no company can survive without advertising. when google first launched, it was the same. chatgpt will follow a similar path, and half a century from now, the cycle will still continue in the same way. advertising, regardless of scale, is the art of turning data into revenue. even if this planning seems insignificant for a company’s future today, it will most likely become its greatest advantage.
You’ve equated selling ads, like a newspaper does, with tracking user behavior, collating it with other information purchased on the market, and targeting people to change their behavior. Disingenuous.
scale changes, time changes, but at its core it’s similar. what i look at is chatgpt’s roadmap, a lifeline.
it doesn’t save my life, but at least i’m seeing more relevant ads now :) not getting detergent ads while searching for perfume is still nice, all things considered.
Also, your newspaper is selling the data points it has. If it had more, it would sell more. See: your local paper isn’t selling ads to a car wash six towns over. They do, however, sell ads that align with the political affinities of your local newsrooms area.
"advertising, regardless of scale, is the art of turning data into revenue."
This is disingenuous. Putting up a billboard over a highway to make people aware of a certain brand of beer is not the same as building detailed profiles on people in order to sell to the highest bidder the opportunity to change your behavior right when you're likely to do so. But somehow, this user puts them together with the very convenient "regardless of scale."
Maybe you're OK with an entire industry that makes money trying to get you to do what they want -- buy what they want, think what they want. Maybe you're OK with your past behavior being written on a shadow ledger and sold the highest bidder, traded on the dark web, and used by governments. It's your right to be okay with that, since it's your life. But you being okay with that doesn't change the fact that this is a fundamentally different type of behavior than what is commonly called "advertising." It's a curious equivocation, this sane-washing, and it does make one wonder why an otherwise intelligent person feels to need to do it.
Awful awful awful, ads lead to anti consumer behavior, anti free market competition, turns capitalism into a pay to win game, are similar to a cancer, incentivize the creation of extremely harmful platforms, such as slop filled tik tok, destroys existing companies such as Facebook, generally harms society in every measure, the cons outweigh any and all pros. It transforms your product into a sticky candy box trap for unassuming visitors while your actual customers are now just the advertising industry, you become, as is so well spoken , the product. Adopting ads should be taken as a step towards harming your consumer base so you can vampiricaly extract attention from them indefinitely and forever, as your company slowly becomes a skeleton drain on all of humanity. There is no such thing as a "good" ad.
