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What I really can't understand, that permeates this whole discussion, is plenty of people that try to sell the idea that ads let us have content "for free", and

What I really can't understand, that permeates this whole discussion, is plenty of people that try to sell the idea that ads let us have content "for free", and that all we have to tolerate is "a little annoyance". It's insane. If companies are buying ad-space, it's because they expect to get more business in return. This means that someone out there is being influenced by said ads, so that if the content cost X to put up online (hosting, funding its creation), someone is paying X+(ad company overhead) for it. If these costs are being borne evenly, then it's complete societal waste. We could pay X for the content, and not incur the overhead. If these costs are not borne evenly, and some people are paying for the consumption of more disciplined people, it's probably contributing to terrible cycles of poverty (ie: some kid spending money on fancy new shoes he doesn't need and can't afford is paying for a well-paid tech-users YouTube habits, because it preys on their lack of education). Either way it's terrible. Advertising isn't free. Insofar it works, for some people, it's basically coercive via psychology and simulated peer pressure.

jacquesm 11y ago
Advertising is an arms race.
- commentzorro 11y ago
  I thank you for your worship. --Vishvarupa
reasonishy 11y ago
Advertising is the method most people use to discover new products/services. Of course these days the line is often blurred. So half the posts on HN could be adverts, and you wouldn't really know about it. In fact lots of them are adverts. But just think about how the world would work without advertising. How would you know there's a star wars movie coming out? How would you know about new products and services you might be interested in buying. I buy quite a few magazines, and one of the reasons I buy them is for the adverts, which tell me about companies who provide things I might be interested in. For example, I buy a bee-keeping magazine, which has many adverts related to bee-keeping. That's valuable. I buy a pig magazine, which has adverts for pig arks, pig tags, weaners, etc etc. Good advertising is a net win for everyone. It provides us information about things we might like. Just because there's some bad advertising on the internet, it doesn't mean all advertising is useless. What is the alternative model to advertising on the internet? The fact is, that most websites are supported by advertising, and if that goes away, so do the websites unless some other magical income model replaces it.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
  That's a false comparison, because there's a huge difference between ads-as-information and ads-as-empty-noise. If you buy a trade magazine it's a given the ads will be targeted to a specific area of interest. The bad ads are simply not very interesting, and the good ads add real value to the experience by giving you useful information and/or entertaining you. But when you turn the page, they're gone. Print ads leave you with some agency. Most ads on the web seem to be completely untargeted. And when they are targeted, they're not targeted very well. And even if they are targeted well, they're incredibly repetitive. Web ads don't give you agency. They treat you as a passive consumer who needs to be forced to see the same stupid banners over and over. Most of the time the banners are simply annoying. Even when they're not, they have a much lower information content than a print ad. So unlike a print ad, which will be some combination of irrelevant, beautiful, sparsely presented, and informative, they carpet bomb your browsing experience with noisy low-value distractions. Instead of adding to the experience, they take away from it. And from the seller's point of view, it's damn near impossible to work out the ROI. You can't assume that view-click-sale works, because often people will research a product before buying. So you don't know if they've seen the ad once, or fifty times, or been persuaded to buy in some other way. There certainly is an arms race, but it's gone in a completely ineffective direction. IMO there's a lot of money to be made by bringing some intelligence back into web marketing. Instead of just spurting banners everywhere or using not-so-bright algos to do poor targeting, the ad industry might want to consider going back to ads that add value, instead of treating customers like not very intelligent prey that has to be herded down a funnel.
  - hagbardgroup 11y ago
    They are supposed to be programmatically targeted, but programmatic is not as accurate as it's billed as. They do get targeted, but a lot of the traffic that they go after is spoofed somehow or otherwise inaccurate. Models of web traffic are much less accurate than unmodeled subscriber rolls. Lots of high end people pay out the nose for information collection and shaping. They're called assistants. Others pay for specialized newspapers and magazines for their profession. There is no such thing as 'free' media because time and attention have value. If the information is more important than the entertainment value, then you can pay someone $10-15 an hour part time to read everything that you need read and give you a digest. You can also have an ad-free life by paying someone else to read the news for you and moving to a rural area, where there are few billboards. Print ads tend to have better targeting because the subscriber rolls get backed up with credit card numbers in most cases. This is a case in which early 20th century technology is a lot more reliable than 21st century programmatic advertising. >And from the seller's point of view, it's damn near impossible to work out the ROI. You can't assume that view-click-sale works, because often people will research a product before buying. So you don't know if they've seen the ad once, or fifty times, or been persuaded to buy in some other way. Actually, you can, at a certain level of scale and spending on many platforms. That requires the user fingerprinting that bugs privacy advocates so much. It's called 'cross-channel attribution,' and there's a lot of material out there about it. Also, it's not that users aren't intelligent. Most people are pretty dumb, but few of the people with disposable income are dumb. You use repetition because you're only getting a fragment of someone's attention, and a fragment of someone's cognition is pretty 'stupid.'
savanaly 11y ago
>If these costs are being borne evenly, then it's complete societal waste. We could pay X for the content, and not incur the overhead. If these costs are not borne evenly, and some people are paying for the consumption of more disciplined people, it's probably contributing to terrible cycles of poverty (ie: some kid spending money on fancy new shoes he doesn't need and can't afford is paying for a well-paid tech-users YouTube habits, because it preys on their lack of education). Either way it's terrible. Advertising isn't a complete societal waste. If I find a way to compete with an established business by offering the same product at a lower cost, or a better product at the same cost, or a new product that is worth the money but no one had thought of before, my only hope to connect people to that product (not to mention make myself money) is through advertising. Word of mouth and objective reporting in news outlets will also do the information spreading work, but advertising does a considerable amount. In other words, it's competition increasing. I think economists have done studies on markets with and without advertising and have found results indicating it does bring down costs in those markets by increasing competition [1]. In economic terms that would be a gain since without advertising we would consume an inefficiently low amount of said product. Note that even if there is a gain to efficiency because of lower prices, it may be completely offset by the cost of advertising itself (costs being the cost of consumers having to be irked by looking at them and the effort that went into crafting the advertisements). [1] Could I be remembering this paper? http://www.jstor.org/stable/724797?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents http://www.jstor.org/stable/724797?seq=1#page_scan_tab_conte...
- improvesnetwork 11y ago
  Who pays the costs in lost efficiency, lost productivity, lost time etc for readers to wade through ads to get to content? Saying something "lowers costs" without considering ALL costs involved is lazy. Most smart consumers are much less interested in what a company has to say about its own products (embellishment) than about what other people say. So yeah, advertising is pretty terrible.
  - savanaly 11y ago
    I made this edit right after I posted it so perhaps you didn't see it, but I added: "Note that even if there is a gain to efficiency because of lower prices, it may be completely offset by the cost of advertising itself (costs being the cost of consumers having to be irked by looking at them and the effort that went into crafting the advertisements)." I think that speaks to your comment about the lost productivity of users of the web. I do think all costs should be considered, absolutely. Didn't quite follow your last two paragraphs. You seem to have a gut feeling that all the costs outweigh all the benefits? I have no such gut feeling.
chatmasta 11y ago
> If these costs are being borne evenly, then it's complete societal waste. That doesn't make sense. You are saying because User reads Content, Advertiser pays Content, and User pays Advertiser, that the middle step of Advertiser paying Content is unnecessary, because User could pay Content. Simple counterexample: I like reading techcrunch, but would never pay for it. But I might see an ad for a new device that I like and would pay for, on techcrunch. If I click through the ad and buy it, then everyone wins. Techcrunch makes money from me, who would never pay them directly, because the advertiser pays them, and the advertiser makes money, because I buy their product.
- aylons 11y ago
  In your example, there are two possibilities: either you did want and need to buy the product before the advertisement or you didn't. In the first case, the advertisement was wasteful: the company that sold you the product has unnecessarily spent money, which goes to the product price. And this is not a small amount: big consumer companies spend billions on advertisement space/time alone, an amount comparable to their R&D expenses. I'm talking about ads alone, not other marketing expenses, many of which are related to advertisement. In most companies, marketing budget dwarves R&D, by the way, and in some markets, this costs could very well be the biggest chunk of the price in a product. In the second case, you would not buy the product without the ad. That may mean that you simply didn't know the product before and finding it was good for you, but most probably you didn't need it or would not want it if not because of the ad. In this common case, you didn't win: you just spent money because of a need/want that you didn't have before seeing the ad. You were hacked and exploited for both the publisher and advertiser benefit.
  - aembleton 11y ago
    He might have had the need before seeing the ad but hadn't seen a solution. Adverts are at their basic level a way of informing end users about what they can purchase. They are also there to try and raise brand awareness. People are more likely to trust a brand that they have heard of rather than some unknown.
jules 11y ago
Funding the content suffers from a tragedy of the commons problem.
- VLM 11y ago
  Something rarely discussed is how the cost of publishing the content is imploding. A generation ago it took a real company with full time employees to run Slashdot. In 2014 it took some volunteers and some linode instances to run SoylentNews using slashcode. In another decade you'll have people running things like /. and HN on the equivalent of a raspberry pi drawing 5 watts. A generation ago some cool sites started as an old desktop underneath some desk, then they scaled to internet size which meant a mid size corporation. Well, for technological reasons we're scaling it back down to some legendary sites will once again run on a desktop underneath someone's desk, its just that desktop will run internet scale not mere thousands of users. I'm not sure that society gets much value from journalists. Take corporate press release, lightly wrap in trendy breezy cliches and clickbait headline like 1000 of your closest competitors but supposedly your re-skin is better than theirs, and spam the link everywhere. When that industry is gone, I won't miss it. Remember when the blue collars were losing their jobs and the journalists were all "ha ha not my problem go back to school"? What comes around goes around, and after the journos lose their jobs they can go back to beautician school or air conditioning repairman or whatever, "ha ha not my problem go back to school"
  - zzalpha 11y ago
    Something rarely discussed is how the cost of publishing the content is imploding. You are aware that content generation isn't, in fact, a technological problem, right? You still need folks to write the copy, edit, research and fact check, moderate discussion forums, etc. Yes, the cost of the actual physical act of publishing copy has gotten cheaper. But high quality journalism costs money. That's unavoidable. I'm not sure that society gets much value from journalists. Take corporate press release, lightly wrap in trendy breezy cliches and clickbait headline like 1000 of your closest competitors but supposedly your re-skin is better than theirs, and spam the link everywhere. I hate to break it to you, but: this was caused by the internet. Two major effects are at play. First, yup, it's a lot cheaper to publish complete drek, hence the Gawkers of the world. This has caused those organizations that actually invested in content generation to have to cut costs (ask any news agency in the world... the investigative journalist is a dying breed, to everyone's detriment). The result is lower and lower quality journalism as investigation, fact checking, and so forth, is thrown out the window. This is exactly like folks who would complain about the incompetence of government while trying to financially strangle it. And then, when that underfunded government isn't able to react to some disaster or adequately execute some social program, they use that as further evidence that government must be slashed ("look, government is so competent, yuk yuk yuk!"), while conveniently downplaying the fact that they caused the problem in the first place. Quality journalism is dying because no one will pay for content. And no one will pay for content because of the perceived low quality of journalism. Repeat ad nauseum.
fweespeech 11y ago
> It's insane. If companies are buying ad-space, it's because they expect to get more business in return. This means that someone out there is being influenced by said ads, so that if the content cost X to put up online (hosting, funding its creation), someone is paying X+(ad company overhead) for it. Yes, and if you paid directly you'd have X+(B2C payment processing overhead) which is more than B2B. > We could pay X for the content, and not incur the overhead. That is really not true. Have you ever tried to support N customers instead of 20 businesses? There are some very major costs in providing any kind of support, even if its just for billing. You are simply unrealistic if you believe that ad companies have higher overhead than providing large scale customer support. I know someone who runs a [small] ad network and his overhead is a fraction of what it'd cost me to run a similar subscription based model.
- blacksmith_tb 11y ago
  The micropayments could be handled via one of those 20 companies. For example, it would be fairly easy for Doubleclick to have users set up an account and fund it with a few bucks, and then they'd pay TechCrunch .01 USD when the user read an article. In effect it'd be a sort of protection racket, if you don't want see any ads, pay up.
  - MisterBastahrd 11y ago
    Which is why this will never be viable. Internet content providers are radio stations, not performers. They aren't going to Spotify themselves.
  - fweespeech 11y ago
    ...and then its the same overhead because they are the ones collecting. You are just shifting who bears the cost of customer service.
eevilspock 11y ago
Dude, I've been trying to spread this exact understanding on HN for years[1]. You would think that this crowd would get that there is no free lunch. But cognitive dissonance is powerful: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” – Upton Sinclair I've been tracking this debate (or, until recently, lack thereof) for years and no one is articulating this well, myself included. Specifically, no one is articulating how this doesn't even make sense from an economics perspective. I'm glad Marco Arment is supporting ad blocking, but he fails to see the how bad the ad-supported business model is for the web and how much it costs society. He's an intelligent guy, so I suspect it's for the reason Upton Sinclair put so well. "I make most of my living from ads," Arment writes. Let's work on articulating this better together? Email me! Anyone else interested is welcome too. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4245427 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4245427, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8585237 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8585237, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9961761 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9961761
- minimaxir 11y ago
  On HN, I've recently seen less "complaining about ads" and more "complaining about hostile UX modals and popovers to force ad clicking." Which is fair.
- Merovius 11y ago
  > I've been tracking this debate (or, until recently, lack thereof) for years and no one is articulating this well, myself included. Specifically, no one is articulating how this doesn't even make sense from an economics perspective. That sounds like very bad economics. Because a) Either the spending power of the population is constant. In that case, there is no cost (for consumers), because they don't spend more, they just spend differently. b) Or, spending power increases as a function of amount of ads. In that case, there is no cost (for consumers), because their increase in spending due to ads is precisely offset by the increase in spending power. Unless you are somehow suggesting that people would just insanely accumulate wealth, instead of spend their income, if only there where no advertising.
  - 11y ago
pc86 11y ago
> some people are paying for the consumption of more disciplined people, it's probably contributing to terrible cycles of poverty You are honestly suggesting that internet advertising is contributing to poverty?
petercooper 11y ago
If these costs are not borne evenly, and some people are paying for the consumption of more disciplined people, it's probably contributing to terrible cycles of poverty C'mon, that isn't the only alternative. I saw an ad for some slippers on Facebook the other day. They looked nice. I remembered I wanted some slippers for the office. I bought the slippers. I'm happy, the advertiser is happy, Facebook is happy. Advertising is not always about unhappy or annoying endings, even if sometimes it is. In many cases it works, is ethical, and can even provide a service. In these situations, it's a great way to fund things without forcing end users to pay evenly.
Merovius 11y ago
Your logic is flawed. Advertisers advertise to increase their share of the whole economy. Every single person could spend exactly the same amount of money and even on exactly the same kind of things as before and advertising would still make sense. I am not denying, that due to advertising we shift our buying habbits. But advertising is born out of competition, it is to take a share of the spending power of people away from other companies. Spending power is pretty much a constant (at least in regards to advertising, it increases as a function of the strength of the economy). Seriously, think about it for a second: If advertising stopped today, completely. Would you spend less money? I don't think so.
- Merovius 11y ago
  And in regards to > if these costs are being borne evenly, then it's complete societal waste. that is exactly what is happening. Advertising is the classical real world example for the prisoners dilemma. It is literally the reason, why game theory exists. Every company can chose to advertise (defect) or not advertise (cooperate). If no one advertises, everyone is better off. But that is not a stable equilibrium, so instead everyone is advertising, even though it incurs some cost on social wellfare.
mollerhoj 11y ago
Advertising could also just make you aware of a product that you didn't know about, no? As far as I'm aware advertising can be a win for both the advertiser and the consumer.
chrismcb 11y ago
You make several assumptions. "We could pay X..." but we don't. How is it a complete societal waste? When someone purchases ad time they are essentially paying for your content. They do this in hopes of selling more product. It is essentially a win/win. You get a free product, and they get more sales. From a financial perspective the marketers aren't going to sell their product for less because they don't advertise. They are spending some money to make more money. So it makes sense for them to spend the money. As far as "we could pay X for the content..." Well that is essentially what we do today, we just do it through ads. Does it contribute to a "cycle of poverty" Not really. That kid will want those fancy new shoes whether he sees it in an ad, or sees it on his friends feet. And yeah, he is helping pay for your YouTube habit. But then so are you. Even if you don't watch ads, you are still purchasing the products that generate the ads.

jacquesm 11y ago

Advertising is an arms race.

commentzorro 11y ago
I thank you for your worship. --Vishvarupa

reasonishy 11y ago

Advertising is the method most people use to discover new products/services. Of course these days the line is often blurred. So half the posts on HN could be adverts, and you wouldn't really know about it. In fact lots of them are adverts. But just think about how the world would work without advertising. How would you know there's a star wars movie coming out? How would you know about new products and services you might be interested in buying. I buy quite a few magazines, and one of the reasons I buy them is for the adverts, which tell me about companies who provide things I might be interested in. For example, I buy a bee-keeping magazine, which has many adverts related to bee-keeping. That's valuable. I buy a pig magazine, which has adverts for pig arks, pig tags, weaners, etc etc. Good advertising is a net win for everyone. It provides us information about things we might like. Just because there's some bad advertising on the internet, it doesn't mean all advertising is useless. What is the alternative model to advertising on the internet? The fact is, that most websites are supported by advertising, and if that goes away, so do the websites unless some other magical income model replaces it.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
That's a false comparison, because there's a huge difference between ads-as-information and ads-as-empty-noise. If you buy a trade magazine it's a given the ads will be targeted to a specific area of interest. The bad ads are simply not very interesting, and the good ads add real value to the experience by giving you useful information and/or entertaining you. But when you turn the page, they're gone. Print ads leave you with some agency. Most ads on the web seem to be completely untargeted. And when they are targeted, they're not targeted very well. And even if they are targeted well, they're incredibly repetitive. Web ads don't give you agency. They treat you as a passive consumer who needs to be forced to see the same stupid banners over and over. Most of the time the banners are simply annoying. Even when they're not, they have a much lower information content than a print ad. So unlike a print ad, which will be some combination of irrelevant, beautiful, sparsely presented, and informative, they carpet bomb your browsing experience with noisy low-value distractions. Instead of adding to the experience, they take away from it. And from the seller's point of view, it's damn near impossible to work out the ROI. You can't assume that view-click-sale works, because often people will research a product before buying. So you don't know if they've seen the ad once, or fifty times, or been persuaded to buy in some other way. There certainly is an arms race, but it's gone in a completely ineffective direction. IMO there's a lot of money to be made by bringing some intelligence back into web marketing. Instead of just spurting banners everywhere or using not-so-bright algos to do poor targeting, the ad industry might want to consider going back to ads that add value, instead of treating customers like not very intelligent prey that has to be herded down a funnel.
- hagbardgroup 11y ago
  They are supposed to be programmatically targeted, but programmatic is not as accurate as it's billed as. They do get targeted, but a lot of the traffic that they go after is spoofed somehow or otherwise inaccurate. Models of web traffic are much less accurate than unmodeled subscriber rolls. Lots of high end people pay out the nose for information collection and shaping. They're called assistants. Others pay for specialized newspapers and magazines for their profession. There is no such thing as 'free' media because time and attention have value. If the information is more important than the entertainment value, then you can pay someone $10-15 an hour part time to read everything that you need read and give you a digest. You can also have an ad-free life by paying someone else to read the news for you and moving to a rural area, where there are few billboards. Print ads tend to have better targeting because the subscriber rolls get backed up with credit card numbers in most cases. This is a case in which early 20th century technology is a lot more reliable than 21st century programmatic advertising. >And from the seller's point of view, it's damn near impossible to work out the ROI. You can't assume that view-click-sale works, because often people will research a product before buying. So you don't know if they've seen the ad once, or fifty times, or been persuaded to buy in some other way. Actually, you can, at a certain level of scale and spending on many platforms. That requires the user fingerprinting that bugs privacy advocates so much. It's called 'cross-channel attribution,' and there's a lot of material out there about it. Also, it's not that users aren't intelligent. Most people are pretty dumb, but few of the people with disposable income are dumb. You use repetition because you're only getting a fragment of someone's attention, and a fragment of someone's cognition is pretty 'stupid.'

savanaly 11y ago

>If these costs are being borne evenly, then it's complete societal waste. We could pay X for the content, and not incur the overhead. If these costs are not borne evenly, and some people are paying for the consumption of more disciplined people, it's probably contributing to terrible cycles of poverty (ie: some kid spending money on fancy new shoes he doesn't need and can't afford is paying for a well-paid tech-users YouTube habits, because it preys on their lack of education). Either way it's terrible. Advertising isn't a complete societal waste. If I find a way to compete with an established business by offering the same product at a lower cost, or a better product at the same cost, or a new product that is worth the money but no one had thought of before, my only hope to connect people to that product (not to mention make myself money) is through advertising. Word of mouth and objective reporting in news outlets will also do the information spreading work, but advertising does a considerable amount. In other words, it's competition increasing. I think economists have done studies on markets with and without advertising and have found results indicating it does bring down costs in those markets by increasing competition [1]. In economic terms that would be a gain since without advertising we would consume an inefficiently low amount of said product. Note that even if there is a gain to efficiency because of lower prices, it may be completely offset by the cost of advertising itself (costs being the cost of consumers having to be irked by looking at them and the effort that went into crafting the advertisements). [1] Could I be remembering this paper? http://www.jstor.org/stable/724797?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents http://www.jstor.org/stable/724797?seq=1#page_scan_tab_conte...

improvesnetwork 11y ago
Who pays the costs in lost efficiency, lost productivity, lost time etc for readers to wade through ads to get to content? Saying something "lowers costs" without considering ALL costs involved is lazy. Most smart consumers are much less interested in what a company has to say about its own products (embellishment) than about what other people say. So yeah, advertising is pretty terrible.
- savanaly 11y ago
  I made this edit right after I posted it so perhaps you didn't see it, but I added: "Note that even if there is a gain to efficiency because of lower prices, it may be completely offset by the cost of advertising itself (costs being the cost of consumers having to be irked by looking at them and the effort that went into crafting the advertisements)." I think that speaks to your comment about the lost productivity of users of the web. I do think all costs should be considered, absolutely. Didn't quite follow your last two paragraphs. You seem to have a gut feeling that all the costs outweigh all the benefits? I have no such gut feeling.

chatmasta 11y ago

> If these costs are being borne evenly, then it's complete societal waste. That doesn't make sense. You are saying because User reads Content, Advertiser pays Content, and User pays Advertiser, that the middle step of Advertiser paying Content is unnecessary, because User could pay Content. Simple counterexample: I like reading techcrunch, but would never pay for it. But I might see an ad for a new device that I like and would pay for, on techcrunch. If I click through the ad and buy it, then everyone wins. Techcrunch makes money from me, who would never pay them directly, because the advertiser pays them, and the advertiser makes money, because I buy their product.

aylons 11y ago
In your example, there are two possibilities: either you did want and need to buy the product before the advertisement or you didn't. In the first case, the advertisement was wasteful: the company that sold you the product has unnecessarily spent money, which goes to the product price. And this is not a small amount: big consumer companies spend billions on advertisement space/time alone, an amount comparable to their R&D expenses. I'm talking about ads alone, not other marketing expenses, many of which are related to advertisement. In most companies, marketing budget dwarves R&D, by the way, and in some markets, this costs could very well be the biggest chunk of the price in a product. In the second case, you would not buy the product without the ad. That may mean that you simply didn't know the product before and finding it was good for you, but most probably you didn't need it or would not want it if not because of the ad. In this common case, you didn't win: you just spent money because of a need/want that you didn't have before seeing the ad. You were hacked and exploited for both the publisher and advertiser benefit.
- aembleton 11y ago
  He might have had the need before seeing the ad but hadn't seen a solution. Adverts are at their basic level a way of informing end users about what they can purchase. They are also there to try and raise brand awareness. People are more likely to trust a brand that they have heard of rather than some unknown.

jules 11y ago

Funding the content suffers from a tragedy of the commons problem.

VLM 11y ago
Something rarely discussed is how the cost of publishing the content is imploding. A generation ago it took a real company with full time employees to run Slashdot. In 2014 it took some volunteers and some linode instances to run SoylentNews using slashcode. In another decade you'll have people running things like /. and HN on the equivalent of a raspberry pi drawing 5 watts. A generation ago some cool sites started as an old desktop underneath some desk, then they scaled to internet size which meant a mid size corporation. Well, for technological reasons we're scaling it back down to some legendary sites will once again run on a desktop underneath someone's desk, its just that desktop will run internet scale not mere thousands of users. I'm not sure that society gets much value from journalists. Take corporate press release, lightly wrap in trendy breezy cliches and clickbait headline like 1000 of your closest competitors but supposedly your re-skin is better than theirs, and spam the link everywhere. When that industry is gone, I won't miss it. Remember when the blue collars were losing their jobs and the journalists were all "ha ha not my problem go back to school"? What comes around goes around, and after the journos lose their jobs they can go back to beautician school or air conditioning repairman or whatever, "ha ha not my problem go back to school"
- zzalpha 11y ago
  Something rarely discussed is how the cost of publishing the content is imploding. You are aware that content generation isn't, in fact, a technological problem, right? You still need folks to write the copy, edit, research and fact check, moderate discussion forums, etc. Yes, the cost of the actual physical act of publishing copy has gotten cheaper. But high quality journalism costs money. That's unavoidable. I'm not sure that society gets much value from journalists. Take corporate press release, lightly wrap in trendy breezy cliches and clickbait headline like 1000 of your closest competitors but supposedly your re-skin is better than theirs, and spam the link everywhere. I hate to break it to you, but: this was caused by the internet. Two major effects are at play. First, yup, it's a lot cheaper to publish complete drek, hence the Gawkers of the world. This has caused those organizations that actually invested in content generation to have to cut costs (ask any news agency in the world... the investigative journalist is a dying breed, to everyone's detriment). The result is lower and lower quality journalism as investigation, fact checking, and so forth, is thrown out the window. This is exactly like folks who would complain about the incompetence of government while trying to financially strangle it. And then, when that underfunded government isn't able to react to some disaster or adequately execute some social program, they use that as further evidence that government must be slashed ("look, government is so competent, yuk yuk yuk!"), while conveniently downplaying the fact that they caused the problem in the first place. Quality journalism is dying because no one will pay for content. And no one will pay for content because of the perceived low quality of journalism. Repeat ad nauseum.

fweespeech 11y ago

> It's insane. If companies are buying ad-space, it's because they expect to get more business in return. This means that someone out there is being influenced by said ads, so that if the content cost X to put up online (hosting, funding its creation), someone is paying X+(ad company overhead) for it. Yes, and if you paid directly you'd have X+(B2C payment processing overhead) which is more than B2B. > We could pay X for the content, and not incur the overhead. That is really not true. Have you ever tried to support N customers instead of 20 businesses? There are some very major costs in providing any kind of support, even if its just for billing. You are simply unrealistic if you believe that ad companies have higher overhead than providing large scale customer support. I know someone who runs a [small] ad network and his overhead is a fraction of what it'd cost me to run a similar subscription based model.

blacksmith_tb 11y ago
The micropayments could be handled via one of those 20 companies. For example, it would be fairly easy for Doubleclick to have users set up an account and fund it with a few bucks, and then they'd pay TechCrunch .01 USD when the user read an article. In effect it'd be a sort of protection racket, if you don't want see any ads, pay up.
- MisterBastahrd 11y ago
  Which is why this will never be viable. Internet content providers are radio stations, not performers. They aren't going to Spotify themselves.
- fweespeech 11y ago
  ...and then its the same overhead because they are the ones collecting. You are just shifting who bears the cost of customer service.

eevilspock 11y ago

Dude, I've been trying to spread this exact understanding on HN for years[1]. You would think that this crowd would get that there is no free lunch. But cognitive dissonance is powerful: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” – Upton Sinclair I've been tracking this debate (or, until recently, lack thereof) for years and no one is articulating this well, myself included. Specifically, no one is articulating how this doesn't even make sense from an economics perspective. I'm glad Marco Arment is supporting ad blocking, but he fails to see the how bad the ad-supported business model is for the web and how much it costs society. He's an intelligent guy, so I suspect it's for the reason Upton Sinclair put so well. "I make most of my living from ads," Arment writes. Let's work on articulating this better together? Email me! Anyone else interested is welcome too. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4245427 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4245427, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8585237 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8585237, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9961761 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9961761

minimaxir 11y ago
On HN, I've recently seen less "complaining about ads" and more "complaining about hostile UX modals and popovers to force ad clicking." Which is fair.
Merovius 11y ago
> I've been tracking this debate (or, until recently, lack thereof) for years and no one is articulating this well, myself included. Specifically, no one is articulating how this doesn't even make sense from an economics perspective. That sounds like very bad economics. Because a) Either the spending power of the population is constant. In that case, there is no cost (for consumers), because they don't spend more, they just spend differently. b) Or, spending power increases as a function of amount of ads. In that case, there is no cost (for consumers), because their increase in spending due to ads is precisely offset by the increase in spending power. Unless you are somehow suggesting that people would just insanely accumulate wealth, instead of spend their income, if only there where no advertising.
- 11y ago

pc86 11y ago

> some people are paying for the consumption of more disciplined people, it's probably contributing to terrible cycles of poverty You are honestly suggesting that internet advertising is contributing to poverty?

petercooper 11y ago

If these costs are not borne evenly, and some people are paying for the consumption of more disciplined people, it's probably contributing to terrible cycles of poverty C'mon, that isn't the only alternative. I saw an ad for some slippers on Facebook the other day. They looked nice. I remembered I wanted some slippers for the office. I bought the slippers. I'm happy, the advertiser is happy, Facebook is happy. Advertising is not always about unhappy or annoying endings, even if sometimes it is. In many cases it works, is ethical, and can even provide a service. In these situations, it's a great way to fund things without forcing end users to pay evenly.

Merovius 11y ago

Your logic is flawed. Advertisers advertise to increase their share of the whole economy. Every single person could spend exactly the same amount of money and even on exactly the same kind of things as before and advertising would still make sense. I am not denying, that due to advertising we shift our buying habbits. But advertising is born out of competition, it is to take a share of the spending power of people away from other companies. Spending power is pretty much a constant (at least in regards to advertising, it increases as a function of the strength of the economy). Seriously, think about it for a second: If advertising stopped today, completely. Would you spend less money? I don't think so.

Merovius 11y ago
And in regards to > if these costs are being borne evenly, then it's complete societal waste. that is exactly what is happening. Advertising is the classical real world example for the prisoners dilemma. It is literally the reason, why game theory exists. Every company can chose to advertise (defect) or not advertise (cooperate). If no one advertises, everyone is better off. But that is not a stable equilibrium, so instead everyone is advertising, even though it incurs some cost on social wellfare.

mollerhoj 11y ago

Advertising could also just make you aware of a product that you didn't know about, no? As far as I'm aware advertising can be a win for both the advertiser and the consumer.

chrismcb 11y ago

You make several assumptions. "We could pay X..." but we don't. How is it a complete societal waste? When someone purchases ad time they are essentially paying for your content. They do this in hopes of selling more product. It is essentially a win/win. You get a free product, and they get more sales. From a financial perspective the marketers aren't going to sell their product for less because they don't advertise. They are spending some money to make more money. So it makes sense for them to spend the money. As far as "we could pay X for the content..." Well that is essentially what we do today, we just do it through ads. Does it contribute to a "cycle of poverty" Not really. That kid will want those fancy new shoes whether he sees it in an ad, or sees it on his friends feet. And yeah, he is helping pay for your YouTube habit. But then so are you. Even if you don't watch ads, you are still purchasing the products that generate the ads.