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Advertising ruins every medium it ever touches. Newspapers. Billboards. Magazines. Radio. TV. Cable TV. VHS / DVD. Usenet. Email. The Web. Online new

Advertising ruins every medium it ever touches. Newspapers. Billboards. Magazines. Radio. TV. Cable TV. VHS / DVD. Usenet. Email. The Web. Online news. Smart phones. Streaming video. It is a watershed decision to have ads or a subscription model. Ads will doom your platform / media. A subscription can create high quality content, if there is market demand for your content. Do not do both subscription AND ads. That devolves quickly. Just IMO.

grumpy8 7y ago
Viewed from a different angle "Advertising powers every medium it ever touches."
- effingwewt 7y ago
  Viewed from yet another angle "Advertising forms parasitic bonds and makes whatever it attaches to dependent on it for survival"
- ken 7y ago
  But nobody likes advertising. People like that the product is free, and advertising is merely an unpleasant side effect. Your statement sounds to me about like saying “Exhaust fumes power cars”.
  - greggman2 7y ago
    I like advertising. I don't like distractions and I don't like being tracked but I enjoy seeing ads for products in fields I like. I'm old though and throughout the 80s and early 90s subscribed to several magazines in large part to read the ads. I loved the ads in Byte, Creative Computing, Compute!, Wired, the Game Developer Magazine. I learned about all kinds of products I wanted. If all ads on the net somehow were (a) related to the content and (b) no more than static pictures and a link with no tracking I'd still enjoy them.
    - JohnFen 7y ago
      I agree, to an extent. Advertising can be overdone, of course. My problem is mostly the tracking, but even if I ignore the privacy issue, I've found that targeted advertising has seriously reduced the value of advertising to me.
    - scarface74 7y ago
      Let’s not forget that back in the day, geeks use to buy Computer Shopper for the ads. I know I subscribed to InCider and later MacWorld for the ads and would mail out the cards in the back for more information. How else were we going to find out about products we wanted? Even today, I find a lot of the ads for tech podcasts informative the first time I hear them. I would have never known about BackBlaze, Hover or SquareSpace if it weren’t for podcast ads.
- coldtea 7y ago
  ...when the medium should have been powered by the content and desire to spread it...
- JohnFen 7y ago
  I guess. But advertising also substantially reduces the quality of the media that it touches.
wvenable 7y ago
Advertising makes things "free" for users and it's extremely hard to compete with free.
yoz-y 7y ago
Podcasts run on advertising and there are many good quality ones. Subscriptions are good if you have either massively popular content or massively impactful and insightful content for professionals who can expense it. I think in current day and age it is possible to start making the latter. But you will not become popular without being free.
- coldtea 7y ago
  >Podcasts run on advertising and there are many good quality ones. And many which are just thin excuses for the promotional break...
- chimi 7y ago
  These types of podcasts are almost always side money for people with a real job.
- JohnFen 7y ago
  > Podcasts run on advertising and there are many good quality ones. There are also many good quality podcasts that don't use advertising.
- DannyB2 7y ago
  Advertising starts out okay. But the endpoint is all ads, no content. And the content is very low quality. An excellent ongoing example is Cable TV. Content is now about 50 % of the time. When a long string of ads are completed, then characters and other bugs and gizmos walk out onto the screen, on top of the content, obscuring the content, sometimes even important plot elements. Or remember how BYTE magazine gradually became pregnant with ads, then eventually became what I would call the forerunner of Computer Shopper. All ads, no content. And the web. Sites now have more ads than content. Especially some "news" sites. And the ads are obnoxious. Pop up, flashing, blinking, jumping, scrolling, in your face, making the content impossible to read.
  - cameronbrown 7y ago
    But consumers now have the power to block ads, that's something we never really had before (other than fast forwarding through them on TV). This massively evens the power imbalance - if websites keep abusing their customers, bye bye revenue. We're slowly seeing that happen today.
bryanlarsen 7y ago
I've always figured that advertising should be subject to a pretty heavy Pigouvian tax. (a tax on any market activity that generates negative externalities) 1. advertising is all about externalities 2. advertising's cost is relative. It matters more how much Coke spends on advertising relative to Pepsi and less the absolute amount that Coke spends. So if half of both Coke & Pepsi's advertising budget are taxed away neither Coke nor Pepsi lose much. But citizens gain due to both reduced ads and services provided with the state tax revenue gained.
- dooglius 7y ago
  The thing is, the negative externalities are essentially the entire revenue increase, so that's tantamount to a ban.
  - bryanlarsen 7y ago
    Pigouvian taxes rarely capture the entire externality just a significant portion of it. In my example I suggested half.
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  Advertising was taxed heavily, in England, in the early 19th century. That was eventually repealed, which now seems a poor decision.
chimi 7y ago
Advertising creates a race to the bottom, that is, the lowest common denominator. It requires watering down of content to be entertaining to the masses, rather than to provide deep insights required by a very small population of eyeballs.
- seem_2211 7y ago
  Depends on who your target market is.
  - dredmorbius 7y ago
    If the market is, or can become, the greater public, the race to the bottom is inevitable. See Mssrs. Barnum and Mencken.
notacoward 7y ago
Advertising didn't ruin billboards, because they had no other reason to exist. Some of the others would be very different without advertising - radio and TV definitely, newspapers and magazines to lesser degrees. Even the "ad free" sites are not entirely free of advertising. For example, right here. How much of YC's money comes from investing in companies that depend on advertising for their revenue, and how much of that money they're investing comes from people who made their fortunes that way? Yes, advertising might be a net negative, but it's not a pure negative. It is important to help sellers connect with buyers. In a lot of ways it's like finance, which can also help lubricate the gears of commerce, but both it and advertising should be adjuncts to commerce. They shouldn't be these swollen behemoths that dwarf other industries. IMO taxes are the way to account for their externalities, and also reduce them to their economically optimal levels.
omarhaneef 7y ago
I don't disagree, but the problem with the paid model is that people need a sense of the value of the item before they buy it. It is hard to sell someone a news product with the promise that it will be worth what they spend. This approach does work with how-to books (how to program X language), but not with news.
nitwit005 7y ago
I'm struggling to imagine how advertising could ruin billboards, given that they seem to have no purpose beyond ads?

grumpy8 7y ago

Viewed from a different angle "Advertising powers every medium it ever touches."

effingwewt 7y ago
Viewed from yet another angle "Advertising forms parasitic bonds and makes whatever it attaches to dependent on it for survival"
ken 7y ago
But nobody likes advertising. People like that the product is free, and advertising is merely an unpleasant side effect. Your statement sounds to me about like saying “Exhaust fumes power cars”.
- greggman2 7y ago
  I like advertising. I don't like distractions and I don't like being tracked but I enjoy seeing ads for products in fields I like. I'm old though and throughout the 80s and early 90s subscribed to several magazines in large part to read the ads. I loved the ads in Byte, Creative Computing, Compute!, Wired, the Game Developer Magazine. I learned about all kinds of products I wanted. If all ads on the net somehow were (a) related to the content and (b) no more than static pictures and a link with no tracking I'd still enjoy them.
  - JohnFen 7y ago
    I agree, to an extent. Advertising can be overdone, of course. My problem is mostly the tracking, but even if I ignore the privacy issue, I've found that targeted advertising has seriously reduced the value of advertising to me.
  - scarface74 7y ago
    Let’s not forget that back in the day, geeks use to buy Computer Shopper for the ads. I know I subscribed to InCider and later MacWorld for the ads and would mail out the cards in the back for more information. How else were we going to find out about products we wanted? Even today, I find a lot of the ads for tech podcasts informative the first time I hear them. I would have never known about BackBlaze, Hover or SquareSpace if it weren’t for podcast ads.
coldtea 7y ago
...when the medium should have been powered by the content and desire to spread it...
JohnFen 7y ago
I guess. But advertising also substantially reduces the quality of the media that it touches.

wvenable 7y ago

Advertising makes things "free" for users and it's extremely hard to compete with free.

yoz-y 7y ago

Podcasts run on advertising and there are many good quality ones. Subscriptions are good if you have either massively popular content or massively impactful and insightful content for professionals who can expense it. I think in current day and age it is possible to start making the latter. But you will not become popular without being free.

coldtea 7y ago
>Podcasts run on advertising and there are many good quality ones. And many which are just thin excuses for the promotional break...
chimi 7y ago
These types of podcasts are almost always side money for people with a real job.
JohnFen 7y ago
> Podcasts run on advertising and there are many good quality ones. There are also many good quality podcasts that don't use advertising.
DannyB2 7y ago
Advertising starts out okay. But the endpoint is all ads, no content. And the content is very low quality. An excellent ongoing example is Cable TV. Content is now about 50 % of the time. When a long string of ads are completed, then characters and other bugs and gizmos walk out onto the screen, on top of the content, obscuring the content, sometimes even important plot elements. Or remember how BYTE magazine gradually became pregnant with ads, then eventually became what I would call the forerunner of Computer Shopper. All ads, no content. And the web. Sites now have more ads than content. Especially some "news" sites. And the ads are obnoxious. Pop up, flashing, blinking, jumping, scrolling, in your face, making the content impossible to read.
- cameronbrown 7y ago
  But consumers now have the power to block ads, that's something we never really had before (other than fast forwarding through them on TV). This massively evens the power imbalance - if websites keep abusing their customers, bye bye revenue. We're slowly seeing that happen today.

bryanlarsen 7y ago

I've always figured that advertising should be subject to a pretty heavy Pigouvian tax. (a tax on any market activity that generates negative externalities) 1. advertising is all about externalities 2. advertising's cost is relative. It matters more how much Coke spends on advertising relative to Pepsi and less the absolute amount that Coke spends. So if half of both Coke & Pepsi's advertising budget are taxed away neither Coke nor Pepsi lose much. But citizens gain due to both reduced ads and services provided with the state tax revenue gained.

dooglius 7y ago
The thing is, the negative externalities are essentially the entire revenue increase, so that's tantamount to a ban.
- bryanlarsen 7y ago
  Pigouvian taxes rarely capture the entire externality just a significant portion of it. In my example I suggested half.
dredmorbius 7y ago
Advertising was taxed heavily, in England, in the early 19th century. That was eventually repealed, which now seems a poor decision.

chimi 7y ago

Advertising creates a race to the bottom, that is, the lowest common denominator. It requires watering down of content to be entertaining to the masses, rather than to provide deep insights required by a very small population of eyeballs.

seem_2211 7y ago
Depends on who your target market is.
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  If the market is, or can become, the greater public, the race to the bottom is inevitable. See Mssrs. Barnum and Mencken.

notacoward 7y ago

Advertising didn't ruin billboards, because they had no other reason to exist. Some of the others would be very different without advertising - radio and TV definitely, newspapers and magazines to lesser degrees. Even the "ad free" sites are not entirely free of advertising. For example, right here. How much of YC's money comes from investing in companies that depend on advertising for their revenue, and how much of that money they're investing comes from people who made their fortunes that way? Yes, advertising might be a net negative, but it's not a pure negative. It is important to help sellers connect with buyers. In a lot of ways it's like finance, which can also help lubricate the gears of commerce, but both it and advertising should be adjuncts to commerce. They shouldn't be these swollen behemoths that dwarf other industries. IMO taxes are the way to account for their externalities, and also reduce them to their economically optimal levels.

omarhaneef 7y ago

I don't disagree, but the problem with the paid model is that people need a sense of the value of the item before they buy it. It is hard to sell someone a news product with the promise that it will be worth what they spend. This approach does work with how-to books (how to program X language), but not with news.

nitwit005 7y ago

I'm struggling to imagine how advertising could ruin billboards, given that they seem to have no purpose beyond ads?