Why I Work on Ads
jefftk.com
jefftk.com
For example, Slack is a growth focused company that uses a subscription model for revenue and has no incentive to maximize time spent in their App.
You are correct that advertising, microtransactions and gambling lead to very similar business model incentives.
For example: “we’re rolling out a new tool. It takes only fifteen minutes to learn!” when 100,000 people have to learn it.
Developers working in advertising aren’t just exhibiting this disorder; they are consumed by it.
Time is the most valuable commodity anyone possesses. Stealing it is diabolical.
I don't like these things at all, but they're something. With an ad, you're solely siphoning off a portion of my infinitesimally fleeting existence. It's like getting stuck in traffic, except deliberate and with malice aforethought.
For that and several other reasons, I strongly prefer independent solo journalists (or very small independent self-operating teams) rather than ones that work for publications. I think Substack and Patreon are far better solutions here than advertising is, for example.
There's the aesthetic cost. If I see an ad on or near a nicely designed or produced website or video, it immediately detracts from the visual appeal.
There's the annoyance cost. I'm personally immediately irritated and annoyed when I see or hear an ad. It affects my mood and my impression of whatever I'm trying to look at or listen to. (I despise it when I'm away from my computer and have a podcast on which ends and instantly transitions to some loud peppy ad for a fast food restaurant and I have to interrupt whatever I'm doing to walk over and shut the thing off.)
For some, there's the cost of paying for a product or service that an ad misled them about. They may pay more than they should have or get something which is portrayed a certain way in an ad which doesn't hold up in reality.
There's the psychological and sociological cost. Ads (especially in video or audio form) present a certain clinical and biased world frame. People usually talk and act in unnatural or "perfect" ways. A young person exposed to, say, hundreds of ads per week and thousands of ads per year may eventually start to subconsciously find that frame normal and expected. Even though they know they're ads rather than non-fiction, I think those things can potentially seep in in some cases.
There are the conflicts of interest and the effects caused by suspicion of conflicts of interest. If I see a "sponsored search result" or "sponsored article", I expect that the source will be less likely to show things which might propose a competing narrative or say anything negative about the sponsor. "Okay, I can't trust this source for anything related to [X], now."
As a corollary to the annoyance cost, there's the fakeness/sincerity dissonance cost. If I'm reading an article or listening to a podcast that's presented as, or may very well be, sincere and truthful, it's a little bit jarring for it to be interrupted with some fake, artificial, marketer-crafted bullshit with superlatives about how [X] will change your life and is the best thing ever. A little hard to take the rest seriously at that point.
I feel like I could list at least ten more. From a purely subjective and personal perspective, I don't even mind the egregious privacy implications as much as all these other things. I just fucking hate seeing and hearing ads.
This is a big one. Something being free with advertisements doesn't mean that we're not paying for it, just that the way we're paying for it is hidden. Companies don't pay Google money for altruistic reasons, they're paying because they can earn more.
If you think about it, we're actually likely to pay more when we pay through ads. Google wants X dollars. In a subscription model, we pay X. In an ad model, a company gives Google X, because they think they can make X + P (profits). So they get us to buy a product we don't need, and in order to recoup their loss we need to be paying the manufacturing cost M (we'll pretend other costs like transportation and retail markups are included in here as well), plus X, plus P. Otherwise the advertising isn't worth it. Instead of us paying X to Google to us their products, now we're paying X+P+M for their products in a very roundabout way, and then calling it free.
Banner blindness. It's been proven that people have become used to ignoring banner ads. Their eyes jump over them as soon as they're recognized. Since there may be false positives, this habit has implications for user interface design: an actual user interface element that looks like a banner ad will be ignored by most people. On the other hand, sites have also begun to style their ads exactly like their main content in order to make it harder for users to distinguish them.
A product you pay for with your attention has a voracious appetite for your attention. The more you use it, the more valuable it is to the company that made it. It would be best if you were using it All The Time. It would be best if it was incredibly addictive so you would never get tired of it and move on to something else. It would be best if the maker of this product could measure how much of your time they were capturing so they could make sure to capture even more in the future.
And in fact, if you look at time use studies, we pretty much spend all of our waking lives using a phone, tv or computer. There is literally no time left, so an advertising company is trying to invent a self driving car so you can keep using your phone during your commute, the last sliver of waking life left unconquered. Our dreams will surely be next.
The sweet spot is likely a little different for everyone, and is whatever amount of attention keeps them subscribed, but no more.
Additionally, I have a customer-vendor relationship with Netflix. With a random ad-supported website or something like Facebook, I'm the product, not the customer. I would much much much rather be a customer than a product.
Does Netflix license content on a per play basis? All the info over the years I’ve read, although not official, indicate they were paying the content owners a flat amount for a certain time period.
For example
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/04/business/media/netflix-fr...
I used to believe that. Nope, they want all your attention all the time. If they lose it, another streaming service might gain some market share, and the stock price will lose billions.
All else being equal, given a choice between a change that makes people watch more minutes per month or less, Netflix will always choose more.
So while Netflix wants all your TV time, they derive no extra benefits if all your time us TV time. This is absolutely not true of advertising supported services that make more from you the more time you spend.
"Most" means "not all".
As much as we like to imagine our minds to be impenetrable bastions of rationality, they are not. We can easily be enticed and manipulated to do things we wouldn't otherwise do, to see things differently than we otherwise would, to consider things we wouldn't consider, and all of that is exactly what the advertisers are paying for.
And maybe abolishing democracy
Political manipulation ads, helping an authoritarian rise to power.
But ads for buying what I just searched for: "buy new running shoes", aren't like that -- they can be helpful instead :-). It's mainly social network ads like on Facebook that are dangerous for society?
From the article:
> I think advertising is positive
It's both? Ads are different from ads, just like different things one can eat are different, like potatoes (running shoe ads) versus poisonous mushrooms (nation states abolishing democracy in the US via political manipulation on Facebook)
I’m pretty sure there are better criteria for those results than the amount of money paid to end up in that list.
But alas, that’s not what modern search engines use, because they are advertisers first and foremost. Not reputable search providers anymore.
I looked at my competitors and saw that most of them were obviously shilling for the company that was paying them the most, which was never the best. I figured by being the most honest I could be the most trusted and win out.
The trouble is, the best companies would rely upon word of mouth. Promoting them wouldn't get me paid a dime. Honesty would benefit them, but not me.
Getting traffic, meanwhile, I realized would cost me money.
That's when I realized that the only way to get a non negative margin in that industry was to sacrifice your objectivity (which is what everyone did).
Theoretically you could charge users for this I guess, like Which? magazine does but I couldn't see a straightforward route to that point that wouldn't involve burning a lot of capital I didn't have. The chicken/egg problem rose its ugly head again.
I gave up soon after.
Besides, how could he prove his honesty either way?
I guess he could arrange commission with all companies, hope that his favourite brand isn't also the one paying the most, and then disclose all the commissions.
I think so too
> hope that his favourite brand isn't also the one paying the most, and then disclose all the commissions.
I'm thinking that if the site visitors have a way to see that usually the site promotes other brands than the highest paying, then that'd be good enough. At the same time, why would they trust the disclosure info :-)
Another thought: if his/her favorite brand didn't pay enough, s/he could just disclose the commissions, but not write any review. (To encourage that brand to pay more)
The competing sites would tend to either pretend that these companies don't exist, or if that wasn't possible coz the brand was strong would subtly try to indicate that they weren't all that hot compared to [site that pays a LOT for new customers].
I don't mean to suggest that the challenge was insurmountable, but I couldn't figure out a way to make honesty pay, particularly given the high cost of acquiring traffic.
Moreover, if you acquired some sort of trust (which many parties did) or a high spot in google through an aged domain or something, the incentive to exploit it for profit would inevitably take over.
It was clearly something users cared about coz they complained about it, but there was something akin to a tragedy of the commons going on.
These market dynamics are fairly common across many industries. I don't think the one I chose was particularly special.
Consulting or something might have been possible but at that point it's basically giving up and joining an entirely different industry - which is what I ultimately did.
I really really tried to make honesty pay but I couldn't.
Those sneaker ads probably aren't destroying our democracy[1], they're just costing the society things that are hard to quantify. They induce me to buy what's most profitable to the sellers, not what's best for me. They take away business from actually helpful resources, and from those who don't advertise on Google.
[1] They are enabling the existence of a search monopoly (along with other factors), so you know, "probably" is the strongest word I'd go with here.
The whole system incentivises ads that match the intent of the user, any deviation from this is extremely difficult and not profitable for the advertiser in most cases.
But if the user buys from the ad, that doesn't say anything about whether the ad was useful (or counter-productive) to the user, it only means that this transaction was profitable to Google and the advertiser.
Ads not matching the search query are not the issue. They are neither profitable nor helpful, so you can't use that criterion to distinguish the two goals.
I don't think advertising does work well on everybody nor does it have to. Maybe not even half of us need to be susceptible for it to be as profitable as it is.
I have noticed some people are much more susceptible to suggestion than others. These people are probably responsible for a disproportionate amount of commercial profits and probably more likely to be taken in by paid political campaigning.
Furthermore, I reckon if we could hold a mirror up to many of these people they might reconsider their behavior (it probably would work better than shouting at them at thanksgiving or over Facebook).
Thus, there is a monetary cost if the advertiser succeeds. Google is just a middleman, taking a cut of those prospective sales.
The sad part of online ads is that the internet allows an advertiser, with Google's help, to potentially annoy hundreds of millions of people in order to make some small number of sales. The "solution" to this inefficiency is "targeting" and "stickiness", and that is where the whole business becomes far too intrusive and counterproductive.
In the earlier days of the internet people knew ads were not what they wanted to see on the network. I remember the first ad someone posted to Usenet. IIRC it was an immigration lawyer. Brin and Page originally said when they announced Google in 1998 that they wanted to offer an alternative to a black box web search engine that is funded by advertising.
The only thing that has changed since then is that new users are less critical, they have no idea what the internet is like without the advertising. Imagine if every household had to participate in an AC Nielson study just to watch TV. There are generations of users now that have no idea what those times were like, when people expected privacy and there were boundaries. They cannot fully appreciate what has been lost because they never experienced it to begin with. It is not too late to reclaim what is being stolen.
This sentence suddenly made me see all online ads as essentially modern, “intelligent” robocalls at scale.
That is, you are incentivized to significantly reduce the pleasure obtained from your product, as the attention demanded by ads competes with the attention of your readers/viewers.
But if you are selling a good for money, while you are also incentivized to keep raising prices until the marginal cost of the product is equal to the marginal benefit, the money you charge doesn't reduce the quality of the product. A beautiful car may be painful to buy, but it's still a beautiful car. There is no such thing as a beautiful website with ads, the product is intentionally made awful.
And that situation of destroying value creates really weird long and short-run equilibria. For example, ads incentivize the kind of products for which attention is more easily shared: you wont find a lot of deep-think pieces that are ad-supported because the ads are too distracting. Instead, you find a lot of short-attention span pieces as these work better with ads. Thus the staccatto assaults of 9 weird tricks to do X, where you read a weird trick and then look at a couple of ads and go to the next weird trick. You can feel the presence of the ads in the work itself. In the Old TV era, episodes would encounter these cliff-hangers when the detective walks into a room, points a gun, you hear the sound of a woman screaming, and then it cuts to a commercial. They needed to create this peak of interest so you'd stick around to see what was in the room. But that peak also artificially disrupted the story. Online, all that is compressed into a few seconds of recognition, it is constant disruption.
In terms of long-run equilibria, there is this ratchet effect: As people flee the ad-sponsored world the ones who remain are more insentitive to ads and so the number of ads increases. In other words, the quality of the writing gets worse over time, in an ad-supported eco-system.
So no, ads are not just an alternate way of paying for content, they are a way of shaping content, and for the worse.
In other comments people have mentioned YouTube subscriptions as being an alternative, it really isn't - OK, you don't see any adverts, but they're still harvesting and selling you. That a privately owned corporation is allowed to read your messages and sell what they find to the highest bidder is vile and honestly makes me wonder how we got here.
I quit advertising after only a couple of years because it blackened my soul. If I was helping to harvest people's personal lives for private profit I can only imagine it would have been worse.
It seems to me that YouTube and many of the ad-supported services out there provide broad benefits to people, and I am swayed by OPs point that a regressively priced business model which restricts these benefits to the global rich is a greater disservice.
Then, we go on to ads. Ads charge everyone a similar amount of bandwidth, attention, etc. But you know what? Some people who have more resources or knowhow will understand how to block ads. And they probably won't be paying by the MB on a crappy cell phone plan such that they spend their money on bandwidth to load the ads, while the content they want to read languishes below the fold of the ads and they struggle to navigate to it on their crappy device struggling to render ads.
The costs are more abstract than when paying in actual dollars, but surely we can recognize that the cost of ad supported web pages is also not felt evenly by everyone. As a privileged software engineer, I can guarantee you that the impact of "paying" for things with ads is felt far less by me than many others. That is regressive in my opinion.
Keep in mind people are still paying in actual dollars. Companies spend money on advertisement because they want something in return, and that comes from the people being targeted from the ads. I wouldn't be surprised if the poor end up paying much more than the rich in the end. It might even be more regressive than a subscription model.
Also worth noting that their are other negative externalities as well. Health for example - the poor tend to have a much worse diet that leads to bad health conditions, and there's likely a large connection between this and the advertisements for unhealthy products.
Sure! Thanks for asking. One idea I like is this: you pay a small, fixed subscription on top of your internet bill. This amount is then given proportionally to the services you visit.
This is nice for several reasons: even a small amount (~3-5$) gives a similar or higher revenue for content creators than ads do (a very rough back-of-the-envelope estimate based on youtube CPM). Plus, there's no problem with the friction of paying for things: you pay the same, regardless of watching 1 or 1000 videos (the netflix model, the cable tv model, heck any subscription model). Plus of course: no ads :)
Why are ads the way to generate revenue? Like I don't care about buying a coffee grinder. Ads not only help contribute to needless purchases but also directly affect the environment cause of that.
[0]: You can see what those looked like here https://www.versionmuseum.com/history-of/youtube-website. Youtube added its first advertisements in mid 2007.
Prior to Google's purchase they were running at a massive loss, burning investment money. That's not working by any normal definition.
tell me how you want to pay for 500h++ of video uploaded to a platform every minute
If I sound judgy there, note that you are condemning a lot of people. Not me, actually, but I still take issue because the basis of your condemnation doesn't even make sense to me...
I think ads are a decent way to pay for a service and I prefer targeted ads to generic ads, especially since they are more effective (and if the idea is to pay for the service you are using, that is relevant).
So the issue is the data, and so the fact that Google has never sold or lost their user's data - you seem to imply otherwise - is extremely relevant, and is why I'm OK with them storing my data. In this industry that is very rare, and yet you consider Google the worst - I'm having a hard time squaring that.
> I used to work in more trad advertising, so my question wasn't so much an objection to working in advertising itself...
(Not commenting on whether they should be given a pass, just noting that GP really did seem to be doing so.)
[I work at Google too, not on ads though] Could you clarify what you mean by this.
A natural reading of these two things ("reading your messages" and "selling to the highest bidder") aren't true. There are lots of things you could mean (reading messages could mean reading emails, reading comments on Youtube, reading hangouts messages, and harvesting that data to sell ads) So I'm curious what things Google does that you mean by that.
> you don't see any adverts, but they're still harvesting and selling you
This is concretely untrue, even by the stretchy definitions. Google (and generally most ad companies) don't sell your data. Sometimes people mean sell your eyeballs, in that they gather data and then use it to sell your attention, and some people find that just as bad.
But if you aren't seeing ads, they're not even doing that. There's no one they're selling anything of yours to. Not your data, not your attention, nothing.
Does Google collect information about what websites you visit (via Chrome / Google Analytics / Google account cookies) and what search queries you make and what search results you click on and provide or sell that information to advertisers in some shape or form? (Where advertisers includes not just third parties but also Google / Google subsidiaries themselves.)
If so, that's definitely "harvesting and selling you", IMO. I'm not sure what other form of "harvesting and selling you" would be possible, even?
>A natural reading of these two things ("reading your messages" and "selling to the highest bidder") aren't true. There are lots of things you could mean (reading messages could mean reading emails, reading comments on Youtube, reading hangouts messages, and harvesting that data to sell ads) So I'm curious what things Google does that you mean by that.
I assume one of the things they mean is reading Gmail email messages and showing you ads based on the contents of those email messages. My understanding is that Google indeed isn't doing this - but that they did do exactly that up until 2017, which wasn't that long ago.
If you're using "provide" in the common sense, then no I don't think so. No one gets a "Josh is a hackernews reader" report. I just get ads for things that appeal to HN users.
There are arguments that you can use this for sort of targeted attacks to get more info, for example if you have a website and can correlate an ad request with a username, you can then put together that "joshuamorton" is interested in things HN users like. But I'm not sure how real those kinds of attacks are (I think a major limiting factor is that they're expensive, since if your goal is to only gain information, you have to compete but also never win a bid, and that's very difficult and like in practice its just cheaper to do your own tracking).
> My understanding is that Google indeed isn't doing this - but that they did do exactly that up until 2017, which wasn't that long ago.
Yes but my recollection is that even before then (at least for some time), gmail data was siloed. It was only used to serve ads in gmail, so this was very much a first party only sort of thing (same as if I run a forum and serve interest based ads on different parts of that forum).
It's just much hard to explain that than to explain "not used at all", so we stopped entirely.
I can definitely feel this - I worked in mobile gaming for a little while. The camaraderie was amazing, I keep in touch with a number of coworkers from that job - the company was terrible (like gaming companies tend to be) but the fact that I was devoting part of my life to building a system I knew was deeply immoral and taking advantage of people's addiction is what pushed me away from it in the end.
I really try to avoid judging people over their career or life choices since nobody is as simple as a statistic, but advertising and mobile gaming is where I break this rule - I definitely don't judge marketers as categorically evil, but the vocation is poisonous. In the article the author calls out that...
> One answer is that I'm earning to give: I give half of what I earn to the most effective charities I can find, and the more I earn the more I can give.
As a response to people asking why they're in marketing and I think this is a really bad sign. If you need to justify your work by calling out the charity you're doing with the earnings then I think you, internally, have identified that what you're doing is causing harm to society.
I understand and sympathize with the fact that brands with poor visibility can struggle to break into established markets but these positives seem quite limited when stacked up against over-consumption, addiction exploitation, decreased general attentiveness, a weakening of what objective truths are and leaving a gigantic security hole in our society for disinformation to easily penetrate deep into folks' hearts and minds.
Advertising, at it's most basic, is trying to change the minds of consumers - you're attempting to take someone who is thinking wrong and make them think right - where right is the mindset that leads them to purchase your product. I think that advertising is really an emotional manipulation at its core.
There is probably a distinction between purely informational marketing that's done to increase general awareness of your brand and marketing that's targeting increasing the chances that an uninterested party will impulse buy your product (the later is what can lead to the over consumption of high sugar products and spur on obesity). I, honestly, couldn't draw a line between the two so if we have to throw out the baby with the bathwater so be it.
I've tried to write this up with a calm head and in an even manner, but my apologies in advance if it's too strong - it's a subject I personally have extremely strong feelings on.
You're misunderstanding the author's intent here. He's saying he works so that he can donate to charities. That part of his answer would remain no matter what type of work he did. Charity is important to him. He was giving a large fraction of his income before he ever started working on ads.
I think that because you believe ads are harmful, you're assuming that the author must also internally feel that ads are harmful. That may be your own bias. What seems obvious to you may not seem true to others. The author explained why he feels ads are a net benefit to society (and also acknowledged some negatives of ads).
I could say that I specifically play board games because I need to repay my student loan - maybe board games are a slightly more economic choice than playing MMORPGs but these two qualities are only tangentially related and, if I made that statement - you'd probably be awfully curious why I thought playing board games was a tactic specifically related to paying off my student loan.
I definitely do feel they're harmful so while I'll try to remain neutral in logic I won't downplay the fact that I'm very much not emotionally neutral - but that sort of a statement specifically rings false to me, it sounds like someone trying to make an excuse.
He's not donating to charity out of guilt from working on ads. We know this because he was giving large amounts to charity well before he started work on ads. His behaviour hasn't changed.
I understand you're interpreting it as, "Really, I'm just doing this (distasteful) job to make money." That isn't how the author meant it. It's more like, "Ultimately, the reason I work at any job is to make money. But here's why I think this job in particular makes the world better."
I'm curious though. If you didn't think he was working for the money, and you also think he feels that ads are bad, then why do you think he chose that job?
a user makes an http request to a domain. the current accepted response is to send back ads and trackers, pillage and extract as much value from that user as possible, immediately. as a user I feel I should be prompted:
"this site is funded by ads. by continuing, you agree to the following..."
its just a sort of zero permission adulteration of the web - guaranteed ad revenue from a click begets more crap clickbait content and so on. in fact, perhaps ads and tracking mechanisms should be treated by browsers the same as zero click JS malware. no content til the user agrees to have ads delivered to them.
i get it, of course prompting a user would create friction and decrease revenue. its the user's machine, data. they are entitled to the optionality of rejecting an HTTP response if it contains unwanted/unwelcome crap.
The big problem is that most people do not use a browser that is truly their agent--they use a browser that is an agent of an advertising company. The result is entirely predictable: Chrome acts in the best interests of its client, and loads the ads and trackers.
If we want to change the status quo with regards to advertising, we don't need to change the technology at all: we have to change the way people see a web browser. We need to help people to make the paradigm shift from "Chrome is how you consume content on the internet" to "a browser is an agent that acts on my behalf in the digital realm".
I don't care one bit if ad supported sites just vanish, no need for an alternative. Yes please, clean up the web. What's left is the stuff that is worth enough for people to pay for.
I bucketed the responses to something along the lines of greater than $1, $.75, $.5, $.25, $.01 or nothing.
What I was (secretly) hoping was that people would be willing to pay something like a cent for a page view, since I was building a prototype for a more user friendly anti-adblocker, seeing that many websites started to deploy their own back then, and hating that there was no middle ground.
However, what I found was that people were unwilling to pay anything for a page view. I think the author actually mentions this as a failed alternative model.
Point being it really seems like people have decided/agreed that they prefer the ad model to anything else. Even if it means that the cost of serving ads is actually higher (in terms of bandwidth) than what it would cost to just pay a cent or two cents or whatever for pageviews.
I'm not sure how you mean this but what you say comes dangerously close to implying that people want ads. That may be true if you force them into a false dichotomy (pay or have ads).
I think it's more just that people don't want to pay. If it's on the web, they read it for free, period. If it's not on the web, then it isn't and they don't read it. If you look at it from this perspective, ads aren't even part of the discussion. I think people prefer the "someone pays for it" model to anything else.
The dichotomy is only real if you construct a hypothetical scenario about some ad-or-paywall site that absolutely must exist and that people absolutely want to read and for which no alternative can emerge if that site stops existing.
This is especially true if we want high quality content. So the dichotomy is only false if you assume people are willing to accept "stop consuming content" which, by and large, they aren't.
Seems to me that creators are getting a dreadful deal from the current set up and that FB etc are the ones gaining massively.
Clough42 for example is a software engineer, and makes metalworking & 3D-printing videos that I enjoy watching; he certainly gets ad money (O(100ks) subscribers) but I'd guess he spends more on equipment, tools, etc. (and would despite the income) - certainly if you counted lost earnings from 'he could be doing contract work instead' - because that's not the point, it's a hobby, and a secondary hobby is putting it on YouTube for me (and millions of others) to enjoy.
(I'm sort of hesitant to single someone out - especially someone who's probably on HN, heh - but I that's the impression I get anyway. If it's not totally true for him I'm sure it is for others.)
As for quality, it's all opinion, I guess, but the only form that seems to have gotten better recently is prestige television, but even there I'd say it so far peaked around 2010. Film and pop music peaked in the 60s and 70s. Instrumental music, literature, and painting peaked centuries ago. Artists have created perfectly good art for as long as humans have existed without the need to track their consumers private behavior to develop targeted ad profiles.
> That was fine for centuries...
I always assumed that this was an artifact of recording technology: if you can record a movie or music, then you can have a handful of actors and musicians service the entire world, but without that each city needs its local musicians and theater troupes. If that's correct then we've been in this state for maybe 1 century.
For writers though it's been centuries, since writing enabled distribution of content in many places.
I see it often, but it is honestly the most laughably selfish opinion to believe that one should be entitled to the internet as it exists today, but also not pay directly or indirectly to be able to use those services.
Which is true. If its not on the web, then I don't read it, and don't miss it - by and large.
A huge number of people seem to believe that 95% of the internet is of any value - yet the existence of HN itself shows that's not true. This whole site exists to turn "the internet" into a selection of high quality links, and even then the front page is maybe 20% interesting to me on a day by day basis.
So how much of the internet matters to me? 6 links out of 30, selected by a community which completely avoids all the "major" sites.
People pay for an internet connection, and e.g. will pay more to get a faster connection or higher quota. There is value, its just not in the casual attention model that the ad driven internet has developed. Even the term "browser" implies how we interact with most content, and to me doesn't evoke "I'll pay by the page"
A partial parallel is radio. Would you pay for local FM radio without ads? Unlikely, but some might pay for satellite radio because of the bundled content and national accessibility. And even more would pay for spotify. These are not just the old radio with ads swapped for direct cash, they provide something better. Paid internet will have to be the same.
I work in the ads business at FB. I do so because I personally like ads and my biggest gripe is that ads are not relevant and personalized enough. I want better ads.
Ultimately ads support a robust ecosystem of free software and content that keeps many creators going. Consumers can also choose to buy their software and content, or donate, but most don’t. Despite their whining, most people want free stuff, and ads are almost free (a small attention cost).
I think people comparing ads to guns, plagues, and locusts need to check their own values. Ads support free stuff for the poor and middle classes. Rich coastal elites can tell themselves they will pay for everything, and that’s great (most don’t). Most consumers cannot afford to pay for software or news subscriptions. Ad models fill out the spectrum of options.
Is the current ads ecosystem perfect? Clearly not. There’s a lot we need to do to educate users, get consent, and increase control and transparency. On the flip side, this needs to be simple and easy: consent needs to be an understandable and low friction process to avoid consent fatigue. They are also plenty of privacy enhancing technologies like differential privacy and local caching to deal with data sharing issues.
If you hate ads, lean into that. Don’t work for adtech, block all your ads, pay for everything. I support you and respect that! I just think it’s mean and shortsighted to think that everyone else is like you and to aggressively attack adtech engineers, platforms, businesses, and the billions of consumers who aren’t as rich as you and will happily watch ads to get free stuff. The internet is great because a lot of high quality stuff like software, news, videos, etc is free for anyone, anywhere. Ads make that possible and I’m proud of it.
Why doesn't FB offer a "premium" tier for people to buy their way out of ads?
Warning: here goes my armchair theory.
Because as soon as you put a price tag on it, people will instantly see that they can actually get that "premium" tier for free by using an adblocker, which will lead to more people using adblockers.
If something is just free, most people don't really care for it. But if it is something that is free while it is normally not free, people will flock to it. Just think about random just that people wouldn't care to buy normally, but end up buying it because it is on a "90% off sale" (even if the "sale" price is the same as it would've been without a "sale").
Which sort of makes sense with FB, because you get a clear price tag attached and you feel bad for spending those money, when you can get the exact same experience "for free".
If I watch a Youtube video and it gets interrupted by an ad, I am stuck until it is over and cannot consume my content. Same with Spotify. So understandably, people would be willing to pay for the premium tier. I, myself, pay for premium on those services to not deal with ads, as they steal my time and interrupt my normal usage of those services.
With FB, ads aren't interrupting the experience. They are just there, but you are welcome to completely ignore them and proceed consuming your content. I wouldn't pay premium to get rid of FB ads, even if it was just $1/mo. Especially given that, more than once, I got genuinely useful ads that helped me with making a good purchasing decision (the final decision came down to me doing my independent research before buying, but the ads pointed me towards the type of stuff I was looking for). So I don't gain much by getting rid of FB ads (as they are non-interruptive), while potentially losing out on some stuff.
I think the last bit I mentioned is kind of the key to FB strategy. They don't want to offer the "no-ads" premium tier, because they don't want to pose their ads as an annoyance you have to pay to get rid of, they want to pose them as a value add. Not trying to argue whether it is indeed a value add for users or not, just theorizing how FB product team sees it and tries to pose it.
P.S. I don't work in ads or anything even tangentially related. And neither do I have a stake in FB or any other ad-related business. Just describing my genuine user experience.
I have heard the opposite, which is people getting creeped out due to things like getting ads for infant products before they've told their family they're pregnant (presumably inference from browsing).
> Most consumers cannot afford to pay for software or news subscriptions.
> Don’t work for adtech, block all your ads, pay for everything.
All this is false.
Growth hacking has created products that are addictive and which people don't really need. These are then justified by saying that consumers can't afford to pay for them (fact is that they wouldn't do because deep down they know they're not worth much). And in the meantime society suffers the consequences whilst FB etc profits hugely.
Certainly if this were not the case, people seek out advertisements themselves (classifieds).
I'm pretty sure ads don't support the cell phone industry, or at least didn't support its exponential growth phase, yet the middle class and poor have cell phones.
Android destroyed its competition by having excellent support for Google's "free" software and because of their huge ad income they can pay to develop it further.
So yeah I believe the modern phone industry has to thank the freemium adtech world for pushing Android into the world.
I'm still not convinced that even smartphones would have been stillborn. The apps might have been more klunky, but I'm not sure that's important. For instance, I would be happy to receive my daily news in a giant flat text file, and don't need the features that generate "engagement" or tell me what other people are reading. People who are "in the know" about computing tend to use less flashy interfaces, and more of the terminal window.
But of course the ultimate answer is... I don't know.
It's interesting that the freemium model kind of contradicts that idea that we benefit from ads, since we are willing to pay money to get rid of them, rather than the other way around. Maybe the industry could be funded by making ads available to those who want them, for a price.
Until i can ACTUALLY opt out by paying money, you need to get off your high horse. My data is clearly more valuable to you than my dollars - otherwise I'd have a choice.
> If you hate ads, lean into that. Don’t work for adtech, block all your ads, pay for everything. I support you and respect that!
I do, pls continue to support me by:
1. making it possible to not have my data constantly collected and sold by facebook in exchange for dollars.
2. Stop tracking me after my account has been deleted.
3. Stop acting like you are part of something good while I don't have a "no surveilance" option. Until then, YOU are the problem.
Alternatively, people are just not that willing to pay money to avoid ads. FB's revenue per user in the US is ~$5/month, but users who would pay to avoid ads tend to be richer, so to break even FB might need to charge, say, $20/month. I'd bet too few people are willing to pay $20/month to justify the costs and complexity of offering an ad free product. Especially when you consider the bad publicity that would come from offering something "overpriced".
"FB's revenue per human datum in the US is ~$5/month, but discrete datums who both know they are tracked by Facebook and are rich enough to pay protection money for privacy are few. To protect everyone, they would need to pay $20/month."
People are misdirecting their hatred towards ad-tracking towards ad developers when in reality the people who decide to use ad trackers in their websites should be asked questions.
I understand some giant sites will always come with "we will track you" (Facebook is the easiest example) but even those Facebook spy buttons appear on websites because the developer of the site agreed to it and embedded it there.
On the other hand, a fixed fee would cap the incentive to push the upper bounds of user time on site, thereby respecting users time and inherent interest in whatever platforms offer, absent addictive designs that try to alter that inherent interest.
Features that nag you to invite people into groups, add non-friends via PYMK, push low quality notifications to reengage, show you outrage-inducing content, push you to constantly engage or share private details of your life, check out related groups and drive you deeper down rabbit holes, etc wouldn’t have the same oxygen if the fixed fee model was used. And a service to chat with and find out what your friends were up to wouldn’t be costly at scale; likely pennies per month [1].
I appreciate your thoughtful comment and the logic you’ve laid out but disagree. I believe we’ve settled on a lucrative, low friction, easy to implement incentive model with ads but it is far far from the ideal model with way too many negative externalities.
Note this only goes for ad models with unlimited appetite for user time. I wouldn’t have a problem with ad models that have an upper bounds, eg 5 ad impressions a day max.
[1] see: WhatsApp $1/yr model prior to FB acquisition
I sense A LOT of misdirected anger towards ad companies when the "enablers" of ad companies – the web developers willing to monetise traffic with ads – are not getting any blame directed at them.
As long as you guys at Facebook are transparent about what happens if you embed your like buttons or comment sections in blogs and forums etc. the onus is on the developers to serve their visitors with safe content.
I may be in the minority on this belief, but I think advertising -- any kind of advertising -- is inherently bad. To me, it's just psychological manipulation. I never want to see any ads, ever. If I could wear a pair of contact lenses that removed things like billboards from my vision, I would wear them in a heartbeat, even though billboards are far less harmful than internet-based ads.
I sometimes hear arguments that advertising isn't all bad because when someone actually is planning to make a particular kind of purchase, advertising can help them figure out which brand/model/etc. to buy. The problem with that is that the ads have no interest in satisfying anyone's particular needs in the best way. Someone could easily be swayed by a slick ad for a product that is not as good for their use as another product that had a less-engaging/less-manipulative ad.
The worst thing about internet advertising is of course the erosion of privacy. If ad networks were merely paying for people's eyeballs, that might not be too nefarious. But they're paying to track people and build intimate profiles about them, and that's not ok. I have very little faith that any of these initiatives that will supposedly make ad targeting privacy-preserving will actually work. All they do is make it appear that a company is doing something, so they can point to it when they get in trouble, claiming that they tried really hard to help preserve privacy, but it just didn't work out.
I'm just not interested in any of this crap. I know micropayments and pay-per-article and such are really hard to do, and really hard to get adopted, but that is the only model I will accept if people want me to pay in some way for web content. Making me pay for a $30/month subscription for the three or four articles I'll end up reading on your site per month is not something I'm interested in doing. And I will not pay through psychological manipulation and erosion of privacy.
Look at Wikipedia - it's a search engine and content repository for all of the world's knowledge, and its operating expenses are around $100M / year.
The Internet Archive has an annual budget of $10M / year.
Google on the other hand, has annual revenues of $181B / year, or about 2000 times Wikipedia's spending.
Is the crawling part hard? The folks at Common Crawl (https://commoncrawl.org/) crawl the entire web every month and release it free of charge.
What about the search algorithms? Well, you can do a bunch with TFIDF and PageRank, for which patient protection has expired.
For the sake of argument, let's assume that the cost of hosting a ubiquitous search engine would be double Wikipedia's annual costs. Still about a thousand times less expensive than Google.
Ads don't pay for a search engine. They pay for vast amounts of excess.
What keeps such a solution from us? Here are a few of many reasons:
* Google pays billions of dollars a year to make it the default option on browsers.
* Exclusive deals with portals such as LinkedIn which exclude open engines such as Archive.org from their content.
* Limits on peer-to-peer connections perpetuated by IPv4 which prevent us from hosting a distributed engine ourselves.
Posing the problem as one of "there's no other way to pay for this expensive machine" is pretty lame isn't it?
"Businesses should keep adding engineers to work on optimization until the cost of adding an engineer equals the revenue gain plus the cost savings at the margin. This is often many more engineers than people realize." https://danluu.com/sounds-easy/
The key takeaway from that article:
>Businesses that actually care about turning a profit will spend a lot of time (hence, a lot of engineers) working on optimizing systems, even if an MVP for the system could have been built in a weekend.
Google's goal is to make as much profit as possible. Wikipedia's isn't. If Google had stayed a non-profit search engine the whole time (as proposed in the original paper for Google), then its costs would probably be not too different from Wikipedia's.
Let's say someone wants to sell fishing equipment. The traditional way of doing this is to buy ads on fishing sites. So now my fishing equipment purchases make there be more writing about fishing; yay!
Then one of the fishing websites decides to put a tracking pixel on their site to drop "fishing website visitor" cookies (or, in a future without third-party cookies, a turtledove interest group). They make a deal with a third party provider and get paid a small amount per visitor. Then fishing retailers have a new choice: instead of buying ads on fishing sites they can instead buy ads on any site for users who have one of the "fishing website visitor" cookies. If there were a monopoly fishing site, then this would increase their earnings: while the ad space on their site isn't as valuable, they will set the pixel price high enough that they come out ahead. It's not a monopoly, though, so the price of the pixel gets driven down through competition, and money that would go to fishing sites instead goes to the publishers that people who spend money on fishing equipment visit.
In this case I see how it's worse for fishing sites, but not how it's bad for consumers: their willingness to buy fishing equipment translates into support for all the sites they visit, and not just the fishing sites.
But there are also many niches that don't have economic tie-ins, or have ones that are far weaker than "writing about fishing" and "buying fishing equipment". In a world with targeted advertising, these niches do better, because of overlap between audiences. A "let's have better housing policy" blog can show ads for fishing equipment, vacations, HVAC supplies, or whatever else visitors have shown interest in on other sites.
Additionally, targeted advertising increases the total amount of funding available for online content, because people with niche interests are available to be advertised to in more places. Seeing ten fishing ads once a week when you visit a fishing site vs seeing twenty fishing ads spread over the course of the week, etc.
So while niche publishers in lucrative niches would likely make more money if we only had context-based advertising, I don't think niche publishers overall, publishers overall, or consumers would be better off.
(This is modified from a comment I originally posted on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21620763)
You seem to be deliberately focusing on the beneficial parts of advertising, at the exclusion of the harmful bits. If you want to maintain your credibility -- let alone give the impression of someone striving to live ethically -- you'll need to give that second part its due attention.
Addendum:
If I were offered a generous salary to work on Google ad technology, I might accept. I'm not 100% sure, but the temptation would very real. As such, I want to make it clear that my criticism does not stem from any feeling of moral superiority, but rather from deep-seated respect and sympathy for someone engaged in an ethical dilemma.
I believe the comments would be much more charitable had your position been something along the lines of "I do it because it's good money, and I sometimes struggle with the dilemma. Here is the nature of the issue as I see it." As a general rule, people respect earnest introspection. Not so with playing ostrich.
Maybe I'm just terribly dense, but I seriously can't think of any reasonable objection to what google does. The best I personally can come up with is that most people don't understand what google is doing and if they did know some of them might object.
When I google "the individual and collective consequences of mass data collection" I get results that talk about the NSA and human rights -- this doesn't seem to have much to do with what google is doing though. When I add "google" to that search I get a rambling article on "How surveillance changes people's behavior".
Please help me out here -- how am I or anyone else being harmed by google knowing what sites I visit?
I don't think the author is being disingenuous. I do think there is a sizable subset of privacy advocates who have become so stringently ideological about this issue they would downvote even thoughtful replies and are so caught up in their bubble that they seemingly can't have a conversation with anyone outside of it.
Yes, let's. I'm not an expert, so I don't have any insight. Do you?
Still, this question seems like an essential part of essay about the ethics of working in the ad industry.
Perhaps you meant to direct your sarcasm towards the author?
to me it seems really bad to mine and centralize PII (note: this PII is also arbitrarily being shared with third-parties, usually without explicit or informed consent from user).
---
ie: this is data which is mined in a way, depth and scope of any implication is usually abstracted away from the user or hand-waved away in legalese or presented in such an annoying way users have become conditioned to unconditionally accept that which they do not understand, and therefore they likewise usually remain uninformed/ignorant/naive of any implication, security or otherwise, in order to get to the service asap. and this is something absolutely exploited by these companies.
---
do we really want companies, companies who have demonstrated they are not immune to simple mistakes leading to vulnerabilities, or leaked PII, mind you, to be in a position where we the user have no choice, but to trust it won't leak PII to nefarious persons (persons who can then do meaningfully harmful things with even basic PII)?
we are already bleeding enough PII as it is -- when should we truly be concerned with stopping it? if never, and there is no concern as you seem to indicate, then let us arbitrarily share medical information, too.
on that subject, there are also so many instances of arbitrarily collected and shared PII, for the sake of ads, that would almost unequivocally be a HIPA violation in other contexts -- to me it seems asinine to have such well-defined understandings of PII for the protection of the person in some contexts, but yet in the context of ads, suddenly <i>anything</i> goes, and the spiel we always get from the ads advocates is: but it is good for the user and the content creators cannot exist without it, so it must exist as is, unchained.
(un)ironically this is also a psychology presented by abusive relationships where the abuser keeps the abused thinking they need them, and the abuser establishes itself as a (survival) dependency in the abused's mind.
idk, i'm pretty skeptical of the claim that ad tech and the ad industry has good intentions, and i am becoming increasingly of the opinion that most of the advertising models advocates are trying so hard to convince users to enable, are just fucking profit-driven-at-all-costs cancer.
It's bad for the consumer because their privacy is being violated and their metadata is being sold, in order for advertisers to track them everywhere they go online, so businesses can try and extract all of their spending money as efficiently as possible.
It also is bad for the consumer because it's bad for the collective whole: instead of quality content online everything is being driven by outrage and clickbait in order to serve as many targeted ads as possible.
Personally I don't even want to support that ecosystem or those sites.
It's also bad for the fishing site because now their niche targeted ad slots that used to pay decently in order to target people with an interest in fishing are pushed into the same race to the bottom low return ads that are being automatically targeted. So they lose too.
Only winners are huge publishers that don't have any niche audience to target because now they effectively target every niche. And Google of course. Basically the two groups who I want to win the least.
This is exactly what I'm working on changing; have a look at the second half of the post?
(Or read https://github.com/WICG/turtledove)
Before digital advertising or Google reading emails to find out you're going on a fishing trip, how did people buy fishing equipment?
Whatever we did then, we can probably go back to and be much better off.
Like why do I need "relevant ads" on a blog about urban planning? What problem does that solve for me?
We can use the web to bring those in the fishing community into wider contact with each other.
Or use it to create communities vulnerable to ads. I know which one I prefer.
I.e if I send you an email talking about finding a vacation deal to go to Egypt, we will get ads to that effect (obviously it'll vary somewhat).
Official documentation:
https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6603?hl=en#:~:text=Th....
Appreciate it
Ad blockers are a godsend though. I either get to opt-out of ads, or I get to opt-out of sites that rely on ads (for the most part, caveats aside).
Targeted advertising hasn't been a blessing just for small businesses selling fishing equipment and organic combucha, but also -- actually, especially, for companies that sell things like:
* Potentially addictive subscriptions (for e.g. online casinos or other gambling games) -- thus specifically targeting people who are at risk for addiction, unless your targeting settings are crap.
* Snake oil skincare products for teenagers, or potentially dangerous weight loss tablets -- thus compounding peer pressure against young people with poor self esteem.
* Bullshit therapy "options" like German New Medicine, specifically targeting people who are terminally ill, or researching things like cancer treatment for a relative or a friend.
Boy am I glad we're increasing the total amount of funding available for online content!
* HIV meds
* LGBT*A forums
* politically charged sites
* cancer/heart disease/diabetes pagesYou make cars? You focus on good things like driving to a vacation, but what about all the cars used in drive by shootings?
You sell cloud services? You talk about the great websites, but what about all the people who host scam sites on the cloud?
You write monitoring software? What about all the people who monitor ad services?
The author of the post specifically (you read the article, didn't you?) said:
> The thing is, I think advertising is positive, and I think my individual contribution is positive. I'm open to being convinced on this: if I'm causing harm through my work I would like to know about it.
Then goes on to not mention a single example of harm being caused through their work, like virtually all articles that attempt to defend the advertising industry's practices. I thought I'd list a few.
You cannot be in good-faith with these kinds of arguments.
But advertising mental health apps or government intervention programs doesn't seem intrinsically unethical within limits.
It's almost like the actual unethical item should be regulated!
Advertising expands markets for goods.
Word of mouth and aggregators (like yelp) can help people find solutions when they know of a problem, but ads inform/manipulate (depending on how you see it) people to know they have a problem in the first place.
Also if you've ever written ad copy it's all pretty structurally similar: hook, problem statement, solution, testimonials, etc.
2) New challenger SaaS brands can get in front of customers to compete with mammoth corporate brands with worse software (I see this all the time on my job).
3) Without good ad targeting, only bottom hanging fruit advertisers that appeal to the lowest common denominator can afford to spend. Weight loss, teeth whitening, etc. Good ad targeting means a better user experience with ads.
I have an example loosely inspired by real life.
Let's say I visit a fishing forum using the shared computer of my very, very vegan family. That website has now dropped the "fishing website visitor" cookie, and suddenly all my computer shows are ads for lure and fishing rods. My father is now furious, asking everyone in the house who has been visiting "those" websites.
I want the association between me and fishing gone. But who do I talk to? The website says they had nothing to do with this, the ad network won't even give me the time of day, and if the cookie is a supercookie then clearing history and cache may not be enough. And heavens help me if I get targeted mail, like Target used to do with pregnant women...
That, I believe, is the problem with targeted advertising: that my privacy is taken away in the name of helping somebody's website, it's leaked everywhere, and I have no real way to say "I don't want this".
Fishing retailers have a choice. They can rely on the strength and quality of their products and organic interest in fishing as a recreational activity. Or they can contract out their marketing to a commercial version of a spy agency that invents a silent, invisible device that follows their customers around when they're otherwise alone, recording everything they ever do to learn how to better predict their future spending preferences.
Surely, even if this resulted in better sales for the fishing industry, lower prices for the consumer, and the ability of niche publications to exist by predicting that their readers also like fishing and charging the fishing industry to sell them this information, you would not find this okay.
You've convinced yourself that this kind of surveillance and profiling is totally okay and different when it takes place on network connected computing devices and that people have even consented to it, but the actual people being monitored do not feel this way.
I know there's a lot of negative reaction to it, and I can empathize with that because there's a long history of negative behavior by the advertising industry. But there's no doubt that there are benefits too, and seeing some nuance on HN is always a win.
Advertising is a very wide spectrum and I think its way too heavy handed to say it is all intrinsically immoral. Some is, maybe even most of it, but surely not all is immoral.
I'd argue that advertising in general is a good thing, but that there are a few parts that are bad. One bad part is the vast surveillance and privacy intrusion of modern digital advertising is what is bad. Another are the advertising tactics used to manipulate people into buying things they shouldn't.
The coffee shop with far too many flyers or 7 by the same local tutor becomes very hard to handle. With experience you fight through the flyers to read the menu and get to the counter to order that coffee.
There is so much 'opportunity' in the world at any moment for which the provider of the opportunity's ad thinks that it could be relevant to me. I can accept a little of that every day without it being bad, but patience wears very fast.
* I see contraception as intrinsically immoral...
* I see gun ownership as intrinsically immoral...
* I see capitalism as intrinsically immoral...
Which are all sort of arguments by normative value and probably not very convincing to those who don't share the same values.
There most certainly are doubts that there are any benefits. Online ads aren't any more beneficial than billboards.
I think we would do well to follow the example of Sao Paulo.
> Minimal friction.
Fair enough when the site had one ad. Pretty much no site had one ad now. They have lots of them, which is significantly slowing down loading the page. And if you add all tracking and surveillance code, it can inflate a simple site into megabytes of data. There are common sites that load literally hundreds of outside URLs for ad and surveillance mechanics.
Which brings us to point 2:
> Non-regressive. Paywalls, like other fixed costs, are regressive
Ad costs are regressive too - if you have weak computer and low bw connection, if your connection is unstable or expensive, if your only internet device is a mobile phone with less than excellent bandwidth - which is commonly the case in low income communities - then the last thing you want is to be hit with megabytes of ad data which have zero relationship to what you want to get. Of course, for people sitting on optical gigabit networks with latest-greatest hardware their employer paid for is not much of a problem...
If it was just a paid service, you could work out a deal - maybe it could be cheaper for your country, or have some kind of library or per-provider setup that could make it easier for you to get to it - but you don't have this option, it's megabytes of ad everywhere.
Not to mention how they disproportionately affect "non tech savvy" groups. I almost never see ads, especially not the really obnoxious ones, and I imagine it's the same for most people here. Meanwhile elderly people are being inundated with ads that look like forms and buttons and warnings, and getting tricked into doing who knows what. Even if that's not financially regressive, it still has an outsized impact that is worse for groups that are already having a harder time of it.
According to https://www.jefftk.com/donations, Jeff and Julia have donated about $1.5m. GiveWell top rated charities are estimated [1] to save a life for each $3,000 - $5,000 donated. For a ballpark analysis, let's call that $4,000 and ignore secondary factors (eg inflation over their donation history).
Jeff and Julia have saved something like 375 lives, many of them likely children.
Please keep that in mind while forming and communicating your views.
I estimate that while he is still earning income, the upper bound for person-years saved will be 550_000 (30 more working years, 19_000_000$ total donations, a lifetime is worth 100 years and costs 3_500$). I estimate the lower bound for person-years destroyed will be 24_000 person-years (50_000_000 people affected, each losing 365 seconds every year over 42 years). These numbers are inconclusive.
I cannot answer the big philosophical question whether he shares responsibility with the other people working in advertisements, so we would divide the total destruction person-years by the number of people working in advertisements. If yes, this would certainly make the donation scheme very favourable/positively utilitarian.
Even then, while this kind of individual calculus is at least tractable, there is also the concern of large-scale cultural drift, as in the net impact of the world's smartest people collectively working on things like ad targeting, engineering synthetic financial derivatives, and figuring out how to manufacture scarcity out of abundance so speculators can get rich off of modern tulip mania, compared to what good might have come from whatever else they could have collectively accomplished. It's entirely possible that if Google and Facebook are as good at identifying uniquely talented and intelligent people as they think they are, they could have figured out how to entirely eradicate malaria if that is where they chose to direct the effort rather than figuring out how to predict the spending habits of most people in the world and using some of the profit to buy nets.
I'm not saying this for sure comes out against working for personal profit, of course. Louis Pasteur effectively proved the germ theory of disease, enabling the population explosion of the post-industrial age and possibly the most good ever done, while trying to figure out how to make better wine so he could patent and sell the process. But scant historical knowledge though I have, I'm having trouble thinking of historical examples of great good done by people just being wealthy and giving money to others who then do good, as opposed to direct work on technological good multipliers even when doing good is not the intention. At first, I was thinking maybe Da Vinci, but he might even be a counterexample in that he had little to no direct impact on science and engineering in the centuries to come despite conceiving of quite a few novel devices that were eventually invented. Perhaps if the patrons of Renaissance era Europe had paid their greatest minds to work on engineering instead of art, we could have had the industrial age centuries earlier.
Every time I hear/read a "net offset" justification like in the greatgrandparent comment my brain only hears
I'm gonna sell heroin/meth/crack to fund a rehab clinic;
AND
if more persons are rehabbed than addicted
then the whole endeavour is a good thing;
AND
I am a good person; call me "one of the good ones.
Some see the nature of advertising as neutral, some even see it as good, some see it it as evil. I see it as too impractical to wield as intended; rare-times good, some-times neutral and most-times bad.
Although we can measure air water and noise pollutions, we still have wild disagreements over how much to allow. Given that we suck at measuring the mental pollution produced by advertising-based business models, it is natural that disagreement is even greater over mental pollution.
Where is the startup that shows folks the pollution-free mental spaces that they didn't know they wanted_needed, but that they will never let-go once experienced. Sadly, most minds are limited to imagining the same sad choices jefftk listed. I for one choose to believe that people exist who see how to "fund the web" sans advertising. To them I leave this future message: "Hurry up dammit. We need you. The jefftk's of this world are making the most ungodly of big messes."
> (…)
> So: why is advertising good? (…) The question is, what is the alternative?
“I can’t think of a better alternative than the status quo, thus the status quo is positive” isn’t a sound conclusion. Every sufficiently ingrained societal negative we’ve abolished since was likely reasoned in that manner at one point.
I see an annoying ad in public space? I might get in contact with them to complain about that ad.
I think it is just fair to tell someone my honest opinion as soon as they take the time and effort to target me.
I'm totally lost on why we support generic unrelevant ads in public spaces. It makes our cities ugly.
Some of the states that care a lot about their communities have done so, like Maine and Vermont.
However, I have a problem with Google adverts specifically and that is that they’re absolute hot garbage. Google has advertised to me: outright scams, malware, gambling, mobile games with extremely exploitative monetisation.
And they are working to take away any privacy I might have to keep showing me this shit. In my opinion, Google is basically evil these days.
I personally have a very low opinion of anyone who works for a company that does that and even lower of anyone who actually works on serving those adverts.
I mean, my brother once bought a "personal fan" for $1 and that was the most coveted possession we had for about 6 months.
As someone who grew up extremely poor and effectively dumpster dived for my first computer what pragmatic alternative is there?
I don't want to be uncharitable but this seems like a very middle class and annoyed wealthy problem to have, I haven't seen any non regressive approaches accept for MAYBE from crypto browsers.
Maybe the wealthy and middle class are just tired of subsidizing the internet and the content on it. As a broke child ads got me to a place where I could download html, learn to program and code and break out of an insane degree of poverty. The borland turbo c books at the library never seemed to have code that would compile.
It may just be my personal experience but all of this feel like pulling up the ladder behind me and I haven't seen anyone articulate practical alternatives that address this issue.
edit: Even mass surveillance and government control seems like an orthogonal near strawman issue to me, as far as I'm aware the most restricted countries on earth like China and NK don't need or use ad networks for their lockdowns. Frankly if you can't scrape data off my hard drive, don't have the power of incarceration (or feed data to those who do), and don't tie it to my credit score or ability to bank (I think we should pass legislation explicitly banning that on the banking side) and don't make it illegal to use ad blockers, I don't see the problem.
But perhaps I have not noticed very much because I mostly use an ad-blocker. When I don't use an ad-blocker, I notice ads are mostly on crappy click-baity sources and social media (youtube, forums, etc.).
educational information is usually just text, so it's easy to host I suppose. wikipedia, for example is only a couple hundred gigabytes. But the stuff most people want to spend their time on is video and image forums, which are expensive to host.
Scholarly articles and research have been behind paywalls (jstore, etc.) if you don't have access through a university (which I never have.)
Alternatively, everything is free if you pirate the content, I just don't think the numbers add up to having that be a lasting funding model.
The most helpful "free" content for doing home electrical work, car repair, etc. which make a big difference for people on near $0 budgets is media on youtube.
I think the argument could be made for publicly subsidized video, media hosting and other "utility" style services, but the mass adoption and accessibility of the internet for the poor wasn't built on that (as far as memory serves from my experience of being on BBSs and then online in the 90s.) and I think killing ads without an alternative feels like a regressive cart before horse approach.
But I think the advertising industry as currently constituted is a misuse of attention, money, and other resources.
I haven't solved this dilemma for myself, but I don't ignore the conflict just because of the positives. Hopefully I'll find the courage to do more than gripe.
I recently started paying creators on Patreon and subscribing to news outlets I wanted to support. But within a year, I realized that this was inefficient, I didn't like/read/watch most of the content that my subscriptions were supporting. As much as I wanted to support the content creators and quality journalism, I questioned the value of my subscriptions and cancelled - I felt like I signed up for a gym membership on Jan 1st that I wasn't using anymore.
Ads allow me "to pay" with my attention for only the content that I value. I don't like ads, I generally use an ad-blocker, but I appreciate the post and the perspective.
Thanks for your work and sharing your thoughts jefftk!
Surely it's okay for sites that "don't have a commercial tie-in" to stick with untargeted ads? I just think that building a giant stalking network is an extreme (and ideally illegal) solution to the "problem" that a couple of sites won't make as much money off their popularity as they'd like.
And is it that uncharitable to characterize what Facebook and Google are building as a giant stalking network?
This is also why if you stumble into some parts of the web, they vomit out a billion ads per page to try and compensate.
Really the problem is that there is a tremendous gap between the costs to serve content and users willingness to pay (either directly or via any indirect method). It is a tremendously deep hole we've built with freemium models that will probably require some level of societal agreement to dig back out of.
It also corrupts what products get built because the incentives between the users of the software and the funders of the software are not aligned (even though ad devs pretend they are by pretending users like relevant ads). To test if users truly find 'relevant ads' as value-add: make two products, one with ads and one without and charge for the one with ads - see how many people buy it.
Why doesn't Hulu charge more many for their streaming service with ads instead of their service without? The behavior of these companies suggests they know on some level this value-add nonsense is a rationalization. Even if you say it's only value-add when compared to un-targeted ads - let users choose to have un-targeted ads without giving up their data privacy. I'd bet money on what choice they'd make.
The truth is targeted ads work and make enormous amounts of money for the ad companies - that's why they do them. The twisted narratives of why this is actually good for people or society are just another example that there is no limit to humanity's ability to rationalize anything when it's in their interest to do so.
--
"“In the beginning not everyone tended to their free data farms. Many did not know what to do with them, some only planted one or two tweets and then abandoned them entirely. This disappointed the earls of our kingdom. If they don’t encourage growth, their share of the data harvest is smaller, there’s no one to hear their pronouncements, and all of the land they spent time cultivating is wasted. They realized that not only do they need to make the land easy to cultivate, but they need to make the serfs want to cultivate it. They experimented for a while and learned that new types of controversial, viciously competitive crops are great for encouraging data farming - they call this type of encouragement ‘engagement’.”"
https://zalberico.com/essay/2020/07/14/the-serfs-of-facebook...
For more on effective altruism broadly, some resources:
A person who donates generously may more easily justify dubious money-earning efforts by saying, "it's really not for me so much, it's for the kids!" In other words, it is possible (again, not saying this is case for you) that one might take a job in advertising because they feel their donations provide ethical cover.
imo, honest hearts never need to publicize their altruism to the world.
Publicizing altruism helps build a culture of altruism.
By the way I don't donate anything to charity at the moment, although I plan to someday. So I'm speaking from a no-skin-in-the-game perspective.
It doesn't mean I hate people who work on ads / ad software. It doesn't mean I want to cancel them. You, and the others in that field, don't have to justify yourself. You don't have to donate to charity to feel better about what you're doing (it doesn't mean "stop donating NOW", it's just.. do what you feel is good, like you are doing now).
There's a lot of bad going on in the world. Ads are shady-grey area. I know how to fight it and have my internet ad-free. You're ok, don't let negative comments get to you. Cheers!
First, users do not currently have that choice. Sure, you can pay for some things (e.g. youtube premium), but it does nothing for your privacy. If you buy youtube premium you'll very likely see more ads for youtube premium (if you're not already blocking ads).
Second, The real benefit of ads is that it lets small sites that might get a single one-time visit from a user monetize that visit. A blog with a trending post is not going to be able to sell micro-subscriptions to one-time users, but they can get some ad revenue. The only current alternative here is begging for donations. That takes some effort and can piss off readers.
Ironically, although Kaufman mentions that micropayments are hard, Google is one of the few companies currently situated to implement them in a way that would actually improve user privacy. e.g. If a user paid a "Premium Internet" monthly fee, Google Ads could have a flag that turns it's data collection/sharing off and replaces it with micropayments to any site that user visits that are running Google Ads.
Of course, it does seem a little bit like a mafia protection racket for a company devoted to invading user privacy and selling their data to turn around and offer to stop doing that if paid by users!
It's not exactly what you're describing, but they've tried several (unsuccessful) approaches along these lines with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Contributor
(speaking only for myself)
That would be horrible! Data collection and sharing should be off by default, and I never want to see a "Premium Internet" experience.
Have you thought about the possibility that there actually was a choice and it just miserably failed. Or we can call it a "natural selection". One example would be https://contributor.google.com/, which never has gained enough traction since publishers don't like it. This is simply a hard problem. You can build another big tech if you can provide a meaningful, scalable alternative.
Really? I have youtube premium and I can't recall seeing ads for it. Why would they advertise a product to people that already have that product?
> Google Ads could have a flag that turns it's data collection/sharing off and replaces it with micropayments to any site that user visits that are running Google Ads.
FWIW, this flag already exists, except you don't have to do micropayments: https://adssettings.google.com/
I guess you still see ads with this setting, they're just not personalized. Hypothetically you could imagine a "stronger" setting that doesn't just do away with personalization, it does away with ads altogether by allowing the user to "outbid" any advertiser. But I suspect there will be some surprised users who get a bill for hundreds of dollars by doing some particularly high-value searches like "personal injury lawyer" or "mortgage" or something.
And if it were a flat rate, my intuition is that the fee would have to be much higher than most would expect or be willing to pay.
Google built this, it was called Contributor, and it wasn't very popular.
This doesn't make sense. I mean, you might see ads for YouTube premium on other sites, but you aren't seeing them on YouTube. You're paying to remove ads on YouTube, not the whole web. (Nor does it prevent people from stalking you IRL)
2. There are worst jobs to have like working for the auto industry.
3. He's definitely a better person than I am with better values. Who gives 50% earned to charity?
Perhaps some. But I'm sure they don't brag to the world about it.
If I don't do those things (or don't claim to), people will say, "Why should I do that? You don't do that! Hypocrite."
If I do those things, people will say, "You are just bragging/virtue signaling."
(Written years before I started on ads at Google)
Trying every way possible to track and record every second of my life online and in the physical world is evil.
I'm surprised the author focused singularly on the "funding the open web" stance, and did not discuss the alleged negative externalities created by advertising-driven business incentives. The top comments of the blog comments (e.g. https://www.jefftk.com/p/why-i-work-on-ads#lw-Nvd9ZHJLxZpNZD...) also point this out.
For instance, The Netflix documentary "The Social Dilemma" discusses these at length, and it forms a lot of the political zeitgeist around regulation of adtech companies (e.g. driving polarization, radicalization, depression and such).
> The question is, what is the alternative? I see two main funding models:
It's possible to simultaneously believe that ads are currently the effective way to lower barrier of entry to accessing content, and also believe that ads are a detriment to people's mental health.
One alternative would be an ad-supported system that performs less-personalized ad-targeting, and in doing so influences people's behavior less but generates enough revenue to keep the lights on with a reasonable profit margin. The government has laws for regulating natural monopolies like this, where they prevent utility companies from price gouging but grant them a certain amount of margin.
I will offer a contrarian opinion as a user whose salary does not depend on advertising: the advertising model for using Google search and watching Youtube videos works better for me as a consumer.
The alternative of paying $9.99/month for Youtube... or micropayments for each search query or a "Google Search Engine yearly subscription" ... or Patreon donations for video content ... are all more user hostile for my use cases. I don't like ads but they are the most friction-free way to consume a wide variety of content.
I've been using Google Search for over 20 years for free which is pretty amazing. Would I rather replay history and pay ~$120 every year (~$2400 ?) to search for web articles? No.
That said, there are also many corrosive aspects of advertising. Advertising should be open and transparent. If the business of ads are truthful, I will sometimes pay to see ads. E.g. I pay $10 ticket for a home & garden convention show so the manufacturers in booths can advertise their wares to me. The opposite and immoral idea of hidden ad tracking is Facebook trying to convince Apple not to show confirmation dialogs about ad IDFA tracking.
If groceries used to be free, but suddenly cost money, people would riot.
Thus: if groceries used to be free, but suddenly cost money, people would riot.
Arguably: why would people riot about not-free Youtube?
Free services like YouTube have provided me with an immense amount of value, but I would still be hesitant to pay for them unless I absolutely had to.
Ad fraud is already a huge problem, as are things like ransomware. Micropayments would just give bad actors a direct line to your wallet.
It would be utterly exhausting, which is why it will not happen.
I didn't hear any outrage at all when several newspapers transitioned to a pay model and threw up a paywall. The parties most upset were the newspapers themselves.
With video... I pay $70 USD for my cable company (HBO+Star+misc-crap) plus $13 USD for Netflix, plus $12 for disney plus (wife likes a couple shows there), plus $13 Amazon Prime, plus $10 for the local Netflix-like crap in my country (for some local shows).
That means $118 USD for video only, which is 14% of the average income in my country ($843 USD). Imagine if I had to pay $10 dollars a month for each of the internet services we use?
$10 Gmail $10 google $10 Reddit $10 HackerNews $10 Youtube $10 Linkedin $10 Facebook $10 twitter $10 Whatsapp $10 LiChess $10 Slack $10 Samsung Health $10 Google Maps $10 Podcast Republic $10 CBS News (The only US channel I like for news) $10 Home Workout $10 Discord
And that's at the top of my head, it will be $180 USD, or 21% of the average income of someone in my country.
If that happened, the internet will become "a place for the rich" and pretty much only the north emisphere will use it. Yeah, ads suck... but their are a necessary evil to "monetize" users that are just not monetizable any other way.
Sh, it's OK, everyone does it, you are not alone :P
1. Bundling multiple subscriptions is a long-time practice and if more services were paid offerings we'd likely all buy some bundle that gave us most of what we wanted at a reasonable price.
2. Paying for services will reduce the number of services around... which may be a good thing when so many offerings are sub-par.
3. With more paid offerings, we will be more deliberate about how we spend our time, which is what advertising-based models make us forget we are really spending. And as you age you realize that the time you spent watching ad-supported drivel was more expensive than if you had just paid directly for the things you really needed and spent the rest of your time on things that matter - friends, family, experiences, learning etc.
Does the web have to be supported by ads? If the web was a non-profit service, supported by public funds, managed by academic institutions for example, would we miss 90% of the content that's basically sponsored by someone who wants to sell something?
From my point of view it looks like the web is a giant advertising machine built on top of something that could be ... not a giant advertising machine. Still from my POV, it just happens that the big players on the web are suppoting ads because that's where their revenue comes from and if they weren't the big players, then we wouldn't have a web of ads.
So basically we're not paying for ads that we wouldn't be paying for if google didn't run the web.
I remember ~2001 or so a lot of the sites I visited were ad supported, but it mostly just made enough to cover hosting costs. At this point hosting costs are so cheap that I don't even think those style of sites would have trouble existing. Most of those sites existed because some people were interested in a hobby or a subject, and would publish news and have bulletin boards and articles and stuff. Sadly those kind of communities don't seem to exist anymore, now those kind of things end up being subreddits or facebook groups and I never feel like those are quite the same, they just don't have the same curation or community feel.
I wonder whether the gradual switch would need to be made possible through something similar to a micropayment subscription model, which is non publisher specific.
I don't want to commit to subscriptions for 5+ publications, but I'd happily buy a days access occasionally. This feels much more akin to buying a newspaper in the old world.
I think we'd end up seeing positive changes. Especially the end of content producers being held to ransom by advertisers and commercial pressures.
I don't think that's why people are downvoting. Speaking for myself, it's because his analysis focuses only on the benefits of ads, and conveniently ignores the actual ethical problems (e.g. large-scale collection of personal information).
In other words, I see no fresh insight and perspective in jefftk's writing, and worse still, it bears remarkable semblance to a bad-faith argument. I'm sure he is a decent person (really!), but this particular essay is neither interesting, nor particularly respectable IMHO. As a result, a downvote feels appropriate.
I find it ironic to see this brought up as the first example of problems, when this is exactly what Google's FLoC intends to solve. The same FLoC that has so vocally been rejected by HN recently.
Same here:
- Google and Facebook have turned ads into 24/7 surveillance of everything people do
- Now Google roll backs some of it by saying, "with FLoC we can only surveil groups of people 24/7"
- we are expected to praise them for finding a "solution"
And there are also a lot of design questions remaining that Google hasn't answered or is not sure about.
Eg. How will ad bidding work with FLoC?
Finally, and most importantly as it relates to this post - Google pays an enormous amount of money to employees to spend their time and intelligence on building better profiling tools. Building profiling tools is something ethically questionable because of the damage that can be done.
I don't work on FLoC, but why wouldn't bidding handle it just like any other signal? For example, here's where it is in the OpenRTB docs: https://developers.google.com/authorized-buyers/rtb/openrtb-... An advertiser could take it into account in considering whether they want to bid and how much.
I think I have an idea. So by visiting site A, A gets your cohort and now there is somewhere a "central store" or register. Using that A can now do ad bids for that entire cohort to reach others.
But where is that central store? Is Google running that?
Might also work fundamentally different.
Some entity might choose to run a "store" like you're describing, but there's no reason there would only need to be one.
It looks to me like Chrome is proposing a low-level feature that anyone can build more sophisticated products on top of.
I don’t see irony there!
May be I am living in my bubble, but most of the site I visit, mostly mainstream media news in tech, along with most of the social media post, has a flat out dismissal of Ads in general.
So while ads works to pay for X isn't a "fresh" insight, it was never really pointed out ( enough ) in most of the discussions. If the discussion in general was even slightly balanced in pros and cons, then pointing out ads do serve some usefulness wouldn't even be what OP labeled as "contrarian opinion".
>and conveniently ignores the actual ethical problems (e.g. large-scale collection of personal information).
In the context of Ads. Not all ads are large-scale collection of personal information. Which is what FloC was ( AFAIK ) trying to solve. As Apple did with their differential privacy. I often wondered if Google didn't decide to invent a new term called FloC and instead follow Apple and call it differential privacy would the backlash still be the same. But I think at the end of the day it is just a matter of trust. Whether you Trust Google or Apple. ( Or Facebook )
Yes, I agree. That is indeed another unoriginal, stale perspective.
The question for me isn't so much whether hear from one side more than the other, but whether there is some new idea. For me, intellectual content matters much more than equal representation in (social) media.
By this measure, the OP's post is equally trite.
>In the context of Ads. Not all ads are large-scale collection of personal information.
We're talking about Google ads here. Let's stop pretending otherwise.
>Which is what FloC was ( AFAIK ) trying to solve.
Leaving my skepticism aside for a moment, this may have been an opportunity for OP to provide some insight into how the adtech market is evolving, and make the case that it is headed in an ethical direction. He did not. There is no insight here, either.
So again, I think a downvote is a pretty reasonable and measured response. The OP's post was unconvincing and cliched. No big deal. I've written plenty of stuff like that, myself.
There's a section of post with "build browser APIs that will allow this kind of well-targeted advertising without sending your browsing history to advertisers, and then get rid of third-party cookies"; I'm curious what you think of it?
Random generic advertising is fine. It isn't as profitable but it doesn't exploit a person's mental weaknesses. Targeted advertising is straight up exploitation.
Kids being bombarded with ads for plastic surgery nonestop on TikTok, radicalized individuals being targeted with fear-based ads. This is super toxic. And while advertising is a tale as old as human commerce, such insane targeted advertising is not.
The insanely annoying thing that I have seen for a long time is that despite the fact that you have more information on me than anyone else the ads have been either useless or even insulting for years.
I remember bothering to click through the microscopic x in tve corner and select not relevant or something on Thai mail order brides. What did I get next? Filipino mail orders brides. Out of curiosity I marked a number of them as not relevant and I think I also saw:
- Polish
- Ukrainian
- Chinese
- and possibly a couple of more nationalities
- later I got ads for older women near me
- and then gay cruises
This went on for years.
Last year I finally started seing ads for electronics etc but now I feel no remorse for blocking ads anymore.
I'm just fed up.
Meanwhile Facebook, for all their faults and despite me blocking them for far longer than Google actually has had interesting ads.
Edit: I've nothing against Filipino or Thais or gay people or anyone, but I have something against scantily clad women etc showing up on my monitor both at work and at home and I think it says something about Google that they think this was the most relevant ads they could show me for years.
Work and personal.
Much more likely explanation IMO (someone please correct me if I am wrong):
Google get paid by the view these days and optimize for the most expensive views.
Yes it doesn't drive as much engagement, but that's the point. Over-optimizing for engagement is a bad thing. We have seen repeated evidence of this.
There should be general overarching categories: News site, food site, movie site, game site. But not "news site for radical right-wingers who believe in tucker carlson and think gun control is communism" which doesn't really require user tracking, but I think still falls on the bad side of things.
"Is a kid" is interesting. There's literally laws to prevent children from receiving too much advertising on TV _for good reasons_ their brains aren't developed enough to counter it. But on the internet? ANYTHING GOES!
This is "mainstream Republican" and it's about 1.5bits of information after "is UA resident".
Tucker is one of the most popular people in the USA.
I think that's what ads should be - exactly like TV.
Ads sucks and it is alive due to economic incentive from ads. And we know where there is economic incentive its hard to stop (eg. bitcoin mining economic incentive)
(If you said it was signaling race or wealth or something I would understand, but virtue?)
The "badness" of the ads results from the selecting function and what becomes sustainable and favored. Infamously with spam and phone calls it can include outright crime.
I'd apply the same logic here: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
Ad supported models on news paper websites have nearly killed publications like NYTimes. A lot of smaller news papers have died. Only after the paywall model really took off have they been able to survive and thrive.
So there's nothing you can say to the media that will convince them that there's value in ads.
To them, ads and big tech in general are evil entities and must be criticized at every possible turn.
Ignores? That's what the entire second half of the post is about ;)
Starting at "But the biggest issue I see people raising is the privacy impact of targeted ads..."
Yes, that's literally all you have to say on the subject.
The very next paragraph is about how this helps keep ads relevant...
Not at all! First I talk about the economic benefit of targeted ads ("Most products are a much better fit for some people than others..."), then how it works today ("Historically, ads like this have been built on top of third-party cookies..."), then how it can work without cross-site tracking ("build browser APIs that will allow this kind of well-targeted advertising without sending your browsing history to advertisers, and then get rid of third-party cookies...")
Why?
Targeting Ads based on anything else is invasive, discriminatory, and enables even higher levels of manipulation. If I get targeted by content independent targeted ads, it can be almsot impossible to avoid those Ads as they will follow you everywhere you go.
Instagram gives me fantastically targeted ads, and I appreciate that.
For example think about how much better society could've been over the past decades if, instead of saying "people can't reasonably make decisions about [insert drug here] so we're going to illegalize all of them" we'd said "wow, adults can make decisions for themselves".
The war on drugs was a fundementally bad approach to fixing the problem. If it had worked and drug use had dropped near zero over a decade or two, you wouldn't see the current level of support for ending it. There are other cases where removing personal choice is not controversial (such as seat belt laws, incarceration,
In fact, the failure of the war on drugs is an argument against relying purely on personal responsibility to solve the problem. Simply punishing people and expecting them to learn enough about the consequences of drug use to make the responsibile decision to stay away failed.
It turns out that sometimes to get people to a place where they can take full personal responsibility, it requires giving them some help.
We should strive to avoid removing personal responsibility and choice. The better job we do of providing the tools and support needed to make good decisions (i.e. ones the deciser will look back on without regret), the more respsibility we can easily allow.
For examole: If we do a good job of protecting amd treating gambling addicts, that facilitates opening up gambling to more people in more locations.
Your original comments were that you wanted to outlaw certain types of ads entirely, war-on-drugs style. Not "take care of people who might be adversely affected by certain types of ads", but rather "these ads shouldn't exist", even if (from the broader perspective) that approach could cause more harm than good.
Can you be more precise about what you mean and why the current system doesn't have it? You're saying that everyone should see ads, even ads they won't like? Forgive me if this isn't a hill I'm interested in dying on.
"It makes content providers more responsible for the Ads they carry. It allows me to avoid sites that show me bad Ads (such as mail order brides)."
Not in a meaningful way. If the ads are generated automatically based on the content, the site might not have much to do with it. Example: Suppose there's a wedding planning site, and a content-based targeting system notices the word "bride" on the site a lot and serves mail order bride ads. Yes, you could avoid the wedding planning site because of this, but is there any reason to punish them? It's not their fault.
"If I get targeted by content independent targeted ads, it can be almsot impossible to avoid those Ads as they will follow you everywhere you go."
Isn't there a menu that lets you select "I don't want to see this ad"?
> Yes, you could avoid the wedding planning site because of this, but is there any reason to punish them? It's not their fault.
It is absolutely their fault. Content providers should face full responsibility for the Ads they allow to appear on their website.
One of the ways that the current Ad targeting system is awful is that it allows advertisers to pretend to foist this responsibility onto Ad companies that are much more insulated from consumer blow back.
> Isn't there a menu that lets you select "I don't want to see this ad"?
Those menus often don't stop other Ads of that type from being shown and there is no legal obligation to do so. All they really do is give the advertiser more information about you.
If the only recourse you have to abusive behavior is to politely ask them to stop, someone is going to keep abusing you to make money.
I wish that my ads would be more relevant to what I like especially when it comes to music. What does youtube do? I search for a specific video because somebody told me it's there. I find it and sit through the whole length of 50+ mins and after I'm done navigate back to the YT frontpage. What do I see? A recommendation of the video I just watched. And it'll stay there for the next 6 weeks.
The other extreme for me is watching something from the other camp simply because I want to learn what they're being exposed to. In my bubble this means conservative stuff like videos of people debating Ayn Rand or a Jordan Peterson. And I swear I'll have to fight for the next 6 months to get similar shit off my timeline. In fact it's easier to throw myself into the rabbit hole of watching Foucault, Zizek, Philosophy genre and fighting my way into content that is dominated by the likes of Tucker Carlson (and what used to be Alex Jones, Brietbart and others) than it is to shed the conservative label that YT has filed me under. And with conservative I mean seriously questionable stuff like Q-anon, climate change denying, cray-cray type of things.
Because of this I now have different accounts for when I want to see the other side of the coin/polarization.
Not sure if I should be blaming YT/Google with this since society is so polarized that the algorithm just reflects that reality. But it's not like the algo hasn't played a major role in creating this dystopian reality in the first place.
Now they are still doing that, but they have compounded the awfulness, because now they track where you are visiting and push more of those ads in your eyeline. Switched device, tough, the ads do too. The advertiser now also knows who looked at the ad, where they came from to see the ad, where the left to after they saw the ad. And then what they did for the next 2 weeks, so now they can make sure their ad is in front of your eyes whenever they want because they tracked your browsing habits.
Advertising was bad before, now it is insidious tracking and monitoring of users, under the pretense of advertising. /rant
My guess is that offline advertising has become cheaper and so they do more of it.
I live out in the country now. There are no outdoor ads here. I like it.
(The local weekly paper is called The Advertiser: an apt name, for it’s about ¾ ads. But I don’t look at it. My life is basically completely ad-free except when I go down to Melbourne.)
Some of the ads are hilarious. Some are for the services that are not common in the USA. Nintendo has some where they add in a trivia Q&A, the format being, Question->Ad->Answer and I usually find them interesting and I'm often happy to learn about whatever new Nintendo game they are showing off. Often there are ads for theater plays, concerts, museum events that I only find out about because I saw them on the train.
I also like some of the campaigns where they decorate an entire station or the entire train, the entire car.
friend unsure about her marriage.. getting ads to sell her wedding ring via fbook.. they divorced 2 months later. Guess what the first thing she did was?
A friend's father.. gambling addiction and an android phone - sleeps on the streets and eats via dumpsters, still keeps that addictive android device running.
Google sending data on people to fusion centers.. maybe none of those people were ever hurt by that - or the sharing of info from location data dumps, or the vids from nest cams.. I would assume there is a probability that at least one person was hurt when actions via gun toting state came knocking on at least one door, maybe more - and that stuff 100% coming from collection of data.
Just because journalists aren't interviewing these people to see if they were hurt, does not mean it's not happening.
I have no way to opt people out of alcohol ads.. I've seen them so I know others have.. does a sale on the new pink-liqour at 10am lead someone to drink out of juice boxes before noon at a kid's soccer practice? I can't say for sure.. it's just a coincidence they are drinking the new advertised thing - maybe it was an ad on the liqour store window that did it - there won't be hard evidence there.
I can think of more, but I know these are small data points from here. I'm glad you have not witnessed such things.
- Are you suggesting that your friend got divorced so that she could sell her ring, because an ad told her she could sell her ring? I doubt that was the straw that broke the camels back.
- The android phone has utility beyond it's addictiveness. Yes homeless people need a phone.
- Re fusion centers: ads targeting data is a relatively shitty surveillance too, the three letter agencies have much better ways of collecting this data.
- Targeted alcohol advertising I'll agree is an issue, but if you're an alcoholic, you can't really escape the ubiquity of alcohol everywhere.
I think the adverse privacy impact of targeted advertising is pretty overblown, but it so happens that ad targeting is so effective it has the illusion of being surveillant. The actual data being collected is anonymized and not personal.
I suspect there may different rules for different jurisdictions/markets which might explain differences in your experiences.
when trying to cater to folks who struggled with such, indeed the options were limited for dining out.. IHop and waffle bouse two of the options I recall.
The ring thing - I think it was the straw that broke the camels back honestly.. and hey that might have been a good thing - it certainly wasn't the two-ton elephant on top - but I do think it was the thing that made an easy / quick escape possible - maybe that's a good thing - some religious folks may feel otherwise - I'm on the fence about it - but it does point to a weird thing that probably should not be happening with social network data imho.
the fusion centers / requests for locations / emails / search history - all other data.. I agree ads are shitty surveillance generally - however the mass amounts of data being collected to make the ads more valuable - the location data, the emails, the search history - all of that has been quite valuable in many cases from what I have seen on the news..
when it's a murderous ex lover people may cheer - but how much reporting is done on the requests for data that just pry into people's lives and cause them to lose time and money and threats of being shot - that don't go to trials / convictions / wrong person...
so this is more of a reply to the parent comment to consider about harm from mass surveillance they could not think of any.. well there are some - and really many.. certainly many more than my weak top of the head considerations. Not just specifically ads themselves.
I think there are some places where alcohol ads on billboards are banned - and part of me thinks that's a good thing, the free speech absolutist in me says it's not.. but if we ban nudes or gore or whatever on billboards cuz public safety - well sadly alcohol and tobacco probably should also be included there - and gambling.. and addictive technology.. I mean maybe not in Vegas.. I dunno. I hate the alcohol ads on the tables at restaurants and the immediate upsell by waiters/resses with great drink specials.. they should ask if you want a "dry" experience at the table imho.
I agree targeted ads are very good in many ways - I just think people should get more control to 'stop showing X ad cuz Y (already bought it / decided I hate it / have an addiction / whatever) - turn off all targeted cuz it's a shared device and fam is seeing presents.. whatever..
I must disagree about the data being collected though - sure a third party advertiser on yahoo may not be collecting a ton of info about someone - but google does collect a ton of personally identifiable info including emails, gps / locations traveled, search history and much more I am sure.
That data can be used to harm people, by the state, by divorce attorneys.. one could say the hernandez location data led to him being jailed and suicided - I think most would argue that catching him with tech was a good thing - but the demanding of data from big G is not always used for such things, and it can be abused or just used to fish expedition into lives.
There are many ways to harm using the data collected.. oh yeah - the insurance fraud people in new york demanding all stored info about people while they fished for people pretending to be disabled.. I mean, doing good was thier goal - but some people's privacy was slayed that were not doing fraud - is that harm? People seem to lean towards certain other pics of people being shared re-harms victims - so I dunno.
It's not just the ads - it's the other data collected to enable highly targeted ads that can and is used to harm.
How many arrests have been made using google data? How many investigations to peer into lives that did not lead to an arrest? How many give us all cell phones near location X during Y-Z time so we can look into them.. How many times has google taken info and sent it voluntarily to agencies with guns? I'd love to see that in a transparency report.
I know both F and G occasionally push back in requests from doj - but in the end - they give up data on a regular basis even if they ask to limit scope sometimes - and certainly there are times when harm comes to a target at least once I would guess.
Not trying to make a strong case for digital ad companies evil - just trying to point to parent commenter that there are examples in the news of harm done using the data - and suggesting many more examples exist - we just don't hear about them all. Admittedly - percentage wise - it's probably .0000002 percent or something, unless we get into addictions and shopping addictions - then higher - but it's not like the intent by the companies is to do evil always - it's just that the tools do enable it imho.
Targeted ads supports the status quo instead of exposing everyone to stuff they might want.
Not to mention targeted ads just don't work for me. They always show crap I'd never use, within my domain of knowledge, and never show interesting things outside my domain. Overall I'm more than glad to block ads because I gain nothing from them. They are a liability. Anonymization I don't believe in, what's the difference between my SSN and a MD5 of my SSN?
https://www.intomore.com/you/facebook-ads-outed-me/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2018/12/12/dear-tec...
https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2020/4/9/21204425/targeted-ads...
https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-lets-advertisers..., https://www.propublica.org/article/hud-sues-facebook-housing..., https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-advertising-disc...
https://themarkup.org/citizen-browser/2021/04/29/credit-card...
https://themarkup.org/news/2021/04/13/how-facebooks-ad-syste...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Ana...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-03-27/ad-scamme...
etc. etc. etc.
Links 2 and 3 are concerning. The FB and Google do have a way to stop that though - you can click an ad and say it doesn't interest you or you don't like it, that signal is insanely strong and the platforms will turn off the spigot.
The rest is not actual harm to people, its people concerned about the idea of targeting being harmful. Cambridge Analytica was a laughable scandal btw, absolutely no one was actually impacted by it.
As a side note, it's funny how people say that ads are terrible, but also its terrible if certain groups of people don't get to see ads.
via (Ads Are Impersonating Government Websites in Google Results, Despite Ban - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27150407 )
> This model has some major drawbacks from a privacy perspective. Typically, the vendor doesn't just get that you are interested in cars, they get the full URL of the page you are on. This lets them build up a pretty thorough picture of all the pages you have visited around the web. Then they can link their database with other vendors databases, and get even more coverage.
Most people have no issue with the collection of personal information in itself. They only start caring when others start to make money off of it. If Google completely got rid of ads as a revenue source and still made the exact same services for free, they would still collect nearly as much sensitive data (e.g. location tracking for better routing). However, a lot fewer people would care. Privacy activists would still exist, but I doubt that regular people bother to listen to them.
So it’s hardly a surprise to me that people see it as ok for Google to use their information to provide them a service like routing, but disapprove of their using that data to enable an industry they see as harmful. I don’t think the problem is exclusively that Google makes money but rather that they make money as the kingpin of an industry most people feel negatively impacts their lives.
The opposing view would call "harmful" downright hysterical in the same way teens would nigh universally roll eyes at Tipper Gore's claims of music as harmful or Jack Chick's anything.
As for claims that the effort and money at Google could be spent in less harmful ways? No it couldn't, not the money they received - except as operating as a take the money and run scam which hardly qualifies as less harm as an instant zeroing of account values. The "harm" is why they got the money in the first place. You have to give the people paying money what they want to keep receiving money to get what you need to fulfill the demands.
Now, if Google spun off a non-profit foundation to offer those services for free without Ads, more people might accept trusting them with all that personal info.
I work in a different industry with its own issues and impacts on the society and the environment. I try not to think about it and even look at the positive things to gloss over the bad impact.
Anyway one thing I haven't seen mentioned yet about ads is that it encourages the unrestrained growth of ad space itself. There are just a billion articles on the internet written for the sole purpose of grabbing your attention and selling it. A lot of these sites have no real value, one of each ("How do I do X") on the internet would be more than enough. A lot of them ought to just be headlines that I can skip ("Man Utd interested in a teenager" would in the old days just say the guy's name).
The real argument against the article is that the calculus of paywall vs ads is not quite as straightforward as proposed. Either mode of operation has reflexive influence on what the internet looks like, and that's maybe where to dig deeper for an argument. How do the different options encourage different interests to behave?
1. All ads in general.
2. Targeted advertisement, regardless of the privacy implications.
3. Data collection for targeted advertisement.
4. Data collection for anything.
5. Whether or not users consent to all of the above.
So I don't really think it is fair for anybody to insist that there is a single agreed upon actual ethical problem in web advertising.
Did you read the section starting from "This model has some major drawbacks from a privacy perspective"?
We know what bad ads are, not in terms of ads quality but the amount of tracking and personal information gathered and sold across different companies.
The Internet Archive is a great example of this. A non-profit that relies neither on advertising revenue nor subscription revenue from individual users, and instead thrives on income for providing archival services and grants from organisations that recognise the public good it is providing.
I grew up with "free internet services" but I can't complain on one side about ads and consuming stuff and in the other side not just paying for those services directly and it's a monthly thing. Easy to cancel much better than all those 1 year contracts for stuff like paytv.
The ads. Aren't. The problem. The stalking is.
Ads can be useful. But no one is saying they aren't! So why is it constantly the case that when internet users make the simple and reasonable request "Please, can you just not stalk us everywhere we go?" the response is "but we're helping you!"
The parasitic advertising industry likes to pretend we're in a symbiotic relationship while conveniently ignoring the actual symbiotic solution (see e.g., DDG) because it won't make them nearly as much money.
Exactly. If you want online ads done right, look no further than how podcasts do it. The medium doesn't allow for stalking. Podcast producers often stake their own reputation by voicing the ads themselves. That editorial freedom lets them be creative and respectful of their audiences. And advertisers can use podcast-specific coupon codes to attribute ad campaigns to sales. It's a win-win for everyone.
Huh. Are you sure? I don't know anything about how podcast advertising works, but it sounds like you're assuming the full audio track, complete with ads, is the same everywhere and always.
Spotify will use everything it knows about you to target podcast ads https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/8/21056336/spotify-streaming...
Most podcasts and players operate on RSS feeds though. While they can very well target things via IP addresses and user-agent (no getting around that), podcasters and their advertisers don't have the capability to read/write persistent tracking data on the client, at least as far as I know. An advertiser would be hard-pressed to see that I personally listen to Stuff You Should Know and This American Life, even if the advertiser had contracts with both. The medium really hobbles how much tracking can be done.
The usual answer to this is to use the context rather than personal information and browsing history. You bring less value to the company advertising their product, but I'd argue that most people are fine with this approach.
The problem is that current incentives lead to a race to the bottom: if some advertisers are less ethical, they can arguably bring more value to their clients, and the ethical advertiser cannot compete anymore.
Contextual advertising, on the other hand, is simple. It shifts the focus away from technology and toward people: recognizing your audience and crafting a message to them, instead of trying to have a computer do it for you. It's old-fashioned marketing.
It's possible to target ads to a specific audience by exploiting the selection effect that led to your audience existing. This doesn't favour general-audience communities, sure, but I'd honestly be happy with the answer "general-audience things just aren't how the future looks".
But I have no clue what would distinguish (to me) a non-shit ad? Is it saving me money on something I was already going to buy?
Yes. I've been looking for weight equipment over the past year because of the pandemic and gyms being closed and the majority of ads on Instagram are now exercise equipment. I ended up seeing an ad for a company in my country with fairly decent prices and bought a new squat stand. The price difference between the one I bought and the ones I was looking at from companies in the area was around $200. I give up some privacy, they give me targeted ads. Please give me more.
Perhaps today, but not if we design browser APIs that allow targeting without cross-site tracking: https://github.com/WICG/turtledove https://github.com/WICG/privacy-preserving-ads/blob/main/Par...
1. Facebook tracks users across the internet to enrich the profiles of their users
2. Data leaks.
3. Users are now in trouble.
I can come up with many more if you ask and then give me a sec.
Similar things happen with jobs and ethnicity, jobs and gender, with jobs and age discrimination, etc.
But you asked how targeted ads hurt people, and I showed a fairly recent example. Something that wouldn't exist without targeted advertising. How does that not prove my point?
Here's a list of ways around "cannot filter by race". It took 2 seconds on google: https://www.searchenginewatch.com/2011/12/06/how-to-target-e...
But, you seem to be shifting the goalposts pretty significantly. So, do you agree with the base point that targeted ads can produce pretty bad results?
Beyond that, it's an open secret (as in: it's been mentioned several times in available documents, but never deliberately disclosed or extensively discussed publicly, so far as I know) that since at least the mid or late 00s the US government has had contracts with multiple major tech companies that have a high level of access to citizen Internet traffic to basically search their databases of Internet activity at will. Which companies these are, I'm not sure—I suspect it's mostly telcos, personally—but it's another reason the existence of these datasets is inherently dangerous, and that they should not be permitted to exist at all, no matter who holds them.
A simple search here for “facebook data” will get you started: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=facebook+data
I mean there are so many examples it's difficult to believe this is a genuine question. It sort of like asking in 1984 did anyone really get hurt by big brother watching?
My primary work is on https://github.com/WICG/turtledove (discussed in the post), which allows well-targeted advertising without sending your browsing history to advertisers
* Ads render inside "fenced frames" where they cannot learn what page they are on and the page cannot learn what ad is being shown
* Reporting is available, but it is aggregate-only
> GET https://first-ad-network.com/.well-known/fetch-ads?interest_...
So, at the very least, the ad network will be able to see your IP and know that you like athletic shoes and visited www.wereallylikeshoes.com. If you visit some other domain first-ad-network.com owns with the same IP whithin a small window of time, it can be pretty confident it's the same person and even store some client side data at that point. It feels like they can construct a reasonably good profile about their users by using that technique. That's considering the browser doesn't leak out any other potentially identifying information.
Then, the actual ad owner could have something in the URL that identifies which campaign you ultimately came from, as they probably know which interest groups they were targeting. So, when you click on the ad, they know one interest about you and, if you clicked in ads from other campaigns they run, they may reconstruct your profile well.
Yes, there are a lot of user identifying bits in an IP address. Chrome has two proposals: https://github.com/bslassey/ip-blindness I'm not sure what other browsers are thinking?
> That's considering the browser doesn't leak out any other potentially identifying information.
Which they definitely do. All the browsers are working on figuring out how to thwart fingerprinting, and it's really hard. I am glad, at least, that we were able to get Google Ads to publicly commit to not fingerprinting.
> when you click on the ad, they know one interest about you and, if you clicked in ads from other campaigns they run, they may reconstruct your profile well
Yes, when people click on ads in Turtledove the advertiser does learn something. This is a huge improvement to the status quo where advertisers learn things just by bidding, or an intermediate stage where advertisers learn things when they win an auction -- users don't click on ads very often, so the amount of information leaked this way is very low.
Exactly how much information the advertiser is able to learn on a click is still very much up in the air, so if you have views on this you might consider participating on the repo?
In a less techinical point of view, ads are probably a net negative for society. People are buying things they don't need, spending time they could be doing other things and just having a worse experience they could have were not for content farms and other practices incentivised by ads. I do see the value of ads bringing services to people who wouldn't have money to pay for them otherwise, it's income distributions of sorts, but I think we can do better.
Anyway, interesting read about ip blindness. As long as the CDNs and proxies are not controlled by the same company that owns the ad networks, then it could work out. Though it's hard to find the correct incentives for the right people to own the right parts of the network. Another alternative would be something like onion, which is more distributed (although quite wasteful of resources).
Since at least the 1920s (I’m thinking of Edward Bernays but there are probably earlier examples) the goal of advertising is to manipulate consumers into making irrational decisions. The majority of ads make us feel inadequate to get us to buy something, like the only the thing that will make us whole is a new instant pot or whatever.
I know it's hard to disprove but I don't think adverts have that effect on me, partially it's because I don't see many adverts and partly because that kind of blatant manipulation is so hilariously blatant.
I acknowledge that someone might be running a really effective advertising campaign on me but since I basically don't buy anything I don't actually need I can't imagine what that would be.
Haven't bought anything techie for about 18mths and when I do mostly shop on specs, reviews from sources I trust.
I viscerally loathe advertising, I don't like been manipulated in any context so I run a background process mentally watching for it :).
I'm an advertisers nightmare, I'll not only ignore your advertising I'll go to significant technical lengths to block it for myself and everyone in my family.
Our cogniitive biases act as shortcuts to save energy when making decisions, and advertisers exploit those shortcuts. If you’re on high alert while shopping, catching and recalibrating for your biases at every step of the way then yeah you can probably escape most marketing but for most people that doesn’t come naturally.
If you’re not careful I bet you too slip up sometimes. I know I’ve caught myself at the grocery store reaching for one product over another just because it’s in unbleached cardboard packaging (signaling to me that it’s somehow more local or organic or whatever).
These tricks become obvious when you consciously work through them (ex: obviously some megacorp can package their items in cardboard the same way mom and pop small businesses can) but most of the time we aren’t processing consciously, and that’s how marketing works.
If people were interested in seeing ads, a business of selling pure ad catalogues would actually be a successful venture! As it stands now, you can't even give such material away for free without generating hate. Because people don't want to see ads! It doesn't matter if they're tracked or not. The ad is the problem!
But what about the manipulation?
One of the other replies note that podcasts do ads right. I hugely disagree. Not only does it steal the listener's time and focus (presuming they don't just scrub past it, which I presume most people do unless they put little value on their own time, and think a host is being sincere when they pitch some snake-oil supplement, pillow or VPN), it puts a dirty veneer over the whole realm where everyone becomes half-bit hucksters.
Yes. That's the problem. Make less money from ads --> make less content/riskier to make content (same thing). The more money ads make, the fewer of them you have to see to fund the same amount of content (or, alternatively, you get more/higher quality content for a given (fixed) quantity of ads).
There is no set "amount of effectiveness," so to speak. If ads are more profitable, advertisers are still going to spend just as much or more on them, precisely because they have a higher ROI.
So you see more ads, the people publishing content make more money (more ads + better ads --> more valuable eyeballs --> more valuable content), and then the ROI for making content is higher, so people make + publish more of it. You get more, more valuable content.
Now, you may argue that the privacy cost is higher than the reward of more/better content, but I think that it probably isn't. Especially because it's hard (not impossible) to match your browsing history with your IRL identity and no one really cares about you, I think that the privacy cost is smaller than the reward. You might disagree.
There's a couple of non-sequitors here.
1. You don't necessarily get more valuable content. A lot of times the higher ROI leads to gamification of the whole system and you get more content, but it's all spam or varying levels of quality. This spam varies from complete trash to fairly polished, but none of it is actually valuable.
2. Even if we concede the point and assume that we get purely more valuable content, there is a limit to the amount of content anyone can consume in a day. And the advertising itself competes for your attention with even that valuable content. So the benefit from an increased amount of valuable content has a natural limit. The harm from the increase of ads is not so naturally bounded. So even if the balance of cost/benefit starts on the side you think, where the benefit of the content outweighs the cost of advertising, it will naturally, eventually trend towards the cost outweighing the benefit.
You are correct that in my view, personally, the cost already far outweighs the benefit. We can argue whether that's true on the whole for most people, but there is no argument when it comes to me personally. It's not worth it. There is a lot of content I only consume because I'm blocking ads. If I was unable to block ads and had to pay that cost, I would certainly forgo the content.
So annoyingly while it is true that ads are a currently necessary part of funding the internet, it is also true that a perverse incentive exists to just keep hammering the $ button once you find a model that works. It is a good argument for why we probably should want to pay directly for content. Or y'know, just topple capitalism on account of it generating toxic localized optimizations literally everywhere.
Many people have a favorite TV ads. People watch the Super Bowl for the ads. People sing radio jingles to themselves. College kids put nice magazine ads on their dorm walls. People pay money for clothes with logos that are essentially just ads for themselves. People watch videos of influencers unboxing/using/reviewing products they are paid to unbox/use/review. Etc. People love all kinds of ads.
No one likes banner ads. It is failed ad format and should be replaced. No one likes direct targeting. It should be made illegal. There are lots of other ad formats and methods that work great. Those two are the problem.
Look, for example, at large advertisers like Coca Cola. Coke spends ~$1 billion/year in the US alone on ads. That's not because nobody has heard of them. The point is to shift money into Coke's pockets.
Almost all advertising provides no net benefit to society; it's just an arms race between companies competing to manipulate people. If we banned it, we'd quickly find other ways to get people the minimal information content it contains. We'd definitely find ways to spend the $1tn or so that it consumes now. And that's not even counting the benefits from less waste and market distortion caused by advertising.
And there certainly is a universe where we would pay for search, in the same way that we pay for countless other things. Google's business model scorched Earth the realm, though, so there isn't a lot of potential for that now, but it's a universe I could easily imagine.
"the advertising model for using Google search and watching Youtube videos works better for me as a consumer."
Do you use an ad blocker? I certainly do, as does most of HN. Layers of ad blockers. It works for me because I get the content for free and I don't have the scourge of ads, so sure it's a fine model.
When that podcast starts with six minutes of promos I just scrub right past them. I don't believe I've clicked on a single ad online in decades, at least not intentionally. I honestly don't even understand how that industry survives. My gut instinct is that it's a giant illusion and effectively a massive fraud.
A major reason many of us have such a laissez-faire attitude towards the detritus of the ad world is that it's something that other people endure.
However, I understand that if this had to change, the income would have to shift, too.
I understand it pretty well. I pay for a variety of services for the value they provide me and to ensure they remain viable. I use a lot of free, ad-supported tools without an ad-blocker.
I make a small amount of money from ad-supported sites. I make more money from user-supported sites.
I tend to be more concerned with the user experience. I don't mind ads that don't get in the way of my intent for using a tool or site. I have backed out of many sites that show me more ads than content, especially if presented in a way that make them more likely to be clicked accidentally than out of actual interest. They loose me as a user. That's a choice I get to make.
I enjoy physical magazines (or digital versions of physical magazines). I pay for several subscriptions, but I know they are making much more money from advertising. I wouldn't pay more for a version without ads. I like many of the ads. They are well-targeted and visually appealing. But I am free to ignore them and I am free to stop subscribing if the advertising diminishes the value I get from it.
Ad-supported sites are important to the ecosystem. Can they be done better? Yes! Can we make choices as consumers as to whether or not we patronize a site based on their advertising behavior? Yes! Ad blockers may play a role in that. Perhaps both will help push the industry in a more privacy-centric direction.
Privacy is more commonly seen as a feature these days. I have a few services I promote as both free and privacy-focused; no ads, no or minimal analytics, etc. And with enough interest I would hope to eventually charge for them to make them sustainable without ads.
Maybe it's personal taste, but signing into an account is much more pleasant for me than watching an ad. As for the monetary cost, it only takes one ad per year that works on you to lose as much money anyway.
> Advertising should be open and transparent. If business of ads are truthful
Ads are not truthful because they are highly incentivized to lie > I will sometimes pay to see ads. E.g. I pay $10 ticket for a home & garden convention show so the manufacturers in booths can advertise their wares to me.
I have to honestly ask why? What do you feel you are measuring other than the advertising budget of the sellers? Granted, such a convention would also allow you to evaluate the wares to some extent, but doing that is to ignore the ads.
Only if you regret the purchase, no? For example, I subscribed to CBS (now Paramount+) because I saw ads for a show I was interested in watching (Picard).
(I realize lots of advertising does not follow this model)
In advertising, context matters. Ads when you’re in discovery mode looking for things to consume? Great, ads are usually unobtrusive in that context. But there are only so many discovery scenarios but lots of ad money to be made.
Advertising is a zero-sum game to dominate the human attention span. This has negative effects on our social lives and mental health. Is saving a few dollars a month worth the societal impact that constant advertising entails? In my opinion this constant barrage of ads is a big part of why we as a society can disagree about basic facts about the world: we’ve been conditioned to consume media that is promoted by virtue of its ability to draw eyeballs through being controversial / shocking, rather than the veracity or value of the information. Ads create a perverse incentive for publishers to operate at the edge of truth because those stories / media get more views.
Why are these user-hostile? I see very little friction to any of them - $10/year YT subscription disappears into the background (that's, what, two moderately expensive coffee drinks? if you spend just a single day watching educational content, the obtained value will easily exceed $10), per-search microtransactions would be so cheap that you could just turn on the "always transparently pay for this" feature, and any YouTube video of reasonable size that is worth watching is definitely worth spending the few seconds of time to assess and then click the "donate to get access" button.
What, you're saying that these things don't exist? Then that's a problem with currently available implementations of microtransactions, not the concept of microtransactions itself.
It's easy, from a technical perspective, to design a low-friction microtransaction system.
> Would I rather replay history and pay ~$120 every year (~$2400 ?) to search for web articles?
That's a price problem, not a pricing model problem. Microtransactions/subscriptions are irrelevant - that price is so far above the actual cost of your Google searches that the equivalent in terms of the current model (you pay with your data) is that Google demands your SSN in order for you to search - and the results in both cases will be the same: users will use a different product.
Edit: Because this comment has gotten strawmanned in the same way repeatedly: I did not say that the ad-funded model should go away, nor do I believe that - my comment was purely a response to the idea that microtransactions are infeasible, and nobody carefully reading it would think otherwise.
Oh? People have been trying since at least https://www.w3.org/Conferences/WWW4/Papers/246/ (1995)
And, in the specific case of microtransactions, it's well-known that consumers like cheap and free things - which causes them to flock to ad-funded services because said services make it as difficult as possible to see what data you're paying for those services with.
The reason why microservices have failed is largely due to the negative externalities (e.g. massive personal information harvesting and sale) being concealed from users. If you showed users how much of their data was being harvested, and who it was being sold to (transitively), how many do you think would continue to use an ad-supported product if a reasonably-priced paid alternative was available?
Edit: to provide a specific example of a somewhat-low-friction microtransaction system (that could easily be scaled to "extremely low friction" with non-architectural UI tweaks) that I've had experience with, I present to you Blendle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blendle
These are not hard technical problems.
If we are using micropayments to let users directly pay a site for views of that site's articles or for skipping ads on those articles, then the jurisdiction that the user is in is likely to consider that a sale in their jurisdiction and want the site to collect VAT or sales tax. If people from 50 different countries purchase articles, you might end up having to deal with taxes in 50 different countries! (Even countries that have thresholds of the form "no tax unless total sales in the country are above $X" might require you to register there and fill out a form each quarter saying you didn't meet the threshold).
The site doesn't have that problem if instead they sell ads and get their money from the advertisers or from the ad network. That money is taxed, but it is taxed as income in the location of the site, not as a sale where the users are. Having people visit your site from 50 different countries doesn't increase the complexity of your tax situation.
Assuming we can't get widespread adoption of more micropayment friendly rules for online purchased of content access and/or ad skipping, there is a way to use micropayments for that while avoiding the tax jurisdiction explosion.
That is the imposition of a middleman service. It sounds like Blendle might be such a middleman.
You buy articles from the middleman, making your micropayment to the middleman. The middleman license the content for resale from the publishers and pays a royalty based on volume.
If you arrange this right when the user buys an article the middleman is the seller for VAT or sales tax purposes and so it is the middleman that has to deal with all the different jurisdictions. The publishers only have to deal with their own jurisdiction and perhaps the jurisdiction of the middleman.
But then you have the issue of who will be the middleman? I don't think we want it to end up like streaming movies, where we've got Netflix and Disney+ and Peacock and Hulu and Prime and Google and HBO Max and a whole bunch of others and you need to use more than one of them to see all the content you want.
We probably need at most 3 or 4 big middlemen that are easy enough for publishers to use that most sites that want to offer a pay per article option are signed up with all of those middlemen.
My guess is that it might end up being the same companies that provide "sign on with" services that end up providing micropayment middlemen services and/or companies that already provide big online stores that sell internationally.
That would be Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google.
I used to live off of $7,000 a year. $10/year is something I'd seriously think about.
I'd be careful about generalizing a fixed cost subscription's impact. Typically, it will hit poorer communities harder than wealthy communities.
So there are several problems with this:
1. You restated the above commenter's cost from $10/month to $10/year for some reason. For context, Google's annual revenue seems to be $180B. That makes $10/month far closer to the likely alternative;
2. That $10/year or $10/month "disappears into the background" for you. That's a far more significant cost for the majority of Internet users who are in the developing world. Cost aside, there may be issues with even having the payment infrastructure to actually pay for that (eg due to sanctions or US foreign policy).
I agree with the post's author: there are significant benefits to an ad-supported model and high on that list is low friction (paying for any service is a huge point of friction) and that those in the developing world get highly-equivalent services to the developed world.
There are definitely problems with advertising. The over-collection of data is of course one. But it seems convenient and disingenuous to overlook the benefits as they're inconvenient to a shallow anti-advertising diatribe.
fyi... That was my fault because I later edited it without realizing others had quickly quoted it. I made a typo "$10/year" which was clearly a mistake because no mainstream service for videos/music/books charges 84 cents a month.
Parent's comment originally read $10/year.
> For context, Google's annual revenue seems to be $180B. That makes $10/month far closer to the likely alternative
I don't see how the first part of your statement at all supports the second. Google's revenue now, with many different services in wildly varying stages of profitability, has very little connection to the hypothetical subscription price that would be applied to a service that is now ad-funded - you seem to be engaging in wild speculation.
> 2. That $10/year or $10/month "disappears into the background" for you.
First, YouTube is a luxury service. Second, I specifically addressed the problem of "it's too expensive" later on in my comment, with "That's a price problem, not a pricing model problem." - which still holds. Third, market segmentation is a thing. Fourth, those in the developing world will pay with their personal information - which can be far more devastating if e.g. they're a dissident living in an oppressive regime. Fifth, I never said the ad model should be removed.
You seem to be making the assumption that I am suggesting that the ad-funded model be replaced with the subscription/microtransaction models - I do not, and my comment was carefully worded to not make that claim. I specifically believe that models where payment is made in money should always be available, with ads as an option - not that the former should be completely removed.
> paying for any service is a huge point of friction
False. I can relatively easily design a microtransaction service that has very little friction for payment. Meanwhile, there already exist many extremely low-friction payment services. If you have a credit card in the US with the new contactless payment technology, it's extremely easy to pay for things - you just swipe your card. If you have a Google Play account, it's similarly easy to purchase a new app. If you have a subscription service with auto-renew, paying for another month/year is literally frictionless - there's absolutely no interaction necessary.
> But it seems convenient and disingenuous to overlook the benefits as they're inconvenient to a shallow anti-advertising diatribe.
See previous statement about your mistaken assumption that I said that advertising should be eliminated. Attacking a strawman does nobody any good.
Showing ads is the first level and from that perspective I suppose it's fine.
At the next level is harvesting data from those ads and sharing that data with third parties. I feel that's where things get very, very messy.
Because if ads can be targeted based on a person's profile, so can other manipulations. Especially if that data is available with an authoritarian government.
Since most companies showing ads don't play fairly, users in turn choose to block ads completely.
I feel the main point is, no you haven't got this for free.
If you were to pay $2400 dollars, Google would also need to pay you for your attention during this time
It reads a lot like that.
Jeff posits that advertising is competing only with paywalls and brushes aside hobby work, people producing content for the pure benefit of it, as if that is not impacted.
If I produce something creative with real value as part of a hobby, I know there is a high chance it will be copied/stolen by a slick advertiser who will then out-compete me.
So, I'm net less motivated to participate in the whole system of creating content.
Get me started on the ads that come with play store apps and "free games".
however at $12/month that would be $864 per year to help them. I would jump at $60 / year for 6 people.. heck that would save me on comcast overages several months of the year.
We still pay for some searches by paying the ad costs of the places we spend money, but that's another thing to figure.. $120 / year for search? I doubt my clicks amount to that for any advertiser. I'd pay 20 for ad free, zero tracking searches, but not 100.
In addition, a flat fee could lead to a slow on googles growth, as once a users pays, they can not find new ways to monetize that user.
Don't get me wrong, I love the option to pay a fee to opt out of certain ads. It really helps align the incentives of the user with the company, but unfortunately it would have to be expensive to average out the more lucrative ads.
The other day to prevent a young one from replaying the same soundtrack over and over via youtube - (bandwidth repeatedly counting against and lots of ads for the same repeated songs oh my) - I just popped over to amazon and bought the album and popped it onto a usb stick for them.
I picked up a couple of gift cards for their bday this week - one of them was a google play card - then I remembered G killed the music section of the play store, so I put it back and got an amazon card instead.
that premium would be a great deal if we had one more in the household here. we've got three chromecasts - two with the google tv - but not the gtv plan - sheesh the ads via youtube with that are a drain, and I wonder about the compression for music - but they still use them for convenience and the other things like discovery+ which is affordable.
Oh if only they would plex-like into a win7 box on the network and pull my collection of mp3s.
Maybe all this is going in a good direction. Fingers crossed.
Recently, just from my youtube subscriptions I think, my youtube ads have been surprisingly relevant, for things like cnc routers or various embedded tools or what not -- ads that are actually for things I might be interested in buying. (Granted there's still a ton of obnoxious get rich quick schemes that I have to skip).
I have to admit, seeing ads that actually are of interest to me does change my mindset on advertising a little bit. I still find it super creepy being tracked, and I'd like the ability to know what they know about me, and erase it if I don't like it (is that even possible?), but it is kind of nice to get ads that don't suck if I have to sit through ads.
Just let the users set their own advertising profiles! Always relevant ads, no tracking needed.
with our own set profiles, we could opt out of gambling, loot boxes, and alcohol ads too. I've been suggesting this for some time now.
The cost of advertising is not your attention; it is your perception. Advertisements fundamentally alter your perception of the world in favor of whatever the advertiser is showing you. You are choosing to have your view of the world shaped in a way that may change your behavior. Note that this change occurs on an emotional level and cannot simply be discarded by your rational mind even if you don't believe / care about the ad at a conscious level.
Ads are fine. Stalking people to “optimise” those ads isn’t.
You advertise to me, You don't track every single fucking thing I do online to do it.
If we agree to that then I'll turn my adblocker/pi-hole off - otherwise enjoy the null-hole.
Yes. However...
I have found 0.001% of what I wanted because of an ad. That's something like one item in a decade. I don't think that's worth the costs of tracking to privacy and bandwidth. Certainly not worth the obtrusiveness of contemporary ad space which is the result of the inevitable runaway arms race between the flitting attention of users and the desperate need of businesses to sale their wares.
I don't see any resolution to the waste other than abandoning tracking for ads. Good enough demographics can be found by the content being consumed. Please, let's leave it at that.
When you say "I'm using Google for free because it's supported by ads", what it means is:
- some companies are buying (expensive) ads on Google
- they are therefore increasing their marketing budget
- which mechanically increases the price of their services and products
- which you ultimately have to pay
so no, the "free ads" are not free for the consumers, you pay them as a "marketing tax" on each product and service that you pay for
And there's another issue. Even if all online services switched to a subscription model tomorrow, companies would not suddenly stop spending money on promoting their products. They would just do it differently and we would pay twice.
They ask €11.99/month for Premium (no ads) + YouTube Music. Or €9.99/month just for YouTube Music. Given that I already pay for another service, I don't want either of these plans.
It's not possible to get only YouTube Premium (avoid ads), even if the marginal cost of ad-free YouTube experience is only €2/month, according to Google. I think €24/year is a very reasonable price to pay for YouTube, €144 is not.
The other side of this is that someone has actively spent $2400 worth of ad-buy to show you ads for the last 20 years.
I don't think the other-side of the argument has been explored well enough; I'd love to see what is possible without these ulterior motives controlling what you see and hear.
Sure, your use cases. Not other people's though, and we don't get a choice.
I do pay for YouTube Red, and it's worth it to not see ads.
> micropayments for each search query or a "Google Search Engine yearly subscription"
I would pay for this, too.
> ... or Patreon donations for video content ...
I do it for music. It feels really good to support creators directly.
Ads are the worst, and I adblock everything.
I'd happily pay for web content if there were microtransactions. Either that, or a content marketplace that disburses based on views or some other accounting.
But measuring the net societal impact of a cheap stopped at that point is basically worthless. There are many 2nd and 3rd order impacts that must be included. The obvious is health, but others include the marginal cost considerations of where the money will go that is "saved". Or what alternative food would be purchased (if it's deep fried Twinkies, maybe free doughnuts are a health win).
Any work that makes the ad marketplace more efficient (easier for creation and deployment of effective ads or ad instrumentation) has huge effects on relative competitiveness of startups vs. conglomerates. Just as one example. And those effects directly affect consumers.
I can avoid ad surveillance to some degree, but am powerless to help a business that can't survive in an ad-driven economy. I can't single-handedly keep my local hardware store in business against the threat from conglomerates capable of operating indefinitely on zero margins.
I would absolutely pay that.
Search is incredibly valuable and has deteriorated as has the web as a whole largely because of ads and this terrible business model.
It’s not even slightly ‘free’, your attention is being wasted on stuff that other people are paying for you to see.
I value that at way more than $120 per year.
And that is the point, where I would say: "No, you have not been using Google for free. You have paid with something. That something is your personal data and privacy of others."
Why privacy of others? Well, because by using Google, you are actually supporting their business model, which is online stalking and selling info about you basically.
If no one was using their search (and other services), then what would be the point for businesses to throw money at them for placing ads there? Every user counts in the end. Many people keep thinking, that they alone will not make any difference, but that is, where people go wrong in many scenarios. The typical: "But if only I do x then it wont be so bad." or "If only I stop doing x, it wont change the big picture." If everyone thinks that way, then nothing ever will change of course. It is a feedback loop, or vicious cycle, or whatever it is called. The right idea is to start doing, what one can do oneself. And that is to stop using services such as Google search.
Personally, if I had the choice between paying money every year to have a non-stalker Internet search for the whole world, ensuring everyone's privacy when searching, I would rather choose that Internet. I would prefer it over an Internet, which we have today, where I need to arm up my browser to the teeth, to avoid being tracked everywhere, being unable to access a lot of content, because knowingly or unknowingly people put it behind stalker-walls and paywalls. I also think that your suggested numbers of 120 or even 2400$ are wildly exaggerated. It would probably be much more like an Internet tax, that everyone had to pay and that is lowered or increased based on your personal economical situation.
So I resolved to sit back and enjoy what time I have left for getting a great experience.
Ads on podcasts don't bug me as much as the ads Google/Facebook does. Nor do the ads that are sponsored inside videos (see LTT). I don't mind the ads that DDG does (which just uses key words in your search).
I don't like this dichotomy of ads vs no ads, I'm not sure that's really the right framework. I turn off ads everywhere I go because I can't trust ads. But I don't bother skipping through ads on my podcasts or in videos. So it isn't the ad part that's the problem.
I completely agree - until you have kids watching Youtube the Ads are much better in general.
I am however extremely concerned with the amount of data being collected on my family to then aggregate and sell.
But that's an outrageous sum. I'm sure you also wouldn't sacrifice your first-born son on Google's altar either. Meanwhile, would you pay $5-10/year ($100-$200 total)? That would probably cut Google's revenue by two-thirds - one-third, but still they would have plenty. I believe FB averaged under $10/year/active user in all the years I looked at (which ignores the most recent years).
Meanwhile, I guess I'll just leave my adblocker installed and take the subsidy.
That might be true in the beginning but long term ad's add a lot of friction and frustration e.g. having to wait X amount of seconds before getting access to the content.
I have been a YouTube Premium user since day one and I can't imagine not using it.
What I would love to see more is having a choice of having a free ad supported version and the option to upgrade and pay to remove those ads.
But people don't like to pay for software. So we alternatives.
Ads that attempt to take me all the way from browsing-->discovery-->potential purchase-->purchase I view as always bad. Leave me alone while I'm browsing. Ads that attempt to take me from discovery-->potential purchase I view as ok but ineffective. At least throw a promo code in that ad next time, please and thank you. Ads that successfully take me from discovery-->potential purchase-->purchase I view as ok since my utility is higher having purchased the product given the payload of the ad (and I wouldn't have purchased the product having not gotten the ad).
One thing then from my (not necessarily everyones) preferences is that displaying an ad to me should only potentially be done if the conditional probability of me being in discovery mode is higher than the conditional probability of me being in browsing mode. And then it comes down to what of me is in that conditioning set. Some very fuzzy anonymous slice of me, well ok. But better not be PI in there...
But these are just my preferences, and they may not be representative. So there's an aggregation problem also. In general I'd also prefer if brands shifted the marginal marketing dollar towards channels where the disutility of showing me an ad when they estimate I'm in discovery mode but I'm actually in browsing mode is lowest - so (in my mind) when possible put more in influencer marketing versus google display network for instance. Ideally this preference is evident in brand's roi calcs so it's internalized.
Tracking me is not.
Are we talking ad-tech, or tracking-tech?
I don't hate ads, they are useful. I use Instagram for ads, I follow restaurants and hotels. They are just some information. But I don't want to be targeted.
There is nothing wrong with ads per-say, it is the real time bidding and targeted ads that I have problems with.
And of course malvertising such as the one which compromised my sisters laptop with a fileless rootkit a few years back.
Ads and analytics are not allowed on my home network.
Additionally, opening with I give half of my money to charity so leave me alone, should be a red flag that what's to follow is not a strong argument for the point the author is trying to make.
That aside, the effectiveness of ads are orthogonal to the quality or "good"-ness of jobs and products. They just seem, to me, like more of an amoral thing that can be used to sell something else, good or bad.
And that's the reality we presently live in. It's not holes, it's watching ads and reading things that aren't worth our time and buying things that don't provide us value. Click on a link, dig a hole. Read the mindless alarm-inducing article, fill the hole in.
Can you provide example of businesses where employees produce value just for the owners of the business but not the society in general?
> And that's the reality we presently live in. It's not holes, it's watching ads and reading things that aren't worth our time and buying things that don't provide us value. Click on a link, dig a hole. Read the mindless alarm-inducing article, fill the hole in.
What are you proposing? That some entity tells what to read, what to buy, what to do? Why not just leave it to individuals to figure it out?
Much of the financial sector. M&A firms. Lobbying. SEO. Fake web traffic generators. App/game companies that only clone others. Content mills. Collection agencies. Old growth loggers. Ticket scalpers.
It's a little tricky because the most common scenario provides benefit to somebody, even if the overall social cost is far higher than that benefit. The customers of drug dealers want the product. Sleazy personal injury lawyers' clients gain from their services. Crypto miners.
>> And that's the reality we presently live in. It's not holes, it's watching ads and reading things that aren't worth our time and buying things that don't provide us value. Click on a link, dig a hole. Read the mindless alarm-inducing article, fill the hole in. > What are you proposing? That some entity tells what to read, what to buy, what to do? Why not just leave it to individuals to figure it out?
Uh, I'm not sure how you got there from what I said. I could make an argument for regulation, but I didn't.
We live an existence of partial information, and that's very exploitable. "Clickbait" is pejorative because it works but the expected payoff is not there. We are where the "free" market put us, though the market is not very free -- there's regulatory capture, information inequalities, and massive externalities that would not exist without the previous two.
I don't need to propose a guaranteed-effective fix in order to make the point that much economic activity provides zero or negative value.
If I had to point in the direction of a solution, I'd say that antitrust laws are vaguely the right idea, except they are based on very outdated notions of harm to consumers, and are also subject to regulatory capture. We need to make serious attempts at capturing more externalities. Even something as straightforward as a carbon tax is hard to define and implement, but it's the right idea; we need something similar for the massive damage done to people's time and attention, to civil society, to the commons. Capitalism got us here; it won't get us out. Although it's one of the tools that can and should be used.
Or, let's say the jobs created are for producing more cigarettes and asbestos. Do you think that producing more cigarettes and asbestos, which requires more jobs, is "good" for society?
Because there's a strong case to be made that they:
- exploit the credulous, mentally-deficient and emotionally unstable
- carry significant externalities in the form of personal data collection & malware
- contribute to psychological distress (anxiety, degraded sense of self-worth, poor body image, etc)
- cause financial distress by encouraging unnecessary spending
- act as a vector for selling harmful products (tobacco, predatory loans, etc.)
etc.
If you want to take the consequentialist approach, you have to contend with these questions as well. You'll also have to admit that the net balance is unclear at best.
"personal data collection & malware" - you agree to those conditions. In return you get amazing free products. Don't want that? There are many alternatives (Linux, Chromium / Firefox, duckduckgo, telegram and other alternative open-source products).
This is nice for several reasons: even a small amount (~3-5$) gives a similar or higher revenue for content creators than ads do (a very rough back-of-the-envelope estimate based on youtube CPM). Plus, there's no problem with the friction of paying for things: you pay the same, regardless of watching 1 or 1000 videos (the netflix model, the cable tv model, heck any subscription model). Plus of course: no ads :)
Also, do people who use the internet for half an hour a week pay the same as those that spend all day online? Not sure I like that either.
I do like the general idea, I suppose, but trying to make it reward people who actually add value, proportional to that value, is not an easy problem.
Paywalls vs. ads.
Now it's not that those are the only two conceivable options, it's that those are the only two options that are reasonably successful at scale.
I'm sure you could think up a donation system, or do something similar to what the Brave browser does, but those do not scale. Of course if you have some alternative approaches that work and produce viable business models, it would be great to hear them.
There's a wide range from honest honorable work to complete scumbag devil.
One of the common criticisms of ads is how they impact privacy. I'm not going to pick any particular comment there, because I agree with some and disagree with others and find some to be incoherent. But the core issue is that ads (and the associated tracking and data collection) are an unethical privacy intrusion.
I think that some of the arguments (especially the ones I find incoherent) are because some people value privacy for privacy's sake. That is, I usually try to look at my privacy from the perspective of threats I care about. Some people don't do that, they want privacy for the sake of privacy. Privacy as a goal, not as a means to an end of avoiding specific attacks. When I ask these kinds fo people what kinds of privacy "attacks" they're afraid of, I get things that sounds to me like conspiracy theories.
This isn't wrong, it's just fundamentally different than how I approach things. I expect (given that Jeff publishes his salary every year and is super transparent about many things) he's similarly not worried about privacy as a goal, and instead cares about "circumstantial" privacy.
I wonder if this difference in values is part of the disconnect.
I think another part of the disconnect is that once you have insight into an organization, is much easier to see how it actually works. It's very easy to presume bad things as an outsider than an insider. But by the same token, it's somewhat rational for an outsider to not believe an insider who says "no just trust me, we aren't doing that". And so this too isn't an easy thing to fix without some sort of radical transparency on the part of the company (and even then).
Then why stop there? No one needs to make the ads. Everyone employed to design, shoot, and display the ad can serve others instead of working to manipulate them. As long as the transactions keep going as normal, it's a huge win for everybody.
Of course, this is business. Corporations wouldn't spend that money just to subsidize newspapers, television, and page views. In a world without advertisement, tons of content would suddenly lose its revenue stream, without an easy way to monetize attention. Attention would not be profitable on its own.
That's a negative thing on the face, but I believe content which cannot survive by donation or by subscription deserves to die. Netflix survives already without (third-party) advertisement; Facebook, on the other hand, would collapse. But a social network does not need as many engineers as Facebook does. Without competing against ad-based sites, a less bloated, less attention-sucking social network could replace Facebook. And so on for other sites. SEO blogspam would die, whereas useful and interesting newsletters would survive (as demonstrated by Substack). High-quality TV could survive, but game shows and reality TV would be forced to greatly pare down their offerings. Valuable, accurate subscription news would survive, whereas clickbait news would have no more reason to bait clicks.
The alternative to the status quo is that many forms of content would become unprofitable, and I don't think that's a bad thing.
I dislike seeing ads, especially when they are poorly or intentionally designed to block you from doing what you came to site for. And I do have a concern about the amount of detail these companies end up accruing about a user and its implications. I also get distracted by them - but only when I don't have an intention or strong need to focus on the task at hand.
This does not make me think that ads themselves or the model itself is fundamentally bad. A model, ultimately is, as good or bad as its implementation. GMail, Google Maps, Android are some of the things that have changed the landscape in significant and positive ways, and all of them were made possible by ad tech.
Putting aside the privacy and PII concerns, it seems like there is a large contingent of HN'ers who are uncomfortable with the idea that websites/apps are addictive or manipulative or otherwise take advantage of flaws in human nature. For instance: we like shiny things with lots of colors/movement, we generally leave things on default, we engage with hate/dissent more readily than other things, etc.
Many HN'ers seem to be uncomfortable with this even if the people using these websites/apps are adults.
This seems to fly directly in the face of another seemingly wide-held opinion: that the rights of an individual to make their own choices should not be abridged, regardless of what those choices are, who they are, what they believe in, etc. as long as they are adults.
I wonder how these two beliefs coexist although perhaps I've misread the room.
But dark patterns undermine that kind of personal choice. Think of Facebook hiding the "delete my account" page so that you literally cannot navigate to it through the UI -- you need to have a link to that page. Doesn't that erode my autonomy to decide when I want to delete my account?
Similarly, software like Windows 10, my LinkedIn profile, Firefox settings, macOS/iOS options, and plenty of others that decide to conveniently forget my explicitly chosen opt-out settings when an update comes in. Hiding behind the veil of "it's hard to test every possible option during an update!" to justify pushing folks back to the happy path where those companies get to collect more data.
So I ask you: do dark patterns actually let you make "your own choices"? If I give you a multiple choice test, and you have the option to submit an "other" option on any question, but you have to mail in your text for the "other" option, jump through hoops, and I might forget to actually count your option... do you really have the choice?
> But dark patterns undermine that kind of personal choice. Think of Facebook hiding the "delete my account" page so that you literally cannot navigate to it through the UI -- you need to have a link to that page. Doesn't that erode my autonomy to decide when I want to delete my account?
>Similarly, software like Windows 10, my LinkedIn profile, Firefox settings, macOS/iOS options, and plenty of others that decide to conveniently forget my explicitly chosen opt-out settings when an update comes in. Hiding behind the veil of "it's hard to test every possible option during an update!" to justify pushing folks back to the happy path where those companies get to collect more data.
One response may be: you are not required to use any of the above services, so the choice is perhaps better described as between using (or leaving/disabling) a service with attendant friction, or not at all. If you don't like the service, don't use it.
I completely understand not being happy with a service. There are more than a few that I don't like, so I don't use them.
Now, if a company is going to such extreme measures that the activity can well be described as fraud, that's a different matter. That should be stopped and I think most would agree.
> If I give you a multiple choice test, and you have the option to submit an "other" option on any question, but you have to mail in your text for the "other" option, jump through hoops, and I might forget to actually count your option... do you really have the choice?
I think this may be a false comparison. I'm not required to take your test, so if I don't want to, I'll just throw it out. If I think the potential benefits outweigh the friction imposed by mailing it, then I may do it.
Perhaps a better comparison would be a multiple choice test that's a requirement to do something you really want to do -- scuba diving, or renting a bike to ride around a national park, something like that. Sure, it's not essential. But it sounds fun, and you could question the necessity of the test in the first place. But the test needs you to submit your name, birthdate, address, and answer a bunch of personal questions about your interests before you can do the fun thing. At some point, you feel like you're being taken advantage of.
However, if the problem is a network effect like you describe, I would say that the it is grounded in monopoly/oligopoly exploitation. I think it is separate from the discussion of advertising and manipulative content.
Ads are psychological warfare against a populace using their very nature against them. All in an effort to get them to change their behavior in a way that's going to be detrimental to them. Either they stop looking for alternatives, or they make purchases they don't need to (see: toothpaste consumption rates).
Ads are unethical, and are only considered acceptable because they have been around for so long, and because they're "easy" to use and supposedly ignore. Anyone working in the ad industry is directly supporting this unethical behavior. This isn't an "NTP is also used in cyber warfare" style of engagement, this is writing missile guidance systems levels of engagement.
Try running ads now for the KKK's new "hoods and cloaks" business if you'd like a practical example.
If society actually wants it then they can learn about it from places that aggregate such ideas. Moreover if our lives weren't inundated with ads 24/7 then those aggregators would be in much more demand. Very very few advertisements are for novel ideas that are actually a net positive for society.
Is a doctor telling you to brush 2x a day an ad for toothpaste? What about their suggestion that you floss more? Those are aligned with your well being, but will increase your consumption.
> change their behavior in a way that's going to be detrimental to them.
This seems obviously wrong. The implication here is that anything advertised must be bad for the target. From an econ perspective this means that you reject the idea of comparative advantage.
If it's paid promotion, it's an ad. If the doctor's doing this only because they think it's in my best interest, it's not. The FTC already has some pretty clear guidelines on this because ads are required to be clearly marked as such in many cases.
>psychological warfare against a populace using their very nature against them. All in an effort to get them to change their behavior in a way that's going to be detrimental to them. Either they stop looking for alternatives, or they make purchases they don't need to
In this context, a doctor making a recommendation to use a particular brand (paid or unpaid) is an ad. Even a doctor generally recommending you change your behavior to consume more toothpaste is an ad.
So in this framing, how do you determine the difference between an ad and not?
> in a way that's going to be detrimental to them.
A dentist recommending that I use more toothpaste may change my behavior, but not in a detrimental way. If the dentist is paid to make the same recommendation, it's more difficult to say whether they made the recommendation purely out of my best interest, so the definition begins to apply again.
To use a more current example: would Pfizer marketing in a way that intentionally appeals to anti-vax people be mind control to their detriment?
Taking a step back, there are at least (but really I think only) two reasons for an advertisement: to raise awareness or to convince. The first clearly isn't unethical. Saying "we exist" isn't really mind control, and results in a more informed consumer. I admit that most ads that appear to do that don't just do that, but an advertisement that simply points out that Colgate is a Toothpaste brand that you can buy Is ethical. Its exactly the same as putting your logo on your box (which is a form of advertisement!) and having your box at eye level on the shelf (which is also a form of advertisement!!).
The second type convinces people that one act may be better than another (our brand > their brand, or brushing > not). These can be ethical or not, but GP stated that, essentially, advertising is always going to be detrimental to the consumer, which implies that everyone is already acting in a globally optimal way. That seems immediately suspicious, does it not?
Also (and this is more radical), I do think it's a legitimate to want to unsubscribe, even from "we exist" ads. Attention is valuable, it shouldn't be considered an inalienable right to sneak anything you want into my consciousness for the purposes of selling. Even if you accept that it's not a zero-sum game. I recognize that this is not the status quo at all currently, but it's the feeling behind comments like the above.
As just an anecdote, I'm always shocked by the amount of advertising at Burning Man. There's always people trying to get you to come to their event or join in their activity. Signs and street barkers are everywhere. There's no money and no bartering allowed, but advertising is everywhere, since ultimately attention is what is in limited supply.
If they aren't unethical in this scenario, it seems like what you're saying is that it's the underlying socio-economic system that's unethical, which would explain why all of the alternatives to ads also appear to be unethical.
First in the obvious way: there are products that I have found useful that I would not have known existed if not for ads. The idea that you should only ever purchase something because you were specifically looking for it seems a bit silly, because that's not how it has played out in my life. Have I purchased stuff I didn't need, influenced by ads? Of course. But I've also purchased things which objectively made my life better, which I would not have even known existed without ads.
We are lucky to live at a point in time where most of the world's information is at our fingertips (via the internet) and we can quickly, easily, and freely find information about anything we could want. But this is ignoring the fact that a lot of this is in turn funded by ads.
e.g. when I'm trying to find something, I google it, which is free because their business model is ads. There are a lot of people who are reviewing products with high levels of trust on sites like YouTube (tech reviewers like MKBHD), but they are able to produce those videos (which I watch for free) because they too are funded by ads.
Sure, we could pay subscriptions for all those things, but as pointed out in the OP, that is a regressive funding model – it becomes harder for a poor person to find the best products if all the best product reviews are locked behind paywalls.
And you know what? Perhaps it is.
Even if that's the case, I still think it's unethical, that a bit more brainpower should be put into a funding model that isn't ads. Even if it increases friction.
The most expedient way to expand a country's border is still war, and I believe that's unethical as well.
With regards to the second part, which you addressed, it's one thing to say "this is bad we should replace it with X". It is an entirely different thing to say "this is bad I have no idea what we should replace it with". Because nothing is black and white, so it doesn't matter how bad ads are if the thing that replaces them is then worse.
What if an ad is for a product that someone wants, and is beneficial to them by helping them find a product they were not aware of?
Same answer as a sibling comment. It's unethical to take advantage of a person's psychological blind spots or weaknesses to turn a profit.
> What if an ad is for a product that someone wants
Do they want it prior to viewing the ad? If not, the ad is creating a psychological desire for something not previously needed or wanted.
Or did they pull a trick like a sibling commenter called out - searching for "good USB drive" and providing an ad. The ad takes advantage of being shown in response to a keywords that implies a level of quality of the product that isn't substantiated. There's no technical reviews that demonstrate that it's good, or even suitable to the task at hand. The only thing that actually sets it apart is how much was paid to put it in front of the searcher's eyes.
Another drawback of the ad-supported model is that it has created a very pervasive culture of unaccountability. Google has terrible user support because they truly don't care about users - they 'll keep making money regardless of what their users think and there's no way for users to vote with their feet (practically -- after all google gatekeeps all their address bars).
I dunno. Maybe it's different. But I still put up my contents (writings and source codes) for free with no ads. And it's not so strange to imagine that there are many people like me. Maybe a newspaper would put up a part of their articles for promotion. In that case, the contents themselves are ads. That's not such a bad world either!
I don't think anyone is arguing that serving ads for consumer products and services is evil. Definitely annoying, but not morally wrong.
However that is not what is happening. Some of the largest companies in the history of the world are actively building and profiting from platforms that allow political parties and governments to distribute targeted propaganda and digest huge amounts of personal information collected under intentionally obfuscated terms of service.
If you are working at google / facebook / twitter you are just as responsible as the scientists and engineers who worked on the Manhattan project. You are the destroyer of worlds.
>I must be fun at parties
Parties with ads, or any paid "guests" are not fun...
So no, "because of the salary" doesn't explain any of it, and you should read the blog post before posting insulting comments like these.
The question is, what is the alternative? I see two main
funding models:
Paywalls. You pay with your money.
Ads. You pay with your attention.
I can immediately see significant issues (user data, managing payments, admin, biggest sites get bigger etc.) but if there's a market demand for a new model, it wouldn't even have to be regulated initially. It could be a feature offered by an innovative ISP. A sort of patron model for general browsing.
My 2 cents fwiw.
Nope. Ads are not funding the open web.
The vast majority of ad revenue and spending goes into the pockets of Facebook (openly hostile to the idea of an open web) and Google (sneakily hostile to the open web, and busy working on replacing the web with all things Google).
Actual open web partially supported by advertisement? I don't think it ever existed. And when it did, it sure as hell didn't require pervasive 24/7 surveillance of everyone.
Advertising on the net doesn't bother me as much as it once did, but I also see less of it. I don't really visit news sites, mostly the ones already funded by my tax money or the subscription I pay for.
The best blogs rarely have ads. 20 years ago any random blog would have ads, not so any more. Search engines, at least DDG have a reasonable ad policy, even though I have reported a large number of questionable ads. Google is a little useless, because actual result drown in ads for some searches.
I think contextual ads should be preferred over those based on a users past behaviour online. It's really only news sites and social media that needs the ads based on tracking users.
The author seems to have fallen into the classic trap of conflating media/medium and content. Content can be free (or not) but getting it to eyeballs requires additional effort that is rarely free/gratis (your ISP charges you).
As for this article, I think it is good to find a way to have targeted ads while preserving privacy.
I do note that this chap has put his actual salary numbers on the internet. This definitely places him in the minority in terms of willingness to share private data. Most people don't have this level of comfort I would guess. This should probably be taken into account when considering his opinions on targeted advertising.
I don't hate ads, I don't mind it at all to be honest. I use Instagram just for ads :) Restaurants, hotels, we need
I think the author is simply vieweing this as a binary issue due to cognitive dissonance / moral disengagement.
The concentration of power in a few handful gigantic corporations is.
How about making ad containers on a page that enforces these?
Solving world hunger is obviously better than ads, but I'd say in the scheme of things tech people spend their time on, ad improvements is middling in importance? It's not the bottom. Good ad targeting means:
1) New small businesses (like Shopify stores) can reach customers without going through retail gatekeepers. Ask any Shopify seller, nothing beats FB.
2) New challenger SaaS brands can get in front of customers to compete with mammoth corporate brands with worse software (I see this all the time on my job).
3) Without good ad targeting, only bottom hanging fruit advertisers that appeal to the lowest common denominator can afford to spend. Weight loss, teeth whitening, etc. Good ad targeting means a better user experience with ads.
That's the basic problem? We tried communism. It doesn't work.
> And so: ads. Funding the open web.
Or to put it another way: Ads waste human life and productivity.
If you waste 10 seconds of Elon Musk's time, yes actually the world just lost more than if you waste 10 seconds of my time.
And if you let me pay $1 instead of wasting my time, then I can spend that time being productive for more than $1, adding more to the collective value of the world.
Wasting everyone's time equally is actually hurting everyone, because it means taking away the positive-sum value produced by exchange of values.
I'm not saying inequality isn't a problem, but man, you say that ANY difference in equality of disposable income is a PROBLEM? That's just a race to the bottom of caring or doing anything at all for other people.
No-one is forcing you to see ads and often you have the option to buy your way out of ads. More in general if people preferred to pay we see a paid alternative emerge, thanks to the nature of the market. The reality is that the majority of people are not privacy conscious and don't care as much as people in tech do.
Overall, I'd be prouder to work on Google Ads, which provides services on a voluntary basis, than to work for the IRS or HMRC which impose their government's decisions on people under threat of fines and eventually incarceration.
Uh? Where do you live? Where do you browse?
I'm a paid subscriber to newspapers and they keep tracking me and emailing/notifying/displaying ads. They even share my data to their "partners". I can't get out of my apartment without seeing ad everywhere (subway, buildings, billboards...). You cannot escape advertising unless you completely isolate yourself from society.
My point is, it's not impossible to avoid ads these days.
Besides, I really don't see ads in my life - but that's because I use adblock and similar software. I don't live in a big city anymore so I don't see physical ads as well.
If your product is good, then you wouldn't need to advertise (take for example, Ferrari or Lamborghini). If companies focused on making their products better rather than spend hundreds of millions of dollars on advertising a half baked product, it would make the world so much better.
The argument here isn't that ads aren't good for the business doing the advertising, it's that they're bad for the community at large.
I believe it is simplification.
Let's say that I want to get good standing desk or chair - how can I discover those smaller players that make good products?
I don't want to spend time on some ChairHackerNews for 2 months and read about this stuff
As much as search used to suck, I kind of long for the days where I could organically find products by searching.
- new and upcoming products - think Tesla in 2010, or Signal messenger in 2020/21
- making things accessible for those who can't afford them - I know a lot of folks who'd rather watch YT ads than fork over 15$ to Google every month. They simply don't have that much money
- letting me know about stuff I was not thinking about but am happy to know now - eg. interesting summer camps for my kids
Our Internet experiences are becoming Ray Bradbury's worst nightmare, interspersed with its "Denham's Dentifrice" ads and Facebook Mildreds everywhere.
So I was wondering if those people either not watch YouTube or pay for premium?
For a subscription service (paywalled), users are making an up-front decision to pay for the content an outlet publishes because they believe in some sense that the writing is worth it. This is a pretty intellectual thing to do, since you have to actually enter payment details and select a plan. It's fundamentally a premeditated act.
The advertising-based model is closer to the lizard-brain, I think. To a first approximation, it seems that ad-based funding created the whole world of "click bait": low quality articles with catchy headlines designed to increase ad views by tapping into peoples' curiosity. This model is the opposite of premeditated: it's almost subconscious and driven by moment-to-moment impulse. And I think web-based advertising incentivizes this greatly, to the point that the low-quality content designed to be engaged with impulsively is driving who gets elected.
I don't have high conviction that my thinking here is correct, but the dots do seem to connect, and I don't see it discussed much. I raise it here because while I abhor the data gathering associated with ad targeting, if I'm honest with myself, I think the harm coming from click-bait content online is more tangible today than the harm from the data collection.
If I walked into your neighbor's home, robbed $3,000 from them and then gave half of what I stole to some charity would you consider me to be a good guy?
Am I the only one that finds the first answer to be mad logic?
I'd say that knowing you're interested in cars is also a violation of your privacy. Knowing that people that are in car festivals may be interested in cars is ok, but knowing that a person attended to a car festival is not ok.
He is also just normalising the whole surveillance part by not bringing it up, ever! All he is doing is talking about the top layer of what an ad is and what it is for and how the users are interacting with them etc. This doesn't talk about tracking your ip address, your location across services, your search history, your video watching history and everything else that you have interacted with. Then using it to manipulate you.
And I actually think it has been extremely smart and cunning to play the mind game of "look, it is not for you, it is for the smaller and poor people who can't afford it. THE POOR PEOPLE!". This works I am sure.
Facebook literally did this by displaying ads on big news papers on behalf of "small businesses" when they were threatened by Apple's privacy features which actually protected the end users.
Ad businesses like Ad Sense etc in it's current form doesn't do anything else than being intrusive and eventually become used against you by businesses to manipulate you or govts to oppress you.
I will give a simple example. The ads that comes as sponsored in youtube channels where the youtube creator gives a shout out to some services / products, or ads in podcasts that are directly related to the content of the creator things definitely have more impact on the creators monetary department. You would've heard a lot of youtube creators admitting the same.
SO YES, ADS WORK. SURVEILLANCE, MANIPULATING AD BUSINESS LIKE AD SENSE DOESN'T!
I would suggest people to keep questioning these kind of smart people to work on something worth while than tracking and not to mention shadow tracking people to just create data which can be sold to third parties which the end users are unaware of, among soo many other things. In all sense, jeezz! Get a life!!
PS: This would be my one and probably only "cut the bulshit honey comment" when I know these people are smart enough to understand the consequences but want to virtue signal by saying, I donate to good causes blah blah blah. This is a very common and well put consistent messaging we/I have been hearing over and over. So yeah, I don't want to give a benefit of the doubt.
> Ads. You pay with your attention.
Pretty disingenuous. Ads: You pay with your attention, and, ultimately, either your money or the money of someone who trusts you. This is only not the case to the extent that advertising doesn't actually work, in which case the ethical problems have not stopped for this person.
If ads were not working, I don't know where this money would go.
But there was a certain reality-distortion field that only becomes apparent when stepping out of it.
Ads exist in order to sell your attention to the highest bidder. Ads exist to support an exponentially growing tech giant's goals of infinite growth. Ads exist to keep a snowball snowballing. There is no ads business on Earth today that is focused on "just keeping the lights on". So the amount of ads that are out there just keeps increasing. Ads are creeping into every corner of life.
Just take Google search. If you look at the amount of computational resources that it takes Google to run search for today's internet, it takes X dollars. But Google's revenues are literally 5 X, if not 10 or 20. Google is sucking down a huge ton of money that is going to growth and funding zillions of other things...that will also eventually get ads, like Maps, reviews, YouTube, etc. Second, this "X dollars to run search" we are talking about is probably somewhere between 10 and 100 times what was required just a few short years ago. So we are talking about throwing 100 or 200 times--maybe even 1000, just look at the racks of Google made from legos from 1999!--the amount of computational power at a problem than it really needs, and that's to support the advertising market that Google has created in order to support search.
If Google websearch were a non-profit, I think it would require less than a billion dollars to run every year. For perspective, the United States Federal Government spent over $85 billion on the SNAP (food stamps) program last year.
So, instead of spending pocket change on a public utility that gives everyone access to "organized, universally accessible" (to borrow Google's mission statement) information, we have this behemoth focused on generating hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue that just accidentally happens to have a massive influence over everything we see.
You work on ads, Jeff? You've clearly done a lot of thinking as to why that's great. Me? I bowed out of the entity trying to attach a tacky flyer for Ovaltine to every book, magazine, news article, and video clip I see. I bowed out of an entity whose main existence is apparently to mediate every interaction I have with a computer--or another person--and insert advertising into.
I'm actually really sick of ads!
Many have commented on the inherently harmful nature of advertisement, so I would like to address the one argument I see in there, it goes something like must "ads must exist or else we would have to pay for content". But even this seems to me largely unfounded. By excluding "donations and hobbies", what the author is really saying is "ads must exist or else the content we get would be different (read: worse)".
I see no reason to believe this. The sources of information I find reliable are ones based on consensus, eg Wikipedia. If anything, I find getting information from traditional media less reliable than getting it directly from random people, as the latter don't have a financial interest to present only certain types of information or present the information in certain biased ways. The bigger a news corporation is, the more interest it has in 1) relying on fearmongering and 2) conforming to a "current government" bias (as we have seen to horrible effect when Trump was president). As for entertainment, it is doubtful that anyone could become a millionaire with daily vlogs or let's plays as they can today, but I personally know of many that would be glad to just make a living. It's also improbable that a single big website such as YouTube would totally dominate the video sharing landscape, as they wouldn't be able to rely on ads to do so. Incidentally, getting rid of ads would solve the "advertiser friendly" problem that plagues mass media, small content creators and consumers alike.
In short, saying "ads are the only way" seems to me the same as saying "the web is have is the best version of the web" or even "it's the only web we can have". I disagree on both counts, and I for one can't wait until the house of cards crumbles.
The “alternatives” are not paywalls vs. ads, the alternative is to be a less awful ad provider.
Unintrusive text is fine. Static images without flashy animations are fine. Even watching something like a funny TV commercial is great because it seems worth the time.
Yet somewhere along the line, somebody decided it was “fine” to shove overlays in my face, stubbornly keep things in place during scrolling, auto-playing sound, etc. And all that crap is before even factoring in the gigabytes of bandwidth stolen from me to download and run JavaScript that ultimately serves to be a creepy stalker around the Internet.
So feel free to work on ads without shame as long as the ads you work on aren’t shameless.
> So: why is advertising good? I mean, isn't it annoying when sites show you ads instead of whatever it is you want to read? The question is, what is the alternative? I see two main funding models:
> Paywalls. You pay with your money.
> Ads. You pay with your attention.
Anyone on the internet prior to 2000 knows people make content just to make content. I would strongly argue that the wave of "everything must be monetized" has been entirely negative. While it's made the quantity of content go way up, it's polluted everything with clickbait. Whereas before you used to get much higher quality content due to them being passion projects and not people trying to make money.
> I feel OK about working on it because I give half my salary to charity
Cognitive dissonance that occurs between sentences is particularly hilarious.
Paywalls, subscriptions and micropayment are regressive, unless they are indexed by cost of living.
money.
recent experience:
Friend needs to google ads for new location in another state. I say call google and get setup - your web site is good - and they will actually answer the phone when you call for this.
Couple months later - zero calls for new clients.
I take a peek into his campaign - it's set on some new fangled 'smart ads' - there is like almost no data on keyword clicks and such.
I mention that it's odd for ads for a specific niche (rolfing) to burn through a few thousand dollas in ads and not being a single new customer. (he laughs 'there is no way it's been thousands of dollars' - I did not laugh and said yes you have spent thousands already I can see THAT in your stats - he had no idea)
He reaches out for support via phone and help forms. Eventually I do the same.
The pain one must go through filling out these long forms with lots of entries to get support - omg.
No one can figure out where the money went, which search phrases, etc. I start to work on negative keywords lists and location radius.. it burns another 2 grand - with no stats.
Support is delayed - even India is delaying things with covid at that point.. messaging is sparse - basic answer is we took your money, you agreed, sorry you got zero business.
His bank account wiped out and he did not even know it was happening. I think he panicked with his bank and they cancelled his debit card about that time.
I tried to create a new campaign for him that would be exact match and have good negative keywords at that point that would actually get clients and not waste clicks.. but his account was frozen.
More support attempts.. weeks later - a message saying similar to - pay us another $1800 - smart ads don't do good stats - sorry about your luck.
I had paused the smart ads campaign that google set up and created a better one - but at that point my friend was so soured on the google experience, and the ripoff that he did not want to pay the additional $1800 that could not be charged to his cancelled card.
Short story long.. this campaign was not setup and run by an ad agency - google set it up. It was a complete waste of money and time and it has hurt the brand not just wit the two of us, but others we share details on this.
I suggested they refund 1800 and let him start fresh with the new setup I created.. more long forms to fill out.. eventually no dice.
There was a time when I helped businesses with google ads and it made several places successful for some time. What google has become with their lack of customer support and transparency is mind boggling to me.
If the yellow pages helped customers make ads and charged 3 grand a month to run them and in turn zero new customers called - I would imagine there would be less ads in those sections next year.
Anyhow your google ad folks essentially took advantage of a 70 year old and wiped his bank account - and returned zero benefits.
Might be time for some changes with how all that works - maybe just stop the retail side of doing ads for small folks and make them go through an agency so you can place the blame elsewhere - or/and maybe an agency would do a better job making sure there were proper stats and return on investment in order to keep paying clients in business.
Right now the metrics and reports of taking money from small businesses while paying folks in India to sell and support it - it's really not working as well as it might look in those quarterly spreadsheets.
imho - ymmv.
The privacy invading tactics used to drive those targeted ads are not fine. They are abusive, manipulative, and covert. I am not in Europe, so perhaps I'm bias, but I also don't see regulation of the data collection industry via the GDPR as improving the situation much. It seems to have just moved the goal posts for being more manipulative to gain permission. From my totally outsider point-of-view it seems the only way to effectively limit this privacy-invading data collection is to regulate how the data can be used vs. the collection itself. Heavily regulating the ad targeting itself vs. the data collection would mean even if you did collect the data, it loses its value to the advertisers. This also allows more legitimate data collection such as error reporting to continue as-is without the burden of extra regulation.
Anyways, that is my point of view on it. I would be interested to hear other's opinions on it, perhaps from those in industry.
To maximize your advertising revenue, you need to track your users as effectively as possible. This:
a) Reduces user privacy. Even recent developments like FLoC, which appear to be pro-privacy on the surface, are really just yet another datapoint with which to violate the privacy of users.
b) Reduces performance. It's easy to blame trendy bloated tech stacks for the state of the web, but the reality is that a big chunk of the slowness comes from ad-related tracking and delivery technologies (install privacy extensions on a low-end system and see the difference!). This reduced performance disproportionately affects those with lower system and network resources, further reinforcing global inequality.
Although some will disagree, I do think that it's possible to advertise ethically, but no large corporation operating in a capitalist society is going to be doing that voluntarily - unless strict regulation comes down from above (Spoiler Alert: It won't).
All that said, I don't blame the author for working in adtech, but perhaps only due to my rather bleak perspective that we're all just cogs in the capitalist machine whether we like it or not.
Don't hate the player, hate the game.
P.S: Cynically, I think the author's announcement of their charitable donations counts against them. It makes it seem like he's trying to "offset" the harm caused by his work, even if he won't openly admit that such harm exists. Charitable donations may make you a net-virtuous individual, but they do nothing to address the harm of adtech itself - which is orthogonal to the author's original claim that they believe that advertising is a good thing.
The false dichotomy between ads/paywall is not really useful, when the reality is that you often get a paywall and ads after you agree to pay. The advertisement industry is a cancerous blight of our societies, its sole purpose is to sell us stuff we do not need to increase a company’s profit. The fact that this is done on the web by plundering our personal data with no regard for our privacy is just the cherry on top. Ads business is unhinged capitalism and a social and ecological disaster, and advocating in its favor today is short-sighted at best.
It’s fine to work a job you like in an unethical industry, but it is not necessary to try to sell it to other people.
They wrote that the two choices are
> Paywalls. You pay with your money.
> Ads. You pay with your attention.
But that's not quite right. Ads have two options themselves:
> Ads. You pay with your money, because the ads get you to buy stuff.
> Ads. You pay with your attention, wasted on stuff you'll never buy.
Two negatives. Either you buy stuff you otherwise wouldn't (and therefore don't need, and were manipulated into buying), or you don't buy stuff and just have to suffer the attack on your attention in a world where your attention is already strained to its limits. No good outcomes here.
No argument for ads works if you believe, like I do, that buying things in general is bad -- bad for you, bad for the human race, and bad for the environment.
Do you mean to qualify this in any way? This is quite the radical statement that I'm not sure how you can reconcile with human existence any time the last X thousand years.
Specifically, there's the prevalence & overabundance of low-quality manufactured products made possible through economies of scale and mispriced environmental externalities.
In fact I think it's a good thing for one to question once in a while if they really need to buy that new thing.
imo, buying something you need is good, but then you don't need an ad to tell you to do it. Buying something you want is good. Buying something you neither need nor want is bad. Allowing something to manipulate you to want more stuff seems bad compared to it not happening.
Okay, those are the qualifiers I was looking for. That makes sense. It sounded like you were taking a stance against all purchases and not just excesses.
If you work on ads that only take my attention then you work on good ads, and I completely support that. If, however, you feel that your ads must try to pinpoint my identity by harvesting personal information in the name of "targeting" or "fraud prevention", then that's no longer me paying with my attention, it's me paying with my privacy and integrity.
There's also the alternative-which-must-not-be-named, which is non-regressive and frictionless: socialism. You pay with money, through taxes.
I have a hard time believing the author is unaware of this, so I'm left wondering: why? What was the point of this exercise? The result is closer to a self-indictment than an apology.
I reckon it was mostly a brag about (1) how he earns over half a million dollars a year for inflicting this upon us all and (2) how much more charitable he is than most of the rest of us.
The problem is that its selectively truthful, of course, which renders the whole exercise moot. Even though the author landed on a position in which he is not at fault, it's not going to buy him any peace of mind.
That's a good point and I agree that the essay does attempt this. But with opening his piece by letting us all know about his huge income and hefty charitable donations, I felt rather overshadowed the rest of his arguments.
nit: that's my family's joint income. My individual income is at https://www.jefftk.com/money
(I've been putting my income online since 2008 when my salary was $65k. https://www.jefftk.com/p/salary-publicy for why I think more people should share their incomes.)
Which is to say, I don't blame him for what he does. If someone dangled all that money in my face I can't say I wouldn't be tempted to take it, even if people call me evil.
However, the mental gymnastics to write an article like this does bother me. It's the same stuff probably everyone else in ads and other evil industries does to justify their actions. Reading something non-satirical like this makes me feel less good about the world.
The reason that I work (as opposed to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FIRE_movement) is so I can donate, which is why I start with that piece of the explanation.
Let's not blame engineers for what is effectively a political issue. If ads are an issue, let's get the law to handle it.
If you think something is wrong, the first step is to not do it. If you think it's so wrong it should be illegal, you can take the optional second step of trying to change the law.
There are some circumstances where you think something is wrong, but not doing it would be impossible or require really drastic life changes. For example, maybe you think driving a gas-powered car is wrong because it contributes to climate change, but you can't afford to buy an electric car or move somewhere that doesn't require a car. This is not one of those cases. The author has 10 years of experience at Google and could easily find a very well paying job either at another department inside Google, or at another company.
My point is that quitting or getting a different job accomplishes nothing. With a multinational corporation like Google, they will never struggle to fill roles. If you work in these positions, you at least have influence on product growth, and you can use the massive amount of money earned to lobby against harmful behavior. If you quit, you have no internal influence and have less money to take political action with, meaning the only way you could change things is through legislation.
The way I look at it is like so:
I think most people want to bring a net positive value to society. One way of doing that is working on something whose intrinsic value to society is neutral or nebulous (or just not thinking about it too hard), and compensating for that giving the money we make to other organizations that are definitely contributing positively. While this is better than not doing so, I think it misses out on the leverage that exists in what we build vs. the money we're paid for it.
For example, despite making over $500k last year, we know your employer thinks you are producing more value than that, because otherwise they wouldn't pay you that much. You would be a drag on their income statement otherwise. What this means is that even if you donated 100% of your salary to charity, you still aren't taking advantage of the leverage of what you can build, vs. the fixed amount you can earn.
If instead, you choose to work on something which is inherently good for society, society at large benefits from that leverage. You might be paid less, say $200k instead of $500k. But since the positive value you produce is leveraged you could be contributing, let's say, $1M of positive value for society - $200k to pay you to live in the bay area ($800k net positive value).
Just something to think about.
If I increase online sales by 0.1% through optimizing something, I am worth millions of dollars to Amazon and nearly nothing to Joe Schmoe with a small Shopify site.
Yes, but software skills are fairly fungible. Just because you currently work on ads doesn't mean that's all your skills are good for, or even that you need to work anywhere in ecommerce.
He specifically said he doesn't do that. Did you finish the article?
https://genius.com/Bill-hicks-on-advertisers-and-marketing-a...
You’re way off base here. The author links to the Effective Altruism page on “giving to earn” one link deep in: https://www.jefftk.com/donations
This is a well established concept, the idea is that in many life situations you can maximize your positive impact by taking a well-paying job and putting that money into charity.
So the arrow of causation is the opposite to what you are claiming; starting with the desire to give to charity, what job optimizes the amount that can be given?
It’s disheartening to see the cynicism that is being directed towards someone that is transparently advocating for making the world a better place, and taking the time to put their thinking in public to seek feedback on it.
The problem, of course, is that this closer inspection didn't happen.
I disagree. Advertising is intrusive and designed to convince you to do things you wouldn't normally do. It's large scale psychological manipulation that's only considered ethical because we've been doing it for so long.
The problem is that the power of targeted advertising has been democratized (irony intended) to allow everyone to do it. It is capable enough that it can end peaceful democracies.
My every interaction with my environment doesn't involve millions of trained professionals bent to the sole purpose of influencing my actions.
Outside of ads, that is.
I'm not saying that ads are particularly ethical, but I struggle to think of a replacement that isn't more paywalls. This is an easy decision to make for people that have the money, but is much harder for the majority of Americans. A Vox article [1] estimates that this would add an average of $35 a month, assuming every US adult paid this cost (which is a bold assumption).
[1] https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/6/24/18715421/internet-free-...
It was something I was interested in; I wouldn't have know about it without the advertising. We had an exchange of services for money.
How is this wrong?
Sure there are deceitful practices in advertising, but you're painting everyone with the same broad brush. IMHO, it is best to address the negative aspects of advertising instead of restricting communication from vendors to potential consumers.
Unfortunately, more widespread and effective advertising has real costs that end up raising prices. Coke’s premium over sugar water is backed up by their advertising spend.
Tracking, manipulation, etc are major downsides to advertising. But, even purely informative adds on TV aren’t free.
Whether true or not, it will convince you to top off your tank, and potentially purchase some things from the shop.
To change how much gas you’re buying in a lifetime it would need to change how far you drive. On the other hand T-Shirt advertising can convince you to buy significantly more clothes in a lifetime.
It’s a qualitative difference even if I didn’t express it well.
> To change how much gas you’re buying in a lifetime it would need to change how far you drive.
City/state/national tourism bureaus are taking care of that part. With help from the automobile industry's marketing arm.
It’s little different than a hospital sign. People don’t think hey there’s a hospital maybe I should have this gaping chest wound taken care of. Which is why they end up as H’s with a simple arrow rather than list out which specific hospital etc.
When I search "good USB charger" in Google and get an ad, click the ad and make a purchase for a USB charger, how was that nothing something I normally would do?
There's absolutely deceptive advertising, but to pretend all advertising is "intrusive" and "convincing you to do things you wouldn't normally do" is disingenuous.
Why do people have such a great impression of John Deere tractors? To the point where there's a whole culture of "green iron" and other companies had huge trouble breaking into the market? Ads. Ads going back to childhood in the form of toys.
Why do folks trust some brands, and not others? Why is brand recognition such an influential thing when it comes to making purchasing decisions? Why do children beg their parents for certain toys? Why do adults pick TGI Friday's over the diner next door?
Ads.
EDIT: I think it's worth flipping the question a bit as well. Why would companies pay for ads if they had no value, if they did not change our behavior? If we'd do something naturally, there would be no need for ads in the first place.
How would you find a USB charger brand if you were unaware of any to begin with?
> Why do folks trust some brands, and not others?
So then why even have a brand to begin with? Are you suggesting we just ban all advertising altogether? When you start a new company, new market, new idea, then what would you suggest that isn't advertising for a company to do to explain to customers what it is you do and how you may help them?
Trying to conflate the two as equivalent when someone says "ads are toxic" in the context of the online ad industry is doing the argument no good.
> How would you find a USB charger brand if you were unaware of any to begin with?
Why search for a brand, and not a high quality, well reviewed USB charger? To use the original example, googling for "good USB charger" and then buying one via an ad will not give you any guarantees that the USB charger is good. All it guarantees is that they paid the most to get your eyeballs on that particular search.
This is where you lost me. You assume:
1. There is a free service that allows you to search products. PS - it's called Google/Amazon.
2. There is a free service that allows you to read product reviews. PS - it's called Google/Amazon.
> To use the original example, googling for "good USB charger" and then buying one via an ad will not give you any guarantees that the USB charger is good.
And please do tell me, where does this perfect search capability exist in the world that allows one to search for goods and services free from all advertising.
Even a Turkish Bazaar merchant will tell you that the tube of toothpaste they're selling you last only a month.
That an alternative is not easily available, does not somehow make the existing services ethical.
That said, and the mystical service is called your friends/family/neighbors/colleagues/etc. It ain't perfect, but it's remarkably effective. In the 2-300 people in your first and second degree networks, there's probably a few anecdotes to help you find a good product.
It even has a neat name: word of mouth.
Tangent, but damn I wish reviews were reliable nowadays. They've fallen to deceitful practices like fake reviews, and are no better than advertising nowadays.
The minimum advertisement is essentially: "we sell ____."
I guess that could be called manipulative but without it, I'm not sure the economy could exist.
my take on this is to call advertisements/marketing as "lies" on regular conversations. "I watched a lie from nike the other day..."
I work at a company that is trying to introduce a new kind of product, one that I sincerely believe is intended to help people rather than _just_ make money (this is unusual for me, because i'm usually extremely cynical about motivations). The problem is that most potential customers we could help aren't even aware that what we're offering exists, they may not even think to find out if such a thing exists. How do we create awareness of this thing without advertising?
Ads are the consumers choice. Given a choice between paying for something or ads, they will chose the ads. So they get ads. That's mostly why we are where we are.
Many of the negative externalisatons are a matter of application, moreover, there are a variety of opinions on what is appropriate and not. For example, I don't care if Facebook uses my behaviour on Facebook to decide what ads to run, as long as that is otherwise anonymous, private and protected. Others will have differing opinions but I think most regular Americans, Europeans etc. have a variety of views but mostly not centred around the notion that ads are inherently evil.
"My sins are forgiven as long as I tithe some of my profits". Buys your way out of the issue, doesn't change the lifestyle.
The question is really how do you count all that excess "value", and is it good-value or evil-value. Once upon a time, the culture over there explicitly stated that they didn't want it to be evil... the bikeshedding going on here is opinions about the current implications of it all.
Could you be more specific about what you think the ethical issue is? I've seen many comments describing very different ethical objections, from several perspectives, and I'm not sure which one is yours?
The is actually what I like about Brave's solution, which is:
- no ads by default.
- if you have money and want to pay for the content you consume, you can load money into the browser and have it automatically dispense to publishers/creators based on which content you consume for how long, determined locally on your machine so no privacy leakage there.
- or if you don't have enough to justify paying all those creators directly you can turn on (again) privacy focused ads, where analysis for targeting only happens locally in the browser.
But from what I've seen, HN really hates Brave so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
> I kinda mean a better alternative to funding all this stuff.
I tend to think we'd be just fine without this "stuff." The internet still worked when the only advertising was banner ads that didn't run code on my machine. In a lot of ways, it worked better.
Some might find
1. all advertising unethical
2. targeted advertising unethical
3. not consider advertising unethical
4. consider the product that is being advertised
Advertising is not 'prima facie' unethical. It's actually a societal good. I know this is an unpopular opinion, but if you can set aside your emotions with regards to the discussion, and view it from a distance, it's not too hard to show.
To start off, I've never actually met anyone who doesn't want advertising at all (despite their claims). They just use the term advertising to refer to those kinds of advertisements they don't like, or find too intrusive.
Advertising is, at it's base, finding a way to deliver a message to someone who is doing something else. Thus, getting rid of advertising means no more signs on buildings (yes, being forced to read the name of a store as you walk down the street is a form of advertising). Even if you were willing to accept how difficult this would make it to discover businesses (life harder for the end user), this would make it nigh impossible for new entrants to any market. That means that pretty much all commerce would be funneled into a few catch-all stores, and not only would the economy suffer, but consumer power would be greatly diminished.
Advertising indirectly improves the quality of life of people who have more time than money. (Generally the less money you have in total, the more advertising benefits you.) This is because advertising as a source of revenue is a useful tool to amortize the cost of a product over many users. Free-to-watch TV would be mostly non-existent without advertising, not to mention all of the internet services like search and news; also consider free newspapers like the Metro or 20 Minutes.
That doesn't mean that I don't understand what people really get worked up about. Let's forget spam and obnoxious blinking signs, or having to punch the monkey. It's like how knives are great in the hands of chefs, but not murderers. Crime is crime, and someone like the poster of this article is not trying to defend those kinds of practices.
Let's get into what people tend to get really worked up about: customized advertising. However, it's not the customized advertising that really bothers people, it's the fear of abuse of tracking. In a world where customized advertising was perfected, you would see 95% less ads. Why? Every ad you see that isn't a match is a waste for everyone involved. The business doesn't want to pay, because you aren't interested, and the user doesn't want to see it, because it's distracting and wastes your time.
But still, tracking, that bothers you, right? You don't want an advertiser to know your kink, right?
Well, what if the advertiser is the store that happens to serve whatever your kink is? People shop in adult stores, and they have no problem letting the store know that they're interested in their wares, so clearly it's not just the stores learning that is the problem. The problem is the abuse. People want to choose who they trust to share information with, and don't wish to risk. But... if you're clicking on an ad from some store that delivers your own brand of kink, you're okay sharing that with them, so what's the problem?
Well, as an example, maybe if you're a teacher you don't want your community to know that you like buying purple teddy bears because it might cost you your job. You're okay shopping in a purple teddy bear store... but if the purple teddy bear store had advertising that only targeted teachers, suddenly someone knows that you're a teacher that likes purple teddy bears, and you consider that dangerous.
So yes, abuse is a problem. This is why advertisers actively engage in trying to solve the abuse problem. This is why the advertising industry is looking for ways to move forward.
Yes, they also fight the change, because in their own eyes, they're trustworthy (to at least their own standards), and change is hard and expensive. But that doesn't make advertising unethical, 'prima facie' or otherwise.
The biggest problem is that you are shipping and forcing something users, in most cases, don’t want. It’s like pornography and illicit drugs in that yes eventually there are some beneficial edge case side effects, but almost universally it is bad. In order to increase market penetration you must become more bad and simultaneously sell it as a positive.
This isn’t a universal truth. Users are willing to accept advertising as a payment in exchange for media or something similar. This isn’t evil so long as it isn’t violating privacy, is immediately apparent without deception, and is voluntarily accepted by the audience.
Citation needed.
You're criticizing the author for not addressing the "actual ethical issue", yet you yourself are failing to even state what you think it is.
There is absolutely zero societal consensus that advertising is unethical, in the way there is a consensus that fraud or murder are.
To the contrary -- there is vast disagreement around the ethics of online advertising, delicately balancing concerns around societal good, access to information, funding, factuality, bias, tracking, privacy, and consent. The incredible complexity of the issues involved is pretty much proof that there is nothing merely "prima facie" at all.
The only reasonably accurate targeting I've ever run into is the occasional ad for something I just browsed on Amazon. I've never clicked on an internet ad. Youtube advertising might as well be targeted to an alien race. What in the hell keeps this whole business afloat at it's current level? Am I being programmed to buy that mechanic's vise because they threw up an after-the-browse ad?
No doubt there's some sort of backend telemetry that proves the value of all this trouble, but I just don't see it. Maybe the emperor really is nekkid.
edit: It may well be that the real marketing genius in the advertising industry is not it's value in increasing sales, whether it's old school print media/OTA/tradeshows or the newfangled spying-on-you internet variety, but in convincing it's customers of advertising's value. Anything beyond pushing you up a search engine's ranking strikes me as a sketchy proposition.
Instead I get ads targeted at people who share my IP. I can often tell what my girlfriend has been browsing for from the ads I'm hit with, for instance, which is somewhat creepy.
I've had ads for medication that I'm prescribed, or could be prescribed, play on other people's devices when they use my network. It's likely targeted because I don't get ads for other types of prescriptions at all at home.
I'm also pretty sure of some of the medical conditions my friends and family have based on the ads I consistently see in their homes.
And it seems like unless you go to a lot of trouble, you're essentially relying on the ad network's own metrics for efficacy... Which when you consider the sheer quantity of money at stake, seems like it will end in a massive fraud at least once. I could be wrong about the perverse incentive though, it seems almost too obvious so I would assume that people who know the ad industry better than me would have a response to it.
There's a whole ecosystem of "buyside verification vendors" that advertisers contract with to validate that they're getting what they paid for. Buyers don't just take the seller's word for it, or at least enough of them don't that shady sellers are kept in check.
On top of that, plenty of marketers are absolutely clueless about how to go about their strategy, mostly because unlike previous generations (in online ads), they don't grok the underlying tech at all.
If that's all there is to it, I expect there's a lot of needless work being done under the covers.
Although for me, it's a 50/50 split between topic-related and ads that appear to target a generic male audience, which is a very good guess for some topics.
Advertising is throwing darts at the board with your eyes closed, whenever it lands somewhere on the board and nets you point is good enough for most.
Typical conversion rates are under the 1% threshold so you accept that a lot of your spend is not efficient but when it is, you make your money back and some, if you are any good at it.
Some podcasts use "dynamic ad insertion", where the ads are inserted when you download the podcast rather than when the podcast file is created and uploaded. [0] Discovered my podcasts were tracking me when I traveled and then heard ads for an out-of-state regional chain after I returned home, clearly because I had downloaded the episodes while traveling. Overcast added privacy & tracking info, to show whether each podcast uses dynamic ad insertion or (possibly) tracks IP etc. [1].
[0] https://themarkup.org/ask-the-markup/2020/10/08/podcast-priv... [1] https://9to5mac.com/2020/09/03/podcast-privacy-alerts/
The most successful ads looks very similar to the organic content and tend to have very similar targeting mechanisms. Search ads that look like search results. Product ads on amazon that look like product search results. Facebook ads that look like Facebook posts. In my experience all those ads are quiet close to content I'd like and I've clicked on quiet a few without realizing it's an ad.
Granted, incumbents are likely to score high on organic search results. If somebody new comes up with a better product, which can deliver more value at a lower price, the page rank algorithm isn’t going to do much for them. But the newcomer’s superior unit economics mean they can afford to bid higher for an ad, which allows them to get market share from the incumbent. In that sense, ads can make the market more liquid, and speed adoption of improved products and more efficient manufacturing or business processes.
The ad publisher does end up capturing a big chunk of this value, and it’s valid to ask if that’s fair and if we as a society should allow it.
Literally every ad I say to myself "wow, that is actually something I would consider buying" and in certain instances, I have. Outside of Instagram it is exceedingly rare that I would purchase something based on an ad.
On the other side there are Google Play ads with mouth open guys - I'm never going to play one of those vile games, ever.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AndroidGaming/comments/cv4ezs/mouth...
And from my anecdotal experiences, I have to agree with both you and what I see on HN in that regard. Not only they get the advertisers right up my alley, they even get the exact products I want to click on.
For a specific example: I don't get easily baited by random no-name "hip" clothing startups (that are mostly just alibaba dropship sort of places), so instagram keeps giving me ads for Adidas products as well. And the thing is, not only does it get correctly that I am likely to be interested in Adidas products, the specific products from Adidas that get suggested to me in those ads are the exact kind of products from Adidas that I would be interested in. Which is very impressive and surprising, given how wide the range of Adidas products is, and how most of their general stuff isn't super appealing to me. It is hard to describe to the point where I am struggling myself to define what exactly I am looking for if I am navigating Adidas website. But somehow Instagram ads get it right on target most of the time.
The only time when those ads let me down big time was when I saw an Adidas tracksuit advertised with the design I just liked a ton. Without looking at the details, I ordered it, only to realize a bit later that it was in "kids" section of their website, and I have no kids (and neither do I fall under the typical "people who might have kids" demographic by any metric; e.g., I don't search for any items even tangentially related to children, not a part of any FB groups that are heavily populated by parents or children, etc.). But damn, I would be lying if I said that Instagram didn't get the exact idea of what I wanted perfectly correct, sizing issues aside lol.
According to their algorithm, you do now.
Movie plot: Two people meet up, have fun, then go their separate ways. 9 months later she has a kid, dad doesn't know. But FAANG knows...
The problem with "plausible movie plots" is they are often overrated in terms of % chance of happening.
With linked graphs and relationship trees, it doesn't seem impossible "The Algorithm" could figure out you have kids before you do, or at least base it's Advertising results on a % chance guess.
I've seen things go from saying things in a conversation to targeted advert on Twitter, for example, in under 1hr routinely (although not always). Many of my peers have reported the same. While I've reproduced this on multiple devices (Android + iPhone) over many tests, I've been unable to isolate the app(s) doing this and how it works.
It's baffling how it's done and at scale, but somehow a few organizations seem to have extremely advanced adtech in production.
It seems to me that Facebook is extremely good at targeting me with ads (via Instagram) for products I might be interested in. I’m also much more likely to talk about products I’m interested in. I’m also much more likely to notice the spooky scenarios where the ads match what I was talking about, but not so likely to notice the ads unrelated to my conversations.
There are so many ways we could detect such surveillance. Power consumption, network usage, mic activity indicators, etc. but I still have seen no such evidence.
What do you think could be going on?
Unfortunately, this topic tends to be routinely brushed off as coincidence and I believe it's partially because the level of surveillance underway would cause panic and outrage, if it becomes widely known. Although I have have exposure to adtech and ML, it's difficult to grasp how this sort of activity is being done at scale.
My current theory is audio may be heavily compressed prior to occasional uploads to a trusted domain, which could be obfuscated by cloudfront or similar service. It's also possible some on-device speech to text is happening, which would make the files trivial to upload. That said, on device ML itself would be a quite a feat, especially to be running on mobile devices with high degree of accuracy to isolate keywords to be used in prod, for ad targeting.
My feeling here is that it's just like when someone in your family buys a particular make/model of car, you start noticing the same car on the road and are surprised that you never noticed how many of them there are.
That same ad for a set of Bose headphones might show up in your feed once a week, but one of those days you just happen to have a conversation about headphones with a friend, and it feels weird.
The paranoia in me sometimes wants to believe that my phone is listening to me all the time and is extracting ad keywords from everything I say, but I have a hard time figuring out how it would work.
Uploading voice clips, even using a good compressor like Opus, would still be noticeable. Maybe not by me, personally, but someone would have noticed that by now. Doing on-device voice recognition is possible (uploads of compressed text might not be noticeable), but my intuition is that would be a huge drain on the battery if it was running all day, processing everything it hears.
But who knows. Maybe it is possible, and there's a novel, but secret technology that enables it. It's a little far-fetched, though, I think.
Now-days "Ads" are a watching you.
Now advertisers can track you directly where/when you go, without your permission. Your search and purchase history forever remembered, your location verified, your friends identified.
With such level detail we will soon have custom pricing to maximize profits.
I've seen the thesis that all this advertising revenue - even if poorly spent - subvents large portions of exciting research in deep learning etc. at the likes of Google and Facebook. So all that talent wouldn't entirely be lost to advertising.
Possible explanations that I have seen for inaccurate targeting:
1. Some folks have a ton of money in their budget to spend on marketing, and they frankly don’t care about optimizing their targeting. In some cases, this is a shrewd decision, since the benefits of marginal optimization don’t really justify the cost of optimization. That said, in most cases, it’s just sloth or ignorance combined with the knowledge that they better spend their ad budget or else “bad things” will happen.
2. Lots of people call themselves digital marketers. Most of them who are employees suck, and I mean suck really bad. The reason is that if you are really good at digital marketing, it’s pretty easy to roll your own small business that, at a minimum, makes enough money while still having a lot of latitude in terms of free time or financial upside. Most companies are not willing or are not able to pay highly competent digital marketers what they are worth. Regardless, these employee marketers who suck tend not to do well at optimizing targeting.
3. Most digital marketing agencies suck at targeting. This is largely a byproduct of #2 above. The owner of an agency or the lead marketer might be really good, but they often delegate to people who are not. Streamlining the work of the underlings turns out not to be that important for most of these agencies.
That’s my 2 cents. I would love to hear other opinions.
If the web were 100% ad-free, it would still exist. It would still be growing. People would still spend countless hours working on computer programming. People would still be endlessly tinkering with the internet. This is reality, I saw it in the 80's and 90's. However, they would not be, as the author is today, asking for forgiveness, pledging to donate half their "earnings" to charity. Online ads may be an efficient way to make money but it also may be the only efficient way to make money from such "work" (experimentation, fun). The folks who are profiting from online ads will say anything to avoid that reality check.
The emperor may indeed be naked, but the amount of money and infrastructure these companies have to bury the truth is enormous. They will not allow the world to ever again experience a web without pervasive advertising. The person who started the web already had a real job. He did not try to make money with online ads. That world was fun while it lasted. There were so many possibilities.
Thanks to this author's "work", the possibilities now appear to be mostly dystopian. Compare this post "Why I work on Ads" to the original paper from Brin and Page that described the influence of advertising on web search as undesirable and a primary motivation for creating Google.
"Half of my advertising budget is wasted. The problem is, I don't know which half."
Me neither, but marketing is significantly about awareness, not just the clicks.
If you've seen it, it is at some level "in you", and the brand has (fractionally) been built.
I know this doesn't apply to all ads by any means, but it's important to remember that advertising also works this way.
But I do click ads in my work, if the top (ad) link on Google is something relevant I might click it if I don't care for the company. I try to avoid clicking links for companies I really like since I work in a very ad heavy industry and know how much CPC can cost.
We are sold on the idea that they work, because someone clicks this ad, we track them, they buy the product, and we attribute the sale to that ad.
But we don't know whether the customer would have bought anyway. And some research suggests that, for the most part, they would have.
Steve Tadelis at Berkeley wrote a paper in 2013 demonstrating little to no efficacy of nine figures of ad spend at eBay.
http://conference.nber.org/confer/2013/EoDs13/Tadelis.pdf
This may not be true of all ads - ads for little-known brands, for example, may reach people who would have never heard of it. But the bulk of advertising bought by large brands may largely be a waste.
Advertisers still spend money because almost nobody is getting paid to rain on the parade. There's an endless stream of ad agencies, paid search marketers, marketing department staff themselves, CMOs, media properties, ad nauseam who are all invested in continuing marketing spend. A CMO will almost never declare that his department is useless. So they continue to make the case for their continued relevance.
On the other hand, brand recognition I do believe has value but is hard to quantify.
I also never click on an internet ad EXCEPT if it links to a price -not to buy.
Take paid Amazon reviews for example. This is advertising, just one of the most scummy possible forms of it. It's effective because people like me look to reviews to provide a third-party take on whether or not a product is any good. If I have a choice between two otherwise equivalent products, I'll pick the one with better reviews. But usually this just means rewarding the company that paid more to "advertise" on Amazon.
I realize you're probably talking about "real" organic mentions, but those are growing increasingly harder to find. A good example is the last time I bought headphones. I got suckered by a bunch of small review sites that had either been paid or gotten free samples in exchange for reviews. I bought two pairs, and when they arrived the sound from both was distorted. One pair broke within a few months. It was clearly trash that had been pumped using fake organic marketing. When I went back to find the sites that had provided the reviews in the first place, a few of them did mention (in very tiny print) that the reviews were paid. Me, suckered by advertising?! More likely than you'd think.
Back in the day, Johnny Carson reading an ad was convincing to the median consumer because they could be led to believe that the ad really was an endorsement of the product. That doesn't work any more, or not nearly as much at any rate. The basic strategy hasn't changed: it's still an attempt to find someone the consumer will trust. This is why, in my opinion, ads have always been and always will be bad, an attempt to subvert human rationality. Johnny Carson endorsing a product didn't mean that the product was good, it meant he was paid to endorse it. A review site endorsing a product nowadays doesn't mean that the product is good, it means they're paid to endorse it. In both cases the breakdown between what the consumer believes is happening and what is actually happening is the very thing advertising is trying to create, its raison d'être.
The niche ones have mods which allow genuine dissent as well as other recommendations from competing solutions.
Smart marketers don't try to get you to buy from an ad click. They want to move you one step down the funnel, which is usually getting your email/contact info if it's the type of product that has a longer nurturing process and sales cycle.
You can certainly waste a lot of money doing it too. Getting the right message in front of the right user at the right time is a lot harder than people think it is.
The above is where there's a lot of smoke and mirrors in ad tech. But for advertising as a whole, it's not a massive industry because it doesn't work.
Guess that's why we need those brightest minds of our generation on the problem, as the saying goes, right?
That sentence gives me extreme Matthew McConaughey-in-Wolf of Wall Street vibes. After seeing you wrote that, I immediately assumed you very likely work in advertising. Sure enough...
I have no clue whether anything you've written there is accurate or not. Either way, this whole thing and this whole industry just looks, sounds, and feels gross and intrinsically empty. I get a much better and more wholesome feeling from the cryptocurrency industry, even.
Greatest minds? Maybe there are some, you'll find them everywhere. But I'd worry that the greatest minds are toiling away in academia chasing grants or working on things that they don't want to work on.
In the paraphrased words of Don Draper (Mad Men character), nobody grows up wanting to be in advertising. It just kind of happens.
The core of advertising is just getting some message about your product or service to a relevant audience.
A lot of companies offer that service, some more effective than others.
But yes, I started an ad-tech company that supports indie news publishers. Before that, I was offered a great gig at Yahoo (when it was still kind of cool) where I got into it. I honestly didn't seek it out but I guess I liked it enough to stick with it.
It's certainly hard to compare entire industries apples-to-apples. The worst parts of the cryptocurrency industry are definitely worse than the worst parts of the advertising industry. However, I personally feel like in an "average", "net", or "expected value" sense, advertising may be worse. But maybe it isn't; either way, all I was trying to say is I really just don't like advertising or ad tech, and I wanted to use a rather extreme comparison to viscerally convey that. (Perhaps a little like a kind of "bullshit-industry" analogue of Godwin's law - my comparison was somewhat tongue-in-cheek and bad faith, basically, but also kind of not, because I do like some aspects of cryptocurrencies while I like zero aspects of advertising.)
>that supports indie news publishers
Sure, and maybe someone else could've started one that supports starving children. (The originally posted article similarly mentions that one of their reasons for working on ads is "I give half of what I earn to the most effective charities I can find, and the more I earn the more I can give".)
These all feel like cop-outs to me. I could significantly support independent creators or starving children by running a cryptocurrency Ponzi scheme, but it still doesn't make it positive on net. The difference is that you and the article author simultaneously say that you feel like the work is inherently positive, too, which in my book just makes it delusional rather than dissonant or contradictory.
So I absolutely don't think you're at all behaving knowingly unethically; just unknowingly. I think part of the issue here is that it's generally only a tiny bit unethical, so it takes a lot for it to add up to being a-lot-unethical, and humans (including myself) usually aren't so good at perceiving these potential cumulative effects when they're upstream of it all.
>The core of advertising is just getting some message about your product or service to a relevant audience.
At the same time, I can't not acknowledge this. How can I fault a small business owner for wanting people to know they exist? There's some cognitive dissonance of my own, here. And at the moment I'm resolving the dissonance by disliking the advertising and ad tech industries rather than disliking businesses who place ads. (As long as the ads they place aren't annoying, deceptive, or malicious in any way.)
Maybe my opinion on all this will eventually shift a bit, though, because a lot of it's certainly more emotional than logical. At a very deep, subjective level, I just strongly dislike advertising and everything about it. It gives me nothing but negative feelings. Most of the cryptocurrency industry gives me negative feelings, too - but the industry as a whole doesn't give me nothing but negative feelings. Some part of it gives me neutral or positive feelings.
Not to get off track, but ultimately it's a subjective position. I could easily take the view that anyone working for Facebook is actively helping erode the privacy of internet users. Or, that anyone working for Google is furthering its anticompetitive agenda and stifling innovation on the open web.
Without my platform, there are some towns and cities across the US that wouldn't have a local news outlet or reporter to follow local government and uncover corruption. I have case studies on my website where the publishers say it themselves.
From someone else's point of view I could be deluded, but from my standpoint, I'm doing something very positive. I don't think someone has to actively seek out the most cynical perspective on their line of work.
Can you provide some pointers to that data (as the parent did for the contrary position)? Forgive me, but it seems you work in advertising, so I'm not sure if you're the most unbiased person to assert something like this without evidence.
But with many parts of digital, you can show certain pages of your website exclusively to those who have clicked on ads (ie. hide those pages from regular browsers).
In this way you can directly measure the direct effects of the advertising spend.
There are many businesses, including three that I own, that have grown as a sole consequence of social media advertising. We have not promoted these businesses in any other way (no SEO, no trade shows, nothing).
I'm not going to share my advertising accounts with you; I'm just going to ask you to trust that when I get my laptop out and show my results to my 'marketing skeptical' friends, they stop being skeptical.
Actual words, from one of these friends: "wow. That is like a money printing machine."
Consider for a second: how many advertisers that are actually succeeding are going to publicly call attention to their success? Would you?
The only hint is Facebook and Google's revenues. They go up, and I am one of the people who makes their revenues go up.
spoken like a true used car salesman
I'd like to be proven otherwise, so, here are my key points, which you didn't contend with:
-> It's possible to completely isolate the effect of advertising spend, thereby making the effectiveness (or not) measurable.
-> I pointed to growing revenues on Google/FB's platforms, two platforms which make isolated measurement feasible.
In terms of _externally_ verifiable facts, that's the best I'll be able to give you.
The rest, you (and others) have to take on a/ good faith b/ using basic logic, that I'm telling the truth.
Though I don't doubt that you are right on the whole, this is a poor argument; homeopathy and other snake-oil are a massive industry as well.
Yes, I believe this is true. But also, I've heard that payouts per impression are going down precipitously. Desperate news sites are chock full of heavy ads because each impression pays less and less. Popular Youtube channels increasingly run their own integrated promotional content instead of depending on youtube ad revenue which keeps falling, even as viewership rises.
It's reasonable to suspect that as ad performance becomes perfectly measurable, payouts to content creators will asymptotically approach zero, because most ads don't work. Consumers spend most of their time looking at ads that don't work at all. That the occasional well crafted and placed ad does work isn't much consolation.
Direct sold digital advertising (OG, cutting ad networks out) is a different story.
Imagine, for example, that HN said they would auction off a single ad slot beneath the navbar to the highest bidder for the year.
How much do you think that would command? Do you think there could be sincere branding value (and actual performance) for the advertiser? I think it could be worth north of 1MM just to promote open jobs at a company.
If it was a clean, tasteful ad, and it was simply to support the cost of running HN, I'm pretty sure most of the audience would put up with it.
The common perception of digital advertising is network advertising. But the type of advertising that is the least annoying and most beneficial to both the advertiser and publisher is direct sold.
That being said there’s plenty of waste due to politics, bureaucracy, bad tech and general mismanagement. It’s important to separate the concept from the implementation.
Are we being 5D-chess'd and it's working on all of us subliminally and subconsciously and we just think we're immune? Or is there some other huge population of people out there it's working on who actually somehow are real manifestations of the unfathomably-cringeworthy-to-utter "sheeple" / "NPC" trope or something?
One area I can see is more subtle word-of-mouth kinds of influence (organic or astroturfed), where someone may see a lot of their friends or people they admire using and recommending something. I can definitely be influenced in that way in some cases - that's kind of how interest in almost anything works, isn't it? (For a non-profit example, would I have become interested in Rust if I didn't see it positively mentioned thousands of times on websites I use for the past decade? Probably not.) But for traditional ads like banners and commercials and billboards, I perceive zero efficacy in my own case.
>It's in your TV shows, your news articles, your Instagram feed, your word of mouth, your everything unless you are in the forest
I think I, and some decent percentage of HN readers, may kind of be "in the forest". I don't watch TV, I don't read news articles, I've never had an Instagram account or any kind of social media account (besides more "pseudonymous" social media like HN and reddit), I have comprehensive ad blockers, etc.
I also don't really buy products. I buy food, maybe I'll upgrade to a new laptop or phone every 4 - 5 years, but otherwise I don't think I really "consume" new things.
The only thing I can think of that ads have consciously made me do is pay to get rid of them. For example, I pay for YouTube Premium so I can never see ads. (Ad blocking gets tough for mobile devices and casting to other screens.) They got me there, because I watch a lot of YouTube (which I acknowledge is kind of "the new TV") and in some ways it's the best $12/month I've ever spent. It doesn't cover video makers including sponsored content, but I use crowdsourced browser extensions to identify and skip those.
The great misunderstanding of this industry is that what ads you see are just as important as the ads you don’t see, which allows for profit maximization.
In your circumstance, it may be true that bank transactions are farmed and analyzed to be additive to data gathering on the web, which in turn is additive to the offline data gathering offered by various companies. Every transaction made is analyzed for location, merchant, purchase category, amount, date & time, and more.
Most of the other commenters who are claiming and linking to articles that ads don’t work aren’t in the industry. This is an important distinction because what we’re talking about here are the machines that crunch all this data are considered trade secrets and/or intellectual property. Also, slightly off topic, but it’s important to understand that ads != marketing. Ads are a child component of marketing. When you look at the overall function of marketing (of which product management is a discipline, no matter how desperately some attempt to align it to technology), then consider how much of a factor data analysis and operationalization of data is a driver of success for Fortune 500 companies. Almost any company in consumer technology (e.g. FAANG), consumer healthcare (CVS), telecommunications (AT&T), FMCG or retail (Walmart, Costco), and retail banking (Chase, Wells Fargo) are using these techniques to build better products, sharpen communications, and win new customers.
It’s like CGI graphics in movies. If it looks good then it just looks good and you definitely notice when it looks bad. Your average TV show probably has half the stuff on the screen being CG in some way but millions of watchers never know.
I have a pixel on my thank-you page. I manually delete placements and optimize creatives and angles and funnels and demographic targeting until it goes from making no sales to ludicrously profitable. This is an entire industry you know nothing about.
Big brands can be dumb but they do mostly have the tools to not be.
In a lot of Tech industry firms, the in-house expertise just isn't there to do this stuff and that possibly breeds skepticism. I've had fairly junior members of my teams head out to FAANG who've been shocked at how limited the depth of knowledge is.
a. A $300 billion dollar industry is based entirely on a delusion.
b. You are an outlier.
Given that some industries (or movements, ideologies, etc.) could credibly be based on delusions, what do you think is the upper limit for how big such an industry could get?
Google / FB just say they show your ad to a XXXX million people. You owe them $XXXX.
"We suspect X million people watch this TV show (based on highly inaccurate Nielsen ratings) and then stayed around for the ad break, pay XX dollars."
"XXX people passed by your billboard, XX saw it, X people visited your website and made a purchase, pay XX dollars."
Plus you can go watch TV and see that it's actually been on there. Or walk down the street, or pick up a newspaper.
There's definitely accountability. The problem is that you can't always blame FB or Google because maybe your targeting is off, your ad copy sucks, you dumped the user off the front page of your website and they bailed, etc. There's a lot more to performance and accountability.
Blaming technicians for the negative externalities of their industries is a dark path. Are we going to blame lawyers who defend rapists? General Motors assembly-line workers? Engineers who work for oil companies?
Software engineers agreeing to build awful shit is more like mechanical engineers building weapons. They should know what they are doing is going to cause harm and if they choose to do it anyways I have no issue calling them unethical.
Lawyers effectively defending awful clients, for example, managing to get them off the hook on a technicality, are likewise generating massive negative externalities for society at large.
It's either both or neither, and I'm not comfortable going down that path.
The phrase "Effective adtech" is really downplaying the amount of unethical shit involved in building it.
It could be effective without turning the internet into a race to the bottom. It could be effective without third party tracking, it could be effective without vacuuming every bit of data possible from every source imaginable. It could be effective without turning every device we own into an ad platform.
> It's either both or neither, and I'm not comfortable going down that path.
No, its not both or neither. That's absurdly reductive to suggest. It is possible for lawyers to behave unethically in their duties, but just defending the guilty (or prosecuting the innocent) is not unethical on it's own.
Similarly, it's possible for engineers to behave unethically in their duties. Just building software isn't unethical.
Building platforms that are deliberately and systematically eroding our privacy in every corner of our lives in order to make money absolutely is unethical. Turning society into a corporate-controlled panopticon is absolutely unethical. Absolutely scumbags
I'm a developer myself and I've never faced the dilemma, but I don't feel like blaming others for not wanting to become judges of good and evil. Like in the case of a lawyer, doing your job and doing it well is in and of itself ethical.
I really can't draw a line in the sand where adtech is unacceptable but $something_else is, just because I have such an hatred for advertisement.
This is the kind of rhetoric that is used to justify doing war crimes. It is absolutely not a defense of unethical behavior.
This is a harmful misunderstanding of how the legal system works. Subjecting laws and procedures to scrutiny, and exposing "loopholes" is exactly the role of a vigorous defence. The fact that the consequences for the state (and society) of miswriting or misapplying the law can be so severe is exactly what keeps the system honest.
Sorry for the low signal answer, but you're the second to raise this objection and I wanted to clarify I don't actually think that.
Even if they have been declared guilty of a crime in the past they might be innocent of this one and still have a right to council.
Suggesting that software somehow has that same kind of standard where engineers are required to build anything and everything they are asked to the best of their ability or they can lose their accreditation (as if we even have that in software) is absolutely absurd.
He told them about how it is important that defendants are presumed innocent, and that everyone gets a strong defense, in order to make sure that those who are wrongfully accused do not get wrongfully convicted.
They talked about it for something like an hour, and the people were only sort of convinced. And his lunch got cold.
Later, he found himself in another small town, defending another rapist/murdered, eating lunch in a diner and being asked by the people there the same question.
This time he said "his family paid me $100000 to defend him". The crowd accepted that right away as a perfectly fine reason to defend some totally vile criminal, and went back to their lunches.
Only if such lawyers are unethical in how they go about doing this.
Lawyers who defend accused rapists are a necessity for a well-functioning justice system. The alternative is a process where the accused isn't permitted a legal defence, if they're taken to trial for serious crimes like rape.
Software engineers who spend their days forcing increasingly invasive advertising technology upon us all are not necessary. For the most part, we'd all be better off if they all downed tools.
The structure of the argument is: because A is equivalent to B and I'm not comfortable with B, then I'm not comfortable with A either. Resolving the let binding in the variables A and B is left as an exercise to the reader.
EDIT: parent has been edited since this comment was written. Please disregard the belligerent tone, reply to parent no longer applies.
Disagree.
> Are we going to blame lawyers who defend rapists?
No, because I want there to be someone who defends that rapist's rights. In contrast, it's easy for me to blame a software engineer who's developing bad technology X, because I want the job of developing X to not exist.
> General Motors assembly-line workers? Engineers who work for oil companies?
Yes, but only if they have better options for earning a living: I can't blame anyone for not wanting to starve. Assembly-line workers often don't have better options, but software engineers usually do.
This path looks pretty well-lit to me.
A company I worked for was more in the business of improving targeting. Of course people will argue if targeting demographics is bad per se, or better or worse than other parts, but I personally don't care if I get generic ads or ones tailored to me. So for one of our main product, we were reselling and integrating some data for a bigger player, as in, we were 1 of many data points determining if the ad would be interesting for the person who would see the ad or if they'd give them another one.
Yes, it kind of gets into this angle of privacy and user tracking... but I'm ok with the scope we did it in and I thought hard about if I can accept this without a guilty conscience - but for example I'd never knowingly work on trying to bombard the user with even more ads, or popups, or whatever - but just saying "ads shouldn't exist" is maybe aspirational but sadly I don't see it as a valid version of reality in the foreseeable future.
I think morally that's correct as well.
Cryptocurrency is a weird one you bring up coz I don't think anybody is proposing hunting down and jailing Satoshi even if they think Bitcoin ought to be banned.
What? No. You pay with your data. You pay with your privacy.
And the ads additionally destroy legitimate paid services. Ads have destroyed the entire internet economy, and brought upon a surveillance state.
This blog post is more detached from reality than the Q board on 8kun.
Just stop. We get one chance on earth, do something of value.
Why do we grant them such a generous separation of work/personal life? They spend their day screwing us over, in the evening we all sing kumbaya? There's been no accountability.
Yes, my message is not going to bathe them in the positivity sunshine they've likely grown accustomed to in their work environment echo chamber. I am okay with that. Others might be more successful getting through to them with their slider closer to the carrot. I truly respect that ability, I just keep thinking appeasement is a failed strategy.
...I shouldn't have gone with "whoring" I suppose, sorry about that. I like the idea of serving your argument from your own site, decentralization and individuality and all that. But for some it's just another way to pad their resume to facilitate becoming more of the problem.
So I agree with you, there is no moral high ground for the people involved. They should be looked on no differently than anyone else exploiting addiction for profit.
Fair enough. I prefer to engage with both sides on this issue, but I suppose there are other issues where my feelings are strong enough, and my faith in one side of the issue low enough, that I would not bother engaging.
Lord knows there are loads of problems to worry about, but damaging the community you're participating in is counterproductive.
Also there was a comment somewhere I can't find right now "There are 2 ways to make money in the internet - bundling and unbundling" with this I think there is value of a paywall that bundles, see Apple News. In the end I don't like the way AdTech works right now, I am not sure about what's next. I don't think explicit regulation is the way, especially since Internet is international and law is as a rule local. But either we will sell our data to monopolies or we will die in bills for selfhosting everything and even though involuntarily our internet histories will be sold.
tbh kinda seems like a paywall with extra steps for buy in
That's not at all justification for practices that harm society, especially when that harm takes fewer resources to achieve than charity donations can make up for. It's like saying "I'm willing to work for a company with massive pollution because I donate some of my salary to Greenpeace."
Maybe I'm reading too much into things, but the fact that the author put this justification first is an implicit admission that they feel what they do is wrong in some way and try to offset it with donations.
The thing is, I think advertising is positive
It is difficult to think otherwise about something attached to your paycheck
I think advertising is positive... if I'm causing harm through my work I would like to know about it.
One really great example of harm is propaganda delivered via political attack ads that polarize the population by provoking anger, fear, and hatred.
Ads. You pay with your attention.
You aren't given a choice in most cases to choose attention or $$. You also pay with more than attention: your privacy, personal data, and tracking of online actions. Many off-line actions can also be tracked by purchasing data from other sources and matching to the data collected online.
Non-regressive
This would be a better point if many media outlets didn't still use paywalls and ads together
What many people find reprehensible is all the invasive spyware and tracking that comes with modern ad tech (largely pioneered by Google).
Lots of people do. E.g. the first user feedback comment in that article: "Advertising is bad because it’s fundamentally about influencing people to do things they wouldn’t do otherwise. [...]"
And every HN thread about advertising also has a variation of that sentiment.
I wish that was the case, but it is not.
>And every HN thread about advertising also has a variation of that sentiment.
And it is not just on HN, but across the Internet. Reddit, Forum, Twitter.
Their voice are crystal clear, All ads are bad. And any objection will.... well you know the internet.
It is the same with tracking. Somehow all tracking are bad on the internet.
Another recent example on the Internet. All VCs are bad. ( Although that didn't gain much traction )
Edit: See, Instant downvoting. And if you disagree, go on to read all the comments on HN on the subject and count for yourself how many comments were there to support resonable "ads", and how many were flat out dismissal.
I had a high school teacher give us a book about print advertising (this was way before the internet was a common thing) and how it deceives. How they sell cars with sexy women, how instead of selling a product they sell an unrelated image of success (which is not really tied to the product). It was a nice book, with lots of photos and examples, and all about how advertisement is designed to deceive and encourage a "need" that wasn't there before.
Advertising signs that con you\
Into thinking you're the one\
That can do what's never been done\
That can win what's never been won\
Meantime life outside goes on
All around you
I'm supporting jasode's comment that lots of people do consider advertising morally objectionable. I believe this assertion is not controversial regardless of what one personally thinks about ads.
Arguing that advertising is somehow inappropriate manipulation isn't consistent with a market economy. Like it or not, efficient markets require marketing. Now, you could be against the market economy of course, but I don't see a lot of the people claiming ads are manipulation also claiming that the market economy is bad (which imo would be more intellectually honest).
I'd say disregard the "all ads are bad" crowd. It's a completely uninteresting discussion. The interesting discussion is the line to be drawn between advertising (which is good, or at least acceptable) and the shady side of adtech with trading in personal information.
> efficient markets require marketing
The problem with ads is that they fundamentally violate consent. I can't avoid seeing an ad, even if I'm not interested. Ads are not the equivalent of a salesman who's pitching his script to me, they are like an unsolicited robocall.
* Wasting large amounts of resources
* Potential security risks (js ads with malware is a thing)
* Potentially gathers a lot of data that could be abused by others
Contextual ads aren't _that_ bad, assuming they're simple enough to not run actual code on the client devices, and the clients can spare the bandwidth/resources in their end. Until that's universally true ads are a nuisance at best and actively hostile at worst.
Tbh, that kinda seems like a minority opinion (that I share, but still) around these parts
- high QPS feeds
- massive volumes of data
- interesting problems to solve everyday
It's an industry that doesn't stand still.
Beyond that, people who ask such things are just taking the moral high ground.
Sure he probably goes into paragraphs about other reasons or what he does with the money, but it boils down to money. The author chose to sell his/her time to an advertising company. Thats OK, we all need to work. But I dont need a blog post from them to justify their choice, they arent making me think more of them. They might make themselves feel better but it boils down to they chose to do something not great for more money, than choosing something more worthwhile for less money.
The sad bit is the amount they would earn not in advertising probably would not be much below what they currently earn. But they still made that choice and they have to live with it.
The extreme tracking based on the mental state and identity of ads make them more than annoying. It is annoying to watch stupid ads on TV. But it is way worse when the ads are targeting my mental weaknesses directed directly at me. Example being how the Cambridge Analytica was able to make ad campaigns targeting _individuals_.
Generalized, non-targeted ads are fine. Though I do have problems with ads assaulting me wherever I go. I am fine with visiting a website that is ad supported and getting ads on the side, but I am not fine with walking home and seeing ads everywhere I glance at. And worse when ads are formatted so much like the actual content to trick you into thinking you're consuming content and not ads. Or even worse, sponsored pushes when you don't even know this is an advertisement.
Point is: Things cost money. Yes. But I don't think the current ad industry is anything other than toxic as hell.