4 ms·
My hope is that advertising, as an industry, dies (or morphs) sooner rather than later. At best, it is visual pollution, and at worst employs subtle forms of m
by codex 14y ago
My hope is that advertising, as an industry, dies (or morphs) sooner rather than later.
At best, it is visual pollution, and at worst employs subtle forms of mind control to encourage people to do what the advertiser wants. No thank you!
However, it is useful: it helps disemenate information. Didn't know about the all new BMW i3 electric car? Thanks to some ad, now you do. Most of the time you don't care, but when you do care, it can be useful.
The Internet is much better at dissemanting relevant information than advertising, however. Why should I watch an ad for a movie if rottentomatoes.com has all the info I need? Why look at car ads when websites will happily tell me the pros and cons of various cars? My hope is that eventually the best products and services for me will be peer identified an given to me when I need them. Ads will no longer be necessary. The peer review process must be paid for somehow; manufacturers may end up footing the bill, or perhaps ads from unpopular products will; either way I cannot wait for this garbage/propaganda called advertising to vanish from the earth.
- intellegacy 14y agoWhat happens to all the newspapers/ news sites that run on ads? Advertising money has allowed the public access to non-subscription news on the web for some time now. If you take all that money away, doesn't the free content mostly dry up?
- redwood 14y agoThat's where we NEED to move toward some easier way of frictionless micro-transactions that are secure, safe, and ubiquitous... how to do it is unclear, but perhaps a mega-site like Facebook could create such a thing.
- intellegacy 14y agoIf you are referring to micro-transactions whereby readers pay content authors, tipjoy and others have already tried the "e-tip" model and failed. Also, paypal's donate feature has existed for some time now but it doesn't seem to be able to replace ads. If anybody could implement the safe, seamless microtransaction model I'd think it'd be paypal as they have the existing infrastructure already. Either they have overlooked it or they've decided that the model wouldn't work.
- lmm 14y agoMany good ideas have to be tried a few times before someone gets them right. Witness Sun's "network computer" ideas in the '90s. As far as I can tell Flattr is doing well and gradually growing.
- snapdata 14y agoPaypal? No. I just signed up for an account using my debit card. Instantly, my account is suspicious. They then demand access to my bank accounts and scans of my social security card, birth certificate, photo ID, etc. No thank you.
- lmm 14y agoThere is more than enough will to write. If newspapers are providing anything more valuable than amateur bloggers, people will start paying for it. If not, then I guess their time has come.
- _delirium 14y agoI don't think internet advertising ever has actually funded that much news. For the 1990s and 2000s, non-subscription news on the web was mostly cross-subsidized by print subscriptions. Taken purely as an online operation, sites like wsj.com and nytimes.com didn't make nearly enough money from ads to pay for the cost of their reporting. It's only recently that newspapers seem to be trying to make the online business actually fund the reporting, and the NYTimes, at least, is going back to a quasi-subscription model to try to make that work. Now there are some sites that are purely ad-supported, but imo most of them don't produce particularly high-quality news. Stuff like, say, TechCrunch or Gawker.
- malandrew 14y agoFree content is not always necessarily honest content, especially at scale. Large sites aren't charities, but a personal blog often can be. Free content will never dry up. Free content from organizations that produce at scale will dry up.