The idea feels like sci-fi because you’re so used to it, imagining ads gone feels like asking to outlaw gravity. But humanity had been free of current forms of advertising for 99.9% of its existence. Word-of-mouth and community networks worked just fine. First-party websites and online communities would now improve on that.
The traditional argument pro-advertising—that it provides consumers with necessary information—hasn’t been valid for decades.
I really hope ypu create an inspirational moving piece of art that could truly change the world only to discover the only way anyone can learn about it is word of mouth.
Not all ads are screaming for your attention to buy useless stuff.
If you need to pay someone to talk about your product, it’s probably not as good as you think.
Lol, ok. Is that why we have had advertisements for thousands of years? Is it because products are worse or is it because someone had more stuff than they could sell by word of mouth?
Like you mentioned, if you create something high-quality, people will notice, and it’ll slowly gain recognition.
I’m anti-advertising, but this simply isn’t true. Customers don’t show up out of thin air. They don’t care. Anyone who’s built or created anything knows that feeling invisible is the rule, not the exception.
A lot of us here on Lemmy are part of the software industry. Have you ever tried to make money by building a great app and waiting for users to trickle in? It doesn’t work. You might as well declare bankruptcy before you start. Selling anything at all, let alone software, is like pulling teeth—and software is more often a luxury than a necessity, making it even harder.
(Granted, advertising has made the situation worse by training people to ignore any and all attempts to get their attention or communicate information.)
Approximately every successful software business has talented and hardworking salespeople behind the scenes. I’ve learned this the hard way: you need sales experts or you won’t sell a damn thing.
Maybe someday we can find a way to get by without ads. But let’s not pretend it’s as easy as “if you build it, they will come.”
Over the course of centuries maybe
In fact, all quality works became famous much later.
Picasso’s works became famous in his time due to…advertising.