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People hate bad advertising, but they also hate paying for things. There is a happy medium where good advertising can subsidize things people only kind of want

People hate bad advertising, but they also hate paying for things. There is a happy medium where good advertising can subsidize things people only kind of want to pay for. People are largely indifferent or sometimes like good advertising. Super Bowl ads, for example, often draw as much of a crowd as the game itself because the ads are well produced and entertaining. The problem is there is always pressure to make more and more money and eventually that leads to bad practices in advertising. Examples of Bad Advertising: - Popups or other types of digital ads that compromise the user experience - Privacy compromising tracking - Misleading / false advertising - Over-saturation of advertising - Outdoor ads that block a beautiful view The whole digital advertising landscape, unfortunately, is filled with some of the worst advertising we have seen in the modern era. The ads are sold too cheaply and at too high of a volume causing over saturation.

mschuster91 5y ago
> People hate bad advertising, but they also hate paying for things. People hate having to put effort or risk into paying for things. Online payment was ridiculously blasted with friction even before PSD2 hit thanks to all the fraud going on, now it's even worse. Not to mention you can't just go and pay 10-50 cents to view a single online news article behind a paywall - the papers all want your personal data to upsell you, don't offer non-subscription models, and make bailing out of subscriptions ridiculously hard. And the credit card industry wants their cut on top, too, which makes micropayments even more expensive to offer. How did iTunes, Spotify and Netflix get so big and essentially killed piracy in their respective markets? They offered an easy, risk-free way for consumers to access content they want. Everyone else - particularly news media - hasn't gotten the hint yet. How to fix it? I think the situation needs to be fixed from two sides: First is obviously banking. There should absolutely be an international (!) instant banking network - I'm thinking about something like expanding SEPA Instant payments, but specialized on nano-transactions, and correspondingly low fees. Then, a bank issues auth tokens that allow a set budget of micropayments to users; their browsers then upon authentication (e.g. fingerprint or user's password) automatically emit a micropayment transaction - basically, the user visits a paywall site, an OS/browser dialog pops up that asks for confirmation to pay e.g. 10 cents to the New York Times, the user presses their finger on Touch ID, and a second later the NYT has their ten cents and I can read the article. The other side is content authors themselves. They absolutely need to get rid of the need to know everything about their customer and to lock them in. Provide good content and the people will come.
- etempleton 5y ago
  Written media hasn’t figured it out yet. Though NYTimes is trying to get there with their recent acquisitions. I would pay 10-15 bucks a month to access a lot of quality written content, but print charges more and is more limited in the amount of content you receive. And it feels like you should have access to everything when you are on the internet. Hitting a paywall when trying to read a 500 word article is a bad feeling.
  - mschuster91 5y ago
    The problem is, how to actually fund decent journalism? Quality journalism costs money, and personally I pay about 40€ in total a month for a selection of quality media. Crap journalism - and I'm not just talking about clickbait of the Buzzfeed style, but especially right-wing-leaning rags - in contrast are funded by dark or enemy government money, so they can publish their crap without needing paywalls... which leads to people drifting towards these for getting their news. Austria has experimented with a different system, in contrast: there, the government pays a ton of money in advertising, so newspapers are essentially free - but at the cost of corruption like the scandal that (thankfully) caused the demise of the former Chancellor Kurz.
perlgeek 5y ago
What are examples of good advertising then? I'm currently aware of one podcast (risky.biz) where I don't always the ads; they have, per episode, one interview with an advertiser, with the following features: * it's a different interview each episode * many of the interviews talk about actual interesting stuff. For example, a thread intelligence company talks about some recent trends in phishing and credential stuffing they observed, not primarily about their services. It's still good advertising for them. * I believe the host that he vets the advertisers and doesn't just let everyone sell crap products through his podcast Now that is a lot of effort both for the producer and for the advertiser, but that podcast has been running for several years, so it seems to work. --- The first problem is: producing a custom sponsored interview for a single podcast episode isn't sustainable for any small podcast. You really need something bigger to make it worthwhile. The second problem is, that is one example of Good Advertising. Maybe by thinking deeply about it, I'd come up with two more. Finding thousands of examples of Bad Advertising seems trivial. What can be done to shift that balance? I honestly don't know, the incentives seem to point towards mass-produced, annoying ads.
- cwkoss 5y ago
  Covid lockdowns shifted attitudes about wfh so significantly. I wonder what would happen to society if we had a month where all advertising stopped. People would find new ways to buy things, and the economy would continue in new adaptive ways. Would be really interesting to see what would happen after the prohibition was lifted.

mschuster91 5y ago

> People hate bad advertising, but they also hate paying for things. People hate having to put effort or risk into paying for things. Online payment was ridiculously blasted with friction even before PSD2 hit thanks to all the fraud going on, now it's even worse. Not to mention you can't just go and pay 10-50 cents to view a single online news article behind a paywall - the papers all want your personal data to upsell you, don't offer non-subscription models, and make bailing out of subscriptions ridiculously hard. And the credit card industry wants their cut on top, too, which makes micropayments even more expensive to offer. How did iTunes, Spotify and Netflix get so big and essentially killed piracy in their respective markets? They offered an easy, risk-free way for consumers to access content they want. Everyone else - particularly news media - hasn't gotten the hint yet. How to fix it? I think the situation needs to be fixed from two sides: First is obviously banking. There should absolutely be an international (!) instant banking network - I'm thinking about something like expanding SEPA Instant payments, but specialized on nano-transactions, and correspondingly low fees. Then, a bank issues auth tokens that allow a set budget of micropayments to users; their browsers then upon authentication (e.g. fingerprint or user's password) automatically emit a micropayment transaction - basically, the user visits a paywall site, an OS/browser dialog pops up that asks for confirmation to pay e.g. 10 cents to the New York Times, the user presses their finger on Touch ID, and a second later the NYT has their ten cents and I can read the article. The other side is content authors themselves. They absolutely need to get rid of the need to know everything about their customer and to lock them in. Provide good content and the people will come.

etempleton 5y ago
Written media hasn’t figured it out yet. Though NYTimes is trying to get there with their recent acquisitions. I would pay 10-15 bucks a month to access a lot of quality written content, but print charges more and is more limited in the amount of content you receive. And it feels like you should have access to everything when you are on the internet. Hitting a paywall when trying to read a 500 word article is a bad feeling.
- mschuster91 5y ago
  The problem is, how to actually fund decent journalism? Quality journalism costs money, and personally I pay about 40€ in total a month for a selection of quality media. Crap journalism - and I'm not just talking about clickbait of the Buzzfeed style, but especially right-wing-leaning rags - in contrast are funded by dark or enemy government money, so they can publish their crap without needing paywalls... which leads to people drifting towards these for getting their news. Austria has experimented with a different system, in contrast: there, the government pays a ton of money in advertising, so newspapers are essentially free - but at the cost of corruption like the scandal that (thankfully) caused the demise of the former Chancellor Kurz.

perlgeek 5y ago

What are examples of good advertising then? I'm currently aware of one podcast (risky.biz) where I don't always the ads; they have, per episode, one interview with an advertiser, with the following features: * it's a different interview each episode * many of the interviews talk about actual interesting stuff. For example, a thread intelligence company talks about some recent trends in phishing and credential stuffing they observed, not primarily about their services. It's still good advertising for them. * I believe the host that he vets the advertisers and doesn't just let everyone sell crap products through his podcast Now that is a lot of effort both for the producer and for the advertiser, but that podcast has been running for several years, so it seems to work. --- The first problem is: producing a custom sponsored interview for a single podcast episode isn't sustainable for any small podcast. You really need something bigger to make it worthwhile. The second problem is, that is one example of Good Advertising. Maybe by thinking deeply about it, I'd come up with two more. Finding thousands of examples of Bad Advertising seems trivial. What can be done to shift that balance? I honestly don't know, the incentives seem to point towards mass-produced, annoying ads.

cwkoss 5y ago
Covid lockdowns shifted attitudes about wfh so significantly. I wonder what would happen to society if we had a month where all advertising stopped. People would find new ways to buy things, and the economy would continue in new adaptive ways. Would be really interesting to see what would happen after the prohibition was lifted.