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.
Even with an adblock and the best privacy controls available, you cannot escape the effects of advertising. Article headlines will still be clickbait. Online recipes will still have long, unnecessary stories at the start. Companies will still want your email for trivial things so they can spam you. There are a hundred ways that advertising affects culture, and it’s not something that can change based on individual effort.
This is less because of that and more copyright. You can’t copyright a recipe as such, so the framing and layout and bullshit narrative are there to fix that.
You don’t need a very long blurb for that. A short paragraph would do fine. Tons of cookbooks have figured this out.
You have a long blog post because Google’s SEO favors that, and that’s tied into advertising.
So in your hypothetical advertising free world we also don’t have search engines, at all? Or at least search engine results specifically don’t favor long blog posts?
SEO as we know it is a hugely marketing driven thing. The recipe blog does it because they want to bring eyeballs from Google search results, which gives them advertising revenue. Google optimizes their rules for SEO to likewise bring in Google AdSense money.
Search engines would exist, but the incentives are all different.
Right, but the food blog is still going to end up with an incentive for people to see it, so they’re still going to SEO because they can’t get subs/patrons/whatever they get income from from people who don’t know they exist. So, the implication is that search engines would preference a different style of food blog in the absence of advertising?
I mean, if you want my radical answer, it’s that people would write food blogs because they like giving out recipes in a mutual aid society. They don’t care about SEO, because it’s just a bother. Traffic will come to them organically or it won’t.
https://www.justtherecipe.com/
You also can’t escape the society affected by advertising. And it would be reasonable to assume that advertising not just increases consumerism, leading to pollution and worse climate change and genocide, but also must have an effect on the mind.
I would assume that people conditioned with advertising are less able to make rational decisions for e.g. voting. Advertising might have similar adverse effects on developing brains to lead in drinking water. But I doubt there is much academic research on this.
Another thing I always thought about this is how beautiful our cities and world could look if there was no advertising everywhere.
PS: Really good article. There is a sci-fi movie “Branded (2012)” which dramatizes this idea.