5 ms·

Or ads, as Jeff Hammerbacher said better: "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks."

• twiceaday 13y ago
  Somebody has to pay the bills for self driving cars and fancy eye-wear.
  • jbjohns 13y ago
    Ads can't really be that "somebody". If everything is paid for by ads, what exactly are those ads advertising?
    • twiceaday 13y ago
      I thought we were talking about Google.
• RWeaver 13y ago
  Unless you think of a dynamic ad market as an efficient market signals system critical to the economy. Ie get the most interesting market messages to the right people, while not bothering the rest. Not that I do anything related to advertising, but when done intelligently it can actually be a pretty important.
  • Wilya 13y ago
    The "while not bothering the rest" part effectively doesn't work, though. People who will never buy anything from an ad in their lives still get ads served to them, because the cost of serving ads is roughly zero. The facts that ads are paid per click and not per impression creates more ad impressions, not more efficient ones.
    • rlanday 13y ago
      I think there are a lot of people who claim to not be influenced by advertising but actually are. Just because you’re not clicking on ads doesn’t mean they’re not succeeding at influencing your behavior: http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/newswire/2009/is-the-ad-biz-through-with-click-through.html http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/newswire/2009/is-the-ad-biz-thr...
• nextweek2 13y ago
  Another way to look at it is that the best minds are thinking about how to optimise capitalism. They are doing that and in effect we are all getting a better more efficient society. Plus the best minds aren't working on world peace because people vote for people with the best hair to do that job.
  • nitrogen 13y ago
    I struggle to believe that our current models of advertising can in any way lead to overall societal efficiency. We can do much better.
  • 6d0debc071 13y ago
    That only really makes sense if you think that ads are providing information that's relevant to people's best interests and is going to be fed into fairly rational decision making, rather than exploiting cognitive biases as an attack vector.
  • eli_gottlieb 13y ago
    Another way to look at it is that the best minds are thinking about how to optimise capitalism. If this is true, we should all be mortally terrified and running around like headless chickens, screaming to the heavens to save us.