Now, advertising...
But this can go too far. In London during 2000-2008, finance consumed every spare IT worker, as well as mathematicians and physicists. Salaries were far higher working for a bank than working in any other IT-related industry or start-up. Did this produce great works? Is London now better off because of this? In a word, no.
But then, the US is full of picturesque small towns where the original heavy industry (logging, copper mine, steel mill) disappeared and tourism did not fill the gap. And all the young people moved out in search of better opportunities, except for the ones addicted to meth. There's no money, no jobs, no hope.
Every socioeconomic shift has downsides, but it doesn't automatically mean that the alternative is better. Broad economic gains tend to lift all boats because money changes hands.
London is a very desirable place to live.
Reviewers/Influencers/interest-publications are often just a half-step above banner ads, but at least has more incentives than just "loudly capture attention" and "publish anything that pays the algorithmic sticker price".
Facebook is currently showing me these ads:
Lady's earrings (see my name), Pixel 10 (I'm theoretically an iPhone developer), cat food (I don't own any pet let alone a cat), special offers from a supermarket I would have been shopping at anyway even if they had not told me about the offers, a sponsored government message because apparently the Bundesministerium für Gesundheit don't have a better method of contacting German residents than by buying ads from a US social network (I have previously seen such from the British government telling me that some breed of dog was now banned even though I don't own a dog and also live in Germany)…
… but none of that's what's importantly wrong.
Cost effective? It's an auction, each ad in isolation may be fair (but there's reason even then to be suspicious), but in aggregate the ad sector is an all-pay auction.
There's a massive over-supply of solutions because all the startups chase the same ideas at about the same times, and the only one of them to get big is the one that pays enough to the gatekeepers of eyeballs to win the all-pay auction bidding for mindshare.
If everyone stopped advertising, the knowledge of solutions would still diffuse, the winner would be so by word of mouth. The difference is that the 1200 "trusted partners" on all the GDPR popups wouldn't collect rent on advising people on the best strategy for selling their user's privacy and battery life and mobile data allowance for money that those users never get to see, and the people buying those eyeballs wouldn't be wasting their VC runway making something other than the product.
Word of mouth benefits incumbents. Advertising at least enables newcomers to temporarily burn money to gain mindshare, while “slow diffusion” will lock society into a “nobody ever got fired for buying IBM” state forever.
