15 ms·

Advertising as a business model is destroying the things we love. Nobody wants addictive content. We want informative, enjoyable content, but that's not profita

• seeing 11y ago
  Are you willing to pay?
  • natrius 11y ago
    I subscribe to four publications and fund two nonprofit publications. But let's assume I wasn't willing to pay. We should still stop supporting our own addictions. Especially since the people feeding us junk literally sell changes in our behavior to the highest bidder. This is madness, y'all. Opt out.
  • dingaling 11y ago
    > Are you willing to pay? Yes, because it doesn't have to be a direct exchange of money. For example I feed live data to Wunderground, Flightradar24 and several other smaller sites and in exchange they give me ongoing advertisement-free subscriptions to their services. That costs me a few pence per day in electricity, on top of initial equipment acquisition, but neither of those costs is tied to one particular service. I could change from Flightradar to Planefinder or Flightaware, for example, and receive the same benefits.
• brador 11y ago
  Naivity. The ads will be hidden in the content and articles/videos will be paid for by advertisers to shill their products with subtle mentions. Everything will be a PR piece, and you can't block that without blocking the content.
  • natrius 11y ago
    Yes, it's an arms race. We might lose, but until then, let's go faster.
    • askafriend 11y ago
      We've already lost
      • dexterdog 11y ago
        We have, but I haven't.
    • tobltobs 11y ago
      Seriously?
  • username223 11y ago
    We seem to have reached a bearable truce with spam. I think well north of 90% of email people try to send is spam nowadays, but no more than 50% of what I actually see on any given day is PR junk, unsolicited or otherwise. Granted, messages I care about sometimes get lost, but it doesn't happen often enough to make email useless. ML-based "native advertising" blockers will eventually become as common as spam filters, and the war will become a slightly unpleasant stalemate. Maybe the end-state will be something like current product placement in movies and TV, which is usually either comically heavy-handed, or completely unobtrusive and ignorable.
    • esolyt 11y ago
      But PR pieces are not exactly spam. You might block "27 Thoughtful Wedding Gifts" because it has product links, but there is chance some of those links would actually be useful to people looking for wedding gifts. Such a blocker would have to block the entire Buzzfeed, for instance.
      • takno 11y ago
• dcgoss 11y ago
  While I understand your position, I'm not so sure that Google, Facebook, and Twitter would look the same today if they charged each user directly for access.
  • natrius 11y ago
    Right, they'd look very different. But charging money isn't necessarily the answer there. I'm betting on decentralization. Facebook and Twitter manage identities that let us interact with our friends, but we have the technology for decentralized identities that have no middlemen. We'll replace these services with clients that act on our behalf.
    • Chronic51 11y ago
      Who is "we" in "we'll replace these services"? Because it sure won't be me or my organization. Just like everyone who reads this comment, we will hope someone else will do it.
      • natrius 11y ago
        My day job is to solve this exact type of collective action problem. Wish me luck!
        • jnicholasp 11y ago
          I do wish you luck. Can you give more detail about your day job?
      • flashm 11y ago
        That's it. Everyone is too busy trying to make money, which is fair enough. Even open source to an extent. What's the first thing programmers say when someone says how do I get a programming job and earn loads of cheddar writing apps? 'Do some open source and get it on your CV'. No one is going to build this stuff unless it has some sort of personal gain for them. There's nothing wrong with that at all, it's just the way things work.
• dota_fanatic 11y ago
  The masses have been strongly motivated to prefer the easy, the immediately satisfying, the addictive, for centuries via advertising. If nobody wants addictive content then we wouldn't be where we are---domesticated, holding certain preferences that we like to believe are our own which are actually merely beneficial to certain businesses. Turn on your ad blockers (and destroy addiction as a business model)? Yeah, right. Really, you're kidding, right?
• pink_dinner 11y ago
  Ad blockers will eventually do to the content industry what file sharing has done to the music industry: it will make it impossible to make a living at it unless you are part of a very large corporation, mostly because they have other businesses to subsidize the unprofitable content models. Even podcasts don't do that well as a business. The longest lasting podcasts are the ones that are essentially one large advertising vehicle for products or services owned by the individual or company running the podcast. open source, another example of this, has pushed many individuals out of business because they give away many of the same set of features for free and then charge for support. A support company doesn't scale well with a single person or even a couple. This is why pretty much all popular open source projects are funded by large corporations. I can't think of one that isn't. The pattern has been pretty clear in the last decade: push to give something away for free, the big corps take over because the individual can't compete with free, complain that big corps are ruining everything, and the latest: we now need a basic income because there are no jobs left. Money is a necessary evil. It can give even the individual more power over their own life. I'm just surprised that so many people here advocate the voluntary shift in power away from the individual and into the hands of big corporations. I guess I shouldn't be surprised. The whole progressive movement does exactly this. In the Nordic countries for instance, it's nearly impossible to run your own company due to the crippling taxes and regulations involved. Your only choices for employment are big corporations and the government.
  • stevesearer 11y ago
    My ad-run business is doing pretty well and I'm the only person running it. Ad blocking doesn't seem to have affected me - yet - because my ads are relevant, nice to look at, and self-hosted. Readers and advertisers (and me) get value out of them. I hope I'm around in the future, and I hope that other websites will see the light and follow good practices.
    • zdean 11y ago
      This is a really great perspective. My background is in the print publishing world...going back to the late 90s. What I realize is that we keep going back to that world for guidance on what the future of the web will hold (in terms of content publishing). The first place I saw this was in design. In the wild west of the early net (prior to about 10 years ago), there was really not much rhyme or reason to how websites were designed. Then people like Khoi Vinh started advocating for grid structure in web design...bringing a concept that was well developed in the print world. Today, we seem to be fighting for this false binary of either a web with ads or one without. What the old world of print might teach us is the importance of quality, limited, relevant advertising. When done well, people are not only OK with advertising, they embrace and look forward to it. Magazines were best at this...but they've gone down the path of devaluing their ads by moving towards more and more paid content (advertorials) and by overwhelming the content with the quantity of ads. I think in the end, publishers will have no choice but to see what you see or else perish.
• themartorana 11y ago
  And that content will be served through what internet paid for by who(m) exactly?
• ThomPete 11y ago
  Content marketing is destroying the things we love :) It's almost impossible to read a well written popular piece of content today that isn't selling something either directly or indirectly. I think we will see advertising in the form of a piece of promotion attached to other content is going to disappear as we become better and better at injecting it into our normal content.
  • mozumder 11y ago
    The problem is, the entire purpose of life is to sell. People sell themselves just by brushing their teeth in the morning, so that they're more marketable than the slob that doesn't. I am selling you my influence right now.
    • ThomPete 11y ago
      Yup. I am with you.
    • Retra 11y ago
      I brush my teeth because I don't want them to rot out of my face and make my life difficult. And I'm writing this comment because I think your perspective is amateurish and stupid, and maybe I'm really just a compulsive asshole. You're pounding round pegs into square holes and just ignoring the shredded bits that went flying when you did that.
      • mozumder 11y ago
        No, you wouldn't care about "making life difficult" if you weren't selling yourself. Everybody markets.. some are just better at it than others. You exist to market yourself. The moment you partake in a social group, whether it's through one more person, or through a nation, you have marketed.
        • Retra 11y ago
          That's an extremely myopic way of looking at it. Not everything that is done is done solely for the benefit of the one doing it. And I really don't see why you're so committed to generalizing marketing and sales terminology into a general human philosophy, save for your lack of familiarity with the existing, perfectly suitable terminology. More importantly, human identity is complex and multi-faceted, and is not entirely defined by human individuality. I can see myself as an individual, and maybe I'm selling something there, but if I see myself as a living creature, there is nothing for me to sell myself to, since rocks and stars don't give a shit what I'm 'selling.' Humanity itself is not selling anything, and my ability to see myself as an agent of humanity precludes me from selling anything in that role. So anything I do in service of those goals isn't marketing. Imagine you just stubbed your toe. You've just participated in life. Now what are you 'selling' by doing that? Nothing.
• sytelus 11y ago
  Sounds good for upper middle class population. If your wages were $50,000/yr (aka US median wage) then you would think twice or may be thrice about anything that has word "subscription" in it. Also, consider the fact lot of subscriptions have poor overall value. Advertises allow you to try and move on without making any commitments. If all internet websites enforced subscriptions then you won't be browsing around so often. Finally, anyone who had been in media business for long enough knows that subscription is terrible business model. Subscriber churn is almost always ongoing threat putting significant pressure on aquition pipeline. If TV channels went subscription only, most would die quick horrible death. The open secret in media industry is that advertisers are forced to pay lot more money than return they would actually get which ultimately "subsidizes" the content creation.
  • natrius 11y ago
    Advertisers aren't funding content to help the middle class. They're funding content to take the middle class's money. You might think advertising doesn't make people spend more, but there's a pretty big industry that disagrees with you. I don't care if it's hard to build a business on subscriptions. The alternative—building a business on addiction and manipulation—is immoral. I will happily watch it die.
    • LoSboccacc 11y ago
      also they are not funding insightful writing, but poisonous clickbaits, that's the real thing that ruined it (and virus served by ad networks)
    • icebraining 11y ago
      You might think advertising doesn't make people spend more, but there's a pretty big industry that disagrees with you. So what would people do with the money if ads didn't exist? Make quilts out of bills? People are going to spend it all, that's the whole purpose of money, ads just redirect who gets it.
      • pjc50 11y ago
• kriro 11y ago
  If I were a cynic I'd say the result of such a plan would be more articles like the one we're discussing here. Thinly veiled PR pieces. I should probably dust of my Zotero subfolder on subliminal stimuli, too.
• VenkiPhy6 11y ago
  Personally I have gotten access to some legitimately good products via ads. So, I don't believe advertising is destroying things - only irresponsible, immoral advertisements of bad products is. This latter form of advertising thrives only via junk content(like daily newspapers, reality television etc.). No good company will be willing to advertise its products via junk content and no creator of good content is going to let a bad product get advertised. So I feel, speaking against junk content is the way to go. That way we will have good content making money by advertising products that actually deserve it while also getting rid of bad companies and junk content. If you are thinking of blocking ads then that will hit not only the pockets of junk content creators(which is fine) but also that of good content creators who will then eventually turn to the junk.
  • tracker1 11y ago
    X10 is the brand I will forever associate with popover/under ads... The product itself and the company weren't necessarily bad. That said, I've always avoided them because they started it all in my mind.
    • tamana 11y ago
      Ha, I recently thought of X10 as an alternative to the modern IoT cloud crapware, I forgot about their webspam.
  • amelius 11y ago
    > Personally I have gotten access to some legitimately good products via ads. Don't worry. When, someday, ads are gone, you can probably subscribe to some product recommendation service if you so desire.
• trollingineeer 11y ago
  You're such an idiot. Get out of here with your Marxist dogmatic BS.
• qznc 11y ago
  In Germany we have mandatory media flatrate. A different business model. However, many people don't like it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beitragsservice_von_ARD,_ZDF_und_Deutschlandradio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beitragsservice_von_ARD,_ZDF_u...
  • pluma 11y ago
    It's not a media flatrate. It's a tax by any other name to maintain publicly funded television and radio channels while maintaining a separation of state and media (because of bad experiences with state-controlled media in the Third Reich and the German Democratic Republic). The reason many people don't like it are: * it feels like a third-party license fee due to how it is charged (e.g. you have to pay it yourself and it is charged per household rather than per citizen) * prior to the simplification of the rules in 2013 many people would be subjected to "inspections" by the media companies, with ethically and legally dubious behaviour like peeking into bedroom windows and rummaging through trash cans (in the days of tv magazines) * it costs money, unlike most private channels (via satellite or antenna) * you have to pay even if you don't use it or don't want it * despite being something you have to pay for, there is no obvious way to influence the programming * although they are the only channels that are required by law to feature a certain amount of educational and cultural programming, in practice a lot of it is basically "entertainment for the elderly" (like telenovelas and cheesy romance flicks) or game shows Personally I'm also extremely annoyed that they give free airtime to the dominant religious groups (Catholic Church of Germany, Evangelical Church of Germany and sometimes Jews or Muslims) "because culture", to the point that they always invite religious ministers or monks for ethical debates and frequently give them more weight than secular arguments (though to be fair: the religious representatives usually come off as fairly progressive although their arguments are of course still entirely based on theology). Plus, of course, the fact that while BBC subscribers get Terry Pratchett we only get Rosamunde Pilcher -- and German actors, who are mostly horrible and take themselves too serious.
    • qznc 11y ago
      I think the system needs some serious changes. However, the core idea that everyone pays a small fee for some basic media looks good to me.
• return0 11y ago
  I don't think it's advertising that has got people addicted to facebook & twitter.
  • natrius 11y ago
    The advertising business model is why those companies built addictive products. To make money from ads, you have to keep them coming back as often as possible, even if it isn't adding value to their lives.
    • return0 11y ago
      Facebook or twitter was addictive even before it had any ads on it. How is blocking ads going to change that? You can't change human nature.
• jcslzr 11y ago
  Ads are not bad, they allow more content to be available, its one thing to see my ads on every site like a virus or spam but if you enjoy visiting my site the least you can do is allow the ads so I get a profit out of it. Also Free content is not better, and it makes easier for people with money and an agenda to fill the space of people who tries to make a living HONESTLY with ads.