Advertisement is mostly a zero-sum game, competing for a limited amount of spending. If one player in a market advertises, they gain while the other players lose roughly the same amount. If the advertising world kept operating as normal, but the ads never displayed anywhere—blank sidebars, blank sponsored content, blank billboards—it would be more pleasant for consumers, and the market as a whole would not be any worse off for it.<p>Then why stop there? No one needs to make the ads. Everyone employed to design, shoot, and display the ad can serve others instead of working to manipulate them. As long as the transactions keep going as normal, it's a huge win for everybody.<p>Of course, this is business. Corporations wouldn't spend that money just to subsidize newspapers, television, and page views. In a world without advertisement, tons of content would suddenly lose its revenue stream, without an easy way to monetize attention. Attention would not be profitable on its own.<p>That's a negative thing on the face, but I believe content which cannot survive by donation or by subscription deserves to die. Netflix survives already without (third-party) advertisement; Facebook, on the other hand, would collapse. But a social network does not need as many engineers as Facebook does. Without competing against ad-based sites, a less bloated, less attention-sucking social network could replace Facebook. And so on for other sites. SEO blogspam would die, whereas useful and interesting newsletters would survive (as demonstrated by Substack). High-quality TV could survive, but game shows and reality TV would be forced to greatly pare down their offerings. Valuable, accurate subscription news would survive, whereas clickbait news would have no more reason to bait clicks.<p>The alternative to the status quo is that many forms of content would become unprofitable, and I don't think that's a bad thing.