The ecosystem is broken, add work but many products have marketing costs built into them that are over 30% of what you pay for, in some cases, over 50% of your monthly fees are marketing expenses. In fact, in SaaS software, a world class company spends 33% (3:1 CAC ratio) on sales and marketing. I don’t mind ads or even having embedded marketing costs in the products I buy, what frustrates me is how long and hard I have to work in addition to all of the waste on marketing to find what a product does, what it costs, what it’s strengths and weaknesses are. And google does nothing to help. I get millions of pages to read, thousands of reviews (many of them fake) and at the end of the day, everyone of us has to waste our time figuring these things out. Go shop for auto insurance or a mortgage or a new piece of software or anything that costs over $1000 annually and you will see what I am talking about.
Yes it's just exploiting both sellers and users. The market power is broken. Google needs to be broken up, and advertising and general web browsing needs to be completely non-identifiable, or our civilisation is heading to a micromanaged dystopia of stalinesque proportions.
