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This is a fantastic post, and nails down one of the most frustrating contradictions I encounter online: People whose salaries are ultimately paid by advertisers

This is a fantastic post, and nails down one of the most frustrating contradictions I encounter online: People whose salaries are ultimately paid by advertisers complaining about low income people making self-sabotaging decisions. Either advertising works or it doesn't. Insofar it works, it's basically coercion. If it pays for things we love it's because we're indirectly paying for them + the advertising industry.

eevilspock 12y ago
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." -- Upton Sinclair And thanks for the +1. I usually get downvoted on HN whenever I raise this issue, because many HN'ers do get their salaries ultimately from advertisers.
tomjen3 12y ago
Either advertising works or it doesn't. Insofar it works, it's basically coercion Not even close. An ad can make a decent amount of money if it does one of three things: show me a new place where I can get a need that I have solved, or show me a solution to a problem or need that I know I have that didn't know had a solution or, and this is the most tangential and the one that is most difficult to do - shows me a need or a problem I didn't know I had and a solution to that (this is what people often complain about as superficial, but if I see a sign saying "most people pay more tax than they have to, lets us do your taxes and save" that might get me thinking). There is no coercion there, the information itself is valuable to me and the advertiser. The trouble with most ads, and the reason people think they suck in general, is that most of them are for crappy products because crappy products, in general, need more advertising. Great products need advertising too but not so much.
- eevilspock 12y ago
  You're right in principle but not in practice, as you yourself point out in your final paragraph. How are users supposed to know which ads are honest, and which ads are crappy products spun as great? And if crappy products far outnumber quality ones (case in point, how much of the content on the web do you think is garbage?), how does advertising achieve what you claim in your second paragraph? And even for those non-crappy products, how much incentive is there for sellers to tell half-truths to increase sales? "Here is my great product (but I won't tell you about this other better or cheaper product that I know about, and in fact, I'm buying this ad to make sure that that upstart competitor never even has a chance! It's so nice that my established market dominance pays for my wide and deep advertising mote!)" See this thread for more on this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7733941 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7733941

eevilspock 12y ago

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." -- Upton Sinclair And thanks for the +1. I usually get downvoted on HN whenever I raise this issue, because many HN'ers do get their salaries ultimately from advertisers.

tomjen3 12y ago

Either advertising works or it doesn't. Insofar it works, it's basically coercion Not even close. An ad can make a decent amount of money if it does one of three things: show me a new place where I can get a need that I have solved, or show me a solution to a problem or need that I know I have that didn't know had a solution or, and this is the most tangential and the one that is most difficult to do - shows me a need or a problem I didn't know I had and a solution to that (this is what people often complain about as superficial, but if I see a sign saying "most people pay more tax than they have to, lets us do your taxes and save" that might get me thinking). There is no coercion there, the information itself is valuable to me and the advertiser. The trouble with most ads, and the reason people think they suck in general, is that most of them are for crappy products because crappy products, in general, need more advertising. Great products need advertising too but not so much.

eevilspock 12y ago
You're right in principle but not in practice, as you yourself point out in your final paragraph. How are users supposed to know which ads are honest, and which ads are crappy products spun as great? And if crappy products far outnumber quality ones (case in point, how much of the content on the web do you think is garbage?), how does advertising achieve what you claim in your second paragraph? And even for those non-crappy products, how much incentive is there for sellers to tell half-truths to increase sales? "Here is my great product (but I won't tell you about this other better or cheaper product that I know about, and in fact, I'm buying this ad to make sure that that upstart competitor never even has a chance! It's so nice that my established market dominance pays for my wide and deep advertising mote!)" See this thread for more on this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7733941 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7733941