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Comment by graaben | Hacker News Reader

I've worked with System1 in a previous job. One of their main products is ad arbitrage, which as far as I can tell adds zero (or negative) value to the average consumer's browsing experience. This is a company that only cares about extracting as much money as they can by finding new ways of showing you ads.

As a side note - the whole digital advertising industry reminds me a little of the financial engineering on Wall Street of the last decade. Doesn't add any new value to society - and in many ways actually harms it - but makes so much money that companies build their whole strategy around it.

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Former adtech CTO here.

I've heard this argument a lot but it's hard for me to agree.

Saying that ad arbitrage doesn't "add value" is kind of like arguing that someone with a media-buying/sales role doesn't "add value" because they're just sitting in the middle taking a paycheck/commission.

Partnering with ad arbitragers isn't much different than outsourcing internal media buying/sales roles to an agency to increase reach or fill-rate.

Your point about ads being annoying to end-users isn't unique to digital. Advertisements on all mediums have always annoyed end-users. Certain implementations like full-page takeovers & loading 100 ads on a page are the most annoying. Generally it's the publisher's fault for the bad UX.

It's kind of funny how both counter-replies seem to ignore everything after the first word of "value to the average consumer's browsing experience".

There's that old saw about being incapable of understanding when one's salary depends on the misunderstanding, and it applies here. Our profession has helped make advertisements markedly worse (which is to say, better, by data-mining the hell out of individuals and aggregates alike and sharpening the psychological tools of attack to points) and markedly more aggressive, but fuck it, let's go shopping. I guess.

Did you read the last paragraph in my post? I explicitly addressed that. My point is:

1. Ad arbitrage has a role.

2. The blame of annoying/bad UX is unfairly being deferred to arbitragers. It's usually the implementation that annoys users, and that's generally the publisher's fault.

I don't know anything about System1's ethics and I'm not trying defend them by any means, but I don't agree with an argument that X company is bad because they've participated in arbitrage.

I think it is entirely fair to blame arbitragers. They are the only ones who can control the advertisement implementation (as website owners no longer have direct relationships with ad providers), and they clearly fail to do so.

The biggest issue that I have with companies like System1 is that a huge portion of their business model is tricking technically un-savvy people into clicking on ads they otherwise would not want to click on. How is that adding any value to society, other than a check in the pocket of the middle man?

The money comes from advertisers eventually, who are funded by sales, so the question becomes -- are those sale making the purchaser happy more than making nonpurchasers unhappy?

> Advertisements on all mediums have always annoyed end-users.

This is untrue. Historically speaking, print advertisements in many markets (even when restricted to English-speaking ones) could and did serve multiple purposes, including the relation of interesting topics and stories--ones that certainly were brought-to-you-by or even featured products in them, but worked in concert with the material of the publlication to entertain and inform the reader.

It wasn't until the 1960s, approximately, that print advertisements turned into the screaming look-at-me garbage that they have continued to amplify in volume to this day.

Advertising does not have to be a pustule on society, but we have chosen to allow such.

Advertising has been problematic for quite some time.

A favourite telling of this is Hamilton Holt's 1909 lecture at UC Berkeley, published in book form.

It's a quick and informative read.

https://archive.org/details/commercialismjou00holt/page/10

> Your point about ads being annoying to end-users

Is the entire point. Yes, advertising might add value to other parties. It's almost certainly net negative overall.

You are paid to be part of the problem, why would you understand it or even try? Its clear you dont want to.

It's hyperbolic to proclaim ad tech doesn't add value, given that Facebook and Google manage to serve billions of happy customers with services subsidised by ad tech.

That in no way implies I approve or like what they do - I run ad block wherever possible. Just refuse to believe in falsehoods trendy among rich, Urban tech savvy HN-ers, whose reality is far removed from the truth. Some estimates peg the value of "free" internet services, like Google search, Gmail, Facebook, etc at $30/month. That's a lot of value, if you ask me

He was saying ad arbitrage adds no value. As far as I can tell, this means the same ads are sold, and the free services receive the same amount of money, but companies have to pay more for ads and System1 takes a cut.

Why do you say it doesn't add value? I assume the targeting actually works and improves ad performance for advertisers?

I see you omitted "to society" on purpose on your question (after the word "value")

Many things exist that don't add value to "society", I'm going to stick to worrying about the value given to the people actually doing the purchasing thank you.

But if it improves ad performance for the people advertising then it does provide value for society. If nobody knows about your product then nobody's going to use it, which would make your product worthless to society regardless how good it is. Just think about launching a product, but you aren't allowed to advertise it in any way. You can't even expect word of mouth, because somebody would have to actually have known it exists.

You're assuming that marginally-advertised things are worth the attention budget of anyone downrange of it.

In the modern era and with the corpus of data available to them, advertisers are psychological attackers and should be treated as such.

Ads are worth it to some people, because products do have customers and some of those customers had to learn about the product from the maker in some way. They're not worth it for everyone that sees them, but that's exactly what these types of ad middle men are trying to improve - to be able to show relevant ads to relevant people. I say trying, because they've pretty much only failed at it.

The company you work at creates a product. How would people find out about it without any advertising? Keep in mind that even just having a sign in front of a store is advertising.

We are not talking about general "advertising" concept -- we are talking specifically about System1, which is ad arbitrage and "unlocks consumer intent across channels including social, native, email, search"

There is nothing wrong with non-tracking advertizing -- looking solely at the content of the page ad is embedded it, or at the search term for the search engine is enough to let people know about new products, and has no negative social implications.

Hmm, I'm with the GP. I've lived through the transition from mostly restrained and controlled (and often very naive) UK advertising in the sixties and seventies, through to today when advertising ate everything. Available in-yer-face on every surface, tracking every move and psychologically trying to manipulate. We can trust nothing whatsoever. I didn't much mind how it was, I detest how it is now.

Probably a very minority view on HN, but I'd like to outlaw and treat as hostile all forms of advertising, except:

+ Yellow Pages style classified magazines and sites - Like old-school Yellow Pages, or the classifieds in the back of old magazines. When I want a new product, I can open the site or book and look for one. Easy.

+ Flat, silent and static magazine and newspaper style ads, locally served.

+ Branding on the packaging.

+ Shop signage akin to say the sixties or earlier - sign on frontage only. Illumination only whilst store open, and it's after lighting up time. No 20m KFC neon topped poles outside. No floodlights 24/7.

Nowt else. I'm fucking sick of the advertising arms race.

Hear, hear. Advertising can serve a function to society if and only if it is opt-in, honest, non-obtrusive and informative. That these characteristics happen to be the opposite of what the industry produces nowadays can not be a coincidence.

Those around here old enough to remember Computer Shopper [1] and other similar phone-book sized ad catalogues might agree that those were an example of a form of advertising which met at least three of the four mentioned criteria, some even might have met the fourth (being honesty). The model seemed to work back in those days given the 30-year lifespan of the magazine, the advent of the 'net followed by the decline of paper magazines eventually did it in.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Shopper_(US_magazine)

The UK has a regulatory requirement for advertising honesty. Magazines and TV would refuse ads they judged made too outrageous claims. Not perfect, but until those regs became mostly powerless in the face of web ads, it worked pretty much OK.

Computer Shopper - the UK version lasted about as long, Autotrader and Exchange and Mart are exactly the sort of thing I had in mind. Advertising as a positive, and nicely self-contained - you bought Autotrader when you needed a new car or van. Sure beats retargeting chasing you with the same ad for days because you briefly read a page on some silly product.

Yes. I've seen billboards as a hazard for years. And now we have digital billboards. Brightly lit, designed to catch the eye, rotating through an array of ads, right in the face of dozens of drivers travelling at 70+ mph.

Somehow--somehow--companies survived and even thrived off of static advertisements that generally targeted recipients by dint of the estimated (not exact) audience of a given publication and by signage controlled by community policy and with pretty strict requirements around night-time lighting and sound-and-nuisance in general. Somehow, those companies found buyers for their stuff. I know it's shocking, but they did.

It was better then.

This "oh but what about a sign?!" is some /r/iamverysmart strawman junk and I would hope that you would be better than that.

By this line of reasoning, you would be in favor of me sending a drone to follow you around all day telling ads in your ear?

How can you jump to such conclusions? There's a middle ground between "no ads ever" and "intrusive ads 24/7". Better targeting actually is an improvement for the receiving party too, but our solutions for better targeting are just really bad.

Who said anything about "no ads ever"? The choice is between "fixed ads, like paper magazines and physical posters" and "tracking ads which follow you across the web, no matter where you go".

It’s our right to live knowing your product DOES NOT exist.

It'd add value to my bank account if I stole your car.

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