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I am beginning to believe that advertising (at all, on any medium) is an evil we need to do without. The "free stuff" that we get in return is never without co

I am beginning to believe that advertising (at all, on any medium) is an evil we need to do without. The "free stuff" that we get in return is never without consequences, as we're finding out. The "hey we built a thing you might want to buy" function can be done in different forms, better, I think. Probably by newspapers. I think we could start by taxing all advertising revenue by, say, 50%.

ddevault 6y ago
Strong agree. Advertising should be outlawed entirely. Or rather, corporate propaganda should be outlawed. Psychologically manipulating people for profit is horrible, I cannot comprehend how it's become normalized. This is our brains on capitalism, I guess.
- ryanianian 6y ago
  If we outlaw it or have some litmus test for "propaganda-vs-ad" etc there will of course be very smart people who figure out the loopholes. Hence "influencers" and astroturfing and ads that masquerade as blogs and...even without legal restrictions in place.
  - ddevault 6y ago
    The law isn't a script. Exploiting loopholes can either result in a judge intepreting the law as designed and handing down a fine regardless, or we can work to refine the law in further legislation. Just because it's difficult and someone will try to circumvent it doesn't mean we shouldn't work on it.
- jancsika 6y ago
  I guess you're getting downvoted because your statement is rather broad. But narrowing a bit to the feedback loop between data collected by the ad machine and the next ad you see based on that and ongoing data collection-- if Las Vegas casino games are regulated then we can certainly regulate that dangerous practice.
  - marcus_holmes 6y ago
    I think it's the "our brains on capitalism" bit that got downvoted. To be fair, the communists are no better/worse at this, it's just government propaganda instead of corporate advertising.
marcinzm 6y ago
Advertising is in some ways an equalizer. If you can pay then you get an audience. Doesn't matter if you're a popular brand or not. Doesn't matter if you know celebrities to hawk your stuff. Doesn't matter if you're famous or not. Doesn't matter if you have the right connections or not.
- ddevault 6y ago
  >Advertising is in some ways an equalizer. If you can pay then you get an audience. You've contradicted yourself. Not everyone can pay. Obviously advertising heavily favors the wealthy - it is not an egalitarian system. And it is a blight on our society even without considering that.
  - marcinzm 6y ago
    >it is not an egalitarian system. Nothing is, ever, if that's your criteria then everything fails. So the question is what you want to matter in terms of influence. If you believe in capitalism then money should matter more than connections for example.
- varispeed 6y ago
  But the playing field is not level. You will compete for ad space against big corps that can easily spend millions on advertising and can do much better targeting than yourself.
  - marcinzm 6y ago
    >can do much better targeting than yourself. All existing online ad platforms provide very good targeting tools and do automated optimizations on your behalf. On a targeted audience you can easily outcompete big corps with a generic offering as it's not overall budget that matters but how much you're spending per view/click/conversion adjusted for how relevant your ad is.
    - danaris 6y ago
      I mean...sure, that's what they promise. But whenever they actually study these things, from all I've seen, the benefits of targeted-to-the-individual advertising fail to materialize. Targeting by the content of the site can work (eg, advertising cake decorating tools on a blog about cake decorating), but at least the vast, vast majority of all the privacy-invading, personal-data-aggregating "targeted" advertising online seems to do no better than the much simpler forms, and as I understand it, in many cases it does worse.
stevesearer 6y ago
I’d be interested in knowing what qualifies as advertising in this hypothetical. Web banners? Sponsored content? Trade shows? Sales rep stopping by and buying lunch and talking about a product? Clothing with logos? Hacker News? There are lots of ways to capture people’s attention to build awareness of your business that probably technically fall under advertising but would be quite difficult to regulate in any meaningful way.
- throwaway13337 6y ago
  The formalized ad business would be a good place to start. At least you'd kill the ad supported business model because clarity of the transaction required.
  - jbay808 6y ago
    I think the GP's question is not so much "where does it start", as "where does it end".
    - marcus_holmes 6y ago
      Though a good starting place is helpful. We can figure out where to stop as we go along.
- marcus_holmes 6y ago
  "Being paid by someone to publish content that mentions their product", I guess, as a first draft? So, in your examples: Web banners: yes, Sponsored content: yes, Trade shows: no, Sales rep stopping by: no, clothing with logos: yes if the logo isn't the brand of the clothing itself, Hacker News: I have no idea how this site is funded. And I don't even vaguely pretend to know where we should draw the line. I just think it should not be where it currently is.
  - stevesearer 6y ago
    Paying a 3rd party to spread a message or information would be an interesting way to define it. In that scenario things like classifieds, craigslist, and job boards would all get the ax too. I like to think about these issues because I make a living selling advertising on my website. We try to have use good practices, have the ads be high quality, targeted toward the content as opposed to the user. On the other hand, I live in a city which does not allow billboard advertising (Santa Barbara, California) and I do enjoy it in comparison to cities with many billboards.
throwaway13337 6y ago
This is a big, necessary idea. Advertising is turning into a paperclip maximizing machine that tends to grow relative to total market. As we get efficient with other parts of the economy and "grow the pie", mind-share remains zero-sum. Without something changing, advertising will tend to eat all the productivity gains so we can show more ads to people. This is insidious and benefits no one.
megaman821 6y ago
Taking away that "free stuff" is not without consequence either. Now people without means can't read the news, watch tv, connect with friends and family online, play casual games, etc. Are ads more evil than taking away free access for those without the means to pay?
- snarf21 6y ago
  Yes
  - megaman821 6y ago
    Well, I am sure millions of less fortunate people in this world are glad you have no say in deciding these things. Millions of people using Whatsapp to stay in contact with their friends and family for free, many who couldn't afford to pay for the service, but shut it down because snarf21 saw an ad he didn't like.
    - marcus_holmes 6y ago
      yeah but we had email before that. It wasn't "free" but it was cheap and worked across everything and no-one stole your personal data.
      - umeshunni 6y ago
        By we, if you mean a few rich people in the west, sure.
        marcus_holmes 6y ago
        No, I don't. Poor people in (most parts of) the developing world have better internet access and more free stuff with it than we do in the West. Email is dirt cheap to provide. We probably all still get a free email account with our ISP, except none of us bother because gmail.
    - nimih 6y ago
snarf21 6y ago
Absolutely in agreement. Digital advertising should be heavily taxed and we should outlaw advertising for medicines, alcohol, vitamins and other predatory categories just like we did for smoking.
DamnInteresting 6y ago
“People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.” —Banksy
- krapp 6y ago
  Don't get me wrong, I think advertising is responsible for a lot of evil in the world, and SEO in particular is a cancer. But if anyone reacts to an ad with this degree of paranoia and self-loathing, it speaks more to their own fragility than it does than the nature of advertising.
  - fendrak 6y ago
    I don't think it requires any particular paranoia or self-loathing, just the day-in, day-out grind against the receiver's psyche. We take it for granted that living with an emotionally-abusive person deeply affects someone's sense of self-perception, but for some reason when advertisers use the same sort of tactics, but at a slightly lower level spread across a greater amount of time, we're supposed to accept it as appropriate? We all have a finite store of, let's call it "self confidence"; why should we accept as status quo that all comers have a right to drain some of it every day in order to line their own pocketbooks?
    - krapp 6y ago
      Does it drain you that much? It doesn't drain me. It's anecdotal but no one I know seems to be suffering from some psychological equivalent of battered-spouse syndrome due to the effects of advertising. I don't even really see a lot of advertising that uses psychologically demeaning tactics, sneering and flippant insults and shaming and the like. Maybe I just don't notice them. But to me, demeaning your customers isn't likely to result in them being more likely to buy your product.
ouid 6y ago
I think there's value in describing advertising for what it actually is, paying someone else to lie for you. You can talk about how it's necessary for businesses to let the "public know about their products", but you can't really get around this description of it. It's pretty inconsistent with the idea of free speech, but supposed defenders of free speech don't seem to have any problem with paid speech. A lot of advertising is negative, not in the sense of attack ads, but in what it is that you agree not to say, for money. When advertisers pull "funding" when a platform doesn't censor "swear words", the lack of swear words is now an advertisement. Do we really think that there is a consistent definition of free speech which is compatible with advertising? Freedom and anarchy are different.
faichai 6y ago
I’ve long thought something along similar lines: in a world with instant search, advertising becomes irrelevant if the search actually helps you to find products. It is in this way that google has actually failed. If you look for a product you get a whole load of dross back. It’s impossible to filter by spec, you can add keywords but this rarely gives you more sensible results these days. The products get lost in the noise. Most of the time what would be better would be a structured directory of product information enabling you to zero in on the product you want without the crap. This directory would be independent of any specific vendor. All new products would be released into the directory so you can track all new products in certain categories to stay informed. Gaming of the directory would be policed ensuring equal standing of all products. The only thing this doesn’t handle well is new product categories. But sure there’s ways to handle it.
- throwaway13337 6y ago
  So what's the business model? These sorts of listing aggregators (like pc parts sites) have a perverse incentive to always allow those that pay to get top placement. I'm genuinely interested in a business model for this stuff that can support fair placement. Flat subscription fees on the vendor side needs to first solve the chicken and egg problem. Flat subscription fees on the customer side doesn't seem likely to work. Communicating that your service is really really different because it does not have shady business practices is a hard sale at best. Look at how free to play games thrive versus more ethical business models. I want to work on solutions to these insidious businesses that seem so commonplace today but I don't know a model that could work.
  - zentiggr 6y ago
    Typical aggregator sites so far, don't have customer-side "flag this product" or "flag this tag/category as incorrect" feedback. Allow buyers to push back against bogus, overtagged, or miscategorized items and that aggregator will gain some serious reputation over Amazon and any other venues in the same niche. And I mean meaningful pushback - not "it's flagged and will be online still until reviewed by the scarce human team gets to it" but "it's flagged and offline until humans review it and reapprove or flush it". Sure there will always be trolls who flag anything and everything but they can get banned as users under existing abuse terms. Imagine how quickly Amazon would get flushed clean of bogus listings if user flags pushed them offline until Amazon staff could verify and relist them... they'd have to prioritize restoring actual useful items, or at least start seriously policing the worst actors on the supplier side to stem the tide. Losing "good" items in a sea of flagged bad ones would also be a secondary incentive to clean house and keep it that way.
deleted 6y ago
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manfredo 6y ago
I disagree substantially. Advertising, especially web advertising, allows us to pay for services not with money but our attention. When the Economist polled people how much they would pay to forego search engines, the result was over $17,000 [1]. It'd be simplistic to say that this is what Google could charge in a subscription model, but the point is that the value is very high. Is a world where poorer students who can't afford google have to compete against wealthier students with google a better world than one with web ads? I think it's easy to focus on the bad, the privacy issues and dark patterns that web ads incentivize, to the exclusion of the fact that it has expanded access to incredibly powerful services to people of all means (well, all means as long as they have access to the internet). 1. https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2018/04/25/how-much-would-you-pay-to-keep-using-google https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2018/04/25/how-much...
- 6510 6y ago
  Where advertisement automatons have better information (which they increasingly do) advertising things to poor people is carefully avoided. So the model has finite life-span. Japan CPC $1.32 CPM $0.38 Montenegro CPC $0.05 CPM $0.01 http://www.rudibedy.com/blog/facebook-advertising-cpc-cpm-per-country/ http://www.rudibedy.com/blog/facebook-advertising-cpc-cpm-pe...
  - manfredo 6y ago
    Lower cost-per-click and cost per impression for lower income countries does not mean that companies are avoiding advertising to those populations. It just means people buying ads aren't as willing to spend money to reach those populations. The cost of advertising to populations with lower disposable income has always been lower. This isn't something new to web ads, it's a phenomenon that has existed long before the internet. I'm really not sure where you're going with this line of thinking.
    - 6510 6y ago
      I don't see the add driven free services for all system survive in the long run. Say they start by dedicating more funds (hardware & software) to matching offers to customers with more disposable income. Say the next step is to offer more elaborate services or options to customers with money. Say, some coupon trick, if you buy a product A-Z you get 24 months of service B which is a paid version of the free service that served you the advert. This scheme is already doable with dumb adverts and without hoarding personal data. Its already that you send the poor person a 10% discount coupon for one box of chocolate and the rich person 4 boxes for free, a bottle of wine and a life time 10% discount. Why would the digital world be different?
Guest42 6y ago
It is a interesting notion to ask oneself how much these web services are worth or how to spell out contractual relationships for advertising.
SimeVidas 6y ago
I’m completely fine with ads on YouTube. They can sometimes get annoying, but it’s a very small price to pay for the hours of free entertainment that I get from YouTube.
- sli 6y ago
  This gets frequently undercut when fair use content is claimed by a corporation, redirecting the ad revenue away from the creator.
bonestamp2 6y ago
> The "free stuff" that we get in return is never without consequences, as we're finding out. Largely, I agree. But, this is an editorial decision and not an absolute. We used to get better news when we paid straight up for it (newspaper cover price/subscriptions). But, lets not forget, those papers had advertising too. The difference is that the ads were not the only form of revenue and the papers with the best journalistic integrity were responsible to their readers more than their advertisers. Therefore, news was optimized for readers. Now that most news is paid for by advertising, and because advertising pays out based on impressions and/or clicks, we get news that is optimized for impressions and clicks -- which is obviously much worse news than we used to get. This shift in incentive means that news organizations are now more responsible to their advertisers than their readers/viewers (and they don't like that either, but it is a decision that helps keep the lights on). I don't think you can get rid of all advertising. I mean, there will always be advertising. If it's not overt, it will become more and more covert. So, I don't think the government would be successful in trying to control it further than they already have. Their current approach of transparency is on the right trajectory at least, but it's not much of a solution either. It's probably ok to allow: overt, paid, and responsible advertising. The key there is "responsible". No responsible editor should allow an advertisement that interrupts the content in any way! I have worked in all of the industries involved in this issue so I can assure you it will be a difficult problem to solve. Either the incentives have to be flipped, so that the news organizations are incentivized to create the best content for readers (simply inform the public at large in an unbiased way -- the original purpose of "journalists" in ancient Greece). Or, the tastes of the readers/viewers has to change so that they reject clickbait news. I don't have a lot of faith in readers, myself included, because it's often difficult to see that something was clickbait until you read it. I also don't have faith in news organizations being innovative enough to get ahead of this problem and fix it. So, I believe we need some kind of third party solution. We need something like those content summary bots that can distill an article into a paragraph, but can rewrite clickbait headlines into boring but factual headlines. Then provide that bot as a browser plugin so the clickbait headlines are replaced for those of us who want a more honest approach to news. Again, not a perfect solution either... I'm not sure one exists for this problem.
- marcus_holmes 6y ago
Jakobeha 6y ago
Advertising itself is good. Knowing about different products that can help you is actually really good. Sure you can get this information from friends and word-of-mouth, but it's not always accurate, and there is nothing wrong with using advertisements too. Plus, there are some advertisements that are genuinely works of art. Even personalized ads are good if they're done in a way that ensures your privacy is safe. It would be awesome if Steam could find me some video games that are actually interesting. The problem is a lot of current advertising is completely broken. It's been said a lot before, but: companies making you watch ad after ad that you're just not going to buy, ads encouraging me to ignore them because they're ugly and make it harder to see content, advertisers that are so obnoxious and bad at advertising their products that I'm less inclined to buy them. Idk how this kind of crap advertising actually gets companies more money, but I guarantee it's not "subtly influencing" me to buy "Slots Royale" or fake medicine, or even Geico - and I know I have human biases and distortions. Also, ad tracking which takes all of my data and doesn't even work. Idk what the current trend is but I've heard that advertisements are generating less and less revenue. I wouldn't be surprised if, as population the gets more tech-savvy, ads will be forced to change / die out because so few people actually use them. Or at least get better at advertising.
- horsawlarway 6y ago
  > Advertising itself is good I used to think roughly the same - I'm really not that convinced anymore. I'd actually say your last point really drives home just how BAD advertising is right now. It's so bad that there's evolutionary pressure to learn to ignore advertisements. Ads are like a form of social parasite - They've hijacked a human instinct to share things we like and turned it into a profit motivated, manipulative, abusive channel to suck money out of people. Just like animals ridden with parasites are less fit - consumers who are most susceptible or surrounded by ads are less fit. Their decisions are influenced by ads to no longer objectively consider whether a product is useful to them. Like a mouse infected with toxoplasma is drawn to the small of cat urine - even though it means getting eaten far more often. Good for the parasite, bad for the mouse. Ads are good for the company, bad for the person.
Bakary 6y ago
Another way to consider this issue is to ask whether we want to consume all of that content in the first place.

ddevault 6y ago

Strong agree. Advertising should be outlawed entirely. Or rather, corporate propaganda should be outlawed. Psychologically manipulating people for profit is horrible, I cannot comprehend how it's become normalized. This is our brains on capitalism, I guess.

ryanianian 6y ago
If we outlaw it or have some litmus test for "propaganda-vs-ad" etc there will of course be very smart people who figure out the loopholes. Hence "influencers" and astroturfing and ads that masquerade as blogs and...even without legal restrictions in place.
- ddevault 6y ago
  The law isn't a script. Exploiting loopholes can either result in a judge intepreting the law as designed and handing down a fine regardless, or we can work to refine the law in further legislation. Just because it's difficult and someone will try to circumvent it doesn't mean we shouldn't work on it.
jancsika 6y ago
I guess you're getting downvoted because your statement is rather broad. But narrowing a bit to the feedback loop between data collected by the ad machine and the next ad you see based on that and ongoing data collection-- if Las Vegas casino games are regulated then we can certainly regulate that dangerous practice.
- marcus_holmes 6y ago
  I think it's the "our brains on capitalism" bit that got downvoted. To be fair, the communists are no better/worse at this, it's just government propaganda instead of corporate advertising.

marcinzm 6y ago

Advertising is in some ways an equalizer. If you can pay then you get an audience. Doesn't matter if you're a popular brand or not. Doesn't matter if you know celebrities to hawk your stuff. Doesn't matter if you're famous or not. Doesn't matter if you have the right connections or not.

ddevault 6y ago
>Advertising is in some ways an equalizer. If you can pay then you get an audience. You've contradicted yourself. Not everyone can pay. Obviously advertising heavily favors the wealthy - it is not an egalitarian system. And it is a blight on our society even without considering that.
- marcinzm 6y ago
  >it is not an egalitarian system. Nothing is, ever, if that's your criteria then everything fails. So the question is what you want to matter in terms of influence. If you believe in capitalism then money should matter more than connections for example.
varispeed 6y ago
But the playing field is not level. You will compete for ad space against big corps that can easily spend millions on advertising and can do much better targeting than yourself.
- marcinzm 6y ago
  >can do much better targeting than yourself. All existing online ad platforms provide very good targeting tools and do automated optimizations on your behalf. On a targeted audience you can easily outcompete big corps with a generic offering as it's not overall budget that matters but how much you're spending per view/click/conversion adjusted for how relevant your ad is.
  - danaris 6y ago
    I mean...sure, that's what they promise. But whenever they actually study these things, from all I've seen, the benefits of targeted-to-the-individual advertising fail to materialize. Targeting by the content of the site can work (eg, advertising cake decorating tools on a blog about cake decorating), but at least the vast, vast majority of all the privacy-invading, personal-data-aggregating "targeted" advertising online seems to do no better than the much simpler forms, and as I understand it, in many cases it does worse.

stevesearer 6y ago

I’d be interested in knowing what qualifies as advertising in this hypothetical. Web banners? Sponsored content? Trade shows? Sales rep stopping by and buying lunch and talking about a product? Clothing with logos? Hacker News? There are lots of ways to capture people’s attention to build awareness of your business that probably technically fall under advertising but would be quite difficult to regulate in any meaningful way.

throwaway13337 6y ago
The formalized ad business would be a good place to start. At least you'd kill the ad supported business model because clarity of the transaction required.
- jbay808 6y ago
  I think the GP's question is not so much "where does it start", as "where does it end".
  - marcus_holmes 6y ago
    Though a good starting place is helpful. We can figure out where to stop as we go along.
marcus_holmes 6y ago
"Being paid by someone to publish content that mentions their product", I guess, as a first draft? So, in your examples: Web banners: yes, Sponsored content: yes, Trade shows: no, Sales rep stopping by: no, clothing with logos: yes if the logo isn't the brand of the clothing itself, Hacker News: I have no idea how this site is funded. And I don't even vaguely pretend to know where we should draw the line. I just think it should not be where it currently is.
- stevesearer 6y ago
  Paying a 3rd party to spread a message or information would be an interesting way to define it. In that scenario things like classifieds, craigslist, and job boards would all get the ax too. I like to think about these issues because I make a living selling advertising on my website. We try to have use good practices, have the ads be high quality, targeted toward the content as opposed to the user. On the other hand, I live in a city which does not allow billboard advertising (Santa Barbara, California) and I do enjoy it in comparison to cities with many billboards.

throwaway13337 6y ago

This is a big, necessary idea. Advertising is turning into a paperclip maximizing machine that tends to grow relative to total market. As we get efficient with other parts of the economy and "grow the pie", mind-share remains zero-sum. Without something changing, advertising will tend to eat all the productivity gains so we can show more ads to people. This is insidious and benefits no one.

megaman821 6y ago

Taking away that "free stuff" is not without consequence either. Now people without means can't read the news, watch tv, connect with friends and family online, play casual games, etc. Are ads more evil than taking away free access for those without the means to pay?

snarf21 6y ago
Yes
- megaman821 6y ago
  Well, I am sure millions of less fortunate people in this world are glad you have no say in deciding these things. Millions of people using Whatsapp to stay in contact with their friends and family for free, many who couldn't afford to pay for the service, but shut it down because snarf21 saw an ad he didn't like.
  - marcus_holmes 6y ago
    yeah but we had email before that. It wasn't "free" but it was cheap and worked across everything and no-one stole your personal data.
    - umeshunni 6y ago
      By we, if you mean a few rich people in the west, sure.
      - marcus_holmes 6y ago
        No, I don't. Poor people in (most parts of) the developing world have better internet access and more free stuff with it than we do in the West. Email is dirt cheap to provide. We probably all still get a free email account with our ISP, except none of us bother because gmail.
  - nimih 6y ago

snarf21 6y ago

Absolutely in agreement. Digital advertising should be heavily taxed and we should outlaw advertising for medicines, alcohol, vitamins and other predatory categories just like we did for smoking.

DamnInteresting 6y ago

“People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.” —Banksy

krapp 6y ago
Don't get me wrong, I think advertising is responsible for a lot of evil in the world, and SEO in particular is a cancer. But if anyone reacts to an ad with this degree of paranoia and self-loathing, it speaks more to their own fragility than it does than the nature of advertising.
- fendrak 6y ago
  I don't think it requires any particular paranoia or self-loathing, just the day-in, day-out grind against the receiver's psyche. We take it for granted that living with an emotionally-abusive person deeply affects someone's sense of self-perception, but for some reason when advertisers use the same sort of tactics, but at a slightly lower level spread across a greater amount of time, we're supposed to accept it as appropriate? We all have a finite store of, let's call it "self confidence"; why should we accept as status quo that all comers have a right to drain some of it every day in order to line their own pocketbooks?
  - krapp 6y ago
    Does it drain you that much? It doesn't drain me. It's anecdotal but no one I know seems to be suffering from some psychological equivalent of battered-spouse syndrome due to the effects of advertising. I don't even really see a lot of advertising that uses psychologically demeaning tactics, sneering and flippant insults and shaming and the like. Maybe I just don't notice them. But to me, demeaning your customers isn't likely to result in them being more likely to buy your product.

ouid 6y ago

I think there's value in describing advertising for what it actually is, paying someone else to lie for you. You can talk about how it's necessary for businesses to let the "public know about their products", but you can't really get around this description of it. It's pretty inconsistent with the idea of free speech, but supposed defenders of free speech don't seem to have any problem with paid speech. A lot of advertising is negative, not in the sense of attack ads, but in what it is that you agree not to say, for money. When advertisers pull "funding" when a platform doesn't censor "swear words", the lack of swear words is now an advertisement. Do we really think that there is a consistent definition of free speech which is compatible with advertising? Freedom and anarchy are different.

faichai 6y ago

I’ve long thought something along similar lines: in a world with instant search, advertising becomes irrelevant if the search actually helps you to find products. It is in this way that google has actually failed. If you look for a product you get a whole load of dross back. It’s impossible to filter by spec, you can add keywords but this rarely gives you more sensible results these days. The products get lost in the noise. Most of the time what would be better would be a structured directory of product information enabling you to zero in on the product you want without the crap. This directory would be independent of any specific vendor. All new products would be released into the directory so you can track all new products in certain categories to stay informed. Gaming of the directory would be policed ensuring equal standing of all products. The only thing this doesn’t handle well is new product categories. But sure there’s ways to handle it.

throwaway13337 6y ago
So what's the business model? These sorts of listing aggregators (like pc parts sites) have a perverse incentive to always allow those that pay to get top placement. I'm genuinely interested in a business model for this stuff that can support fair placement. Flat subscription fees on the vendor side needs to first solve the chicken and egg problem. Flat subscription fees on the customer side doesn't seem likely to work. Communicating that your service is really really different because it does not have shady business practices is a hard sale at best. Look at how free to play games thrive versus more ethical business models. I want to work on solutions to these insidious businesses that seem so commonplace today but I don't know a model that could work.
- zentiggr 6y ago
  Typical aggregator sites so far, don't have customer-side "flag this product" or "flag this tag/category as incorrect" feedback. Allow buyers to push back against bogus, overtagged, or miscategorized items and that aggregator will gain some serious reputation over Amazon and any other venues in the same niche. And I mean meaningful pushback - not "it's flagged and will be online still until reviewed by the scarce human team gets to it" but "it's flagged and offline until humans review it and reapprove or flush it". Sure there will always be trolls who flag anything and everything but they can get banned as users under existing abuse terms. Imagine how quickly Amazon would get flushed clean of bogus listings if user flags pushed them offline until Amazon staff could verify and relist them... they'd have to prioritize restoring actual useful items, or at least start seriously policing the worst actors on the supplier side to stem the tide. Losing "good" items in a sea of flagged bad ones would also be a secondary incentive to clean house and keep it that way.

deleted 6y ago

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manfredo 6y ago

I disagree substantially. Advertising, especially web advertising, allows us to pay for services not with money but our attention. When the Economist polled people how much they would pay to forego search engines, the result was over $17,000 [1]. It'd be simplistic to say that this is what Google could charge in a subscription model, but the point is that the value is very high. Is a world where poorer students who can't afford google have to compete against wealthier students with google a better world than one with web ads? I think it's easy to focus on the bad, the privacy issues and dark patterns that web ads incentivize, to the exclusion of the fact that it has expanded access to incredibly powerful services to people of all means (well, all means as long as they have access to the internet). 1. https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2018/04/25/how-much-would-you-pay-to-keep-using-google https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2018/04/25/how-much...

6510 6y ago
Where advertisement automatons have better information (which they increasingly do) advertising things to poor people is carefully avoided. So the model has finite life-span. Japan CPC $1.32 CPM $0.38 Montenegro CPC $0.05 CPM $0.01 http://www.rudibedy.com/blog/facebook-advertising-cpc-cpm-per-country/ http://www.rudibedy.com/blog/facebook-advertising-cpc-cpm-pe...
- manfredo 6y ago
  Lower cost-per-click and cost per impression for lower income countries does not mean that companies are avoiding advertising to those populations. It just means people buying ads aren't as willing to spend money to reach those populations. The cost of advertising to populations with lower disposable income has always been lower. This isn't something new to web ads, it's a phenomenon that has existed long before the internet. I'm really not sure where you're going with this line of thinking.
  - 6510 6y ago
    I don't see the add driven free services for all system survive in the long run. Say they start by dedicating more funds (hardware & software) to matching offers to customers with more disposable income. Say the next step is to offer more elaborate services or options to customers with money. Say, some coupon trick, if you buy a product A-Z you get 24 months of service B which is a paid version of the free service that served you the advert. This scheme is already doable with dumb adverts and without hoarding personal data. Its already that you send the poor person a 10% discount coupon for one box of chocolate and the rich person 4 boxes for free, a bottle of wine and a life time 10% discount. Why would the digital world be different?

Guest42 6y ago

It is a interesting notion to ask oneself how much these web services are worth or how to spell out contractual relationships for advertising.

SimeVidas 6y ago

I’m completely fine with ads on YouTube. They can sometimes get annoying, but it’s a very small price to pay for the hours of free entertainment that I get from YouTube.

sli 6y ago
This gets frequently undercut when fair use content is claimed by a corporation, redirecting the ad revenue away from the creator.

bonestamp2 6y ago

> The "free stuff" that we get in return is never without consequences, as we're finding out. Largely, I agree. But, this is an editorial decision and not an absolute. We used to get better news when we paid straight up for it (newspaper cover price/subscriptions). But, lets not forget, those papers had advertising too. The difference is that the ads were not the only form of revenue and the papers with the best journalistic integrity were responsible to their readers more than their advertisers. Therefore, news was optimized for readers. Now that most news is paid for by advertising, and because advertising pays out based on impressions and/or clicks, we get news that is optimized for impressions and clicks -- which is obviously much worse news than we used to get. This shift in incentive means that news organizations are now more responsible to their advertisers than their readers/viewers (and they don't like that either, but it is a decision that helps keep the lights on). I don't think you can get rid of all advertising. I mean, there will always be advertising. If it's not overt, it will become more and more covert. So, I don't think the government would be successful in trying to control it further than they already have. Their current approach of transparency is on the right trajectory at least, but it's not much of a solution either. It's probably ok to allow: overt, paid, and responsible advertising. The key there is "responsible". No responsible editor should allow an advertisement that interrupts the content in any way! I have worked in all of the industries involved in this issue so I can assure you it will be a difficult problem to solve. Either the incentives have to be flipped, so that the news organizations are incentivized to create the best content for readers (simply inform the public at large in an unbiased way -- the original purpose of "journalists" in ancient Greece). Or, the tastes of the readers/viewers has to change so that they reject clickbait news. I don't have a lot of faith in readers, myself included, because it's often difficult to see that something was clickbait until you read it. I also don't have faith in news organizations being innovative enough to get ahead of this problem and fix it. So, I believe we need some kind of third party solution. We need something like those content summary bots that can distill an article into a paragraph, but can rewrite clickbait headlines into boring but factual headlines. Then provide that bot as a browser plugin so the clickbait headlines are replaced for those of us who want a more honest approach to news. Again, not a perfect solution either... I'm not sure one exists for this problem.

marcus_holmes 6y ago

Jakobeha 6y ago

Advertising itself is good. Knowing about different products that can help you is actually really good. Sure you can get this information from friends and word-of-mouth, but it's not always accurate, and there is nothing wrong with using advertisements too. Plus, there are some advertisements that are genuinely works of art. Even personalized ads are good if they're done in a way that ensures your privacy is safe. It would be awesome if Steam could find me some video games that are actually interesting. The problem is a lot of current advertising is completely broken. It's been said a lot before, but: companies making you watch ad after ad that you're just not going to buy, ads encouraging me to ignore them because they're ugly and make it harder to see content, advertisers that are so obnoxious and bad at advertising their products that I'm less inclined to buy them. Idk how this kind of crap advertising actually gets companies more money, but I guarantee it's not "subtly influencing" me to buy "Slots Royale" or fake medicine, or even Geico - and I know I have human biases and distortions. Also, ad tracking which takes all of my data and doesn't even work. Idk what the current trend is but I've heard that advertisements are generating less and less revenue. I wouldn't be surprised if, as population the gets more tech-savvy, ads will be forced to change / die out because so few people actually use them. Or at least get better at advertising.

horsawlarway 6y ago
> Advertising itself is good I used to think roughly the same - I'm really not that convinced anymore. I'd actually say your last point really drives home just how BAD advertising is right now. It's so bad that there's evolutionary pressure to learn to ignore advertisements. Ads are like a form of social parasite - They've hijacked a human instinct to share things we like and turned it into a profit motivated, manipulative, abusive channel to suck money out of people. Just like animals ridden with parasites are less fit - consumers who are most susceptible or surrounded by ads are less fit. Their decisions are influenced by ads to no longer objectively consider whether a product is useful to them. Like a mouse infected with toxoplasma is drawn to the small of cat urine - even though it means getting eaten far more often. Good for the parasite, bad for the mouse. Ads are good for the company, bad for the person.

Bakary 6y ago

Another way to consider this issue is to ask whether we want to consume all of that content in the first place.