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I was going to comment that Google, Facebook and Twitter are platforms for search, connections and communicating respectively. Ads are simply a revenue model.

by tpatke 15y ago

I was going to comment that Google, Facebook and Twitter are platforms for search, connections and communicating respectively. Ads are simply a revenue model. If Facebook charged $20 per month, would you work for them then? However, after seeing comments like: I work for facebook - "advertising is itself a worthwhile problem." and... I work for google - "People in non-advertising teams hardly ever ask 'how will this effect click-through rates?'." Hardly ever? :-) Maybe it is more about advertising then I realize.

aristus 15y ago
If "more about" means "non-zero", sure. I don't work in ads now, but I appreciate the extremely tricky and fractal problem they are trying to solve, in the same way I appreciate the work people do in security, design, features, reliability, etc. The OP has a point: most advertising is a waste of time for both the advertiser and the recipient. There are many perverse incentives that skew outcomes, even leaving aside spam and scams. It's totally fine to hate bad ads. But condemning advertising per se because most ads don't work is like condemning programming because most strings of characters don't compile.
jsnell 15y ago
> Hardly ever? :-) Maybe it is more about advertising then I realize. That's a broad interpretation of "hardly"... Clearly some people in some non-advertising projects are at some point going to care about some ad metric in some way, so "never" would be inaccurate. That still doesn't mean that there's any significant amount of effort spent on non-ads people on ads performance.
yeahsure 15y ago
If Facebook charged $20 per month, would anyone use it?