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Comment by TheLogothete | Hacker News Reader

I find discussions on HN about advertising very amusing. If advertising would magically disappear tomorrow, most of the people visiting this site would be jobless.

Something to think about.

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I find them amusing because you get a hardcore of geeks thinking how they view the world (and advertising) as being the Right Way™ and that the general public secretly shares their opinions, even thought they don't.

It's on the same level of idiocy as thinking all the "brightest minds" are in tech or working in Silicon Valley, "print is dead", or that social media doesn't matter.

there is definitely a recurring problem with this sort of thinking... i think it actually hurts the whole of the tech industry.

i'm glad someone else notices this though and is willing to call it out as idiotic. that is exactly what it is. :)

If advertising magically disappeared tomorrow, someone would solve micro payments within a week, and we'd all have jobs again.

This is not a technical problem. It's a people problem. People, in general, don't want to pay for content. Never will.

That's ridiculous. People pay for "content" all the time, and always have.

Then start a search engine and ask people to pay per query.

Do you mean to imply that all forms of content are equally sensible as units of sale?

I imply that the marketplace will never allow you to charge money for something which can be given for free and monetized with ads.

Yeah, I would more or less agree with "people in general don't want to pay for content that they can easily and legally get for free with non-obtrusive ads."

Odd that Fastmail have a market, given Gmail, then

If I think really hard, I can find one exception to every rule.

Why would we need to do that? If Google (and all of its advertising-based competitors) disappeared tomorrow, something like YaCy[0] would take over. So many business models that exist today based on advertising and central hosting could be replaced by decentralized, peer-to-peer, free software projects. The main thing limiting these projects right now is lack of interest due to the non-profit property.

[0] http://yacy.net/en/index.html

If there's no other legal way, they will pay for content.

People pay for content constantly: they go to the theater in droves, they buy books, they subscribe to Netflix, etc.

People don't pay for low-quality content, and don't pay when a free _and simpler_ alternative is available.

Sigh - this fallacy is getting tiresome. Of course they use the "free" option when you don't actually offer them any other options.

https://www.asc.upenn.edu/news-events/publications/tradeoff-...

Of course, there is also the possibility that the actual market value of a lot off "content" is zero. In those cases, deriving your revenue from advertising distorts the market.

I have only glanced at this, but it seems that it is about optins for discounts at retailers. Not quite what we are discussing here, is it?

Also, I can make a study and get whatever results I wish. Talk about fallacies.

My challenge stands. Go ahead, start a search engine and charge people to use it.

>I can make a study and get whatever results I wish.

I don't think it is a fair way to argue at all when someone links to an actual study, and you assert that all studies are worthless?

He accentuates some research as the be-all, end-all authority on the matter. Of course it is a valid argument to point out that a study can be fabricated to give arbitrary conclusions.

Plot twist: the study is not actually on topic.

I don't think its a fallacious viewpoint... although you are right that there are few alternative options in this case.

Generally people want to get the best value for their money - free things are the positive extreme of good value for money... and whilst people will pay more for something that is better than the free version, this is often a very small proportion of those who will use a free version. at least based on my real world experiences from working on apps that have both free and paid versions...

away from the extreme this logic is obviously faulty though. i've seen many cases where /raising/ a price increases the volume sold... which completely baffles me.

Indeed! This is probably why there are some personally invested negative responses to the idea of removing ads.

It's a basic protection of investment.

That, and most "techies" here are just working in traditional business fields, selling stuff, producing products, marketing things.

That's what I keep saying also (at expense of some downvotes).

As most people, I don't like ads. But this is capitalism, a system fueled by consumption. Without changing the system, ads will never disapeer, they will always come back with a different form, they are a necessary 'evil'.

[edit/disclaimer] I don't work on ads, I only curate a niche blog.

if this discussion makes people who work in jobs dependent on ads to reflect on their choices then so this goes the initial step towards a change, even if it's a change in career from digital marketing to a technology company.

Which company is not dependent on advertising?

YC?

Consumption is the final purchase of goods and services by individuals. What other direction or purpose ("fuel") should a system have?

A system that doesn't end in consumption either doesn't produce anything, or produces for no reason, which seems wasteful.

One of the problems with pure capitalism is that it favours those that are buying. i.e. those with money. The direction of progress under a capitalist system is governed by the desires of the wealth-holders (whether that is millionaires, the middle class, or some other cross-section of society), not humanity as a whole.

That would be a lot more powerful argument if capitalism didn't so readily churn out ever-cheaper (ie, directed at the poor) offerings of, well, everything. Walmart and Spirit Airlines (to pick a few out of many such offerings) aren't exactly pandering to the rich.

Anyway, this was not the point the GP made, and thus not what I responded to.

That's not a counter argument - cheap products exist because there is a market for it (whether the market demographic is rich or poor, it doesn't matter). It still hinges on the exchange of money to decide what should be produced. It's far from perfect, but it does seem to have a blurry correlation with what humanity needs (in my opinion).

I guess it's not a counter argument as much as disagreeing with the premise. If the outcome is good (a wide range of products available to the poor) then why declare the mechanism by which it happens (exchange of money) problematic? At least, let's focus on concrete problems.

The problem with declaring something "far from perfect" is deciding what perfect looks like. The fact that even the poor has a Walmart-sized vote in what gets produced looks like a pretty strong vindication of the system to me. Sure, there are always areas that can be improved, I'm not declaring the current state of things perfect, but I'm appealing to a focus on specific, practical improvement, rather than a yearning for an abstract perfect state that epistemologically probably can't be known.

Consumption is necessary (as a mean) in all systems but it's not fomented as it is in capitalism. In advanced capitalistic societies comsumption exists mostly to feed the system and this over consumption doesn't seem to correlate to extra life quality.

If not consumption as the final purchase of goods and services by individuals is the goal (not a mean), then what is the goal?

Since the system is made of people producing goods and services for other people to enjoy (consume) what is the problem with feeding the system itself?

Absolutely, some sorts of production are destructive in excess of the consumption value of the goods produced, but most certainly aren't, so I don't see how that indictes the system as a whole.

In my opinion the goal should be the well-being of society and consumption should be just a mean to achieve it. After some level, consumption doesn't seem to correlate with well-being, becoming just a waste of resources that could be allocated more efficiently having in mind this optimization towards the well-being of society.

The problem, IMHO, happens when we don't 'fuel' the capitalistic 'society engine' with more and more consumption, strange things seem to happen: the 'engine' stiffs.

Startups as we know them would collapse, yes. Look at how many of the top apps on iOS and Android rely on advertising -- hint: it's all of them

"If advertising would magically disappear tomorrow, most of the people visiting this site would be jobless" but really this is just a silly presumption with absolutely no evidence.

I think that most people in here build services rather than content.

Let's cross that bridge when we get to it. We're innovative, imaginative folks around here. I'm sure a solution will present itself.

There are lots of innovative and imaginative folks all over the world.

...and ads are still the best solution to certain problems.

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