6 ms·

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

• DogOnTheWeb 6y 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 6y 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.
    • bnralt 6y ago
      > The costs are more abstract than when paying in actual dollars Keep in mind people are still paying in actual dollars. Companies spend money on advertisement because they want something in return, and that comes from the people being targeted from the ads. I wouldn't be surprised if the poor end up paying much more than the rich in the end. It might even be more regressive than a subscription model. Also worth noting that their are other negative externalities as well. Health for example - the poor tend to have a much worse diet that leads to bad health conditions, and there's likely a large connection between this and the advertisements for unhealthy products.
  • andrepd 6y ago
    > Do you have a position on a better alternative business model Sure! Thanks for asking. One idea I like is this: you pay a small, fixed subscription on top of your internet bill. This amount is then given proportionally to the services you visit. This is nice for several reasons: even a small amount (~3-5$) gives a similar or higher revenue for content creators than ads do (a very rough back-of-the-envelope estimate based on youtube CPM). Plus, there's no problem with the friction of paying for things: you pay the same, regardless of watching 1 or 1000 videos (the netflix model, the cable tv model, heck any subscription model). Plus of course: no ads :)
    • Datsundere 6y ago
      Ads should not exist period. Youtube worked without ads before and it can work without ads. I don't need to be paying a premium to use a service. Why are ads the way to generate revenue? Like I don't care about buying a coffee grinder. Ads not only help contribute to needless purchases but also directly affect the environment cause of that.
      • joshuamorton 6y ago
        Youtube only existed without ads for around a year. It's not clear that a youtube post, say 2008, could exist without ads or a subscription fee. [0]: You can see what those looked like here https://www.versionmuseum.com/history-of/youtube-website https://www.versionmuseum.com/history-of/youtube-website. Youtube added its first advertisements in mid 2007.
      • nl 6y ago
        YouTube never worked before ads. Prior to Google's purchase they were running at a massive loss, burning investment money. That's not working by any normal definition.
      • ThatMedicIsASpy 6y ago
        youtube works without ads sure that means you the channel provider pays for the hosting and bandwidth. tell me how you want to pay for 500h++ of video uploaded to a platform every minute
  • nonameiguess 6y ago
    Does YouTube need to exist? I think most of us were alive before 2007 and I don't remember it being some kind of apocalyptic hellhole in which I could never find information or entertainment.
• ep103 6y ago
  My understanding is this is how people felt about traditional advertising during the rise of Madison Avenue as well? Or at least, this is how it was portrayed on Mad Men : )
• tomComb 6y ago
  Only a couple of years to quit something that blackened your soul? A couple of years is a pretty common amount of time to remain in a job these days. If I sound judgy there, note that you are condemning a lot of people. Not me, actually, but I still take issue because the basis of your condemnation doesn't even make sense to me... I think ads are a decent way to pay for a service and I prefer targeted ads to generic ads, especially since they are more effective (and if the idea is to pay for the service you are using, that is relevant). So the issue is the data, and so the fact that Google has never sold or lost their user's data - you seem to imply otherwise - is extremely relevant, and is why I'm OK with them storing my data. In this industry that is very rare, and yet you consider Google the worst - I'm having a hard time squaring that.
• notJim 6y ago
  I'm not sure why traditional advertising should get a pass here. Traditional advertising finds whatever fears and insecurities you have and exploits them to sell you stuff. If you're worried you're not manly enough, better buy an $80k truck with at least a V-6. If you're worried you're not a good enough parent, better give your kids some sugary crap. Exploiting people's psychology like this is also an overreach.
  • m3at 6y ago
    GP said he worked in traditional advertising then quit after a few years out of disgust, I don't think he's giving traditional advertisers a pass.
    • notJim 6y ago
      To be clear, my comment wasn't meant as a criticism of the person I was replying to, just expanding the discussion of negatives from advertising. I think these ethical decisions are fairly hard to make, and it's hard to blame anyone, unless the career is obviously purely harmful. It's admirable when people even consider these things, considering how many people just take the money and don't think twice about it.
    • lolinder 6y ago
      I don't know if the comment has been edited (I doubt it), but I don't see where GP said they quit out of disgust. In fact, this line really does seem to be giving traditional advertisers a pass: > I used to work in more trad advertising, so my question wasn't so much an objection to working in advertising itself... (Not commenting on whether they should be given a pass, just noting that GP really did seem to be doing so.)
• joshuamorton 6y ago
  > 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 work at Google too, not on ads though] Could you clarify what you mean by this. A natural reading of these two things ("reading your messages" and "selling to the highest bidder") aren't true. There are lots of things you could mean (reading messages could mean reading emails, reading comments on Youtube, reading hangouts messages, and harvesting that data to sell ads) So I'm curious what things Google does that you mean by that. > you don't see any adverts, but they're still harvesting and selling you This is concretely untrue, even by the stretchy definitions. Google (and generally most ad companies) don't sell your data. Sometimes people mean sell your eyeballs, in that they gather data and then use it to sell your attention, and some people find that just as bad. But if you aren't seeing ads, they're not even doing that. There's no one they're selling anything of yours to. Not your data, not your attention, nothing.
  • meowface 6y ago
    >Sometimes people mean sell your eyeballs, in that they gather data and then use it to sell your attention Does Google collect information about what websites you visit (via Chrome / Google Analytics / Google account cookies) and what search queries you make and what search results you click on and provide or sell that information to advertisers in some shape or form? (Where advertisers includes not just third parties but also Google / Google subsidiaries themselves.) If so, that's definitely "harvesting and selling you", IMO. I'm not sure what other form of "harvesting and selling you" would be possible, even? >A natural reading of these two things ("reading your messages" and "selling to the highest bidder") aren't true. There are lots of things you could mean (reading messages could mean reading emails, reading comments on Youtube, reading hangouts messages, and harvesting that data to sell ads) So I'm curious what things Google does that you mean by that. I assume one of the things they mean is reading Gmail email messages and showing you ads based on the contents of those email messages. My understanding is that Google indeed isn't doing this - but that they did do exactly that up until 2017, which wasn't that long ago.
    • joshuamorton 6y ago
• munk-a 6y ago
  > 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. I can definitely feel this - I worked in mobile gaming for a little while. The camaraderie was amazing, I keep in touch with a number of coworkers from that job - the company was terrible (like gaming companies tend to be) but the fact that I was devoting part of my life to building a system I knew was deeply immoral and taking advantage of people's addiction is what pushed me away from it in the end. I really try to avoid judging people over their career or life choices since nobody is as simple as a statistic, but advertising and mobile gaming is where I break this rule - I definitely don't judge marketers as categorically evil, but the vocation is poisonous. In the article the author calls out that... > 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. As a response to people asking why they're in marketing and I think this is a really bad sign. If you need to justify your work by calling out the charity you're doing with the earnings then I think you, internally, have identified that what you're doing is causing harm to society. I understand and sympathize with the fact that brands with poor visibility can struggle to break into established markets but these positives seem quite limited when stacked up against over-consumption, addiction exploitation, decreased general attentiveness, a weakening of what objective truths are and leaving a gigantic security hole in our society for disinformation to easily penetrate deep into folks' hearts and minds. Advertising, at it's most basic, is trying to change the minds of consumers - you're attempting to take someone who is thinking wrong and make them think right - where right is the mindset that leads them to purchase your product. I think that advertising is really an emotional manipulation at its core. There is probably a distinction between purely informational marketing that's done to increase general awareness of your brand and marketing that's targeting increasing the chances that an uninterested party will impulse buy your product (the later is what can lead to the over consumption of high sugar products and spur on obesity). I, honestly, couldn't draw a line between the two so if we have to throw out the baby with the bathwater so be it. I've tried to write this up with a calm head and in an even manner, but my apologies in advance if it's too strong - it's a subject I personally have extremely strong feelings on.
  • nearbuy 6y ago