4 ms·

I’m afraid it’s inevitable. If there’s a large enough audience, someone will be willing to pay to market to them. Almost no business will be able to say no to t

by qzw 6y ago

I’m afraid it’s inevitable. If there’s a large enough audience, someone will be willing to pay to market to them. Almost no business will be able to say no to the money.

narag 6y ago
Netflix?
- jon-wood 6y ago
  Are doubtless taking money for product placement, which while less irritating than cutting into the show for an ad break, is still marketing.
- vinay_ys 6y ago
  Don't they do brand product placement in their shows and do cross-promotion campaigns with those brands?
- claudeganon 6y ago
  Netflix invests massively in tracking how users engage with content on their platform. They’ll either sell these services down the road to third parties or become a kind of quasi-monopoly player doing this in the entertainment industry, like Google or Facebook.
- qzw 6y ago
  Call me a pessimist, but I think Netflix will only be ad-free for as long as it is a competitive advantage. The day will come when that’s no longer true, and the ads will come. When their growth has stalled and they have raised prices as much as the market will bear, how long can they resist “free” ad money? Will their shareholders just let them leave it on the table?
addicted 6y ago
Ads are not the same thing as spying. One of the biggest problems with this whole discussion is that people, including those who should know better, are not making distinctions between ads based maybe on broad characteristics vs ads that are based on tracking every move you make across the internet, purchases in stores with credit cards, and micro targeting based on specific interests. With just ads you can place a direct value on how much people are willing to pay to not see them. Netflix does this. Hulu does this by offering 2 services, as free and and supported at different prices. Normal business practices should create a market that allows people who are willing to see ads and those who wish to pay more to be ad free to both be serviced. The problem right now with micro targeting and extreme spying is that you have a race to the bottom that has users paying for the services they use not through watching ads, or monetary payments but through data and information about themselves. That data is much more valuable than just for ads. It makes it extremely difficult for someone who isn’t the biggest player in a market to, for example, compete with the entrenched power. So it’s not just people watching creepy ads, but it also entrenches monopolies, and allows the likes of Google and Facebook to create new monopolies based on data they have gained from their existing monopolies. Ads are, if anything, the least problematic part about the spying and data collection because at least they are open and obvious to everyone. Google and Facebook do far more creepy things than what they do with the ads privately, but the largest uproar has been about ads simply because that’s the most transparent use of the crazy data collection practices.
- Mediterraneo10 6y ago
  > distinctions between ads based maybe on broad characteristics vs ads that are based on tracking every move you make across the internet, purchases in stores with credit cards, and micro targeting based on specific interests. That very broad and general advertising of which you speak will only dwindle with time and therefore the distinction will not be a very useful one. Already ordinary billboards are being upgraded to smart billboards that can scan and identify the people walking by (facial recognition, Bluetooth, perhaps soon gait, etc.). The decline of print media means that we’re losing the one kind of advertising that can't hook into technology to track you.
- m463 6y ago
  Unfortunately advertising is the ambiguous less-confrontational term for surveillance. Maybe we should use terms like dossier.
- xg15 6y ago
  Ads have more adverse effects than just being distracting and facilitating spying. They are privately designed propaganda. They spread misinformation, establish harmful standards and desires, manipulate emotions and make it harder to find unbiased market information that would be needed for a rational purchasing descision. Ads are universally bad, targeted or not.
- yuhong 6y ago
  To come back to Google, I wrote a Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft:Effects_of_the_2007-2008_financial_crisis_on_Google https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft:Effects_of_the_2007-2008...

by qzw 6y ago

I’m afraid it’s inevitable. If there’s a large enough audience, someone will be willing to pay to market to them. Almost no business will be able to say no to the money.

narag 6y ago

Netflix?

jon-wood 6y ago
Are doubtless taking money for product placement, which while less irritating than cutting into the show for an ad break, is still marketing.
vinay_ys 6y ago
Don't they do brand product placement in their shows and do cross-promotion campaigns with those brands?
claudeganon 6y ago
Netflix invests massively in tracking how users engage with content on their platform. They’ll either sell these services down the road to third parties or become a kind of quasi-monopoly player doing this in the entertainment industry, like Google or Facebook.
qzw 6y ago
Call me a pessimist, but I think Netflix will only be ad-free for as long as it is a competitive advantage. The day will come when that’s no longer true, and the ads will come. When their growth has stalled and they have raised prices as much as the market will bear, how long can they resist “free” ad money? Will their shareholders just let them leave it on the table?

addicted 6y ago

Ads are not the same thing as spying. One of the biggest problems with this whole discussion is that people, including those who should know better, are not making distinctions between ads based maybe on broad characteristics vs ads that are based on tracking every move you make across the internet, purchases in stores with credit cards, and micro targeting based on specific interests. With just ads you can place a direct value on how much people are willing to pay to not see them. Netflix does this. Hulu does this by offering 2 services, as free and and supported at different prices. Normal business practices should create a market that allows people who are willing to see ads and those who wish to pay more to be ad free to both be serviced. The problem right now with micro targeting and extreme spying is that you have a race to the bottom that has users paying for the services they use not through watching ads, or monetary payments but through data and information about themselves. That data is much more valuable than just for ads. It makes it extremely difficult for someone who isn’t the biggest player in a market to, for example, compete with the entrenched power. So it’s not just people watching creepy ads, but it also entrenches monopolies, and allows the likes of Google and Facebook to create new monopolies based on data they have gained from their existing monopolies. Ads are, if anything, the least problematic part about the spying and data collection because at least they are open and obvious to everyone. Google and Facebook do far more creepy things than what they do with the ads privately, but the largest uproar has been about ads simply because that’s the most transparent use of the crazy data collection practices.

Mediterraneo10 6y ago
> distinctions between ads based maybe on broad characteristics vs ads that are based on tracking every move you make across the internet, purchases in stores with credit cards, and micro targeting based on specific interests. That very broad and general advertising of which you speak will only dwindle with time and therefore the distinction will not be a very useful one. Already ordinary billboards are being upgraded to smart billboards that can scan and identify the people walking by (facial recognition, Bluetooth, perhaps soon gait, etc.). The decline of print media means that we’re losing the one kind of advertising that can't hook into technology to track you.
m463 6y ago
Unfortunately advertising is the ambiguous less-confrontational term for surveillance. Maybe we should use terms like dossier.
xg15 6y ago
Ads have more adverse effects than just being distracting and facilitating spying. They are privately designed propaganda. They spread misinformation, establish harmful standards and desires, manipulate emotions and make it harder to find unbiased market information that would be needed for a rational purchasing descision. Ads are universally bad, targeted or not.
yuhong 6y ago
To come back to Google, I wrote a Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft:Effects_of_the_2007-2008_financial_crisis_on_Google https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft:Effects_of_the_2007-2008...