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Comment by joaodlf | Hacker News Reader

> Grow a backbone?

No idea what this means from a business perspective.

It means having the courage to do the right thing for your users instead of the thing that maximizes profits in the short term.

This. traditionally, is where you explain to me that it's patently absurd to ask a businessperson to care about anything but profit, or even to suggest that they could.

Business is made of people. People are entities with conscience. Conscience, when applied, can be a market signal.

The issue is that the web-driven model of free content is unsustainable to the point these junk ads leading to junk sites are attractive to finance. The big issue is that the economics of journalistic and creative content aren't sustainable ethically any more.

I don't think anyone LIKES renting a storefront to a pawnshop, for example, but if they are the only ones who want to rent your location, you're screwed.

Essentially ethical business would wind up needing the journalism market to implode, ending up with a few state-subsidized outlets that could more or less survive with no advertising at all.

Nobody's asking why they're attractive to finance though. These ads pay for themselves on a cost-per-click level. It isn't views that makes the money off these ads, it's clicks. That means that people are clicking on them. What's more, people continually click on them, which implies that they are getting some sort of benefit from them.

>What's more, people continually click on them, which implies that they are getting some sort of benefit from them.

How do you go from "people exhibit this behaviour" to "this behaviour provides them some benefit"?

Most of the ads are hyper-targetted to psychological weaknesses we have in the same way that drugs hijack our reward pathways.

Heheheh I know we spend a lot of money trying to make that happen but from where I sit we're not that good at it yet, at least in the realm of native advertising.

I've had plenty of people say to me (and plenty of frugality pundits write) they had to get off of social media because they feel manipulated by their personal network into buying crap they don't need. I've never heard somebody say they need to opt out of Outbrain ads because of the same thing.

You dispense with "they provide a benefit" and instead land on "we're not great at being malicious yet".

Literally the top post from this comments section is someone highlighting adblocking software to get rid of the stuff.

I get that a job is a job, but don't drink the industry kool-aid.

Eh not quite. I said they must provide a benefit, otherwise people wouldn't click on the stuff. You said, "No they're being manipulated into clicking on the stuff." I responded with "Outbrain is not nearly as good at manipulating people as social networks."

To me that means there are other reasons people are clicking on the stuff and yeah I like to believe it's because they get some benefit from it (even if it's the same benefit they get from watching trashy tv or reading pulp fiction). I don't like to believe that because I think ads are awesome, I like to believe that because it feeds my belief that people do much of what they do out of free will. If we're puppets of corporations we're willing puppets of corporations and blaming ad networks won't change us.

I don't have the solution but I don't think state-subsidized is it. It's a conflict of interest when the people you're trying to hold accountable are the ones writing your paycheck. Congress (usually the members unhappy with the coverage) is constantly trying to cut funding from NPR, and it's very difficult to budget and plan long term when you don't know if you will continue to be funded. Big advertisers do occasionally pull out over negative coverage, which is another reason diversified revenue streams are essential.

> I don't have the solution but I don't think state-subsidized is it. It's a conflict of interest when the people you're trying to hold accountable are the ones writing your paycheck.

The current alternative seems to be a combination of "that, but indirectly, through access to primary sources" and "your paycheck comes from turning everyone against everyone by saturating their attention with outrage-inducing content". Is that really better?

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