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> I prefer to be able to steer my own attention, and not have it be steered by those who win the bids for it. He who pays the piper calls the tune. Very few pe

> I prefer to be able to steer my own attention, and not have it be steered by those who win the bids for it. He who pays the piper calls the tune. Very few people are going to create content for you for free. If you don't want your attention steered, prepare to pay the piper. > I don't like paying a surcharge on every product to enable this practice. The theory that advertising is a "surcharge on every product" assumes that the dynamics of sales and competition wouldn't be hurt in the absence of ads, that honest, unbiased, uncommercial content would pick up the information slack from ads. These assumptions does not stand up to basic scrutiny: a: Ads support the entrance of new products into the market. For new products to be successful, they need to drive either new value, higher efficiency, better status-signalling or lower prices. b: There is nothing to keep uncommercial content from recommending alternative equal-quality non-advertising products, which we would then expect to be cheaper, as they don't incur the surcharge. Certainly, there are examples of such products (eg. consumables that have a store-brand alternative), but if the theory were true, those alternatives would be widely available throughout the market. Consumer Reports routinely recommend products from brands with expensive ad campaigns. c: Status-signalling is a thing, it really is, and while certainly exploited and supported by the ad industry, it wasn't invented by it, and won't go away if the ad industry does. > It seems like an inefficient way to finance the web. Perhaps so, but in a century and a half(?) of ad-supported mass media, not a lot of viable alternatives have appeared. Subscriptions (newspapers, magazines, still contains ads), donations (NPR), tax support (BBC and the like). It's not obvious to me either model would support the almost absurdly rich pluralism of content the web has with ad-finance. EDIT: spelling, cleaned up ambiguous language.

SoMuchToGrok 11y ago
People block ads because they can. It's that simple. Morals and philosophy have little room when all it takes is a few mouse clicks to disable virtually all ads. The barrier of entry (or de-entry, if you will) is incredibly low. > Ads support the entrance of new products into the market. It's going to be difficult for this trend to stop until there are some technical hurdles built. Until then, I think it's unrealistic to say we should subject ourselves to ads because "historically the market has worked that way". It may have worked that way in the past, but times are changing.
morsch 11y ago
No, the the fact that ads entail a surcharge on most products is fairly self-evident (companies pay for it, and price it in), and does not rely on those assumptions. My take on your argument is that despite the fact that products get cheaper when you remove the "ad portion" of the price, the consumer markets would get more inefficient, and hence the price would increase (or products would be worse, which is basically the same thing). Which is a fair point. But if that were true, it's still not clear which of the two would have a greater impact. However, I don't think it's very hard to come up with mechanisms that serve the same function as ads in terms of market transparency. You don't even have to be very creative about it, since they already exist (e.g. consumer reports are a thing, and vaguely 10% of the Internet seems to be dedicated to discuss the dos and don'ts of buying shit). Ads are already one of the worst ways to get information about products, particularly in non-niche markets.
- mseebach 11y ago
  > (companies pay for it, and price it in) ... when you remove the "ad portion" of the price, the consumer markets would get more inefficient, and hence the price would increase Yes, that is what I meant. I guess "net surcharge" is a better term. > it's still not clear which of the two would have a greater impact I believe it is, which is essentially what my argument is about. If the net surcharge is non-trivial and positive, then where are the people (trying to) capture it for profit? They can even piggy-back for free on certain kinds of competitors advertising (your competitors spend on ads explaining why everybody must have a dishwasher, you can just show up a sell a dishwasher). > However, I don't think it's very hard to come up with mechanisms that serve the same function as ads in terms of market transparency In theory correct, but in empirical practice this doesn't happen. Where is the car/dishwasher/whatever brand that is cheaper because it doesn't advertise, but consistently come out top in Consumer Reports? Even store brand consumables doesn't consistently test as better or equally good, just as good enough, and cheaper. This is not one of those things where an obvious inefficiency shows up and everybody is falling over themselves because the market takes a few years or ten to smooth things out -- ads have been a fixture of the market, well, since the 60s, going by Mad Men. This is the bit where I speculate wildly, but I think some of the fallacy is thinking about product, ad and consumer in an abstract isolation. Effects are probably much more diffused and harder to quantify. Broader status-confirmation than that of being seen carrying a can of Coke rather than Walmart Quality Cola is probably one: it feels good to be buying Tide, even is nobody ever sees the bottle, it's a confirmation to yourself that you've made it, and when you and I can shrug that off and get the cheap alternative, it partly because we can derive status confirmation from our work in a way that frankly isn't available to everybody. Also, positive branding (as supported by ads) is pretty important for employee morale which rubs off on product quality. This is way out in the margins, but an employee at the white-label detergent factory probably isn't going to feel the same pride the Tide employee is, and even a little compounds over time.
grey-area 11y ago
Very few people are going to create content for you for free. The very popular site you yourself are posting on for free demonstrates the opposite. Millions provide valuable content for free every day in twitter, medium, HN, Reddit, blogs, Wikipedia etc etc. An ad-driven web should not be the only future we can envisage, and ads and the search for clicks are what is actively damaging our news media at present IMO. We can do better than ads.

SoMuchToGrok 11y ago

People block ads because they can. It's that simple. Morals and philosophy have little room when all it takes is a few mouse clicks to disable virtually all ads. The barrier of entry (or de-entry, if you will) is incredibly low. > Ads support the entrance of new products into the market. It's going to be difficult for this trend to stop until there are some technical hurdles built. Until then, I think it's unrealistic to say we should subject ourselves to ads because "historically the market has worked that way". It may have worked that way in the past, but times are changing.

morsch 11y ago

No, the the fact that ads entail a surcharge on most products is fairly self-evident (companies pay for it, and price it in), and does not rely on those assumptions. My take on your argument is that despite the fact that products get cheaper when you remove the "ad portion" of the price, the consumer markets would get more inefficient, and hence the price would increase (or products would be worse, which is basically the same thing). Which is a fair point. But if that were true, it's still not clear which of the two would have a greater impact. However, I don't think it's very hard to come up with mechanisms that serve the same function as ads in terms of market transparency. You don't even have to be very creative about it, since they already exist (e.g. consumer reports are a thing, and vaguely 10% of the Internet seems to be dedicated to discuss the dos and don'ts of buying shit). Ads are already one of the worst ways to get information about products, particularly in non-niche markets.

mseebach 11y ago
> (companies pay for it, and price it in) ... when you remove the "ad portion" of the price, the consumer markets would get more inefficient, and hence the price would increase Yes, that is what I meant. I guess "net surcharge" is a better term. > it's still not clear which of the two would have a greater impact I believe it is, which is essentially what my argument is about. If the net surcharge is non-trivial and positive, then where are the people (trying to) capture it for profit? They can even piggy-back for free on certain kinds of competitors advertising (your competitors spend on ads explaining why everybody must have a dishwasher, you can just show up a sell a dishwasher). > However, I don't think it's very hard to come up with mechanisms that serve the same function as ads in terms of market transparency In theory correct, but in empirical practice this doesn't happen. Where is the car/dishwasher/whatever brand that is cheaper because it doesn't advertise, but consistently come out top in Consumer Reports? Even store brand consumables doesn't consistently test as better or equally good, just as good enough, and cheaper. This is not one of those things where an obvious inefficiency shows up and everybody is falling over themselves because the market takes a few years or ten to smooth things out -- ads have been a fixture of the market, well, since the 60s, going by Mad Men. This is the bit where I speculate wildly, but I think some of the fallacy is thinking about product, ad and consumer in an abstract isolation. Effects are probably much more diffused and harder to quantify. Broader status-confirmation than that of being seen carrying a can of Coke rather than Walmart Quality Cola is probably one: it feels good to be buying Tide, even is nobody ever sees the bottle, it's a confirmation to yourself that you've made it, and when you and I can shrug that off and get the cheap alternative, it partly because we can derive status confirmation from our work in a way that frankly isn't available to everybody. Also, positive branding (as supported by ads) is pretty important for employee morale which rubs off on product quality. This is way out in the margins, but an employee at the white-label detergent factory probably isn't going to feel the same pride the Tide employee is, and even a little compounds over time.

grey-area 11y ago

Very few people are going to create content for you for free. The very popular site you yourself are posting on for free demonstrates the opposite. Millions provide valuable content for free every day in twitter, medium, HN, Reddit, blogs, Wikipedia etc etc. An ad-driven web should not be the only future we can envisage, and ads and the search for clicks are what is actively damaging our news media at present IMO. We can do better than ads.