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For the record, I 100% agree with you, and still I am left with this question: How do I, as a producer of a product worth money, find customers for my product w

by chimi 14y ago

For the record, I 100% agree with you, and still I am left with this question: How do I, as a producer of a product worth money, find customers for my product without contributing to the advertising system I loathe for all the reasons you mention? I have a product and there are people out there who want it. How do I connect the two in an ethical and moral way that doesn't make the world worse?

niggler 14y ago
I mentioned a solution in the discussion over PG and install monetizer. Advertising as a whole isn't bad but advertise where it makes sense (like a relevant trade conference or through word of mouth or in places that people would actually look). http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5094295 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5094295
- eevilspock 14y ago
  I agree with you in principle, but in practice its not always this simple. With the deluge of products of varying quality, its hard to be found even when your product is best. Word of mouth works over the long run, but a fledgling business might not survive long enough. On the other hand, it's easier and easier to bootstrap these days, paying only for the scale you actually need, thereby supporting growth curves with low early slopes that accelerate later. Back in the day when we lived in small enough communities, word of mouth was entirely sufficient. In fact advertising would have backfired if it contradicted community knowledge and unnecessary if it agreed. But word of mouth doesn't scale without some help. That's where good collaborative filtering comes in. For example Yelp surfaces mom-and-pop hole-in-the-wall gems and buries crap. Yelp's two major problem is that it is ad supported and therefor does not always putting user's interests first, and their collaborative filtering does not understand that people have different tastes. If all those smart brains that are currently applied to ad revenue and ad conversion optimization were applied to collaborative filtering, I'm convinced we'd find an honest way to connect consumers to producers. Ads would then become as irrelevant as they would in a small village.
eevilspock 14y ago
Are you asking whether you should advertise your product, whether it should be ad supported, or both?

by chimi 14y ago

niggler 14y ago

I mentioned a solution in the discussion over PG and install monetizer. Advertising as a whole isn't bad but advertise where it makes sense (like a relevant trade conference or through word of mouth or in places that people would actually look). http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5094295 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5094295

eevilspock 14y ago
I agree with you in principle, but in practice its not always this simple. With the deluge of products of varying quality, its hard to be found even when your product is best. Word of mouth works over the long run, but a fledgling business might not survive long enough. On the other hand, it's easier and easier to bootstrap these days, paying only for the scale you actually need, thereby supporting growth curves with low early slopes that accelerate later. Back in the day when we lived in small enough communities, word of mouth was entirely sufficient. In fact advertising would have backfired if it contradicted community knowledge and unnecessary if it agreed. But word of mouth doesn't scale without some help. That's where good collaborative filtering comes in. For example Yelp surfaces mom-and-pop hole-in-the-wall gems and buries crap. Yelp's two major problem is that it is ad supported and therefor does not always putting user's interests first, and their collaborative filtering does not understand that people have different tastes. If all those smart brains that are currently applied to ad revenue and ad conversion optimization were applied to collaborative filtering, I'm convinced we'd find an honest way to connect consumers to producers. Ads would then become as irrelevant as they would in a small village.

eevilspock 14y ago

Are you asking whether you should advertise your product, whether it should be ad supported, or both?