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Online advertising industry is at the point of negative externality. If everyone is blasting ads to users, the effectiveness of each ad goes down, and thus an

by quanto 3y ago

Online advertising industry is at the point of negative externality. If everyone is blasting ads to users, the effectiveness of each ad goes down, and thus an advertiser need to blast even more ads. All this is at decreased quality of user experience and increased resource serving ads (screen real estate, servers, developer hours) while the economic efficiency (matching willing sellers and buyers) is no longer increased. In other words, between online advertisers, it is a zero sum game -- there are only so many willing buyers' eyeball-hours. It's difficult to imagine how to end this negative (externality) spiral. A legal ban on online ads could reduce drastically, but that is throwing the poor baby out with the bathwater. I wonder if something like phantom clicking ads could tip the economic scale for advertisers such that it is no longer cost effective for them to blast ads at people. There is a serious game theoretic optimization going on in this trillion-dollar field (and I worked in this field before) and a novel tech or paradigm can change the game completely.

beachy 3y ago
> if everyone is blasting ads to users, the effectiveness of each ad goes down, and thus an advertiser need to blast even more ads. Things have really gone full circle now. If I visit a site (happens rarely) that has a clean design and puts all the ads into a plain column down one side of the page, I'm pretty sure I'm more likely to look at those ads than I am on the typical crappy site where I need to swat away ads like blowflies off a horse turd just to begin to see the underlying content.
- lioeters 3y ago
  > swat away ads like blowflies off a horse turd Brilliant.
dooglius 3y ago
Advertising is not zero sum because a company can choose to keep money rather than pay for a marginal ad, which may be more profitable. Microeconomics indicates that increased per-unit costs to suppliers (advertisers) decreases quantity sold. I'm not sure I understand your argument for why this would not apply. Although, I will note that giving advertisers disinformation resulting from adnauseam loads is probably a much more significant effect than the cost of serving additional bytes.

by quanto 3y ago

beachy 3y ago

> if everyone is blasting ads to users, the effectiveness of each ad goes down, and thus an advertiser need to blast even more ads. Things have really gone full circle now. If I visit a site (happens rarely) that has a clean design and puts all the ads into a plain column down one side of the page, I'm pretty sure I'm more likely to look at those ads than I am on the typical crappy site where I need to swat away ads like blowflies off a horse turd just to begin to see the underlying content.

lioeters 3y ago
> swat away ads like blowflies off a horse turd Brilliant.

dooglius 3y ago

Advertising is not zero sum because a company can choose to keep money rather than pay for a marginal ad, which may be more profitable. Microeconomics indicates that increased per-unit costs to suppliers (advertisers) decreases quantity sold. I'm not sure I understand your argument for why this would not apply. Although, I will note that giving advertisers disinformation resulting from adnauseam loads is probably a much more significant effect than the cost of serving additional bytes.