when it doesn't rely on ads, you, not the advertisers become the customer.

No.

The BBC get their revenue from a government monopoly. They schmooze the government of the day when their charter comes up for renewal. They pay zero attention to customer complaints.

The gizmos on CSI are pretty cool too. :-)

Perhaps not.

Last year, many accredited the success to cultural influences, such as the “Brian Cox effect”.

New data, however, suggest a network designed to help science teachers inspire students with the wonder of physics, called the Stimulating Physics Network (SPN), has played a major part in translating this nascent inspiration into A-level entries.

A BBC engineer gave an interesting talk about their web platform at the PHP UK Conference 2012: "Monitoring your back end for speed and profit"

Netgear offer something similar with their replicate software.

It's the unintuitive ways in which it's taught

You could just as easily blame lack of intellectual curiosity among children/society.

I've just finished reading Made to Stick in which they tell the story of a teacher successfully winning students over to algebra being useful to them by describing it as mental weight training. "you do math exercises so that you can improve your ability to think logically" (ch.5, p.194) .

I thought the current UK government were trying to reintroduce maths and science as a basic requirement for all school children.

Both true and relevent

Advertising is not optional. Every business requires it. It's cheaper than employing sales reps, or telesales staff, and if you have a good product, like Avis, it pays off. If you do not have a good product then telling people about it is pointless.

No, I'm not a salesman.

The return depends on your offer, and your performance. Advertising brings the new customers, it doesn't close the sale.

I'm a big fan of Amazon's recommendations too. Coupled with the customer reviews, it's driven a lot of my book/gizmo buying.

I've often thought that advertising, all advertising is hugely overvalued,

Advertising brings in new customers, the alternative is hiring salespeople to cold-call.

In 1962, just before the first 'We try harder' ads launched, Avis was an unprofitable company with 11% of the car rental business in the USA. Within a year of launching the campaign Avis was making a profit, and by 1966 Avis had tripled its market share to 35%.

http://www.grabinerhall.com/press-detail.php?a=17

http://www.avis.co.uk/blog/we-try-harder-the-legacy-of-robert-townsend/

the semantic HTML tags are less than useless, because they're based on a now obsolete statistical analysis of common ids/classes.

Schema.org does much the same thing, labelling headers, footers, navigation etc.

I believe Mr Hickson used to work for Google, perhaps the HTML5 semantic tags were just a search engine wishlist, that they've now decided to push via schema.org?