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Yeah. It’s like Google explaining how they help us by having “relevant ads”. The only ad that’s relevant to me is the one that I don’t see. I must be in a minor

Yeah. It’s like Google explaining how they help us by having “relevant ads”. The only ad that’s relevant to me is the one that I don’t see. I must be in a minority though, considered how successful ad businesses are.

dahart 5y ago
I think you’re in the majority with the rest of us. Like you I hate most ads, and I suspect most people do too. That said, one way to look at it from an advertiser’s perspective is that if you spend money on anything, then relevant ads must exist, and they will continue to try to find them. If they can’t find them, they’ll still continue to spam us with irrelevant ads because they still work a little; statistically, a few people will buy the product for every million people who see the ad. I spend money, and I even sometimes spend significant amounts of time trying to figure out what to buy when I need something I don’t know a lot about. I also spend far more time than I want to trying to ignore ads I don’t care about on the internet and YouTube, just like I used to with TV. Those are two separate time sucks, and I’d love to have ads at least be teaching me impartial information about whatever it is I’m shopping for, and help me figure out what I need. It would save me time if I could merge ad watching time with shopping research time. Google and advertisers would love that too. But the level of invasive privacy compromise that would bring would be a million times worse than the bad situation we already have, I’m not willing to accept it.
gumby 5y ago
Back when magazines were printed on paper there were whole genres of magazines that 95+% ads with essentially no articles at all. Fashion, and, in the 90s, computing were examples of this. There were lots of them on the newsstand. And “advertorial” is not a web-era idea; the travel, sports, entertainment etc sections of the newspaper, and most of local television news, looked like news but were essentially all paid content one way or another.

dahart 5y ago

I think you’re in the majority with the rest of us. Like you I hate most ads, and I suspect most people do too. That said, one way to look at it from an advertiser’s perspective is that if you spend money on anything, then relevant ads must exist, and they will continue to try to find them. If they can’t find them, they’ll still continue to spam us with irrelevant ads because they still work a little; statistically, a few people will buy the product for every million people who see the ad. I spend money, and I even sometimes spend significant amounts of time trying to figure out what to buy when I need something I don’t know a lot about. I also spend far more time than I want to trying to ignore ads I don’t care about on the internet and YouTube, just like I used to with TV. Those are two separate time sucks, and I’d love to have ads at least be teaching me impartial information about whatever it is I’m shopping for, and help me figure out what I need. It would save me time if I could merge ad watching time with shopping research time. Google and advertisers would love that too. But the level of invasive privacy compromise that would bring would be a million times worse than the bad situation we already have, I’m not willing to accept it.

gumby 5y ago

Back when magazines were printed on paper there were whole genres of magazines that 95+% ads with essentially no articles at all. Fashion, and, in the 90s, computing were examples of this. There were lots of them on the newsstand. And “advertorial” is not a web-era idea; the travel, sports, entertainment etc sections of the newspaper, and most of local television news, looked like news but were essentially all paid content one way or another.