The meme that never dies. Advertising funded tons of tons of businesses on apps and on web, employed hundreds of thousands directly and created a large economy.
Disclaimer: Former google, current facebook employee, working in ads.
well, did adtech change the available income or why is it that it's so much bigger than the old way of doing advertisement?
I think the only point, why you are seeing this "growth" is that you have an oligopolic structure which is just skimming money (mainly to the benefit of the 0.1 percenters) without creating any additional value compared to the traditional way of doing advertising? Or how again are you increasing available income with your smokescreen of targeted ads?
EDIT: actually I think wikipedia captured it perfectly https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking - and no, financing some productive webbusiness (which there are?) with a minuscule fraction of the ad money or following personal spleens of the founders/crazy people is not altering the outcome.
Plenty of (say, gaming, entertainment etc) companies in developing countries employed plenty of people due to advertising revenue, which would otherwise not be viable.
Google display ads takes a fraction of revenue and passes the rest to publishers. Same with audience network.
Digital advertising lowered the barrier significantly to making profit for lots of digital businesses. It enabled lots of physical businesses to get recognition and discovery in one way or the other.
Not sure why this is not clear, but happy to discuss more.
Why not pay them directly in a functioning economy, if its worth it? Why do you need to skim from random (!) other ventures to finance this kind of business?
I'm also not sure, if I understand this correctly, but 32% (or 1 third) seems like quite a big "cut" for any service to me - but apparently ratios changed with the internet which allows placing these ads at such a low cost :)
https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/180195?hl=en
So, do these "digital businesses" create anything, or just skim money? Just because you've built a network of rent-seekers, this doesn't really change the concept.
Also could you explain how physical businesses actually benefit from the "new kind of ads" in a more concise way compared to the weasel-wording "one way or the other" - is more product sold because of ads in a certain area (doubtful, because ads won't change available income), does the percentage of advertising spend go down, when all business go "online" (doubtful as well, or how can you generate growth beyond the growth of the economy, which is the declared target of most adtechy-enterprises?!). So this is frankly neither clear to me nor apparently to you (nor anybody else I suppose), but these are the hard questions society has to answer, before accepting "adtech" as a productive sector of the economy.
Try not to pick on specific instances for the sake of argument. US military power and it's geopolitical position, combined with a bunch of other things made dollar the reserve currency. Fed is printing money yet there is no inflation except asset inflation. Noone can threaten us military, hence we will be for foreseeable future the country people will pour money on.
Surveillance capitalism was only impactful because there is no way to pay small amounts of money to view a digital good. No one is going to applaud you or your employer for setting up the greatest invasion of privacy the world has ever known.
I would go so far to say you have harmed the business models of tons and tons of apps by setting up an expectation that apps should be "free".
The meme that never dies. Advertising funded tons of tons of businesses on apps and on web, employed hundreds of thousands directly and created a large economy.
Disclaimer: Former google, current facebook employee, working in ads.