5 ms·

This is very informative and you make many cogent observations. However, you don't even remotely address the point of the article, which, as far as I understand

by lkozma 15y ago

This is very informative and you make many cogent observations. However, you don't even remotely address the point of the article, which, as far as I understand it, is that something is fundamentally wrong if a child wants to learn about dinosaurs and he/she is lured away with addictive games. Even more so if this is considered the pinnacle of our combined capabilities and at the same time a hint of the future into which we are heading.

patio11 15y ago
It's a comment, not a debate. I'm not trying to crush raganwald's constructive and collect many finger snaps from the judges. I'm just trying to explain how Internet advertising works for a community which a) viscerally despises advertising, b) often dreams of working for an advertising company, and c) even if they don't work directly for the ad company will have their careers determined in large part by their ability to form an accurate mental model of how advertising actually works. To the limited extent that I disagree with raganwald about anything, I think that any mental model where "An ad for a BBC documentary about dinosaurs" sounds like a more attractive placement for this pageview than "generic remant inventory" economically is likely flawed. That mental model has not come to grips with the fact that the conversion math would suggest a click on that ad would be worth fractions of a hundredth of a penny to the BBC and cost several orders of magnitude more.
- lkozma 15y ago
  Patrick, your argument is flawless, but you've become a bit of a robot. There must be some reason why they don't put Marlboro ads in a lung cancer clinic or a Ballantine's ad in an alcohol rehab center. Surely they would be perfect choices for the well-defined audience that frequents those places and they would make perfect sense economically, more than whatever else they put on those walls. Someone might even come along and say, hey, as long as it pays for the heating, it's good for everyone, right? Also, I think you misrepresent Raganwald's point. I don't think he claims that economically a BBC ad would be better than an online game ad, he must be thinking along some other axis, along which it would rank higher.
  - defen 15y ago
    He's describing the behavior of a massive real-time international marketplace that's (wild-ass guess) 99% under algorithmic control. I don't see how you could avoid sounding like a robot if you wanted to accurately describe its high-level behavior.
  - fleitz 15y ago
    The reason there are no marlboro ads in lung cancer clinics is because it would generate massively bad PR, other than that it's a phenomenal idea. Especially for former smokers who now no longer have any risk factors from smoking. A lung cancer diagnosis is a perfect "smoke 'em if ya gotta em" moment.
  - tweak2live 15y ago
    OC does not misrepresent the point, he does not engage it, (those are distinct). In not engaging it, he provided tremendous value for everyone ITT. [Thanks, Patrick] However, if you want someone to bite - I will. Why bother engaging in moralizing if you don't care enough about your values to pay for them? Better yet, how much is your morality worth to you? "I know that this engine is driven by the money, and the money is in luring people into Google's social thingamajiggy instead of trying to sell someone a book or a course or even a BBC/Discover/National Geographic edutainment special on dinosaurs or natural history. But you know, the whole point of having values is that sometimes you don't do the most expedient thing or the most profitable thing or the easy thing. That’s what makes them values, you value them more then pecuniarum." Well, if Raganwald wishes to educate children, why not create a service that serves educational ads instead of selling add slots to the highest bidder? Because it wouldn't be able to compete with Google outside of some tiny niche. Clearly, society as a whole is not willing to pay for this moral value, namely educating children. It might be tempting to trivialize this by the way of "heartless businessmen" argument, but that would be misrepresenting the point. The point is - in a society where the only over-arching value is money, morality becomes a liability. One could argue that this is an inevitable state of human affairs due to $characteristic_of_human_nature. However, to me this seems to be more of an inevitable consequence of implementation of a universal means of exchange. Not everything boils down to money - true. But most things do. And most things will always be enough for some people. And the rest will ultimately have to follow. That, or find a clever way to monetize their "moral liabilities".
coldarchon 15y ago
You DO know that the type of ads is influenced more by your own browsing history than by the type of content? So if the kid looked for games on google previously then this ad will more likely show up. But if the kid used google to search for books on dinosaurs there might be a link to dinosaur books. I give you an example. Go to stepstone.com and browse for a specific job. Then go to thedailywh.at and find an ad of stepstone cycling through job offers of that kind you searched for. Go to ebay or dell and look for some products. Then go to the thedailywh.at again and see ads with similar products ..

by lkozma 15y ago

patio11 15y ago

It's a comment, not a debate. I'm not trying to crush raganwald's constructive and collect many finger snaps from the judges. I'm just trying to explain how Internet advertising works for a community which a) viscerally despises advertising, b) often dreams of working for an advertising company, and c) even if they don't work directly for the ad company will have their careers determined in large part by their ability to form an accurate mental model of how advertising actually works. To the limited extent that I disagree with raganwald about anything, I think that any mental model where "An ad for a BBC documentary about dinosaurs" sounds like a more attractive placement for this pageview than "generic remant inventory" economically is likely flawed. That mental model has not come to grips with the fact that the conversion math would suggest a click on that ad would be worth fractions of a hundredth of a penny to the BBC and cost several orders of magnitude more.

lkozma 15y ago
Patrick, your argument is flawless, but you've become a bit of a robot. There must be some reason why they don't put Marlboro ads in a lung cancer clinic or a Ballantine's ad in an alcohol rehab center. Surely they would be perfect choices for the well-defined audience that frequents those places and they would make perfect sense economically, more than whatever else they put on those walls. Someone might even come along and say, hey, as long as it pays for the heating, it's good for everyone, right? Also, I think you misrepresent Raganwald's point. I don't think he claims that economically a BBC ad would be better than an online game ad, he must be thinking along some other axis, along which it would rank higher.
- defen 15y ago
  He's describing the behavior of a massive real-time international marketplace that's (wild-ass guess) 99% under algorithmic control. I don't see how you could avoid sounding like a robot if you wanted to accurately describe its high-level behavior.
- fleitz 15y ago
  The reason there are no marlboro ads in lung cancer clinics is because it would generate massively bad PR, other than that it's a phenomenal idea. Especially for former smokers who now no longer have any risk factors from smoking. A lung cancer diagnosis is a perfect "smoke 'em if ya gotta em" moment.
- tweak2live 15y ago
  OC does not misrepresent the point, he does not engage it, (those are distinct). In not engaging it, he provided tremendous value for everyone ITT. [Thanks, Patrick] However, if you want someone to bite - I will. Why bother engaging in moralizing if you don't care enough about your values to pay for them? Better yet, how much is your morality worth to you? "I know that this engine is driven by the money, and the money is in luring people into Google's social thingamajiggy instead of trying to sell someone a book or a course or even a BBC/Discover/National Geographic edutainment special on dinosaurs or natural history. But you know, the whole point of having values is that sometimes you don't do the most expedient thing or the most profitable thing or the easy thing. That’s what makes them values, you value them more then pecuniarum." Well, if Raganwald wishes to educate children, why not create a service that serves educational ads instead of selling add slots to the highest bidder? Because it wouldn't be able to compete with Google outside of some tiny niche. Clearly, society as a whole is not willing to pay for this moral value, namely educating children. It might be tempting to trivialize this by the way of "heartless businessmen" argument, but that would be misrepresenting the point. The point is - in a society where the only over-arching value is money, morality becomes a liability. One could argue that this is an inevitable state of human affairs due to $characteristic_of_human_nature. However, to me this seems to be more of an inevitable consequence of implementation of a universal means of exchange. Not everything boils down to money - true. But most things do. And most things will always be enough for some people. And the rest will ultimately have to follow. That, or find a clever way to monetize their "moral liabilities".

coldarchon 15y ago

You DO know that the type of ads is influenced more by your own browsing history than by the type of content? So if the kid looked for games on google previously then this ad will more likely show up. But if the kid used google to search for books on dinosaurs there might be a link to dinosaur books. I give you an example. Go to stepstone.com and browse for a specific job. Then go to thedailywh.at and find an ad of stepstone cycling through job offers of that kind you searched for. Go to ebay or dell and look for some products. Then go to the thedailywh.at again and see ads with similar products ..