perhaps tell their friends too).

I am not saying that the tests themselves are not independent, nor that people don't use them to make purchasing decisions, but the prevalence of advertising is such that you cannot disentangle its influence from every other. Clearly, even in Germany, ads exist, and if they did not work, then the ads would not exist.

> such as Amazon […] reviews

> many PR firms exist to push your product onto media outlets

> personal recommendations

Half of that is fraud, the other half is at least unethical. Reviews may only be the personal opinion of people who provably purchased the product. False reviews are fraud and explicitly a criminal act. Placing ads in media without explicitly marking it clearly and obviously an ad, so-called “native advertising”, is explicitly a criminal act.

> the prevalence of advertising is such that you cannot disentangle its influence from every other.

My original argument was that advertising isn't necessary. I think after this discussion it's become obvious that there are many other working and prevalent ways to discover products.

In fact, all advertising does is distort and corrupt those existing methods, trying to get me to spend more money than necessary on a worse product. Every cent spent on advertising could've been spent on improving the product instead.

> Half of that is fraud, the other half is at least unethical.

Not really. Yes, ads must be clearly stated, but oftentimes news outlets are just looking for stories to run, which are not compensated with free product or money, and thus are not subject to such advertising laws (in the US). With regards to reviews, I don't mean that reviews are paid, rather that Amazon charges companies to be "sponsored" and if people buy those and review them, their review was at least partially influenced by buying the top sponsored product. Same with personal recommendations, not sure how you can construe it as fraud or unethicality if I see a Coke ad, buy it, and recommend it to my friends.

> Every cent spent on advertising could've been spent on improving the product instead.

It is clear that you don't work on any products that make money, or at least aren't in any of the non-technical sales or marketing roles, or are not a founder who must necessarily do both the technical and business side. I used to think the same way, that ads are bad, but if I build a product and I want people to use it, I must necessarily tell people about it in some way, Twitter posts, telling a local reporter or tech blog, cold outreach to people, all of that is advertising in some respect. If I build it, they do not come, automatically, of their own volition, they don't even know I exist! Us engineers do not exist in a vacuum, we code for the goal of businesses to make money. Such black-and-white thinking as yours is not conducive to actually making and selling a product.

I was co-founder in the past, and I run a few open source projects. My partner specializes in SEO, and my neighbor is in a leading position in an ad agency.

I understand the advertising industry perfectly well, but that's exactly why I hate it so much. All advertising does is help incumbents, because they can afford to waste money on excessive marketing budgets. So many products are sold on buzzwords, false claims and promoting a lifestyle instead of on merit.

Advertising, especially false advertising, needs to be at least heavily regulated if not banned entirely. Even the slightest exaggeration from the truth needs to be punished harshly. It's impossible to compete honestly in a market when your competitors are selling based on AI Cloud Blockchain Smart Industry 4.0 IoT buzzwords.

Sure, I hate false advertising as much as the next person, but by banning all advertising, I'd make no money from my product if I couldn't even tell people my product existed, which is the effect such bans you advocate for would have.

To get back to a prior question you asked (which I did not answer it seems) as to why banning advertising would protect incumbents, it's because people already know about them while they wouldn't know about upstarts. Again with the Coke example, a new soda brand would find it exceedingly difficult to gain a foothold if everyone simply defaults to Coke normally. Same as in software, imagine if a new search engine competing with Google came about, but since everyone already uses Google and since the new search engine could not advertise themselves (with such a ban as yours), they will likely fail, even if their product is superior.

Google did not grow through advertising, but through word-of-mouth because they were actually better than the competition. I discovered the soda brands I'm now primarily drinking (Fritz, Premium) the same way.

So much of human society works through word-of-mouth. In fact, I'd argue that the type of megacorporation that can only exist grow through advertising is in fact damaging to society in itself. Small, localised SMBs is how we should go into the future.

Small, localized SMBs were the ones most hurt by advertising changes such as between Apple and Facebook. But, let's agree to disagree, I don't think we'll change each other's minds in this conversation. Have a good day and happy new year.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/08/small-businesses-cou...