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I would have agreed in the past but now that my SO has started an escape room, if your ideal world existed, she would be bankrupt right now. Most ads isn't abo

by dwild 7y ago

I would have agreed in the past but now that my SO has started an escape room, if your ideal world existed, she would be bankrupt right now. Most ads isn't about manipulation, it's just about getting your attention and reminding you that this product exists. Ads are the only way to reach her market. You could argue that search is a good one too (which is true), but sadly people have trouble paying to watch videos online, there's no way they would pay for a search engine. We are still not really high in the search result after a year of existence either and paying for ads is a good way to get people on the website (which I'm sure will help our position in search results). EDIT: In case it's not clear, I don't believe she deserve to be higher than other escape room in the search result, we have actually almost no competition close to us and it's pretty much why she started that business. Simply that Google have no metric to know that her website has to be higher than another one, so clicks are needed to provide some. She always asks people what they think of the experience once they are done and recently one even said that we are not visible enough. It's a pretty great feedback, we are lucky that's our main issue, but sadly ads are the only way to become visible to others. Ads are almost amazing by allowing investment into market that people aren't ready to pay for but yet provide great entertainment, learning experience or a great service. Without ads, I probably wouldn't be the developper that I am today because the guy that did the great tutorial that create the passion in me wouldn't have time to works full time on them.

skummetmaelk 7y ago
If the current ad model of the popular search engine(s) was made extinct by law. I would be extremely surprised if search simply disappeared rather than move to a paid model. Who wouldn't pay to have any information in the world reachable in the 30 seconds it takes to craft a query and scan the first page of results? It is a huge competitive advantage.
- kspacewalk2 7y ago
  My guess is that the vast majority of people wouldn't pay. Firstly, because it's notoriously difficult to get people to pay for something that used to be free. Lack of tracking and respect for privacy is not something most people would recognize as an obvious upgrade - hence the need for legislation in the first place. So the public will see it as paying for the exact thing that used to be free, and just won't do it. If Google won't find a loophole to bring marketing, paid results or some other monetization back in such a legislative environment, someone else will. You'll end up with something that's won't necessarily be better for consumers than the advertising model.
- yoz-y 7y ago
  Nobody ever paid for something like that. If there is anything on the internet people assume it should be free. Taking example of the HN crowd, every time there is a pay walled article people ask for web links, praise outline links and generally complain.
  - majewsky 7y ago
    This is because there are free alternatives. When 99% of the articles on the frontpage are freely accessible, it feels "wrong" to find an article that requires you to cough up money first, especially when it does not hold up to the insane quality level implied by that price difference. If there were no free search engines, I can see people paying a few bucks a month for Google. Even more so if Google would then again make their results as useful to users as they once were. A practical example: I'm incredibly price-sensitive wrt productivity applications because there are many great such applications available as open source. I'm much less price-sensitive when it comes to video games (e.g. I spent 300€ on Breath of the Wild since it required buying a Switch) because the selection of open source video games is very limited.
  - e_proxus 7y ago
    I would gladly pay, say $2-8 a month, for a search engine that actually delivered good results. Nowadays it's just SEO garbage and blog spam. Try searching for product reviews for example. It's almost impossible to find good, honest review sites via a search engine (they definitely exist though). Most are shopping sites or fake reviews that just list scraped product information.
  - wpietri 7y ago
    > Nobody ever paid for something like that. Sure, because the web was ad-funded from the early days. People have an irrationally strong preference for "free". Even though in this case "free" really means "paid for by people manipulating how you spend your money". But I think it's implausible that if ads didn't happen the web would just be an empty wasteland. Up until the web existed, people paid for all sorts of information and informational services. And plenty of people still do. I spend maybe $1k/year on journalism.
- dwild 7y ago
  > I would be extremely surprised if search simply disappeared rather than move to a paid model. Sure, but that would be available to the ones that can profit from it directly, not the mass population that would have an hard time seeing value created from it. Instead they would expect word of mouth to be sufficent, and in a way they wouldn't be wrong in that world because in that world everything would depends from it. They just wouldn't have the luxury of having all theses others experience that depends on ads to exist, simply because ads wouldn't be there to allow them to exist.
Fnoord 7y ago
> I would have agreed in the past but now that my SO has started an escape room, if your ideal world existed, she would be bankrupt right now. In the old days, if her product -in this case escape room- would be good, she'd get enough customers by word of mouth alone.
- SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
  Why is that necessarily so? Maybe some products inherently can't be sustained by word of mouth, and in a world without widespread commercial advertising they wouldn't exist at all.
  - krapp 7y ago
    >Maybe some products inherently can't be sustained by word of mouth, and in a world without widespread commercial advertising they wouldn't exist at all. Maybe those products shouldn't exist, then. Just because someone has an idea or wants to sell yet another iteration on an existing product or service, doesn't mean they deserve to. Maybe advertising allows markets to be far more diverse and saturated than they should be? Also, maybe advertising isn't as necessary as it once was in a world where search engines and online stores exist and you can literally see a product and its competition all listed in one place if you're looking for something.
    - cameronbrown 7y ago
      Don't be so reductionist. Someone could find this escape room via a search ad, have a blast and tell all of her friends and none of them may never choose to do the same. And an escape room experience isn't something you can easily bring people back for - you need to find new customers every single time. I suppose a good way that could make word of mouth work is to create two experiences and recommend the other in an email afterwards. Advertising has made the internet a bit shit, yes. But let's not pretend it has it's upsides because it really does. That's why people pay for it. Now I'll grant that old school banner ads aren't worth much and we'd probably be better off without them. Most of what they're funding is garbage, not independent bloggers like I'd want to be funding. Disclaimer: Small Google Ads customer.
necovek 7y ago
I would disagree with the proposition that "most ads [aren't] about manipulation" (especially if we are talking about "most exposure time" rather than majority of ads being created regardless of the number of times they've been viewed). Of course, I don't have data to prove my statement, but I doubt you have any to prove yours either. And without ads and that "great tutorial", maybe you'd be something of greater value to society rather than the "developer you are today". (Just saying that what-ifs are even less of a support for any thesis) Note that the original article does not complain about informative ads, but about manipulative ones.
- yoz-y 7y ago
  > Note that the original article does not complain about informative ads, but about manipulative ones. It’s funny because the title would suggest that “all ads are one of the worst things that happened to humanity”. So it’s a click bait headline = manipulative ad. Maybe without a different title nobody would read the article.
  - necovek 7y ago
    The entire article argues how advertising parallels cancer: as such, title is appropriate. As I said in another comment, I am not a big fan of the analogy because it's unclear: you have to work backwards to reconfirm it.
- dwild 7y ago
  > maybe you'd be something of greater value to society rather than the "developer you are today" I'm a pretty great value for my works actually. Could do more? I don't actually believe it. I learned what I'm doing since I was 8. There's no way anyone would have paid for theses learning experience for me except advertisers. You could certainly argue that I could have a more fun childhood if I didn't dedicate so much of it to learning. That could certainly be true, but I still enjoyed quite a bit my childhood doing theses crazy projects. > Note that the original article does not complain about informative ads, but about manipulative ones. > Advertising Is a Cancer on Society Sure he talk against manipulative ones, but he fight against the whole advertising industry.
Zeklandia 7y ago
If you have to tell people they need something then they don't need it. Escape rooms are an entertainment luxury. When there is essential work that needs to be done (infrastructure, healthcare, education, &c.), it makes sense that it takes psychological manipulation to convince people that what they really need to do with their time and effort is temporary entertainment. If you want more customers, provide something that people find more necessary, like childcare.
- therealdrag0 7y ago
  But we live in a culture that can afford entertainment luxury, if people don't find this gals business, they will spend that time on Netflix or at a bar instead.. The zero-sum game you propose is not really close to what would happen without advertising imo.
  - Zeklandia 7y ago
    We only tell our selves we can afford. The truth is we are constantly putting off work that needs to be done as if some future generation will fix all these problems. There are tens of millions of Americans living in homelessness, shanty towns, and trailer parks. We need to build housing (apartments, homes) for them. No individual person can do that. We have to organize ourselves to tackle these kinds of problems cooperatively. However, our society insists that we allow the market to organize our activities. The market is controlled by exchange, and people who can afford to exchange more than anyone else can control the market. The majority of our wealth is concentrated in the hands of a minority of people. Thus the market mostly organizes people to solve their concerns while paying no mind to people who cannot afford to engage with it. Either you can fix the market (something arguably impossible to do) or you can use a different method of organizing humans into cooperative efforts.
    - dragonsngoblins 7y ago
      Even with absolutely 0 advertising I probably wouldn't be working to build apartments for the homeless. Sure maybe I'm not seeing some movie, or buying some piece of chocolate I heard discovered through advertising but in that case I'm going to be spending my time watching/reading/playing/indulging in various other hobbies and vices and any money I would otherwise have spent I'd be saving. Absolutely no benefit to future generations or my fellow man, and I'd assume the case to be true of most people. It isn't as if advertising has made me more callous or lazy. Unless your point is that companies could be doing those things instead of spending ad dollars, but that is a ridiculous proposition because they'd be using it to make more capital in some other way
jiveturkey 7y ago
> Most ads isn't about manipulation, it's just about getting your attention and reminding you that this product exists. I'd wager you're wrong, unless of course you are an ad executive which it doesn't sound like you are? Maybe, maybe, most ads by dollar spent is about brand awareness. But for sure, most ads by quantity are about manipulation.
flukus 7y ago
> Most ads isn't about manipulation, it's just about getting your attention and reminding you that this product exists. That is manipulation. If they weren't actively thinking about visiting one or actively looking for things to do and your advertising convinced them to do it then you've manipulated them into doing something the otherwise wouldn't have.
- yoz-y 7y ago
  I think the other user here had a great example with his sister’s escape room. If you want to visit one how would you find it if it’s not on your way to work?
  - majewsky 7y ago
    The traditional solution to this is the Yellow Pages. The business owner would pay a small fee to be listed. In the internet age, Yellow-Pages-like directories of business do not need a publishing house generating them. You can basically build one yourself from OpenStreetMap data, and if it gains traction in the community, you could turn it into a side business by taking a small fee from businesses, say 10$/yr, to offer them "OpenStreetMap update as a service" for their business's POI.
    - dwild 7y ago
      > The business owner would pay a small fee to be listed. I don't understand how you could do that without being an advertisement. How can you make a few businesses pay a fee without being advantaged against a business that doesn't pay that fee. You do bring an interesting idea, if it's a directory financed by the government, which is neutral and randomize results (or else we would see much more A* companies ;) ), that could works in a way. It may become an administrative nightmare to manage though with categories and stuff.
- dwild 7y ago
  > If they weren't actively thinking about visiting one or actively looking for things to do and your advertising convinced them to do it ... which is exactly what our ads are doing. None of the targetting that we do is related to anything else than entertainment, or activities to do. I even had to black list plenty of keywords that triggered our ads, some for prostitution service even. Believe me, if we weren't targetting like that, it would cost WAY TOO MUCH. I'm pretty happy right now with an average 4.95% of CTR for the past 2 weeks.
arendtio 7y ago
Yes, you are right, there are (at least) two effects of advertising: 1. Education (let people know a company/product exists) 2. Manipulation (by various means) From a moral point of view, the first effect is not bad. It actually helps people to make better decisions and extend their knowledge about available products and services. However, the second effect is the harmful one. Since companies are trying to make money, they want as many people as possible to buy their products. So they start lying, leaving the negative aspects of their products out, use visual material that creates yearning contexts, present the information at a higher frequency than relevant and so on. So saying it is just about getting your attention is a huge understatement. Simply put, the advertising industry tries to find human vulnerabilities on a daily basis. Sadly, not to inform and help protect us, but to exploit them. If advertising was actually about helping society, the spending would be more like a tax (independent from the effect), the visual appearance would be standardized and the process of presenting ads would be strictly controlled by a neutral entity. Furthermore, everybody would be allowed to not participate. Maybe the receivers of that valuable, educating information should even pay to have access to it. And I am sure, at this point you are with me, that the majority of ads aren't about educating people but about placing information in their heads.
- wpietri 7y ago
  Agreed. A couple of exercises I recommend to everybody: 1) Take a day and for each ad you see note how much novel, useful information you receive from it. 2) For any ad that had significant novel, useful information, redesign it in a format that is optimized to be informative, with any manipulation subtracted. (E.g., imagine it written in the style of the best encyclopedia articles.) Doing this makes it pretty clear that pure information is a very, very small portion of what's going on with advertising.
neop1x 7y ago
I would pay for the search and to watch videos as long as the price were reasonable. I already pay for SlingTV and Netflix for example. Yet there is free to watch PlutoTV, filled with annoying ads. There should at least be an option to pay for ad-free, tracking-free, service.
- dwild 7y ago
  > I would pay for the search and to watch videos We are sadly a tiny minority. I keep seeing people talking against Youtube Premium. > There should at least be an option to pay for ad-free, tracking-free, service. Agree completely, but the existence of ads isn't what stops that sadly.
  - wpietri 7y ago
    The existence of ads definitely stops that. People were happy to pay for newspapers for decades before they appeared for free on the internet. They are still happy to pay for news that isn't available for free, as Bloomberg, the WSJ, etc show. It's only when there are "free" alternatives that people flock in droves to the "free" options.
    - dwild 7y ago
      > It's only when there are "free" alternatives that people flock in droves to the "free" options. People were happy to pay 10$ for something until there was the same thing for 5$ and theses peoples thus flock to the "5$" options. This is why we should stop the 5$ option because it hurt the 10$ one! People that paid more, just did because they had no alternative to get that. In that amount, there was some that couldn't pay that and didn't, and maybe you don't know them, but they exist. The cheaper option still provide enough value, or else why would the one that paid more move to the cheaper one? It also allowed the one that couldn't afford the previous price, to afford it and get that value too. It's even possible that it was in aggregate delivering more value in total when the people that wanted the 5$ options were paying 10$ for the one with more things in it, but is it ethically right to force them to pay 5$ more for something they don't care about? Isn't it one of the important point here in this discussion manipulating people to pay for something they didn't want? > The existence of ads definitely stops that. It thus doesn't stop that, it only show that people were forced to pay more for value they didn't care for. The people that want more and can afford it are still there. Like you said, they are still happily paying for Bloomberg and WSJ. Talking about that, I don't read theses newspaper, yet they are annoying me enough that I may pay for it one day just because I keep getting linked to their article on Hacker News. It's weird how the paying one is giving me worse experience than ads ever did in my case, but I still believe that option is needed.
wpietri 7y ago
> if your ideal world existed, she would be bankrupt right now [citation needed] You're making a couple of mistakes here. One is imagining that in a world without ads, her experience would be the same as her not advertising. The other is that something that is bad for a given business is something that's bad for society. Both of these are at best unproven. > Most ads isn't about manipulation For every ad you see today, ask yourself how much useful new information you have gained from it. I've done that a few times and it's pretty close to zero. Note that the biggest spenders on ads are brands you've already heard of, suggesting that your theory needs some revision.
- dwild 7y ago
  > [citation needed] I can't really give financial, but believe me, after having to spend 30k$ more because of some problems, we only had about 6k$ to pay for 5k$ a month of expense. After a year, in a location surrounded by restaurants (more than a dozen), with quite a bit of event closeby, with quite a bit of people going around, the amount of people that found out about us outside of ads, is barely a handful. After a full year, even while spending for ads, even if we can count on 1 hand the number of people that had a bad experience, we are still barely profitable and still, almost everyone only finds us with ads and not word of mouth. We still have a pretty big list of people that wait after our third room impatiently, I think there's not a day where there's not someone that mentions it. The thing is, even if an escape room is fun, even if I think that anyone can enjoy them, sadly our public is a tiny fraction of the population and even if theses enthusiast talks about it to others, it just doesn't reach enough other enthusiast people. > One is imagining that in a world without ads, her experience would be the same as her not advertising. Then you would have to explain to me how she could reach people between 10 km to 300 km aways without ads in the first 6 months of existence. > The other is that something that is bad for a given business is something that's bad for society. Her business is great, people are all crazy about the experience, that's a few thousands of peoples that wouldn't have that experience that they enjoyed quite a bit, simply because they are too few in a huge market. > For every ad you see today, ask yourself how much useful new information you have gained from it. From the ads itself? More than 0. From the content that has been paid from it? More than thousands actually. I wouldn't have read your comment, simply because Hacker News is a place that advertize ycombinator startup. > Note that the biggest spenders on ads are brands you've already heard of, suggesting that your theory needs some revision. It's actually exactly what I'm talking about. You think about Coke regularly? I'm pretty sure you don't. It's sad but in this world of so many choice, you need to keep reminding people you exist or else they may switch to another choice they may see more (doesn't even have to be ads related, could be just more people that consume it at that moment, could be a location that have a contract with that brand, etc..). So both in a world where you are known or not, you need to remind people that you are a possibility to even be considered. Even in the amazing marketing space that is a supermarket where you can extremly easily browse a good amount of choice, brands pay for the right of a specific shelf because that will sell more. Imagine how much worse it is when you don't even have all the choices in front of you.
mijamo 7y ago
I don't think that is true at all. Without advertising you would just have the information elsewhere. Let's take an example similar to your girlfriend's case: entertainment. In Paris you have plenty of events, of all kinds. And that did not start with the internet. And promoters can be very small and have a marketing budget of around 0. Now how did they get people without advertising? You had a collaborative newspaper every week showing all the events with a small comment. Everyone interested in going out had access to it, either because they bought it or read it at school/work/library/press stand. You also have informative stands for small theaters in the metro. No advertising does not mean no information. At last, the majority of ads budget is taken by huge corporations with famous products, like Unilever, and really don't bring anything to society, not even information.

by dwild 7y ago

skummetmaelk 7y ago

If the current ad model of the popular search engine(s) was made extinct by law. I would be extremely surprised if search simply disappeared rather than move to a paid model. Who wouldn't pay to have any information in the world reachable in the 30 seconds it takes to craft a query and scan the first page of results? It is a huge competitive advantage.

kspacewalk2 7y ago
My guess is that the vast majority of people wouldn't pay. Firstly, because it's notoriously difficult to get people to pay for something that used to be free. Lack of tracking and respect for privacy is not something most people would recognize as an obvious upgrade - hence the need for legislation in the first place. So the public will see it as paying for the exact thing that used to be free, and just won't do it. If Google won't find a loophole to bring marketing, paid results or some other monetization back in such a legislative environment, someone else will. You'll end up with something that's won't necessarily be better for consumers than the advertising model.
yoz-y 7y ago
Nobody ever paid for something like that. If there is anything on the internet people assume it should be free. Taking example of the HN crowd, every time there is a pay walled article people ask for web links, praise outline links and generally complain.
- majewsky 7y ago
  This is because there are free alternatives. When 99% of the articles on the frontpage are freely accessible, it feels "wrong" to find an article that requires you to cough up money first, especially when it does not hold up to the insane quality level implied by that price difference. If there were no free search engines, I can see people paying a few bucks a month for Google. Even more so if Google would then again make their results as useful to users as they once were. A practical example: I'm incredibly price-sensitive wrt productivity applications because there are many great such applications available as open source. I'm much less price-sensitive when it comes to video games (e.g. I spent 300€ on Breath of the Wild since it required buying a Switch) because the selection of open source video games is very limited.
- e_proxus 7y ago
  I would gladly pay, say $2-8 a month, for a search engine that actually delivered good results. Nowadays it's just SEO garbage and blog spam. Try searching for product reviews for example. It's almost impossible to find good, honest review sites via a search engine (they definitely exist though). Most are shopping sites or fake reviews that just list scraped product information.
- wpietri 7y ago
  > Nobody ever paid for something like that. Sure, because the web was ad-funded from the early days. People have an irrationally strong preference for "free". Even though in this case "free" really means "paid for by people manipulating how you spend your money". But I think it's implausible that if ads didn't happen the web would just be an empty wasteland. Up until the web existed, people paid for all sorts of information and informational services. And plenty of people still do. I spend maybe $1k/year on journalism.
dwild 7y ago
> I would be extremely surprised if search simply disappeared rather than move to a paid model. Sure, but that would be available to the ones that can profit from it directly, not the mass population that would have an hard time seeing value created from it. Instead they would expect word of mouth to be sufficent, and in a way they wouldn't be wrong in that world because in that world everything would depends from it. They just wouldn't have the luxury of having all theses others experience that depends on ads to exist, simply because ads wouldn't be there to allow them to exist.

Fnoord 7y ago

> I would have agreed in the past but now that my SO has started an escape room, if your ideal world existed, she would be bankrupt right now. In the old days, if her product -in this case escape room- would be good, she'd get enough customers by word of mouth alone.

SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
Why is that necessarily so? Maybe some products inherently can't be sustained by word of mouth, and in a world without widespread commercial advertising they wouldn't exist at all.
- krapp 7y ago
  >Maybe some products inherently can't be sustained by word of mouth, and in a world without widespread commercial advertising they wouldn't exist at all. Maybe those products shouldn't exist, then. Just because someone has an idea or wants to sell yet another iteration on an existing product or service, doesn't mean they deserve to. Maybe advertising allows markets to be far more diverse and saturated than they should be? Also, maybe advertising isn't as necessary as it once was in a world where search engines and online stores exist and you can literally see a product and its competition all listed in one place if you're looking for something.
  - cameronbrown 7y ago
    Don't be so reductionist. Someone could find this escape room via a search ad, have a blast and tell all of her friends and none of them may never choose to do the same. And an escape room experience isn't something you can easily bring people back for - you need to find new customers every single time. I suppose a good way that could make word of mouth work is to create two experiences and recommend the other in an email afterwards. Advertising has made the internet a bit shit, yes. But let's not pretend it has it's upsides because it really does. That's why people pay for it. Now I'll grant that old school banner ads aren't worth much and we'd probably be better off without them. Most of what they're funding is garbage, not independent bloggers like I'd want to be funding. Disclaimer: Small Google Ads customer.

necovek 7y ago

I would disagree with the proposition that "most ads [aren't] about manipulation" (especially if we are talking about "most exposure time" rather than majority of ads being created regardless of the number of times they've been viewed). Of course, I don't have data to prove my statement, but I doubt you have any to prove yours either. And without ads and that "great tutorial", maybe you'd be something of greater value to society rather than the "developer you are today". (Just saying that what-ifs are even less of a support for any thesis) Note that the original article does not complain about informative ads, but about manipulative ones.

yoz-y 7y ago
> Note that the original article does not complain about informative ads, but about manipulative ones. It’s funny because the title would suggest that “all ads are one of the worst things that happened to humanity”. So it’s a click bait headline = manipulative ad. Maybe without a different title nobody would read the article.
- necovek 7y ago
  The entire article argues how advertising parallels cancer: as such, title is appropriate. As I said in another comment, I am not a big fan of the analogy because it's unclear: you have to work backwards to reconfirm it.
dwild 7y ago
> maybe you'd be something of greater value to society rather than the "developer you are today" I'm a pretty great value for my works actually. Could do more? I don't actually believe it. I learned what I'm doing since I was 8. There's no way anyone would have paid for theses learning experience for me except advertisers. You could certainly argue that I could have a more fun childhood if I didn't dedicate so much of it to learning. That could certainly be true, but I still enjoyed quite a bit my childhood doing theses crazy projects. > Note that the original article does not complain about informative ads, but about manipulative ones. > Advertising Is a Cancer on Society Sure he talk against manipulative ones, but he fight against the whole advertising industry.

Zeklandia 7y ago

If you have to tell people they need something then they don't need it. Escape rooms are an entertainment luxury. When there is essential work that needs to be done (infrastructure, healthcare, education, &c.), it makes sense that it takes psychological manipulation to convince people that what they really need to do with their time and effort is temporary entertainment. If you want more customers, provide something that people find more necessary, like childcare.

therealdrag0 7y ago
But we live in a culture that can afford entertainment luxury, if people don't find this gals business, they will spend that time on Netflix or at a bar instead.. The zero-sum game you propose is not really close to what would happen without advertising imo.
- Zeklandia 7y ago
  We only tell our selves we can afford. The truth is we are constantly putting off work that needs to be done as if some future generation will fix all these problems. There are tens of millions of Americans living in homelessness, shanty towns, and trailer parks. We need to build housing (apartments, homes) for them. No individual person can do that. We have to organize ourselves to tackle these kinds of problems cooperatively. However, our society insists that we allow the market to organize our activities. The market is controlled by exchange, and people who can afford to exchange more than anyone else can control the market. The majority of our wealth is concentrated in the hands of a minority of people. Thus the market mostly organizes people to solve their concerns while paying no mind to people who cannot afford to engage with it. Either you can fix the market (something arguably impossible to do) or you can use a different method of organizing humans into cooperative efforts.
  - dragonsngoblins 7y ago
    Even with absolutely 0 advertising I probably wouldn't be working to build apartments for the homeless. Sure maybe I'm not seeing some movie, or buying some piece of chocolate I heard discovered through advertising but in that case I'm going to be spending my time watching/reading/playing/indulging in various other hobbies and vices and any money I would otherwise have spent I'd be saving. Absolutely no benefit to future generations or my fellow man, and I'd assume the case to be true of most people. It isn't as if advertising has made me more callous or lazy. Unless your point is that companies could be doing those things instead of spending ad dollars, but that is a ridiculous proposition because they'd be using it to make more capital in some other way

jiveturkey 7y ago

> Most ads isn't about manipulation, it's just about getting your attention and reminding you that this product exists. I'd wager you're wrong, unless of course you are an ad executive which it doesn't sound like you are? Maybe, maybe, most ads by dollar spent is about brand awareness. But for sure, most ads by quantity are about manipulation.

flukus 7y ago

> Most ads isn't about manipulation, it's just about getting your attention and reminding you that this product exists. That is manipulation. If they weren't actively thinking about visiting one or actively looking for things to do and your advertising convinced them to do it then you've manipulated them into doing something the otherwise wouldn't have.

yoz-y 7y ago
I think the other user here had a great example with his sister’s escape room. If you want to visit one how would you find it if it’s not on your way to work?
- majewsky 7y ago
  The traditional solution to this is the Yellow Pages. The business owner would pay a small fee to be listed. In the internet age, Yellow-Pages-like directories of business do not need a publishing house generating them. You can basically build one yourself from OpenStreetMap data, and if it gains traction in the community, you could turn it into a side business by taking a small fee from businesses, say 10$/yr, to offer them "OpenStreetMap update as a service" for their business's POI.
  - dwild 7y ago
    > The business owner would pay a small fee to be listed. I don't understand how you could do that without being an advertisement. How can you make a few businesses pay a fee without being advantaged against a business that doesn't pay that fee. You do bring an interesting idea, if it's a directory financed by the government, which is neutral and randomize results (or else we would see much more A* companies ;) ), that could works in a way. It may become an administrative nightmare to manage though with categories and stuff.
dwild 7y ago
> If they weren't actively thinking about visiting one or actively looking for things to do and your advertising convinced them to do it ... which is exactly what our ads are doing. None of the targetting that we do is related to anything else than entertainment, or activities to do. I even had to black list plenty of keywords that triggered our ads, some for prostitution service even. Believe me, if we weren't targetting like that, it would cost WAY TOO MUCH. I'm pretty happy right now with an average 4.95% of CTR for the past 2 weeks.

arendtio 7y ago

Yes, you are right, there are (at least) two effects of advertising: 1. Education (let people know a company/product exists) 2. Manipulation (by various means) From a moral point of view, the first effect is not bad. It actually helps people to make better decisions and extend their knowledge about available products and services. However, the second effect is the harmful one. Since companies are trying to make money, they want as many people as possible to buy their products. So they start lying, leaving the negative aspects of their products out, use visual material that creates yearning contexts, present the information at a higher frequency than relevant and so on. So saying it is just about getting your attention is a huge understatement. Simply put, the advertising industry tries to find human vulnerabilities on a daily basis. Sadly, not to inform and help protect us, but to exploit them. If advertising was actually about helping society, the spending would be more like a tax (independent from the effect), the visual appearance would be standardized and the process of presenting ads would be strictly controlled by a neutral entity. Furthermore, everybody would be allowed to not participate. Maybe the receivers of that valuable, educating information should even pay to have access to it. And I am sure, at this point you are with me, that the majority of ads aren't about educating people but about placing information in their heads.

wpietri 7y ago
Agreed. A couple of exercises I recommend to everybody: 1) Take a day and for each ad you see note how much novel, useful information you receive from it. 2) For any ad that had significant novel, useful information, redesign it in a format that is optimized to be informative, with any manipulation subtracted. (E.g., imagine it written in the style of the best encyclopedia articles.) Doing this makes it pretty clear that pure information is a very, very small portion of what's going on with advertising.

neop1x 7y ago

I would pay for the search and to watch videos as long as the price were reasonable. I already pay for SlingTV and Netflix for example. Yet there is free to watch PlutoTV, filled with annoying ads. There should at least be an option to pay for ad-free, tracking-free, service.

dwild 7y ago
> I would pay for the search and to watch videos We are sadly a tiny minority. I keep seeing people talking against Youtube Premium. > There should at least be an option to pay for ad-free, tracking-free, service. Agree completely, but the existence of ads isn't what stops that sadly.
- wpietri 7y ago
  The existence of ads definitely stops that. People were happy to pay for newspapers for decades before they appeared for free on the internet. They are still happy to pay for news that isn't available for free, as Bloomberg, the WSJ, etc show. It's only when there are "free" alternatives that people flock in droves to the "free" options.
  - dwild 7y ago
    > It's only when there are "free" alternatives that people flock in droves to the "free" options. People were happy to pay 10$ for something until there was the same thing for 5$ and theses peoples thus flock to the "5$" options. This is why we should stop the 5$ option because it hurt the 10$ one! People that paid more, just did because they had no alternative to get that. In that amount, there was some that couldn't pay that and didn't, and maybe you don't know them, but they exist. The cheaper option still provide enough value, or else why would the one that paid more move to the cheaper one? It also allowed the one that couldn't afford the previous price, to afford it and get that value too. It's even possible that it was in aggregate delivering more value in total when the people that wanted the 5$ options were paying 10$ for the one with more things in it, but is it ethically right to force them to pay 5$ more for something they don't care about? Isn't it one of the important point here in this discussion manipulating people to pay for something they didn't want? > The existence of ads definitely stops that. It thus doesn't stop that, it only show that people were forced to pay more for value they didn't care for. The people that want more and can afford it are still there. Like you said, they are still happily paying for Bloomberg and WSJ. Talking about that, I don't read theses newspaper, yet they are annoying me enough that I may pay for it one day just because I keep getting linked to their article on Hacker News. It's weird how the paying one is giving me worse experience than ads ever did in my case, but I still believe that option is needed.

wpietri 7y ago

> if your ideal world existed, she would be bankrupt right now [citation needed] You're making a couple of mistakes here. One is imagining that in a world without ads, her experience would be the same as her not advertising. The other is that something that is bad for a given business is something that's bad for society. Both of these are at best unproven. > Most ads isn't about manipulation For every ad you see today, ask yourself how much useful new information you have gained from it. I've done that a few times and it's pretty close to zero. Note that the biggest spenders on ads are brands you've already heard of, suggesting that your theory needs some revision.

dwild 7y ago
> [citation needed] I can't really give financial, but believe me, after having to spend 30k$ more because of some problems, we only had about 6k$ to pay for 5k$ a month of expense. After a year, in a location surrounded by restaurants (more than a dozen), with quite a bit of event closeby, with quite a bit of people going around, the amount of people that found out about us outside of ads, is barely a handful. After a full year, even while spending for ads, even if we can count on 1 hand the number of people that had a bad experience, we are still barely profitable and still, almost everyone only finds us with ads and not word of mouth. We still have a pretty big list of people that wait after our third room impatiently, I think there's not a day where there's not someone that mentions it. The thing is, even if an escape room is fun, even if I think that anyone can enjoy them, sadly our public is a tiny fraction of the population and even if theses enthusiast talks about it to others, it just doesn't reach enough other enthusiast people. > One is imagining that in a world without ads, her experience would be the same as her not advertising. Then you would have to explain to me how she could reach people between 10 km to 300 km aways without ads in the first 6 months of existence. > The other is that something that is bad for a given business is something that's bad for society. Her business is great, people are all crazy about the experience, that's a few thousands of peoples that wouldn't have that experience that they enjoyed quite a bit, simply because they are too few in a huge market. > For every ad you see today, ask yourself how much useful new information you have gained from it. From the ads itself? More than 0. From the content that has been paid from it? More than thousands actually. I wouldn't have read your comment, simply because Hacker News is a place that advertize ycombinator startup. > Note that the biggest spenders on ads are brands you've already heard of, suggesting that your theory needs some revision. It's actually exactly what I'm talking about. You think about Coke regularly? I'm pretty sure you don't. It's sad but in this world of so many choice, you need to keep reminding people you exist or else they may switch to another choice they may see more (doesn't even have to be ads related, could be just more people that consume it at that moment, could be a location that have a contract with that brand, etc..). So both in a world where you are known or not, you need to remind people that you are a possibility to even be considered. Even in the amazing marketing space that is a supermarket where you can extremly easily browse a good amount of choice, brands pay for the right of a specific shelf because that will sell more. Imagine how much worse it is when you don't even have all the choices in front of you.

mijamo 7y ago

I don't think that is true at all. Without advertising you would just have the information elsewhere. Let's take an example similar to your girlfriend's case: entertainment. In Paris you have plenty of events, of all kinds. And that did not start with the internet. And promoters can be very small and have a marketing budget of around 0. Now how did they get people without advertising? You had a collaborative newspaper every week showing all the events with a small comment. Everyone interested in going out had access to it, either because they bought it or read it at school/work/library/press stand. You also have informative stands for small theaters in the metro. No advertising does not mean no information. At last, the majority of ads budget is taken by huge corporations with famous products, like Unilever, and really don't bring anything to society, not even information.