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> The internet existed before advertising Advertising has been around for centuries, perhaps even millennia. I mean, I think you mean "before online advertisi

by geocar 8y ago

> The internet existed before advertising Advertising has been around for centuries, perhaps even millennia. I mean, I think you mean "before online advertising", but that's not true either! Online advertising predates the web and even the Internet by decades; We had ads in the BBS days, and people didn't hate it. So what's going on? China does a lot of "social" advertising and doesn't have the problems with ad fraud that the western world does: The trick is that "publishers" are responsible for what they serve. That's it. > People still desire instant communication and they would pay for it if a free option did not exist. People do pay for it. That's why we have slack and Cisco, and they aren't alone! The paid ones predate the "free" ones by decades too, but even the "paid" chat systems needed advertising to get those sales– we have throughout history always relied heavily on some form of sponsorship to bring products to market, so there will always be a channel for advertising.

realusername 8y ago
> Advertising has been around for centuries, perhaps even millennia. Not really, unless you stretch the definition so much that it does not make sense anymore. The problem here is the advertising industry, not the small sign on a local business, when you stretch definitions, of course the reasoning does not work anymore.
- geocar 8y ago
  The advertising industry was not merely or limited to "a small sign on a local business" before the Internet. Not in the last few decades, or even in the last few centuries. Moving the goalposts doesn't help anyone.
  - Dylan16807 8y ago
    The internet existed in a major fashion before there was any notable amount of advertising on the internet. The original goalpost was not "advertising did not exist in the entire world". The discussion of the origin of advertising is a different issue. But I'd say that "advertising" as normally understood didn't really exist before mass-produced newspapers at the very least, so that's less than four centuries and nowhere near millennia.
    - geocar 8y ago
      > The internet existed in a major fashion before there was any notable amount of advertising on the internet. We got Netscape Navigator, Yahoo! and the famous AT&T banner ad all in the same year. Even still, we had irc, email and newsgroup spam in the preceding decades (even if you can still call that "the Internet"). I would see advertising prior to this on commercial online platforms (like AOL and compuserve) -- but I can accept that this might not have been considered "the Internet". I was thinking maybe you define the few years between "the WWW" was invented (1991, if you believe some accounts) to when it became popular (1993, maybe) as some kind of "golden era" of Internet when there weren't any banner ads, despite the fact early websites were directly advertising for eachother (a kind of "sign on the local business" perhaps?). This interpretation seems unkind though. So I'm left thinking you and these couple other people are just wrong. I simply can't imagine the Internet before advertising, and I doubt most people could. I have been online since the 1980s and I have in that entire time seen ads, so if you actually meant something by this statement, I'll need some help unpacking it.
      - Dylan16807 8y ago
        I'm not counting spam, and I'm not counting sites that link to each other for free. And by "notable" I mean something like 10%, not an experiment or "it existed somewhere".

by geocar 8y ago

realusername 8y ago

> Advertising has been around for centuries, perhaps even millennia. Not really, unless you stretch the definition so much that it does not make sense anymore. The problem here is the advertising industry, not the small sign on a local business, when you stretch definitions, of course the reasoning does not work anymore.

geocar 8y ago
The advertising industry was not merely or limited to "a small sign on a local business" before the Internet. Not in the last few decades, or even in the last few centuries. Moving the goalposts doesn't help anyone.
- Dylan16807 8y ago
  The internet existed in a major fashion before there was any notable amount of advertising on the internet. The original goalpost was not "advertising did not exist in the entire world". The discussion of the origin of advertising is a different issue. But I'd say that "advertising" as normally understood didn't really exist before mass-produced newspapers at the very least, so that's less than four centuries and nowhere near millennia.
  - geocar 8y ago
    > The internet existed in a major fashion before there was any notable amount of advertising on the internet. We got Netscape Navigator, Yahoo! and the famous AT&T banner ad all in the same year. Even still, we had irc, email and newsgroup spam in the preceding decades (even if you can still call that "the Internet"). I would see advertising prior to this on commercial online platforms (like AOL and compuserve) -- but I can accept that this might not have been considered "the Internet". I was thinking maybe you define the few years between "the WWW" was invented (1991, if you believe some accounts) to when it became popular (1993, maybe) as some kind of "golden era" of Internet when there weren't any banner ads, despite the fact early websites were directly advertising for eachother (a kind of "sign on the local business" perhaps?). This interpretation seems unkind though. So I'm left thinking you and these couple other people are just wrong. I simply can't imagine the Internet before advertising, and I doubt most people could. I have been online since the 1980s and I have in that entire time seen ads, so if you actually meant something by this statement, I'll need some help unpacking it.
    - Dylan16807 8y ago
      I'm not counting spam, and I'm not counting sites that link to each other for free. And by "notable" I mean something like 10%, not an experiment or "it existed somewhere".