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Advertising is so completely intertwined with everyday life, it’s impossible to block them. The worst kind of ads, IMO, are the non-intrusive, organic looking a

Advertising is so completely intertwined with everyday life, it’s impossible to block them. The worst kind of ads, IMO, are the non-intrusive, organic looking articles / news stories placed there by PR. The ultimate brainwash. Most of HN and Reddit content is advertisement whether you realize or not. Front page CNN, outside of weather events and sports, it’s closing in on 100%.

bee_rider 3y ago
What do you mean by “HN and Reddit content?” I think most of the people here are real (not ad bots) and most of the comments are just their opinions. I mean you can sometimes see folks who are clearly either super-fans or actual paid shills, but if they were the majority, I think people would give up on the sites.
- bombcar 3y ago
  Some of the HN content is explicitly advertising (the posts you see you can't comment on) but some percentage of the "native/organic" content posts are just advertising - which may not be bad mind you, I'd much rather have company X put $Yk dollars into well written posts that are actually useful than have them buy a stadium. But other are pretty thinly veiled, and some commenters are pretty obviously pushing something. It gets cleaned up decently well.
- 93po 3y ago
  It's wild how often I click the comments on a reddit post and there's a link to buy something within the first full screen display of comments. Most recently it was some random dish towel in the background of a staged couples-prank video.
ltbarcly3 3y ago
I find product placement and 'organic' ads annoying, but I don't think they are as effective as regular old advertisements. If they were, the fraction of the advertising budget would be heavily shifted towards 'product placement' and away from '30 second pre-roll ads' and banner ads.
- bombcar 3y ago
  Advertisers are addicted to what they can measure, you can measure 30 second pre-roll ads and you can measure click-throughs, but you can't really measure how many Nikes sold because Forrest Gump wore them.
mgbmtl 3y ago
Legislation can be surprisingly efficient, even if not 100% efficient. There's a borough in my city that decided to ban big billboards. Everyone hated them, they were ugly and everywhere. The advertising lobby sued, it went all the way to the supreme court of Canada, and the city won: advertising was declared a form of visual pollution and therefore banning them was an acceptable infringement to free speech (https://www.scc-csc.ca/case-dossier/info/sum-som-eng.aspx?cas=38911 https://www.scc-csc.ca/case-dossier/info/sum-som-eng.aspx?ca...). Another example is forcing influencers to disclose when content is sponsored (and apply local advertising laws). If influencers receive money, they are therefore freelancers (in most jurisdictions) and subject to many laws. I have seen them enforced in my jurisdiction.
- bombcar 3y ago
  You can also sidestep 90% of the advertising problem without infringing on actual speech by doing something like saying that "billboard-like things on a property can only be erected by the property owner, and cannot receive remuneration for said erection". Then the local guy can print "SHERIFF JOE SUCKS" on his fence without repercussions but large billboards are mostly banned. You still have the gas station sign issue, but that's separate.
uoaei 3y ago
This is the business model of Business Insider, CNBC, MIT Tech Review, etc. There are many more we could list. Then there's the obvious manufacturing-consent style truthmaking like you see in The Economist, Financial Times, NYT, WaPo, etc. I've found immense value in studying media criticism to improve my literacy of what is "genuine" journalism (of course still colored by someone's ideology, just maybe not one so hamfistedly handed down from above) and advertising dressed up as "news" or conveniently shaped and styled narratives that mislead the public into believing something that will only be true if enough people believe in it.
kuratkull 3y ago
If HN front page is mostly advertisement then that happens to be the only kind of advertisement I'm interested in. Otherwise I'm served well by uBlock origin, uMatrix and privacy badger - zero "regular" ads.
chrismorgan 3y ago
> The worst kind of ads, IMO, are the non-intrusive, organic looking articles / news stories placed there by PR. I live out in the country. I don’t do TV, radio, newspaper¹ (including even general news websites—anything that’s important, I’ll probably hear about from siblings or parents). I don’t use any software with anything like banner ads. As for things like billboards, I know of one pair of billboards on the sides of a fish-and-chips shop in a town 40km away (Stawell)², one traffic safety billboard in a town 45km away (Avoca), a few in Ballarat, around 110km away, and finally loads in the big city 200–260+ km away, Melbourne. Occasionally (increasingly rarely) I go down to Melbourne, where I grew up until I moved away six years ago. I hate it more and more each time I go down there, partly for things like traffic³, but much more for things trying to steal my attention, billboards, animated billboards, bright billboards, bright lights, flashing lights, &c. And this stuff has certainly got significantly worse in the last decade (I’ve written details a couple of other times here on HN). Very rarely (like, once every year or two) I get exposed to a television in any form. I don’t know how people can tolerate them, the advertisements are just awful. If you forced me to sit down and look at them, I expect I would feel sick within a few minutes. And apart from a probable degree of autism⁴, there’s nothing particularly abnormal about me physiologically, save that I have become unaccustomed to these assaults upon the senses. Very occasionally, I observe people using the web without an ad blocker, or use some mobile app (e.g. YouTube) and get exposed to ads thereby. Ugh. Very unpleasant stuff. So your organic-looking paid articles and such, I don’t experience very much of them; just a few here on HN, and occasionally when I look at a mainstream news site for some weird reason, and a few sponsored articles from CSS-Tricks or Smashing Magazine which I’ll almost certainly immediately skip in my feed reader. But from the exposure I do get, I know that I hate billboards and their digital equivalents far, far more. —⁂— ¹ The local paper is called The Weekly Advertiser. I’ve measured it a few times, and it’s consistently been about 75% ads by surface area. ² I confess I’ve been tempted to go in and ask why and how they started doing it, and how much money they make out of it, out of sheer curiosity. ³ If I drive the 40km to Stawell, I might encounter fewer than a dozen vehicles. ⁴ Note that I’m here using present definitions of autism, which have shifted pretty extremely from what the word meant fifty years ago, when it strongly suggested low function (that is, that you really were disabled by it). In my experience, someone under the age of, say, thirty, will probably be willing to accept the word roughly how it’s used diagnostically now, while people over fifty will probably understand it in the older, more extreme, more probably debilitating sense. Nowadays, most of my family could probably get a formal diagnosis without too much difficulty, but none of us see anything to be gained by the endeavour. Funny fact, I believe this is the first time I’ve ever used the word “autism” online.

bee_rider 3y ago

What do you mean by “HN and Reddit content?” I think most of the people here are real (not ad bots) and most of the comments are just their opinions. I mean you can sometimes see folks who are clearly either super-fans or actual paid shills, but if they were the majority, I think people would give up on the sites.

bombcar 3y ago
Some of the HN content is explicitly advertising (the posts you see you can't comment on) but some percentage of the "native/organic" content posts are just advertising - which may not be bad mind you, I'd much rather have company X put $Yk dollars into well written posts that are actually useful than have them buy a stadium. But other are pretty thinly veiled, and some commenters are pretty obviously pushing something. It gets cleaned up decently well.
93po 3y ago
It's wild how often I click the comments on a reddit post and there's a link to buy something within the first full screen display of comments. Most recently it was some random dish towel in the background of a staged couples-prank video.

ltbarcly3 3y ago

I find product placement and 'organic' ads annoying, but I don't think they are as effective as regular old advertisements. If they were, the fraction of the advertising budget would be heavily shifted towards 'product placement' and away from '30 second pre-roll ads' and banner ads.

bombcar 3y ago
Advertisers are addicted to what they can measure, you can measure 30 second pre-roll ads and you can measure click-throughs, but you can't really measure how many Nikes sold because Forrest Gump wore them.

mgbmtl 3y ago

Legislation can be surprisingly efficient, even if not 100% efficient. There's a borough in my city that decided to ban big billboards. Everyone hated them, they were ugly and everywhere. The advertising lobby sued, it went all the way to the supreme court of Canada, and the city won: advertising was declared a form of visual pollution and therefore banning them was an acceptable infringement to free speech (https://www.scc-csc.ca/case-dossier/info/sum-som-eng.aspx?cas=38911 https://www.scc-csc.ca/case-dossier/info/sum-som-eng.aspx?ca...). Another example is forcing influencers to disclose when content is sponsored (and apply local advertising laws). If influencers receive money, they are therefore freelancers (in most jurisdictions) and subject to many laws. I have seen them enforced in my jurisdiction.

bombcar 3y ago
You can also sidestep 90% of the advertising problem without infringing on actual speech by doing something like saying that "billboard-like things on a property can only be erected by the property owner, and cannot receive remuneration for said erection". Then the local guy can print "SHERIFF JOE SUCKS" on his fence without repercussions but large billboards are mostly banned. You still have the gas station sign issue, but that's separate.

uoaei 3y ago

This is the business model of Business Insider, CNBC, MIT Tech Review, etc. There are many more we could list. Then there's the obvious manufacturing-consent style truthmaking like you see in The Economist, Financial Times, NYT, WaPo, etc. I've found immense value in studying media criticism to improve my literacy of what is "genuine" journalism (of course still colored by someone's ideology, just maybe not one so hamfistedly handed down from above) and advertising dressed up as "news" or conveniently shaped and styled narratives that mislead the public into believing something that will only be true if enough people believe in it.

kuratkull 3y ago

If HN front page is mostly advertisement then that happens to be the only kind of advertisement I'm interested in. Otherwise I'm served well by uBlock origin, uMatrix and privacy badger - zero "regular" ads.

chrismorgan 3y ago

> The worst kind of ads, IMO, are the non-intrusive, organic looking articles / news stories placed there by PR. I live out in the country. I don’t do TV, radio, newspaper¹ (including even general news websites—anything that’s important, I’ll probably hear about from siblings or parents). I don’t use any software with anything like banner ads. As for things like billboards, I know of one pair of billboards on the sides of a fish-and-chips shop in a town 40km away (Stawell)², one traffic safety billboard in a town 45km away (Avoca), a few in Ballarat, around 110km away, and finally loads in the big city 200–260+ km away, Melbourne. Occasionally (increasingly rarely) I go down to Melbourne, where I grew up until I moved away six years ago. I hate it more and more each time I go down there, partly for things like traffic³, but much more for things trying to steal my attention, billboards, animated billboards, bright billboards, bright lights, flashing lights, &c. And this stuff has certainly got significantly worse in the last decade (I’ve written details a couple of other times here on HN). Very rarely (like, once every year or two) I get exposed to a television in any form. I don’t know how people can tolerate them, the advertisements are just awful. If you forced me to sit down and look at them, I expect I would feel sick within a few minutes. And apart from a probable degree of autism⁴, there’s nothing particularly abnormal about me physiologically, save that I have become unaccustomed to these assaults upon the senses. Very occasionally, I observe people using the web without an ad blocker, or use some mobile app (e.g. YouTube) and get exposed to ads thereby. Ugh. Very unpleasant stuff. So your organic-looking paid articles and such, I don’t experience very much of them; just a few here on HN, and occasionally when I look at a mainstream news site for some weird reason, and a few sponsored articles from CSS-Tricks or Smashing Magazine which I’ll almost certainly immediately skip in my feed reader. But from the exposure I do get, I know that I hate billboards and their digital equivalents far, far more. —⁂— ¹ The local paper is called The Weekly Advertiser. I’ve measured it a few times, and it’s consistently been about 75% ads by surface area. ² I confess I’ve been tempted to go in and ask why and how they started doing it, and how much money they make out of it, out of sheer curiosity. ³ If I drive the 40km to Stawell, I might encounter fewer than a dozen vehicles. ⁴ Note that I’m here using present definitions of autism, which have shifted pretty extremely from what the word meant fifty years ago, when it strongly suggested low function (that is, that you really were disabled by it). In my experience, someone under the age of, say, thirty, will probably be willing to accept the word roughly how it’s used diagnostically now, while people over fifty will probably understand it in the older, more extreme, more probably debilitating sense. Nowadays, most of my family could probably get a formal diagnosis without too much difficulty, but none of us see anything to be gained by the endeavour. Funny fact, I believe this is the first time I’ve ever used the word “autism” online.