I wonder, how would the world be different if a major government was to completely ban user tracking? Ad companies would be forced to use contextual advertising. How would that play out?
I had a different idea, which was that governments of the future could ban advertising altogether.
I know it's a... stretch, but imagine this:
- you can't put billboards in the city
- you can't place any images, text, etc. banners anywhere (except for tightly controlled, single-design descriptions of businesses in buildings, decided by each municipality like it's already done in some cities to maintain consistent look of historical town centers)
- in general, no publicly visible ads of any kind are allowed
- no ads in videos, TV, etc.
Where would ads be?
- you can search for ads like you do today, in search engines (preferably opt in), i.e. ads become a catalogue, not a "here I am" attention grabber
- gray line (recommendations/suggestions which really are ads would need to be limited/removed as well) to be decided
In general, clear up public space and attention holding spaces from explicit commercial interests as much as possible.
I'd love to live a few years in such a world and see whether value propositions of businesses would start shifting...
I grew up in a place like this. It was very nice, honestly. It was possible to attain inner peace and quiet while being out in the street and not be disturbed by something one would consider intentionally intrusive for minutes or even hours at a time.
As a slight tangent, there have been restrictions on advertising that might affect views from the River Thames in London that date back more than 100 years. In an effort to circumvent these restrictions, a company name was incorporated into brickwork features of what's known as the "Oxo Tower" - Oxo being a brand of stock cubes.
You would end up stalling the development of new products. I can't invent and sell an 800 usd massage chair if people assume they cost 5000 usd and so don't even go looking for them.
I can't start a "we are cheaper than wallmart" discount business without advertising this fact.
You need advertisements, or something like that, to encourage new products and price competition.
You do not need tracking for any reason since you can advertise against the content of the article, video or podcast. If I am reading up about apartment prices in AREA, serve me suggestions based on that.
That's a nice theory but doesn't mirror my experience. Online ads will be for overpriced junk, when it's not literal scams.
The reason is it's all highest bidder, no quality control. If there was an ad network with a brand, with a reputation for only running ads for high quality products at competitive prices, then maybe I'd pay attention.
EDIT: Writing this comment made me consciously pay attention to ads to verify my thesis, but honestly the quality was better than I expected.
Yes, it would stall development of a lot of business. Many of these businesses are not necessary. Humans would start a different path of looking for what's actually useful rather than falling for what's out there -- or at least that's the dream :)
[edit] Onto your second point, that you need ads to promote price competition, I don't think so. There's almost no advertisement in many kinds of services like e.g. hair salons, but they still very much compete (price included). Also, huge majority of professional trainers do not advertise anywhere in my area, and yet we all compete on price and our customers know the range of prices that are reasonable. So information about price etc. flows quite well regardless of ads.
There is an honest need in here, to surface unknown unknowns within the world's of consumer producta/services. It could be solved by a trade show/business fair kind of thing (maybe we would know we had solved it when B2C looked like B2B)
The thing is, advertising does not efficiently suggest products/services now, so the idea that removing it would hurt customers ability to find what they want is a little melodramatic
There is plenty of price comparison websites that one can use right now that allow one to search for a specific product and compare price offers.
One would search for a massage chair on there and find that some are cheaper than others and read the reviews to make an educated guess about whether the extra price is worth it.
So, still ads but different name. These price engines (every one I've seen) are all affiliate hubs; they list only products that pay for the click. Any reviews on such sites are biased in similar ways to the gaming in reviews in major sites like Amazon.
Now, one could say, "so what? Most folks know that, useful info still, and it's better than ads!". But is it? At least the ad is an overt block of color, but affiliate links are hidden behind redirects and tiny disclaimers (in the few regions that require disclosure).
It's fine (and easy) to complain about display ads or video ads, but there's a lot more. Product brand shown or mentioned in tv or movie:ad. Movie trailers: yep, ad. Public media mentioning a sponsor: ad. That tiktok or insta person who always has branded product in the frame? ad.
In fact, most product discovery comes from ads. Is there another way? Probably, but ads have worked better than any other approach for so long, we haven't beaten it yet. I hope we do, but til then, for every 100 ads I despise, I'm still happy I found that one thing I actually liked. Can't say that defends all ads, but it gives me hope that we can find a good middle spot.
It depends who's paying. If the product seller pays then it's an advert. If the product buyer pays it's not. The difference in economic incentives is... stark.
Ad supported media has a similarly skewed structure. If I'm paying for media I better like it. If adverts pay for it, the key is lots of people spend lots of time looking at it.
I still say that there should be a .adv TLD, and any paid advertising goes on either the manufacturer's site or in a .adv page, nowhere else.
.adv would be the internet catalog (good or bad, awesome shopping resource or godawful bag of crap, as may be) and all other TLDs (even .com) will be free of ads. Period.
My point, is that you wouldn't do that if you thought the price was around 5k.
But then take the example of new technology: you wouldn't want to buy gore-tex shoes, which would be more expensive than the others, if you didn't know that they were both waterproof and breathable, something you would consider impossible before seeing the ad.
Apples M1 is a more recent example: until their marketing/pr blitz hit I couldn't buy a fanless laptop with anywhere decent performance and so because I didn't know it existed, I wouldn't have gone to search for it.
You can run a price comparison website for know old things, e.g I use them when I am after something specific.
Of course that leaves me the problem of which price comparison site I should use.
If enough people abandon cities I could see this happening. Imagine how much it would cost to engage a marketing company to put your BS "message" onto a billboard and have enough people see it. Imagine too all of the added compliance costs that would come with having to deal with dozens of small municipalities, each with their own quirky laws.
That sounds like a nightmare. Cities are not perfect but they're amazing for a million reasons. Civilization started with agriculture and then with cities.
There are big cities, see the comments above yours, where billboards are banned or strictly limited.
There's no need to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
I wish you could think a bit before writing such thing.
How do you decide what is an ad and what is not an ad? What if I tell my friend, that my new TV is really good? What if I tell it to 10 of my friends? What if I send an email to everyone I know, saying, that my new TV is great?
Would you investigate, if the TV manufacturer paid me or not? How exactly would you do it? Or did they gave me a discount on the TV?
I wish you could see, that you can not ban advertising, without banning free speech.
It would be also great to ban lying in media, right?
Well, you're not a billboard, or any other fixed sign broadcasting to everyone that walks by, or pushing your opinion at literally everyone you meet, so while you may have an opinion, it's not being forced on everyone who comes in proximity to you.
As opposed to the billboards, building side adverts, and web site ads that are just splatting out at anyone that happens by.
My idea for this is that we should nationalise advertising & product discovery.
Over consumption is killing the planet, processed foods are destroying our health, user engagement hacking is eroding free will.
Powerful companies like HSBC manipulate the press through the pressure of their ad-spend. [1]
But obviously we can't just see the vast advertising industry and all it supports vanish overnight. However, we could nationalize them. We could pay last years ad-spend to market healthy food, low consumption & social connections. Then next year we could cut spending a little, say 90%. If companies can't survive without the economic dead weight of advertising then they shouldn't exist. It's not like they're required for product discovery in the information technology age.
My city (Overland Park, Kansas) definitely has some sort of restrictions on billboards [0]. I looked it up, if you're super interested on page 230 it indicates that there's a density restriction (1200 feet from already existing billboards) and a zoning restriction against residential (400 feet). They also can't be on top of a building, or over 30 feet tall.
I can't really think of any billboards nearby, so I think this effectively restricts the billboards to maybe very busy interstates and nowhere else. Going across state lines into Missouri is very noticeable because there's billboards everywhere.
I despair it will be the opposite. To enhance revenues in the face of recent unexpected expenses due to global pandemic, government will embrace advertising to enhance revenues. Not just government web sites, but all government communications and services. Finding the right line to fill in when completing your tax form will become a game of Where's Waldo among the print ads. Want to see the beauty of a national park... it's right there behind the electronic billboards taking advantage of the proximity detectors in your phone and linked to user tracking.
There is too much lucre at stake for the government to be allowed to regulate. The government is vulnerable and needs to be supported by the advertising lobby. After all, it's what they do.
I think one of the reasons for user tracking is fraud detection. The moment you get rid off it, nobody would be willing to "risk" advertising on smaller, unknown websites. So maybe such ban would make monetization for small publishers much harder.
Fraud is only a problem for advertisements based on CPM/CPC. Time-based advertisements (pay X to have your ad displayed here for Y time) tracked by overall purchases (using an unique link) don't have a "fraud" problem given that the only way to boost the ad's effectiveness is to literally buy the product multiple times and pay for it.
Agreed and advertisers do agree too. They themselves demanded controversial content to be removed while their ads are showing, society demanding the same is in line with that thought.
They do pay for many internet services, but I think the negative aspects outbalance the monetary advantages.
> They themselves demanded controversial content to be removed
I don't think this is necessarily true. They demanded that their ads are not shown next to controversial content.
An unintended consequence of this is that the definition of 'controversial' is fluid and open to abuse. So if a pressure-group deems your thoughts and opinions 'controversial' you get no ads. And if you get no ads there's no real incentive for YT or whatever to serve your content; they're not charities. Your only other option is to self-host. So advertisers and indirectly control the societal narrative, and that should be troubling.
Youtube can just set the conditions with their market share. Content creators draw the attention they sell to advertisers.
They made the mistake that they did comply and now get overwhelmed with further demands. They could have just had a "take it or leave it" strategy and I am very sure advertisers would just have continued to pay, because it benefits them too.
Youtube set the precedent for advertisers demanding editorial control on content, it is purely on their misbehavior we have this problem.
Because now advertisers can be made responsible where their ads are shown and what is seen next to them.
CCPA for me is, for all its faults and ambiguities, to me a great start in that you must provide controls, so eventually maybe the controls can have teeth behind them. The definition of “operational” data though is where it currently falls flat.
The article speaks mostly of telemetry rather than ad delivery - however “native” ads delivered in content streams such as thru Reddit’s newer APIs are harder to filter. The only reason client side tracking was a thing in the first place was that the browser data was the easiest way to fingerprint users. We’re entering the age that happens after the market consolidation - the squeeze. Hoping the eventual alternative shows itself soon.
It always bother me that ads on tv/paper/radio are highly controlled, regulated (at least in France), with maximum time and restricted content.
But ads in internet are just wild! You can have 1 minute of ads for less than 10 minutes of content, plus all the banners, sponsored content etc...
I wish the Europe would regulate this and impose a maximum exposition time for ads, like we have for tv. (e.g: in France 6-9 minutes per hour in average)
I believe (but don't quote me on this) that the existing laws SHOULD also apply to online ads, but for some restrictions maybe. It may take a lawsuit for e.g. youtube to start following these restrictions.
It seems to me anecdotally as a free YouTube user that the number of ads I see on there have been cranked up. As often as once every 3 minutes. I remind myself that I'm not paying anything for their hosting and serving of the video, but it still grinds... particularly so when it's the likes of BBC content which as a UK license payer, has already been paid for and is being monetised on there.
I've seen a lot of individuals reporting the same thing. Also, it seems almost every video has ads now. I wonder if those videos you see in landing pages will get them too.
Also, it started showing a "please sign up" to me every hour or so, which is not only disruptive but also buggy, as it forces me to reload the page, losing the position of the video.
YouTube very recently (last 2 weeks?) updated their policy to where ads will be shown in front of videos that don't even qualify for monetization. So, the uploader is ineligible to collect money for "their" content but Google can...
The number of ads on YouTube seemed to increase enough recently to be annoying. So I installed uBlock Origin extension on Chrome. It's a great extension - kudos to the developer Raymond Hill.
Plus point - I don't get annoying adverts any more on YouTube, just a one second video freeze when an advert would have been.
Minus point - I don't want to deny ad revenue to other ad-supported websites that I browse, but I leave my settings the same so effectively I do.
In my country (Spain) there's an awful ongoing trend of betting houses popping up everywhere, both physical and online (sports bet, online poker, etc).
It's awful because the online ads are frequently directed at teenagers, using famous personalities like musicians or sport players as bait, and trying to sell it as the next step after gaming, and something math based where you can learn and use your skill to win a fortune.
I think they're trying to target the generation that grew up with lootboxes, and they're succeeding.
> why no home router makers have put ad and track filtering in their products is slightly mystifying
French ISP "Free" used to vocally advertise their router ad blocker (consumer interest).
They also vocally claimed to be the underdog and fought YouTube then Netflix (huge data volume interconnections are expensive).
If I'm not mistaken, in all the 3 cases they ended up "settling"
While it would be awesome to have hardware that did the heavy lifting, I don't like the incentives for commercial products anywhere near the ad-space. It would only be a matter of time before a firmware update allows "permitted" ads through because the advertiser paid the proper sum. It may be time to finally set up my pi-hole.
I set up NextDNS instead of a pi-hole, because frankly pi-hole seemed a bit daunting as a non technical user (if not setup, proper maintenance) and it's been great, between that and uBlock Origin I feel well shielded, and when I use my wife's iPad with neither of these I'm appalled at what the internet has become ad-wise
just beware that pi-hole and nextdns are not the same thing, albeit they maybe solve the same problem on the user end.
but nextdns is suffering from the same problem as every other centralised service (beeing a prime point for siphoning information on a large scale and a easy target for manipulation)
Thanks yeah it's a fair point, but at my skill level I have to make trade-offs and in this case I hope that the increased attack attractiveness of NextDNS relative to just my one endpoint with pi-hole is still a better solution than me poorly managing that one pi-hole config
I wanted to set up a Pi-hole and even bought a Raspberry Pi, but then I realized that :
- It didn't really support IPv6.
- Neither did my ISP.
- It was hosted on Github.
So I gave up on the idea...
not sure if you're trolling but yeah, it isn't. algorithms are discovered. inventions require physical objects, so all software patents end up being 'method and apparatus'.
Dumping chemicals in shared rivers/air vs placing ads in a privately owned space that users have the option of visiting. Not comparable.
The fact that more people use Gmail than Protonmail / others is a testament to their willingness to trade their eyeballs on ads for a service they don't have to spend their monetary resources on.
It's also worth asking - what makes you so confident about an absence of malfeasance from the largest, unbreakable corporate entity (ie. the government)?
Except that advertisers' activities goes beyond just showing ads. They stalk you, collect data and build a profile which will persist forever & be used down the line against you in one way or another (either intentionally by those advertisers or by someone else if the data falls into the wrong hands) long after you've left the website.
> It's also worth asking - what makes you so confident about an absence of malfeasance from the largest, unbreakable corporate entity (ie. the government)?
I'm not confident in that either.
But in a democracy, the government is the people. It's voted by the people, replaced by the people. The government may be corrupted but at least its stated goal and the way it works is to serve the people.
Corporation don't even have that as a goal. They only serve their shareholders.
So on one hand we have one party which has a stated goal to serve the people and another one which has goals that can directly contravene this, and nobody will bat an eye.
Given the American federal response to Covid-19, compared to the efforts of corporate America... it's not so clear to me that being chosen by the people is the better option.
People do vote with their wallets, there are many websites that let you pay to remove ads. How is that not self-regulating?
> That's how we got leaded gasoline for 60+ years.
But lead wasn't known to be bad, once it was, an entire industry scrambled (successfully) to innovate to provide alternatives. I think this makes the opposite of your point lol
If we know that humans have all sorts of cognitive biases, how come it's ok to use that fact while at the same time we insist there's some kind of free market?
Say you discover that putting good-looking women next to cars causes the sale of cars to increase. Why does nobody question whether it is legitimate to do so? It's as if there's a line between actively lying ("Studies show that men who buy this car will find many many women attracted to them") and just putting it there suggestively, for some as yet undescribed but working cognitive bias to do its magic.
Some advertisers even make a joke out of it, eg the Lynx ads where the dude is thronged by a huge horde of women. It's a cliché, for a good reason.
I suppose most people will just say you have free will and it's your own fault for thinking what was suggested, but I sense this is more of a grey zone than most people are willing to admit. How can the free market work if everyone is so easily affected by suggestion?
>humans have all sorts of cognitive biases, how come it's ok to use that fact while at the same time we insist there's some kind of free market? [...] How can the free market work if everyone is so easily affected by suggestion?
I'm (genuinely) surprised that someone with your financial background knowledge would write those sentences about "free market".
I think you already know that the "free" in "free market" means free (as practically possible) from government controls. (The first sentence in wikipedia.[1]) E.g., the baker decides to bake 10 loaves of bread instead of a government official telling him a quota.
Yes, I understand that many people use another definition of "free market" to mean "theoretical and impossible to exist market" -- because it would require all humans to be all-knowledgeable Laplace's Demon[2] and impervious to hidden influences.
Ok, I get that language usage evolves and labels get diluted and therefore, "free market" is meaningless. In that case, what _do_ we call imperfect humans trading without government dictating quotas to us? I'm open to alternative labels.
EDIT: people are misunderstanding my comment to lordnacho. I'm not against government intervention to limit bad effects of ads. I'm dissecting lordnacho's rhetoric.
Well we gotta call it something, kinda like communism and democracy. It means a lot of things to different people, but those things still vaguely refer to similar ideas. I tend not to support stringent definitions on things ("The US is a republic, not a democracy") because basically it ends up being word games.
If you look at economics, the idea is that people are rational agents. At least the orthodox idea which people are not told to question. From there you get all sorts of efficiency ideas that are the support for that government intervention idea of free markets. It goes free thinking -> efficient decisions -> government shouldn't intervene.
So of course if people aren't so free thinking, doesn't that change something?
The issue with advertising is that we have indeed agreed that certain interventions are legit. Externalities are another one of those things they mention in economics, and you'll find all sorts of models for how to deal with them. There are in fact loads of regulations, all grounded in the idea that even rational agents sometimes cause things to happen that we don't want, and should be fixed by intervention. Typically to do with information problems.
So then if actually we think government should intervene in some situations, why not in this one? Maybe it's just a matter of time, as evidence builds up. I suppose there's already controls for things like addictive gambling.
>So of course if people aren't so free thinking, doesn't that change something? [...] So then if actually we think government should intervene in some situations, why not in this one?
Since the majority of your reply is about justifying more positive government intervention, I've done a poor job explaining what I was talking about.
I already agree with government intervention to limit bad effects of advertising. That's not what my comment was about; instead, I was critiquing your rhetoric.
E.g. the following type of statement : "If people are not truly free thinking, how can we have a free market?!?"
The above statement has a nice poetic symmetry but doesn't actually advance the discussion in a productive way. Let me try more rhetorical examples and hopefully you'll see the same pattern:
Proposal: Facebook should open its social graph as API so users can be free to choose their own 3rd-party client and not be locked in a walled garden. But if users are not so free thinking, how can there be a free choice to choose their own social client?
Proposal: People should be able to freely choose which state or house they want to live in. But if citizens are not aware of hidden influences, and are not perfectly rational agents, and disadvantaged with information asymmetry, can there truly be a free choice to pick a home?
Proposal: People should be free to choose their spouse. But... [same pattern]... because people don't know hidden life influences that had predetermined their eventual mate selection, etc.
What I'm saying is that yes, we can be flexible with definition of "free" -- but that just means we're going down a rabbit hole of philosophical word games. I contend this isn't productive discussion.
If we want to recommend more positive government intervention, we can do that without the "free isn't truly free" philosophy.
I guess you are getting at the whole Marxist false consciousness idea?
Because while false consciousness is one of those convenient thought-ending "explanations" that seem to explain everything and nothing, we actually do have evidence that people can't do rational very well. So how do we square that circle?
> If we want to recommend more positive government intervention
My instinct is normally against intervention, so I do feel a bit quesy about finding problems all over the place that need fixes that are potentially themselves wrong.
It's an issue for sure. I don't know how to resolve it either, just looking for people's perspectives.
The problem is that those words are really bad for describing things. “Communism” can mean among other things authoritarian regime, UdSSR-Style socialism, China-style state capitalism, or the idea of an utopia with no social classes, no money and no state. By conflating those things you bring down also the level of the discussion.
My view is we should be aiming for _competitive_ markets or perfect markets. Markets which approach as near as possible perfect competition[1].
It's obviously impossible to realize in reality. However, it's instructive that we get closest to it in the stock market. The market most important to the very rich.
Elon Musk can't even tweet a joke about TSLA stock. Meanwhile if you're _buying_ a Model 3 you'll get expertly crafted disinformation shoved down your throat from every billboard and website.
"For classical economists such as Adam Smith, the term free market does not necessarily refer to a market free from government interference, but rather free from all forms of economic privilege, monopolies and artificial scarcities."
so this usage is at least 250 years old - and canonical.
I suspect the 'free from government interference' definition is a modern conservative creation, attempting to claim the ground of what an ideal market looks like in the public's imagination.
Market free from government control is an oxymoron. Trade starts at the local group based on gift and debts. States create markets by making people pay taxes that they have to get the money for. Without a rules a market ceases to be free as it breaks down e.g. by monopolization.
I (sincerely) don't understand responses like yours.
You are arguing against a red herring.
To be clear the definition is: "A red herring is something that misleads or distracts from a relevant or important question.
People have accepted the term "web advertising" as "showing product images" or something similar.
"web advertising" is actually identification of the individual viewing a web page, matching it to an online database of other information about that person, tracking and recording that person's behavior, and the sale of information about that person to others.
Putting an attractive woman next to a car is small potatoes next to the darkness of identification and surveillance.
Advertising is in some ways an equalizer. If you can pay then you get an audience. Doesn't matter if you're a popular brand or not. Doesn't matter if you know celebrities to hawk your stuff. Doesn't matter if you're famous or not. Doesn't matter if you have the right connections or not.
Nothing is, ever, if that's your criteria then everything fails. So the question is what you want to matter in terms of influence. If you believe in capitalism then money should matter more than connections for example.
But the playing field is not level. You will compete for ad space against big corps that can easily spend millions on advertising and can do much better targeting than yourself.
All existing online ad platforms provide very good targeting tools and do automated optimizations on your behalf. On a targeted audience you can easily outcompete big corps with a generic offering as it's not overall budget that matters but how much you're spending per view/click/conversion adjusted for how relevant your ad is.
But whenever they actually study these things, from all I've seen, the benefits of targeted-to-the-individual advertising fail to materialize.
Targeting by the content of the site can work (eg, advertising cake decorating tools on a blog about cake decorating), but at least the vast, vast majority of all the privacy-invading, personal-data-aggregating "targeted" advertising online seems to do no better than the much simpler forms, and as I understand it, in many cases it does worse.
I mean, there's no good way to advertise on a site like Facebook or Twitter without user based personalization. Everything is a feed so there's not really discrete pages for various topics. And a large percentage of advertising is on those platforms nowadays.
Big spenders don't have access to the same tools you have. They use dedicated systems with more granular targeting and often have dedicated account managers that oversee the ads on particular platform.
I mean, having used Facebook and Twitters ad systems the targeting is absurdly granular even if you spend no money. I doubt there's much advantage to being more granular in terms of actual ROI. Most of the big spender tools from what I understand are for the logistics of managing such large spend while bound by the rules of the parent company more than improved performance per dollar.
Strong agree. Advertising should be outlawed entirely. Or rather, corporate propaganda should be outlawed. Psychologically manipulating people for profit is horrible, I cannot comprehend how it's become normalized. This is our brains on capitalism, I guess.
If we outlaw it or have some litmus test for "propaganda-vs-ad" etc there will of course be very smart people who figure out the loopholes. Hence "influencers" and astroturfing and ads that masquerade as blogs and...even without legal restrictions in place.
The law isn't a script. Exploiting loopholes can either result in a judge intepreting the law as designed and handing down a fine regardless, or we can work to refine the law in further legislation. Just because it's difficult and someone will try to circumvent it doesn't mean we shouldn't work on it.
I guess you're getting downvoted because your statement is rather broad.
But narrowing a bit to the feedback loop between data collected by the ad machine and the next ad you see based on that and ongoing data collection-- if Las Vegas casino games are regulated then we can certainly regulate that dangerous practice.
I think it's the "our brains on capitalism" bit that got downvoted. To be fair, the communists are no better/worse at this, it's just government propaganda instead of corporate advertising.
I’d be interested in knowing what qualifies as advertising in this hypothetical.
Web banners? Sponsored content? Trade shows? Sales rep stopping by and buying lunch and talking about a product? Clothing with logos? Hacker News?
There are lots of ways to capture people’s attention to build awareness of your business that probably technically fall under advertising but would be quite difficult to regulate in any meaningful way.
"Being paid by someone to publish content that mentions their product", I guess, as a first draft?
So, in your examples:
Web banners: yes, Sponsored content: yes, Trade shows: no, Sales rep stopping by: no, clothing with logos: yes if the logo isn't the brand of the clothing itself, Hacker News: I have no idea how this site is funded.
And I don't even vaguely pretend to know where we should draw the line. I just think it should not be where it currently is.
Paying a 3rd party to spread a message or information would be an interesting way to define it. In that scenario things like classifieds, craigslist, and job boards would all get the ax too.
I like to think about these issues because I make a living selling advertising on my website. We try to have use good practices, have the ads be high quality, targeted toward the content as opposed to the user.
On the other hand, I live in a city which does not allow billboard advertising (Santa Barbara, California) and I do enjoy it in comparison to cities with many billboards.
Good point: the things you mention are definitely (explicitly) advertising, but also not evil.
Maybe a "except in the cases where users/readers/individuals can create adverts, and the entire publication is explicitly devoted to such adverts" clause as well. I'm only a business grad, not a lawyer, so I expect it can be framed better than this.
I think it's pretty clear. Advertising is when someone pays to pass to you any information you didn't intentionally ask for. Banners and sponsored content obviously are advertising. Your friend telling you about some cool product is not advertising because he wasn't paid for that.
I dont know why it continues, but when someone says or does something that says "im not interested in ads" the response is to hook around that and force it upon them.
This is how you create hostility toward your product, not desirability.
I am uncertain if you are saying that I was engaging in the behavior you are describing or if you are describing behavior you have observed regularly in discussions like these.
My question was meant more to think about what constitutes an advertisement for the purposes of a hypothetical "50% tax on all advertising revenue" proposed by the parent comment.
as far as the elaboration part i could if you like but in general, a yes means yes , and no means nothing i want to hear so ill act like i heard yes, attitude does not make new customers, but rather anticustomers. This creates a vector toward hostility rather than adoption.
I've heard this so often in marketing talks - "it takes 5 touches to make a sale, so that's 4 'no's' you've got to get through to get a 'yes'". Makes me sick. But it clearly works, even though we hate it.
So I think the goal is to make it not work. Like any other antisocial behaviour that we'd like to tone down in our society - tax the shit out of it.
Advertising is turning into a paperclip maximizing machine that tends to grow relative to total market.
As we get efficient with other parts of the economy and "grow the pie", mind-share remains zero-sum.
Without something changing, advertising will tend to eat all the productivity gains so we can show more ads to people. This is insidious and benefits no one.
Taking away that "free stuff" is not without consequence either. Now people without means can't read the news, watch tv, connect with friends and family online, play casual games, etc. Are ads more evil than taking away free access for those without the means to pay?
Well, I am sure millions of less fortunate people in this world are glad you have no say in deciding these things. Millions of people using Whatsapp to stay in contact with their friends and family for free, many who couldn't afford to pay for the service, but shut it down because snarf21 saw an ad he didn't like.
If only there were a way to redistribute resources and provide services to the less fortunate without relying on the whims and benevolence of predatory multinational corporations.
I don't know. I've never lived in a world where this stuff wasn't paid for by advertising.
I think "means to pay" is relative - Cambodian tuk-tuk drivers get cheaper, better internet access than Berliners. And they watch YouTube on it. If they didn't have access to YouTube for free there would be a huge market in producing Cambodian content for them to watch, priced appropriately for that market.
Good question. That's a broadcast medium, though. In the UK, Australia and Germany (amongst others - these are only the countries I've lived in that do this) there is a public broadcaster supported by a tax. It's not popular - irrelevant and annoying in the internet age. But it clearly solved the "how do you get broadcast media without adverts" problem.
I meant the business model, not the content. German collection of the tax is incredibly unpopular, especially for those of us who don't even have a television.
true, would be more sensible to make it a "real" federal tax instead of collection via a obnoxious semi-private entity.
while i have not owned a tv for the last two decades i still sometimes consume their content via internet or car-radio and would probably miss it if it wasnt available.
In Australia, the ABC is just funded out of general taxation, with no specific tax for it. That works a lot better.
Triple-J (their "youth" music radio station) is an Australian cultural mainstay (or was; its relevance is fading), and I don't think anyone actually minds that some of their tax goes to support it. Except the usual right-wing conspiracy dicks who are mad that the ABC doesn't publish their shite.
Alternative potential consequence: it allows indie news publishers to become more competitive and visible against billionaire-backed business with huge advertising powers.
> [can't] connect with friends and family online
same - if Facebook goes under, that's a positive network effect to smaller competitors. (there are plenty of free ways to connect that don't depend on advertising)
Absolutely in agreement. Digital advertising should be heavily taxed and we should outlaw advertising for medicines, alcohol, vitamins and other predatory categories just like we did for smoking.
“People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.”
Don't get me wrong, I think advertising is responsible for a lot of evil in the world, and SEO in particular is a cancer.
But if anyone reacts to an ad with this degree of paranoia and self-loathing, it speaks more to their own fragility than it does than the nature of advertising.
I don't think it requires any particular paranoia or self-loathing, just the day-in, day-out grind against the receiver's psyche.
We take it for granted that living with an emotionally-abusive person deeply affects someone's sense of self-perception, but for some reason when advertisers use the same sort of tactics, but at a slightly lower level spread across a greater amount of time, we're supposed to accept it as appropriate?
We all have a finite store of, let's call it "self confidence"; why should we accept as status quo that all comers have a right to drain some of it every day in order to line their own pocketbooks?
It doesn't drain me. It's anecdotal but no one I know seems to be suffering from some psychological equivalent of battered-spouse syndrome due to the effects of advertising.
I don't even really see a lot of advertising that uses psychologically demeaning tactics, sneering and flippant insults and shaming and the like. Maybe I just don't notice them. But to me, demeaning your customers isn't likely to result in them being more likely to buy your product.
Does it drain me entirely every day? No. Does it drain me some days or in particular instances? Certainly! Are some people far less resilient than I, and are perhaps drained to a larger degree? It stands to reason so.
To be clear I'm not saying any one advertiser is directly attempting to demean any particular person into buying their particular product, because clearly this isn't a winning strategy. It's the dose that makes the poison, however.
If one person walks up to me on the street and says "I've got some shirts that would make you look really slim" I would shrug it off as a weird happening. When the second person say "I used to look large, but this brand really made the pounds seem less obvious", I think it's been an odd day. When this continues to happen over the course of the month, perhaps I begin to think I'm looking a bit large around the middle.
Taken in isolation, no one instance is going to break me. Taken together, over a lifetime? That could change my own perception of myself in ways I can't even begin to estimate.
>When this continues to happen over the course of the month, perhaps I begin to think I'm looking a bit large around the middle.
Maybe you are. I certainly am. Are these theoretical shirt-sellers trying to convince you you're getting overweight to get you to buy a shirt for overweight people, or have they noticed you're overweight and have a shirt you might want to buy? One is clearly abusive but the other isn't.
Indeed. I wonder though whether they could possibly know the answer to that question to a degree of confidence that would make them comfortable to pursue me endlessly to make their sale, and sell and trade my information and their inferences about me with their advertising partners in order for them to do the same, just with 1000 different variants of the above example.
And I wonder whether they're incentivized to care. In either cases above, my money is still green and smells like money, and makes the same number go up in their quarterly sales goal dashboard.
My point, and I gather the point of the Banksy quote, is that any one instance has a negligible effect on me, but that in aggregate I'm stuck staring down the barrel of a machine that has infinite stamina and resources that's attempting to wear me down, and is likely succeeding in ways I can't detect, nor have the power to detect if I wanted to.
If being exposed to this aggregate process all day makes me less patient with my family at night, to what degree is it worth it? If it makes me less willing to treat someone else with kindness, is it still justified if it's only a _little_ less willing?
No single advertiser is literally laughing at me while doing the backstroke across their vault full of money, but none of them needs to have such overtly malicious intent for the aggregate effect of the entire system on me to be just as corrosive.
I think there's value in describing advertising for what it actually is, paying someone else to lie for you. You can talk about how it's necessary for businesses to let the "public know about their products", but you can't really get around this description of it. It's pretty inconsistent with the idea of free speech, but supposed defenders of free speech don't seem to have any problem with paid speech.
A lot of advertising is negative, not in the sense of attack ads, but in what it is that you agree not to say, for money. When advertisers pull "funding" when a platform doesn't censor "swear words", the lack of swear words is now an advertisement. Do we really think that there is a consistent definition of free speech which is compatible with advertising?
I’ve long thought something along similar lines: in a world with instant search, advertising becomes irrelevant if the search actually helps you to find products.
It is in this way that google has actually failed. If you look for a product you get a whole load of dross back. It’s impossible to filter by spec, you can add keywords but this rarely gives you more sensible results these days. The products get lost in the noise.
Most of the time what would be better would be a structured directory of product information enabling you to zero in on the product you want without the crap. This directory would be independent of any specific vendor. All new products would be released into the directory so you can track all new products in certain categories to stay informed. Gaming of the directory would be policed ensuring equal standing of all products.
The only thing this doesn’t handle well is new product categories. But sure there’s ways to handle it.
These sorts of listing aggregators (like pc parts sites) have a perverse incentive to always allow those that pay to get top placement.
I'm genuinely interested in a business model for this stuff that can support fair placement.
Flat subscription fees on the vendor side needs to first solve the chicken and egg problem. Flat subscription fees on the customer side doesn't seem likely to work.
Communicating that your service is really really different because it does not have shady business practices is a hard sale at best. Look at how free to play games thrive versus more ethical business models.
I want to work on solutions to these insidious businesses that seem so commonplace today but I don't know a model that could work.
Typical aggregator sites so far, don't have customer-side "flag this product" or "flag this tag/category as incorrect" feedback.
Allow buyers to push back against bogus, overtagged, or miscategorized items and that aggregator will gain some serious reputation over Amazon and any other venues in the same niche.
And I mean meaningful pushback - not "it's flagged and will be online still until reviewed by the scarce human team gets to it" but "it's flagged and offline until humans review it and reapprove or flush it".
Sure there will always be trolls who flag anything and everything but they can get banned as users under existing abuse terms.
Imagine how quickly Amazon would get flushed clean of bogus listings if user flags pushed them offline until Amazon staff could verify and relist them... they'd have to prioritize restoring actual useful items, or at least start seriously policing the worst actors on the supplier side to stem the tide. Losing "good" items in a sea of flagged bad ones would also be a secondary incentive to clean house and keep it that way.
one site i frequently consult for electronics is https://geizhals.at because it lets one filter by various product characteristics.
it is mainly for DACH region.
i guess their business model is whitelabeling for other sites which want to include the functionality, never noticed any bias.
it's a great site. They also advertise on certain category pages (e.g. on the page for all TVs: https://geizhals.de/?o=36 "featured brand" or "featured merchant"), e.g. with amazon links but only for products where amazon has the lowest prices. Additionally, they probably get some money from their regular ref links (there are even webpages that only have good prices when going directly through the geizhals link; but that's no secret since it says so on the product listing on geizhals, so that's fair by me also).
Then your ad spend becomes your search engine optimization spend and you get even worse results.
It is quite hard for a search engine to fairly treat results which are trying everything to manipulate the system and results that aren’t trying at all.
I disagree substantially. Advertising, especially web advertising, allows us to pay for services not with money but our attention. When the Economist polled people how much they would pay to forego search engines, the result was over $17,000 [1]. It'd be simplistic to say that this is what Google could charge in a subscription model, but the point is that the value is very high.
Is a world where poorer students who can't afford google have to compete against wealthier students with google a better world than one with web ads? I think it's easy to focus on the bad, the privacy issues and dark patterns that web ads incentivize, to the exclusion of the fact that it has expanded access to incredibly powerful services to people of all means (well, all means as long as they have access to the internet).
Where advertisement automatons have better information (which they increasingly do) advertising things to poor people is carefully avoided. So the model has finite life-span.
Lower cost-per-click and cost per impression for lower income countries does not mean that companies are avoiding advertising to those populations. It just means people buying ads aren't as willing to spend money to reach those populations. The cost of advertising to populations with lower disposable income has always been lower. This isn't something new to web ads, it's a phenomenon that has existed long before the internet. I'm really not sure where you're going with this line of thinking.
I don't see the add driven free services for all system survive in the long run. Say they start by dedicating more funds (hardware & software) to matching offers to customers with more disposable income. Say the next step is to offer more elaborate services or options to customers with money. Say, some coupon trick, if you buy a product A-Z you get 24 months of service B which is a paid version of the free service that served you the advert. This scheme is already doable with dumb adverts and without hoarding personal data.
Its already that you send the poor person a 10% discount coupon for one box of chocolate and the rich person 4 boxes for free, a bottle of wine and a life time 10% discount. Why would the digital world be different?
I would love a paid search service that excluded all the crap and just gave me the good stuff with no ads, let me set my own filter preferences for what I call "the good stuff".
And would you be willing to spend $17,500 a year on said service? That's the figure cited in the Economist. And even if you were willing to spend that sum, it'd be far beyond the means of most people. Heck, almost the average global income of $18,000.
Probably not that much ;) But I pay $10/month for all the music I could ever listen to if I did nothing but listen to music for the rest of my life, so how hard can it be?
I’m completely fine with ads on YouTube. They can sometimes get annoying, but it’s a very small price to pay for the hours of free entertainment that I get from YouTube.
> The "free stuff" that we get in return is never without consequences, as we're finding out.
Largely, I agree. But, this is an editorial decision and not an absolute.
We used to get better news when we paid straight up for it (newspaper cover price/subscriptions). But, lets not forget, those papers had advertising too. The difference is that the ads were not the only form of revenue and the papers with the best journalistic integrity were responsible to their readers more than their advertisers. Therefore, news was optimized for readers.
Now that most news is paid for by advertising, and because advertising pays out based on impressions and/or clicks, we get news that is optimized for impressions and clicks -- which is obviously much worse news than we used to get. This shift in incentive means that news organizations are now more responsible to their advertisers than their readers/viewers (and they don't like that either, but it is a decision that helps keep the lights on).
I don't think you can get rid of all advertising. I mean, there will always be advertising. If it's not overt, it will become more and more covert. So, I don't think the government would be successful in trying to control it further than they already have. Their current approach of transparency is on the right trajectory at least, but it's not much of a solution either. It's probably ok to allow: overt, paid, and responsible advertising. The key there is "responsible". No responsible editor should allow an advertisement that interrupts the content in any way!
I have worked in all of the industries involved in this issue so I can assure you it will be a difficult problem to solve. Either the incentives have to be flipped, so that the news organizations are incentivized to create the best content for readers (simply inform the public at large in an unbiased way -- the original purpose of "journalists" in ancient Greece). Or, the tastes of the readers/viewers has to change so that they reject clickbait news.
I don't have a lot of faith in readers, myself included, because it's often difficult to see that something was clickbait until you read it. I also don't have faith in news organizations being innovative enough to get ahead of this problem and fix it. So, I believe we need some kind of third party solution.
We need something like those content summary bots that can distill an article into a paragraph, but can rewrite clickbait headlines into boring but factual headlines. Then provide that bot as a browser plugin so the clickbait headlines are replaced for those of us who want a more honest approach to news. Again, not a perfect solution either... I'm not sure one exists for this problem.
totally agree. This is why I think taxing advertising revenue is a good first step. It's not banning things, it's not stopping the industry from working. But it maybe will make people think more before spamming us all with irrelevant crap - the margins on advertising will change, and it'll get more expensive, and so will need to be more focused.
Also, all the businesses that are real margin-calls on an advertising model if they clickbait the shit out of us will have to find something better. They're going to have to do this anyway - the revenue from advertising is shrinking. This just speeds up the timeline. Oh, and newspapers are in that group.
Advertising itself is good. Knowing about different products that can help you is actually really good. Sure you can get this information from friends and word-of-mouth, but it's not always accurate, and there is nothing wrong with using advertisements too. Plus, there are some advertisements that are genuinely works of art.
Even personalized ads are good if they're done in a way that ensures your privacy is safe. It would be awesome if Steam could find me some video games that are actually interesting.
The problem is a lot of current advertising is completely broken. It's been said a lot before, but: companies making you watch ad after ad that you're just not going to buy, ads encouraging me to ignore them because they're ugly and make it harder to see content, advertisers that are so obnoxious and bad at advertising their products that I'm less inclined to buy them. Idk how this kind of crap advertising actually gets companies more money, but I guarantee it's not "subtly influencing" me to buy "Slots Royale" or fake medicine, or even Geico - and I know I have human biases and distortions. Also, ad tracking which takes all of my data and doesn't even work.
Idk what the current trend is but I've heard that advertisements are generating less and less revenue. I wouldn't be surprised if, as population the gets more tech-savvy, ads will be forced to change / die out because so few people actually use them. Or at least get better at advertising.
I used to think roughly the same - I'm really not that convinced anymore.
I'd actually say your last point really drives home just how BAD advertising is right now. It's so bad that there's evolutionary pressure to learn to ignore advertisements.
Ads are like a form of social parasite - They've hijacked a human instinct to share things we like and turned it into a profit motivated, manipulative, abusive channel to suck money out of people.
Just like animals ridden with parasites are less fit - consumers who are most susceptible or surrounded by ads are less fit. Their decisions are influenced by ads to no longer objectively consider whether a product is useful to them. Like a mouse infected with toxoplasma is drawn to the small of cat urine - even though it means getting eaten far more often. Good for the parasite, bad for the mouse. Ads are good for the company, bad for the person.
If there was a non gamefiable system for allowing people to pay a small amount automatically for reading content, and that system allowed you to specify you did not want to pay, which then told the website this and allowed it to show ads instead, otherwise they got most of the small amount, what would that do to advertising?
Ads exist to (1) pay for free content (2) try to get you to buy/try/etc the thing being advertised. If (1) were taken care of, would (2) even exist? Or would websites just do both and piss everyone off?
If think ad targeting should be illegal, because if you know who is going to see your ad, you can easily manipulate them into signing up or buying the product by exploiting characteristics that person may have.
Internet ads as we see them today are absolutely disastrous for people with ADHD.
When even people who don't have to deal with this disability are finding these ads way too distracting, it can't be hard to imagine just how bad it is for us invalids.
Taking away my ability to use an ad blocker - like what Google is trying to do - would be like removing all wheelchair ramps. It would have a massive negative impact on my quality of life, and would have far reaching consequences for my productivity levels.
Meta: Posted this earlier in response to a top level comment but figured it's better on its own.
I don't think that any government should ever make such fine-grained regulation. Telling the most innovative companies on the planet how they supposed to function is a recipe for disaster. There will never be another Google-like company if this becomes law that's for sure.
Also of course people have control already, they can chose not to visit websites with ads on them.
Legal controls? You mean you want to bring in government regulation so that all the players down to the smallest personal website will have to do all the things required of even the most giant corporations? So that once this onerous system of centralized control is set up it'll soon be bought and co-opted by the very people it was meant to regulate originally?
No. We've already seen this game play out over and over, and recently too! It's not like GDPR has stopped the big corporations from monetizing information about you. It's just made it so that WHOIS lookups are now worthless and don't even contain contact emails.
Imagine a system that's so technologically complex, that lawmakers can't even create laws to codify the system, much less controls on the dependent systems.
We already have that in the W3C browsers. This idea of "legal controls" on advertising will have to start with well understood systems before online advertising is affected, imo.
Europe has legal controls over cookies and it is nothing good: more banners having buttons doing something I do not know (so I ignore them despite using 10-20% of viewport for viewing the content). I think web does not need any legal control.
The original "cookie law" was indeed badly designed, however the GDPR is sane. The only problem (which causes the banners & annoyances) is that it's not being enforced (the aforementioned annoyances are actually against the regulation).
In "The World Beyond Your Head" by Matthew B. Crawford, the author introduces the idea of an "attentional commons".
The gist of this is that there are shared resources in the world. Air and water are examples. We recognize them as shared resources, and we recognize that without regulations, some people would use them in ways that make them unusable for others.
Crawford makes a pitch for treating "attention" as a resource, and asserts that folks should have a right not to be addressed by mechanized means.
It's a very good read, especially for software developers, phenomenologists, or cognitive science folks.
Additionally, doesn't advertising go directly against the notion of a "free market"? The idea that "capitalism breeds competition, and competition creates quality" goes out the window when huge advertising budgets urge you to buy some cheap commodity product over a well-made product with a smaller advertising budget.
How about we fix the underlying problem: how to earn money without advertising? The issue right now is that subscribing to 100s of different services is both annoying and expensive. What if you could subscribe to a single service, which then would compensate the different services you use based on how much you use them? Sort of like how Spotify compensates artists based on number of listens. Quite easy to solve technically I think, but of course hard to solve socially.
Hopefully not a single org, or any org. But like I said, it's not easy to solve socially. The main point is to somehow get paid without advertising (Which already exists, it's just that people won't pay individually for every service on the internet. At least that's my assumption).
The hardest part is probably how you would handle payments.
I'm happy to pay for things like newspaper site subscriptions - I just don't want to give my card or any identifying information to known spammers, 30-days-to-unsubscribe data-sellers, and hostile companies that refuse to allow you to cancel subscriptions other than calling them during a 1 hour timespan once a week.
I'd be happy to throw $0.25 at a single article with no advertising or tracking and without leaking any identifying information at all - that means I have balance stored somehow, and I do not want to give even an email address [they've already shown that they cannot be trusted with it, much less anything else].
For example, NYT allows Californians purely because of the law that requires you to be able to sign up online -> cancel online only has this turned on if you have a CA billing address and CA geoip.
This is hostile, asshole design. The code is there already, the implementation is there already, they just require everyone in every other state to call in during tight hours if not absolutely forced to via regulation.
Blizzard/EA: Call of Duty has an option to opt out of selling your personal information. This option is only visible to be modified at all (not disabled - just gone entirely) if you are on a CA IP. If you ever log in once from another machine or another location, it's reset to retroactively sell all information and also not shown on the options menu.
Excessively heavy handed legal controls are needed because nobody can fucking behave.
The way we make our money makes all the difference for our cultures and general way of life, it seems that we have chosen poorly and we have little recourse. In a world of add-salesmen inoffensiveness becomes the chief value. This value scheme has become central to the modern left and right poles of politics, but instead of affirming or negating it, we should just regulate its conditions out of existence. If we don't achieve this (and we won't), what comes next is an even more aggressive affirmation of inoffensiveness, which will give to an open affirmation of censorship in the name of preventing "harm" and "exclusion" aided by technology. When censorship was historically affirmed, it was to remove the 'wrong' opinion, but what was right was very clearly presented, however, because now the primary value is negatively determined there is no way it can be totalized and presented as something known. This indetermination of negativity, coupled with a new power of technology that can exert control in a much more detailed way, accompanied by a general trend of digitalization of all human activity will make censorship ubiquitous and insidious.
What we have today isn't really advertising in my opinion.
To me advertising should be fairly passive and loosely targetted. Basically putting car ads on a motoring website or serving local interest ads based on your location.
What the web has given us is a form of "thought manipulation". It has gone beyond just trying to make us aware of a product in to manipulating us to make irrational decisions. The idea of the likes of Google and other ad brokers constantly researching web users actions in order to get inside their heads really bothers me. It's more than creepy, its disturbing.
One thing that has always bothered me about advertising is that to work in that sphere you have to be more soulless than usual, even if it can have good outcomes or make many services possible. You have to spend 40+ hours a week coming up with ways to exploit human psychological weakness. You can dress it up in many other ways but that's the core unavoidable aspect of it. Only a tiny minority of the work goes into ads that simply state of a product's existence, and these often serve to make physical spaces uglier to live in.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 183 ms ] threadI know it's a... stretch, but imagine this: - you can't put billboards in the city - you can't place any images, text, etc. banners anywhere (except for tightly controlled, single-design descriptions of businesses in buildings, decided by each municipality like it's already done in some cities to maintain consistent look of historical town centers) - in general, no publicly visible ads of any kind are allowed - no ads in videos, TV, etc.
Where would ads be? - you can search for ads like you do today, in search engines (preferably opt in), i.e. ads become a catalogue, not a "here I am" attention grabber - gray line (recommendations/suggestions which really are ads would need to be limited/removed as well) to be decided
In general, clear up public space and attention holding spaces from explicit commercial interests as much as possible.
I'd love to live a few years in such a world and see whether value propositions of businesses would start shifting...
See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxo_Tower#History
https://99percentinvisible.org/article/clean-city-law-secret...
https://www.rapidtransition.org/stories/adblocking-the-globa...
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/aug/11/can-cities-ki...
A gallary of Tokyo stripped of advertising: https://www.theguardian.com/cities/gallery/2015/aug/12/tokyo...
I can't start a "we are cheaper than wallmart" discount business without advertising this fact.
You need advertisements, or something like that, to encourage new products and price competition.
You do not need tracking for any reason since you can advertise against the content of the article, video or podcast. If I am reading up about apartment prices in AREA, serve me suggestions based on that.
Targted ads don't work.
The reason is it's all highest bidder, no quality control. If there was an ad network with a brand, with a reputation for only running ads for high quality products at competitive prices, then maybe I'd pay attention.
EDIT: Writing this comment made me consciously pay attention to ads to verify my thesis, but honestly the quality was better than I expected.
[edit] Onto your second point, that you need ads to promote price competition, I don't think so. There's almost no advertisement in many kinds of services like e.g. hair salons, but they still very much compete (price included). Also, huge majority of professional trainers do not advertise anywhere in my area, and yet we all compete on price and our customers know the range of prices that are reasonable. So information about price etc. flows quite well regardless of ads.
The thing is, advertising does not efficiently suggest products/services now, so the idea that removing it would hurt customers ability to find what they want is a little melodramatic
One would search for a massage chair on there and find that some are cheaper than others and read the reviews to make an educated guess about whether the extra price is worth it.
Now, one could say, "so what? Most folks know that, useful info still, and it's better than ads!". But is it? At least the ad is an overt block of color, but affiliate links are hidden behind redirects and tiny disclaimers (in the few regions that require disclosure).
It's fine (and easy) to complain about display ads or video ads, but there's a lot more. Product brand shown or mentioned in tv or movie:ad. Movie trailers: yep, ad. Public media mentioning a sponsor: ad. That tiktok or insta person who always has branded product in the frame? ad.
In fact, most product discovery comes from ads. Is there another way? Probably, but ads have worked better than any other approach for so long, we haven't beaten it yet. I hope we do, but til then, for every 100 ads I despise, I'm still happy I found that one thing I actually liked. Can't say that defends all ads, but it gives me hope that we can find a good middle spot.
Ad supported media has a similarly skewed structure. If I'm paying for media I better like it. If adverts pay for it, the key is lots of people spend lots of time looking at it.
I haven’t heard anyone suggest we ban distributors.
.adv would be the internet catalog (good or bad, awesome shopping resource or godawful bag of crap, as may be) and all other TLDs (even .com) will be free of ads. Period.
But then take the example of new technology: you wouldn't want to buy gore-tex shoes, which would be more expensive than the others, if you didn't know that they were both waterproof and breathable, something you would consider impossible before seeing the ad.
Apples M1 is a more recent example: until their marketing/pr blitz hit I couldn't buy a fanless laptop with anywhere decent performance and so because I didn't know it existed, I wouldn't have gone to search for it.
You can run a price comparison website for know old things, e.g I use them when I am after something specific.
Of course that leaves me the problem of which price comparison site I should use.
There are big cities, see the comments above yours, where billboards are banned or strictly limited.
There's no need to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
How do you decide what is an ad and what is not an ad? What if I tell my friend, that my new TV is really good? What if I tell it to 10 of my friends? What if I send an email to everyone I know, saying, that my new TV is great?
Would you investigate, if the TV manufacturer paid me or not? How exactly would you do it? Or did they gave me a discount on the TV?
I wish you could see, that you can not ban advertising, without banning free speech.
It would be also great to ban lying in media, right?
As opposed to the billboards, building side adverts, and web site ads that are just splatting out at anyone that happens by.
Over consumption is killing the planet, processed foods are destroying our health, user engagement hacking is eroding free will.
Powerful companies like HSBC manipulate the press through the pressure of their ad-spend. [1]
But obviously we can't just see the vast advertising industry and all it supports vanish overnight. However, we could nationalize them. We could pay last years ad-spend to market healthy food, low consumption & social connections. Then next year we could cut spending a little, say 90%. If companies can't survive without the economic dead weight of advertising then they shouldn't exist. It's not like they're required for product discovery in the information technology age.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/feb/17/peter-oborne-t...
I can't really think of any billboards nearby, so I think this effectively restricts the billboards to maybe very busy interstates and nowhere else. Going across state lines into Missouri is very noticeable because there's billboards everywhere.
[0] http://online.encodeplus.com/regs/overlandpark-ks/export2doc...
There is too much lucre at stake for the government to be allowed to regulate. The government is vulnerable and needs to be supported by the advertising lobby. After all, it's what they do.
They do pay for many internet services, but I think the negative aspects outbalance the monetary advantages.
I don't think this is necessarily true. They demanded that their ads are not shown next to controversial content.
An unintended consequence of this is that the definition of 'controversial' is fluid and open to abuse. So if a pressure-group deems your thoughts and opinions 'controversial' you get no ads. And if you get no ads there's no real incentive for YT or whatever to serve your content; they're not charities. Your only other option is to self-host. So advertisers and indirectly control the societal narrative, and that should be troubling.
They made the mistake that they did comply and now get overwhelmed with further demands. They could have just had a "take it or leave it" strategy and I am very sure advertisers would just have continued to pay, because it benefits them too.
Youtube set the precedent for advertisers demanding editorial control on content, it is purely on their misbehavior we have this problem.
Because now advertisers can be made responsible where their ads are shown and what is seen next to them.
The article speaks mostly of telemetry rather than ad delivery - however “native” ads delivered in content streams such as thru Reddit’s newer APIs are harder to filter. The only reason client side tracking was a thing in the first place was that the browser data was the easiest way to fingerprint users. We’re entering the age that happens after the market consolidation - the squeeze. Hoping the eventual alternative shows itself soon.
I wish the Europe would regulate this and impose a maximum exposition time for ads, like we have for tv. (e.g: in France 6-9 minutes per hour in average)
Also, it started showing a "please sign up" to me every hour or so, which is not only disruptive but also buggy, as it forces me to reload the page, losing the position of the video.
Plus point - I don't get annoying adverts any more on YouTube, just a one second video freeze when an advert would have been.
Minus point - I don't want to deny ad revenue to other ad-supported websites that I browse, but I leave my settings the same so effectively I do.
It's awful because the online ads are frequently directed at teenagers, using famous personalities like musicians or sport players as bait, and trying to sell it as the next step after gaming, and something math based where you can learn and use your skill to win a fortune.
I think they're trying to target the generation that grew up with lootboxes, and they're succeeding.
But the first case is less ads than the second case.
French ISP "Free" used to vocally advertise their router ad blocker (consumer interest). They also vocally claimed to be the underdog and fought YouTube then Netflix (huge data volume interconnections are expensive). If I'm not mistaken, in all the 3 cases they ended up "settling"
but nextdns is suffering from the same problem as every other centralised service (beeing a prime point for siphoning information on a large scale and a easy target for manipulation)
Really? PageRank is not an invention like the transistor?
And playing minesweeper.
That's how we got leaded gasoline for 60+ years.
How are they not comparable? The incentives are not aligned: corporate profit vs the commons.
The fact that more people use Gmail than Protonmail / others is a testament to their willingness to trade their eyeballs on ads for a service they don't have to spend their monetary resources on.
It's also worth asking - what makes you so confident about an absence of malfeasance from the largest, unbreakable corporate entity (ie. the government)?
Except that advertisers' activities goes beyond just showing ads. They stalk you, collect data and build a profile which will persist forever & be used down the line against you in one way or another (either intentionally by those advertisers or by someone else if the data falls into the wrong hands) long after you've left the website.
Again, not generally a problem when using paid services.
I'm not confident in that either.
But in a democracy, the government is the people. It's voted by the people, replaced by the people. The government may be corrupted but at least its stated goal and the way it works is to serve the people.
Corporation don't even have that as a goal. They only serve their shareholders.
So on one hand we have one party which has a stated goal to serve the people and another one which has goals that can directly contravene this, and nobody will bat an eye.
Which party is closer to what we want and need?
> That's how we got leaded gasoline for 60+ years.
But lead wasn't known to be bad, once it was, an entire industry scrambled (successfully) to innovate to provide alternatives. I think this makes the opposite of your point lol
Say you discover that putting good-looking women next to cars causes the sale of cars to increase. Why does nobody question whether it is legitimate to do so? It's as if there's a line between actively lying ("Studies show that men who buy this car will find many many women attracted to them") and just putting it there suggestively, for some as yet undescribed but working cognitive bias to do its magic.
Some advertisers even make a joke out of it, eg the Lynx ads where the dude is thronged by a huge horde of women. It's a cliché, for a good reason.
I suppose most people will just say you have free will and it's your own fault for thinking what was suggested, but I sense this is more of a grey zone than most people are willing to admit. How can the free market work if everyone is so easily affected by suggestion?
I'm (genuinely) surprised that someone with your financial background knowledge would write those sentences about "free market".
I think you already know that the "free" in "free market" means free (as practically possible) from government controls. (The first sentence in wikipedia.[1]) E.g., the baker decides to bake 10 loaves of bread instead of a government official telling him a quota.
Yes, I understand that many people use another definition of "free market" to mean "theoretical and impossible to exist market" -- because it would require all humans to be all-knowledgeable Laplace's Demon[2] and impervious to hidden influences.
Ok, I get that language usage evolves and labels get diluted and therefore, "free market" is meaningless. In that case, what _do_ we call imperfect humans trading without government dictating quotas to us? I'm open to alternative labels.
EDIT: people are misunderstanding my comment to lordnacho. I'm not against government intervention to limit bad effects of ads. I'm dissecting lordnacho's rhetoric.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_market
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laplace%27s_demon
If you look at economics, the idea is that people are rational agents. At least the orthodox idea which people are not told to question. From there you get all sorts of efficiency ideas that are the support for that government intervention idea of free markets. It goes free thinking -> efficient decisions -> government shouldn't intervene.
So of course if people aren't so free thinking, doesn't that change something?
The issue with advertising is that we have indeed agreed that certain interventions are legit. Externalities are another one of those things they mention in economics, and you'll find all sorts of models for how to deal with them. There are in fact loads of regulations, all grounded in the idea that even rational agents sometimes cause things to happen that we don't want, and should be fixed by intervention. Typically to do with information problems.
So then if actually we think government should intervene in some situations, why not in this one? Maybe it's just a matter of time, as evidence builds up. I suppose there's already controls for things like addictive gambling.
Since the majority of your reply is about justifying more positive government intervention, I've done a poor job explaining what I was talking about.
I already agree with government intervention to limit bad effects of advertising. That's not what my comment was about; instead, I was critiquing your rhetoric.
E.g. the following type of statement : "If people are not truly free thinking, how can we have a free market?!?"
The above statement has a nice poetic symmetry but doesn't actually advance the discussion in a productive way. Let me try more rhetorical examples and hopefully you'll see the same pattern:
Proposal: Facebook should open its social graph as API so users can be free to choose their own 3rd-party client and not be locked in a walled garden. But if users are not so free thinking, how can there be a free choice to choose their own social client?
Proposal: People should be able to freely choose which state or house they want to live in. But if citizens are not aware of hidden influences, and are not perfectly rational agents, and disadvantaged with information asymmetry, can there truly be a free choice to pick a home?
Proposal: People should be free to choose their spouse. But... [same pattern]... because people don't know hidden life influences that had predetermined their eventual mate selection, etc.
What I'm saying is that yes, we can be flexible with definition of "free" -- but that just means we're going down a rabbit hole of philosophical word games. I contend this isn't productive discussion.
If we want to recommend more positive government intervention, we can do that without the "free isn't truly free" philosophy.
Because while false consciousness is one of those convenient thought-ending "explanations" that seem to explain everything and nothing, we actually do have evidence that people can't do rational very well. So how do we square that circle?
> If we want to recommend more positive government intervention
My instinct is normally against intervention, so I do feel a bit quesy about finding problems all over the place that need fixes that are potentially themselves wrong.
It's an issue for sure. I don't know how to resolve it either, just looking for people's perspectives.
It's obviously impossible to realize in reality. However, it's instructive that we get closest to it in the stock market. The market most important to the very rich.
Elon Musk can't even tweet a joke about TSLA stock. Meanwhile if you're _buying_ a Model 3 you'll get expertly crafted disinformation shoved down your throat from every billboard and website.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_competition
re [1], which of the mutually exclusive definitions of "free market" do you subscribe to? Adam Smith's Georgism? Hayek's laissez faire? Other?
so this usage is at least 250 years old - and canonical.
I suspect the 'free from government interference' definition is a modern conservative creation, attempting to claim the ground of what an ideal market looks like in the public's imagination.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKNTCP-ctGw
It's hard to imagine a world where these tactics ever go away. When dealing with cognitive biases I feel like it's loophole city.
You are arguing against a red herring.
To be clear the definition is: "A red herring is something that misleads or distracts from a relevant or important question.
People have accepted the term "web advertising" as "showing product images" or something similar.
"web advertising" is actually identification of the individual viewing a web page, matching it to an online database of other information about that person, tracking and recording that person's behavior, and the sale of information about that person to others.
Putting an attractive woman next to a car is small potatoes next to the darkness of identification and surveillance.
The "free stuff" that we get in return is never without consequences, as we're finding out.
The "hey we built a thing you might want to buy" function can be done in different forms, better, I think. Probably by newspapers.
I think we could start by taxing all advertising revenue by, say, 50%.
You've contradicted yourself. Not everyone can pay. Obviously advertising heavily favors the wealthy - it is not an egalitarian system.
And it is a blight on our society even without considering that.
Nothing is, ever, if that's your criteria then everything fails. So the question is what you want to matter in terms of influence. If you believe in capitalism then money should matter more than connections for example.
All existing online ad platforms provide very good targeting tools and do automated optimizations on your behalf. On a targeted audience you can easily outcompete big corps with a generic offering as it's not overall budget that matters but how much you're spending per view/click/conversion adjusted for how relevant your ad is.
But whenever they actually study these things, from all I've seen, the benefits of targeted-to-the-individual advertising fail to materialize.
Targeting by the content of the site can work (eg, advertising cake decorating tools on a blog about cake decorating), but at least the vast, vast majority of all the privacy-invading, personal-data-aggregating "targeted" advertising online seems to do no better than the much simpler forms, and as I understand it, in many cases it does worse.
But narrowing a bit to the feedback loop between data collected by the ad machine and the next ad you see based on that and ongoing data collection-- if Las Vegas casino games are regulated then we can certainly regulate that dangerous practice.
Web banners? Sponsored content? Trade shows? Sales rep stopping by and buying lunch and talking about a product? Clothing with logos? Hacker News?
There are lots of ways to capture people’s attention to build awareness of your business that probably technically fall under advertising but would be quite difficult to regulate in any meaningful way.
At least you'd kill the ad supported business model because clarity of the transaction required.
So, in your examples:
Web banners: yes, Sponsored content: yes, Trade shows: no, Sales rep stopping by: no, clothing with logos: yes if the logo isn't the brand of the clothing itself, Hacker News: I have no idea how this site is funded.
And I don't even vaguely pretend to know where we should draw the line. I just think it should not be where it currently is.
I like to think about these issues because I make a living selling advertising on my website. We try to have use good practices, have the ads be high quality, targeted toward the content as opposed to the user.
On the other hand, I live in a city which does not allow billboard advertising (Santa Barbara, California) and I do enjoy it in comparison to cities with many billboards.
Maybe a "except in the cases where users/readers/individuals can create adverts, and the entire publication is explicitly devoted to such adverts" clause as well. I'm only a business grad, not a lawyer, so I expect it can be framed better than this.
I often get told unpaid by my friend about cool product because:
a) my friend wants to be viewed as a trustworthy influencer (trustworthy to ad execs) and hopes or expects to be paid later,
b) my friend is unconsciously parroting marketing speak from advertising they have seen,
neither of which are particularly helpful to me.
Stopping these cases would be an additional benefit of banning (or heavily taxing) paid advertising, I would expect it to be somewhat self-regulated.
This is how you create hostility toward your product, not desirability.
I am uncertain if you are saying that I was engaging in the behavior you are describing or if you are describing behavior you have observed regularly in discussions like these.
My question was meant more to think about what constitutes an advertisement for the purposes of a hypothetical "50% tax on all advertising revenue" proposed by the parent comment.
i think this is a misfire on my part and should be a reply to [Marcus] up thread.
So I think the goal is to make it not work. Like any other antisocial behaviour that we'd like to tone down in our society - tax the shit out of it.
Advertising is turning into a paperclip maximizing machine that tends to grow relative to total market.
As we get efficient with other parts of the economy and "grow the pie", mind-share remains zero-sum.
Without something changing, advertising will tend to eat all the productivity gains so we can show more ads to people. This is insidious and benefits no one.
Email is dirt cheap to provide. We probably all still get a free email account with our ISP, except none of us bother because gmail.
I think "means to pay" is relative - Cambodian tuk-tuk drivers get cheaper, better internet access than Berliners. And they watch YouTube on it. If they didn't have access to YouTube for free there would be a huge market in producing Cambodian content for them to watch, priced appropriately for that market.
relatively speaking, no
>irrelevant and annoying in the internet age
disagree strongly
while i have not owned a tv for the last two decades i still sometimes consume their content via internet or car-radio and would probably miss it if it wasnt available.
Triple-J (their "youth" music radio station) is an Australian cultural mainstay (or was; its relevance is fading), and I don't think anyone actually minds that some of their tax goes to support it. Except the usual right-wing conspiracy dicks who are mad that the ABC doesn't publish their shite.
Alternative potential consequence: it allows indie news publishers to become more competitive and visible against billionaire-backed business with huge advertising powers.
> [can't] connect with friends and family online
same - if Facebook goes under, that's a positive network effect to smaller competitors. (there are plenty of free ways to connect that don't depend on advertising)
—Banksy
But if anyone reacts to an ad with this degree of paranoia and self-loathing, it speaks more to their own fragility than it does than the nature of advertising.
We take it for granted that living with an emotionally-abusive person deeply affects someone's sense of self-perception, but for some reason when advertisers use the same sort of tactics, but at a slightly lower level spread across a greater amount of time, we're supposed to accept it as appropriate?
We all have a finite store of, let's call it "self confidence"; why should we accept as status quo that all comers have a right to drain some of it every day in order to line their own pocketbooks?
It doesn't drain me. It's anecdotal but no one I know seems to be suffering from some psychological equivalent of battered-spouse syndrome due to the effects of advertising.
I don't even really see a lot of advertising that uses psychologically demeaning tactics, sneering and flippant insults and shaming and the like. Maybe I just don't notice them. But to me, demeaning your customers isn't likely to result in them being more likely to buy your product.
To be clear I'm not saying any one advertiser is directly attempting to demean any particular person into buying their particular product, because clearly this isn't a winning strategy. It's the dose that makes the poison, however.
If one person walks up to me on the street and says "I've got some shirts that would make you look really slim" I would shrug it off as a weird happening. When the second person say "I used to look large, but this brand really made the pounds seem less obvious", I think it's been an odd day. When this continues to happen over the course of the month, perhaps I begin to think I'm looking a bit large around the middle.
Taken in isolation, no one instance is going to break me. Taken together, over a lifetime? That could change my own perception of myself in ways I can't even begin to estimate.
Maybe you are. I certainly am. Are these theoretical shirt-sellers trying to convince you you're getting overweight to get you to buy a shirt for overweight people, or have they noticed you're overweight and have a shirt you might want to buy? One is clearly abusive but the other isn't.
And I wonder whether they're incentivized to care. In either cases above, my money is still green and smells like money, and makes the same number go up in their quarterly sales goal dashboard.
My point, and I gather the point of the Banksy quote, is that any one instance has a negligible effect on me, but that in aggregate I'm stuck staring down the barrel of a machine that has infinite stamina and resources that's attempting to wear me down, and is likely succeeding in ways I can't detect, nor have the power to detect if I wanted to.
If being exposed to this aggregate process all day makes me less patient with my family at night, to what degree is it worth it? If it makes me less willing to treat someone else with kindness, is it still justified if it's only a _little_ less willing?
No single advertiser is literally laughing at me while doing the backstroke across their vault full of money, but none of them needs to have such overtly malicious intent for the aggregate effect of the entire system on me to be just as corrosive.
A lot of advertising is negative, not in the sense of attack ads, but in what it is that you agree not to say, for money. When advertisers pull "funding" when a platform doesn't censor "swear words", the lack of swear words is now an advertisement. Do we really think that there is a consistent definition of free speech which is compatible with advertising?
Freedom and anarchy are different.
It is in this way that google has actually failed. If you look for a product you get a whole load of dross back. It’s impossible to filter by spec, you can add keywords but this rarely gives you more sensible results these days. The products get lost in the noise.
Most of the time what would be better would be a structured directory of product information enabling you to zero in on the product you want without the crap. This directory would be independent of any specific vendor. All new products would be released into the directory so you can track all new products in certain categories to stay informed. Gaming of the directory would be policed ensuring equal standing of all products.
The only thing this doesn’t handle well is new product categories. But sure there’s ways to handle it.
These sorts of listing aggregators (like pc parts sites) have a perverse incentive to always allow those that pay to get top placement.
I'm genuinely interested in a business model for this stuff that can support fair placement.
Flat subscription fees on the vendor side needs to first solve the chicken and egg problem. Flat subscription fees on the customer side doesn't seem likely to work.
Communicating that your service is really really different because it does not have shady business practices is a hard sale at best. Look at how free to play games thrive versus more ethical business models.
I want to work on solutions to these insidious businesses that seem so commonplace today but I don't know a model that could work.
Allow buyers to push back against bogus, overtagged, or miscategorized items and that aggregator will gain some serious reputation over Amazon and any other venues in the same niche.
And I mean meaningful pushback - not "it's flagged and will be online still until reviewed by the scarce human team gets to it" but "it's flagged and offline until humans review it and reapprove or flush it".
Sure there will always be trolls who flag anything and everything but they can get banned as users under existing abuse terms.
Imagine how quickly Amazon would get flushed clean of bogus listings if user flags pushed them offline until Amazon staff could verify and relist them... they'd have to prioritize restoring actual useful items, or at least start seriously policing the worst actors on the supplier side to stem the tide. Losing "good" items in a sea of flagged bad ones would also be a secondary incentive to clean house and keep it that way.
It is quite hard for a search engine to fairly treat results which are trying everything to manipulate the system and results that aren’t trying at all.
Is a world where poorer students who can't afford google have to compete against wealthier students with google a better world than one with web ads? I think it's easy to focus on the bad, the privacy issues and dark patterns that web ads incentivize, to the exclusion of the fact that it has expanded access to incredibly powerful services to people of all means (well, all means as long as they have access to the internet).
1. https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2018/04/25/how-much...
Japan CPC $1.32 CPM $0.38
Montenegro CPC $0.05 CPM $0.01
http://www.rudibedy.com/blog/facebook-advertising-cpc-cpm-pe...
Its already that you send the poor person a 10% discount coupon for one box of chocolate and the rich person 4 boxes for free, a bottle of wine and a life time 10% discount. Why would the digital world be different?
Largely, I agree. But, this is an editorial decision and not an absolute.
We used to get better news when we paid straight up for it (newspaper cover price/subscriptions). But, lets not forget, those papers had advertising too. The difference is that the ads were not the only form of revenue and the papers with the best journalistic integrity were responsible to their readers more than their advertisers. Therefore, news was optimized for readers.
Now that most news is paid for by advertising, and because advertising pays out based on impressions and/or clicks, we get news that is optimized for impressions and clicks -- which is obviously much worse news than we used to get. This shift in incentive means that news organizations are now more responsible to their advertisers than their readers/viewers (and they don't like that either, but it is a decision that helps keep the lights on).
I don't think you can get rid of all advertising. I mean, there will always be advertising. If it's not overt, it will become more and more covert. So, I don't think the government would be successful in trying to control it further than they already have. Their current approach of transparency is on the right trajectory at least, but it's not much of a solution either. It's probably ok to allow: overt, paid, and responsible advertising. The key there is "responsible". No responsible editor should allow an advertisement that interrupts the content in any way!
I have worked in all of the industries involved in this issue so I can assure you it will be a difficult problem to solve. Either the incentives have to be flipped, so that the news organizations are incentivized to create the best content for readers (simply inform the public at large in an unbiased way -- the original purpose of "journalists" in ancient Greece). Or, the tastes of the readers/viewers has to change so that they reject clickbait news.
I don't have a lot of faith in readers, myself included, because it's often difficult to see that something was clickbait until you read it. I also don't have faith in news organizations being innovative enough to get ahead of this problem and fix it. So, I believe we need some kind of third party solution.
We need something like those content summary bots that can distill an article into a paragraph, but can rewrite clickbait headlines into boring but factual headlines. Then provide that bot as a browser plugin so the clickbait headlines are replaced for those of us who want a more honest approach to news. Again, not a perfect solution either... I'm not sure one exists for this problem.
Also, all the businesses that are real margin-calls on an advertising model if they clickbait the shit out of us will have to find something better. They're going to have to do this anyway - the revenue from advertising is shrinking. This just speeds up the timeline. Oh, and newspapers are in that group.
Even personalized ads are good if they're done in a way that ensures your privacy is safe. It would be awesome if Steam could find me some video games that are actually interesting.
The problem is a lot of current advertising is completely broken. It's been said a lot before, but: companies making you watch ad after ad that you're just not going to buy, ads encouraging me to ignore them because they're ugly and make it harder to see content, advertisers that are so obnoxious and bad at advertising their products that I'm less inclined to buy them. Idk how this kind of crap advertising actually gets companies more money, but I guarantee it's not "subtly influencing" me to buy "Slots Royale" or fake medicine, or even Geico - and I know I have human biases and distortions. Also, ad tracking which takes all of my data and doesn't even work.
Idk what the current trend is but I've heard that advertisements are generating less and less revenue. I wouldn't be surprised if, as population the gets more tech-savvy, ads will be forced to change / die out because so few people actually use them. Or at least get better at advertising.
I used to think roughly the same - I'm really not that convinced anymore.
I'd actually say your last point really drives home just how BAD advertising is right now. It's so bad that there's evolutionary pressure to learn to ignore advertisements.
Ads are like a form of social parasite - They've hijacked a human instinct to share things we like and turned it into a profit motivated, manipulative, abusive channel to suck money out of people.
Just like animals ridden with parasites are less fit - consumers who are most susceptible or surrounded by ads are less fit. Their decisions are influenced by ads to no longer objectively consider whether a product is useful to them. Like a mouse infected with toxoplasma is drawn to the small of cat urine - even though it means getting eaten far more often. Good for the parasite, bad for the mouse. Ads are good for the company, bad for the person.
Ads exist to (1) pay for free content (2) try to get you to buy/try/etc the thing being advertised. If (1) were taken care of, would (2) even exist? Or would websites just do both and piss everyone off?
Taking away my ability to use an ad blocker - like what Google is trying to do - would be like removing all wheelchair ramps. It would have a massive negative impact on my quality of life, and would have far reaching consequences for my productivity levels.
Meta: Posted this earlier in response to a top level comment but figured it's better on its own.
Also of course people have control already, they can chose not to visit websites with ads on them.
No. We've already seen this game play out over and over, and recently too! It's not like GDPR has stopped the big corporations from monetizing information about you. It's just made it so that WHOIS lookups are now worthless and don't even contain contact emails.
We already have that in the W3C browsers. This idea of "legal controls" on advertising will have to start with well understood systems before online advertising is affected, imo.
The gist of this is that there are shared resources in the world. Air and water are examples. We recognize them as shared resources, and we recognize that without regulations, some people would use them in ways that make them unusable for others.
Crawford makes a pitch for treating "attention" as a resource, and asserts that folks should have a right not to be addressed by mechanized means.
It's a very good read, especially for software developers, phenomenologists, or cognitive science folks.
Additionally, doesn't advertising go directly against the notion of a "free market"? The idea that "capitalism breeds competition, and competition creates quality" goes out the window when huge advertising budgets urge you to buy some cheap commodity product over a well-made product with a smaller advertising budget.
I'm happy to pay for things like newspaper site subscriptions - I just don't want to give my card or any identifying information to known spammers, 30-days-to-unsubscribe data-sellers, and hostile companies that refuse to allow you to cancel subscriptions other than calling them during a 1 hour timespan once a week.
I'd be happy to throw $0.25 at a single article with no advertising or tracking and without leaking any identifying information at all - that means I have balance stored somehow, and I do not want to give even an email address [they've already shown that they cannot be trusted with it, much less anything else].
For example, NYT allows Californians purely because of the law that requires you to be able to sign up online -> cancel online only has this turned on if you have a CA billing address and CA geoip.
This is hostile, asshole design. The code is there already, the implementation is there already, they just require everyone in every other state to call in during tight hours if not absolutely forced to via regulation.
Blizzard/EA: Call of Duty has an option to opt out of selling your personal information. This option is only visible to be modified at all (not disabled - just gone entirely) if you are on a CA IP. If you ever log in once from another machine or another location, it's reset to retroactively sell all information and also not shown on the options menu.
Excessively heavy handed legal controls are needed because nobody can fucking behave.
To me advertising should be fairly passive and loosely targetted. Basically putting car ads on a motoring website or serving local interest ads based on your location.
What the web has given us is a form of "thought manipulation". It has gone beyond just trying to make us aware of a product in to manipulating us to make irrational decisions. The idea of the likes of Google and other ad brokers constantly researching web users actions in order to get inside their heads really bothers me. It's more than creepy, its disturbing.