Advertising Is a Cancer on Society
jacek.zlydach.pl
jacek.zlydach.pl
For example, everybody on the planet is now familiar with soft drinks. If anybody has never tasted Coke, it's not by accident. But Coke's ad budget is enormous. If all soft drink companies stopped advertising tomorrow, society would not be worse off. And we'd have billions of dollars [1] to spend on something useful.
Like the author, I won't work on ad tech. I don't like manipulation and I don't like waste, and most advertising is both.
[1] e.g., https://notesmatic.com/pepsico-advertising-and-marketing-bud... https://www.investopedia.com/articles/markets/081315/look-co...
Lawmakers have slowly banned advertising for more and more obviously addictive and harmful things.
They just can't make headway against the most pervasive and least obviously harmful things.
The direct economic costs - health care costs, lost productivity caused by illness - are immense, and the soda and junk food industries make no contribution towards them.
There are also less direct personal and emotional costs, in the form of family/partner illness and sometimes death.
Some luxuries are similarly toxic, but as a "cheap" luxury sugar abuse affects a much larger demographic.
IMO the ad efforts that support these products are unconscionable, and there's no question the money would be better spent elsewhere.
A lot of HN users wish to "optimize" these facets of other people's lives through government regulation, but it's no less odious than going up to people in person and knocking their drink to the ground. It's not your choice.
It's absolutely and completely false to frame this as a government vs individual issue. It's actually corporate propaganda vs the individual.
No one who supports individual freedom has any business encouraging corporate propaganda, because it's the psychological equivalent of sugar - absolutely toxic to genuine free choice.
Big Tobacco has already discovered this strategy doesn't work in the long term. Big Pharma is catching up slowly. (Ask the Sacklers.)
Big Sugar is still lagging behind, but it's only a matter of time.
You know the one of the things the worse off in society enjoy doing? - drinking a soda. They need to know the health risks, yes, but taking that away/adding a sin tax makes their quality of life measurably worse even if their health would be slightly better off in the long run. You're either taking away some of the little enjoyment they have or more of their money and I don't think that's fair.
Wait, what? This exact same argument could be made for cigarettes or hard narcotics. This argument is a non-starter. Especially since advertising is targeted at this demographic to convince them that a sugar addiction makes them less miserable.
Of course, the packaging itself is technically advertising, but still.
The meta question is about how we decide what gets banned.
Not that I disagree, but where do you draw the line? Sure, if Coke stopped advertising we'd have billions of dollars to spend on something "useful". On the other hand, if Coke stopped making soft drinks, we'd have billions of dollars to spend on something "useful" AND significantly decreased obesity.
If you are going to make the argument that having soft drinks improves life somehow, then that implies it's better for people to know about soft drinks, and how will they know? Advertising.
But, the health externalities associated with drinking such beverages should get priced in and be used to offset eventual health complications. This is not easy because no one likes taxes, but you get what you pay for.
In Finland we do (or did, it might have changed on 2017) tax sugar. Then they added artificial sweeteners and even mineral water under the tax because it’s ”fair” that way. Thus negating the original point.
That doesn't mean cake and cookies should be banned, nor should soda. It's nanny state nonsense, and one of the more steeply graded slippery slopes...
If you're really concerned for people's wellbeing, ensuring access to healthcare goes a lot further than denying people snacks..
As to why, clearly it was due to people wanting to eat pleasurable food.
Glad you phrased it that way, because a lot of the people who want me to pay a tax for eating a cookie probably aren't imagining themselves paying a tax for going Whitewater rafting, or for driving their car multiple times a day.
Are these people not aware of kidney stones and the associated pain?
Interesting. That's not even sugar water. We're going to need some pretty elaborate regulations at this rate.
I’ll eat the snacks I want.
I’ll pay for the healthcare I want and need.
You do what you need. And neither one of us is responsible for the other.
Now leave me be.
They will die without treatment. They can be saved, but not for free. What action, if any, do you recommend?
As for the rest, the doctors, nurses, and paramedics are now going to be required to do something that's against their training and likely their nature, by letting people die on the sidewalk out front. Do you suppose this policy will be workable in the long run?
Basically, if you're poor, you will get a public defender. Someone who is overworked, underpaid and probably won't give your case the appropriate time it needs to develop a valid defense..
Whereas if you have money, you can afford an attorney that can spend the appropriate time to create a robust defense.
Absolutely reasonable question. How about coffee? Soda-prohibiters usually ignore it, because, I guess, they like it themselves, or expect a huge backlash. However, it's a very common way of excessive sugar consumption world-wide.
You could buy reduced-sweetness soda I suppose, but I don't know where you're going to find that. Even the boutique brands are very sweet.
You can also buy artificially-sweetened soda, but lots of studies are now showing that crap isn't any healthier for you.
There's no option to just have less-sweet soda. It does not exist. (Unless perhaps you're counting the fact that artificially-sweetened drinks simply don't taste sweet to some people, but that's a different argument.)
Whether you want to believe it or not, it is very easy to control how much sugar you pour into your cup of coffee at work (and you don't have to put artificial sweetener in it either as the only alternative; you can simply not put anything in it). There's no such option with soda, because it's premade. I don't know why you're arguing about this, because it's a simple fact.
Not sure I see what do you mean by "artificial" here. Making extracts from stevia is not more artificial then from sugarcane. What is more (un)healthy is still matter of gathering data, but it doesn't make an argument in either case. The argument is that you are not obliged to buy soda, as you are not obliged to put sugar to your food, and drinks. As well you are not obliged to drink alcohol for which WHO says there's no safe dose - unlike sugar. And which if we stick to your reasoning should be prohibited in the first place. But wait... does it sound as if it was tried already?
I don't know why you're arguing about this, because it's a simple fact.
I don't know too, because I'm nor arguing about exactly that. I suggest you to look at my previous comment again, you probably glanced over it too quickly.
The whole thing started when someone compared soda to coffee and said coffee had sugar too, and I responded that you don't have to put sugar in it, or as much, since you're the one controlling the sugar addition. We're not talking about safe doses of sugar here, or the WHO, or whether you're obligated to drink anything besides water. We're just comparing the sugar in soda and coffee, that's all, and the simple and completely undebateable fact is that you can put a little bit of sugar in coffee, whereas there is absolutely no way for you to control the amount of sugar or other sweetener in your soda. (I guess you could try adding sugar to non-sugar soda, but you can't take out the artificial sweetener (or stevia, which just tastes bitter), and good luck getting sugar to actually go into solution while the soda is still cold.)
Finally, I don't drink soda at all, or coffee either, I'm just pointing out that the drinker is the one in control of the sweetener with most coffee, and this is simply not the case with soda.
Yes you can get cheaper premiums by living healthy, but how far do you want to go? Are you going to let your insurance company log everything you eat and how many steps you walk every day? Seems much easier to just factor in the external cost of goods into their price.
For medical insurance, it seems they could at least do something like "if you send us evidence of healthy exercise/diet/weight, then we'll lower your premiums; otherwise you'll get a premium based on the estimated risk of the set of people who don't do this". (If the government doesn't forbid it. healthcare.gov says "They also can’t take your current health or medical history into account", which sounds like it might rule out some of that.)
1. It was probably a tax write off.
2. It was probably also both a community service project AND a reflection of lower expected insurance payout.
3. Maybe the straight-A students are correlated with insurance payers that would rather pay the repair known 1-off payment (or skip doing anything at all) vs the unknown recurring increase in insurance payments?
(Source: drove a dented-up pickup for over a year after a short romp along/into an orchard)
2. The lower expected payout is exactly what an insurance company is trying to determine, and they’re very good at doing that assuming they have lots of data.
3. Most vehicle insurance cost are liability related, meaning the damage their insured to others, and namely healthcare costs. A collision with another person or their property will not be fixed without the insurance company getting involved, and a reduction in those is what the insurance company is betting on.
And they're far from the only company burning energy, effort, time and knowledge to accomplish nothing but profits at the expense of virtually everything else touching them.
The other option is to let insurance companies monitor your diet, but that sounds quite a bit more dystopic...
Maybe we should ban them as well. All companies "burn" energy, effort, and time to produce profits, that's pretty much the goal of a company.
True. But would people enjoy it as much if it were priced accordingly to give the workers who made it a living wage? If they had to pay full non-subsidized prices for the corn sugar they use, and to give those workers a living wage as well? In other words, would people enjoy it as much if it was instead of a dollar a bottle, more like four dollars?
And don't even try and shift to a different company. It is not unreasonable to assume that there is ethical compromise involved in purchasing anything from a company Coke's size. Chiquita almost started a war so they could continue exploiting South Americans for cheap bananas.
I take issue with this "well there's no haaaarm" point because there very often IS harm. There is tons of harm if you follow the supply lines back to the developing world where western corporations exploit entire nations for the sake of cheap goods that then are consumed at a break neck pace in the West, far more than they should be, which then even harms THOSE people by making them overweight.
If your company could do actual good in the world by ceasing to exist, then I question why you need to exist in the first place. That's all I'm saying.
that would be predicated on an honest and direct pricing scheme for healthcare. taxing soda may be a feel-good thing to do, but how can you say - with a straight face - how much dialysis treatment or 'beetus meds actually cost? The whole business model of healthcare is built on information hiding.
*depending on your definition of working fairly well
It’s the same consequences. Little Johnny with well connected parents and a judge who doesn’t want to ruin the life of someone “who could be his kid” gets off easy while they expel little Jerome who is just “going to turn out to be a thug anyway.”
It also hasn’t stopped kids from getting weed and cigarettes.
people would drink it, but far less.
Bootlegging is generally a short term response to diminished access. But soon after the controls arise, demand generally shifts elsewhere to less inconvenient alternatives.
I can think of no examples of continuing bootlegging in the US, aside from piracy of media, which is another kettle of fish.
Whether Eric Garner was bootlegging cigarettes or not - do you think it was worth it?
It's only through action that power manifests (and the inaction of others to oppose the use and abuse of that power).
That's bullshit. A government can't take away power from others by exercising the power it doesn't have yet.
> (like the people).
A democratic state cannot take away power from the people, the people cannot take away power from itself. And non-democratic states don't have a legitimate government anyway.
Just curious, what are some of your hobbies? Things you like to do in your spare time?
LOL, looks like some people can see where I'm going with this.
Meanwhile, why should my health insurance rates go up because Dr. Joshgel is into cave diving or parachuting or enjoys the occasional track day in his GT3?
Or because someone else leads a sedentary life playing video games? How about banning those? There's no valid science behind claims of an "epidemic" of soda-induced obesity, but if you're going to generalize the argument to include all common causes of obesity, I'd respond by pointing out that there's certainly no shortage of studies showing the harmful effects of a sedentary lifestyle.
Rest assured, after the Dr. Joshgels of the world have come for my soda, they WILL come after something you enjoy. Maybe your steak, maybe your beer, maybe your guns, maybe your Playstation or your sofa. The slippery slope argument is a logical fallacy, but these people aren't logical. They're too busy being right.
There's also huge taxes on alcohol and tobacco for instance.
There's also a lot of other stuff that is banned already or strongly regulated or taxed heavily. Recreational drugs, medicine, certain additives that turned out to be harmful. Or rules like having to buckle up in your car. A lot of nanny state stuff that saves people from themselves.
No, they don't, unless they are doing something their policies call out explicitly. Which is extremely rare.
There's also huge taxes on alcohol and tobacco for instance.
Because unlike soda, the damage done by those products is unequivocally identifiable.
Maybe you're just not convinced about the actual harm that sugar and obesity causes. I won't be able to write a good summary of the research here and now,but there's a lot of evidence out there. It's more dangerous than many people would assume.
> that implies it's better for people to know about soft drinks, and how will they know? Advertising.
Are you really saying the only way you have ever known about a product is advertising? I honestly have trouble believing that, but if that's the case please consider that you're an outlier.
Me, I avoid ads vigorously and have for decades. I have no trouble learning about new products.
But advertising is an easy way to make money fast, that is, if you're happy to sell people stuff they don't need at triple the commodity price. Or... you could turn your hand toward more constructive and lasting alternative endeavors like treating / defeating disease, cheaply desalinating sea water, or a zillion other ends that would do more than pry money out of the clueless hands of fools.
People don't have time to research every single choice in their lives. At some point you just go with brand trust. When I see Uncle Floyd's Cola and CocaCola, I just go with what I know. Advertising establishes brand trust.
The brand is signalling that they have convinced many people, or otherwise, they couldn't afford that ad. So I can trust in the choice of those people. But why should I trust the brand itself?
Or they just convinced a bunch of investors. See e.g. Uber.
Each individual actor is working in their best interest, but as a society it creates unimaginable amounts of waste.
Advertisement is a zero sum game.
This is a non-sequitur. Brands existed long before advertising, and regardless they aren't the only way to solve the problem of choosing what to buy.
If you really care about making things easier for purchasers, you'd be eager to eliminate advertising, which a) adds a great deal of confusion and distraction, and b) reduces the value of earned brands in favor of whomever can spend the most money.
Economy is basically production vs consumption, money is just the grease to keep the cycle flowing, to follow the money isn't getting to the base cause of our problems.
No, it remains in corporate budgets, which, without all the marketing spend, can be shifted to better wages, charity work, capital investments, better wages, safety and health initiatives, better wages...
I think Aperocky observation that following the money doesn't get at the root of the problem is spot on.
A good example for me comes from SF's MUNI system. For decades, they had people whose job it was to track bus arrival times so that schedulers had good data to work from. Eventually, the buses all got computer+GPS devices so they could be tracked continuously. Should we have refused to enable those because of the job losses?
I say no. There's no point in having people doing something wasteful just to protect jobs. Where we find systemic waste, we should eliminate it and shift the people to doing something actually valuable. To say otherwise is a variant on the Broken Window Fallacy.
People choose to spend their hard-earned dollars on the products that provide the most utility. Companies spend their hard-earned dollars on the vehicles that allow them to sell the most product.
Coke is rich because society likes drinking Coca-Cola and pals.
Bill Gates could pay 10000 people $10/hour to dig a hole and 10000 people $10/hour to fill the hole back with dirt. Obviously this money doesn't "vanish", but millions of hours are wasted (and the food and resources needed to power this work).
If I go around smashing windows, I will make money move faster. The people who install replacement windows will have more money to spend. It's not like the money magically vanishes! But it's still a terrible idea, because all this economic activity is based on systemic waste. It's the same for most advertising.
One company that does exactly the same things? No.
Companies that do part of what Google does? Absolutely, duckduckgo for search, countless email services to replace gmail, openstreetmaps to replace gmaps, the list goes on.
In other words, most users could easily afford it.
And yes, here is the current problem, the mindset of the people. Not willing to pay for services and rather get it for "free" and accept manipulation and time waste. On the other hand, where services are adfree avaiable, like netflix, users indeed do pay. So I am positive that it is about to change.
I don't see the downside.
>The growth of advertising is fueled by the enormous waste it creates. In any somewhat saturated market - which, today, is most of them - any effort you spent on advertising serves primarily to counteract the combined advertising efforts of your competitors.
In theory this works, in practice it doesn't. Nobody is quite sure about what the dichotomy is between the theory and actual results. Basically by allowing commercial interests to control the direction of capital you get useless areas of inn-efficiency like advertising. The weird thing is, these types of economies still thrive. However, when you restrict and redirect resources in a centrally controlled manner, the economies tend not to thrive.
Nobody really knows why. However there are hints as to why it works. Google, gmail, search, google docs, hangouts and google maps would not exist if it wasn't for advertising. Google and the services and technologies they provide to the world would not exist if they did not receive revenue from ads.
It's like a sales tax more efficiently allocated towards google services rather than military.
So lots of uneven distributions (anybody growing up in USSR will know what I mean), and lots of overhead.
A modern networked infrastructure could mitigate that. A general AI could solve it (but that has its own drawbacks, great if you like your paper clips though).
Markets in a sense create that distribution system organically, but they pay efficiency costs (comparing to a strictly optimal solution). One of those operational costs is advertising.
Market has its own deficiency/glut profile too -- instead of whole city lacking butter and drowning in socks, we have individual people lacking everything evenly and others having abundance.
Separately I think advertising will have to find new forms of expression that are less repulsive. I won't want to block ads if they are actually fun and interesting.
https://www.wired.com/story/google-chrome-ad-blockers-extens...
On desktop, yes (not for much longer). But not on Android.
If they try to interfere with that, I will try every route I can to ensure my personal freedom.
For phones you can do most of what you want with LineageOS and Xposed; for AR headsets I'm sure something similar can be done and it's just a matter of time before hackers get together and make freedom a reality.
https://99percentinvisible.org/article/clean-city-law-secret...
How many cities have the will to even attempt something like this? Maybe a handful.
I understand the irony of that page having multiple ads :P
"From 2006 until 2018, Oettinger was the official sponsor of Rockets, a professional basketball club based in Gotha. The Rockets played as "Oettinger Rockets" in Germany's first distribution, the Basketball Bundesliga.[5]"
Small brained primate thought du jour; advertising shouldn't be an allowed business expense.
[1]: https://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/investing/tax-rate-paid/
Most ads isn't about manipulation, it's just about getting your attention and reminding you that this product exists.
Ads are the only way to reach her market. You could argue that search is a good one too (which is true), but sadly people have trouble paying to watch videos online, there's no way they would pay for a search engine. We are still not really high in the search result after a year of existence either and paying for ads is a good way to get people on the website (which I'm sure will help our position in search results).
EDIT: In case it's not clear, I don't believe she deserve to be higher than other escape room in the search result, we have actually almost no competition close to us and it's pretty much why she started that business. Simply that Google have no metric to know that her website has to be higher than another one, so clicks are needed to provide some.
She always asks people what they think of the experience once they are done and recently one even said that we are not visible enough. It's a pretty great feedback, we are lucky that's our main issue, but sadly ads are the only way to become visible to others.
Ads are almost amazing by allowing investment into market that people aren't ready to pay for but yet provide great entertainment, learning experience or a great service. Without ads, I probably wouldn't be the developper that I am today because the guy that did the great tutorial that create the passion in me wouldn't have time to works full time on them.
If there were no free search engines, I can see people paying a few bucks a month for Google. Even more so if Google would then again make their results as useful to users as they once were.
A practical example: I'm incredibly price-sensitive wrt productivity applications because there are many great such applications available as open source. I'm much less price-sensitive when it comes to video games (e.g. I spent 300€ on Breath of the Wild since it required buying a Switch) because the selection of open source video games is very limited.
Try searching for product reviews for example. It's almost impossible to find good, honest review sites via a search engine (they definitely exist though). Most are shopping sites or fake reviews that just list scraped product information.
Sure, because the web was ad-funded from the early days. People have an irrationally strong preference for "free". Even though in this case "free" really means "paid for by people manipulating how you spend your money".
But I think it's implausible that if ads didn't happen the web would just be an empty wasteland. Up until the web existed, people paid for all sorts of information and informational services. And plenty of people still do. I spend maybe $1k/year on journalism.
Sure, but that would be available to the ones that can profit from it directly, not the mass population that would have an hard time seeing value created from it.
Instead they would expect word of mouth to be sufficent, and in a way they wouldn't be wrong in that world because in that world everything would depends from it. They just wouldn't have the luxury of having all theses others experience that depends on ads to exist, simply because ads wouldn't be there to allow them to exist.
In the old days, if her product -in this case escape room- would be good, she'd get enough customers by word of mouth alone.
Maybe those products shouldn't exist, then. Just because someone has an idea or wants to sell yet another iteration on an existing product or service, doesn't mean they deserve to. Maybe advertising allows markets to be far more diverse and saturated than they should be?
Also, maybe advertising isn't as necessary as it once was in a world where search engines and online stores exist and you can literally see a product and its competition all listed in one place if you're looking for something.
I suppose a good way that could make word of mouth work is to create two experiences and recommend the other in an email afterwards.
Advertising has made the internet a bit shit, yes. But let's not pretend it has it's upsides because it really does. That's why people pay for it. Now I'll grant that old school banner ads aren't worth much and we'd probably be better off without them. Most of what they're funding is garbage, not independent bloggers like I'd want to be funding.
Disclaimer: Small Google Ads customer.
I've witnessed the Internet before Web 2.0. Yes I received Viagra spam on my mailbox as well. Amount bought thanks to all of that spam: zero. The marketeer does not care about any second in my life I wasted thanks to their spam. Neither do the assholes who hosted them. And still, that Internet functioned. Of course the bills for the IRC server and Usenet server need to be paid. Usenet access was just part of my monthly dial-up subscription though.
As far as I am concerned the invention of high quality (relatively) search engines and high quality (relatively) fact sources such as Wikipedia as well as high quality, honest reviewers could easily make up for advertising. How is such paid for? Donations and credit card.
If we were used to no advertising and paying for services, we'd be outraged by if there was advertising. Ironically, that way is more efficient. The ideal model for data is a Patreon/Kickstarter/Indiegogo-esque project where people are able to offer bounties. This way you could pick a journalist (who's self-employed) and pay them to write an article to research a subject. Such research could then save other people time and money. I mean, if only 100 people in the world pay 10 EUR each then you already got firepower to do some research already.
Advertising and 'free' (where you're the product) is a race to the bottom, and ultimately a product for the poor.
Podcast hosts are biased either way. Ads waste people's time while a subscription doesn't. The subscriber amount is inflated, and the quality of content is lower than it could be because of clickbait and other non-content.
One subscription-based model for news I'm looking forward to gaining adoption is essentially a Spotify for news, called Blendle. I also believe we focus too much on news, and not enough on in depth articles which is a model De Correspondent pursues.
But let's be honest, search ads are not the problem here, toxic banner ads across the web are.
I'm willing to pay for Mozilla Firefox and Duck Duck Go and Wikipedia. I'm not sure it should be paid in month or by amount of usage. The beauty of Wikipedia is that it is open source, same with Firefox. Not sure about DDG.
And they could ignore the ads, too, which most people probably will because it's not that common a thing to want to do. But at least word of mouth can be expected to be reasonably accurate. If this escape room were terrible, the word of mouth would be terrible, but the advertising for it would never reflect that.
>And an escape room experience isn't something you can easily bring people back for - you need to find new customers every single time.
Maybe that makes it a bad business model?
>Now I'll grant that old school banner ads aren't worth much and we'd probably be better off without them.
I'll be honest, if I had to choose, I'd prefer old school banner ads. Get rid of modals, pop-ups, ads in video, javascript tracking, and just give me a banner with a link, or even just text. Something that doesn't intrude on the content.
Maybe it is. But I'd argue having something is better than not having it.
Aka "influencers". Our children are growing up with YouTube idols who don't have integrity. It is even illegal here to focus on children with advertising (which these buggers do).
You just need to know that removing a stump is generally possible. That fact itself can be advertised by a the guild of stump removers if it is obscure enough. "Tired of hitting your toe on the stump in your backyard? Ask you doctor for an eye check!"
What?
Soft drinks, insurance companies, investment advisors, pretty much all prepared foods, all over-the-counter drugs, shampoo, deodorant, desktop computers, etc, etc -- these are the sources of 95% of ads. Yet the difference among them is almost nonexistent.
The ads for these products don't inform the consumer; they exist only to push the brand into consumer consciousness, a necessary evil because otherwise your company's commodity won't survive competition with other companies's commodity products without fabricating mindshare via by constant repetition of media promotions.
Branded commodities exist at all because advertising has constructed a fantasy around them intended to give consumers a sense of identity, and ultimately, meaning in their lives. Buy this slightly tweaked commodity to become smarter or sexier.
Without ads, 95% of everything we guy will quickly drop by at least 50% to match that of the nameless generic commodity that it is.
Soft drinks / prepared food / shampoo / deodorant I never buy due to ads. Heck, I never buy soft drinks. I drink a beer once a week, usually a special one. I find it by looking around at the liquor store dept. of the grocery store. I have zero brand loyalty in this regard (the amount of choice is a fata morgana anyway). I have a sensitive skin as well, so I can't stand a lot of these deodorant / shampoo.
I go to the grocery store to buy my food. The only time I may differentiate is when something is on discount. Which, true, is advertising, but its a clear deal. I don't follow the "saving" deals where you need stamps or whatever because it creates artificial brand loyalty / expenses.
OTC drugs I only buy when I need them. I'd buy the cheapest of active substance. I don't give a rat about which brand. If its insured, I get the cheapest one automatically cause otherwise I can't get it back.
Insurance, water, electricity, I go with the cheapest I can find. No commercial is going to tell me about which one's the cheapest. Comparison websites will, and there are good ones. My favourite one is the national equivalent to US Consumer Reports. To which I'm also an active subscriber.
Quite frankly, all I get from your post is that advertising is pushing crap we don't need. Cause we don't need to buy the branded versions.
If you want an example of a website which is doing great yet doesn't advertise nor contain advertisements then you're currently visiting it.
As soon as I got to play with AR (such as Google Glass) the first thing I will look into is filter out the shit I don'tn need.
I just don't buy the argument that all kinds of advertising for anything at any time are intrinsically evil and must be stamped out. Even in a post-scarcity utopia, writers, artists and other creators would very likely be promoting their creations in an effort to reach people who might not otherwise hear about them.
We get clients from 5 m away to 300 km away. The product is great, on a few thousand client, only an handful weren't happy.
> she'd get enough customers by word of mouth alone.
Word of mouth works when there are enough people to listen to it that may be interested in the experience. I'm a fervent believer that anyone can enjoy it, but let be honest, not everyone believes that being locked somewhere is fun ;). Believe me, it's a complaint that we hear often from our client that they weren't able to convince people around them about how awesome escape rooms are.
There's actually money to be made in something that could allow people to find others people to do escape room together, it's something that I often see people asking for in escape room communities.
> [...]
> There's actually money to be made in something that could allow people to find others people to do escape room together, it's something that I often see people asking for in escape room communities.
Especially something with a small community could use this exposure of word of mouth, or having a platform for their community. You could also be part of the things to do list with the local tourism bureau.
The problem is a lack of standardization/consensus on communication method. You could use Facebook for this, or Mastodon, or Discord, or Slack, or Discourse, or Subreddit, or ... someone with authority just has to pick one, make it half decent, spread it by word of mouth, and you're done. If you can find volunteers for this, great. Otherwise, escape rooms could make a non-profit for this to maintain it. Of course, an escape room in Poland can afford to pay less for membership than one in San Francisco.
Of course, I don't have data to prove my statement, but I doubt you have any to prove yours either.
And without ads and that "great tutorial", maybe you'd be something of greater value to society rather than the "developer you are today". (Just saying that what-ifs are even less of a support for any thesis)
Note that the original article does not complain about informative ads, but about manipulative ones.
It’s funny because the title would suggest that “all ads are one of the worst things that happened to humanity”. So it’s a click bait headline = manipulative ad. Maybe without a different title nobody would read the article.
As I said in another comment, I am not a big fan of the analogy because it's unclear: you have to work backwards to reconfirm it.
I'm a pretty great value for my works actually. Could do more? I don't actually believe it. I learned what I'm doing since I was 8. There's no way anyone would have paid for theses learning experience for me except advertisers.
You could certainly argue that I could have a more fun childhood if I didn't dedicate so much of it to learning. That could certainly be true, but I still enjoyed quite a bit my childhood doing theses crazy projects.
> Note that the original article does not complain about informative ads, but about manipulative ones.
> Advertising Is a Cancer on Society
Sure he talk against manipulative ones, but he fight against the whole advertising industry.
Maybe I could have done better in something else, who knows, what I do know is more learning experience is ALWAYS better.
I've grew up on the free Internet resources without ads (banner ads just came to be). I've read free books on highly technical topics, on Mathematics...
I'm not arguing that at all. I was pretty specific saying that the one that provided my learning experience couldn't have done it full time.
There wouldn't be as many learning opportunities. I also consider that I can't expect others to do work for me for free, that's just wrong.
There are tens of millions of Americans living in homelessness, shanty towns, and trailer parks. We need to build housing (apartments, homes) for them. No individual person can do that. We have to organize ourselves to tackle these kinds of problems cooperatively. However, our society insists that we allow the market to organize our activities.
The market is controlled by exchange, and people who can afford to exchange more than anyone else can control the market. The majority of our wealth is concentrated in the hands of a minority of people. Thus the market mostly organizes people to solve their concerns while paying no mind to people who cannot afford to engage with it.
Either you can fix the market (something arguably impossible to do) or you can use a different method of organizing humans into cooperative efforts.
Absolutely no benefit to future generations or my fellow man, and I'd assume the case to be true of most people. It isn't as if advertising has made me more callous or lazy.
Unless your point is that companies could be doing those things instead of spending ad dollars, but that is a ridiculous proposition because they'd be using it to make more capital in some other way
One function of advertising is demand generation. It makes people believe they need things they don't. The broad message of most ads is "spend more money to be successful/popular/happy". Is it really impossible to think that if people stopped getting told that all day long they'd focus less on spending/consumption and more on other things?
Entertainment does not have to unproductive. People who play sports or do other recreational activities are working to maintain their physical health while having fun. There are games of all sorts you can play to help you improve life skills or even physical and mental abilities.
If your relaxation requires someone else's work, it is counter productive (think resort-type venues that need staff to operate). There are plenty of ways to relax and unwind that don't take away from other people's efforts. Visiting a nature park or a museum, for example. The work to maintain natural resources or to educate and inspire people is necessary beyond simply pleasing people.
If you cannot live efficiently, you will exhaust your available resources and your lifestyle will die out. Humans have put in a great amount of effort in the last few hundred years to make as many resources as possible available to use, but this only encouraged us to use more. If you want to see how to live life efficiently, look at present and past cultures that do. They seem to be plenty happy living on much less than the average person in the first world.
You don't exist to be happy, you exist to survive. What would we have accomplished as humans if after thousands of generations of working to build a world with more possibility if all that work is dashed by a bunch of greedy, selfish idiots who think pleasure is more important than the sustainability of human life?
Speak for yourself. You exist to survive apparently, and what a meager and sad existence that seems to me. Good thing there's no authority telling us why we exist and we're each free to decide for ourselves.
What would we have accomplished as humans if...
What would we have accomplished if we survive until eternity without being happy?
The world does not have infinite resources. We have to be careful how we use them
"All fun must be productive" doesn't follow from that.
You aren't. Everything you do, even doing nothing, has consequences that are beyond your control. Even worse, your actions have consequences not just for you but for others, even people who don't yet exist. We only exist today because generation after generation of the people that came before us have worked together to survive. You absolutely can choose to be a selfish idiot, but selfish idiots go extinct very quickly because they greedily consume the resources they depend on. There are also people who recognize the threat selfish idiots pose to themselves and others and may intervene to stop them from mucking things up not just for themselves but for others. Remember, you yourself took the effort and resources of the human race to get you where you are. Your life is on loan to you from the universe.
Just like the cells in your body, humans work together to make things more capable than themselves individually. Just like the cells in your body, humans are constantly replaced by a new generation that takes our place. If you want to live life as a cancer cell on the human race, you can expect it will react the same way we react to cancer in our own bodies.
This article is about this very problem. Advertisers are abusing the fact that our brains have not adapted to their schemes to trick people into spending their effort supporting not just the advertisers but the enterprises that advertise through them. They climb over the backs of their fellow man to selfishly guarantee their own survival, paying no mind to the consequences their actions bear for others and for the generations that follow us.
> What would we have accomplished if we survive until eternity without being happy?
Doing what we are here to do. Life exists because the universe had latent potential that unthinking matter could not release. The whole universe is working to exhaust its potential. Intelligent life is just another step in that process.
You also don't seem to get what happiness is. Happiness is not a state of ecstatic joy, it's a state of contentment, free of threats and concerns, when you can be at peace. Like all emotion and sensation, we have them because they were useful to our survival. Mental reward mechanisms don't exist because you can't be conscious without them, they exist because without them survival is more difficult. Happiness is always a temporary, illusory, and fleeting feeling. There will always be more mountains to climb, happiness just rewards us for getting to the next peak.
You can choose to live a willfully ignorant life and pretend to be confused just to feel better, or you can see what the world is telling you and listen to it.
Haha... yeah ok. I know better than to try to convince religious people that their irrational views are baseless. It never gets anywhere. But you snuck by my guard because your religion is somewhat non-traditional.
Let's go our separate ways, you believe whatever you want :)
Wikipedia has several articles about these phenomena (e.g., information theory, thermodynamics):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_level
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metastability
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_vacuum
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_in_thermodynamics_and_...
PBS Space Time has some great videos on the cosmological side of all this. Their video "Are You a Boltzmann Brain?" does a great job of explaining entropy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhy4Z_32kQo
Kurzgesagt has some entertaining videos on the subject, too:
* The Most Dangerous Stuff in the Universe - Strange Stars Explained: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_8yK2kmxoo
* The Most Efficient Way to Destroy the Universe – False Vacuum: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijFm6DxNVyI
Most of this is unnecessary for the subject of this thread, which is more about biology, ecology, and evolution than physics.
Nobody chooses to watch a TV or radio show that's all ads. Ads are the opposite of entertainment, otherwise we'd tune in Wednesday at 8 PM to watch our favorite ads.
Since I bought the chair on Amazon, when I don't have an ad-blocker on, like on other people's computers, I can see Amazon showing me advertisements for other chairs. Why? They are trying to convince me, because I showed a willingness to buy chairs, that I need more chairs. There are all sorts of flashy listings showing off the neat gimmicks their chairs are capable of, all to convince customers like me that what we have isn't good enough.
They can't make money if they solved people's problems, so either they design things to break (like planned obsolescence) or they psychologically manipulate people into thinking they have problems they don't have and sell them the solution (InfoWars is this taken to the extreme).
There is a difference between putting information out there for people who want to find it and blasting information at them to get in someone's head and convince them they need to do something for your own benefit.
None of the ads we got say to anyone that they need it. No one thinks that they need it when they see it.
What the ads say is that we exist. When they look for entertainment, and the debate isn't about whether entertainment should or not exist, they see us in the search engine (which is ads financed). When they search for movie theater (which is not related to our business, so it's fair that Google doesn't show our business in the results), they see us.
Actually, it's not even possible trying to convince people that they need us, even if we would want to. We NEED to target people that want entertainment because that's already pretty expensive for us to do.
I'd wager you're wrong, unless of course you are an ad executive which it doesn't sound like you are?
Maybe, maybe, most ads by dollar spent is about brand awareness.
But for sure, most ads by quantity are about manipulation.
That is manipulation. If they weren't actively thinking about visiting one or actively looking for things to do and your advertising convinced them to do it then you've manipulated them into doing something the otherwise wouldn't have.
I don't understand how you could do that without being an advertisement. How can you make a few businesses pay a fee without being advantaged against a business that doesn't pay that fee.
You do bring an interesting idea, if it's a directory financed by the government, which is neutral and randomize results (or else we would see much more A* companies ;) ), that could works in a way.
It may become an administrative nightmare to manage though with categories and stuff.
... which is exactly what our ads are doing. None of the targetting that we do is related to anything else than entertainment, or activities to do. I even had to black list plenty of keywords that triggered our ads, some for prostitution service even.
Believe me, if we weren't targetting like that, it would cost WAY TOO MUCH. I'm pretty happy right now with an average 4.95% of CTR for the past 2 weeks.
1. Education (let people know a company/product exists)
2. Manipulation (by various means)
From a moral point of view, the first effect is not bad. It actually helps people to make better decisions and extend their knowledge about available products and services.
However, the second effect is the harmful one. Since companies are trying to make money, they want as many people as possible to buy their products. So they start lying, leaving the negative aspects of their products out, use visual material that creates yearning contexts, present the information at a higher frequency than relevant and so on. So saying it is just about getting your attention is a huge understatement.
Simply put, the advertising industry tries to find human vulnerabilities on a daily basis. Sadly, not to inform and help protect us, but to exploit them. If advertising was actually about helping society, the spending would be more like a tax (independent from the effect), the visual appearance would be standardized and the process of presenting ads would be strictly controlled by a neutral entity. Furthermore, everybody would be allowed to not participate. Maybe the receivers of that valuable, educating information should even pay to have access to it.
And I am sure, at this point you are with me, that the majority of ads aren't about educating people but about placing information in their heads.
1) Take a day and for each ad you see note how much novel, useful information you receive from it.
2) For any ad that had significant novel, useful information, redesign it in a format that is optimized to be informative, with any manipulation subtracted. (E.g., imagine it written in the style of the best encyclopedia articles.)
Doing this makes it pretty clear that pure information is a very, very small portion of what's going on with advertising.
We are sadly a tiny minority. I keep seeing people talking against Youtube Premium.
> There should at least be an option to pay for ad-free, tracking-free, service.
Agree completely, but the existence of ads isn't what stops that sadly.
People were happy to pay 10$ for something until there was the same thing for 5$ and theses peoples thus flock to the "5$" options. This is why we should stop the 5$ option because it hurt the 10$ one!
People that paid more, just did because they had no alternative to get that. In that amount, there was some that couldn't pay that and didn't, and maybe you don't know them, but they exist. The cheaper option still provide enough value, or else why would the one that paid more move to the cheaper one? It also allowed the one that couldn't afford the previous price, to afford it and get that value too.
It's even possible that it was in aggregate delivering more value in total when the people that wanted the 5$ options were paying 10$ for the one with more things in it, but is it ethically right to force them to pay 5$ more for something they don't care about? Isn't it one of the important point here in this discussion manipulating people to pay for something they didn't want?
> The existence of ads definitely stops that.
It thus doesn't stop that, it only show that people were forced to pay more for value they didn't care for.
The people that want more and can afford it are still there. Like you said, they are still happily paying for Bloomberg and WSJ.
Talking about that, I don't read theses newspaper, yet they are annoying me enough that I may pay for it one day just because I keep getting linked to their article on Hacker News. It's weird how the paying one is giving me worse experience than ads ever did in my case, but I still believe that option is needed.
[citation needed]
You're making a couple of mistakes here. One is imagining that in a world without ads, her experience would be the same as her not advertising. The other is that something that is bad for a given business is something that's bad for society. Both of these are at best unproven.
> Most ads isn't about manipulation
For every ad you see today, ask yourself how much useful new information you have gained from it. I've done that a few times and it's pretty close to zero. Note that the biggest spenders on ads are brands you've already heard of, suggesting that your theory needs some revision.
I can't really give financial, but believe me, after having to spend 30k$ more because of some problems, we only had about 6k$ to pay for 5k$ a month of expense. After a year, in a location surrounded by restaurants (more than a dozen), with quite a bit of event closeby, with quite a bit of people going around, the amount of people that found out about us outside of ads, is barely a handful.
After a full year, even while spending for ads, even if we can count on 1 hand the number of people that had a bad experience, we are still barely profitable and still, almost everyone only finds us with ads and not word of mouth. We still have a pretty big list of people that wait after our third room impatiently, I think there's not a day where there's not someone that mentions it.
The thing is, even if an escape room is fun, even if I think that anyone can enjoy them, sadly our public is a tiny fraction of the population and even if theses enthusiast talks about it to others, it just doesn't reach enough other enthusiast people.
> One is imagining that in a world without ads, her experience would be the same as her not advertising.
Then you would have to explain to me how she could reach people between 10 km to 300 km aways without ads in the first 6 months of existence.
> The other is that something that is bad for a given business is something that's bad for society.
Her business is great, people are all crazy about the experience, that's a few thousands of peoples that wouldn't have that experience that they enjoyed quite a bit, simply because they are too few in a huge market.
> For every ad you see today, ask yourself how much useful new information you have gained from it.
From the ads itself? More than 0. From the content that has been paid from it? More than thousands actually. I wouldn't have read your comment, simply because Hacker News is a place that advertize ycombinator startup.
> Note that the biggest spenders on ads are brands you've already heard of, suggesting that your theory needs some revision.
It's actually exactly what I'm talking about. You think about Coke regularly? I'm pretty sure you don't.
It's sad but in this world of so many choice, you need to keep reminding people you exist or else they may switch to another choice they may see more (doesn't even have to be ads related, could be just more people that consume it at that moment, could be a location that have a contract with that brand, etc..).
So both in a world where you are known or not, you need to remind people that you are a possibility to even be considered.
Even in the amazing marketing space that is a supermarket where you can extremly easily browse a good amount of choice, brands pay for the right of a specific shelf because that will sell more.
Imagine how much worse it is when you don't even have all the choices in front of you.
I certainly don't, and if that's all it said on the door as I was walking to a restaurant, I certainly would not stop in.
Maybe the benefit of online advertising is simply making people who know what it is aware that there is one in their zip code. (Option awareness for the primed is a thing.)
Oh yeah definitely, that's something that we will need to do in our city because the concept is too new. We just don't have too much time and money to invest in that. We were going to do that recently in a festival, but we learned too late that it wasn't going to happen in an adjacent park ^^' like it always did in the past.
> Maybe the benefit of online advertising is simply making people who know what it is aware that there is one in their zip code.
Yeah that what ads does in our case. We hope that word of mouth will help show more people it's fun.
I guess also embedded in my comment was a question: what is an escape room business?
It appears to be a game?
How long does it take?
How much does it cost per encounter?
Can one do it with friends (like lazer-tag) or is it a single-person encounter?
How much space does the facility require to process how many customers per hour?
Many people seem unwilling to admit what they do is bullshit. Not judging that at all, virtually most jobs are bullshit, I've done far more useless things for big companies earning good money too. Yeah it offers entertainment value but were it to disappear humanity would not suffer for it.
I'm honestly amazed at the number of people who truly believe what they do offers value, long lasting, real value to society. Have quite a few friends in advertising/marketing and they've drunk the kool-aid thinking that because they bring in X amount for bigcorp their existence is justified and if they didn't someone else would. Without this delusion it's likely not an easy thing to live with.
You underestimate quite a bit the value of entertainment, but that's your right.
In my case, it was a single example for which I have information about and can talk about. The same will apply to anything which is niche. You can't constantly search for things that fix your problem, even if you know exactly what is required to fix it, and you can't be aware of everything that could fix your problem. Ads are the only ways for theses niches problem to be fixed.
If you think you can do it more efficiently than ads, go for it, you'll be amazingly rich.
And yet capitalism is still lauded as the most efficient economic system...
And no, we wouldn't have billions of dollars to spend on other things. The soft drink companies would have billions of dollars more profit. And fewer people would have jobs
The cost of drinks wouldn't go down. Basically the only thing that would change is we would lose a lot of free things, and fewer people would have money.
I bet there's any number of things this person values that simply wouldn't exist without advertising.
It's a childish and immature opinion really.
Anyone who hates advertising this much should show their commitment by working at an organization that does not advertise. Loathing advertising and at the same time depending on it for income is deeply hypocritical.
But if you're not being pedantic you'll agree that most stuff relating to computing exists in its current form in lockstep with yhe ability of companies to sell and therefore advertise their products.
Not just computers but everything related to them too.
In the late 70s and early 80s, most people simply had no idea why they would want a computer; The first home computer adverts in the mainstream media didn't really sell the benefits of one computer over another, but sold the idea of the computer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7_j_ABrkn8
Without that kind of advertising, it's entirely plausible to believe that home computers might have been a fad, with the computer resigned to being a specialist tool for business and industry. There's a parallel universe where the home computer and video game boom never happened because nobody told consumers why they might want a computer, the 6502 and Z80 remained niche microprocessors for embedded applications, Woz went back to HP and Bill Gates finished his degree and got a job at Honeywell.
I don't know whether there are examples (aside from "the funniest advertisements" shows), but computers certainly aren't one.
Tune into the TV during a sporting event tonight and you won't see some new information about a product that solved a problem you didn't know how to solve. You'll see problems that you didn't know you had, solved in ways no rational person would expect: Your problem is not enough attractive women making eyes at you? Solution: Buy new car. Your problem is life doesn't consist of exciting parties with cool youths? Solution: Buy light beer. Your problem is you're not a professional race car driver? Solution: Buy chunky watch. And if you missed the message, the same three commercials will air during the next ad break in 6 minutes, and you'll see them when you look at your phone or computer, in the wad of glossy ads cocooned within the thin pages of your newspaper, and you'll hear about them on the radio until the host decides it's time to play another song.
That kind of advertising may be necessary for Budweiser to keep up with Coors, or for Ford to keep up with GM, but if it disappeared tomorrow, people would still know that beer and cars were a thing. People might make smarter choices on how much alcohol to drink and when to be content with their current transportation instead of buying a new car, and sales might go down a little, but that would not spell the end of society.
I don't think it's a poor argument, because I don't think "advertising" is hurting "people at large." I think that's a fantasy.
Of course there's some shitty, lame advertising, and there's some "manipulative" crap, and there's shady practices like ad tracking. No one is arguing those are good. Ad people are constantly mocking shitty advertising themselves. But no one is offering better solutions.
I'm always baffled that on a website that's devoted to technology, hosted by the most ambitious startup accelerator in the world, that topic comes up almost monthly, and no one has had any idea how to kill all of those ad tech startups by offering a superior solution. That's a huge opportunity to make billions and make the world a better place that I would support 100%.
Unfortunately, it seems like people are more interested in infantile hot takes and engineering vs. marketing culture war screeds. I'd rather we talked about the above.
Can someone who thinks advertising should disappear explain how they intend their new fangled startup to grow and reach its target market with no form of "advertising" or "marketing", bearing in mind things like opportunity cost and cash flow management? Feel free to include/exclude whatever you want from those labels and explain why.
Edit: double negative.
The argument I'm making in the article is that it's not some advertising that's manipulative and shady, but that it's almost all of it.
> I'm always baffled that on a website that's devoted to technology, hosted by the most ambitious startup accelerator in the world, that topic comes up almost monthly, and no one has had any idea how to kill all of those ad tech startups by offering a superior solution.
It comes up monthly because it's a problem, particularly on the Internet. But solutions are hard to find, because it's a hard problem. For one, it has prisonner's-dillema-like nature - if you show up with a way to do well without advertising, a competitor will take your method, add advertising to it, and proceed to do even better.
(Scott Alexander once wrote a very long essay specifically about such problems[0], and he didn't figure out anything actionable either. It's a hard problem, and arguably the root of all the big human-caused issues on this planet.)
I have no good solutions and I said that exact thing in the article. If I ever find one, I'll let the world know. Best I can think of now is individual and collective (i.e.: regulatory) ways of resisting and reducing the individual shady practices and negative consequences of those.
--
[0] - https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
Advertising has ridiculous externalities; this is what makes it similar to the toxic waste scenario.
I truly believe we can find an equilibrium which works.
You'll note the game-theoretical mechanics at play here. If your competitors use garbage advertising, you can't not use it and hope to compete (much like if your competitor is dumping toxic waste to a river, they have advantage over you who tries to safely dispose of it). If one of your competitors invents even more garbagy way of advertising and gains a temporary advantage, everyone will follow suit and the advantage will be cancelled out.
This suggests that simply making it not possible (technically or legally) to engage in garbage advertising won't hurt companies much, and might even be beneficial - companies will still engage in the same competition, but at a cheaper and less invasive level.
There's an anecdote about tobacco companies that I still need to find a proper citation for, but it goes like this: tobacco companies were apparently happy about legal restrictions on advertising, because it was applied to everyone equally, so no one ended up relatively worse off, but now they didn't have to spend so much on advertising anymore.
The home PC revolution was started in big part by accident when IBM made a computer that was both cheap and easy to clone. They became the leader against other, much better recognized computer brands, clones appeared left and right, and here we are.
They became the leader because their product was a better market fit, and not because of advertising. If anything, PCs actually canibalized the products that IBM was actively trying to market (mainframes come to mind).
And then there's Unix and GNU/Linux, the OS of choice for servers.
I search for a product based on its category, read reviews, and find unpaid recommendations from things like Consumer Reports or Wirecutter.
My SO escape room wouldn't exist without advertising either... I'm pretty sure that's true for PLENTY of business.
> Anyone who hates advertising this much should show their commitment by working at an organization that does not advertise.
That's a rather childish and immature rejoinder. The world of employment simply doesn't work that way, and people's job mobility is not infinite and frictionless.
Advertising offendees will always be offended no matter where advertising sophistication is at.
People won't be less affected if advertising is less harmful or pervasive...?
You aggregation function is broken. The impact of advertising is a not a boolean value.
I'm ready. Go ahead advertisers. Delight me with silence.
That isn't relevant regarding the truthfulness of the author's claim.
Whether or not ads are vital for any industry, product or technology (an extremely complex question by the way, not to be easily dismissed with a dogmatic "X would not exist without advertising") has no logical relation whatsoever to any opinion one might have about ads.
Imagine how much better our world would look without advertising. Will some adtech devs lose their job? Yes, but honestly it would probably be worth it. They'll find work in a non-scummy industry and can be a net positive for humanity.
Don't underestimate the economic loss caused by people just not knowing there's a better way.
There's also a time and place for ads, and the article's examples (like actual medical documents) are neither.
Real world advertising is not about informing, it's about convincing. Over time, it became increasingly manipulative and dishonest. It also became more effective. In the process, it grew to consume a significant amount of resources of every company on the planet.
There's a huge difference between informational advertising, which I support, and manipulative advertising, which is reprehensible. Telling people that their custom CRUD app could be ready quicker, cheaper to support, and contain fewer bugs if they used your product is great. Bombarding people who already know about your product and its half dozen competitors with subconscious messages that your competitors are evil and that if they use your product their sex appeal will increase is dishonest and stupid.
I work at an organization that does almost no marketing; we mostly spread by word of mouth. We have no shortage of customers or work, and growth would be harmful to the quality of our product, so we're pretty content with our place in the market.
The good old survival bias. You did it thus it's possible for all!
Sadly the truth is, word of mouth doesn't always work, you are just lucky.
> don't pretend they'd survive without ads
I don't see why Facebook and Google couldn't work with a non-advertising-based business model. You might end up having to actually pay a little bit for it, though.
> In real world public spaces? That's an even more toxic form of advertising and far more wasteful.
And it's already saturated. This needs to go too.
> Trade shows, product catalogs, storefronts, and their on-line equivalents.
These are all advertisements, just a different type.
Yes. That difference of type is what makes them ethical and not annoying.
How old are you? I'm from the 90's, I'm from the generation that was on MSN all the time. My parent would have never let me pay for anything online, with no access to credit cards...
There's no ways they would have paid 5$ a month for a social networks, even if "all my friends were on it", which wouldn't be true, just like Runescape in the past.
I didn't mention it in the article, but I do recognize what you said as about the only redeeming thing about advertising on the Internet. Free content is a huge boon not just for the less wealthy, but for kids. I do not have a good idea how we could get rid of ads on-line while not excluding these demographics at the same time. I was kind of hoping someone on HN would have some ideas, but nothing turned up so far.
The waste you speak of sounds the result of misjudging demand rather than spamming too little. Or maybe people were informed about the merits of your better mousetrap, but just didn't care. Startups often guzzle that kool-aid.
Advertising is the last place I'd go to learn if someone's novelty is better. Who trusts ads?
There aren't many things that can only exist because of advertising. Most of the things people things think depend on advertising already existed in some form before advertising took over and would continue to exist in some form if ads went away.
http://jacek.zlydach.pl/index.html
I'd respect his position more if he was not on LinkedIn or Facebook and did not work on commercial projects.
I think LinkedIn is despicable but I have a LinkedIn account because it’s basically expected that you have one for recruiting purposes by many employers.
This is exactly why it's a childish opinion that ignores the interconnectedness of our society.
Advertising is baked in to the fabric of how our social systems work in an interconnected way.
I fortunately avoided being ever involved in anything directly related to adtech, and I plan on staying that way.
A LinkedIn profile is technically an advertisement, but it's not one I push on people. Someone needs to go and look for it to find it. It's akin to an entry in a product catalog. I consider this kind of advertising to be fine, and I said so in the article.
(Also incidentally, all the jobs I ever had I got through the word of mouth.)
We do not have to accept the current state of advertising because it may or may not have had good effects in the past (practically by accident). Wanting things to change for the better is the opposite of dogma, and I daresay most advertising is much more childish and immature than this blog post. It is not hypocritical to hate ads and be subjected to them/benefit from them as they are so pervasive as to be unavoidable; they can also still have a net harm even if you think that orgs "depend" on them for income, which is dubious.
And just for the record, I work for a nonprofit who advertises minimally, and definitely not to the public.
"It's a malignant mutation of an idea that efficient markets need a way to connect goods and services with people wanting to buy them. Limited to honestly informing people about what's available on the market, it can serve a crucial function in enabling trade. In the real world however, it's moved way past that role."
Its definitely one of those pieces that merely points out the flaws without suggesting any solutions. You can take those articles how you will but I think its dishonest to take his overall message as being advertising is bad entirely and without exception.
> It's a malignant mutation of an idea that efficient markets need a way to connect goods and services with people wanting to buy them.
> Over time, it became increasingly manipulative and dishonest. It also became more effective. In the process, it grew to consume a significant amount of resources of every company on the planet.
I interpret the loose analogy as: if controlled advertising is like normal cell growth, then out-of-control resource-consuming advertising is like cancerous cell growth.
It's much easier to control advertising if its deployment has more friction, e.g. in a physical newspaper or billboard. On the internet, it's different. We haven't figured out how to control advertising on the internet yet, such that it doesn't have all the harmful side effects cited by the author.
I bet that if we do figure it out, it will be because we've made significant technological advancements in customer<=>product matchmaking* combined with an unrelenting focus on preserving humane values.
* This will also probably entail us, as a society, somehow reframing the way that customer<=>product matchmaking happens, putting more control into the customer's hands.
I think there is room for a bit of optimism here, but it means admitting that there are serious problems with the current system.
> That analogy applies to literally anything that can grow. Great. Startups are a cancer. Technology is a cancer.
Not a logical flow in that analogy from my perspective. There is legitimately bad advertising out there that is blatantly malicious -- malware, popups, click jackers, spyware, non-consensual tracking, etc. -- that could be described by that to a tee. But the original article goes further and calls all advertising cancerous which is just plain dogmatic and frankly, extremist. Its extremely easy to put down advertising, but the truth is everything in life is advertising, since advertising is just a game of attention -- predating the internet and printed paper. I think an average internet denizen has a viewpoint somewhere between.
Then we have people who work in marketing, and might see the article and be opposed to the article. But I don't think that matters. Advertisement is not going to stop because of some article putting it in a undefended spotlight, it's a fulfilling prophecy from a game theory perspective precisely because you can't not advertise -- as the article notes.
"It's a malignant mutation of an idea that efficient markets need a way to connect goods and services with people wanting to buy them."
No, it isn't. It's an expansion of the idea that people are more likely to buy things they have heard of. If it was just to connect people with what they already want to buy, there would be no product development, no product roll-outs, because people don't know they want to buy something that has never existed before.
Also 'over time it became increasingly manipulative and dishonest' is a joke. It's been dishonest since the start. Criers lying about the effectiveness of some tonic, the attractiveness of some woman, the strength and wisdom of some leader.
In no way have you demonstrated a "completely flawed premise".
> It's been dishonest since the start
How is it a rebuttal to the say that advertising was always dishonest and manipulative...?
>How is it a rebuttal to the say that advertising was always dishonest and manipulative...?
Because if your argument is that advertising is becoming or has become dishonest and manipulative and it needs to be pulled back to what it was before, that is a lot weaker if advertising has always been dishonest and manipulative.
If those are harmful practices, why would someone turn them into a business venture? To profit off of evil? Making something into a profitable business does not cleanse an activity of morality.
There is also a significant difference between saying you have found a magic bullet for all illnesses and saying you have discovered a specific treatment for specific diseases and had the treatment studied by independent experts to characterize its positive and negative effects in detail. Trying to convince people they need something (advertising) is manipulative, but informing people of something they might need is not.
Of course there are also plenty of opportunity costs to wasting billions annually on the overpromotion of overpriced products that are consumed in excess...
Take a very broad issue like "advertising", which nearly everyone has had a negative experience with but performs a vital function. Highlight some damaging anecdotes and envision a world free from the issue. Thus, we have laid the groundwork that the issue is actually a problem. The stated or unstated solution is obviously to get rid of the problem, but the specifics of how to accomplish this are hazy at best. The conclusion boils down to anything which helps get rid of the issue must be good, and anything which supports the issue is bad. The resulting actions of true believers attack everything blindly because the moral logic has been simplified.
Lupus causes the immune system to start attacking your own tissue in the same way. Instead of identifying specific problems and working to eliminate them, it starts attacking everything, making the body weaker as it destroys an otherwise healthy organ.
It's the same as saying that living in China and criticising communism is deeply hypocritical.
I believe it's actually the opposite. It takes courage to criticise something your livelihood depends on.
Absolute nonsense that wouldn't survive a 5 minute test in reality. Unfortunately it's more convenient to let other people at your company do that "dirty job", while mocking the "stupid sales jocks" and their "suits", while assuming you have a great understanding of what they're doing.
It's really the mirror image of nerd bullying, and it's not any better.
examples where better regulation is needed: robocalling, pervasive tracking and data sharing, dark advertising patterns, drug marketing, etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton%27s_fence
Those are outweighed by the things that don't exist because due to advertising, resources are allocated to less valuable things instead.
> Anyone who hates advertising this much should show their commitment by working at an organization that does not advertise. Loathing advertising and at the same time depending on it for income is deeply hypocritical.
The classic non-argument of conservatives defending the status quo. People who don't depend on advertising for their income just get criticized for selfishly demanding the stop of a practice that doesn't benefit them instead.
You're asking him to argue against himself rather than put a strong case forward for a position. And you're framing the fact he doesn't as a mental limitation. You're denying the authors agency by asserting it wasn't even a stylistic choice about presentation; he didn't present what you would have so therefore his brain must be broken.
Advertising isn't free, its costs are just hidden. They wouldn't spend money if it didn't relieve you of yours. People who watch TV do pay for it, it's just that the mechanism by which it happens is a magic trick of persuasion. The only question is do advertisers provide a legitimate service to society that is worth paying for and enough to support what we pay to adertisers. That's the only way advertising can be "free" - if it is self-funded service worth value in and of itself.
IMHO, marketing is a good thing, and advertising can be when it's sufficiently targetted. Getting the word out about a new product is fine. But most traditional advertising that tries to sell an image or feeling is a blight.
You sound like you think this is some sort of impossibility, but that's exactly how cable provided multiple packages back in the analog days....
The reason OTA networks aren't allowed to do that is that the spectrum is considered a public resource and the government made that a term of their lease. There's nothing impossible about that idea.
I'm pretty sure its net effect is positive in the economy. The alternative - banning advertising would slow down the economy and make everyone poorer.
I aggressively block ads - no exceptions.
To be fair to the in-laws, my parents do the same as well. It's mind numbing.
Strangely, my ex-gf, who had zero interest in watching any kinds of movies or TV with me (she said it was all stupid) and just wanted to text her friends while I was visiting liked to watch the local news every morning, ads and all.
I can't tell you the shock when I started watching American TV. I couldn't believe people were putting up with this.
Which is why the networks will never group them, given that their revenue is arising from those advertisements. Making them "easier to skip" also reduces the prices the network can extract from the advertisers (because the advertisers would see "easier to skip" as "less effective").
----
If I had the resources and know-how, I'd start a radio station on this premise. I've noticed that most radio stations feel like they play more commercials than actual music, with the sole exception of one station in Reno (96.1 Bob FM) that does hour-long non-stop music split up by very short (1-2 minutes at most) commercial breaks. I've also noticed that I never feel the need to switch from Bob FM to some other station because I know that the music will come back soon. Unsurprisingly, those commercials are way more impactful than the ones on other stations specifically because I'm actually listening to them instead of skipping them.
I'd like to take that to a greater extreme with 29-minute music blocks separated by single 30-second commercials (with 15-second station identification blurbs on either side of it, or perhaps combining them into a 30-second news update for e.g. traffic and weather). Companies probably wouldn't pay a premium for these ads at first, but I suspect once they see the upticks in customer engagement they'll be more willing to bid higher for those slots.
Of course. They're all owned by ClearChannel these days, so why should they play more music than ads? What are people going to do, switch to another (ClearChannel) radio station? You might also notice the ads are usually playing at the same time if you switch between stations.
Non-NPR radio is basically just like landlines and cable TV these days. The only people who still use/listen to/watch these things are dinosaurs who haven't moved on to streaming radio (or just buying your own music), cellphones, and streaming movies, so these companies are milking these people for all they're worth.
Or people like me who drive cars that predate the widespread availability of AUX jacks (which I've worked around by using one of those cassette adapters, but I know of at least some people who drive cars in that awkward phase where cars had neither.
I don't, at least not comfortably (I probably could swing buying a newer car, but it'd definitely be painful). There are millions of Americans out there for whom that's probably out of the question entirely. And then there's the people who can't afford streaming radio (and/or a device + data plan to actually stream it) or buying music outright, or otherwise don't want to pay for those things, and at the same time don't feel like sailing the high seas for it (if your sails catch my drift).
Remember also, older cars cost a lot: they might not cost much to buy, but they cost a lot to keep running, because of repair costs. If you do your own work and have the time, this might not be a big issue, but for a lot of people it definitely is, and it's why they trade up to a newer car every so often: the repair costs on the old car become greater than the value of the car, so it's cheaper to just sell it and buy something newer that isn't breaking down all the time. On top of that, don't forget the cost of having a breakdown, as this can affect your job.
No, my repair costs + price of my current car ain't anywhere near what it'd cost to buy a newer car, at least not yet (if it gets to that point where it really is cheaper to buy a newer car than to fix my current one, then fine, but so far that hasn't been the case). This kind of assumption also hinges on the idea that newer cars don't break down as often (which may be true statistically, but is nowhere near guaranteed).
At best, one could argue that I'd save a lot in gas due to efficiency gains and/or electric drivetrains. That's probably true in the case of electrics, which is why I'm saving up to that effect, but those are - unfortunately - pretty expensive, especially for my needs (I routinely haul enough stuff to justify at least an SUV, if not an outright truck). In any other case, it'd take a long time to get to break-even.
>This kind of assumption also hinges on the idea that newer cars don't break down as often (which may be true statistically, but is nowhere near guaranteed).
It's absolutely true statistically. It might not be guaranteed because there are lemons out there (as well as Chryslers...), but in general it's absolutely true: machines wear out over time so of course older cars have more things breaking on them. But some are definitely better than others. I know someone with an '01 Toyota Camry with 300,000 miles on it and it's still running great, though it's needed a few minor body things fixed (like a side mirror, probably broken by getting hit by something). I wouldn't expect an '01 Chevy to be that reliable, and certainly not an '01 Chrysler.
>I routinely haul enough stuff to justify at least an SUV, if not an outright truck
My suggestion here if you want to save gas is (assuming whatever you're hauling isn't too heavy, and this is an occasional task and not everyday) to get a car, add a tow hitch, and get a 4x8 utility trailer. I had one of these for a while and it was pretty fantastic for things like hauling appliances or furniture in town.
Of course with streaming services this phenomenon is mostly gone.
A lot of us aren't. I suspect that causes the TV companies to try to squeeze more out of who is left, which is a slow-motion death spiral.
Even if you were raised with it, as I basically was, it's gotten a lot worse. I sometimes buy shows that air on prime time on the legacy networks (ABC, CBS, etc.), and over the last few years I've been watching their run times creep steadily downwards. My current record so far is 19min of runtime for a 30min show with a popular 2019 release that I don't want to name to derail the conversation, plus of course the networks tend to shave off the front & back 30 seconds nowadays. If somebody told me they found a 16 I wouldn't be that shocked. By contrast, looking at MASH season 1 (1972) on Amazon, the runtimes are all 26 minutes. Syndication usually ran some cut versions for a bit more time, but, still. That's over 25% less time for a "half hour" timeslot.
See also: https://xkcd.com/810/.
Then of course less than 10 minutes later (or 4 when I'm in America and that's just horrendous) the same ad gets shown again. That's the bit that is truly mind numbing and turns me off ads, the share the copious repetition of low information drivel.
The Law of Unintended Consequences always gets you in weird ways, and I'm not a lobbyist or a public policy person, nor do I know anyone highly placed in those fields.
But one of the ways companies slowly fail is by choosing to sell harder instead of making their product better. If we lower the rate of return on advertising dollars by 15%, won't that shift some more money into R&D, logistics and other divisions that provide something approximating value (although one unintended consequence I can see is an increased focus on strip-mining the Third World, literally and figuratively).
i can only imagine that consumers love the advertisements, otehrwise, why would they buy the product?
I had a coworker who insisted you could just chose not to participate. My argument to him was the same I’ll make to you: the other side is using psychological warfare. It’s privatization of propaganda tactics. That requires something a bit more vigorous in response than taking your ball and going home.
and as far as pyschological warfare goes. Just don't let it affect you. Only buy things you want or need and don't let yourself be manipulated so easily.
You are either a zen monk or have a huge blind spot. Who else would offer this sort of advice?
Fortunately, there isn't a law of the universe that says we can't get better at implementing effective and fair regulations where appropriate.
The essence of propaganda is to weave a story and engage the target population in an action that creates commitment to the story and creates secondary effect due to social proof as people see other people committing.
This is the essence of modern marketing as well.
Cancer is not really a well thought out way to describe it, it sounds a bit fanatical.
There is nothing conspiracy like about this. This is all well known and researched.
General public is just kept ignorant of it. I don't know why. Maybe it's because the more you know about how propaganda works the less effective it is? Thus teaching people en mass how propaganda works would make even benevolent attempts at mass mind control less effective.
[0] Branding is nothing new. In the viking age particular german swords were very well thought off - and they had particular inscription on the blade. The brand was so strong that blacksmiths around baltic created "pirate" copies of the blades by writing the same inscription - or, as some were illeterate, attempted to copy the markings resulting in almost-but-not quite correct spellings. As their clients were likely illiterate as well I don't think it mattered for business.
Actually propaganda is so effective exactly because it works even when you know that it's propaganda. People remember the message but not the source of the message.
Google/Facebook are big and motivated enough that they could probably figure out how to make money.
I know why (privacy and ethics), but most people won't and don't care.
Google will be fine.
Nowadays neither the ads nor the results have any relation to what you search.
I'm not convinced by this statement, and I'd be genuinely interested to hear your reasoning behind it. Is it specific products? Specific technologies? Although Google has built some interesting stuff, I can't think of anything off the top of my head that they've done that was either a) something that couldn't have been invented without them, or b) only unique due to their ability to scale it out, rather than a true innovation.
And regarding your second point, what would the practical difference be to the consumer if the innovation happened because of their ability to scale out, or "true innovation"?
You don't need to like Google to admit they have added value to the world.
The parent comment was looking to weigh the problems of the ad-supported economy and the ills brought about by that described in the article against the value Google has brought to the world, and I just don't see how the two stack up, so I wanted to understand their weighting of the latter.
Everyone seems keen to write haigiographies of companies that in all honesty I mostly find ... okay I guess? Could do better but they make cool stuff? I don't "hate" Google, but I do think that a company the size of Google doesn't need such zealous defenders, it needs a critical society that pushes it to do better with the crazy resources it has, and one of those things is to examine the ways in which it's basic revenue model is harmful.
And I agree, "incalculable" makes it quite a strong statement, and I probably wouldn't have chosen that word myself.
I think it's important to consider that Google is not the sole inventor, proponent, or user of advertisement. You probably aren't claiming that either, but the way your statement reads("problems of the ad-supported economy and the ills [...] against the value of Google") leads one to believe that you put those two things on equal footing. Google certainly evolved advertising, and is certainly a major player, but they aren't solely responsible. So, to weigh "Googles Good" vs. "Advertisements Ills" is hard to reconcile.
"haigiographies" is a new word for me, cheers!
Are you suggesting that order of magnitude improvements on information accessibility in a planetary scale is nothing?
b) only unique due to their ability to scale it out, rather than a true innovation
Scaling out search engine to the entire globe is THE innovation. You need to realize that any kind of innovation doesn't freely come from a bunch of idea guys, but from execution.
Google search now has a revenue driven development target, not a feature driven one, purely because of its advertising lifeblood. It's a shame.
Things like search engines will be able to survive because they’re necessary. They may look different (e.g. wrapped up in a subscription package with gmail and gdocs). We are used to paying $X per month for an internet connection, it’s absurd to believe people won’t add on $Y per month for the over the top services that make that internet connection useful.
And I'll note that Google, etc, only take a fraction of the money flowing through the ad system. So if we got rid of ads, we could not only afford Google, but a number of other valuable things of Google's size.
And static websites with mostly text are very cheap to host now, and there are lots of people willing to share their knowledge without adverts. That was how it was usually done before the rise of web advertising, and old-fashioned websites still exist. You don't even need search engines to find them; there are volunteer-run directory projects like Curlie (successor to Open Directory Project and DMOZ).
Bloated websites full of video and megabytes of Javascript are probably too expensive to host without adverts, but I think the web would probably be better without them. I'd miss Youtube, but how many Youtube videos are really the best way to present the content and a good use of your time? A non-commercial web is possible.
Still, I'm trying to imagine what the web would be like if every site that currently does the "bad kind of advertising" put up guilt boxes instead. For one thing, Wikipedia would probably disappear, because all the other sites are competing for people's limited altruism.
Wikipedia banner falls more or less in the honest category. It's even slightly better as the population "paying" for the product (through gifts) are already using it, and know its quality and its flaws.
[0]https://regmedia.co.uk/2016/08/26/top_30_linux_contributions...
2nd option... add a useful/not useful flag to every search result, so users can flag blogspam, content farms, etc and help keep the results useful.
The technology to run and maintain a web index is not new. Paid indexes have existed in specialized domains (academia, law, news) for decades.
Wikipedia is a vast, self-indexed resource supported by donations. It's also indexed by Google, and it's availability over the public internet makes them (Google) an enormous amount of money. The labor of creating Wikipedia (the actual labor of organizing human knowledge) was done for free, and the maintenance of Wikipedia is funded by donation.
Every paid ISP prior to Google maintained its own index, which was paid for by user fees.
Expert communities (which often can't depend on commercial indexes) maintain encyclopedic curated sets of links.
The internet - a vast decentralized web of self-published information - is what people want. It drives people to the internet in droves. One strategy for capitalizing on that hunger is to index everything, offer a pretty good index for "free," then sell access to those eyeballs. It is far from the only way to make the internet more accessible.
The only thing I use google for right now is a glorified phone book, because I'm too stupid to remember urls and too lazy/forgetful to bookmark them. So sometimes (sadly), I'll google the twoplustwo forums for poker, or "hacker news" because I forgot news.ycombinator.com. But it's the expert communities that I want, not Google's inscrutible index.
No one has really succeeded in substituting attentional transactions with actual micro-payments, but it's certainly not impossible. There's obviously a demand.
Good riddance; it's been most of a decade since Google provided anything of value to the world. They're ruining HTML with AMP, their sponsorship of YouTube has crippled torrent-based video distribution, their search engine is a sick joke, and ReCaptcha puts large chunks of the web behind a Kafka-shrouded spyware-wall.
They're not too great at the "all" part. Or the "organize" part, anymore.
To those who say there is no other model, you are not correct.
(I know I'm trivializing the question; I'm not in your situation and I don't know the perfect model for your product. But I disagree with just lumping together "paywalls" and "advertising" in the same category of "non-desirable things".)
You hit it right on the nose. I'd rather pay not to have strings attached than get something free with hidden other costs.
It made me think of a future where AR is highly prevalent. What will your life be like? Will you have to pay to not have adverts stuck in your face all the time? To me human attention is valuable and it should be protected. I'm concerned for future generations as technology is going to progress further.
I don't have a full argument formed, but in my opinion we should rethink what should be allowed in regards to advertising in the internet age. Why is advertising required at this point with services like google? Could you just have a regulated service directory that operates similarly to google instead?
To those of you that are reading, I get it, yeah we wouldn't have services today without advertising, but now that we have technology, isn't most advertising antiquated? If I really do need something, I'll look for it and let technology bring the service or product to me.
The OC is a good rant, list of grievances.
Missing from his cancer analogy is the feedback loop.
The cancer is monetization and preferential attachment (recommendation engines) leading to outrage culture.
Any remedy, mitigation would interrupt or add friction to that feedback loop. No more retweets. Require all statements to be sourced. Hinkley's notion (elsewhere) of not allowing ads to be treated as biz expense. And so forth.
None of those things will happen. Until...
Advertising today is like petroleum wildcatting in the early days. The bottom will fall out when everyone wises up to the con. Then investors will demand US Govt intervene with regulation, to save the market.
We could try micropayments, probably in the form of crypropayments, probably unaccounted for tax purposes (which is the main obstacle to their acceptance. They can be accounted for via alternative means, eg. by correlating traffic statistics). Until then ads are the most democratic to monetize small websites in the absence of VC money. Unless you can suggest better ways - i d love to try them.
"Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our great war is a spiritual war. Our great depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars, but we won't."
It's a multi-layered story that resists simplistic interpretations, which is why it is so beloved by so many.
Should be clear that the way the characters go about this is an awful, awful solution.
The reason it is beloved by many is that the simplistic story encourages "deep" interpretations.
"People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.
You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.
Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.
You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs."
– BanksyFor restaurants, I usually search for them in a directory and not in ads...
It was amazing, I loved being able to see all the week's events in a single view. Then Facebook decided to shut down the public events API, and that was the end of the site.
The morals of the story are two: You can be notified of pop up events without being data-mined, and fuck Facebook (I know, it's "their" data, but I hate it anyway).
There's a huge difference between reviews, directories, and advertising. You can seek out information without being pushed advertisements. Another facet: whether payment from the entity being promoted is involved and affects placement.
I generally mute/fast-forward commercials. Those are the best kinds of ads we can hope for because they're easy to skip and they're completely distinct from content. I'd rather fast-forward through an anonymous, non-targeted commercial for diapers than have Netflix manipulate me into watching what's profitable for them with their browse interface, based on my viewing and internet history, and then there's Coca-Cola all over the show itself.
The reality though is that even without ads I'm never lacking for things to spend my money/time on. In fact, without ads my main problem is still more often the finite nature of my time/money than a lack of options.
1% of products have natural virality and will be found on their own. The other 99% of products and services in existence, no matter the quality, needs to be promoted so people can find them and use them.
Say you make an app that helps plumbers do their job well. If every plumber used it, plumber productivity would go up 50%, making life easier for all. It cost you years of your time and lots of money to make this great app, and you need a lot of plumbers to buy it to afford to continue working on it.
There's a big plumber app on the market already, but yours is way better.
How do you get plumbers to hear about your product?
1) The press? Uninterested. Plumber magazines or sites? Very low traffic - no way to scale.
2) Call or knock on doors of every plumber near you? If everyone did this, the spam would be unreal. Also inefficient and not scalable.
3) Referrals? You get some, but most plumbers aren't chomping at the bit to help their competitors. And because you started with so few, referrals are a snails pace and by no means exponential.
4) Organic postings and SEO? The big plumber app is way ahead of you. And 100 other worse apps clog up the listings. No one sees your posts.
See the problem? Without ads, you can't grow many many categories of genuinely valuable products. Even if no one else is advertising, you can't really grow without them.
This is barely a hypothetical by the way. I've worked with a dozen companies with similar situations.
Here's a real life example:
I was just hired to scale marketing for a particular app. This app currently has over 100 real reviews online, averaging 4.9 stars out of 5. Retention is nuts - 98% of people who ever started using the product (which has a monthly fee) are still using it. The company is three years old.
Perfect to take off, right? But few industries are actually viral. We just doubled the number of new customers per month using FB ads in the first two months of scaling it out, and we'll scale much further over the next 3.
Anyone who works in start-up growth will tell you the same things I am.
Did know that 97% of statistics are made up on the spot?
The problem with your fictions here is that they're based in a world with a lot of advertising. In your fantasy, people just sit around dying of thirst because there's nobody to advertise water at them. But in reality, people would still find ways to get what they need.
I find great new products all the time despite living an ad-free life. I find them through friends. Through internet discussion like Hacker News. And through sites like Wirecutter and Consumer Reports. I don't find my life particularly lacking.
Would ending ads mean it would be harder for businesses to manipulate their growth numbers? Sure. So I can get why you feel panicked at the thought. But you're used to a world where everybody's burning investor money to get attention, so it's required to do the same. Maybe think about the world where nobody can do that. I promise you, it'll keep on turning.
What would definitely suffer is products that exist only to fulfill a manufactured demand, but that would be a good thing.
Likewise, all the advertising in the world didn’t seem to save a particular obnoxiously-promoted product that one is meant to “apply DIRECTLY to the FOREHEAD!”
As I told you, I find good products all the time without looking at advertising. The problem you imagine might conceivable have been a big issue before the rise of the internet. But now anybody who feels a lack can quickly search. E.g., right now I'm traveling; before I left I looked at Wirecutter's travel products guide: https://thewirecutter.com/reviews/travel-guide/
It was great. I found and tried out a few new products. I'll buy more of some of them, and have already recommended a couple to friends.
The reason you keep failing to understand a pretty simple point is that you are identifying with a particular business, rather than consumers. But think of it the other way: Why should I as a consumer care if a given business can't manipulate me into buying their product?
Answer: I don't. I trust that I'll find sufficient good products when I need them. Indeed, without paid audience manipulation, I expect I'll find better products on average.
Now, how does the prisoners dilemma get solved? External enforcement. In advertising that might entail laws and regulations to curtail advertising. These laws and regulations may be net positive to the erstwhile advertisers themselves in this scenario. (The equivalent mechanism in the actual prisoners dilemma is that snitches get stitches.)
And it's not like I object to companies publishing on their own channels. They can have a website, a Twitter account, a Facebook account. If people volunteer to read that, great. If we just eliminate paid manipulation, it'll be a huge step forward and we'll free up enormous sums of money.
Some who works in adverting values advertising? Yes, you’re well placed to judge, but I’ve little time for adverts and actually dedicate time to avoiding Facebook (blockers, Pihole etc).
If I miss the odd product or service, so be it. The current situation is toxic.
Something that could possibly replace the function of advertising would be an independent organization that would provide tools for picking the best product given your situation. And information channels for new high-quality products (i.e. there's a new restaurant in your neighbourhood).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YhrnMbhMgmw
It makes a really important point, though: where do you draw the line at what is considered "advertising"? It's a pervasive part of humanity.
> Real world advertising is not about informing, it's about convincing.
That's life, though, isn't it? Me convincing my employer I'm the best person for the job. Convincing my wife I'm the best choice for a husband. Ultimately, everything becomes a sort of "advertisement". It's a very slippery slope.
It's even more interesting that this article even says:
> When I say "advertising", I use this term somewhat loosely...
Which is a problem when you want to make bold claims like "Advertising as cancer".
To do that I presume you would actually have to believe that you are the best person for the job. Otherwise you would fill emotional distress, as normal people do when they lie. Professional marketers on the other hand don't have to believe in what they sell.
I don't think it's really as black-and-white as your suggesting, though. In the "employee/employer" context: there are plenty of employees who do think they are the best person for a job. In most cases that's probably just not true, given the size of a candidate pool. Are they lying to themselves?
> Edward Louis Bernays ... was an Austrian-American pioneer in the field of public relations and propaganda, referred to in his obituary as "the father of public relations".
> Of his many books, Crystallizing Public Opinion (1923) and Propaganda (1928) gained special attention as early efforts to define and theorize the field of public relations. Citing works of writers such as Gustave Le Bon, Wilfred Trotter, Walter Lippmann, and his own double uncle Sigmund Freud, he described the masses as irrational and subject to herd instinct—and outlined how skilled practitioners could use crowd psychology and psychoanalysis to control them in desirable ways.
So here's a radical suggestion. Legislation that says: any web site or app that shows ads should offer an option to view the site without ads, by paying for access, and that is priced reasonably (approximately equal revenue as ads) and with options for "a la carte" vs. bundling. Any provider of ads (adSense, etc) has to provide this service as well.
It's complex legislation, I'm sure, and tricky to get right. But it's better than tilting at windmills, as this article leaves me feeling it is doing.
My YouTube subscription feed is full of stuff that is some form of advertising - music instrument retailers demonstrating new products, advertorial content from tool manufacturers, tutorials from software companies and so on. It's all paid for out of the marketing budget, it's all intended to sell more product, but it's also a useful service to me as a consumer.
Back in the day, I bought computer and music magazines in large part because of the advertising. It's how I kept up to date with the industry, it's how I learned about new products that weren't necessarily available in my town and it's how I found out the market price for products.
How do consumers find out about new products without some form of advertising? How do manufacturers find a market without some form of advertising?
But, then again, somethings really are as virulent and aggressive as cancer, and I'm ok with them being compared to it. I'm fine with the (needed, imo) reaction.
In other words, it's obviously figurative, but not necessarily (meant as) hyperbole.
$5/mo probably isn't enough for Google.
But, he is already deeply frustrated by the intrusiveness of online ads. He is old enough and informed enough to be aware that he's being manipulated, but not old enough yet to consistently spot the manipulation that online advertisers use on his own.
A little advertising is a good thing. Inundation is not a good thing, and we are far past the inundation stage.
* I don't like something. * Why do people do it? It is not even effective. * It should be outlawed.
If you and a bunch of other people like you think advertising is a waste of money, what is preventing you from starting your own company that does not use advertising? I promise you the government will not come and force you to buy commercial time or Facebook ads.
The argument can be made that maybe I didn’t need these things in the first place. But I want them, it makes me happy, and these ads have saved me time.
The fact that people attempt to ignore most ads, with varying degrees of success, tells you that they're net-harmful.
But advertising in general is how people find out about things they might need or want. There might be a bakery 2 miles away you'll really enjoy. How will you find out about it if they don't advertise? Being strictly reliant on word-of-mouth is woefully naive (IMHO).
Take Google search, the user is literally looking for something. Why isn't an ad an appropriate response to someone searching for a search for "ozark jetski for hire"? As long as ads and organic search results are clearly differentiated, IMHO this is totally fine.
Certain behaviours obviously need to be restricted, like I'm a big fan of outright outlawing advertising to children. But advertising in general? In what world is that reasonable?
That's in the article. He's arguing the exact point that advertising has a legitimate function in a market to inform about products. They've outgrown that, he continues, and now they do not inform, they convince (and often lie to do so).
I don't do much advertising at all for Tomotcha as our churn is low and I am quite content with the number of subscribers right now. But from time to time we send a tea to an "influencer" or run an adword campaign. It helps.
[1] When I mention my tea subscription service (https://tomotcha.com) right here on HN, does it count as advertisement? It should, because it is, thankfully HN as a community of entrepreneurs is rather forgiving about self-promotion. Other communities (some subreddits) can be very hostile towards it...
I just skimmed your site. It looks like it’s all greens. Is that correct?
But taking just non-roasted green teas, there is a lot of variations. Depending on the way green tea is prepared, it will taste very different. Difference can come from the steaming (asamushi -> futsumushi -> fukamushi, from light and quick to deep and long), from the shading, or lack of shading (sencha -> kabusecha -> gyokuro from no shading to a lot of shading). Then there are teas prepared with different part of the tea plant: my favorite tea is actually called karigane, and is made of twigs instead of tea-leaves.
The teas are definitely all quite different, there are many to try.
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I don't mind informative advertising: "hey, we are making this thing which can help with this" is ok. But that's a rare breed of ads nowadays. One of the eye-openers for me was when I noticed in my early student (and shaving :)) days how all Nivea shaving products were branded as being for sensitive skin (does your skin turn red if you pull razor over it?): I've simply stopped buying their products. They've scaled back on that, but I didn't "forgive" them their attempt to manipulate me.
As a cancer survivor myself, I don't mind the analogy and term, it just seems to not be explicit enough about what the trouble is with ads today: you have to work backwards to establish parallels from "cancer" to "advertising".
I utterly fail to see how it could be the case that website scraping arguably violates the CFAA (though I have my doubts there), but this kind of malware deliberately designed to violate the expressed intent of people to remove data from their own machines, for the purpose of accessing identity information, doesn't.
Interestingly, if you try to download the zip file of the evercookie repo from github, Chrome detects it as malware and blocks it. That makes me rather more confident in the security model of Chrome.
Why assume a lack of will at this point? We know they routinely approach companies about collecting the data the company collects. They've clearly demonstrated the will to collect our data regardless of legality. (Does/did this site have a warrant canary?)
At this point I treat all ads as hostile. As much as websites try to make you feel guilty for blocking their ads I feel zero obligation to allow or support their efforts to manipulate me or compromise my privacy and security.
What's happening is that the barrier of entry - better yet let's use the industry terms: the cost reach of advertising campaigns is low thanks to the internet that drove the cost of distribution of information close to 0.
So you're just seeing what was once a privileged tool open to the masses - and it's bad. Anyone can have access to it with a credit card.
Now just because there's a lot of bad advertising, probably the great majority of it, doesn't mean it's a cancer. Else everything that's abused in a bad way is a cancer.
Is all that money paid for airtime an indirect subsidy or transfer of wealth to those who own media companies?
If the quantity of advertisement can be curbed in such a way that corporates are more conscious of how much space they have on television with advertisements (time limiting law), as well as what message they can convey, this starts discouraging and treating in-your-face advertisement less of a prioritiezed form of pitching a product.
The noise to signal ratio of the modern Internet is such that I, as a technical person, someone that finds it preferable to read instead of listen or watch; I still find myself on Youtube 99% of the time. Almost all of my web browsing is now Youtube. AND I HATE IT.
"Please support our project by enabling advertising on this domain [OK] [Later] [Never]" "For Youtube Movies please install DRM/x264 package from the market [OK] [Later] [Never]" "You will need to enable storage, code, and gaming modules to use Itch [OK] [Later] [Never]"
Because browser extensions suck. Browsers suck. Mobile browsers suck. The experience of the Web sucks, for anyone that knows better. Shopping, gaming, streaming, syndication and publishing all suck big time.
Basically, I imagined a website where you pick the type of service or good that you're interested in, fill out some sort of questionnaire and then get a list of recommendations which are optimal for your situation.
You are not forced to read pamphlets nor do they insert the content of the pamphlets into your newspapers and letters. Typically the only thing you are forced to do by someone distributing pamphlets is to tell them whether you'd like to take one. If advertisements had to ask whether you wanted to see them, the entire industry would collapse.
Pamphlets are also not magically distributed to everyone. People have to decide to help distribute them, which means other people have to cooperate with you to help you spread your message. It is also easier for others to interfere in your efforts, as, unlike online, people can see who and where the information is coming from, and they can also more easily and directly inhibit distribution. On the other hand, any individual can buy a Facebook ad and, with enough money, shove it in millions of people's faces with little to no oversight. Hence, it is easier to spread misinformation (like anti-vaccine propaganda) through Facebook than in real life.
Online ads - and most ads tbh - don't force you to do that either. They want to attract your attention but you re free to ignore them. I used pamphlets as the equivalent of advertising in older times, i m sure people would consider them just as pushy/spammy back then as we consider online ads now. They are not peer-to-peer by definition - there is no point preaching to the choir.
Pamphlet distribution is peer-to-peer. People have to distribute them to other people. However, Advertising is usually lopsided: typically a group of people working together, like a magazine corporation, or a machine, like with Facebook, is distributing content to people. And again, receiving ads from these places is not voluntary. You cannot engage with the activity but refuse receiving advertisements, unlike my experience of walking around on university campuses and refusing pamphlets I am offered.
As an example, google "cbd oil vs cbd isolate" or "why is cbd isolate in powder form...", in order to understand the difference and the relation betweens the 2 components (knowing Canabidiol should already be an oil, as its name suggest) and why cbd isolate is under the form of powder and not liquid as CBD oil.
Everything that come in the first results pages are fake blog posts from commercial sites or commercial offers. We quickly understand one contains the other after reading the first 3 pages from the result. But we never find an article explaining the actual chimical nature of cbd isolate (or pure form of cbd) or even an actual scientific study about cbd.
It's only the same and repeated argument, "article" after "article" about one pure form contained in another... and that for the first several result pages from a meta-search engine like searx (searx.be in this example with setting settle to include in general results Bing, Google, Yahoo, Yandex, DuckDuckGo and StartPage).
The good information has been covered under a thick layer of low density infomertial bullshit.
It's like trying to watch a movie in the middle of car traffic : You can't hear anything from the movie original soundtrack.
It take to further research, like "why is cannabidiol a powder", to have access in the first result page to actual independant articles for cbd, but under the form of its less "commercial" name, "cannabidiol"... to learn that lot of claims about cbd are not founded on actual scientific researches.
In short, the word CBD have been hijacked by commercial entities for profit and lost the biggest chunk of its actual meaning.
Information is lost in the process.
And I still don't know why cbd isolate is in powder form.
> This is why my kid isn't going to watch YouTube. If and when we decide to show her any children's show, it'll be from a manually curated set of videos downloaded and streamed from a NAS.
Until what age? I doubt this resolve will last until 18, particularly when they become old enough to know what their friends are watching. The vast majority of video content isn't legally downloadable, and even illegal downloading is a bit difficult because children's shows aren't as widely shared as content aimed at adults. (Even really popular shows like Paw Patrol have surprisingly limited availability.)
If you want to limit ad exposure, using subscription services like Netflix is more practical, as does purchasing shows on a per show basis on YouTube (which granted gets very expensive). Public broadcasting is also typically ad free; in the UK we have iplayer which has ad-free children's programming available for streaming.
I have no idea what brand my clothes/shoes are, if any. None of the food I buy has any branding whatsoever. ever seen a branded cucumber? nope, neither have I. I only buy new eletronics when the old one breaks, and I almost always get the cheapest one. Other than that, almost all of the rest of my spending goes to housing and savings/assets.
If everyone was like me, the advertising industry might not exist, or at least be much smaller.
Around 2009 I saw it as "unprofitable venture backed companies advertising on unprofitable venture backed platforms" as if it's some kind of matryoshka doll system that works as a baton passing from one generation of bad investments to the next - no revenue is trading hands, just poorly placed investor money:
A kafkaesque anarchy of people siloed at companies named after adjectives spelled without vowels passing pixels for sale among each other hoping that some unicorn will fall out of their back pocket.
A few reasons that we don’t see this:
1. It seems a slightly weird thing to tax. On the other hand, sugar taxes are becoming a thing in some places.
2. Elected governments may not want to piss off the media companies who they feel elected them.
3. Maybe people don’t care about advertising and so would feel like such a tax was for some hidden purpose. São Paulo (iirc) banned almost all public advertising. I wonder how the people there feel about it.
My behance feed is full of artists doing amazing things, being supporded by ad company budgets. GMUNK actually has a great talk on this, I think it's 'pearl 5' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F93CP8UjRxk
There would have to be a fundamental shift in our economic system, not just 'advertising', for artists to be able to have a support system outside of corporate sponsorship and gigs.
We all need advertising in order to enjoy the free services we all use. Cancer is something that nobody should have to live with. Advertising is something we can all live with if done ethically and responsibly.
So, some kinds of cancers are OK. It's hard to take this sort of article too seriously when it undermines it's own point so effectively.
The fact that advertising doesn't have to be a cancer is compatible with the claim that it is one at this point in history.
Some kinds of mold aren't harmful. That doesn't mean mold isn't a bad thing.
One possibility would be setting up some sort of cloud/container solution that isn't really trying to TOR is up, but does manage to obscure and filter traffic enough to harden us mortal targets.
Up from there, perhaps there is some tarted up proxy as a business model that supports doing social media and searching in a low-fingerprint way.
These ideas must have been explored already, so tell me who has some good products, HN.
"In rhetoric, loaded language (also known as loaded terms or emotive language) is wording that attempts to influence an audience by using appeal to emotion or stereotypes."
Provocative analogies can use loaded language, for example when they appeal to emotions. Riddling your text with things like how advertising "infects", "destroys", "corrupts", is "industrial scale abuse" and so on, is loaded language that's not conducive to debate.
Regardless, I've debated the actual content elsewhere in this thread, and many times in the past directly with the author over Hacker News. I'm familiar with his position — it's hardly uncommon — and his arguments. They're not uninteresting, but I'm not sure they're helping push things forward much.
However:
> Riddling your text with things like how advertising "infects", "destroys", "corrupts", is "industrial scale abuse" and so on, is loaded language that's not conducive to debate.
I used those terms not because of their emotional implications, but because I believe they are accurate in terms of actual mechanics. When some aspect of our daily lives, which used to work perfectly well without ads, start to accumulate them until the point they no longer can exist without them, I feel the terms "infection" and "corruption" are apt.
Obviously, it wouldn't be perfect. But we don't need perfection here.
It also seems fairly obvious that there are plenty of alternative ways -- both existing currently and those that could be developed -- for informing people about various products or solutions to problems.
However some advertising is very good. I go to work to make money and I want to spend it ... how do I know what to buy? I like video games, an ad that tells me there's a new game coming out for a console I own is really useful to me! I'm not embarrassed to be a consumer and to be open to influence.
Which isn't to say that a better balance couldn't be struck (in the West and elsewhere) now, but 'cancer' is the sort of thing you want to eradicate rather than moderate.
You realize that advertising isn't what created coloured paints or what allows us to plant flowers right?
I think it can have been a contributory but not a determinative factor. Mainly, I was just relaying an interesting observation, about the impact of advertising on public spaces, that I hadn't heard elsewhere, or previously, which prompted me to think that eradicating advertising probably isn't an optimum solution.
https://www.christchurchnz.com/christchurch/arts-and-culture...
Only thing stopping me is a lot of companies have moved to 2FA via my call phone number as opposed to an authenticator app.
Would this reduce the overall amount of advertising and cause the remaining advertising to be smarter and more effective? Could this even be implemented? Could it be subverted?
Our ads are self-hosted, static images that basically just show pictures of office design products. We also have an area that is literally just a listing of office design products which works kind of like a catalog.
We also sell the ads ourselves and do not participate in ad networks. The only 3rd party scripts we use are a google font and google analytics and the site still works if you block them.
While we are an exception, I'd like to see more people take the approach we do.
I do think the space should be reserved and used for advertising city services such as 311 information, elderly housing services, housing rights etc. It's a great way of educating the city residents about benefits and rights they might not otherwise be aware of.
Jokes aside, advertisement itself maybe not a "cancer on society", but click-based advertisement is definitely ruining the internet and damaging the society. Can't wait until its era is over.
Why should someone with more money get to show off more?
More money doesn't mean a better product.
But what is the alternative?
A nationalized ad network? Like public healthcare, you pay X% of ... IDK ... your sales or something... but the amount of money doesn't determine what you get.
In public healthcare, your medical needs determine what you get, what would be an equivalent in business?
Wikipedia is a non-profit.
"Content" to me is like corporations calling people "human resources". It's a grouping word which removes all that makes elements of the group valuable in the first place.
Occasionally I make an exception and signup for premium services (e.g. Netflix and YouTube Premium).