7 ms·

I think what you're missing is that discretionary spending is not all spending, and marketing budgets are a percentage of all spending. When I go to CNN.com rig

I think what you're missing is that discretionary spending is not all spending, and marketing budgets are a percentage of all spending. When I go to CNN.com right now, I see ads for Tide pods and Toyota SUVs. That ad spend came from our supermarket and car payments, which you can't redirect to tipping websites unless you want to stop eating and driving to work. My argument is basically that no web monetization plan that involves redirecting some of our discretionary spending towards paying websites can make up for the advertising revenue they currently get, because that ad revenue is funded by not only a portion of our discretionary spending, but a portion of ALL our spending, and the non-discretionary portion is much larger. Tide and Toyota are always going to have more money to spend on advertising than Bobby and Jill have the discretion to spend on sponsoring websites.

tripzilch 7y ago
> no web monetization plan that involves redirecting some of our discretionary spending towards paying websites can make up for the advertising revenue they currently get, because that ad revenue is funded by not only a portion of our discretionary spending, but a portion of ALL our spending, and the non-discretionary portion is much larger. It kind of sounds like ads are like a pollution on the web, and we should just ban them. What you describe is a lot like the pollution due to over packaging many products in the food industry. You can say consumers shouldn't buy it, but consumers as an aggregate can't handle that and if you want to solve the problem, it's to put less packaging on the shelves. Similarly, if what you describe is true (and it sounds true, because how massive the internet ad industry is, indeed to me never seemed to quite add up to what people do online), then no matter what sort of monetization schemes we come up with for Internet content, most industry everywhere is still going to pollute the Internet with ads, simply because the content producers want more money, the consumer doesn't have it, but the industry marketing budgets do. I think this is partly due to "content producers want more money", because if it's never enough you can wreck any good thing. But the other part is that "the industry" can apparently stuff the Internet full of as many ads as they want without actually being bound by how much the consumer wants to "pay" for the content via ads or (if we figure out micropayments or something) money. Because their spending budget dwarfs that of the consumer. So, just like I always suspected, all these ads are there because the industry wants to advertise on the Internet, not because it needs to be there to pay for the content. Content automatically becomes advertising when it exists by the virtue of a marketing budget. Turns out this whole "your data for our content" deal, that consumers are supposedly choosing for, isn't the relevant transaction at all. You see pretty much the same problem with outdoor advertising and store front signage. The industry has way more than enough money to spend on advertising to ruin the urban scenery with ads and giant billboards. Where I live we have regulations to keep that in check, but when I go to other countries it's really ugly. It's quite bad in the USA, but at least that country hasn't existed for very long. The saddest thing is in older countries where you see historical buildings being half-obscured or even have the billboards bolted on them. Fortunately due to tourism, there are some regulations. Anyway, the point is that our Internet is being ruined with ads by the marketing budgets of the industry, not because the ads are necessary to support the content (they never were--there was content on the Internet before advertising, lots of it too), but simply because they have the money to put as much ads as they want onto our Internet. It reminds me of certain cafes where they play bad commercial radio. You paid for your coffee, to sit there, but you're still subjected to over-loud ads every 15 minutes. This is not because you didn't pay enough for the coffee, it's because whoever paid for that ad has the resources to pollute the soundscape regardless of whether you pay or not.
sebastos 7y ago
It's all just spending though. Tide is trying to get you to pay a little extra for the name brand over the generic. Instead of a Toyota SUV you could have picked up a used beater - or kept driving the car you have for a few more thousand miles. Netflix wants you to shell out extra "discretionary" money to watch some TV shows you don't need to see. And millions of people do it, because they want to. If it cost money to read a a website, then people might do that too - if they deemed the content worthy of their hard-earned dollars. Millions of people already pony up $1000 for the latest smartphone so they can read stuff online at all hours of the day. I really don't think the web creators should be this worried about whether or not people actually want their stuff. They desperately want it; in fact, most people are probably literally addicted to it. Of course, maybe you're trying to draw the distinction between paying for a good and voluntarily making a donation. If that's the case, I'm with you - the latter idea is a loser. But if popular websites just made you pay to use them, and the amount was tiny, and the actual process of paying was completely frictionless and unnoticeable in terms of the browsing experience, then people would totally do it. I think a lot of people think they learned this fundamental truth that people don't want to pay for things to read on the internet, when what they really learned is that people don't want to be interrupted and asked for their credit card details. But if you can make that process seamless, people will happily fritter away thousands clicking through links.
- tripzilch 7y ago
  > But if popular websites just made you pay to use them, and the amount was tiny, and the actual process of paying was completely frictionless and unnoticeable in terms of the browsing experience, then people would totally do it. People would maybe do it, but ads wouldn't go away because there's x times more money to be made in the ad business than people micropayments.
- galaxyLogic 7y ago
  I think on demand TV works great, you want to watch a movie hit the remote and the cost will be part of your monthly bill. If something similar existed for the web it would be great
  - 7y ago
wutbrodo 7y ago
> Tide pods and Toyota SUVs > eating and driving to work. This confused me for a second before I realized it was intentional. Good one
- rjtavares 7y ago
  Inserting humour in a HN comment and making it highly upvoted is an artform in itself.
danShumway 7y ago
General shoutout to anyone who's less lazy than me: has there been any good research on whether or not advertising increases discretionary spending, and if so by how much? The Tide example here makes me feel a little bit weird, because Tide pods in particular are a pretty bad deal for laundry detergent. If people are buying Tide pods instead of generic laundry detergent, it seems to me that the advertising isn't just shifting money around, it's actually increasing spending. But it could just be bad instincts, I don't know of any actual real research on the topic. Another way of phrasing this -- if Apple stopped advertising iPhones, some Apple users would shift over to Android, which (ignoring cost differences) theoretically would just mean they gave the same money to someone else. But would there be another contingent that stayed on iPhone and just stopped buying new hardware every year? How large would a contingent like that be?
- Fjolsvith 7y ago
  > The Tide example here makes me feel a little bit weird, because Tide pods in particular are a pretty bad deal for laundry detergent. For my wife, the pods are a lifestyle upgrade over the regular powdered pour out detergent. The convenience and effort saved justifies the more expensive packaging. I'm a firm believer in adopting new processes or products that reduce the amount of time required to perform my daily functions. They pay off in the long run.
- OGWhales 7y ago
  I’ve always figured they wouldn’t throw so much money at it if it wasn’t working. I assume the advertising makes them massive profits. I’m sure there are pretty of studies out there.
- Qworg 7y ago
  Here's some of Google's positioning on it - think of it as an arms race: https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/marketing-resources/micro-moments/zero-moment-truth/ https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/marketing-resources/micro-mo...
- mcv 7y ago
  I think advertising increases discretionary spending, it just redirects it. When smoking ads were banned, profits for cigarette companies went up, because they didn't have to spend money on marketing anymore. Addicts still kept buying them anyway. Previously, smoking ads were to get people to buy your brand rather than some competing brand.
marcus_holmes 7y ago
But for any given business the maths work out differently. Building a dedicated audience in a niche who are willing to pay for a thing directly is easier than wrestling with the advertising industry to try and extract enough ad revenue to keep going.

tripzilch 7y ago

> no web monetization plan that involves redirecting some of our discretionary spending towards paying websites can make up for the advertising revenue they currently get, because that ad revenue is funded by not only a portion of our discretionary spending, but a portion of ALL our spending, and the non-discretionary portion is much larger. It kind of sounds like ads are like a pollution on the web, and we should just ban them. What you describe is a lot like the pollution due to over packaging many products in the food industry. You can say consumers shouldn't buy it, but consumers as an aggregate can't handle that and if you want to solve the problem, it's to put less packaging on the shelves. Similarly, if what you describe is true (and it sounds true, because how massive the internet ad industry is, indeed to me never seemed to quite add up to what people do online), then no matter what sort of monetization schemes we come up with for Internet content, most industry everywhere is still going to pollute the Internet with ads, simply because the content producers want more money, the consumer doesn't have it, but the industry marketing budgets do. I think this is partly due to "content producers want more money", because if it's never enough you can wreck any good thing. But the other part is that "the industry" can apparently stuff the Internet full of as many ads as they want without actually being bound by how much the consumer wants to "pay" for the content via ads or (if we figure out micropayments or something) money. Because their spending budget dwarfs that of the consumer. So, just like I always suspected, all these ads are there because the industry wants to advertise on the Internet, not because it needs to be there to pay for the content. Content automatically becomes advertising when it exists by the virtue of a marketing budget. Turns out this whole "your data for our content" deal, that consumers are supposedly choosing for, isn't the relevant transaction at all. You see pretty much the same problem with outdoor advertising and store front signage. The industry has way more than enough money to spend on advertising to ruin the urban scenery with ads and giant billboards. Where I live we have regulations to keep that in check, but when I go to other countries it's really ugly. It's quite bad in the USA, but at least that country hasn't existed for very long. The saddest thing is in older countries where you see historical buildings being half-obscured or even have the billboards bolted on them. Fortunately due to tourism, there are some regulations. Anyway, the point is that our Internet is being ruined with ads by the marketing budgets of the industry, not because the ads are necessary to support the content (they never were--there was content on the Internet before advertising, lots of it too), but simply because they have the money to put as much ads as they want onto our Internet. It reminds me of certain cafes where they play bad commercial radio. You paid for your coffee, to sit there, but you're still subjected to over-loud ads every 15 minutes. This is not because you didn't pay enough for the coffee, it's because whoever paid for that ad has the resources to pollute the soundscape regardless of whether you pay or not.

sebastos 7y ago

It's all just spending though. Tide is trying to get you to pay a little extra for the name brand over the generic. Instead of a Toyota SUV you could have picked up a used beater - or kept driving the car you have for a few more thousand miles. Netflix wants you to shell out extra "discretionary" money to watch some TV shows you don't need to see. And millions of people do it, because they want to. If it cost money to read a a website, then people might do that too - if they deemed the content worthy of their hard-earned dollars. Millions of people already pony up $1000 for the latest smartphone so they can read stuff online at all hours of the day. I really don't think the web creators should be this worried about whether or not people actually want their stuff. They desperately want it; in fact, most people are probably literally addicted to it. Of course, maybe you're trying to draw the distinction between paying for a good and voluntarily making a donation. If that's the case, I'm with you - the latter idea is a loser. But if popular websites just made you pay to use them, and the amount was tiny, and the actual process of paying was completely frictionless and unnoticeable in terms of the browsing experience, then people would totally do it. I think a lot of people think they learned this fundamental truth that people don't want to pay for things to read on the internet, when what they really learned is that people don't want to be interrupted and asked for their credit card details. But if you can make that process seamless, people will happily fritter away thousands clicking through links.

tripzilch 7y ago
> But if popular websites just made you pay to use them, and the amount was tiny, and the actual process of paying was completely frictionless and unnoticeable in terms of the browsing experience, then people would totally do it. People would maybe do it, but ads wouldn't go away because there's x times more money to be made in the ad business than people micropayments.
galaxyLogic 7y ago
I think on demand TV works great, you want to watch a movie hit the remote and the cost will be part of your monthly bill. If something similar existed for the web it would be great
- 7y ago

wutbrodo 7y ago

> Tide pods and Toyota SUVs > eating and driving to work. This confused me for a second before I realized it was intentional. Good one

rjtavares 7y ago
Inserting humour in a HN comment and making it highly upvoted is an artform in itself.

danShumway 7y ago

General shoutout to anyone who's less lazy than me: has there been any good research on whether or not advertising increases discretionary spending, and if so by how much? The Tide example here makes me feel a little bit weird, because Tide pods in particular are a pretty bad deal for laundry detergent. If people are buying Tide pods instead of generic laundry detergent, it seems to me that the advertising isn't just shifting money around, it's actually increasing spending. But it could just be bad instincts, I don't know of any actual real research on the topic. Another way of phrasing this -- if Apple stopped advertising iPhones, some Apple users would shift over to Android, which (ignoring cost differences) theoretically would just mean they gave the same money to someone else. But would there be another contingent that stayed on iPhone and just stopped buying new hardware every year? How large would a contingent like that be?

Fjolsvith 7y ago
> The Tide example here makes me feel a little bit weird, because Tide pods in particular are a pretty bad deal for laundry detergent. For my wife, the pods are a lifestyle upgrade over the regular powdered pour out detergent. The convenience and effort saved justifies the more expensive packaging. I'm a firm believer in adopting new processes or products that reduce the amount of time required to perform my daily functions. They pay off in the long run.
OGWhales 7y ago
I’ve always figured they wouldn’t throw so much money at it if it wasn’t working. I assume the advertising makes them massive profits. I’m sure there are pretty of studies out there.
Qworg 7y ago
Here's some of Google's positioning on it - think of it as an arms race: https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/marketing-resources/micro-moments/zero-moment-truth/ https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/marketing-resources/micro-mo...
mcv 7y ago
I think advertising increases discretionary spending, it just redirects it. When smoking ads were banned, profits for cigarette companies went up, because they didn't have to spend money on marketing anymore. Addicts still kept buying them anyway. Previously, smoking ads were to get people to buy your brand rather than some competing brand.

marcus_holmes 7y ago

But for any given business the maths work out differently. Building a dedicated audience in a niche who are willing to pay for a thing directly is easier than wrestling with the advertising industry to try and extract enough ad revenue to keep going.