Comment by nikivi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nikivi | Hacker News Reader

I personally never understood the value of ads. I subconsciously turn off my brain and press skip whenever I encounter any kind of ad because I know it was made to influence me into doing an action (and I don't want to waste any mental energy in evaluating whether I am being tricked or not). And most ads are bad:

https://twitter.com/JonErlichman/status/1304793136494006272

So to me the whole thing simply doesn't make sense, who actually did buy something from an ad?

The only signal I value for trying out (buying) new things comes from real people.

The privacy implications of storing so much personal data is the other question and that can be used for some bad things that isn't just serving ads. Would be nice to have a law for mandatary differential privacy for ad based social networks.

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Perhaps I am losing out on ignoring all ads wholesale like that. I even sometimes put products that do 'a lot' of advertising in bad light and try to avoid them all together.

I feel the same. Oddly enough my wife is in marketing and looks at every billboard we pass. She sometimes mentions it and I'm like what billboard because I hardly notice them.

When it comes to online ads, if I get a very annoying ad or a pop up on stores website, I'm out and taking my money elsewhere. I also generally try to seek real world reviews but it is hard. So many youtube videos, bloggers and even comments are just paid advertisement, it sucks.

I remember early days of the internet when the information was decent before the MBAs figured out how much money could be made from it.

I think it’s worth being humble and admit that it is possible for ads to work on you, even if you think not.

Here are some examples:

For mass consumer products. Let’s say a smartphone. If an ad is shown every day you may not click it but now that smart phone might be in the list of brands you’d subconsciously consider.

Other ads are more direct I see a lot of start business ads that are very compelling. I ignore them or watch them out of interest in HOW the ad persuades and I can see why people would click them. They often offer a free thing that seems quite valuable to prove themselves which is a marketing tactic as old as the hills.

There are probably lots of other examples. Ads are powerful and it’s not hard to understand how they work. The human brain is a great ad blocker in general but it’s imperfect enough that the EPM of ads makes it still worthwhile and evidenced by how hard it is to pay less than a $1 a click most places.

So know your enemy! ;)

I'm exactly like you, but I think your comment won't find an echo here where most people "need" ads to promote their businesses.

Many people buy things after seeing ads. I was running an e-commerce where the majority of customers came either from direct ads or indirect advertising like influencer marketing. It's a great way to gain new customers for a product business (although in my view the "lifestyle brand" space is pretty saturated now).

Also, there is nothing wrong in advertising as a concept. Advertising has existed as long as products have existed. The problem is tracking and data collection/exploitation about some very granular aspects of users.

Also, even if you take away advertising, the problem remains of addictive apps and 'persuasive' design which will still remain. To tackle that is a whole different discussion altogether.

Guess I am missing out ignoring and blocking all ads I see. I do think there're better ways to conduct business than basing entire business model on ads.

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