Doesn't it depend on what you consider evil? To me, while ads are annoying, I don't consider them to be evil if they're directed at me or people in my age group. I'm an adult, I can make money based decisions and I can research whether I really want the product or not, which is why even if I see ads when they're not blocked, I just mind filter them out of existence.

Ads being directed at kids though, well companies like google have systems that detect your age group and won't shy from showing kids the shadiest shit, with the explicit intent of making them used to it. That's indoctrination, so that is evil.

>I can make money based decisions
Everybody says that, but apparently advertising is still a money maker.
Manipulation is not mind control. It's just an influence, a statistically measurable effect even if its effectiveness is questionable on the individual.
>I can research
The same could be said when discussing the morality of lying. Does that make lying okay?

Ads help me because I'm a friendless loser who doesn't have other people to recommend services and products to me. Ads at least make me aware that products that I want to consume might exist, and the fact that the company had enough money to put them out reassures me about the quality of their product, even though this is an inherently unreliable metric.
Though it has been years since I last saw a relevant ad in my native language.

>>123500
>Everybody says that, but apparently advertising is still a money maker.
I wonder if that's true actually. A lot of the money from advertising seems to come from the analytics and trackers that profile you and sell that information.
On one hand, I do think I underestimate the amount of people that buy junk they don't need from ads, but on the other hand, I don't think I've ever seen anyone on the internet say they've actually clicked on an ad and bought something through it. Certainly not the type of ads you see at random on unrelated pages like ads on youtube videos or when you're browsing some random news article or something similar.
>The same could be said when discussing the morality of lying. Does that make lying okay?
If the advert is outright false advertising or hiding some notable pitfalls then that's a no-no for sure.
It all comes down to intent. If the ad is all about just showing you a product then it's fine, but if it's using some form of manipulation to convince you to buy it regardless of whether you don't need it or there are issues with it that it obfuscates, it's bad.

It really depends on who is advertising and how it's being done.

Free to Air TV is a good example, in return for you not having to pay for a service, you have to put up with their commercials. It's a known quantity, they are no more invasive than they have to be and it's not connected to the shows that are airing themselves. I'm Australian, many of the shows airing on Australian TV come from Britain or the US and would not even know that the products being advertised alongside them even existed.
I would say it's a fair and honest transaction.

But when it comes to YouTubers it's different. Because they have other revenues, many of them make huge amounts of money through patreon, plus their own Youtube revenues and their own merch plus various other revenues streams they may have yet they still try to sell you products that are often quite dodgy that they know nothing about and added to all this it's not like free to air commercials where there is no involvement between the add and the show, it's the person making the show in this case advertising the product which particularly in Youtubes case where the channel is often very personal and it's easy for the audience to form a relation ship with the host it then adds an element of manipulation of the trust and good faith of the audience to the situation.

I wouldn't say advertising is objectively evil but the more annoying a company/website's ads are, the more likely I am to metaphorically or literally shit up their business at every opportunity. Gelbooru's soap ads aren't that annoying so I wait until nighttime on a weekday to mass download thousands of images but I purposefully wait until weekend afternoons/evenings to mass download Youtube videos. Likewise at places like parks or restaurants that don't have annoying ads I will show the courtesy of not making a mess in their restrooms but at places like McDonalds and Walmart I feel it is a moral obligation to shit and piss on the floor and draw naked anime girl graffiti in their restrooms.

If they're advertising things I like, that's good.
If they're advertising things I don't like, that's evil.
If they're introducing kids to things I like, that's cultural education.
If they're introducing kids to things I don't like, that's indoctrination.

>But perhaps the distinction between these two things will have to be drawn
yeah I'd love to see that. Because I'm not convinced that this can be done in a manner that is at all useful.
Anyway, I think advertising is awesome :D

¥unethically collecting user data with no regards for their privacy to better targets ads to them
Das evil
¥ads by themselves
Not evil unless they're really kuso deceptive ones or malware (like in the case of 4chan, not sure what they're like these days though).

>>123509
To me, if you are unobtrusive and descriptive of your product, that's information.
Aggressively seeking the attention of people and organizing your argument around what your customers are looking for rather than what you're selling, that's advertising.
The first one of these two things can probably be objectively measured. For the latter, in edge cases, it may come down to an accusation of a predatory mindset. "What do you mean, you're selling tasty pizza? Clearly you are trying to manipulate me!"
But then, evil is malicious intent, as far as I understand the term. So you can't not have this level of uncertainty.
>>123502
>I wonder if that's true actually.
Even if a person's actions are completely ineffectual, the fact that they have taken steps toward that goal, makes them guilty of the attempt.

>>123498
No, not at all unless they're doing things that are unrelated to advertising itself which are evil, such as lying or manipulation. Ads are how a lot of free stuff I like operate, and since I block ads I think it's a win-win.

>>123512
But don't you know, not watching the ads is the same as piracy.