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Assuming the premises of your scenario (that the ad didn't change anything about you to make you more likely to buy the keyboard, or adversely influence you in

Assuming the premises of your scenario (that the ad didn't change anything about you to make you more likely to buy the keyboard, or adversely influence you in any other way), the display of this ad is a disaster for the advertiser. Advertisers will work as hard as they can to make that not happen.

mingfli 9y ago
Not true. If I know you want a keyboard and that you can buy it from 100 different stores, I would probably give you a discount to buy it from me as long as it still makes me money.
drdeca 9y ago
This is true. However, I do think that there are a few (possibly rare) cases where advertisements can cause a mutual benefit. If I intend to purchase a product of a certain category, and would like to choose one with a particular property, but am under the assumption that no such product exists, and I see an ad for such a product, correcting my impression, I may, as a result, purchase that product instead of competitors which don't have the property that I desire, which satisfies both my own wants, and the wants of the company advertising the product. This has happened to me at least once. However, most ads that I see do not provide me with any new information, and the strategy of having ads follow users around after the first time they see it seems somewhat contrary to this type of benefit, and I don't totally understand why it is understood to be effective.
- JoshMnem 9y ago
  Saving 10% on a keyboard on a very rare occasion isn't worth the dangers of advertising (privacy, malware, brainwashing).
  - drdeca 9y ago
    I wasn't really talking about the 10% savings thing, so I'm not sure how this is relevant to what I said? I do agree that the malware risk that current ad systems cause is bad, and it would probably be good if consumers behaved in such a way that the sort of ad systems that are a malware risk were no longer more financially viable. However, I don't think I have any substantial objection to the style of ads on project wonderful, which do not allow embedding any extra JavaScript or anything like that, only permitting an image, a link, and a hovertext value, iirc. No tracking or malware risk there I think. Or, at least negligible risk. If you have a proposed improvement on how to lead people who desire a product to discover that said product is available, I'd be interested in hearing it?
    - JoshMnem 9y ago
      I think that most ads aren't leading people who desire a product to that product -- they are creating desire for products that people don't really need. Most of the ads I see at the moment are on YouTube/Gmail and they are for things like junk food, "make money online" scam artists, and other garbage. Sometimes there are unblockable content ads on news sites that pretend to be news, but are really just paid content.
      - drdeca 9y ago
        It certainly seems true that the vast majority of times that some person sees some ad, that that impression is not connecting a person who desires some product to that product, and furthermore, I quite doubt that that could plausibly be otherwise, at least assuming any substantial amount of people seeing advertisements. However, I don't think that by itself is sufficient for a condemnation of advertisement in general. If the cost to the viewer (and the advertiser) of the ad impressions which [do not connect a consumer desiring a product to that product] is sufficiently low, then it could be possible for both consumers and advertisers to benefit on average. (Not to say that it is currently the case that they do.) This is true even if the advertisers were to only benefit from the ad impressions which connected a consumer desiring a product desiring a product to said product. So, I guess the question would be, whether or not the costs to consumers (and advertisers) when [not connecting people desiring a product to the product] can be made sufficiently small to make it a mutual benefit. Of course, if that by itself was enough to lead to a mutual benefit, one could wonder why it would be included as part of something else that the consumer wishes to look at, rather than just being something that consumers might look at separately from other content. One possible reason could be that seeing it as part of other desirable content decreases the cost to the consumer when the product is not one that they desire. I'm not sure how much credence to assign to that reason. Thinking on this, I suspect that direct mutual benefit between the advertisers and consumers would not in practice be a sufficient reason by itself for (e.g.) websites to tend to have ads on them, even if ads were restricted to have many fewer problems for consumers. So, I think that it is likely that if not for the inconvenience of removing ads from websites they view, the main reason that consumers might deign to allow the ads to display on the webpages they view would be because of the benefit it provides to the owner of the website. So, I guess I would recommend blocking ads which create more of a cost to you than you consider worth it in order to provide the benefit to website owners get from the ads being displayed to people who reason similarly to you? It is my opinion that for a certain fairly restricted set of types of ads, that the average cost to me is sufficiently low that I am willing to incur it. However, don't get me wrong: I definitely support the freedom to block whatever ads you wish (unless you have made a contract to do otherwise or something like that). I think that ideally, the only ads that should be profitable should be the ones which impose extremely low costs on the viewer, and occasionally provide some benefit to the viewer (even if this is rare enough that the only reason the viewer deigns to see them is so that the website owner benefits).

mingfli 9y ago

Not true. If I know you want a keyboard and that you can buy it from 100 different stores, I would probably give you a discount to buy it from me as long as it still makes me money.

drdeca 9y ago

This is true. However, I do think that there are a few (possibly rare) cases where advertisements can cause a mutual benefit. If I intend to purchase a product of a certain category, and would like to choose one with a particular property, but am under the assumption that no such product exists, and I see an ad for such a product, correcting my impression, I may, as a result, purchase that product instead of competitors which don't have the property that I desire, which satisfies both my own wants, and the wants of the company advertising the product. This has happened to me at least once. However, most ads that I see do not provide me with any new information, and the strategy of having ads follow users around after the first time they see it seems somewhat contrary to this type of benefit, and I don't totally understand why it is understood to be effective.

JoshMnem 9y ago
Saving 10% on a keyboard on a very rare occasion isn't worth the dangers of advertising (privacy, malware, brainwashing).
- drdeca 9y ago
  I wasn't really talking about the 10% savings thing, so I'm not sure how this is relevant to what I said? I do agree that the malware risk that current ad systems cause is bad, and it would probably be good if consumers behaved in such a way that the sort of ad systems that are a malware risk were no longer more financially viable. However, I don't think I have any substantial objection to the style of ads on project wonderful, which do not allow embedding any extra JavaScript or anything like that, only permitting an image, a link, and a hovertext value, iirc. No tracking or malware risk there I think. Or, at least negligible risk. If you have a proposed improvement on how to lead people who desire a product to discover that said product is available, I'd be interested in hearing it?
  - JoshMnem 9y ago
    I think that most ads aren't leading people who desire a product to that product -- they are creating desire for products that people don't really need. Most of the ads I see at the moment are on YouTube/Gmail and they are for things like junk food, "make money online" scam artists, and other garbage. Sometimes there are unblockable content ads on news sites that pretend to be news, but are really just paid content.
    - drdeca 9y ago
      It certainly seems true that the vast majority of times that some person sees some ad, that that impression is not connecting a person who desires some product to that product, and furthermore, I quite doubt that that could plausibly be otherwise, at least assuming any substantial amount of people seeing advertisements. However, I don't think that by itself is sufficient for a condemnation of advertisement in general. If the cost to the viewer (and the advertiser) of the ad impressions which [do not connect a consumer desiring a product to that product] is sufficiently low, then it could be possible for both consumers and advertisers to benefit on average. (Not to say that it is currently the case that they do.) This is true even if the advertisers were to only benefit from the ad impressions which connected a consumer desiring a product desiring a product to said product. So, I guess the question would be, whether or not the costs to consumers (and advertisers) when [not connecting people desiring a product to the product] can be made sufficiently small to make it a mutual benefit. Of course, if that by itself was enough to lead to a mutual benefit, one could wonder why it would be included as part of something else that the consumer wishes to look at, rather than just being something that consumers might look at separately from other content. One possible reason could be that seeing it as part of other desirable content decreases the cost to the consumer when the product is not one that they desire. I'm not sure how much credence to assign to that reason. Thinking on this, I suspect that direct mutual benefit between the advertisers and consumers would not in practice be a sufficient reason by itself for (e.g.) websites to tend to have ads on them, even if ads were restricted to have many fewer problems for consumers. So, I think that it is likely that if not for the inconvenience of removing ads from websites they view, the main reason that consumers might deign to allow the ads to display on the webpages they view would be because of the benefit it provides to the owner of the website. So, I guess I would recommend blocking ads which create more of a cost to you than you consider worth it in order to provide the benefit to website owners get from the ads being displayed to people who reason similarly to you? It is my opinion that for a certain fairly restricted set of types of ads, that the average cost to me is sufficiently low that I am willing to incur it. However, don't get me wrong: I definitely support the freedom to block whatever ads you wish (unless you have made a contract to do otherwise or something like that). I think that ideally, the only ads that should be profitable should be the ones which impose extremely low costs on the viewer, and occasionally provide some benefit to the viewer (even if this is rare enough that the only reason the viewer deigns to see them is so that the website owner benefits).