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Yea this confuses me too. Many advertisements have made me aware of things that I would be interested in but didn't know about. Marketing and advertising can be

Yea this confuses me too. Many advertisements have made me aware of things that I would be interested in but didn't know about. Marketing and advertising can be valuable to those on the receiving end.

ACow_Adonis 5y ago
If people genuinely thought this, there could be a market where people pay money to be advertised to or targeted towards. In many ways this is what trade magazines are/were, but the absence of a general market for such generalised interest is so absent its the kind of witness evidence that is deafening in its silence.
npteljes 5y ago
They could have been, but there's too much abuse going on in the advertising space. In regards of online advertising: it's distracting, manipulative, infringes privacy and wastes bandwidth. Online life without ads is like going out to a park, out of the city center. You just can't believe how noisy it was before.
concinds 5y ago
Online ads benefit the little guy. Nike and others can afford billboard and TV ads. If you've ever tried starting up a small Shopify business, online ads are all you're going to get. The problems are the power Facebook and Google have over the ad market, that increases ad costs for businesses by a lot (I've read, one third, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's more). But online ads are a lifeline for small businesses. Regulate the big players, and keep the ads flowing. Some people here want ads to be abolished, but you'd just strengthen existing brands, i.e. huge multinationals. That's all it would achieve. That's why real issue with Brave, frankly. I still use Brave as my default browser because it's the only one that allows me to allow all ads by default, and only turn on Brave Shields for specific websites. Even uBlock Origin deprecated their default-allow, and it now breaks many websites completely if you try it. But I don't like "anti-ad" sentiment. Sad state of affairs. But people who oppose Big Tech domination, and also want ads abolished, don't realize that doing so would prevent millions of small businesses from getting off the ground. Chrome's killing the open web, but might be saving the "open economy" by trying to disincentivize adblocking (by blocking "annoying ads" by default, and implementing ManifestV3). It's a mess.
- freediver 5y ago
  I think noone argues against ads being useful, when dosed properly. Same like sleeping pills for example. The problem is that ad-based business can not resist the temptation to "overdose" the user. This is how we got in the situation that infuriates so many people (almost a billion devices use an ad-blocker). People just do not want to see so many ads everywhere. Let's take Brave for example. Open home page of brave.com and you get: "The best privacy online Browse privately. Search privately. And ditch Big Tech." And a nice screenshot. The problem is this is not what Brave works/looks like when you open it the first time. By their own research [1], on your first run Brave will immediately "phone home" 80(!) times. The original post discussed here talks about mundane features like installing an extension not working without contacting their servers about it. Then, the user is immediately welcomed by ads for several crypto services right there in the browser on the right hand side (curiously hidden on their home page screenshot). I guess that: "Browser that shares your private information with us and shows you ads you do not really want" would not fly well as a tagline. Having this behavior turned on by default is where user frustration begins and is later then just amplified by even worse behavior, again incentivized by the fact that the business model is simply dependent on ads, like the other big tech. [1] https://brave.com/popular-browsers-first-run/ https://brave.com/popular-browsers-first-run/

ACow_Adonis 5y ago

If people genuinely thought this, there could be a market where people pay money to be advertised to or targeted towards. In many ways this is what trade magazines are/were, but the absence of a general market for such generalised interest is so absent its the kind of witness evidence that is deafening in its silence.

npteljes 5y ago

They could have been, but there's too much abuse going on in the advertising space. In regards of online advertising: it's distracting, manipulative, infringes privacy and wastes bandwidth. Online life without ads is like going out to a park, out of the city center. You just can't believe how noisy it was before.

concinds 5y ago

Online ads benefit the little guy. Nike and others can afford billboard and TV ads. If you've ever tried starting up a small Shopify business, online ads are all you're going to get. The problems are the power Facebook and Google have over the ad market, that increases ad costs for businesses by a lot (I've read, one third, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's more). But online ads are a lifeline for small businesses. Regulate the big players, and keep the ads flowing. Some people here want ads to be abolished, but you'd just strengthen existing brands, i.e. huge multinationals. That's all it would achieve. That's why real issue with Brave, frankly. I still use Brave as my default browser because it's the only one that allows me to allow all ads by default, and only turn on Brave Shields for specific websites. Even uBlock Origin deprecated their default-allow, and it now breaks many websites completely if you try it. But I don't like "anti-ad" sentiment. Sad state of affairs. But people who oppose Big Tech domination, and also want ads abolished, don't realize that doing so would prevent millions of small businesses from getting off the ground. Chrome's killing the open web, but might be saving the "open economy" by trying to disincentivize adblocking (by blocking "annoying ads" by default, and implementing ManifestV3). It's a mess.

freediver 5y ago
I think noone argues against ads being useful, when dosed properly. Same like sleeping pills for example. The problem is that ad-based business can not resist the temptation to "overdose" the user. This is how we got in the situation that infuriates so many people (almost a billion devices use an ad-blocker). People just do not want to see so many ads everywhere. Let's take Brave for example. Open home page of brave.com and you get: "The best privacy online Browse privately. Search privately. And ditch Big Tech." And a nice screenshot. The problem is this is not what Brave works/looks like when you open it the first time. By their own research [1], on your first run Brave will immediately "phone home" 80(!) times. The original post discussed here talks about mundane features like installing an extension not working without contacting their servers about it. Then, the user is immediately welcomed by ads for several crypto services right there in the browser on the right hand side (curiously hidden on their home page screenshot). I guess that: "Browser that shares your private information with us and shows you ads you do not really want" would not fly well as a tagline. Having this behavior turned on by default is where user frustration begins and is later then just amplified by even worse behavior, again incentivized by the fact that the business model is simply dependent on ads, like the other big tech. [1] https://brave.com/popular-browsers-first-run/ https://brave.com/popular-browsers-first-run/