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> I would have agreed in the past but now that my SO has started an escape room, if your ideal world existed, she would be bankrupt right now. In the old days,

• SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
  Why is that necessarily so? Maybe some products inherently can't be sustained by word of mouth, and in a world without widespread commercial advertising they wouldn't exist at all.
  • krapp 7y ago
    >Maybe some products inherently can't be sustained by word of mouth, and in a world without widespread commercial advertising they wouldn't exist at all. Maybe those products shouldn't exist, then. Just because someone has an idea or wants to sell yet another iteration on an existing product or service, doesn't mean they deserve to. Maybe advertising allows markets to be far more diverse and saturated than they should be? Also, maybe advertising isn't as necessary as it once was in a world where search engines and online stores exist and you can literally see a product and its competition all listed in one place if you're looking for something.
    • cameronbrown 7y ago
      Don't be so reductionist. Someone could find this escape room via a search ad, have a blast and tell all of her friends and none of them may never choose to do the same. And an escape room experience isn't something you can easily bring people back for - you need to find new customers every single time. I suppose a good way that could make word of mouth work is to create two experiences and recommend the other in an email afterwards. Advertising has made the internet a bit shit, yes. But let's not pretend it has it's upsides because it really does. That's why people pay for it. Now I'll grant that old school banner ads aren't worth much and we'd probably be better off without them. Most of what they're funding is garbage, not independent bloggers like I'd want to be funding. Disclaimer: Small Google Ads customer.
      • cousin_it 7y ago
        Maybe there could be a middle ground: keep most of the internet ad-free, but allow users to do explicit "commercial searches" for e.g. vacuum cleaners, or hotels, or fun things to do in their area. Then the escape room would show up there.
        • kspacewalk2 7y ago
          You would need to pay for such an ad-free internet in some way, other than being an ad target. This is a critical point of you expect the variety and quality of this ad-free internet to approach what we have now.
          • Fnoord 7y ago
            The first spam on Usenet was by a company called DEC. DEC was known for its great products (VAX, OpenVMS, Alpha) but for shitty management and marketing. I've witnessed the Internet before Web 2.0. Yes I received Viagra spam on my mailbox as well. Amount bought thanks to all of that spam: zero. The marketeer does not care about any second in my life I wasted thanks to their spam. Neither do the assholes who hosted them. And still, that Internet functioned. Of course the bills for the IRC server and Usenet server need to be paid. Usenet access was just part of my monthly dial-up subscription though. As far as I am concerned the invention of high quality (relatively) search engines and high quality (relatively) fact sources such as Wikipedia as well as high quality, honest reviewers could easily make up for advertising. How is such paid for? Donations and credit card.
            • yoz-y 7y ago
              I’d like to see the outrage if google and Facebook were added to the internet bill of everyone around.
              • Fnoord 7y ago
                That's only because the current business model is very closed source (proprietary) a danger RMS warned about decades ago. The original GPLv3 was meant to address that, and websites such as Wikipedia and I suppose OpenAI don't work that way. If we were used to no advertising and paying for services, we'd be outraged by if there was advertising. Ironically, that way is more efficient. The ideal model for data is a Patreon/Kickstarter/Indiegogo-esque project where people are able to offer bounties. This way you could pick a journalist (who's self-employed) and pay them to write an article to research a subject. Such research could then save other people time and money. I mean, if only 100 people in the world pay 10 EUR each then you already got firepower to do some research already. Advertising and 'free' (where you're the product) is a race to the bottom, and ultimately a product for the poor.
  • anoncake 7y ago
    If a product can't be sustained by word of mouth, it's because it doesn't fill a need that wasn't artificially created by advertising. These products shouldn't exist.
    • sphuff 7y ago
      I don't think that's necessarily true. If you and I both enjoy escape rooms, but we aren't friends/don't have a way of contacting each other about it, one of us won't hear about something that would bring us value. Good advertising would take out the roll of the dice that comes with social networks.
      • makapuf 7y ago
        Advertising is not information. If i like invite rooms I can search for <myplace> in best escape rooms.com and find what other people are saying on this forum. Has worked before, can work. Hosting prices for those can be low.
    • kspacewalk2 7y ago
      It can easily be a matter of timing/bootstrapping. Great idea, great service, not enough word of mouth initially, business burns through cash and fails. Who's better off? Established incumbents, of course. This would create a completely artificial disadvantage for new businesses.
    • Balgair 7y ago
      Certain medical products, various hygiene supplies, or other things that cannot be talked about in 'polite society' would fall into the realm of things that are very hard to spread by word of mouth. Additionally, things that are rarely used by a person but are widely used by society, like stump removal services, plumbers, etc.
      • UnFleshedOne 7y ago
        All of those can do just fine with a general search engine. You just need to know that removing a stump is generally possible. That fact itself can be advertised by a the guild of stump removers if it is obscure enough. "Tired of hitting your toe on the stump in your backyard? Ask you doctor for an eye check!"
  • Fnoord 7y ago
    We may assume there are fansites for escape rooms available. Such serve as word of mouth advertising, just like reviews do. There is more focus on facts, and the user voluntarily participates (in contrast to all the billboards, online advertising, useless pages in magazines)
    • kspacewalk2 7y ago
      A great many potential escape room customers are not looking specifically for escape rooms, they're looking for something fun to do in the area. So, again, no ability to advertise would be a gigantic advantage to established incumbents in the "something fun to do with friends" category of businesses.
      • Fnoord 7y ago
        So you start Apple Maps and look for fun to do. You know the data in Apple Maps does not contain spam. Even the local tourist center might have information available. Or you ask around on an escape room subreddit or escape room community forum.
      • flukus 7y ago
        What city doesn't have brochures of fun things to do, community newspapers where new things like this can be announced or meetup groups for people that like activities like this? There are a lot of ways potential customers can actively find you without manipulating random people who weren't looking.
        • yoz-y 7y ago
          Those brochures are literally ads.
          • flukus 7y ago
            Maybe technically, and mostly because of how they're typically implemented. I'd call providing brochures to people that explicitly request them information not advertising.
• ameister14 7y ago
  What old days are you talking about, exactly? That's a pretty nebulous term. Before advertising? That's a few thousand years ago, so maybe?
  • Fnoord 7y ago
    When I grew up football (soccer) matches had virtually no advertising. Driving around, virtually no advertising (you gotta be kidding me regarding safety). Magazines had barely any (pages of ads is my last memory). The internet when I joined had barely any. All the free shit existing thanks to advertising is a race to the bottom. Premium brands can sneakily do such too, all in the name of profit; not the customers interest. And it's worse. Clickbait is a byproduct of it because journalism is no longer about observing, research, hear multiple angles which is all too expensive; it is about page views. Which you can observe here in linked items as well as in YouTube videos. How often do you have the phenomenon where you feel you could have summarized it shorter? Where you feel come on, get to the point. Or where you feel deceived after reading the article? All because of page views. As soon as I got to play with AR (such as Google Glass) the first thing I will look into is filter out the shit I don'tn need.
• chipotle_coyote 7y ago
  How old are the days you're talking about? Archeologists have found commercial messages going back to ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome. According to some historians, the first printed advertisements go back to the Song dynasty a thousand years ago. I just don't buy the argument that all kinds of advertising for anything at any time are intrinsically evil and must be stamped out. Even in a post-scarcity utopia, writers, artists and other creators would very likely be promoting their creations in an effort to reach people who might not otherwise hear about them.
• dwild 7y ago
  > In the old days, if her product -in this case escape room- would be good, she'd get enough customers by word of mouth alone. We get clients from 5 m away to 300 km away. The product is great, on a few thousand client, only an handful weren't happy. > she'd get enough customers by word of mouth alone. Word of mouth works when there are enough people to listen to it that may be interested in the experience. I'm a fervent believer that anyone can enjoy it, but let be honest, not everyone believes that being locked somewhere is fun ;). Believe me, it's a complaint that we hear often from our client that they weren't able to convince people around them about how awesome escape rooms are. There's actually money to be made in something that could allow people to find others people to do escape room together, it's something that I often see people asking for in escape room communities.
  • Fnoord 7y ago
    My SO has claustrophobia. I'm pretty sure she won't enjoy it. I've never done it, but I like the challenge of a puzzle element combined with working together. I don't think such is for everyone. What I've learned from gaming is that a lot of people (most) don't want to be challenged, and M&S (morons & slackers) tend to get away in groups. In general, people just want to be entertained. > [...] > There's actually money to be made in something that could allow people to find others people to do escape room together, it's something that I often see people asking for in escape room communities. Especially something with a small community could use this exposure of word of mouth, or having a platform for their community. You could also be part of the things to do list with the local tourism bureau. The problem is a lack of standardization/consensus on communication method. You could use Facebook for this, or Mastodon, or Discord, or Slack, or Discourse, or Subreddit, or ... someone with authority just has to pick one, make it half decent, spread it by word of mouth, and you're done. If you can find volunteers for this, great. Otherwise, escape rooms could make a non-profit for this to maintain it. Of course, an escape room in Poland can afford to pay less for membership than one in San Francisco.