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[EDIT: Two immediate downvotes and neither has the courage to explain why. Wow. Is the inconvenient truth hitting to close to home?] Relying on ad revenue is a

[EDIT: Two immediate downvotes and neither has the courage to explain why. Wow. Is the inconvenient truth hitting to close to home?] Relying on ad revenue is a moral failing. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need. – Tyler Durden, Fight Club Anyone who is truly honest with themselves will admit that 90 to 99% of ads deceive and manipulate people into consuming a product[1]. The rationalization that allowing ads allows you to give your product free to users is a self-serving shame-allaying delusion[2]. [1] Even an ad that tells no outright lie is lying if it is selectively tells a partial truth. The moral test is whether you sell that product with the same pitch to a friend who does not have money to blow. Would you leave out the cons of your product and the pros of a competing one? Would you use psychological tricks to convince your friend she needs it, even though in honesty you know she doesn't? [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7485773 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7485773

thatthatis 12y ago
"All ads are manipulation" is one way of looking at it. Another way of looking at it is: ads are a mechanism to overcome information shortages. Let's say you invent a shoe that makes back pain go away. How do you get information out about it? - you can tell everyone you know and hope they tell others (word of mouth) - you can pursue PR stories Or - you can advertise Let's assume these are the greatest shoes in the world and that everyone who tries them loves them. Word of mouth will work eventually, but it'll take 5-50 years for everyone who wants the shoes to hear about them. The reason you're getting downvoted is that "ads are manipulation" requires a "consumer as victim" view of the world. Your view sounds nice to angsty teens, and has a kernel of truth, but fails to hold up to the "anyone who is honest" and 90-99% claims. Remember that government programs to provide health insurance to poor children spend a significant amount of money on advertising to make sure people who are benefited by the program know it exists. I drive past CHIP billboards all the time.
- toomuchtodo 12y ago
  In keeping with your shoe analogy, Vibram was just sued for $3.75 million in lying regarding this finger shoes: http://www.csmonitor.com/Business/Saving-Money/2014/0512/FiveFinger-shoes-owner-Come-get-your-refund http://www.csmonitor.com/Business/Saving-Money/2014/0512/Fiv...
  - thatthatis 12y ago
    Yes, that is a tree. I was talking about the forest.
- eevilspock 12y ago
  As you said to toomuchtodo, I think you are missing the forest for the trees. "Ads are a mechanism to overcome information shortages" when honest, but when dishonest they are a mechanism for inferior products to overcome good products and unnecessary products to manipulate people into buying what they don't need. So what proportion of ads do you think are the former, and what proportion the latter? Maybe you're being honest about your shoes (which still doesn't mean you're right), but what about all the others? What about the big established shoe-makers? So easy for them to claim the same thing, and you won't be able to compete with their large marketing budgets. That's fixed by word-of-mouth? No, you already dismissed that mechanism. I think most people will agree with me that at least 90% of ads are dishonest on some level. Even if it were only 70%, ads simply replace the information shortage problem with an overwhelming misinformation problem. The only reason the government needed to spend so much money on advertising the health programs for children is because we've become a society inundated with misinformation (Obama Care is evil!) and news programs that focus on celebrity gossip and missing jetliners instead of truly useful public information (because ratings drive ad revenue). If you can't fight 'em, join 'em. If it weren't for the ad-driven information ecology we have today, there would be much better ways for the government to get that out. For one, it's what the news is supposed to do (as a journalistic duty, not to increase Nielsen ratings/page views to increase ad revenue). > The reason you're getting downvoted is that "ads are manipulation" requires a "consumer as victim" view of the world. Your view sounds nice to angsty teens, and has a kernel of truth, but fails to hold up to the "anyone who is honest" and 90-99% claims. If you in your experience (I'm assuming you're not young) don't see that at least 90% of ads (be it for products or political candidates) are misleading at best, then it's unlikely anything I say will convince you.
  - thatthatis 12y ago
    No, most ads I see have a product they are selling that they present in a positive but truthful light. I don't expect a company to pay for air time to tell me why I wouldn't want to buy their product. If you're going to hold ads to the standard of complete and total disclosure about a product, without even omissions or the possibility for misunderstanding, then 99.99% of all human communication is misleading. And as much as I like parallelism, your assertion that I'm missing the forest is baseless. I've talked only about the general terms. It's fine to disagree with me, just get your facts tight so we can have a productive discussion. If anything you seem to be arguing that I'm missing the forest for discussing the theoretical biosphere.
patio11 12y ago
Anyone who is truly honest with themselves will admit that 90 to 99% of ads deceive and manipulate people into consuming a product My most effective ad incoming, prepare for the perfidy. Make Bingo Cards Quickly Create word bingo to fit any theme. Try now, no download required! www.BingoCardCreator.com It is for a SaaS application which makes word bingo cards. Can you suggest how the ad is deceptive and/or manipulative? If it helps, I'll supply context: it is almost guaranteed to show on pages which talk about making bingo games in an elementary school (or similar) setting. I spent about $8k last year showing this to ~4 million teachers, homemakers, event planners, and other people interested in topics like Halloween bingo. (A particular thing that it does.) This resulted roughly 80,000 of them visiting a landing page which offered them free bingo cards for their email address. Roughly 20,000 of them took me up on that. Somewhere around 500 of those 20k decided they liked their free bingo cards so much they wanted to pay for the product which I sell. I have a pretty good idea of where that $8k ended up. Approximately $3k of it subsidizes operations at Google, a company which you may have heard of. The other $5k subsidizes content creation at a few thousand sites across the Internet. Some of them are honestly not net value providers. Many of them are. One of my most successful ad placements, for example, is on a hobbyist site created by a teacher and her husband. It offers many free printable activities and is ad supported. It's been lovingly maintained since the late 90s or so. My rough approximation of their annual ad revenue is "it would make for a pretty nice teacher's pension in any state." It is very not obvious for me that anyone would be better off if that team decided to take down their site to avoid the moral impurity of advertising. Their users would lose access to many useful, free printable activities. I'd lose access to a large group of great prospects for my product. Many teachers would fail at their goal of playing classroom bingo with their students tomorrow. Their kids would be sad.
- mendelk 12y ago
  I don't see anything wrong with this type of advertising and I appreciate where you're coming from. But, ignoring the issue whether most ads are like this or hyper-tuned to psychologically trick you into consuming goods you can't afford, there seems to be another issue here, separate from the parent. The advertising industry seems to be the biggest pushers of big-data collect-all-you-can-because-you-may-need-it-someday. This automatically erodes privacy for everyone. For you to have reached that many teachers on such a budget, I assume all this collected data helped immensely, but at what cost? I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on this.
dkrich 12y ago
Apart from the counterarguments already cited, this seems very one-sided. You don't seem to apply any blame when it comes to the customers to whom the ads are shown (or apparently deceiving). They choose to purchase from advertisers and ignore en masse most any product that isn't advertised in some way. It's fairly obvious that they want to buy things and they want a certain kind of advertising that leads them to buy those things. What you seem to be arguing for is a place where people just walk around and look for stuff they need/want and if they ask "Where can I buy this thing I need?" for the manufacturer to stare blankly and shrug.
WoodenChair 12y ago
Manipulating people into buying a product is called "sales." It's not necessarily a bad thing. If you truly believe in your product and in your heart believe it's the best solution for the problem it solves, you do not have to be deceitful in selling it. Your argument requires one to believe that advertisement is immoral. One could easily make another argument that selling anything for money that could be given away for free with ads hurts the poor who then are denied access. It wouldn't be true, but it would be built on just as much of a foundation (read none) as yours. Show me some strong statistical studies showing that "90 to 99% of ads" are deceitful. I've watched a lot of ads. I don't think that number's even close to correct. Slick? Sure. Deceitful is a strong word.
ZenPro 12y ago
I doubt Tyler Durden would spend a lot of time on Hacker News railing against corporate culture. HN is subsidised by a pure market economy entrepreneurial construct- a construct in which advertising has a firm place at the table. It is very likely the antithesis of Tyler Durden.

thatthatis 12y ago

"All ads are manipulation" is one way of looking at it. Another way of looking at it is: ads are a mechanism to overcome information shortages. Let's say you invent a shoe that makes back pain go away. How do you get information out about it? - you can tell everyone you know and hope they tell others (word of mouth) - you can pursue PR stories Or - you can advertise Let's assume these are the greatest shoes in the world and that everyone who tries them loves them. Word of mouth will work eventually, but it'll take 5-50 years for everyone who wants the shoes to hear about them. The reason you're getting downvoted is that "ads are manipulation" requires a "consumer as victim" view of the world. Your view sounds nice to angsty teens, and has a kernel of truth, but fails to hold up to the "anyone who is honest" and 90-99% claims. Remember that government programs to provide health insurance to poor children spend a significant amount of money on advertising to make sure people who are benefited by the program know it exists. I drive past CHIP billboards all the time.

toomuchtodo 12y ago
In keeping with your shoe analogy, Vibram was just sued for $3.75 million in lying regarding this finger shoes: http://www.csmonitor.com/Business/Saving-Money/2014/0512/FiveFinger-shoes-owner-Come-get-your-refund http://www.csmonitor.com/Business/Saving-Money/2014/0512/Fiv...
- thatthatis 12y ago
  Yes, that is a tree. I was talking about the forest.
eevilspock 12y ago
As you said to toomuchtodo, I think you are missing the forest for the trees. "Ads are a mechanism to overcome information shortages" when honest, but when dishonest they are a mechanism for inferior products to overcome good products and unnecessary products to manipulate people into buying what they don't need. So what proportion of ads do you think are the former, and what proportion the latter? Maybe you're being honest about your shoes (which still doesn't mean you're right), but what about all the others? What about the big established shoe-makers? So easy for them to claim the same thing, and you won't be able to compete with their large marketing budgets. That's fixed by word-of-mouth? No, you already dismissed that mechanism. I think most people will agree with me that at least 90% of ads are dishonest on some level. Even if it were only 70%, ads simply replace the information shortage problem with an overwhelming misinformation problem. The only reason the government needed to spend so much money on advertising the health programs for children is because we've become a society inundated with misinformation (Obama Care is evil!) and news programs that focus on celebrity gossip and missing jetliners instead of truly useful public information (because ratings drive ad revenue). If you can't fight 'em, join 'em. If it weren't for the ad-driven information ecology we have today, there would be much better ways for the government to get that out. For one, it's what the news is supposed to do (as a journalistic duty, not to increase Nielsen ratings/page views to increase ad revenue). > The reason you're getting downvoted is that "ads are manipulation" requires a "consumer as victim" view of the world. Your view sounds nice to angsty teens, and has a kernel of truth, but fails to hold up to the "anyone who is honest" and 90-99% claims. If you in your experience (I'm assuming you're not young) don't see that at least 90% of ads (be it for products or political candidates) are misleading at best, then it's unlikely anything I say will convince you.
- thatthatis 12y ago
  No, most ads I see have a product they are selling that they present in a positive but truthful light. I don't expect a company to pay for air time to tell me why I wouldn't want to buy their product. If you're going to hold ads to the standard of complete and total disclosure about a product, without even omissions or the possibility for misunderstanding, then 99.99% of all human communication is misleading. And as much as I like parallelism, your assertion that I'm missing the forest is baseless. I've talked only about the general terms. It's fine to disagree with me, just get your facts tight so we can have a productive discussion. If anything you seem to be arguing that I'm missing the forest for discussing the theoretical biosphere.

patio11 12y ago

Anyone who is truly honest with themselves will admit that 90 to 99% of ads deceive and manipulate people into consuming a product My most effective ad incoming, prepare for the perfidy. Make Bingo Cards Quickly Create word bingo to fit any theme. Try now, no download required! www.BingoCardCreator.com It is for a SaaS application which makes word bingo cards. Can you suggest how the ad is deceptive and/or manipulative? If it helps, I'll supply context: it is almost guaranteed to show on pages which talk about making bingo games in an elementary school (or similar) setting. I spent about $8k last year showing this to ~4 million teachers, homemakers, event planners, and other people interested in topics like Halloween bingo. (A particular thing that it does.) This resulted roughly 80,000 of them visiting a landing page which offered them free bingo cards for their email address. Roughly 20,000 of them took me up on that. Somewhere around 500 of those 20k decided they liked their free bingo cards so much they wanted to pay for the product which I sell. I have a pretty good idea of where that $8k ended up. Approximately $3k of it subsidizes operations at Google, a company which you may have heard of. The other $5k subsidizes content creation at a few thousand sites across the Internet. Some of them are honestly not net value providers. Many of them are. One of my most successful ad placements, for example, is on a hobbyist site created by a teacher and her husband. It offers many free printable activities and is ad supported. It's been lovingly maintained since the late 90s or so. My rough approximation of their annual ad revenue is "it would make for a pretty nice teacher's pension in any state." It is very not obvious for me that anyone would be better off if that team decided to take down their site to avoid the moral impurity of advertising. Their users would lose access to many useful, free printable activities. I'd lose access to a large group of great prospects for my product. Many teachers would fail at their goal of playing classroom bingo with their students tomorrow. Their kids would be sad.

mendelk 12y ago
I don't see anything wrong with this type of advertising and I appreciate where you're coming from. But, ignoring the issue whether most ads are like this or hyper-tuned to psychologically trick you into consuming goods you can't afford, there seems to be another issue here, separate from the parent. The advertising industry seems to be the biggest pushers of big-data collect-all-you-can-because-you-may-need-it-someday. This automatically erodes privacy for everyone. For you to have reached that many teachers on such a budget, I assume all this collected data helped immensely, but at what cost? I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on this.

dkrich 12y ago

Apart from the counterarguments already cited, this seems very one-sided. You don't seem to apply any blame when it comes to the customers to whom the ads are shown (or apparently deceiving). They choose to purchase from advertisers and ignore en masse most any product that isn't advertised in some way. It's fairly obvious that they want to buy things and they want a certain kind of advertising that leads them to buy those things. What you seem to be arguing for is a place where people just walk around and look for stuff they need/want and if they ask "Where can I buy this thing I need?" for the manufacturer to stare blankly and shrug.

WoodenChair 12y ago

Manipulating people into buying a product is called "sales." It's not necessarily a bad thing. If you truly believe in your product and in your heart believe it's the best solution for the problem it solves, you do not have to be deceitful in selling it. Your argument requires one to believe that advertisement is immoral. One could easily make another argument that selling anything for money that could be given away for free with ads hurts the poor who then are denied access. It wouldn't be true, but it would be built on just as much of a foundation (read none) as yours. Show me some strong statistical studies showing that "90 to 99% of ads" are deceitful. I've watched a lot of ads. I don't think that number's even close to correct. Slick? Sure. Deceitful is a strong word.

ZenPro 12y ago

I doubt Tyler Durden would spend a lot of time on Hacker News railing against corporate culture. HN is subsidised by a pure market economy entrepreneurial construct- a construct in which advertising has a firm place at the table. It is very likely the antithesis of Tyler Durden.