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When people purchase GQ or Vogue, they are buying it as much for advertisements as for editorial content. When someone flips through one of those magazines, it'

When people purchase GQ or Vogue, they are buying it as much for advertisements as for editorial content. When someone flips through one of those magazines, it's like they appreciate the designers hiring models, taking pictures, and sharing it in the magazine even though both they and the reader paid. Take the ads out of GQ or Vogue and there is almost nothing there. If I create an ad on Facebook and people click on it, leave comments, and share it, Facebook will mark it as quality content and discounts the price per impression. It seems that Facebook wants to create the ad experience of GQ or Vogue and gives money incentive for advertisers to do it. Facebook knows I'm into technology and web development. There are lots of great products for web developers created every month. Facebook is a way for companies to find people who are interested in their products. It helps people learn about new products and it helps companies target people who are interested in their new products. There was a fundraising concert last year for a local charity. I volunteered $300 and time to do Facebook advertising. It yielded several thousands of dollars in ticket sales. For $300 Facebook let me communicate to people who really cared about either the bands who were playing or to people who really cared about the project what was happening. Facebook let me target people who like Candelbox within 40 miles of the venue. This is good. I don't understand why people hate on it so much.

neotek 10y ago
>I don't understand why people hate on it so much. Because they fundamentally misunderstand how advertising works. Read the comments on any article that discusses advertising and you'll see endless pages of people furious that Facebook or Google or Microsoft are "selling my data", as though an advertiser can click a few buttons and download a list of people's names and addresses and preferences. It's the same confusion that exists about cookies, which people seem to think are super secretive bits of code that can somehow infiltrate your browser and watch everything you do. The average person is completely misinformed about how advertising works, and the media breathlessly hypes up that misinformation despite the fact that they know very well exactly how advertising actually works and that nobody (well, nobody like Facebook or Google) is selling your personal information to anyone.
- fdgdasfadsf 10y ago
  So you would claim that these companies do not hold these lists? Or do you understand that they currently don't sell them (because it is currently more profitable to sell services based on them)? Do you remember what happened when Radioshack went under recently?
  - neotek 10y ago
    >So you would claim that these companies do not hold these lists? Why put words in my mouth, particularly when those words have nothing to do with what I actually wrote? To address the meat of your conspiracy theory, Facebook and Google and indeed the vast majority of companies in similar positions with similar data collection activities all have very specific, highly defined privacy statements which explicitly rule out selling direct access to personally identifiable information, and all of them promise to give you notice ahead of time should anything change that would materially affect those agreements. I absolutely trust Google and Facebook never to sell my personal information to an advertiser and I am extremely confident that if they ever decided to do such a thing I'd have ample time to opt out. None of which, by the way, has anything to do with the manner in which the general public misunderstands advertising. The general consensus is that their personal information is currently being sold to the highest bidder, and that's simply factually inaccurate.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - fdgdasfadsf 10y ago
      You position is very naive. The general public is less trusting because they have a collective memory of how the world works. People object to the collection and storage of the data in-and-of-itself. Most people understand that these companies will not sell their competitive edge under current market conditions - but market conditions change and companies change. The privacy policies are subject to change. Radioshack will give you a clue as to what might happen if one of these companies goes bust. Another point to consider is that so called anonymized datasets have been de-anonymized repeatedly.
barrkel 10y ago
I don't purchase GQ or Vogue because I don't want to be visually assaulted with lifestyle gunk. I have enough uses for my money and I don't want more things competing for that attention; trying to inculcate extra desires is not increasing my welfare. Some people aren't like you. They like having higher-level control over what they want; that is, they want to will what they want, and in that effort, they are working in opposition to advertisers, who are trying to make an argument that you should change what you want. The more information you give advertisers, the more leverage you give them to try and sap your willpower as you control your desires; i.e. the more "handles" they have to try and get a grip on your attention and direct it other than as the viewer wills. If you try and live your life at a higher level than a hedonistic consumer flitting from one pleasure to another, you'll see that people who try and tempt you with new pleasures are not working in your interest. It's as simple as that.
- zappo2938 10y ago
  I built a website for a monthly trade newspaper. They have 40 - 60 companies that advertise on the website. It's is a useful connecting companies and people who really need to purchase their services and products for their occupation. Clearly you don't want what GQ or Vogue is selling. If GQ or Vogue targets your demographic and the ad is ignored, not interacted with, or the X is clicked, Facebook will still show the ad but will charge much, much more. Facebook does try to encourage advertisers to show you content that you might have been happy to see if a friend or business associate posted it. Facebook by it's incentives to advertisers wants to blur the line between interesting content posted by friends and interesting content posted by advertisers.
  - barrkel 10y ago
    You do see the difference between trade publications - connecting supply with existing demand - and the kind of marketing done in something like GQ, which is far closer to demand creation, right? For lifestyle goods in particular, demand generation is almost synonymous with trying to make the consumer unhappy with their life. It's pretty evil stuff, even more so in women's style magazines. To the degree that FB advertising could be used for either ends of the advertising spectrum, FB data gathering for this purpose is at best amoral while averaging immoral. But we both know most advertising on FB isn't selling thirsty people water.
0xmohit 10y ago
One pays money in order to buy GQ or Vogue and gets both content and ads in return. On the internet, you usually don't pay anything for the content. In return, (1) you get to see ads, (2) whatever information about you can be harvested is potentially made use of in order to make money (other than that obtained by publishing ads). To be clear: advertising is ok, but using the information somehow obtained by an individual for further advertising is not.
beefield 10y ago
> This is good. I don't understand why people hate on it so much. I think following quote by Banksy/Sean Tejaratchi[1] explains why there are so strong feelings about advertizing. Of course, not _all_ advertizing is bad, as your example shows. Only the vast majority... "People are taking the piss out of you every day. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you. You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity. Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head. You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs." [1]https://en.m.wikiquote.org/wiki/Banksy https://en.m.wikiquote.org/wiki/Banksy
- witty_username 10y ago
  > You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity. Completely wrong. Advertisers have to follow the law and that includes these laws. For example, if an advertisers uses your photo without your permission, you can sue them for copyright infringement.
  - beefield 10y ago
    Of course. Maybe it is good to note that the quote is from a graffiti artist around ten years ago. From his point of view advertisers are allowed almost anything compared to what he is allowed, which is pretty much nothing.
dingaling 10y ago
> I don't understand why people hate on it so much. Perhaps because you're looking at specific subjective examples, rather than the overall end-user experience of advertising. Take your example of a Candelbox concert ad. Let's say that band made more revenue as a result of your ad. But that money was diverted from other uses, perhaps depriving another band of revenue. So, how does the losing side compete with that? Advertise too! Louder, cleverer, sneakier, anyway that works. It's that adversarial aspect that makes the overall experience degrading for the viewer. Did you consider that the people you targetted also saw, say, five other ads on the same page? And several hundred ads online that day let alone billboards, commercial broadcasts, posters on the back of buses... cumulatively it's a bombardment, with each ad designed to have a subtle psychological effect and intended to siphon people's money in one direction. It's not benign. TLDR: one ad might be cute, 1000 ads causes push-back.
yousry 10y ago
To be honest, I would need the 300$ for living and not for Facebook advertisement. But lets take the numbers: You spend 300$ and got several thousands in revenue. So I would expect something between a 3% to 15% share for Facebook. If you try to evaluate the volunteered time spend (only for the advertisement) and subtracted it from the result, the numbers would already look much worse. In my case, as Indy developer, I would have to compete with other software companies and my (cheap < 100.000$) advertisement would most likely show up in unappealing places. Since most small projects are now exclusively financed by advertisement revenues by itself, Facebook created something like a ponzi scheme and most of the advertisement cost trickles away. With minimal profit-margins you also loose the possibility to pay any attention to product quality. You should also consider that you also had the choice to go from door to door in your neighborhood for transactions. Since Facebook also owns the main communication channel for the web this possibility is bared. It is not the question if people hate Facebook instead you should consider that Facebook destroyed the free market. Finally consider that Facebook, as stock cooperation, is growth-oriented. If the advertisement market is ruined they will sell their user data elsewhere.

neotek 10y ago

>I don't understand why people hate on it so much. Because they fundamentally misunderstand how advertising works. Read the comments on any article that discusses advertising and you'll see endless pages of people furious that Facebook or Google or Microsoft are "selling my data", as though an advertiser can click a few buttons and download a list of people's names and addresses and preferences. It's the same confusion that exists about cookies, which people seem to think are super secretive bits of code that can somehow infiltrate your browser and watch everything you do. The average person is completely misinformed about how advertising works, and the media breathlessly hypes up that misinformation despite the fact that they know very well exactly how advertising actually works and that nobody (well, nobody like Facebook or Google) is selling your personal information to anyone.

fdgdasfadsf 10y ago
So you would claim that these companies do not hold these lists? Or do you understand that they currently don't sell them (because it is currently more profitable to sell services based on them)? Do you remember what happened when Radioshack went under recently?
- neotek 10y ago
  >So you would claim that these companies do not hold these lists? Why put words in my mouth, particularly when those words have nothing to do with what I actually wrote? To address the meat of your conspiracy theory, Facebook and Google and indeed the vast majority of companies in similar positions with similar data collection activities all have very specific, highly defined privacy statements which explicitly rule out selling direct access to personally identifiable information, and all of them promise to give you notice ahead of time should anything change that would materially affect those agreements. I absolutely trust Google and Facebook never to sell my personal information to an advertiser and I am extremely confident that if they ever decided to do such a thing I'd have ample time to opt out. None of which, by the way, has anything to do with the manner in which the general public misunderstands advertising. The general consensus is that their personal information is currently being sold to the highest bidder, and that's simply factually inaccurate.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - fdgdasfadsf 10y ago
    You position is very naive. The general public is less trusting because they have a collective memory of how the world works. People object to the collection and storage of the data in-and-of-itself. Most people understand that these companies will not sell their competitive edge under current market conditions - but market conditions change and companies change. The privacy policies are subject to change. Radioshack will give you a clue as to what might happen if one of these companies goes bust. Another point to consider is that so called anonymized datasets have been de-anonymized repeatedly.

barrkel 10y ago

I don't purchase GQ or Vogue because I don't want to be visually assaulted with lifestyle gunk. I have enough uses for my money and I don't want more things competing for that attention; trying to inculcate extra desires is not increasing my welfare. Some people aren't like you. They like having higher-level control over what they want; that is, they want to will what they want, and in that effort, they are working in opposition to advertisers, who are trying to make an argument that you should change what you want. The more information you give advertisers, the more leverage you give them to try and sap your willpower as you control your desires; i.e. the more "handles" they have to try and get a grip on your attention and direct it other than as the viewer wills. If you try and live your life at a higher level than a hedonistic consumer flitting from one pleasure to another, you'll see that people who try and tempt you with new pleasures are not working in your interest. It's as simple as that.

zappo2938 10y ago
I built a website for a monthly trade newspaper. They have 40 - 60 companies that advertise on the website. It's is a useful connecting companies and people who really need to purchase their services and products for their occupation. Clearly you don't want what GQ or Vogue is selling. If GQ or Vogue targets your demographic and the ad is ignored, not interacted with, or the X is clicked, Facebook will still show the ad but will charge much, much more. Facebook does try to encourage advertisers to show you content that you might have been happy to see if a friend or business associate posted it. Facebook by it's incentives to advertisers wants to blur the line between interesting content posted by friends and interesting content posted by advertisers.
- barrkel 10y ago
  You do see the difference between trade publications - connecting supply with existing demand - and the kind of marketing done in something like GQ, which is far closer to demand creation, right? For lifestyle goods in particular, demand generation is almost synonymous with trying to make the consumer unhappy with their life. It's pretty evil stuff, even more so in women's style magazines. To the degree that FB advertising could be used for either ends of the advertising spectrum, FB data gathering for this purpose is at best amoral while averaging immoral. But we both know most advertising on FB isn't selling thirsty people water.

0xmohit 10y ago

One pays money in order to buy GQ or Vogue and gets both content and ads in return. On the internet, you usually don't pay anything for the content. In return, (1) you get to see ads, (2) whatever information about you can be harvested is potentially made use of in order to make money (other than that obtained by publishing ads). To be clear: advertising is ok, but using the information somehow obtained by an individual for further advertising is not.

beefield 10y ago

> This is good. I don't understand why people hate on it so much. I think following quote by Banksy/Sean Tejaratchi[1] explains why there are so strong feelings about advertizing. Of course, not _all_ advertizing is bad, as your example shows. Only the vast majority... "People are taking the piss out of you every day. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you. You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity. Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head. You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs." [1]https://en.m.wikiquote.org/wiki/Banksy https://en.m.wikiquote.org/wiki/Banksy

witty_username 10y ago
> You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity. Completely wrong. Advertisers have to follow the law and that includes these laws. For example, if an advertisers uses your photo without your permission, you can sue them for copyright infringement.
- beefield 10y ago
  Of course. Maybe it is good to note that the quote is from a graffiti artist around ten years ago. From his point of view advertisers are allowed almost anything compared to what he is allowed, which is pretty much nothing.

dingaling 10y ago

> I don't understand why people hate on it so much. Perhaps because you're looking at specific subjective examples, rather than the overall end-user experience of advertising. Take your example of a Candelbox concert ad. Let's say that band made more revenue as a result of your ad. But that money was diverted from other uses, perhaps depriving another band of revenue. So, how does the losing side compete with that? Advertise too! Louder, cleverer, sneakier, anyway that works. It's that adversarial aspect that makes the overall experience degrading for the viewer. Did you consider that the people you targetted also saw, say, five other ads on the same page? And several hundred ads online that day let alone billboards, commercial broadcasts, posters on the back of buses... cumulatively it's a bombardment, with each ad designed to have a subtle psychological effect and intended to siphon people's money in one direction. It's not benign. TLDR: one ad might be cute, 1000 ads causes push-back.

yousry 10y ago

To be honest, I would need the 300$ for living and not for Facebook advertisement. But lets take the numbers: You spend 300$ and got several thousands in revenue. So I would expect something between a 3% to 15% share for Facebook. If you try to evaluate the volunteered time spend (only for the advertisement) and subtracted it from the result, the numbers would already look much worse. In my case, as Indy developer, I would have to compete with other software companies and my (cheap < 100.000$) advertisement would most likely show up in unappealing places. Since most small projects are now exclusively financed by advertisement revenues by itself, Facebook created something like a ponzi scheme and most of the advertisement cost trickles away. With minimal profit-margins you also loose the possibility to pay any attention to product quality. You should also consider that you also had the choice to go from door to door in your neighborhood for transactions. Since Facebook also owns the main communication channel for the web this possibility is bared. It is not the question if people hate Facebook instead you should consider that Facebook destroyed the free market. Finally consider that Facebook, as stock cooperation, is growth-oriented. If the advertisement market is ruined they will sell their user data elsewhere.