>In conclusion, your entire comment is a collection of the very worst, lazy and dishonest arguments and excuses for advertising.
And yet you couldn't address any of them without dodging the material part of the argument in favor of faux outrage, generalities, and personal preference topped off with a belittling logically unsound conclusion.
I just flat out disagree with most of the premises you have shared here. Also I don't understand how something can be wrong or right in an 'academic sense' but fine:
>They distort the product market as they favour those players with the highest marketing budget, rather than with the best product.
Presumably the companies with the bigger budgets have that money to spend because they have a better product. When people buy your product, you have money to spend, and then you go and spend it on marketing and advertising (which are two separate disciplines, I won't get hung up on that but just know that using those two interchangeably betrays a lack of critical understanding). I can think of very few companies that became market leaders solely because of advertising while selling an inferior product. Beer/alcohol springs to mind, but even there I could argue that taste is subjective and that image is a huge part of what people are drinking regardless so much like fashion, customers are buying the label as much as the utility.
> They distort the media market as getting people to look in your direction is the only thing that has value. Clickbait and fake-news are a direct result of advertising, and wouldn't exist without it.
This is also wrong-ish. People didn't tune into a TV show because of the advertisements that aired between commercials, they tuned in because of good TV. The better the TV show, the more money they could command from advertisers because of the audience size. They wouldn't invest that money into more advertisements, they would invest it into making better TV. Now, with clickbait you have a bit of a point - but that's more of a systemic issue. When people started giving content away for free, newspapers crashed as content moved online. Desperate for an audience, advertisers used yesterday's model (look for the place with the most eyeballs) and started migrating over there. There was a period of time where buzzfeed and clickbait reigned supreme for that reason, but that's starting to change as advertisers get wiser about where they are positioning their company. Respectable products tend to dominate respectable sites and clickbaity sites get filled with less respectable companies. It's far from perfect, but again - this is about the method, not really advertising as a practice. I don't see the connection with fake-news at all. Fake news happened because people were glued to their newsfeeds. If anything advertisers are terrified of fake news because it hurts their credibility to show up next to it.
> They are an attempt at manipulation. People have to constantly expend the energy to counteract that manipulation. I also believe this to be a big factor in the decrease in trust in media. Since the stuff that is meant to inform you is always surrounded by stuff trying to manipulate you, how could you ever build trust to it?
Are reviews an attempt at manipulation? Maybe you think they are better because they are a third party... but at the end of the day they are just trying to tell you one product is better than another. If "attempts at manipulation" are bad, then we should get rid of all review sites. If your issue is that the company is saying their thing is best, when maybe it isn't, what company in their right mind would say "hey, our product sucks". Do you have an issue with sales or selling in general? Is the very act of getting someone to try and buy your thing a cause for societal ill? As for people constantly expending energy to counteract this manipulation, this is my least favorite line of argument around advertising. It disrespects people and treats them as weak minded simpletons who have no thoughts other than what they are told to think. At a certain point you have to respect people and their ability to make decisions for themselves.
This just isn't true though. Or at least I don't see where you're coming from. You might see ads as intrusive, or getting you to spend money on something you don't want to spend money on... but that's not how many advertisers see ads. Ideally, they would only be at your attention when you want them there. If I'm looking to buy a washing machine, and I don't know where to start, advertising is one of the primary ways I get introduced to the options out there.
Furthermore, ads have driven most major media from newspapers to radio to tv... and what has made them so financially accessible to most people. Maybe you can afford to pay money to every single patreon out there, but not everyone can. And imagining a world where everyone uses an ad-blocker and advertising dies means that every content creator is just going to put up a paywall, which means information will be exclusively restricted to people with money. That sounds like a fantastic future.
Frankly the notion that advertising is objectively bad, or good, for that matter is reductive. You might say certain practices are good or bad, and certainly the ones we are seeing online right now are not good, but that seems to me the problem Brave is trying to solve - building an ad model for the web that actually works.
Exactly this. I've spent the last year or so studying Ford. His whole point was that if people didn't have the money to buy his product or time to use it (he reduced work hours as well) then your business will never survive. He wasn't banking on employee sales, he was looking at employees as a snapshot of a wider market.
Great example is fast food as well. If you are offering the "lowest cost" food option, and providing the minimum wage, you've got product/purchasing power that are both at the bottom of the food chain. And if employees can't afford to buy your food... then who is going to? Your product doesn't match the market you'd supposedly be selling to.
This is why Ford is considered the creator of the middle class. He took automation and used it as a way to set a different standard for society, one that inherently helped his own product succeed in the long run.
Why is Bezos doing this? Because Amazon succeeds when people have more disposable income. And it starts with his company. sure he might get regulated to do it anyways, but now he is pushing the needle. Regulators might push an overall minimum wage hike to $15 because "if amazon can do it, why cant you?" The merits of that hike aside, know who stands to benefit from people having more money to spend? Amazon.
There is a lot of good information here. The only thing I'll add, which is present in bits and pieces is - hustle. Hustle your behind off.
I have a friend rightly stated the difference between a freelancer and a full time employee is how you react when work is slow. Full-timers enjoy is, freelancers are (and should be) scared of it. Your next job is your next paycheck and its an attitude that is critically important to embrace, especially once you get a little cushion in the bank.
No job should be beneath you (provided you will get compensated appropriately) you'll learn from everything you do so just keep on looking for that next thing and taking it. Along the way you'll make the connections, meet the people that will lead you to more, and ultimately better, freelance jobs. Once you have this network people will be coming to you with work and not the other way around (that's the pot of gold at the end of the proverbial rainbow.)
Sure thing. Your assumption that "it was smashed in the first place" is based on a news report, my assumption being that you are not a Gaza power station employee. In a case where something was fixed nearly a year ahead of the reported schedule, in one of the slowest moving industrial zones on Earth, which is more likely: A) A miraculous feat of engineering happened or B) The damage was not as widespread or destructive as initially reported, if even present at all.
My "logic" was not a value statement on whether the attack was justified - rather a suggestion that before you go posting certain events as fact, you should realize that not everything published is a definite fact.
And yet you couldn't address any of them without dodging the material part of the argument in favor of faux outrage, generalities, and personal preference topped off with a belittling logically unsound conclusion.
Cool.