Hacker News Reader

Comment by Fnoord | Hacker News Reader

> I would have agreed in the past but now that my SO has started an escape room, if your ideal world existed, she would be bankrupt right now.

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.

View on HN

Why is that necessarily so? Maybe some products inherently can't be sustained by word of mouth, and in a world without widespread commercial advertising they wouldn't exist at all.

>Maybe some products inherently can't be sustained by word of mouth, and in a world without widespread commercial advertising they wouldn't exist at all.

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.

Don't be so reductionist. Someone could find this escape room via a search ad, have a blast and tell all of her friends and none of them may never choose to do the same. And an escape room experience isn't something you can easily bring people back for - you need to find new customers every single time.

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.

Maybe there could be a middle ground: keep most of the internet ad-free, but allow users to do explicit "commercial searches" for e.g. vacuum cleaners, or hotels, or fun things to do in their area. Then the escape room would show up there.

You would need to pay for such an ad-free internet in some way, other than being an ad target. This is a critical point of you expect the variety and quality of this ad-free internet to approach what we have now.

The first spam on Usenet was by a company called DEC. DEC was known for its great products (VAX, OpenVMS, Alpha) but for shitty management and marketing.

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.

I’d like to see the outrage if google and Facebook were added to the internet bill of everyone around.

That's only because the current business model is very closed source (proprietary) a danger RMS warned about decades ago. The original GPLv3 was meant to address that, and websites such as Wikipedia and I suppose OpenAI don't work that way.

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 (at least those I listen to) are often asked to provide a paid version of their content without ads. The answer is always the same: ads bring way more money in that a subscription would.

There are examples where subscriptions work perfectly well. Is the model perfect? No.

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.

I've actually thought about that model a lot recently. If Google does this then it's one more step towards their goal of getting somebody what they want. Ads usually only show when you're typing a phrase which correlates with a product. Whenever you type "vacuum cleaners", that's you signalling you're likely searching for a commercial product. If not, ignore the ad.

But let's be honest, search ads are not the problem here, toxic banner ads across the web are.

Yeah, I've been saying for years that someone should make a search engine for the ad-free segment of the internet :-) Then we could use it most of the time, and fall back to Google explicitly when doing queries with commercial intent.

How much per month would you pay for such a service?

Advertisement-bugged content is indeed essentially content for the poor. The rich just buy an iPhone and buy the apps they use on it so they don't see advertisements.

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.

>Someone could find this escape room via a search ad, have a blast and tell all of her friends and none of them may never choose to do the same.

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 that makes it a bad business model?

Maybe it is. But I'd argue having something is better than not having it.

Here's an alternative. All escape rooms need a steady stream of new visitors, so they have a good incentive to cross-promote. Hang a "if you've liked this room, you might enjoy" board by the exit, filled with flyers for other escape rooms in the area, and ask those other escape rooms to put your flyers on their "escape-room-ring" boards.

Funny, such webrings used to exist in Web 1.0 as well. You could even argue this is the point of a franchise. Need a McDonald's (not my cup of tea but a known international subject)? You know what they got, you know the price. There's some culture-specific deviations, too.

> independent bloggers

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).

If a product can't be sustained by word of mouth, it's because it doesn't fill a need that wasn't artificially created by advertising. These products shouldn't exist.

I don't think that's necessarily true. If you and I both enjoy escape rooms, but we aren't friends/don't have a way of contacting each other about it, one of us won't hear about something that would bring us value. Good advertising would take out the roll of the dice that comes with social networks.

Advertising is not information. If i like invite rooms I can search for <myplace> in best escape rooms.com and find what other people are saying on this forum. Has worked before, can work. Hosting prices for those can be low.

It can easily be a matter of timing/bootstrapping. Great idea, great service, not enough word of mouth initially, business burns through cash and fails. Who's better off? Established incumbents, of course. This would create a completely artificial disadvantage for new businesses.

Certain medical products, various hygiene supplies, or other things that cannot be talked about in 'polite society' would fall into the realm of things that are very hard to spread by word of mouth. Additionally, things that are rarely used by a person but are widely used by society, like stump removal services, plumbers, etc.

All of those can do just fine with a general search engine.

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!"

> the guild of stump removers

What?

Also, plenty of useless junk is peddled through "word of mouth" (MLM, anyone?). Fake reviews, paid word of mouth - banning ads won't ban marketing, it will just force marketers to change tactics to ones that aren't clearly better for customers/consumers. Maybe much worse.

Its a cat and mouse game but easy fact checking is the enemy of all the marketing examples you gave, including MLM. If I learn that MLM is a pyramid scheme where the word ethics does not exist, I look up the company name and run away.

You're describing a commodity. So what's an example of a popular product that no longer differentiates on features/quality yet exists solely due to advertising? ... Actually I'm having a hard time thinking of mature products that DON'T meet that description.

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, insurance companies, investment advisors, pretty much all prepared foods, all over-the-counter drugs, shampoo, deodorant, desktop computers

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.

We may assume there are fansites for escape rooms available. Such serve as word of mouth advertising, just like reviews do. There is more focus on facts, and the user voluntarily participates (in contrast to all the billboards, online advertising, useless pages in magazines)

A great many potential escape room customers are not looking specifically for escape rooms, they're looking for something fun to do in the area. So, again, no ability to advertise would be a gigantic advantage to established incumbents in the "something fun to do with friends" category of businesses.

So you start Apple Maps and look for fun to do. You know the data in Apple Maps does not contain spam. Even the local tourist center might have information available. Or you ask around on an escape room subreddit or escape room community forum.

What city doesn't have brochures of fun things to do, community newspapers where new things like this can be announced or meetup groups for people that like activities like this? There are a lot of ways potential customers can actively find you without manipulating random people who weren't looking.

Those brochures are literally ads.

Maybe technically, and mostly because of how they're typically implemented. I'd call providing brochures to people that explicitly request them information not advertising.

> 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.

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.

My SO has claustrophobia. I'm pretty sure she won't enjoy it. I've never done it, but I like the challenge of a puzzle element combined with working together. I don't think such is for everyone. What I've learned from gaming is that a lot of people (most) don't want to be challenged, and M&S (morons & slackers) tend to get away in groups. In general, people just want to be entertained.

> [...]

> 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.

How old are the days you're talking about? Archeologists have found commercial messages going back to ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome. According to some historians, the first printed advertisements go back to the Song dynasty a thousand years ago.

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.

What old days are you talking about, exactly? That's a pretty nebulous term. Before advertising? That's a few thousand years ago, so maybe?

When I grew up football (soccer) matches had virtually no advertising. Driving around, virtually no advertising (you gotta be kidding me regarding safety). Magazines had barely any (pages of ads is my last memory). The internet when I joined had barely any. All the free shit existing thanks to advertising is a race to the bottom. Premium brands can sneakily do such too, all in the name of profit; not the customers interest. And it's worse. Clickbait is a byproduct of it because journalism is no longer about observing, research, hear multiple angles which is all too expensive; it is about page views. Which you can observe here in linked items as well as in YouTube videos. How often do you have the phenomenon where you feel you could have summarized it shorter? Where you feel come on, get to the point. Or where you feel deceived after reading the article? All because of page views.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com