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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

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.
nyolfen 5y ago
products subject to direct market forces are incentivized by this as well. you don't pay for crack with popups.
- meowface 5y ago
  At least you're getting something out of it when it isn't ads, though. If it's a game (like Candy Crush, mentioned in another comment), at least you're getting some tiny dopamine hit, no matter how repetitive and empty. For social media, at least you're getting that slight bit of humor or outrage bait. I don't like these things at all, but they're something. With an ad, you're solely siphoning off a portion of my infinitesimally fleeting existence. It's like getting stuck in traffic, except deliberate and with malice aforethought.
  - kelnos 5y ago
    I despise ads, but I think paying for a stimulating, informative article (for example) with an ad view is inherently less destructive than paying for a meaningless, empty dopamine hit, or manufactured outrage.
    - meowface 5y ago
      In that case I'd rather subscribe to/pay the author directly. (Who's to say an ad impression on some company's website will even help the author in any way? Maybe there's a chance it could indirectly, or maybe there's a layoff or pay cut planned soon anyway.) For that and several other reasons, I strongly prefer independent solo journalists (or very small independent self-operating teams) rather than ones that work for publications. I think Substack and Patreon are far better solutions here than advertising is, for example.
sidlls 5y ago
It's not just the cost in attention--those ads are produced with the price of our privacy included in the cost.
- meowface 5y ago
  I feel like there are other costs beyond attention and privacy, too. Costs of malware and fraud are also common, but for the sake of argument we can just focus on somewhat more "legitimate" / "non-malicious" ads. (Emphasis on the scare quotes.) There's the aesthetic cost. If I see an ad on or near a nicely designed or produced website or video, it immediately detracts from the visual appeal. There's the annoyance cost. I'm personally immediately irritated and annoyed when I see or hear an ad. It affects my mood and my impression of whatever I'm trying to look at or listen to. (I despise it when I'm away from my computer and have a podcast on which ends and instantly transitions to some loud peppy ad for a fast food restaurant and I have to interrupt whatever I'm doing to walk over and shut the thing off.) For some, there's the cost of paying for a product or service that an ad misled them about. They may pay more than they should have or get something which is portrayed a certain way in an ad which doesn't hold up in reality. There's the psychological and sociological cost. Ads (especially in video or audio form) present a certain clinical and biased world frame. People usually talk and act in unnatural or "perfect" ways. A young person exposed to, say, hundreds of ads per week and thousands of ads per year may eventually start to subconsciously find that frame normal and expected. Even though they know they're ads rather than non-fiction, I think those things can potentially seep in in some cases. There are the conflicts of interest and the effects caused by suspicion of conflicts of interest. If I see a "sponsored search result" or "sponsored article", I expect that the source will be less likely to show things which might propose a competing narrative or say anything negative about the sponsor. "Okay, I can't trust this source for anything related to [X], now." As a corollary to the annoyance cost, there's the fakeness/sincerity dissonance cost. If I'm reading an article or listening to a podcast that's presented as, or may very well be, sincere and truthful, it's a little bit jarring for it to be interrupted with some fake, artificial, marketer-crafted bullshit with superlatives about how [X] will change your life and is the best thing ever. A little hard to take the rest seriously at that point. I feel like I could list at least ten more. From a purely subjective and personal perspective, I don't even mind the egregious privacy implications as much as all these other things. I just fucking hate seeing and hearing ads.
jimmaswell 5y ago
My ability to concentrate, learn, or get shit done has only ever been hindered by an ad to the extent that it's annoying waiting for the ad to finish. I can't imagine most people don't just tune ads out most of the time. Still better than having to pay every website a subscription. It's nice having the option though, for example I personally find YouTube Premium worth the money.
- dougmwne 5y ago
  There's a very important piece you're missing here and once you get it, it's hard to see the world in the same way. A product you pay for doesn't care how often you use it. The tennis racket sits there. It doesn't matter how much you use it, that's your choice. A product you pay for with your attention has a voracious appetite for your attention. The more you use it, the more valuable it is to the company that made it. It would be best if you were using it All The Time. It would be best if it was incredibly addictive so you would never get tired of it and move on to something else. It would be best if the maker of this product could measure how much of your time they were capturing so they could make sure to capture even more in the future. And in fact, if you look at time use studies, we pretty much spend all of our waking lives using a phone, tv or computer. There is literally no time left, so an advertising company is trying to invent a self driving car so you can keep using your phone during your commute, the last sliver of waking life left unconquered. Our dreams will surely be next.
  - joshuamorton 5y ago
    This is still ultimately true with things you subscribe to though. Netflix vies for your attention even though you pay directly with $$, because if another streaming service takes more of your attention, you'll pay for it (potentially instead).
    - shkkmo 5y ago
      Not really, Netflix definitely wants to have you use their platform frequently so you value it enough to keep paying for it. But this is balanced against the cost of making sure you don't run out of content and cancel anyway. They also pay a bit more for bandwidth and servers if you watch a lot. So while Netflix wants all your TV time, they derive no extra benefits if all your time us TV time. This is absolutely not true of advertising supported services that make more from you the more time you spend.
nikitaga 5y ago
With ads you're not just paying with your "attention" (waste of time and focus), you're also paying with changes in your behaviour, perceptions, and attitudes. As much as we like to imagine our minds to be impenetrable bastions of rationality, they are not. We can easily be enticed and manipulated to do things we wouldn't otherwise do, to see things differently than we otherwise would, to consider things we wouldn't consider, and all of that is exactly what the advertisers are paying for.
- cutemonster 5y ago
  > not just paying with your "attention" And maybe abolishing democracy Political manipulation ads, helping an authoritarian rise to power. But ads for buying what I just searched for: "buy new running shoes", aren't like that -- they can be helpful instead :-). It's mainly social network ads like on Facebook that are dangerous for society? From the article: > I think advertising is positive It's both? Ads are different from ads, just like different things one can eat are different, like potatoes (running shoe ads) versus poisonous mushrooms (nation states abolishing democracy in the US via political manipulation on Facebook)
  - e_proxus 5y ago
    If I search for “buy new running shoes” I’d rather get the best search results, not the highest paid for. I’m pretty sure there are better criteria for those results than the amount of money paid to end up in that list. But alas, that’s not what modern search engines use, because they are advertisers first and foremost. Not reputable search providers anymore.
  - pydry 5y ago
    I tried starting a website a while back that would give reliable, unbiased information on a certain class of goods and services. I looked at my competitors and saw that most of them were obviously shilling for the company that was paying them the most, which was never the best. I figured by being the most honest I could be the most trusted and win out. The trouble is, the best companies would rely upon word of mouth. Promoting them wouldn't get me paid a dime. Honesty would benefit them, but not me. Getting traffic, meanwhile, I realized would cost me money. That's when I realized that the only way to get a non negative margin in that industry was to sacrifice your objectivity (which is what everyone did). Theoretically you could charge users for this I guess, like Which? magazine does but I couldn't see a straightforward route to that point that wouldn't involve burning a lot of capital I didn't have. The chicken/egg problem rose its ugly head again. I gave up soon after.
1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
The thing is, Google's customers generally do not simply want attention, they want people to pay them for something. Thus, there is a monetary cost if the advertiser succeeds. Google is just a middleman, taking a cut of those prospective sales. The sad part of online ads is that the internet allows an advertiser, with Google's help, to potentially annoy hundreds of millions of people in order to make some small number of sales. The "solution" to this inefficiency is "targeting" and "stickiness", and that is where the whole business becomes far too intrusive and counterproductive. In the earlier days of the internet people knew ads were not what they wanted to see on the network. I remember the first ad someone posted to Usenet. IIRC it was an immigration lawyer. Brin and Page originally said when they announced Google in 1998 that they wanted to offer an alternative to a black box web search engine that is funded by advertising. The only thing that has changed since then is that new users are less critical, they have no idea what the internet is like without the advertising. Imagine if every household had to participate in an AC Nielson study just to watch TV. There are generations of users now that have no idea what those times were like, when people expected privacy and there were boundaries. They cannot fully appreciate what has been lost because they never experienced it to begin with. It is not too late to reclaim what is being stolen.
- J253 5y ago
  > The sad part of online ads is that the internet allows an advertiser, with Google's help, to potentially annoy hundreds of millions of people in order to make some small number of sales. This sentence suddenly made me see all online ads as essentially modern, “intelligent” robocalls at scale.
- canadianfella 5y ago
  > and that is where the whole business becomes far too intrusive and counterproductive. How is it counterproductive?
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
  @canadianfella: same as TV but worse, and we're just getting started
rsj_hn 5y ago
The problem with ads is that they destroy value, which I think is what you are getting at. If you are an ad-dependent website, you are incentivized to fill your site with so many ads until it becomes just barely tolerable for the marginal reader. E.g. if your site as V viewers, and N ads, with L(N) being the number of viewers who turn off in disgust at seeing the N-th ad, then the equilibrium condition is L(N) = V/(N+1). A website with 10 ads displayed would suffer a 10% drop in readership if it added an 11th ad. That's the only condition whereby they don't ad that 11th ad. And you only added 10 ads because the number of readers you lost with the 10th was less than 1/10 of your total. That is, you are incentivized to significantly reduce the pleasure obtained from your product, as the attention demanded by ads competes with the attention of your readers/viewers. But if you are selling a good for money, while you are also incentivized to keep raising prices until the marginal cost of the product is equal to the marginal benefit, the money you charge doesn't reduce the quality of the product. A beautiful car may be painful to buy, but it's still a beautiful car. There is no such thing as a beautiful website with ads, the product is intentionally made awful. And that situation of destroying value creates really weird long and short-run equilibria. For example, ads incentivize the kind of products for which attention is more easily shared: you wont find a lot of deep-think pieces that are ad-supported because the ads are too distracting. Instead, you find a lot of short-attention span pieces as these work better with ads. Thus the staccatto assaults of 9 weird tricks to do X, where you read a weird trick and then look at a couple of ads and go to the next weird trick. You can feel the presence of the ads in the work itself. In the Old TV era, episodes would encounter these cliff-hangers when the detective walks into a room, points a gun, you hear the sound of a woman screaming, and then it cuts to a commercial. They needed to create this peak of interest so you'd stick around to see what was in the room. But that peak also artificially disrupted the story. Online, all that is compressed into a few seconds of recognition, it is constant disruption. In terms of long-run equilibria, there is this ratchet effect: As people flee the ad-sponsored world the ones who remain are more insentitive to ads and so the number of ads increases. In other words, the quality of the writing gets worse over time, in an ad-supported eco-system. So no, ads are not just an alternate way of paying for content, they are a way of shaping content, and for the worse.

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.

nyolfen 5y ago

products subject to direct market forces are incentivized by this as well. you don't pay for crack with popups.

meowface 5y ago
At least you're getting something out of it when it isn't ads, though. If it's a game (like Candy Crush, mentioned in another comment), at least you're getting some tiny dopamine hit, no matter how repetitive and empty. For social media, at least you're getting that slight bit of humor or outrage bait. I don't like these things at all, but they're something. With an ad, you're solely siphoning off a portion of my infinitesimally fleeting existence. It's like getting stuck in traffic, except deliberate and with malice aforethought.
- kelnos 5y ago
  I despise ads, but I think paying for a stimulating, informative article (for example) with an ad view is inherently less destructive than paying for a meaningless, empty dopamine hit, or manufactured outrage.
  - meowface 5y ago
    In that case I'd rather subscribe to/pay the author directly. (Who's to say an ad impression on some company's website will even help the author in any way? Maybe there's a chance it could indirectly, or maybe there's a layoff or pay cut planned soon anyway.) For that and several other reasons, I strongly prefer independent solo journalists (or very small independent self-operating teams) rather than ones that work for publications. I think Substack and Patreon are far better solutions here than advertising is, for example.

sidlls 5y ago

It's not just the cost in attention--those ads are produced with the price of our privacy included in the cost.

meowface 5y ago
I feel like there are other costs beyond attention and privacy, too. Costs of malware and fraud are also common, but for the sake of argument we can just focus on somewhat more "legitimate" / "non-malicious" ads. (Emphasis on the scare quotes.) There's the aesthetic cost. If I see an ad on or near a nicely designed or produced website or video, it immediately detracts from the visual appeal. There's the annoyance cost. I'm personally immediately irritated and annoyed when I see or hear an ad. It affects my mood and my impression of whatever I'm trying to look at or listen to. (I despise it when I'm away from my computer and have a podcast on which ends and instantly transitions to some loud peppy ad for a fast food restaurant and I have to interrupt whatever I'm doing to walk over and shut the thing off.) For some, there's the cost of paying for a product or service that an ad misled them about. They may pay more than they should have or get something which is portrayed a certain way in an ad which doesn't hold up in reality. There's the psychological and sociological cost. Ads (especially in video or audio form) present a certain clinical and biased world frame. People usually talk and act in unnatural or "perfect" ways. A young person exposed to, say, hundreds of ads per week and thousands of ads per year may eventually start to subconsciously find that frame normal and expected. Even though they know they're ads rather than non-fiction, I think those things can potentially seep in in some cases. There are the conflicts of interest and the effects caused by suspicion of conflicts of interest. If I see a "sponsored search result" or "sponsored article", I expect that the source will be less likely to show things which might propose a competing narrative or say anything negative about the sponsor. "Okay, I can't trust this source for anything related to [X], now." As a corollary to the annoyance cost, there's the fakeness/sincerity dissonance cost. If I'm reading an article or listening to a podcast that's presented as, or may very well be, sincere and truthful, it's a little bit jarring for it to be interrupted with some fake, artificial, marketer-crafted bullshit with superlatives about how [X] will change your life and is the best thing ever. A little hard to take the rest seriously at that point. I feel like I could list at least ten more. From a purely subjective and personal perspective, I don't even mind the egregious privacy implications as much as all these other things. I just fucking hate seeing and hearing ads.

jimmaswell 5y ago

My ability to concentrate, learn, or get shit done has only ever been hindered by an ad to the extent that it's annoying waiting for the ad to finish. I can't imagine most people don't just tune ads out most of the time. Still better than having to pay every website a subscription. It's nice having the option though, for example I personally find YouTube Premium worth the money.

dougmwne 5y ago
There's a very important piece you're missing here and once you get it, it's hard to see the world in the same way. A product you pay for doesn't care how often you use it. The tennis racket sits there. It doesn't matter how much you use it, that's your choice. A product you pay for with your attention has a voracious appetite for your attention. The more you use it, the more valuable it is to the company that made it. It would be best if you were using it All The Time. It would be best if it was incredibly addictive so you would never get tired of it and move on to something else. It would be best if the maker of this product could measure how much of your time they were capturing so they could make sure to capture even more in the future. And in fact, if you look at time use studies, we pretty much spend all of our waking lives using a phone, tv or computer. There is literally no time left, so an advertising company is trying to invent a self driving car so you can keep using your phone during your commute, the last sliver of waking life left unconquered. Our dreams will surely be next.
- joshuamorton 5y ago
  This is still ultimately true with things you subscribe to though. Netflix vies for your attention even though you pay directly with $$, because if another streaming service takes more of your attention, you'll pay for it (potentially instead).
  - shkkmo 5y ago
    Not really, Netflix definitely wants to have you use their platform frequently so you value it enough to keep paying for it. But this is balanced against the cost of making sure you don't run out of content and cancel anyway. They also pay a bit more for bandwidth and servers if you watch a lot. So while Netflix wants all your TV time, they derive no extra benefits if all your time us TV time. This is absolutely not true of advertising supported services that make more from you the more time you spend.

nikitaga 5y ago

With ads you're not just paying with your "attention" (waste of time and focus), you're also paying with changes in your behaviour, perceptions, and attitudes. As much as we like to imagine our minds to be impenetrable bastions of rationality, they are not. We can easily be enticed and manipulated to do things we wouldn't otherwise do, to see things differently than we otherwise would, to consider things we wouldn't consider, and all of that is exactly what the advertisers are paying for.

cutemonster 5y ago
> not just paying with your "attention" And maybe abolishing democracy Political manipulation ads, helping an authoritarian rise to power. But ads for buying what I just searched for: "buy new running shoes", aren't like that -- they can be helpful instead :-). It's mainly social network ads like on Facebook that are dangerous for society? From the article: > I think advertising is positive It's both? Ads are different from ads, just like different things one can eat are different, like potatoes (running shoe ads) versus poisonous mushrooms (nation states abolishing democracy in the US via political manipulation on Facebook)
- e_proxus 5y ago
  If I search for “buy new running shoes” I’d rather get the best search results, not the highest paid for. I’m pretty sure there are better criteria for those results than the amount of money paid to end up in that list. But alas, that’s not what modern search engines use, because they are advertisers first and foremost. Not reputable search providers anymore.
- pydry 5y ago
  I tried starting a website a while back that would give reliable, unbiased information on a certain class of goods and services. I looked at my competitors and saw that most of them were obviously shilling for the company that was paying them the most, which was never the best. I figured by being the most honest I could be the most trusted and win out. The trouble is, the best companies would rely upon word of mouth. Promoting them wouldn't get me paid a dime. Honesty would benefit them, but not me. Getting traffic, meanwhile, I realized would cost me money. That's when I realized that the only way to get a non negative margin in that industry was to sacrifice your objectivity (which is what everyone did). Theoretically you could charge users for this I guess, like Which? magazine does but I couldn't see a straightforward route to that point that wouldn't involve burning a lot of capital I didn't have. The chicken/egg problem rose its ugly head again. I gave up soon after.

1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago

The thing is, Google's customers generally do not simply want attention, they want people to pay them for something. Thus, there is a monetary cost if the advertiser succeeds. Google is just a middleman, taking a cut of those prospective sales. The sad part of online ads is that the internet allows an advertiser, with Google's help, to potentially annoy hundreds of millions of people in order to make some small number of sales. The "solution" to this inefficiency is "targeting" and "stickiness", and that is where the whole business becomes far too intrusive and counterproductive. In the earlier days of the internet people knew ads were not what they wanted to see on the network. I remember the first ad someone posted to Usenet. IIRC it was an immigration lawyer. Brin and Page originally said when they announced Google in 1998 that they wanted to offer an alternative to a black box web search engine that is funded by advertising. The only thing that has changed since then is that new users are less critical, they have no idea what the internet is like without the advertising. Imagine if every household had to participate in an AC Nielson study just to watch TV. There are generations of users now that have no idea what those times were like, when people expected privacy and there were boundaries. They cannot fully appreciate what has been lost because they never experienced it to begin with. It is not too late to reclaim what is being stolen.

J253 5y ago
> The sad part of online ads is that the internet allows an advertiser, with Google's help, to potentially annoy hundreds of millions of people in order to make some small number of sales. This sentence suddenly made me see all online ads as essentially modern, “intelligent” robocalls at scale.
canadianfella 5y ago
> and that is where the whole business becomes far too intrusive and counterproductive. How is it counterproductive?
1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
@canadianfella: same as TV but worse, and we're just getting started

rsj_hn 5y ago

The problem with ads is that they destroy value, which I think is what you are getting at. If you are an ad-dependent website, you are incentivized to fill your site with so many ads until it becomes just barely tolerable for the marginal reader. E.g. if your site as V viewers, and N ads, with L(N) being the number of viewers who turn off in disgust at seeing the N-th ad, then the equilibrium condition is L(N) = V/(N+1). A website with 10 ads displayed would suffer a 10% drop in readership if it added an 11th ad. That's the only condition whereby they don't ad that 11th ad. And you only added 10 ads because the number of readers you lost with the 10th was less than 1/10 of your total. That is, you are incentivized to significantly reduce the pleasure obtained from your product, as the attention demanded by ads competes with the attention of your readers/viewers. But if you are selling a good for money, while you are also incentivized to keep raising prices until the marginal cost of the product is equal to the marginal benefit, the money you charge doesn't reduce the quality of the product. A beautiful car may be painful to buy, but it's still a beautiful car. There is no such thing as a beautiful website with ads, the product is intentionally made awful. And that situation of destroying value creates really weird long and short-run equilibria. For example, ads incentivize the kind of products for which attention is more easily shared: you wont find a lot of deep-think pieces that are ad-supported because the ads are too distracting. Instead, you find a lot of short-attention span pieces as these work better with ads. Thus the staccatto assaults of 9 weird tricks to do X, where you read a weird trick and then look at a couple of ads and go to the next weird trick. You can feel the presence of the ads in the work itself. In the Old TV era, episodes would encounter these cliff-hangers when the detective walks into a room, points a gun, you hear the sound of a woman screaming, and then it cuts to a commercial. They needed to create this peak of interest so you'd stick around to see what was in the room. But that peak also artificially disrupted the story. Online, all that is compressed into a few seconds of recognition, it is constant disruption. In terms of long-run equilibria, there is this ratchet effect: As people flee the ad-sponsored world the ones who remain are more insentitive to ads and so the number of ads increases. In other words, the quality of the writing gets worse over time, in an ad-supported eco-system. So no, ads are not just an alternate way of paying for content, they are a way of shaping content, and for the worse.