Does your assessment of the value of advertising include the things that are funded by adverts?
That covers almost all print journalism, a lot of full-time internet content creators (from the onion to full time youtube content creators) not to mention Google Search, Gmail, Google Maps, Chrome and Youtube.
If advertising includes everything paid for by adverts, advertising is useful to humanity. If advertising doesn't include everything paid for by adverts, Google isn't only an advertising company.
We happen to currently fund some things via ads. But that's an accident of history. If we didn't have ads, there's no reason to think we wouldn't have found another way.
Now that we have ads, they're hard to get away from. You're removing a problem people notice (having to pay) and causing problems they mostly don't (wasted time, wasted money, suboptimal purchases). This path dependence doesn't make ads good, though.
Free market systems rely on informed consumers making rational decisions; advertisers rely on creating misinformed consumers making irrational decisions.
That covers almost all print journalism, a lot of full-time internet content creators (from the onion to full time youtube content creators) not to mention Google Search, Gmail, Google Maps, Chrome and Youtube.
If advertising includes everything paid for by adverts, advertising is useful to humanity. If advertising doesn't include everything paid for by adverts, Google isn't only an advertising company.