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In brief: 1. Products reliant on advertising for revenue are incentivized to increase the amount of ads shown (per user and in total). This leads to product st

In brief: 1. Products reliant on advertising for revenue are incentivized to increase the amount of ads shown (per user and in total). This leads to product strategy which prioritizes growth and engagement above all. The line between "highly engaging" and "addictive" products becomes very thin, arguably disappearing entirely. 2. In order to provide highly targeted ads, companies must necessarily collect, store and organize a tremendous amount of data on their users. We have seen over and over again that this data can then be requested, stolen or tapped by governments, hostile actors and other powerful organizations for nefarious purposes without the consent of the user.

soared 8y ago
1. All products are reliant on advertising. full stop. But even then, they are not incentivized to increase the total amount of ads per user, that would be inefficient. They'd prefer better targeted ads over more ads (point 2). 2. Source? Outside of a few edge cases (china) I don't think this is a real concern. The same can happen with financial (or any) data, but I don't see people saying the data is the problem. Rather its the processes around that data that need fixing.
- DogOnTheWeb 8y ago
  1. Subscription products are not reliant on advertising. Payment technologies are not. Neither are ecommerce operations, or in-person services. Just because a firm can advertise their products does not mean it is reliant on advertising. A firm advertising is not the same as it having an advertising revenue business model. Advertising revenue is ad CPM (how valuable the ad is and how well it's targeted) multiplied by ad impressions (which is why people measure page views, time on site, minutes watched, etc.) Both matter in the model. 2. Beyond China and other authoritarian governments, the Cambridge Analytica affair is perhaps the defining example of this. It showcased nonconsensual data harvesting with malicious use of the data against those users to impact politics both domestically and internationally: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/04/us/politics/cambridge-analytica-scandal-fallout.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/04/us/politics/cambridge-ana... Here another example from just a week ago: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/19/climate/koch-brothers-public-transit.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/19/climate/koch-brothers-pub... > "Central to the work of Americans for Prosperity is i360, the Kochs’ data operation, which profiles Americans based on their voter registration information, consumer data and social media activities."
- quadrangle 8y ago
  The discussion is not about making the term "advertising" so broad as to be useless. It's not "advertising" as in "any way that people notice a product or service". We're discussing "advertising" as in specific messages that third parties pay to have shown to people whose attention has been gotten by a second party. In other words, the topic is the advertising where you give your attention to one party and that party participates (gets paid) to show you something else different from what you went there to see. So, concretely: this is about paid ads on Facebook. This is NOT about products listed on Amazon that show up with compelling descriptions when you search for that type of product and clink on a link that wasn't higher in the list because someone paid for that. When you go to Amazon and search, you are specifically choosing to put your attention toward products of a certain sort and asking for information. Amazon is delivering that information. There's marketing in how the products present themselves, but it's still something you are actively looking for, given to you second-party by the company from whom you are considering buying the thing. When you go to Facebook to see how your friends are doing and your attention there gets sold to advertisers to show you unrelated products that may happen to fit your interests, that is the topic of discussion here.

soared 8y ago

1. All products are reliant on advertising. full stop. But even then, they are not incentivized to increase the total amount of ads per user, that would be inefficient. They'd prefer better targeted ads over more ads (point 2). 2. Source? Outside of a few edge cases (china) I don't think this is a real concern. The same can happen with financial (or any) data, but I don't see people saying the data is the problem. Rather its the processes around that data that need fixing.

DogOnTheWeb 8y ago
1. Subscription products are not reliant on advertising. Payment technologies are not. Neither are ecommerce operations, or in-person services. Just because a firm can advertise their products does not mean it is reliant on advertising. A firm advertising is not the same as it having an advertising revenue business model. Advertising revenue is ad CPM (how valuable the ad is and how well it's targeted) multiplied by ad impressions (which is why people measure page views, time on site, minutes watched, etc.) Both matter in the model. 2. Beyond China and other authoritarian governments, the Cambridge Analytica affair is perhaps the defining example of this. It showcased nonconsensual data harvesting with malicious use of the data against those users to impact politics both domestically and internationally: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/04/us/politics/cambridge-analytica-scandal-fallout.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/04/us/politics/cambridge-ana... Here another example from just a week ago: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/19/climate/koch-brothers-public-transit.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/19/climate/koch-brothers-pub... > "Central to the work of Americans for Prosperity is i360, the Kochs’ data operation, which profiles Americans based on their voter registration information, consumer data and social media activities."
quadrangle 8y ago
The discussion is not about making the term "advertising" so broad as to be useless. It's not "advertising" as in "any way that people notice a product or service". We're discussing "advertising" as in specific messages that third parties pay to have shown to people whose attention has been gotten by a second party. In other words, the topic is the advertising where you give your attention to one party and that party participates (gets paid) to show you something else different from what you went there to see. So, concretely: this is about paid ads on Facebook. This is NOT about products listed on Amazon that show up with compelling descriptions when you search for that type of product and clink on a link that wasn't higher in the list because someone paid for that. When you go to Amazon and search, you are specifically choosing to put your attention toward products of a certain sort and asking for information. Amazon is delivering that information. There's marketing in how the products present themselves, but it's still something you are actively looking for, given to you second-party by the company from whom you are considering buying the thing. When you go to Facebook to see how your friends are doing and your attention there gets sold to advertisers to show you unrelated products that may happen to fit your interests, that is the topic of discussion here.