I don’t think this is true, but I also don’t know anybody way to verify it either way. Enthusiast forums were always a better source, although native ads can mess that up.

But, even if ads are a necessary evil, they are definitely overhead (in the sense that they don’t actually accomplish anything, just influence the decision as to what should be done). Maybe we can define some sort of ad-efficiency metric for an economy; what percentage of the money is spent influencing decisions, what percentage is spent actually implementing the decisions…