• betheydocrime@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    Eh. Some level of advertising is necessary.

    I used to run a Magic: the Gathering shop right when it opened. We had great prices, great prizes, a phenomenal gaming area, and since I was the only employee I knew the customer service was top notch.

    None of that would have mattered, though, if people didn’t know I existed. I knew I could eventually rely on word of mouth to grow my community, but I still had to get the first customers in the door for the first time.

    And coming at it from the other side, lots of online services that we use for “free” are paid for by ads being shown to us. If those ads were banned, we would see large upsets in how those services are paid for. There’s potential for good here, since one possible response could be subsidization and commodification of websites like YouTube, reddit, and Facebook, but who knows what the chances of that could be.