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What’s the cost that advertising imposes exactly?

by avalys 7y ago

abdullahkhalids 7y ago
People have finite attention tokens to spend per day. Attention tokens are consumed when you make a conscious and deliberate decision to invest time in something, but they are also consumed when someone approaches you and talks to you. Of course, people close to us usually are mindful of not consuming too many of our attention tokens. And some interruptions are useful to you, so they are welcome. Advertisements, on the other hand, consume the attention tokens of everyone who views them, and because they are optimizing for the revenue to the company, and not the benefit to the person, the expected benefit of each advertisement to the person is extremely low, if not downright negative.
- avalys 7y ago
  Ok. So we ban advertising. Now you have to spend your “attention tokens” earning money to purchase the content you were previously getting for free. Is that better? How about we let people make this choice themselves, just as we do now?
  - danaris 7y ago
    People don't get to make the choice themselves now. They are forced to see the advertising, whether they want to or not. Removing the advertising would, in fact, give them back choice they currently lack.
    - thu2111 7y ago
      People aren't forced to do anything. They don't have to use content supported by ads, plenty of it isn't. And the biggest/best online ad networks offer controls, which nobody uses because vanishingly few people care. Banning targeted advertising would be ridiculous. I'll say it: I love targeted ads. I'd much rather have usefully targeted ads than go back to the days of DoubleClick punch the monkey garbage, or "these beautiful twins" generic garbage. No targeted ads doesn't look like a blissful utopia of clean web pages, it looks like the existing web but all the ads are 10x more distracting and manipulative. We've been there, we know how it is. If you want a reminder just go to a news website in incognito mode and see what lowest common denominator dreck gets presented. When I look around trying to find people supposedly harmed by targeted ads, I come up blank. I've never heard of this being a problem and I resent the constant efforts of "privacy justice warriors" to screw up the internet for everyone else. My internet experience is made far worse by invasive cookie banners than by ad cookies, if I had to pick which one to disappear with a wand there'd be no hesitation.
      - danaris 7y ago
        > People aren't forced to do anything. You're not listening. Or, apparently, thinking critically about the issue. Two things: First, they—we—are forced to see it. That, in itself, is already a cost to us all. It taxes our brains, in ways that have been measured. And yes, I know that banning the targeting isn't the same as banning the advertising, but we should definitely be doing that in more of our spaces, too. Now, second: People do not have the choice to opt out of the data collection. Oh, sure, you can check the box on website X that says "don't sell my data," you can choose not to do business with Facebook, but you can't actually avoid the tracking and actually participate in the modern world. (Heck, in some places, you'll be tracked and profiled just from what you do in the physical world, too, through cameras and such.) The point isn't that people are (by and large) being actively harmed by the targeting in the ads. We're being harmed by the invasion of privacy required to implement the targeting, and we're being harmed by the inability to avoid seeing the ads.
  - ben_w 7y ago
    > Is that better? “Better” by what metric? If the cost of showing 1000 ads is $5 [0], each advert is at worst replaced with needing 0.5¢ for a micro-transaction. It doesn’t take much time to earn that: Even if someone only earns $5/hour, it is 3.6 seconds. There are people on this site earning 30 times as much, for whom the delay between a new pattern of light hitting their retina and their conscious mind having the subjective experience of seeing a thing is longer than the time it takes to earn the money to cover the cost of the advert. > How about we let people make this choice themselves, just as we do now? What choice? We have ad blockers, we don’t have “I reject your ad, but here is some money” plugins. [0] Numbers from ancient memory, treat with caution.
    - dev_tty01 7y ago
      Assuming these numbers are in the ballpark, it seems we could easily get rid of all ads. I tell my browser my max default micro-payment for a website view. If the site asks for that or less, I view the page. If the site wants more I can approve a larger payment or not view the site. Market dynamics will set the price levels for individual sites over time. The browser keeps track of my payment levels for different sites. I get to set whether I want to do micro-payments or look at ads. It should then be illegal for web sites to violate that global preference set in the browser. Bandwidth needs drop, my web viewing isn't cluttered with crap, and info providers still get rewarded for their efforts. This seems simple, so I'm guessing it must have been discussed before. What happened? Was micro-payment security the issue? Is it just too expensive in typical scenarios?
      - Eridrus 7y ago
        Google tried this twice with Google Contributor, Brave already exists. Outside of the privacy/hand-wringing about tech bubble, people don't actually want this. Maybe you could drive a wedge around bandwidth, particularly on mobile where people pay for data, but despite all the articles written about this, most people are clearly not concerned enough about this to do anything.
    - therealdrag0 7y ago
      > We have ad blockers, we don’t have “I reject your ad, but here is some money” plugins. Isn't that what Brave does?
- Nasrudith 7y ago
  That conception of attention as harm has been circulating as a meme since Zine days and it frankly isn't very sane as focus, much less if the obvioud corralaries are considered outside if justifying what they want in a context. Dressing to show off would count as harm. Just looking unusual would also qualify and justify all sorts of bullying and maltreatment because it "robs attention". Onviously they would plead that it is different but accepting their framework it is still "robbing attention". It brings to mind the farce of Marxist Exploitation where buying wheat for a dollar and milling your flour is fine but buying $20 of flour, milling it and selling it for $40 is suddenly robbing the farmer.
adamisom 7y ago
Exactly seems like a pretty tough thing to answer. What's the exact effect on the climate of X or Y company?
bregma 7y ago
Well, for one, I pay for my internet bandwidth. Somewhere around 80% of all my bandwidth is used up with either advertising or all the infrastructure associated with tracking everything I do in order to sell my eyeballs. From my point of view it's a fairly straightforward costing: 0.8 times what I pay for the internet, plus maybe 0.2 times my hourly rate to account for the waiting time I have to donate out of my billable hours.
PaulRobinson 7y ago
Go to a drug store. Find a generic no-brand ibuprofen. Check the price. Find a branded ibuprofen that is advertised on TV. In the UK, Nurofen is popular. Check the price. The difference is advertising. Same goes for detergent, breakfast cereal, AA batteries, etc., etc.
- avalys 7y ago
  That's not a cost imposed on you - you're free to buy the generic off-brand.
  - PaulRobinson 7y ago
    Enough competitors will eventually realise that the only way to sell any units at all is to advertise, and so will start to ramp up their own efforts. Eventually the advertising cost is in all products, and there is no cheap generic off-brand. This is already the case in cars, houses (you're paying the brokers whether directly or indirectly), jobs (the recruiter fees comes out of your salary and training budgets), etc., etc. Getting rid of "advertising" in a sector is possibly the biggest economic disruptor you could ever apply to it.

What’s the cost that advertising imposes exactly?

by avalys 7y ago

What’s the cost that advertising imposes exactly?

People have finite attention tokens to spend per day. Attention tokens are consumed when you make a conscious and deliberate decision to invest time in something, but they are also consumed when someone approaches you and talks to you. Of course, people close to us usually are mindful of not consuming too many of our attention tokens. And some interruptions are useful to you, so they are welcome. Advertisements, on the other hand, consume the attention tokens of everyone who views them, and because they are optimizing for the revenue to the company, and not the benefit to the person, the expected benefit of each advertisement to the person is extremely low, if not downright negative.

avalys 7y ago
Ok. So we ban advertising. Now you have to spend your “attention tokens” earning money to purchase the content you were previously getting for free. Is that better? How about we let people make this choice themselves, just as we do now?
- danaris 7y ago
  People don't get to make the choice themselves now. They are forced to see the advertising, whether they want to or not. Removing the advertising would, in fact, give them back choice they currently lack.
  - thu2111 7y ago
    People aren't forced to do anything. They don't have to use content supported by ads, plenty of it isn't. And the biggest/best online ad networks offer controls, which nobody uses because vanishingly few people care. Banning targeted advertising would be ridiculous. I'll say it: I love targeted ads. I'd much rather have usefully targeted ads than go back to the days of DoubleClick punch the monkey garbage, or "these beautiful twins" generic garbage. No targeted ads doesn't look like a blissful utopia of clean web pages, it looks like the existing web but all the ads are 10x more distracting and manipulative. We've been there, we know how it is. If you want a reminder just go to a news website in incognito mode and see what lowest common denominator dreck gets presented. When I look around trying to find people supposedly harmed by targeted ads, I come up blank. I've never heard of this being a problem and I resent the constant efforts of "privacy justice warriors" to screw up the internet for everyone else. My internet experience is made far worse by invasive cookie banners than by ad cookies, if I had to pick which one to disappear with a wand there'd be no hesitation.
    - danaris 7y ago
      > People aren't forced to do anything. You're not listening. Or, apparently, thinking critically about the issue. Two things: First, they—we—are forced to see it. That, in itself, is already a cost to us all. It taxes our brains, in ways that have been measured. And yes, I know that banning the targeting isn't the same as banning the advertising, but we should definitely be doing that in more of our spaces, too. Now, second: People do not have the choice to opt out of the data collection. Oh, sure, you can check the box on website X that says "don't sell my data," you can choose not to do business with Facebook, but you can't actually avoid the tracking and actually participate in the modern world. (Heck, in some places, you'll be tracked and profiled just from what you do in the physical world, too, through cameras and such.) The point isn't that people are (by and large) being actively harmed by the targeting in the ads. We're being harmed by the invasion of privacy required to implement the targeting, and we're being harmed by the inability to avoid seeing the ads.
- ben_w 7y ago
  > Is that better? “Better” by what metric? If the cost of showing 1000 ads is $5 [0], each advert is at worst replaced with needing 0.5¢ for a micro-transaction. It doesn’t take much time to earn that: Even if someone only earns $5/hour, it is 3.6 seconds. There are people on this site earning 30 times as much, for whom the delay between a new pattern of light hitting their retina and their conscious mind having the subjective experience of seeing a thing is longer than the time it takes to earn the money to cover the cost of the advert. > How about we let people make this choice themselves, just as we do now? What choice? We have ad blockers, we don’t have “I reject your ad, but here is some money” plugins. [0] Numbers from ancient memory, treat with caution.
  - dev_tty01 7y ago
    Assuming these numbers are in the ballpark, it seems we could easily get rid of all ads. I tell my browser my max default micro-payment for a website view. If the site asks for that or less, I view the page. If the site wants more I can approve a larger payment or not view the site. Market dynamics will set the price levels for individual sites over time. The browser keeps track of my payment levels for different sites. I get to set whether I want to do micro-payments or look at ads. It should then be illegal for web sites to violate that global preference set in the browser. Bandwidth needs drop, my web viewing isn't cluttered with crap, and info providers still get rewarded for their efforts. This seems simple, so I'm guessing it must have been discussed before. What happened? Was micro-payment security the issue? Is it just too expensive in typical scenarios?
    - Eridrus 7y ago
      Google tried this twice with Google Contributor, Brave already exists. Outside of the privacy/hand-wringing about tech bubble, people don't actually want this. Maybe you could drive a wedge around bandwidth, particularly on mobile where people pay for data, but despite all the articles written about this, most people are clearly not concerned enough about this to do anything.
  - therealdrag0 7y ago
    > We have ad blockers, we don’t have “I reject your ad, but here is some money” plugins. Isn't that what Brave does?
Nasrudith 7y ago
That conception of attention as harm has been circulating as a meme since Zine days and it frankly isn't very sane as focus, much less if the obvioud corralaries are considered outside if justifying what they want in a context. Dressing to show off would count as harm. Just looking unusual would also qualify and justify all sorts of bullying and maltreatment because it "robs attention". Onviously they would plead that it is different but accepting their framework it is still "robbing attention". It brings to mind the farce of Marxist Exploitation where buying wheat for a dollar and milling your flour is fine but buying $20 of flour, milling it and selling it for $40 is suddenly robbing the farmer.

adamisom 7y ago

Exactly seems like a pretty tough thing to answer. What's the exact effect on the climate of X or Y company?

bregma 7y ago

Well, for one, I pay for my internet bandwidth. Somewhere around 80% of all my bandwidth is used up with either advertising or all the infrastructure associated with tracking everything I do in order to sell my eyeballs. From my point of view it's a fairly straightforward costing: 0.8 times what I pay for the internet, plus maybe 0.2 times my hourly rate to account for the waiting time I have to donate out of my billable hours.

PaulRobinson 7y ago

Go to a drug store. Find a generic no-brand ibuprofen. Check the price. Find a branded ibuprofen that is advertised on TV. In the UK, Nurofen is popular. Check the price. The difference is advertising. Same goes for detergent, breakfast cereal, AA batteries, etc., etc.

avalys 7y ago
That's not a cost imposed on you - you're free to buy the generic off-brand.
- PaulRobinson 7y ago
  Enough competitors will eventually realise that the only way to sell any units at all is to advertise, and so will start to ramp up their own efforts. Eventually the advertising cost is in all products, and there is no cheap generic off-brand. This is already the case in cars, houses (you're paying the brokers whether directly or indirectly), jobs (the recruiter fees comes out of your salary and training budgets), etc., etc. Getting rid of "advertising" in a sector is possibly the biggest economic disruptor you could ever apply to it.