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Why I Work on Ads

• sdfhbdf 5y ago
  Very interesting point of view. My main takeaway from this is "Better ads than paywalls" which entails that the only alternative to ads is a paywall which I don't agree with. I think that there is a middleground with freemium, free trial model. Also there was a comment somewhere I can't find right now "There are 2 ways to make money in the internet - bundling and unbundling" with this I think there is value of a paywall that bundles, see Apple News. In the end I don't like the way AdTech works right now, I am not sure about what's next. I don't think explicit regulation is the way, especially since Internet is international and law is as a rule local. But either we will sell our data to monopolies or we will die in bills for selfhosting everything and even though involuntarily our internet histories will be sold.
  • yetihehe 5y ago
    There is third way - crypto mining on user computers. I would prefer to mine some crypto for someone instead of seeing ads. Biggest problem: mobile users would be much less "valuable".
    • NullPrefix 5y ago
      Is GPGPU feasible on WebGL? Cpu mining isn't really profitable even if you have a big network of "users".
    • lupire 5y ago
      That "paying with money" but with extra steps.
  • bilal4hmed 5y ago
    So I often hear that argument about other ways to make money. Other than a paywall what is the other way ?
  • jedimastert 5y ago
    > free trial model tbh kinda seems like a paywall with extra steps for buy in
• coldtea 5y ago
  Because of the salary?
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • Red_Leaves_Flyy 5y ago
    I'd work on advertisements for high six figures. That being said, I'd also be a terrible culture fit in an advertising shop. I can't stand ads and a hobby of mine is criticising the ads, and companies, forcing me through them for the duration thereof. >I must be fun at parties Parties with ads, or any paid "guests" are not fun...
    • supersrdjan 5y ago
      What are your most frequently recurring points of criticism and what type of ads you find elicit the least criticism?
      • Red_Leaves_Flyy 5y ago
        That's a question I want to get paid six figures to answer.
        • izacus 5y ago
          What makes you think your criticism is worth paying six figures for? :)
          • Red_Leaves_Flyy 5y ago
            The quality of the advertisements I see hocking the wares of blue chip and f500 companies. :D
  • bor100003 5y ago
    Saying so with your real name and blog? Good luck.
• czzr 5y ago
  Biggest issue with this argument - advertising supported businesses are fine, contextual advertising is fine, targeted cross site advertising is a pointless red queen race that is undermining our society in multiple ways.
  • jefftk 5y ago
    Can you say more what you mean by "pointless red queen race"? Let's say someone wants to sell fishing equipment. The traditional way of doing this is to buy ads on fishing sites. So now my fishing equipment purchases make there be more writing about fishing; yay! Then one of the fishing websites decides to put a tracking pixel on their site to drop "fishing website visitor" cookies (or, in a future without third-party cookies, a turtledove interest group). They make a deal with a third party provider and get paid a small amount per visitor. Then fishing retailers have a new choice: instead of buying ads on fishing sites they can instead buy ads on any site for users who have one of the "fishing website visitor" cookies. If there were a monopoly fishing site, then this would increase their earnings: while the ad space on their site isn't as valuable, they will set the pixel price high enough that they come out ahead. It's not a monopoly, though, so the price of the pixel gets driven down through competition, and money that would go to fishing sites instead goes to the publishers that people who spend money on fishing equipment visit. In this case I see how it's worse for fishing sites, but not how it's bad for consumers: their willingness to buy fishing equipment translates into support for all the sites they visit, and not just the fishing sites. But there are also many niches that don't have economic tie-ins, or have ones that are far weaker than "writing about fishing" and "buying fishing equipment". In a world with targeted advertising, these niches do better, because of overlap between audiences. A "let's have better housing policy" blog can show ads for fishing equipment, vacations, HVAC supplies, or whatever else visitors have shown interest in on other sites. Additionally, targeted advertising increases the total amount of funding available for online content, because people with niche interests are available to be advertised to in more places. Seeing ten fishing ads once a week when you visit a fishing site vs seeing twenty fishing ads spread over the course of the week, etc. So while niche publishers in lucrative niches would likely make more money if we only had context-based advertising, I don't think niche publishers overall, publishers overall, or consumers would be better off. (This is modified from a comment I originally posted on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21620763 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21620763)
• ForHackernews 5y ago
  This article is really attacking a straw man. I don't know many people who think advertising per se is morally objectionable (annoying, yes). What many people find reprehensible is all the invasive spyware and tracking that comes with modern ad tech (largely pioneered by Google).
  • jasode 5y ago
    >I don't know many people who think advertising per se is morally objectionable Lots of people do. E.g. the first user feedback comment in that article: "Advertising is bad because it’s fundamentally about influencing people to do things they wouldn’t do otherwise. [...]" And every HN thread about advertising also has a variation of that sentiment.
    • ksec 5y ago
      >This article is really attacking a straw man. I wish that was the case, but it is not. >And every HN thread about advertising also has a variation of that sentiment. And it is not just on HN, but across the Internet. Reddit, Forum, Twitter. Their voice are crystal clear, All ads are bad. And any objection will.... well you know the internet. It is the same with tracking. Somehow all tracking are bad on the internet. Another recent example on the Internet. All VCs are bad. ( Although that didn't gain much traction ) Edit: See, Instant downvoting. And if you disagree, go on to read all the comments on HN on the subject and count for yourself how many comments were there to support resonable "ads", and how many were flat out dismissal.
      • Red_Leaves_Flyy 5y ago
        You're dismissing the reasoned arguments against the fundamental value proposition of advertisements without argument against the reasons themselves, which is essentially flamebait.
    • the_af 5y ago
      I agree, this is a common (and justified) sentiment. I had a high school teacher give us a book about print advertising (this was way before the internet was a common thing) and how it deceives. How they sell cars with sexy women, how instead of selling a product they sell an unrelated image of success (which is not really tied to the product). It was a nice book, with lots of photos and examples, and all about how advertisement is designed to deceive and encourage a "need" that wasn't there before.
• redleggedfrog 5y ago
  That sure sounds like appeasing guilt with charity donations.
  • jefftk 5y ago
    I started on ads at Google in 2017, and have been donating since 2008: https://www.jefftk.com/donations https://www.jefftk.com/donations
    • gorpomon 5y ago
      Jeff have you ever considered giving to specific people? It's quite ridiculous that college costs what you might give in a year, but $264,727 could concretely allow several people to attend college each year (state schools, community colleges, etc). Or how about removing bad debt, letting people rebuild their credit and start to save. I can think of myriad reasons why this is harder and less desirable (finding them, funding them, ensuring it has real impact, etc). But curious what your take on this would be.
      • savanaly 5y ago
        If you strongly believe there are some unexplored avenues for impactful donations to individuals you should make the case to Givewell. It's what they're all about, and that seems to be what Jeff is mainly giving to (all those Against Malaria donations I assume were the top Givewell recommendation of their year). I think Jeff is doing the smart thing by outsourcing the analysis to Givewell who specialize in it.
      • loeg 5y ago
        If you click through to some of Jeff's other articles, you can see he's interested in effective altruism. Broadly, at the same total cost, paying for 5-6 globally wealthy people to attend college is going to have lower QALY impact than buying ~132,000 Long-Lasting Insecticidal bed nets ("LLINs") for people in regions with lots of malaria-carrying mosquitoes. For more on effective altruism broadly, some resources: https://www.givewell.org/giving101 https://www.givewell.org/giving101 https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/about-us/#our-mission https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/about-us/#our-mission
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• blakesterz 5y ago
  The question is, what is the alternative? I see two main funding models: Paywalls. You pay with your money. Ads. You pay with your attention. I guess That question seems good, but with ads, I don't feel like I'm paying with my attention, I'm paying with my personal data. I'm paying by sharing what I'm doing with a seemingly infinite number of companies who turn around and buy and sell all that data and build profiles on me that are then bought or sold. I'm paying with my privacy, not my attention.
  • jefftk 5y ago
    You might be interested in the second half of the post, starting with "But the biggest issue I see people raising is the privacy impact of targeted ads..."? Browsers are getting rid of third-party cookies, and Safari, Edge, and Chrome all have proposals for how ads can do many of the same things they do today without cross-site tracking.
    • lupire 5y ago
      Will be be getting a refund of all the personal data collected in the past?
      • Red_Leaves_Flyy 5y ago
        I'd rather get a nickel for every bit of data that I did not give explicitly consent to be collected, and a nickel for anytime that bits cross referenced, sold, shared, lost, transferred, or otherwise handled in a way that was not explicitly defined in the eula..
  • amalcon 5y ago
    It's also important to realize that with ads, you also pay with your money, when you later buy some product (whether due to the ad or not). Your attention and personal data are only valuable in this context as a way to access your money. The amount of money you pay with is unclear and varies from person to person, but you still do pay.
• omginternets 5y ago
  I'm always surprised that someone would go through the trouble of justifying their involvement in something prima facie unethical -- in writing, no less -- and fail to address the actual ethical issue. As other have noted in comments, the problem is not with advertising in general, but with the specific way in which Google advertises. I have a hard time believing the author is unaware of this, so I'm left wondering: why? What was the point of this exercise? The result is closer to a self-indictment than an apology.
  • crumbshot 5y ago
    > I have a hard time believing the author is unaware of this, so I'm left wondering: why? What was the point of this exercise? I reckon it was mostly a brag about (1) how he earns over half a million dollars a year for inflicting this upon us all and (2) how much more charitable he is than most of the rest of us.
    • solipsism 5y ago
      This comes across as incredibly salty. If the arguments are bad, explain why. Or don't.
    • omginternets 5y ago
      I have a more charitable interpretation. My impression is that the author is dealing with an ethical dilemma that most of us have not had to contend with, and that this essay is an attempt to resolve it. The problem is that its selectively truthful, of course, which renders the whole exercise moot. Even though the author landed on a position in which he is not at fault, it's not going to buy him any peace of mind.
      • crumbshot 5y ago
        > I have a more charitable interpretation. My impression is that the author is dealing with an ethical dilemma that most of us have not had to contend with, and that this essay is an attempt to resolve it. That's a good point and I agree that the essay does attempt this. But with opening his piece by letting us all know about his huge income and hefty charitable donations, I felt rather overshadowed the rest of his arguments.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• Bellamy 5y ago
  1. Good points. There is no better alternative available. 2. There are worst jobs to have like working for the auto industry. 3. He's definitely a better person than I am with better values. Who gives 50% earned to charity?
  • efa 5y ago
    >>Who gives 50% earned to charity? Perhaps some. But I'm sure they don't brag to the world about it.
    • Pfhreak 5y ago
      Can you advocate for doing an ethical thing like that and not have it be considered bragging? I've often wondered about how to encourage others to give more, volunteer more. If I don't do those things (or don't claim to), people will say, "Why should I do that? You don't do that! Hypocrite." If I do those things, people will say, "You are just bragging/virtue signaling."
      • pb7 5y ago
        Both are defense mechanisms to prevent any responsibility to do something themselves.
    • jefftk 5y ago
      More people should: https://www.jefftk.com/p/make-your-giving-public https://www.jefftk.com/p/make-your-giving-public (Written years before I started on ads at Google)
• secondcoming 5y ago
  I work in adtech. The actual ads themselves aside, the backend part of it ticks all the tech boxes: - high QPS feeds - massive volumes of data - interesting problems to solve everyday It's an industry that doesn't stand still.
  • brettermeier 5y ago
    Sell your soul XD
• lupire 5y ago
  People wo believe that "tool makers aren't responsible for how the tool is misused" (for example, with cryptocurrency), do you feel the same way about adtech?
  • qsort 5y ago
    I find all ads reprehensible regardless of tracking and yes, I believe adtech engineers aren't responsible for that. Specifically, author of OP doesn't have to justify himself. He enjoys his job and I'm happy for him. Blaming technicians for the negative externalities of their industries is a dark path. Are we going to blame lawyers who defend rapists? General Motors assembly-line workers? Engineers who work for oil companies?
    • bluefirebrand 5y ago
      Engineers building unethical things is wildly different than lawyers defending rapists, because a lawyer defending a rapist is behaving ethically according to their career path. Software engineers agreeing to build awful shit is more like mechanical engineers building weapons. They should know what they are doing is going to cause harm and if they choose to do it anyways I have no issue calling them unethical.
      • qsort 5y ago
        An engineer building effective adtech is similarly behaving ethically according to their own career path. Lawyers effectively defending awful clients, for example, managing to get them off the hook on a technicality, are likewise generating massive negative externalities for society at large. It's either both or neither, and I'm not comfortable going down that path.
        • bluefirebrand 5y ago
          > An engineer building effective adtech is similarly behaving ethically according to their own career path The phrase "Effective adtech" is really downplaying the amount of unethical shit involved in building it. It could be effective without turning the internet into a race to the bottom. It could be effective without third party tracking, it could be effective without vacuuming every bit of data possible from every source imaginable. It could be effective without turning every device we own into an ad platform. > It's either both or neither, and I'm not comfortable going down that path. No, its not both or neither. That's absurdly reductive to suggest. It is possible for lawyers to behave unethically in their duties, but just defending the guilty (or prosecuting the innocent) is not unethical on it's own. Similarly, it's possible for engineers to behave unethically in their duties. Just building software isn't unethical. Building platforms that are deliberately and systematically eroding our privacy in every corner of our lives in order to make money absolutely is unethical. Turning society into a corporate-controlled panopticon is absolutely unethical. Absolutely scumbags
• inopinatus 5y ago
  The google content marketing division are really going hard trying to foist this flock-of-sheep stuff.
• jasode 5y ago
  The author jefftk is getting unfairly downvoted maybe because cynics just see it as a version of, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." I will offer a contrarian opinion as a user whose salary does not depend on advertising: the advertising model for using Google search and watching Youtube videos works better for me as a consumer. The alternative of paying $9.99/month for Youtube... or micropayments for each search query or a "Google Search Engine yearly subscription" ... or Patreon donations for video content ... are all more user hostile for my use cases. I don't like ads but they are the most friction-free way to consume a wide variety of content. I've been using Google Search for over 20 years for free which is pretty amazing. Would I rather replay history and pay ~$120 every year (~$2400 ?) to search for web articles? No. That said, there are also many corrosive aspects of advertising. Advertising should be open and transparent. If the business of ads are truthful, I will sometimes pay to see ads. E.g. I pay $10 ticket for a home & garden convention show so the manufacturers in booths can advertise their wares to me. The opposite and immoral idea of hidden ad tracking is Facebook trying to convince Apple not to show confirmation dialogs about ad IDFA tracking.
  • raspyberr 5y ago
    But this model is the reason something like Trump and Russian/Chinese medelling happens. Why not reject the advertising model and the payment model until something better comes along? Businesses aren't people. They'll just work out how to make money eventually.
    • crumbshot 5y ago
      > Why not reject the advertising model and the payment model until something better comes along? The Internet Archive is a great example of this. A non-profit that relies neither on advertising revenue nor subscription revenue from individual users, and instead thrives on income for providing archival services and grants from organisations that recognise the public good it is providing.
      • raspyberr 5y ago
• aphextron 5y ago
  There's nothing wrong with ads. But the only adtech we need is <img src="ad.jpg" />. Anything else is indefensibly unethical and anti-user.
  • jefftk 5y ago
    How does the advertiser know they're not getting ripped off?
• fraktl 5y ago
  I hate ads. I always hated them. It doesn't mean I hate people who work on ads / ad software. It doesn't mean I want to cancel them. You, and the others in that field, don't have to justify yourself. You don't have to donate to charity to feel better about what you're doing (it doesn't mean "stop donating NOW", it's just.. do what you feel is good, like you are doing now). There's a lot of bad going on in the world. Ads are shady-grey area. I know how to fight it and have my internet ad-free. You're ok, don't let negative comments get to you. Cheers!
• FriedrichN 5y ago
  Yeah, I still don't like it. I used to not mind ads because they were just images, but then came the ones that moved, then the ones that made sound, then the ones that injected malicious JavaScript. Then I installed an adblocker, then I installed a script blocker, then I installed a proxy. Now most websites won't work and I'm fine with that.
• rpicard 5y ago
  Just wanted to mention I appreciate seeing a different perspective here. I know there's a lot of negative reaction to it, and I can empathize with that because there's a long history of negative behavior by the advertising industry. But there's no doubt that there are benefits too, and seeing some nuance on HN is always a win.
  • andrepd 5y ago
    I see advertising as intrinsically immoral. So it's not only the privacy abuses (which are the most serious part) but advertising in general.
    • zffr 5y ago
      So its immoral for a math tutor to post a flyer about his services in a local coffee shop? Advertising is a very wide spectrum and I think its way too heavy handed to say it is all intrinsically immoral. Some is, maybe even most of it, but surely not all is immoral. I'd argue that advertising in general is a good thing, but that there are a few parts that are bad. One bad part is the vast surveillance and privacy intrusion of modern digital advertising is what is bad. Another are the advertising tactics used to manipulate people into buying things they shouldn't.
      • razzimatazz 5y ago
        Perhaps what is immoral is when the volume of advertising and the workload it places on the brain becomes too much. The coffee shop with far too many flyers or 7 by the same local tutor becomes very hard to handle. With experience you fight through the flyers to read the menu and get to the counter to order that coffee. There is so much 'opportunity' in the world at any moment for which the provider of the opportunity's ad thinks that it could be relevant to me. I can accept a little of that every day without it being bad, but patience wears very fast.
    • chillacy 5y ago
      Just as an analogy, one could imagine similar comments: * I see contraception as intrinsically immoral... * I see gun ownership as intrinsically immoral... * I see capitalism as intrinsically immoral... Which are all sort of arguments by normative value and probably not very convincing to those who don't share the same values.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• Jiejeing 5y ago
  Working in adtech and trying to convince yourself (and others) you are doing the world a favor is a real equilibrium exercise. The false dichotomy between ads/paywall is not really useful, when the reality is that you often get a paywall and ads after you agree to pay. The advertisement industry is a cancerous blight of our societies, its sole purpose is to sell us stuff we do not need to increase a company’s profit. The fact that this is done on the web by plundering our personal data with no regard for our privacy is just the cherry on top. Ads business is unhinged capitalism and a social and ecological disaster, and advocating in its favor today is short-sighted at best. It’s fine to work a job you like in an unethical industry, but it is not necessary to try to sell it to other people.
• PedroBatista 5y ago
  This could be the same as "Why I work on Healthcare". There's a wide range from honest honorable work to complete scumbag devil.
• creata 5y ago
  > but what about all those sites that don't have a strong commercial tie-in? Surely it's okay for sites that "don't have a commercial tie-in" to stick with untargeted ads? I just think that building a giant stalking network is an extreme (and ideally illegal) solution to the "problem" that a couple of sites won't make as much money off their popularity as they'd like. And is it that uncharitable to characterize what Facebook and Google are building as a giant stalking network?
  • the8bit 5y ago
    Each ad serve is not worth that much to start with, facebooks CPMs are about $7-8, so they are getting $0.007 per serve with extensive targeting. The falloff is something around 10x+ for completely non targeted ads which for most sites push them below the level of economic feasibility. This is also why if you stumble into some parts of the web, they vomit out a billion ads per page to try and compensate. Really the problem is that there is a tremendous gap between the costs to serve content and users willingness to pay (either directly or via any indirect method). It is a tremendously deep hole we've built with freemium models that will probably require some level of societal agreement to dig back out of.
• kingsuper20 5y ago
  The online ad business generally mystifies me. While an awful lot of the internet, especially the surveillance advertising part, looks to be the greatest misallocation of engineering (and other) talent in the history of the world, ya gotta ask about the efficacy. The only reasonably accurate targeting I've ever run into is the occasional ad for something I just browsed on Amazon. I've never clicked on an internet ad. Youtube advertising might as well be targeted to an alien race. What in the hell keeps this whole business afloat at it's current level? Am I being programmed to buy that mechanic's vise because they threw up an after-the-browse ad? No doubt there's some sort of backend telemetry that proves the value of all this trouble, but I just don't see it. Maybe the emperor really is nekkid. edit: It may well be that the real marketing genius in the advertising industry is not it's value in increasing sales, whether it's old school print media/OTA/tradeshows or the newfangled spying-on-you internet variety, but in convincing it's customers of advertising's value. Anything beyond pushing you up a search engine's ranking strikes me as a sketchy proposition.
  • pydry 5y ago
    I have tracking blockers set up all over, so I rarely get ads targeted at me. Instead I get ads targeted at people who share my IP. I can often tell what my girlfriend has been browsing for from the ads I'm hit with, for instance, which is somewhat creepy.
    • heavyset_go 5y ago
      > I can often tell what my girlfriend has been browsing for from the ads I'm hit with, for instance, which is somewhat creepy. I've had ads for medication that I'm prescribed, or could be prescribed, play on other people's devices when they use my network. It's likely targeted because I don't get ads for other types of prescriptions at all at home. I'm also pretty sure of some of the medical conditions my friends and family have based on the ads I consistently see in their homes.
  • tonyedgecombe 5y ago
    I wouldn't be surprised if Adwords is a net loss for the majority of Google's customers. The whole thing is full of dark patterns. Personally I got so fed up with the abusive nature of it that I abandoned it several years ago.
• dmitriid 5y ago
  > And so: ads. Funding the open web. Nope. Ads are not funding the open web. The vast majority of ad revenue and spending goes into the pockets of Facebook (openly hostile to the idea of an open web) and Google (sneakily hostile to the open web, and busy working on replacing the web with all things Google). Actual open web partially supported by advertisement? I don't think it ever existed. And when it did, it sure as hell didn't require pervasive 24/7 surveillance of everyone.
  • mrweasel 5y ago
    That one annoyed me as well, but for a different reason. The open web doesn't require funding, the commercial web does. Advertising on the net doesn't bother me as much as it once did, but I also see less of it. I don't really visit news sites, mostly the ones already funded by my tax money or the subscription I pay for. The best blogs rarely have ads. 20 years ago any random blog would have ads, not so any more. Search engines, at least DDG have a reasonable ad policy, even though I have reported a large number of questionable ads. Google is a little useless, because actual result drown in ads for some searches. I think contextual ads should be preferred over those based on a users past behaviour online. It's really only news sites and social media that needs the ads based on tracking users.
• dhimes 5y ago
  Once again (I'm getting hoarse from shouting this): Ads are fine. Having ads where I am looking at something because I am interested in it is fine. Tracking me is not. Are we talking ad-tech, or tracking-tech?
• wzdd 5y ago
  > Paywalls. You pay with your money. > Ads. You pay with your attention. Pretty disingenuous. Ads: You pay with your attention, and, ultimately, either your money or the money of someone who trusts you. This is only not the case to the extent that advertising doesn't actually work, in which case the ethical problems have not stopped for this person.
  • nairoz 5y ago
    Indeed, in the full picture there must be someone paying and making this advertising profitable. If ads were not working, I don't know where this money would go.
    • cm2012 5y ago
      They work by connecting people to products they're interested in.
• alkonaut 5y ago
  > Paywalls. You pay with your money. > Ads. You pay with your attention If you work on ads that only take my attention then you work on good ads, and I completely support that. If, however, you feel that your ads must try to pinpoint my identity by harvesting personal information in the name of "targeting" or "fraud prevention", then that's no longer me paying with my attention, it's me paying with my privacy and integrity.
• samfisher83 5y ago
  According to the sec disclosures the 3 highest paying tech companies are Google, Splunk, and Facebook. They all happen to be among the 10 best paying public companies in America. 2 of the 3 are almost completely funded by ad money.
  • yosito 5y ago
    I'm surprised that I've never heard of Splunk. I tried to understand the company's core business model, but I couldn't get past all the buzz words on their website.
• luxpir 5y ago
  I wonder if something like the radio/royalty model wouldn't work as a replacement for ads. You pay ISP, they are the "radio station" playing what you want to hear, they pay micropayments to all the sites you visited proportionally. I can immediately see significant issues (user data, managing payments, admin, biggest sites get bigger etc.) but if there's a market demand for a new model, it wouldn't even have to be regulated initially. It could be a feature offered by an innovative ISP. A sort of patron model for general browsing. My 2 cents fwiw.
  • jefftk 5y ago
    It is common for people to only have one option for a fast ISP. I would be scared about a world in which monopoly ISPs had that kind of power.
• notsobig 5y ago
  Not only do you spend your day job helping to clutter our web experience, suck up our personal data, and track us across the web, but you want to spend your free time whoring out your blog to us to try to justify the career choice you feel guilty about? Just stop. We get one chance on earth, do something of value.
  • mycologos 5y ago
    This comment seems much more venomous than it needs to be?
    • notsobig 5y ago
      I mean look, my goal is to communicate to the engineers involved in this business that they are responsible for the product they work on, and the monster they've created. People working for G and fb have options. If they choose to continue to work for these companies for great personal gain, at the cost of exploiting and tracking their own users (basically half of the world population?), they are not our friends and I think should not be treated as such. I don't want to play nice and read your blog and validate you, I want you to stop making the world a worse place. Why do we grant them such a generous separation of work/personal life? They spend their day screwing us over, in the evening we all sing kumbaya? There's been no accountability. Yes, my message is not going to bathe them in the positivity sunshine they've likely grown accustomed to in their work environment echo chamber. I am okay with that. Others might be more successful getting through to them with their slider closer to the carrot. I truly respect that ability, I just keep thinking appeasement is a failed strategy. ...I shouldn't have gone with "whoring" I suppose, sorry about that. I like the idea of serving your argument from your own site, decentralization and individuality and all that. But for some it's just another way to pad their resume to facilitate becoming more of the problem.
      • version_five 5y ago
        If you read about the heyday of RJ Reynolds tobacco and all the money they had and all the good they did for Winston-Salem, I think there is a big parallel. If someone wrote a "Why I work in big tobacco" post, talking about their charitable work, I don't think they'd make any friends. But I think order of magnitude wise, the impact on quality of life, mental health, public discourse, etc etc of internet advertising (and specifically the attention economy it gives rise to) will be shown to be (a) just as addictive and (b) as harmful as tobacco was. So I agree with you, there is no moral high ground for the people involved. They should be looked on no differently than anyone else exploiting addiction for profit.
• move-on-by 5y ago
  Ads are fine. I don't like them, but they are fine. Targeted ads are fine too. I don't like them either, but they are fine. The privacy invading tactics used to drive those targeted ads are not fine. They are abusive, manipulative, and covert. I am not in Europe, so perhaps I'm bias, but I also don't see regulation of the data collection industry via the GDPR as improving the situation much. It seems to have just moved the goal posts for being more manipulative to gain permission. From my totally outsider point-of-view it seems the only way to effectively limit this privacy-invading data collection is to regulate how the data can be used vs. the collection itself. Heavily regulating the ad targeting itself vs. the data collection would mean even if you did collect the data, it loses its value to the advertisers. This also allows more legitimate data collection such as error reporting to continue as-is without the burden of extra regulation. Anyways, that is my point of view on it. I would be interested to hear other's opinions on it, perhaps from those in industry.
• djdjdjdjdj 5y ago
  I invented 'antiad'. I see an annoying ad in public space? I might get in contact with them to complain about that ad. I think it is just fair to tell someone my honest opinion as soon as they take the time and effort to target me. I'm totally lost on why we support generic unrelevant ads in public spaces. It makes our cities ugly.
  • andrepd 5y ago
    Absolutely. I cannot even walk through my city without an assault being waged on my senses.
  • medium_burrito 5y ago
    You should become Wanksy, but for advertisements. "Rate My Add, with totally coincidental Poo on it". Maybe there's a market for YTMND with split screen ads, poo or whatever and music for us to mock all these brands with.
  • SyzygistSix 5y ago
    Sao Paulo banned billboards and advertisements. I see no reason why other cities and states cannot do the same. Some of the states that care a lot about their communities have done so, like Maine and Vermont.
• drcongo 5y ago
  As the person who originally asked "why" I feel like I ought to respond, though much of it is covered by other comments. I used to work in more trad advertising, so my question wasn't so much an objection to working in advertising itself, but specifically Google's version of advertising, which I see as gross overreach into people's personal lives. In other comments people have mentioned YouTube subscriptions as being an alternative, it really isn't - OK, you don't see any adverts, but they're still harvesting and selling you. That a privately owned corporation is allowed to read your messages and sell what they find to the highest bidder is vile and honestly makes me wonder how we got here. I quit advertising after only a couple of years because it blackened my soul. If I was helping to harvest people's personal lives for private profit I can only imagine it would have been worse.
  • DogOnTheWeb 5y ago
    Do you have a position on a better alternative business model, or do you feel that a service like YouTube shouldn't exist? It seems to me that YouTube and many of the ad-supported services out there provide broad benefits to people, and I am swayed by OPs point that a regressively priced business model which restricts these benefits to the global rich is a greater disservice.
    • nyczomg 5y ago
      I disagree completely with the author's point that the ad model is not regressive. The author points out correctly that charging everyone some $ is regressive, because for some people that amount of money is a lot, and for others that is a little. Totally makes sense. Then, we go on to ads. Ads charge everyone a similar amount of bandwidth, attention, etc. But you know what? Some people who have more resources or knowhow will understand how to block ads. And they probably won't be paying by the MB on a crappy cell phone plan such that they spend their money on bandwidth to load the ads, while the content they want to read languishes below the fold of the ads and they struggle to navigate to it on their crappy device struggling to render ads. The costs are more abstract than when paying in actual dollars, but surely we can recognize that the cost of ad supported web pages is also not felt evenly by everyone. As a privileged software engineer, I can guarantee you that the impact of "paying" for things with ads is felt far less by me than many others. That is regressive in my opinion.
• thrwaeasddsaf 5y ago
  For me the first big disagreement begins with asking for what's the alternative. I don't think there needs to be an alternative. I think ads are largely responsible for the sorry state of the seo spammed web where finding what you want can be a complete nightmare. (It costs almost nothing to run a website, and if you spam enough ~zero cost sites loaded with ads and affiliate links, you can probably make a buck. This prospect just encourages spam and low effort sites.) I don't care one bit if ad supported sites just vanish, no need for an alternative. Yes please, clean up the web. What's left is the stuff that is worth enough for people to pay for.
  • discmonkey 5y ago
    Just to add a little data from personal experience... About 4 years back I ran a small study in grad school where I was trying to find some alternative to ads. For a survey I basically asked "how much would you be willing to pay to view websites without ads". I bucketed the responses to something along the lines of greater than $1, $.75, $.5, $.25, $.01 or nothing. What I was (secretly) hoping was that people would be willing to pay something like a cent for a page view, since I was building a prototype for a more user friendly anti-adblocker, seeing that many websites started to deploy their own back then, and hating that there was no middle ground. However, what I found was that people were unwilling to pay anything for a page view. I think the author actually mentions this as a failed alternative model. Point being it really seems like people have decided/agreed that they prefer the ad model to anything else. Even if it means that the cost of serving ads is actually higher (in terms of bandwidth) than what it would cost to just pay a cent or two cents or whatever for pageviews.
    • thrwaeasddsaf 5y ago
      > Point being it really seems like people have decided/agreed that they prefer the ad model to anything else. I'm not sure how you mean this but what you say comes dangerously close to implying that people want ads. That may be true if you force them into a false dichotomy (pay or have ads). I think it's more just that people don't want to pay. If it's on the web, they read it for free, period. If it's not on the web, then it isn't and they don't read it. If you look at it from this perspective, ads aren't even part of the discussion. I think people prefer the "someone pays for it" model to anything else. The dichotomy is only real if you construct a hypothetical scenario about some ad-or-paywall site that absolutely must exist and that people absolutely want to read and for which no alternative can emerge if that site stops existing.
• whitepaint 5y ago
  Aren't effective ads good for society? Don't they make us prosperous? Jobs are created, people get cheaper goods, many small businesses emerge?
  • isoskeles 5y ago
    Jobs are not necessarily good for society, nor are cheaper goods. We could have dirt cheap asbestos and cigarettes, that's not good for society. We can have billions of jobs making and filling dirt holes, that's also not good for society. That aside, the effectiveness of ads are orthogonal to the quality or "good"-ness of jobs and products. They just seem, to me, like more of an amoral thing that can be used to sell something else, good or bad.
    • whitepaint 5y ago
      Free markets don't work like that. We would only be having billions of jobs filling dirt holes if it produced more value to the society than it extracted it from.
      • sfink 5y ago
        No, we would have those jobs if they produced more value to whoever is asking for those holes to be dug. And that's the reality we presently live in. It's not holes, it's watching ads and reading things that aren't worth our time and buying things that don't provide us value. Click on a link, dig a hole. Read the mindless alarm-inducing article, fill the hole in.
        • whitepaint 5y ago
          > No, we would have those jobs if they produced more value to whoever is asking for those holes to be dug. Can you provide example of businesses where employees produce value just for the owners of the business but not the society in general? > And that's the reality we presently live in. It's not holes, it's watching ads and reading things that aren't worth our time and buying things that don't provide us value. Click on a link, dig a hole. Read the mindless alarm-inducing article, fill the hole in. What are you proposing? That some entity tells what to read, what to buy, what to do? Why not just leave it to individuals to figure it out?
• NilsIRL 5y ago
  It's not because it's funded by advertising that it's cheaper for the user, in the end, the consumer pays for the advertising when they purchase something
  • topaz0 5y ago
    I came here to say this. I don't think that advertising is inherently unethical, but profit makes unethical behavior in advertising inevitable. The article talks about the scenario where I have a product that I think people will want but don't know about, so I'm giving them information about it. Win/win/win -- the site gets some money for the work they put into the content that they care about, I get (net positive) money from my customer, the customer gets a product that they wanted anyway, and access to the site they were interested in reading. But it's almost always more like I have some money and want more, and it's much more profitable to use shady means to manipulate people who don't really want my product that they do, so I will pay site owners to facilitate the manipulation, both by giving me user data and optimizing for their attention instead of the content that they care about (more manipulation), and the user/customer loses many times over, because they have a product that they didn't want, paid more for it than it was worth, had degraded browsing experience of the content they were interested in, and have sacrificed privacy in the process.
  • elwell 5y ago
    Unless publicity created by advertising enables economies of scale lowering unit cost.
• falcolas 5y ago
  Unpopular opinion: Ads by themselves are unethical. Whether targeted, contextual, or just randomly applied. Ads are psychological warfare against a populace using their very nature against them. All in an effort to get them to change their behavior in a way that's going to be detrimental to them. Either they stop looking for alternatives, or they make purchases they don't need to (see: toothpaste consumption rates). Ads are unethical, and are only considered acceptable because they have been around for so long, and because they're "easy" to use and supposedly ignore. Anyone working in the ad industry is directly supporting this unethical behavior. This isn't an "NTP is also used in cyber warfare" style of engagement, this is writing missile guidance systems levels of engagement.
  • cblconfederate 5y ago
    Not having ads is also unethical. Imagine trying to spread a novel idea / product to a society or an oligopoly that wants to oppress you
    • falcolas 5y ago
      If society, or "the oligopoly," wants to suppress you, the ad industry isn't going to help you. They wouldn't want to run afoul of these big movers and shakers for a couple of hundreds of dollars. Try running ads now for the KKK's new "hoods and cloaks" business if you'd like a practical example.
    • marcinzm 5y ago
      >Imagine trying to spread a novel idea / product to a society If society actually wants it then they can learn about it from places that aggregate such ideas. Moreover if our lives weren't inundated with ads 24/7 then those aggregators would be in much more demand. Very very few advertisements are for novel ideas that are actually a net positive for society.
  • joshuamorton 5y ago
    How do you draw the difference between an ad and not an ad? Is a doctor telling you to brush 2x a day an ad for toothpaste? What about their suggestion that you floss more? Those are aligned with your well being, but will increase your consumption. > change their behavior in a way that's going to be detrimental to them. This seems obviously wrong. The implication here is that anything advertised must be bad for the target. From an econ perspective this means that you reject the idea of comparative advantage.
• MaxwellM 5y ago
  Thanks for sharing. This was a compelling argument that nudged my understanding in a new direction. I recently started paying creators on Patreon and subscribing to news outlets I wanted to support. But within a year, I realized that this was inefficient, I didn't like/read/watch most of the content that my subscriptions were supporting. As much as I wanted to support the content creators and quality journalism, I questioned the value of my subscriptions and cancelled - I felt like I signed up for a gym membership on Jan 1st that I wasn't using anymore. Ads allow me "to pay" with my attention for only the content that I value. I don't like ads, I generally use an ad-blocker, but I appreciate the post and the perspective.
• cm2012 5y ago
  Agree with all. Reposting an old comment of mine: Solving world hunger is obviously better than ads, but I'd say in the scheme of things tech people spend their time on, ad improvements is middling in importance? It's not the bottom. Good ad targeting means: 1) New small businesses (like Shopify stores) can reach customers without going through retail gatekeepers. Ask any Shopify seller, nothing beats FB. 2) New challenger SaaS brands can get in front of customers to compete with mammoth corporate brands with worse software (I see this all the time on my job). 3) Without good ad targeting, only bottom hanging fruit advertisers that appeal to the lowest common denominator can afford to spend. Weight loss, teeth whitening, etc. Good ad targeting means a better user experience with ads.
• k__ 5y ago
  "I give half of what I earn to the most effective charities I can find, and the more I earn the more I can give." It makes me sick to read this garbage. This charity bullshit is what too many rich people hide behind to rationalize the crap they do to humanity. Bezos and Gates destroyed so much good on their way up, they will never be able to buy themselves out with charity. Same goes for the author of that article. It's nice that they want to help people in need, but doing so by shitting on the rest of humanity certainly isn't the best way to do this.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • sweetheart 5y ago
    Do you actually think this is garbage and bullshit, or do you think that maybe you're feeling a little insecure that someone is donating a _lot_ of money to good causes, and you're comparing yourself to them? Genuinely not saying you are, but it's a very common subconscious reaction, and definitely worth investigating. When we see someone who appears to be taking the moral high road (however you define it), we feel the need to tear them down. Because that way we don't need to feel bad about _not_ doing the thing.
    • savanaly 5y ago
      Yeah I find myself asking why is this person indescribably angry about someone working in ads and then donating hundreds of thousands to charity when there are tens (hundreds? across the world?) of thousands of folks out there working in ads donating zilch. It's an emotional response not a logical one to get mad at the OP like that.
  • TimPC 5y ago
    I find this genuinely hard to believe about Gates. There is a lot not to like about Microsoft but I find it hard to believe the net good of who wins in technology is going to be larger than projects like curing Polio, effective sanitation in places that don't have it, all kinds of energy technology to fight global warming and so much more. I'm not saying Bill Gates is a good person or that his actions since redeem bad business practices at Microsoft, but in terms of net good done in the world it's hard for me to believe we haven't come out ahead.
• celticninja 5y ago
  I don't even need to read the article, it's money right, it's always money. Sure he probably goes into paragraphs about other reasons or what he does with the money, but it boils down to money. The author chose to sell his/her time to an advertising company. Thats OK, we all need to work. But I dont need a blog post from them to justify their choice, they arent making me think more of them. They might make themselves feel better but it boils down to they chose to do something not great for more money, than choosing something more worthwhile for less money. The sad bit is the amount they would earn not in advertising probably would not be much below what they currently earn. But they still made that choice and they have to live with it.
• jokethrowaway 5y ago
  I don't think ads are bad per se, people don't like them because they don't like paying. No-one is forcing you to see ads and often you have the option to buy your way out of ads. More in general if people preferred to pay we see a paid alternative emerge, thanks to the nature of the market. The reality is that the majority of people are not privacy conscious and don't care as much as people in tech do. Overall, I'd be prouder to work on Google Ads, which provides services on a voluntary basis, than to work for the IRS or HMRC which impose their government's decisions on people under threat of fines and eventually incarceration.
  • rcMgD2BwE72F 5y ago
    >No-one is forcing you to see ads Uh? Where do you live? Where do you browse? I'm a paid subscriber to newspapers and they keep tracking me and emailing/notifying/displaying ads. They even share my data to their "partners". I can't get out of my apartment without seeing ad everywhere (subway, buildings, billboards...). You cannot escape advertising unless you completely isolate yourself from society.
    • yosito 5y ago
      I'm not OP, but I've stopped using Google products as much as possible, and browse the internet with Firefox and uMatrix. There are very few physical world ads where I live, due to local restrictions. The only ads I see these days are sponsored posts when I open Instagram, and I'm doing that less and less because in my experience 80% of the content on Instagram is either a sponsored post or cheap low-quality recommended posts, and only 20% are the friends that I follow. My point is, it's not impossible to avoid ads these days.
    • jokethrowaway 5y ago
      My point is that if people were that bothered by ads, they would be willing to pay ad-free alternatives and we wouldn't have ads. For some things you can actually choose between free ad-supported or paid without ads. Besides, I really don't see ads in my life - but that's because I use adblock and similar software. I don't live in a big city anymore so I don't see physical ads as well.
• Justsignedup 5y ago
  I do not believe Ads are inherently evil. However there are some problems with the _current_ ad industry. The extreme tracking based on the mental state and identity of ads make them more than annoying. It is annoying to watch stupid ads on TV. But it is way worse when the ads are targeting my mental weaknesses directed directly at me. Example being how the Cambridge Analytica was able to make ad campaigns targeting _individuals_. Generalized, non-targeted ads are fine. Though I do have problems with ads assaulting me wherever I go. I am fine with visiting a website that is ad supported and getting ads on the side, but I am not fine with walking home and seeing ads everywhere I glance at. And worse when ads are formatted so much like the actual content to trick you into thinking you're consuming content and not ads. Or even worse, sponsored pushes when you don't even know this is an advertisement. Point is: Things cost money. Yes. But I don't think the current ad industry is anything other than toxic as hell.
• baby-yoda 5y ago
  My gripe with the author's rationalization (which is probably held by many of his peers as well, not to point specifically at him) is that the default of the web has become that you must accept ads being thrown in your face to do the most benign browsing activity. a user makes an http request to a domain. the current accepted response is to send back ads and trackers, pillage and extract as much value from that user as possible, immediately. as a user I feel I should be prompted: "this site is funded by ads. by continuing, you agree to the following..." its just a sort of zero permission adulteration of the web - guaranteed ad revenue from a click begets more crap clickbait content and so on. in fact, perhaps ads and tracking mechanisms should be treated by browsers the same as zero click JS malware. no content til the user agrees to have ads delivered to them. i get it, of course prompting a user would create friction and decrease revenue. its the user's machine, data. they are entitled to the optionality of rejecting an HTTP response if it contains unwanted/unwelcome crap.
  • lolinder 5y ago
    The web, even as it is, functions exactly like this. You make a request to a domain, that domain says "here are some trackers". The user's browser then has a choice about whether to load them. My browser (and the browsers of many here) just ignores the request to download scripts that I don't want, because that's what I told it to do and the browser is my agent. The big problem is that most people do not use a browser that is truly their agent--they use a browser that is an agent of an advertising company. The result is entirely predictable: Chrome acts in the best interests of its client, and loads the ads and trackers. If we want to change the status quo with regards to advertising, we don't need to change the technology at all: we have to change the way people see a web browser. We need to help people to make the paradigm shift from "Chrome is how you consume content on the internet" to "a browser is an agent that acts on my behalf in the digital realm".
• gfodor 5y ago
  > I see ads as a force for good > I feel OK about working on it because I give half my salary to charity Cognitive dissonance that occurs between sentences is particularly hilarious.
• adamqureshi 5y ago
  I have a 1 man shop start up ( marketplace) and i charge an upfront fee to list. The very fist thing an interested party asks me is, what isn't free to list? The big boys platform in this space make it free to list and they make money from ads. A small time guy like me in a niche market has to charge an upfront fee to pay to put food on the table for my family and i don't run ads on my site and i don't use cookies. Most people are so USED to free that it's a shock to them i charge a fee to list on my site. Advertising has SHAPED their behavior. Thats my 2 cents. I have been in business since 2016. Never ran third party ads on my site.
• decasteve 5y ago
  If I'm trying to read, watch, or listen to something of a thoughtful nature, something that requires my utmost attention to grasp or process, and reflect upon it, ads are destructive. They destroy the experience and slow or limit the learning process. If everything we do is interrupted, it's an attack on our thoughts and disrespectful of our time. Our Internet experiences are becoming Ray Bradbury's worst nightmare, interspersed with its "Denham's Dentifrice" ads and Facebook Mildreds everywhere.
• cblconfederate 5y ago
  "ads are good" is a red herring. i don't object to ads, but i find google's chokehold on the ad market abhorrent, becuase it becomes excusionary, both for publishers and advertisers. Google is thus able to impose e.g. moral codes on what is allowed to be advertised and what content is allowed to be monetized. The solution is indeed micropayments and they exist, like brave. Another drawback of the ad-supported model is that it has created a very pervasive culture of unaccountability. Google has terrible user support because they truly don't care about users - they 'll keep making money regardless of what their users think and there's no way for users to vote with their feet (practically -- after all google gatekeeps all their address bars).
• vim1234 5y ago
  I think what HN community is missing is that tech jobs can allow you to pay for all these services if possible, but most of the world especially the developing world, is not capable of paying for the content. If everything was behind paywalls, internet would be for the rich guys who can afford paying for these services. To make it free and equal for all, ads are the necessarily evil, according to me.
• rpdillon 5y ago
  It's curious that neither the OP nor the comments address the incentives funding via advertising creates. While I strongly agree about issues surrounding the data collection and tracking systems used to target ads, I'm thinking about the publisher's side. For a subscription service (paywalled), users are making an up-front decision to pay for the content an outlet publishes because they believe in some sense that the writing is worth it. This is a pretty intellectual thing to do, since you have to actually enter payment details and select a plan. It's fundamentally a premeditated act. The advertising-based model is closer to the lizard-brain, I think. To a first approximation, it seems that ad-based funding created the whole world of "click bait": low quality articles with catchy headlines designed to increase ad views by tapping into peoples' curiosity. This model is the opposite of premeditated: it's almost subconscious and driven by moment-to-moment impulse. And I think web-based advertising incentivizes this greatly, to the point that the low-quality content designed to be engaged with impulsively is driving who gets elected. I don't have high conviction that my thinking here is correct, but the dots do seem to connect, and I don't see it discussed much. I raise it here because while I abhor the data gathering associated with ad targeting, if I'm honest with myself, I think the harm coming from click-bait content online is more tangible today than the harm from the data collection.
• aflag 5y ago
  > Typically, the vendor doesn't just get that you are interested in cars, they get the full URL of the page you are on. I'd say that knowing you're interested in cars is also a violation of your privacy. Knowing that people that are in car festivals may be interested in cars is ok, but knowing that a person attended to a car festival is not ok.
• sloshnmosh 5y ago
  The late great Bill Hicks perfectly summarized my feelings towards advertisers/marketers. There is nothing wrong with ads per-say, it is the real time bidding and targeted ads that I have problems with. And of course malvertising such as the one which compromised my sisters laptop with a fileless rootkit a few years back. Ads and analytics are not allowed on my home network.
  • dang 5y ago
    Pretty sure Bill thought there was something wrong with ads per se. No?
  • nwsm 5y ago
    Can you quote Bill directly or a give a link to what you're talking about?
• ineedasername 5y ago
  I give half of what I earn to the most effective charities I can find That's not at all justification for practices that harm society, especially when that harm takes fewer resources to achieve than charity donations can make up for. It's like saying "I'm willing to work for a company with massive pollution because I donate some of my salary to Greenpeace." Maybe I'm reading too much into things, but the fact that the author put this justification first is an implicit admission that they feel what they do is wrong in some way and try to offset it with donations. The thing is, I think advertising is positive It is difficult to think otherwise about something attached to your paycheck I think advertising is positive... if I'm causing harm through my work I would like to know about it. One really great example of harm is propaganda delivered via political attack ads that polarize the population by provoking anger, fear, and hatred. Ads. You pay with your attention. You aren't given a choice in most cases to choose attention or $$. You also pay with more than attention: your privacy, personal data, and tracking of online actions. Many off-line actions can also be tracked by purchasing data from other sources and matching to the data collected online. Non-regressive This would be a better point if many media outlets didn't still use paywalls and ads together
• makecheck 5y ago
  Ads are bad because of their implementation, not as a concept. The “alternatives” are not paywalls vs. ads, the alternative is to be a less awful ad provider. Unintrusive text is fine. Static images without flashy animations are fine. Even watching something like a funny TV commercial is great because it seems worth the time. Yet somewhere along the line, somebody decided it was “fine” to shove overlays in my face, stubbornly keep things in place during scrolling, auto-playing sound, etc. And all that crap is before even factoring in the gigabytes of bandwidth stolen from me to download and run JavaScript that ultimately serves to be a creepy stalker around the Internet. So feel free to work on ads without shame as long as the ads you work on aren’t shameless.
• fooblat 5y ago
  Ads are fine. Trying every way possible to track and record every second of my life online and in the physical world is evil.
• publiccharity 5y ago
  Oh man, my sides. This is so rich I'm going to be ill. So the guy who puts his donations majorly on blast is Yet Another Ads Guy. The thing about a guilty conscience is it's hard to miss. Don't worry bro, you're perfect, go make that bread. Sleazy.
• stevenicr 5y ago
  Someone who works on ads!? Thank goodness. recent experience: Friend needs to google ads for new location in another state. I say call google and get setup - your web site is good - and they will actually answer the phone when you call for this. Couple months later - zero calls for new clients. I take a peek into his campaign - it's set on some new fangled 'smart ads' - there is like almost no data on keyword clicks and such. I mention that it's odd for ads for a specific niche (rolfing) to burn through a few thousand dollas in ads and not being a single new customer. (he laughs 'there is no way it's been thousands of dollars' - I did not laugh and said yes you have spent thousands already I can see THAT in your stats - he had no idea) He reaches out for support via phone and help forms. Eventually I do the same. The pain one must go through filling out these long forms with lots of entries to get support - omg. No one can figure out where the money went, which search phrases, etc. I start to work on negative keywords lists and location radius.. it burns another 2 grand - with no stats. Support is delayed - even India is delaying things with covid at that point.. messaging is sparse - basic answer is we took your money, you agreed, sorry you got zero business. His bank account wiped out and he did not even know it was happening. I think he panicked with his bank and they cancelled his debit card about that time. I tried to create a new campaign for him that would be exact match and have good negative keywords at that point that would actually get clients and not waste clicks.. but his account was frozen. More support attempts.. weeks later - a message saying similar to - pay us another $1800 - smart ads don't do good stats - sorry about your luck. I had paused the smart ads campaign that google set up and created a better one - but at that point my friend was so soured on the google experience, and the ripoff that he did not want to pay the additional $1800 that could not be charged to his cancelled card. Short story long.. this campaign was not setup and run by an ad agency - google set it up. It was a complete waste of money and time and it has hurt the brand not just wit the two of us, but others we share details on this. I suggested they refund 1800 and let him start fresh with the new setup I created.. more long forms to fill out.. eventually no dice. There was a time when I helped businesses with google ads and it made several places successful for some time. What google has become with their lack of customer support and transparency is mind boggling to me. If the yellow pages helped customers make ads and charged 3 grand a month to run them and in turn zero new customers called - I would imagine there would be less ads in those sections next year. Anyhow your google ad folks essentially took advantage of a 70 year old and wiped his bank account - and returned zero benefits. Might be time for some changes with how all that works - maybe just stop the retail side of doing ads for small folks and make them go through an agency so you can place the blame elsewhere - or/and maybe an agency would do a better job making sure there were proper stats and return on investment in order to keep paying clients in business. Right now the metrics and reports of taking money from small businesses while paying folks in India to sell and support it - it's really not working as well as it might look in those quarterly spreadsheets. imho - ymmv.
• version_five 5y ago
  I didnt see anything about what I consider to be the major drawback of an ad- driven internet: the content you get skews heavily toward attention grabbing crap instead of anything with deeper value. There are exceptions, but advertising incentives clicks and views, and perverts what could be a great information sharing medium, making it all about outrage, escalation, yelling the loudest or framing things in the most provocative way possible.
• bobdosherman 5y ago
  A lot of this comes down to preferences, and my preference ordering would be: Ads that attempt to take me all the way from browsing-->discovery-->potential purchase-->purchase I view as always bad. Leave me alone while I'm browsing. Ads that attempt to take me from discovery-->potential purchase I view as ok but ineffective. At least throw a promo code in that ad next time, please and thank you. Ads that successfully take me from discovery-->potential purchase-->purchase I view as ok since my utility is higher having purchased the product given the payload of the ad (and I wouldn't have purchased the product having not gotten the ad). One thing then from my (not necessarily everyones) preferences is that displaying an ad to me should only potentially be done if the conditional probability of me being in discovery mode is higher than the conditional probability of me being in browsing mode. And then it comes down to what of me is in that conditioning set. Some very fuzzy anonymous slice of me, well ok. But better not be PI in there... But these are just my preferences, and they may not be representative. So there's an aggregation problem also. In general I'd also prefer if brands shifted the marginal marketing dollar towards channels where the disutility of showing me an ad when they estimate I'm in discovery mode but I'm actually in browsing mode is lowest - so (in my mind) when possible put more in influencer marketing versus google display network for instance. Ideally this preference is evident in brand's roi calcs so it's internalized.
• goertzen 5y ago
  I pay for youtube, support some people on patreon and use an adblocker. But I still think ads a net positive and a clever solution to bootstrapping and continuing to support a relatively open online publishing ecosystem. Thanks for your work and sharing your thoughts jefftk!
• titzer 5y ago
  The article completely misses it. I used to work at Google, too, in Ads (the organization), but not on Ads. Most of the people I know were pretty focused on building their little corner of tech to accomplish a particular technical feat (implement a datastore, find bad ads, etc). None of the people I met were evil money-grubber types. But there was a certain reality-distortion field that only becomes apparent when stepping out of it. Ads exist in order to sell your attention to the highest bidder. Ads exist to support an exponentially growing tech giant's goals of infinite growth. Ads exist to keep a snowball snowballing. There is no ads business on Earth today that is focused on "just keeping the lights on". So the amount of ads that are out there just keeps increasing. Ads are creeping into every corner of life. Just take Google search. If you look at the amount of computational resources that it takes Google to run search for today's internet, it takes X dollars. But Google's revenues are literally 5 X, if not 10 or 20. Google is sucking down a huge ton of money that is going to growth and funding zillions of other things...that will also eventually get ads, like Maps, reviews, YouTube, etc. Second, this "X dollars to run search" we are talking about is probably somewhere between 10 and 100 times what was required just a few short years ago. So we are talking about throwing 100 or 200 times--maybe even 1000, just look at the racks of Google made from legos from 1999!--the amount of computational power at a problem than it really needs, and that's to support the advertising market that Google has created in order to support search. If Google websearch were a non-profit, I think it would require less than a billion dollars to run every year. For perspective, the United States Federal Government spent over $85 billion on the SNAP (food stamps) program last year. So, instead of spending pocket change on a public utility that gives everyone access to "organized, universally accessible" (to borrow Google's mission statement) information, we have this behemoth focused on generating hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue that just accidentally happens to have a massive influence over everything we see. You work on ads, Jeff? You've clearly done a lot of thinking as to why that's great. Me? I bowed out of the entity trying to attach a tacky flyer for Ovaltine to every book, magazine, news article, and video clip I see. I bowed out of an entity whose main existence is apparently to mediate every interaction I have with a computer--or another person--and insert advertising into. I'm actually really sick of ads!
• jarrell_mark 5y ago
  I've been using scroll.com. It removes ads on many sites for $5 per month (Vox, The Atlantic, USA Today, Kotaku, ...). Apparently sites make more from scroll subscribers on average than they do from folks seeing ads. Twitter just announced they bought scroll. As for this article, I think it is good to find a way to have targeted ads while preserving privacy.
• lucasnortj 5y ago
  it's almost as if this guy has been asleep for the last decade and hasn't realised that the attention economy driven by the ad revenue model is destroying civilisation. I don't really care as humanity isn't worth saving.
• djoldman 5y ago
  I find it interesting how ethics seems to play a large part in the discussion about ads and big tech in general on HN. Putting aside the privacy and PII concerns, it seems like there is a large contingent of HN'ers who are uncomfortable with the idea that websites/apps are addictive or manipulative or otherwise take advantage of flaws in human nature. For instance: we like shiny things with lots of colors/movement, we generally leave things on default, we engage with hate/dissent more readily than other things, etc. Many HN'ers seem to be uncomfortable with this even if the people using these websites/apps are adults. This seems to fly directly in the face of another seemingly wide-held opinion: that the rights of an individual to make their own choices should not be abridged, regardless of what those choices are, who they are, what they believe in, etc. as long as they are adults. I wonder how these two beliefs coexist although perhaps I've misread the room.
  • dont__panic 5y ago
    Individuals absolutely have rights to do what they want, but only as far as those things don't have a negative impact on others. Pretty much the central kernel of libertarian philosophy, which, as we all know, HN loves. But dark patterns undermine that kind of personal choice. Think of Facebook hiding the "delete my account" page so that you literally cannot navigate to it through the UI -- you need to have a link to that page. Doesn't that erode my autonomy to decide when I want to delete my account? Similarly, software like Windows 10, my LinkedIn profile, Firefox settings, macOS/iOS options, and plenty of others that decide to conveniently forget my explicitly chosen opt-out settings when an update comes in. Hiding behind the veil of "it's hard to test every possible option during an update!" to justify pushing folks back to the happy path where those companies get to collect more data. So I ask you: do dark patterns actually let you make "your own choices"? If I give you a multiple choice test, and you have the option to submit an "other" option on any question, but you have to mail in your text for the "other" option, jump through hoops, and I might forget to actually count your option... do you really have the choice?
    • djoldman 5y ago
      Good points. > But dark patterns undermine that kind of personal choice. Think of Facebook hiding the "delete my account" page so that you literally cannot navigate to it through the UI -- you need to have a link to that page. Doesn't that erode my autonomy to decide when I want to delete my account? >Similarly, software like Windows 10, my LinkedIn profile, Firefox settings, macOS/iOS options, and plenty of others that decide to conveniently forget my explicitly chosen opt-out settings when an update comes in. Hiding behind the veil of "it's hard to test every possible option during an update!" to justify pushing folks back to the happy path where those companies get to collect more data. One response may be: you are not required to use any of the above services, so the choice is perhaps better described as between using (or leaving/disabling) a service with attendant friction, or not at all. If you don't like the service, don't use it. I completely understand not being happy with a service. There are more than a few that I don't like, so I don't use them. Now, if a company is going to such extreme measures that the activity can well be described as fraud, that's a different matter. That should be stopped and I think most would agree. > If I give you a multiple choice test, and you have the option to submit an "other" option on any question, but you have to mail in your text for the "other" option, jump through hoops, and I might forget to actually count your option... do you really have the choice? I think this may be a false comparison. I'm not required to take your test, so if I don't want to, I'll just throw it out. If I think the potential benefits outweigh the friction imposed by mailing it, then I may do it.
• karmakaze 5y ago
  I'm all for content-only based ads that take a reasonable amount/location of screen space, minimal/no distracting motions, very low computational expenditure. How about making ad containers on a page that enforces these?
• gdsdfe 5y ago
  Sorry but this is a bunch of BS, why work on ads? Because you get a big fat check at the end of the month, and that perfectly fine.
• Retr0spectrum 5y ago
  The problem is not Ads themselves, it's the fact that they inject perverse incentives into the entire tech ecosystem. To maximize your advertising revenue, you need to track your users as effectively as possible. This: a) Reduces user privacy. Even recent developments like FLoC, which appear to be pro-privacy on the surface, are really just yet another datapoint with which to violate the privacy of users. b) Reduces performance. It's easy to blame trendy bloated tech stacks for the state of the web, but the reality is that a big chunk of the slowness comes from ad-related tracking and delivery technologies (install privacy extensions on a low-end system and see the difference!). This reduced performance disproportionately affects those with lower system and network resources, further reinforcing global inequality. Although some will disagree, I do think that it's possible to advertise ethically, but no large corporation operating in a capitalist society is going to be doing that voluntarily - unless strict regulation comes down from above (Spoiler Alert: It won't). All that said, I don't blame the author for working in adtech, but perhaps only due to my rather bleak perspective that we're all just cogs in the capitalist machine whether we like it or not. Don't hate the player, hate the game. P.S: Cynically, I think the author's announcement of their charitable donations counts against them. It makes it seem like he's trying to "offset" the harm caused by his work, even if he won't openly admit that such harm exists. Charitable donations may make you a net-virtuous individual, but they do nothing to address the harm of adtech itself - which is orthogonal to the author's original claim that they believe that advertising is a good thing.
• alienthrowaway 5y ago
  Speaking as someone from the developing world - ads have been excellent way for 1st-world eyeballs to subsidize access to information for the rest of the world - which is a net-positive from my selfish POV. Money from ads allows people who live on less than a dollar a day to have access to the same content as someone in a sea-side villa. Mostly. Paywalls, subscriptions and micropayment are regressive, unless they are indexed by cost of living.
• beloch 5y ago
  The crux of his justification for what he does is that, he argues, people wouldn't want to pay a monthly fee for services like youtube bundled with complete respect for their privacy. First, users do not currently have that choice. Sure, you can pay for some things (e.g. youtube premium), but it does nothing for your privacy. If you buy youtube premium you'll very likely see more ads for youtube premium (if you're not already blocking ads). Second, The real benefit of ads is that it lets small sites that might get a single one-time visit from a user monetize that visit. A blog with a trending post is not going to be able to sell micro-subscriptions to one-time users, but they can get some ad revenue. The only current alternative here is begging for donations. That takes some effort and can piss off readers. Ironically, although Kaufman mentions that micropayments are hard, Google is one of the few companies currently situated to implement them in a way that would actually improve user privacy. e.g. If a user paid a "Premium Internet" monthly fee, Google Ads could have a flag that turns it's data collection/sharing off and replaces it with micropayments to any site that user visits that are running Google Ads. Of course, it does seem a little bit like a mafia protection racket for a company devoted to invading user privacy and selling their data to turn around and offer to stop doing that if paid by users!
  • jefftk 5y ago
    > If a user paid a "Premium Internet" monthly fee, Google Ads could have a flag that turns it's data collection/sharing off and replaces it with micropayments to any site that user visits that are running Google Ads. It's not exactly what you're describing, but they've tried several (unsuccessful) approaches along these lines with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Contributor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Contributor (speaking only for myself)
  • mssundaram 5y ago
    > If a user paid a "Premium Internet" monthly fee, Google Ads could have a flag that turns it's data collection/sharing off That would be horrible! Data collection and sharing should be off by default, and I never want to see a "Premium Internet" experience.
  • summerlight 5y ago
    > First, users do not currently have that choice. Have you thought about the possibility that there actually was a choice and it just miserably failed. Or we can call it a "natural selection". One example would be https://contributor.google.com/ https://contributor.google.com/, which never has gained enough traction since publishers don't like it. This is simply a hard problem. You can build another big tech if you can provide a meaningful, scalable alternative.
• zackkrida 5y ago
  Most people I know work on ads...to get paid. I feel like the author is really working hard to justify his work to himself and falling far short of the bar.
• yubiox 5y ago
  You don't address the issues that most ads are scams and it is possible to accidentally click ads. I recently asked google for directions to a new (to me) dentist while on vacation in Hawaii. As I started driving to the other side of the island I realized maps not taking me to the right town. Turns out apparently another dentist somehow made a scam ad so if you search for directions to the correct dentist it takes you to the scammer dentist instead. This is just one example of many. Screw ads and those who enable them.
• koonsolo 5y ago
  Most people here seem to hate ads and/or find them unethical. So I was wondering if those people either not watch YouTube or pay for premium?
• marketchair 5y ago
  Its a trope at this point, but a major point missed by the author is opportunity cost. Haven't we reached a point where optimizing that many basis points of incremental sales isn't worth what new solutions we could build with all these engineers' time?
• tpoacher 5y ago
  Of course ads are not inherently evil in a black-and-white manner. Like knifes. Or guns. Still need to be regulated though, as left unchecked can cause great harm. And currently we see more harm than good from this model. I think the author is simply vieweing this as a binary issue due to cognitive dissonance / moral disengagement.
• powerapple 5y ago
  ads don't fund the open internet, rather it funds the huge valuation of the internet company. Why internet companies valuation is so much higher than the grocery store around the corner? it does not need to be. I don't hate ads, I don't mind it at all to be honest. I use Instagram just for ads :) Restaurants, hotels, we need
• powerapple 5y ago
  I don't think ads fund open internet, it does fund the huge valuation of internet companies though. Why internet company's valuation is so much higher than the shops on high-streets? it does not have to be. I don't hate ads, they are useful. I use Instagram for ads, I follow restaurants and hotels. They are just some information. But I don't want to be targeted.
• spoonjim 5y ago
  I understand many of the problems with targeted ads, because humans’ “idea immune systems” are not great and easily manipulated. However I’ve gotten some targeted ads that I really really loved. One was for a baby plate that can’t be flung on the ground and has saved me at least 50 hours in cleaning through two children.
• pgcj_poster 5y ago
  > The question is, what is the alternative? I see two main funding models: / Paywalls. You pay with your money. / Ads. You pay with your attention. There's also the alternative-which-must-not-be-named, which is non-regressive and frictionless: socialism. You pay with money, through taxes.
• tailrecursion 5y ago
  The problem I see is that the advertising business enables free services such as Google and Youtube, Facebook, Twitter to dominate. It's even more difficult for a potential competitor to gain users when competing against a free service. Another is the spying and tracking, which are apparently vital for these big companies to grow.
  • TchoBeer 5y ago
    Yeah I'd imagine it's pretty hard to compete for high quality free services which are used by billions of people. Is this supposed to be a bad thing?
• annoyingnoob 5y ago
  The collection, cataloging, and storage of personal data is the issue. We can have effective ads without constantly looking over everyone's shoulder and documenting what they do. But obviously, the author sees this data collection as beneficial, I respectfully disagree. I left advertising because I didn't like what I could see on the backend.
  • andrepd 5y ago
    This ubiquitous and ever-growing surveillance is a catastrophe. But to be honest I'm against ads altogether.
• jurschreuder 5y ago
  The alternative is to pay 20ct a year not $10 a month
• smsm42 5y ago
  I notice immediately two main points are wrong: > Minimal friction. Fair enough when the site had one ad. Pretty much no site had one ad now. They have lots of them, which is significantly slowing down loading the page. And if you add all tracking and surveillance code, it can inflate a simple site into megabytes of data. There are common sites that load literally hundreds of outside URLs for ad and surveillance mechanics. Which brings us to point 2: > Non-regressive. Paywalls, like other fixed costs, are regressive Ad costs are regressive too - if you have weak computer and low bw connection, if your connection is unstable or expensive, if your only internet device is a mobile phone with less than excellent bandwidth - which is commonly the case in low income communities - then the last thing you want is to be hit with megabytes of ad data which have zero relationship to what you want to get. Of course, for people sitting on optical gigabit networks with latest-greatest hardware their employer paid for is not much of a problem... If it was just a paid service, you could work out a deal - maybe it could be cheaper for your country, or have some kind of library or per-provider setup that could make it easier for you to get to it - but you don't have this option, it's megabytes of ad everywhere.
  • version_five 5y ago
    > Ad costs are regressive too Not to mention how they disproportionately affect "non tech savvy" groups. I almost never see ads, especially not the really obnoxious ones, and I imagine it's the same for most people here. Meanwhile elderly people are being inundated with ads that look like forms and buttons and warnings, and getting tricked into doing who knows what. Even if that's not financially regressive, it still has an outsized impact that is worse for groups that are already having a harder time of it.
    • smsm42 5y ago
      Right. I am adblocked up to my ears, but when I use a new device or somebody's else device, I am always startled how bad it is with the ads. I'm like "people, how do you live like this? It's literally impossible to do anything!". But people get used to that. Annoyed in the best case, defrauded very commonly.
  • andrepd 5y ago
• stephc_int13 5y ago
  Advertising is not inherently bad. The concentration of power in a few handful gigantic corporations is.
• ajkjk 5y ago
  Like others I don't buy this argument. They wrote that the two choices are > Paywalls. You pay with your money. > Ads. You pay with your attention. But that's not quite right. Ads have two options themselves: > Ads. You pay with your money, because the ads get you to buy stuff. > Ads. You pay with your attention, wasted on stuff you'll never buy. Two negatives. Either you buy stuff you otherwise wouldn't (and therefore don't need, and were manipulated into buying), or you don't buy stuff and just have to suffer the attack on your attention in a world where your attention is already strained to its limits. No good outcomes here. No argument for ads works if you believe, like I do, that buying things in general is bad -- bad for you, bad for the human race, and bad for the environment.
  • gundmc 5y ago
    > buying things in general is bad -- bad for you, bad for the human race, and bad for the environment Do you mean to qualify this in any way? This is quite the radical statement that I'm not sure how you can reconcile with human existence any time the last X thousand years.
    • stevenhuang 5y ago
      Not so radical. See the minimalist movement and related themes. Specifically, there's the prevalence & overabundance of low-quality manufactured products made possible through economies of scale and mispriced environmental externalities. In fact I think it's a good thing for one to question once in a while if they really need to buy that new thing.
    • ajkjk 5y ago
      Not really. I think we should operate such that consumption is slightly negative to begin with. imo, buying something you need is good, but then you don't need an ad to tell you to do it. Buying something you want is good. Buying something you neither need nor want is bad. Allowing something to manipulate you to want more stuff seems bad compared to it not happening.
      • gundmc 5y ago
• soheil 5y ago
  I think to address "why do you work on ads" and only addressing the positive points misses half of the question. The other half is what harms do ads cause. He addressed bandwidth concerns which they're working on mitigating with ad vendors, but biggest problem with ads is the number of wasted attention cycles by people who do not find ads relevant or otherwise be interested at all in buying anything displayed in ads. If you calculate life lost on the internet due to this factor alone that number may justify banning almost all types of ads immediately. Additionally, opening with I give half of my money to charity so leave me alone, should be a red flag that what's to follow is not a strong argument for the point the author is trying to make.
• ransom1538 5y ago
  Why I Work on Ads: money.
• hermesfeet 5y ago
  Thanks for laying out your logic. I work in the ads business at FB. I do so because I personally like ads and my biggest gripe is that ads are not relevant and personalized enough. I want better ads. Ultimately ads support a robust ecosystem of free software and content that keeps many creators going. Consumers can also choose to buy their software and content, or donate, but most don’t. Despite their whining, most people want free stuff, and ads are almost free (a small attention cost). I think people comparing ads to guns, plagues, and locusts need to check their own values. Ads support free stuff for the poor and middle classes. Rich coastal elites can tell themselves they will pay for everything, and that’s great (most don’t). Most consumers cannot afford to pay for software or news subscriptions. Ad models fill out the spectrum of options. Is the current ads ecosystem perfect? Clearly not. There’s a lot we need to do to educate users, get consent, and increase control and transparency. On the flip side, this needs to be simple and easy: consent needs to be an understandable and low friction process to avoid consent fatigue. They are also plenty of privacy enhancing technologies like differential privacy and local caching to deal with data sharing issues. If you hate ads, lean into that. Don’t work for adtech, block all your ads, pay for everything. I support you and respect that! I just think it’s mean and shortsighted to think that everyone else is like you and to aggressively attack adtech engineers, platforms, businesses, and the billions of consumers who aren’t as rich as you and will happily watch ads to get free stuff. The internet is great because a lot of high quality stuff like software, news, videos, etc is free for anyone, anywhere. Ads make that possible and I’m proud of it.
  • jonny_eh 5y ago
    > Ads support free stuff for the poor and middle classes. Rich coastal elites can tell themselves they will pay for everything, and that’s great (most don’t). Why doesn't FB offer a "premium" tier for people to buy their way out of ads?
    • filoleg 5y ago
      >Why doesn't FB offer a "premium" tier for people to buy their way out of ads? Warning: here goes my armchair theory. Because as soon as you put a price tag on it, people will instantly see that they can actually get that "premium" tier for free by using an adblocker, which will lead to more people using adblockers. If something is just free, most people don't really care for it. But if it is something that is free while it is normally not free, people will flock to it. Just think about random just that people wouldn't care to buy normally, but end up buying it because it is on a "90% off sale" (even if the "sale" price is the same as it would've been without a "sale"). Which sort of makes sense with FB, because you get a clear price tag attached and you feel bad for spending those money, when you can get the exact same experience "for free".
• joshuamorton 5y ago
  I want to make an interesting meta-comment here: One of the common criticisms of ads is how they impact privacy. I'm not going to pick any particular comment there, because I agree with some and disagree with others and find some to be incoherent. But the core issue is that ads (and the associated tracking and data collection) are an unethical privacy intrusion. I think that some of the arguments (especially the ones I find incoherent) are because some people value privacy for privacy's sake. That is, I usually try to look at my privacy from the perspective of threats I care about. Some people don't do that, they want privacy for the sake of privacy. Privacy as a goal, not as a means to an end of avoiding specific attacks. When I ask these kinds fo people what kinds of privacy "attacks" they're afraid of, I get things that sounds to me like conspiracy theories. This isn't wrong, it's just fundamentally different than how I approach things. I expect (given that Jeff publishes his salary every year and is super transparent about many things) he's similarly not worried about privacy as a goal, and instead cares about "circumstantial" privacy. I wonder if this difference in values is part of the disconnect. I think another part of the disconnect is that once you have insight into an organization, is much easier to see how it actually works. It's very easy to presume bad things as an outsider than an insider. But by the same token, it's somewhat rational for an outsider to not believe an insider who says "no just trust me, we aren't doing that". And so this too isn't an easy thing to fix without some sort of radical transparency on the part of the company (and even then).
• angarg12 5y ago
  I work in ads, not particularly because I like the domain, but because it's a great tech challenge. I got the chance to work in large scale systems and solve hard problems using fun technologies. As an engineer, it's my favourite job so far. Beyond that, people who ask such things are just taking the moral high ground.
  • aridiculous 5y ago
    Perhaps they are. Or perhaps they’re just taking a moral position at all.
• fossuser 5y ago
  Ads are a corrupting influence on the web - the issue with framing this as more open access compared to for-pay services is that it sidesteps how the model corrupts the content of the services itself. There are the data collection and privacy issues as well, but it's the corruption of the content that's a really serious destructive force. In the end you can't even pay for the original non-ad supported content anymore because the content itself is an ad created entirely for the purpose of driving engagement. (There are some exceptions to this e.g. Substack). It also corrupts what products get built because the incentives between the users of the software and the funders of the software are not aligned (even though ad devs pretend they are by pretending users like relevant ads). To test if users truly find 'relevant ads' as value-add: make two products, one with ads and one without and charge for the one with ads - see how many people buy it. Why doesn't Hulu charge more many for their streaming service with ads instead of their service without? The behavior of these companies suggests they know on some level this value-add nonsense is a rationalization. Even if you say it's only value-add when compared to un-targeted ads - let users choose to have un-targeted ads without giving up their data privacy. I'd bet money on what choice they'd make. The truth is targeted ads work and make enormous amounts of money for the ad companies - that's why they do them. The twisted narratives of why this is actually good for people or society are just another example that there is no limit to humanity's ability to rationalize anything when it's in their interest to do so. -- "“In the beginning not everyone tended to their free data farms. Many did not know what to do with them, some only planted one or two tweets and then abandoned them entirely. This disappointed the earls of our kingdom. If they don’t encourage growth, their share of the data harvest is smaller, there’s no one to hear their pronouncements, and all of the land they spent time cultivating is wasted. They realized that not only do they need to make the land easy to cultivate, but they need to make the serfs want to cultivate it. They experimented for a while and learned that new types of controversial, viciously competitive crops are great for encouraging data farming - they call this type of encouragement ‘engagement’.”" https://zalberico.com/essay/2020/07/14/the-serfs-of-facebook.html https://zalberico.com/essay/2020/07/14/the-serfs-of-facebook...
• andrepd 5y ago
  This whole post assumes the only options which can conceivably exist for monetising content are: (1) ads, or (2) paying for single pageviews (and (3) doing it for free). Obviously this is a fallacy: there are numerous alternative ways to do things.
  • Kranar 5y ago
    The article states the two options: Paywalls vs. ads. Now it's not that those are the only two conceivable options, it's that those are the only two options that are reasonably successful at scale. I'm sure you could think up a donation system, or do something similar to what the Brave browser does, but those do not scale. Of course if you have some alternative approaches that work and produce viable business models, it would be great to hear them.
    • andrepd 5y ago
      What do you mean by "scale" in this context? I fail to see how, having not tried alternative approaches, you conclude that they do not "scale".
      • ryan93 5y ago
        So google should give up 180 Billion in revenue because some idea you cant name might work?
        • andrepd 5y ago
          I don't think "but company wants to make money" is a reasonable argument for anything.
      • Kranar 5y ago
        Can you please answer the question about the specific alternative approaches you are proposing?
        • andrepd 5y ago
• knorker 5y ago
  > the basic problem that some people have much more disposable income than others That's the basic problem? We tried communism. It doesn't work. > And so: ads. Funding the open web. Or to put it another way: Ads waste human life and productivity. If you waste 10 seconds of Elon Musk's time, yes actually the world just lost more than if you waste 10 seconds of my time. And if you let me pay $1 instead of wasting my time, then I can spend that time being productive for more than $1, adding more to the collective value of the world. Wasting everyone's time equally is actually hurting everyone, because it means taking away the positive-sum value produced by exchange of values. I'm not saying inequality isn't a problem, but man, you say that ANY difference in equality of disposable income is a PROBLEM? That's just a race to the bottom of caring or doing anything at all for other people.
• xyst 5y ago
  Regardless of what this author thinks. Advertising is the bane of our existence. How many hours have we wasted watching advertisements (whether it's in the form of network television, billboards, radio ads, or intermittent ads in VOD sites like YT)? If your product is good, then you wouldn't need to advertise (take for example, Ferrari or Lamborghini). If companies focused on making their products better rather than spend hundreds of millions of dollars on advertising a half baked product, it would make the world so much better.
  • genbit 5y ago
    What if all products are good? How does one stand out?
    • wyattpeak 5y ago
      From a social good perspective, if they're all good your product shouldn't stand out. The argument here isn't that ads aren't good for the business doing the advertising, it's that they're bad for the community at large.
  • tester756 5y ago
    >If your product is good, then you wouldn't need to advertise I believe it is simplification. Let's say that I want to get good standing desk or chair - how can I discover those smaller players that make good products? I don't want to spend time on some ChairHackerNews for 2 months and read about this stuff
    • prepend 5y ago
      Imagine if Google wasn’t full of BS ads and SEO link farms and you could easily find the blog posts and reviews of products from smaller players that make good products? As much as search used to suck, I kind of long for the days where I could organically find products by searching.
  • RestlessMind 5y ago
    I hate a lot of things about advertising, but "If your product is good, then you wouldn't need to advertise" is a very naive take. In spite of my aversion to ads, I see some concrete benefits: - new and upcoming products - think Tesla in 2010, or Signal messenger in 2020/21 - making things accessible for those who can't afford them - I know a lot of folks who'd rather watch YT ads than fork over 15$ to Google every month. They simply don't have that much money - letting me know about stuff I was not thinking about but am happy to know now - eg. interesting summer camps for my kids
• the-pigeon 5y ago
  This analysis starts with a straw-man. > So: why is advertising good? I mean, isn't it annoying when sites show you ads instead of whatever it is you want to read? The question is, what is the alternative? I see two main funding models: > Paywalls. You pay with your money. > Ads. You pay with your attention. Anyone on the internet prior to 2000 knows people make content just to make content. I would strongly argue that the wave of "everything must be monetized" has been entirely negative. While it's made the quantity of content go way up, it's polluted everything with clickbait. Whereas before you used to get much higher quality content due to them being passion projects and not people trying to make money.
• ericjang 5y ago
  Disclaimer: I work at Google too (not ads), all opinions my own. I'm surprised the author focused singularly on the "funding the open web" stance, and did not discuss the alleged negative externalities created by advertising-driven business incentives. The top comments of the blog comments (e.g. https://www.jefftk.com/p/why-i-work-on-ads#lw-Nvd9ZHJLxZpNZDPKr https://www.jefftk.com/p/why-i-work-on-ads#lw-Nvd9ZHJLxZpNZD...) also point this out. For instance, The Netflix documentary "The Social Dilemma" discusses these at length, and it forms a lot of the political zeitgeist around regulation of adtech companies (e.g. driving polarization, radicalization, depression and such). > The question is, what is the alternative? I see two main funding models: It's possible to simultaneously believe that ads are currently the effective way to lower barrier of entry to accessing content, and also believe that ads are a detriment to people's mental health. One alternative would be an ad-supported system that performs less-personalized ad-targeting, and in doing so influences people's behavior less but generates enough revenue to keep the lights on with a reasonable profit margin. The government has laws for regulating natural monopolies like this, where they prevent utility companies from price gouging but grant them a certain amount of margin.
• adriand 5y ago
  The author writes that you can either pay with money or you can “pay with your attention”. What’s left unsaid is the cost of that attention. I believe that cost is very high and it isn’t just ads, it’s the design of countless products including social media sites, games and even the site you’re reading this on right now. It’s all designed to extract as much attention as possible, and the cost is people’s ability to concentrate, learn and get shit done. The cost is, in other words, staggeringly high.
  • traek 5y ago
    That's not a feature of advertising as a business model, it's just a feature of growth-focused businesses. The same forces apply to products that you pay for with money. For a very obvious example, just look at Candy Crush.
    • shkkmo 5y ago
      It is not even remotely a feature of all growth-focused businesses. For example, Slack is a growth focused company that uses a subscription model for revenue and has no incentive to maximize time spent in their App. You are correct that advertising, microtransactions and gambling lead to very similar business model incentives.
  • inopinatus 5y ago
    The arrogance of appropriation is a pathology common to developers. For example: “we’re rolling out a new tool. It takes only fifteen minutes to learn!” when 100,000 people have to learn it. Developers working in advertising aren’t just exhibiting this disorder; they are consumed by it.
    • wjamesg 5y ago
      Can you elaborate
      • inopinatus 5y ago
        I can tell you this is an unpopular observation to put before developers, who are not often great at considering the human price of their choices, and advertising executives will continue to roundly & loudly defend their value proposition until there is no more toothpaste to sell, or we finally convince them to board the Golgafrincham B Ark. The combination of the two is a potent toxin that can turn an unassuming everyday programmer into a vassal of malignant narcissism. Time is the most valuable commodity anyone possesses. Stealing it is diabolical.
• latexr 5y ago
  > I think advertising is positive > (…) > So: why is advertising good? (…) The question is, what is the alternative? “I can’t think of a better alternative than the status quo, thus the status quo is positive” isn’t a sound conclusion. Every sufficiently ingrained societal negative we’ve abolished since was likely reasoned in that manner at one point.
  • devenblake 5y ago
    To me the article read like they were trying to justify working at Google to themself. It never explains why it's acceptable that ads target themselves at consumers in the first place when such a thing would have been considered dystopian fifty years ago (selling flower ads on a flower show is okay, but showing flower ads on a car show the next week because the consumer watched a flower show last week could have been the plot of a Twilight Zone episode), instead it just talks about how they're trying to protect privacy while using principally privacy-hostile ad targeting technology.
  • mikl 5y ago
    Yep, without otherwise equating the two, this is basically “But who will pick the cotton then?” argument against the abolition of slavery.
• kaliali 5y ago
  This is an ad to make AI advertisers look positive.
• TedShiller 5y ago
  I’ll never know since I block them all
• johanneskanybal 5y ago
  It's one of those things people will look back in 10 years at and wonder how we thought that was ok. Driving one of the most important innovations of our time with data driven praying of people's weakest spots. Says something about how many decades behind our financial system is compared to everything else. Haven't clicked on an ad in 20 years but apparently others do, just install an add blocker.
• posharma 5y ago
  I'll probably get downvoted for this. Why does OP need to justify his/her job in adtech? He/she loves the job and probably pays well. That's it. Period. Why go about convincing strangers!
• masalachai 5y ago
  The problem of scattered attention is one that philosophers have been pointing to since thousands of years. Most practices like mindfulness, meditation, yoga help primarily with more conscious attention management. That attention is scattered/captured is not new. What it gets captured by probably changes every decade. I dislike seeing ads, especially when they are poorly or intentionally designed to block you from doing what you came to site for. And I do have a concern about the amount of detail these companies end up accruing about a user and its implications. I also get distracted by them - but only when I don't have an intention or strong need to focus on the task at hand. This does not make me think that ads themselves or the model itself is fundamentally bad. A model, ultimately is, as good or bad as its implementation. GMail, Google Maps, Android are some of the things that have changed the landscape in significant and positive ways, and all of them were made possible by ad tech.
• imwillofficial 5y ago
  If ads were simply “paying with attention” like in the 90s, generally people wouldn’t mind as much. But when ads bring a ton of privacy violating, subtly manipulating, resource hogging baggage, people get angry. So I find His arguments disingenuous at best.
• alex_young 5y ago
  Here's an honest question: Why should a search engine cost so much? Look at Wikipedia - it's a search engine and content repository for all of the world's knowledge, and its operating expenses are around $100M / year. The Internet Archive has an annual budget of $10M / year. Google on the other hand, has annual revenues of $181B / year, or about 2000 times Wikipedia's spending. Is the crawling part hard? The folks at Common Crawl (https://commoncrawl.org/ https://commoncrawl.org/) crawl the entire web every month and release it free of charge. What about the search algorithms? Well, you can do a bunch with TFIDF and PageRank, for which patient protection has expired. For the sake of argument, let's assume that the cost of hosting a ubiquitous search engine would be double Wikipedia's annual costs. Still about a thousand times less expensive than Google. Ads don't pay for a search engine. They pay for vast amounts of excess. What keeps such a solution from us? Here are a few of many reasons: * Google pays billions of dollars a year to make it the default option on browsers. * Exclusive deals with portals such as LinkedIn which exclude open engines such as Archive.org from their content. * Limits on peer-to-peer connections perpetuated by IPv4 which prevent us from hosting a distributed engine ourselves. Posing the problem as one of "there's no other way to pay for this expensive machine" is pretty lame isn't it?
  • wmf 5y ago
    Ah yes, the "how much could it cost" comment. "Businesses should keep adding engineers to work on optimization until the cost of adding an engineer equals the revenue gain plus the cost savings at the margin. This is often many more engineers than people realize." https://danluu.com/sounds-easy/ https://danluu.com/sounds-easy/
    • meowface 5y ago
      Yeah, I think the amount of Google employees is completely rational if you consider it for what it is. The key takeaway from that article: >Businesses that actually care about turning a profit will spend a lot of time (hence, a lot of engineers) working on optimizing systems, even if an MVP for the system could have been built in a weekend. Google's goal is to make as much profit as possible. Wikipedia's isn't. If Google had stayed a non-profit search engine the whole time (as proposed in the original paper for Google), then its costs would probably be not too different from Wikipedia's.
• sidlls 5y ago
  The humblebrag about this individual's income and charitable giving at the top of this article is quite terrible. The depth of detail linked is irrelevant to his point (a simple, "I give a lot of my income to charity; the more I earn, the more I give" suffices) and, aside from that, isn't an argument in support of working on ads. He could earn a similar amount of money working at a business that doesn't have ads as a business model (I know this because I work at such a company).
• euske 5y ago
  This is kind of crazy thought experiment, but would the Internet be really different today if there's no ads? (e.g. somehow it's been considered extremely uncool from the beginning so it's naturally shunned.) Many ad-supporters spread a doomsday scenario like "without ads, the vast majority of the good Internet will die". Is that really true? I dunno. Maybe it's different. But I still put up my contents (writings and source codes) for free with no ads. And it's not so strange to imagine that there are many people like me. Maybe a newspaper would put up a part of their articles for promotion. In that case, the contents themselves are ads. That's not such a bad world either!
• bongobingo 5y ago
  > Ads. You pay with your attention. What? No. You pay with your data. You pay with your privacy. And the ads additionally destroy legitimate paid services. Ads have destroyed the entire internet economy, and brought upon a surveillance state. This blog post is more detached from reality than the Q board on 8kun.
• diveanon 5y ago
  Its hard to see the problem when your livelihood depends on ignoring it. I don't think anyone is arguing that serving ads for consumer products and services is evil. Definitely annoying, but not morally wrong. However that is not what is happening. Some of the largest companies in the history of the world are actively building and profiting from platforms that allow political parties and governments to distribute targeted propaganda and digest huge amounts of personal information collected under intentionally obfuscated terms of service. If you are working at google / facebook / twitter you are just as responsible as the scientists and engineers who worked on the Manhattan project. You are the destroyer of worlds.
• DistressedDrone 5y ago
  This guy works in ad tech and this is the extent of their moral reasoning on the issue? This is about one argument and 90% history. Better to say you don't want to think about how the sausage is made. Many have commented on the inherently harmful nature of advertisement, so I would like to address the one argument I see in there, it goes something like must "ads must exist or else we would have to pay for content". But even this seems to me largely unfounded. By excluding "donations and hobbies", what the author is really saying is "ads must exist or else the content we get would be different (read: worse)". I see no reason to believe this. The sources of information I find reliable are ones based on consensus, eg Wikipedia. If anything, I find getting information from traditional media less reliable than getting it directly from random people, as the latter don't have a financial interest to present only certain types of information or present the information in certain biased ways. The bigger a news corporation is, the more interest it has in 1) relying on fearmongering and 2) conforming to a "current government" bias (as we have seen to horrible effect when Trump was president). As for entertainment, it is doubtful that anyone could become a millionaire with daily vlogs or let's plays as they can today, but I personally know of many that would be glad to just make a living. It's also improbable that a single big website such as YouTube would totally dominate the video sharing landscape, as they wouldn't be able to rely on ads to do so. Incidentally, getting rid of ads would solve the "advertiser friendly" problem that plagues mass media, small content creators and consumers alike. In short, saying "ads are the only way" seems to me the same as saying "the web is have is the best version of the web" or even "it's the only web we can have". I disagree on both counts, and I for one can't wait until the house of cards crumbles.
• S_A_P 5y ago
  Justify it however you want, its not (IMHO) adding value to society and has created perverse incentives on the internet. Donating to "efficient" charities does not excuse what you do for a living. That was thrown out there first to virtue signal, but something tells me if that is your first argument you know that what you are doing isnt good for society. I honestly would feel better about the guy if he just said 'I work on ads. They pay me a shit ton of money. I know its a dirty business, but right now I want to get paid'.
• gerdesj 5y ago
  This is good skills: https://www.jefftk.com/donations https://www.jefftk.com/donations The author seems to have fallen into the classic trap of conflating media/medium and content. Content can be free (or not) but getting it to eyeballs requires additional effort that is rarely free/gratis (your ISP charges you).
  • gerdesj 5y ago
    Just in case I didn't point it out. They donate 30% of their income to charity.
• OOPMan 5y ago
  People will say anything to feel like they're not doing a dirty job...
• dkersten 5y ago
  I’m against advertisement, in my opinion it’s the worst thing to happen to the internet. However, I have a problem with Google adverts specifically and that is that they’re absolute hot garbage. Google has advertised to me: outright scams, malware, gambling, mobile games with extremely exploitative monetisation. And they are working to take away any privacy I might have to keep showing me this shit. In my opinion, Google is basically evil these days. I personally have a very low opinion of anyone who works for a company that does that and even lower of anyone who actually works on serving those adverts.
  • fellowniusmonk 5y ago
    When I was a impoverished kid, how else was I supposed to get internet and email accept for with Juno, then NetZero or stealing internet? Yeah I used gophernet through a local library dialup and it was not the internet. I mean, my brother once bought a "personal fan" for $1 and that was the most coveted possession we had for about 6 months. As someone who grew up extremely poor and effectively dumpster dived for my first computer what pragmatic alternative is there? I don't want to be uncharitable but this seems like a very middle class and annoyed wealthy problem to have, I haven't seen any non regressive approaches accept for MAYBE from crypto browsers. Maybe the wealthy and middle class are just tired of subsidizing the internet and the content on it. As a broke child ads got me to a place where I could download html, learn to program and code and break out of an insane degree of poverty. The borland turbo c books at the library never seemed to have code that would compile. It may just be my personal experience but all of this feel like pulling up the ladder behind me and I haven't seen anyone articulate practical alternatives that address this issue. edit: Even mass surveillance and government control seems like an orthogonal near strawman issue to me, as far as I'm aware the most restricted countries on earth like China and NK don't need or use ad networks for their lockdowns. Frankly if you can't scrape data off my hard drive, don't have the power of incarceration (or feed data to those who do), and don't tie it to my credit score or ability to bank (I think we should pass legislation explicitly banning that on the banking side) and don't make it illegal to use ad blockers, I don't see the problem.
    • testific8 5y ago
• kelnos 5y ago
  While I applaud the author for giving a chunk of his income to charity, to me it just feels like paying a penance for doing something bad. I may be in the minority on this belief, but I think advertising -- any kind of advertising -- is inherently bad. To me, it's just psychological manipulation. I never want to see any ads, ever. If I could wear a pair of contact lenses that removed things like billboards from my vision, I would wear them in a heartbeat, even though billboards are far less harmful than internet-based ads. I sometimes hear arguments that advertising isn't all bad because when someone actually is planning to make a particular kind of purchase, advertising can help them figure out which brand/model/etc. to buy. The problem with that is that the ads have no interest in satisfying anyone's particular needs in the best way. Someone could easily be swayed by a slick ad for a product that is not as good for their use as another product that had a less-engaging/less-manipulative ad. The worst thing about internet advertising is of course the erosion of privacy. If ad networks were merely paying for people's eyeballs, that might not be too nefarious. But they're paying to track people and build intimate profiles about them, and that's not ok. I have very little faith that any of these initiatives that will supposedly make ad targeting privacy-preserving will actually work. All they do is make it appear that a company is doing something, so they can point to it when they get in trouble, claiming that they tried really hard to help preserve privacy, but it just didn't work out. I'm just not interested in any of this crap. I know micropayments and pay-per-article and such are really hard to do, and really hard to get adopted, but that is the only model I will accept if people want me to pay in some way for web content. Making me pay for a $30/month subscription for the three or four articles I'll end up reading on your site per month is not something I'm interested in doing. And I will not pay through psychological manipulation and erosion of privacy.
• Tumblewood 5y ago
  Advertisement is mostly a zero-sum game, competing for a limited amount of spending. If one player in a market advertises, they gain while the other players lose roughly the same amount. If the advertising world kept operating as normal, but the ads never displayed anywhere—blank sidebars, blank sponsored content, blank billboards—it would be more pleasant for consumers, and the market as a whole would not be any worse off for it. Then why stop there? No one needs to make the ads. Everyone employed to design, shoot, and display the ad can serve others instead of working to manipulate them. As long as the transactions keep going as normal, it's a huge win for everybody. Of course, this is business. Corporations wouldn't spend that money just to subsidize newspapers, television, and page views. In a world without advertisement, tons of content would suddenly lose its revenue stream, without an easy way to monetize attention. Attention would not be profitable on its own. That's a negative thing on the face, but I believe content which cannot survive by donation or by subscription deserves to die. Netflix survives already without (third-party) advertisement; Facebook, on the other hand, would collapse. But a social network does not need as many engineers as Facebook does. Without competing against ad-based sites, a less bloated, less attention-sucking social network could replace Facebook. And so on for other sites. SEO blogspam would die, whereas useful and interesting newsletters would survive (as demonstrated by Substack). High-quality TV could survive, but game shows and reality TV would be forced to greatly pare down their offerings. Valuable, accurate subscription news would survive, whereas clickbait news would have no more reason to bait clicks. The alternative to the status quo is that many forms of content would become unprofitable, and I don't think that's a bad thing.
• dbenamy 5y ago
  There's a lot of talk in the comments here about how ads are terrible, Jeff is terrible, etc. Eg "I personally have a very low opinion of anyone who works for a company that does that and even lower of anyone who actually works on serving those adverts." According to https://www.jefftk.com/donations https://www.jefftk.com/donations, Jeff and Julia have donated about $1.5m. GiveWell top rated charities are estimated [1] to save a life for each $3,000 - $5,000 donated. For a ballpark analysis, let's call that $4,000 and ignore secondary factors (eg inflation over their donation history). Jeff and Julia have saved something like 375 lives, many of them likely children. Please keep that in mind while forming and communicating your views. [1] https://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities https://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities
  • bmn__ 5y ago
    If you really want to be utilitarian about it, then you must weigh the lives saved by donations against the lives destroyed by advertisements. If Jeff does not comes out ahead, he is terrible. The Less Wrong creed "shut up and multiply" is relevant, I ask commenters be sure to understand what I mean before replying to my argument. I estimate that while he is still earning income, the upper bound for person-years saved will be 550_000 (30 more working years, 19_000_000$ total donations, a lifetime is worth 100 years and costs 3_500$). I estimate the lower bound for person-years destroyed will be 24_000 person-years (50_000_000 people affected, each losing 365 seconds every year over 42 years). These numbers are inconclusive. I cannot answer the big philosophical question whether he shares responsibility with the other people working in advertisements, so we would divide the total destruction person-years by the number of people working in advertisements. If yes, this would certainly make the donation scheme very favourable/positively utilitarian.
    • nonameiguess 5y ago
      That isn't how to evaluate a career choice. You evaluate it against all other choices, not in a vacuum. Choosing to work in advertising only comes out ahead if the excess of the good you do with the money you earn over the harm done by the job exceeds the excess good you could have done with money earned over harm of the job from any other job you could have chosen. Net good is better than net harm, but it's not better than even more net good. Even then, while this kind of individual calculus is at least tractable, there is also the concern of large-scale cultural drift, as in the net impact of the world's smartest people collectively working on things like ad targeting, engineering synthetic financial derivatives, and figuring out how to manufacture scarcity out of abundance so speculators can get rich off of modern tulip mania, compared to what good might have come from whatever else they could have collectively accomplished. It's entirely possible that if Google and Facebook are as good at identifying uniquely talented and intelligent people as they think they are, they could have figured out how to entirely eradicate malaria if that is where they chose to direct the effort rather than figuring out how to predict the spending habits of most people in the world and using some of the profit to buy nets. I'm not saying this for sure comes out against working for personal profit, of course. Louis Pasteur effectively proved the germ theory of disease, enabling the population explosion of the post-industrial age and possibly the most good ever done, while trying to figure out how to make better wine so he could patent and sell the process. But scant historical knowledge though I have, I'm having trouble thinking of historical examples of great good done by people just being wealthy and giving money to others who then do good, as opposed to direct work on technological good multipliers even when doing good is not the intention. At first, I was thinking maybe Da Vinci, but he might even be a counterexample in that he had little to no direct impact on science and engineering in the centuries to come despite conceiving of quite a few novel devices that were eventually invented. Perhaps if the patrons of Renaissance era Europe had paid their greatest minds to work on engineering instead of art, we could have had the industrial age centuries earlier.
• Gatsky 5y ago
  Fair enough argument. I do note that this chap has put his actual salary numbers on the internet. This definitely places him in the minority in terms of willingness to share private data. Most people don't have this level of comfort I would guess. This should probably be taken into account when considering his opinions on targeted advertising.
• danny_kre 5y ago
  The author writes "One answer is that I'm earning to give: I give half of what I earn to the most effective charities I can find, and the more I earn the more I can give." If I walked into your neighbor's home, robbed $3,000 from them and then gave half of what I stole to some charity would you consider me to be a good guy? Am I the only one that finds the first answer to be mad logic?
• unsungNovelty 5y ago
  Let's get one thing straight, we the users don't like ads that are intrusive, manipulating and data generating when it doesn't have to be. This guy makes it look like (or want to make it look like) we are complaining about ads. No, we just don't want to be tracked. Simple. He is also just normalising the whole surveillance part by not bringing it up, ever! All he is doing is talking about the top layer of what an ad is and what it is for and how the users are interacting with them etc. This doesn't talk about tracking your ip address, your location across services, your search history, your video watching history and everything else that you have interacted with. Then using it to manipulate you. And I actually think it has been extremely smart and cunning to play the mind game of "look, it is not for you, it is for the smaller and poor people who can't afford it. THE POOR PEOPLE!". This works I am sure. Facebook literally did this by displaying ads on big news papers on behalf of "small businesses" when they were threatened by Apple's privacy features which actually protected the end users. Ad businesses like Ad Sense etc in it's current form doesn't do anything else than being intrusive and eventually become used against you by businesses to manipulate you or govts to oppress you. I will give a simple example. The ads that comes as sponsored in youtube channels where the youtube creator gives a shout out to some services / products, or ads in podcasts that are directly related to the content of the creator things definitely have more impact on the creators monetary department. You would've heard a lot of youtube creators admitting the same. SO YES, ADS WORK. SURVEILLANCE, MANIPULATING AD BUSINESS LIKE AD SENSE DOESN'T! I would suggest people to keep questioning these kind of smart people to work on something worth while than tracking and not to mention shadow tracking people to just create data which can be sold to third parties which the end users are unaware of, among soo many other things. In all sense, jeezz! Get a life!! PS: This would be my one and probably only "cut the bulshit honey comment" when I know these people are smart enough to understand the consequences but want to virtue signal by saying, I donate to good causes blah blah blah. This is a very common and well put consistent messaging we/I have been hearing over and over. So yeah, I don't want to give a benefit of the doubt.
• rerbrerb 5y ago
  Because money.