I'm talking about the basic principles of advertising. A simple sign in the street is advertising, as is a static graphic on a niche hobby website advertising products from a company people within that community respect. There's nothing wrong with letting people know your products exist. The problem is always in the execution.

> They distort the product market as they favour those players with the highest marketing budget, rather than with the best product.

I don't see any alternative to letting people make claims and making laws to stop them blatantly lying. What is the "best" product in any category? How does the best product surface in front of me without advertising in any context?

> Clickbait and fake-news are a direct result of advertising

Advertising is a part of it, sure, but it's not the whole picture.

> They are an attempt at manipulation. People have to constantly expend the energy to counteract that manipulation

100% agree, which is why I promote adblockers. But I don't think this is a problem with the principle of advertising, it's an execution problem. Like many others mention if a website had a small sidebar with static graphic ads that weren't invasive I wouldn't block them as they wouldn't be requiring me to expend energy to counteract them and I would still think it would be ethical to block them if someone wished to. It's never unethical to choose what code runs on my machine after being sent to me, if you don't want me to have free content then don't send me content for free.

I think we're mostly on the same page, I just don't have a problem with ads at the bottom end of the manipulation and annoyance scale.

I didn't just mean news sites, they are a good example though.

There is a lot of sites out there with very valuable information, I'm not convinced that they inherently need compensating though? but I might be mis-interpreting what you mean. More specifically I don't think encouraging these valuable sites to survive on new ad driven or donation modals is pragmatic, especially one backed by a crypto like BAT.

If I create high value content and put it online for free I don't think it's fair I then complain that it doesn't generate enough revenue through ads. I would rather the content not be given to me for free in the first place.