Ideally, advertising is a way for the seller (or teacher/advocate/government) to pay some of the buyer’s/researcher’s search costs. Targeted advertising lets t

Ideally, advertising is a way for the seller (or teacher/advocate/government) to pay some of the buyer’s/researcher’s search costs. Targeted advertising lets the advertiser pay for part of more expensive searches. One of the problems with Google and Facebook is that they are businesses whose core product should be driving search costs very low, so they compromise their product so that their advertising remains valuable to close the gap.