How did people find businesses and tradespeople back in the day? Either word of mouth or through the phone book.
Word of mouth is good because it encourages businesses to provide the best service & value as that will directly affect whether they get referrals or not.
Phone book is also good because although it's similar to advertising, it's advertising that benefits both sides. The customer is in the market for a service and looks at ads from businesses that are looking for customers, unlike now where ads are pushed at you even when you don't actually need anything and distract you from whatever task you were doing.
There's no reason we can't have a modern version of the "phone book" where businesses can publish ads for a nominal fee (to pay for a background check to ensure they're legitimate) and prospective customers can then search through it.
Back in the word of mouth days, the first few to advertise gained a clear advantage.
Same here and now. Even if we did restrict advertising through laws, it would be a race to see who could advertise “legally” first, and thus suddenly capture everyone’s attention.
> Even if we did restrict advertising through laws, it would be a race to see who could advertise “legally” first, and thus suddenly capture everyone’s attention.
This would still resolve all of the issues caused by the current model of advertising, so I think it's worth it. Sure, it may make business more difficult, but so do the various safety regulations we already have; being in business is not a right and if your business can't be sustained without heavy advertising (which has negative externalities) then maybe it shouldn't exist?
Let’s say we got strict on the “phone book” idea: that advertising was only allowed on your own storefront and in a central directory. My point is not about whether businesses should survive (that’s a whole other topic), but more that that businesses would start to try to exploit those two avenues. For example:
- Buy the largest storefront in the most visible area, even if all you have is one product
- Create a shell company that creates directories, position it as “the best directory for <your industry>”, charge bleeding-high prices then give yourself adspace for pennies
- Good old fashion bribery: pay the lawmakers 10mil to put in a clause so that you’re allowed to advertise “in the header of your own site”, then buy a bunch of industry sites
Keep in mind that any solution has to understand that at the top of the heap there are companies making millions of dollars per month, and who are willing to spend whatever it takes to keep the revenue high
Basically, opt-in advertising. A phone book. Mail-order catalogues. Searchable listings. Trade shows. All of these restricted to providing information, optimized for comparison shopping and minimizing available artistic freedom.
