[Zarath]

Right, but it redistributes demand around. Ever been to a busy boardwalk with people hired to call out and give samples out to get people to come in? It's an arms race like that, it redistributes the demand of eating on the boardwalk, and those that don't pay for the advertising don't survive, so everyone does it, but ultimately the boardwalk would be more or less the same without it

[corysama]

That assumes all products are of equal value to all people. Which is clearly not true.

What makes this situation hard is that there are two problems:

1) Even if you make a good product, it is not reasonable to demand the world to just inform everyone about it on your behalf. Getting the word out takes effort. Money is the potential energy of human effort.

2) There is so much money to be made from various products that trillions of dollars are being spent getting the word out about various products. That makes it hard to rise above the baseline noise if you don't happen to start with large amounts of money.

As a result, I've seen many investment deals based entirely around "You have a good product. We have money. We'll put money into advertising your product in return for owning part of it."