Very interesting point of view. My main takeaway from this is "Better ads than paywalls" which entails that the only alternative to ads is a paywall which I don't agree with. I think that there is a middleground with freemium, free trial model.
Also there was a comment somewhere I can't find right now "There are 2 ways to make money in the internet - bundling and unbundling" with this I think there is value of a paywall that bundles, see Apple News. In the end I don't like the way AdTech works right now, I am not sure about what's next. I don't think explicit regulation is the way, especially since Internet is international and law is as a rule local. But either we will sell our data to monopolies or we will die in bills for selfhosting everything and even though involuntarily our internet histories will be sold.
There is third way - crypto mining on user computers. I would prefer to mine some crypto for someone instead of seeing ads. Biggest problem: mobile users would be much less "valuable".
I'd work on advertisements for high six figures. That being said, I'd also be a terrible culture fit in an advertising shop. I can't stand ads and a hobby of mine is criticising the ads, and companies, forcing me through them for the duration thereof.
>I must be fun at parties
Parties with ads, or any paid "guests" are not fun...
If jefftk wanted to stop working on ads, he could transfer within weeks to any of hundreds of open positions on Google's internal recruitment platform, keeping the same compensation, benefits, etc. It's stupidly easy (doesn't even require your current manager's approval!) and the only "cost" is usually that it can set you back slightly in your career due to abandoning your current projects and having to ramp up on new stuff.
So no, "because of the salary" doesn't explain any of it, and you should read the blog post before posting insulting comments like these.
Biggest issue with this argument - advertising supported businesses are fine, contextual advertising is fine, targeted cross site advertising is a pointless red queen race that is undermining our society in multiple ways.
Can you say more what you mean by "pointless red queen race"?
Let's say someone wants to sell fishing equipment. The traditional way of doing this is to buy ads on fishing sites. So now my fishing equipment purchases make there be more writing about fishing; yay!
Then one of the fishing websites decides to put a tracking pixel on their site to drop "fishing website visitor" cookies (or, in a future without third-party cookies, a turtledove interest group). They make a deal with a third party provider and get paid a small amount per visitor. Then fishing retailers have a new choice: instead of buying ads on fishing sites they can instead buy ads on any site for users who have one of the "fishing website visitor" cookies. If there were a monopoly fishing site, then this would increase their earnings: while the ad space on their site isn't as valuable, they will set the pixel price high enough that they come out ahead. It's not a monopoly, though, so the price of the pixel gets driven down through competition, and money that would go to fishing sites instead goes to the publishers that people who spend money on fishing equipment visit.
In this case I see how it's worse for fishing sites, but not how it's bad for consumers: their willingness to buy fishing equipment translates into support for all the sites they visit, and not just the fishing sites.
But there are also many niches that don't have economic tie-ins, or have ones that are far weaker than "writing about fishing" and "buying fishing equipment". In a world with targeted advertising, these niches do better, because of overlap between audiences. A "let's have better housing policy" blog can show ads for fishing equipment, vacations, HVAC supplies, or whatever else visitors have shown interest in on other sites.
Additionally, targeted advertising increases the total amount of funding available for online content, because people with niche interests are available to be advertised to in more places. Seeing ten fishing ads once a week when you visit a fishing site vs seeing twenty fishing ads spread over the course of the week, etc.
So while niche publishers in lucrative niches would likely make more money if we only had context-based advertising, I don't think niche publishers overall, publishers overall, or consumers would be better off.
Now take us through the individual and collective consequences of mass data collection.
You seem to be deliberately focusing on the beneficial parts of advertising, at the exclusion of the harmful bits. If you want to maintain your credibility -- let alone give the impression of someone striving to live ethically -- you'll need to give that second part its due attention.
Addendum:
If I were offered a generous salary to work on Google ad technology, I might accept. I'm not 100% sure, but the temptation would very real. As such, I want to make it clear that my criticism does not stem from any feeling of moral superiority, but rather from deep-seated respect and sympathy for someone engaged in an ethical dilemma.
I believe the comments would be much more charitable had your position been something along the lines of "I do it because it's good money, and I sometimes struggle with the dilemma. Here is the nature of the issue as I see it." As a general rule, people respect earnest introspection. Not so with playing ostrich.
Let's talk about the individual and collective consequences of mass data collection. Are you saying you know something about those? Do tell!
Maybe I'm just terribly dense, but I seriously can't think of any reasonable objection to what google does. The best I personally can come up with is that most people don't understand what google is doing and if they did know some of them might object.
When I google "the individual and collective consequences of mass data collection" I get results that talk about the NSA and human rights -- this doesn't seem to have much to do with what google is doing though. When I add "google" to that search I get a rambling article on "How surveillance changes people's behavior".
Please help me out here -- how am I or anyone else being harmed by google knowing what sites I visit?
I don't think the author is being disingenuous. I do think there is a sizable subset of privacy advocates who have become so stringently ideological about this issue they would downvote even thoughtful replies and are so caught up in their bubble that they seemingly can't have a conversation with anyone outside of it.
Are you being sarcastic? You cannot see consequences in the fact of a gigantic tech company having access to: searches, emails, attachments, photos, videos, location, messages, calls, apps installed and their usage, sleep schedules, driving styles, medical records, and about 1001 things I forgot to mention?
genuinely cannot tell if trolling or not -- do you not see a security implication to centralizing PII (or similar data)?
to me it seems really bad to mine and centralize PII (note: this PII is also arbitrarily being shared with third-parties, usually without explicit or informed consent from user).
---
ie: this is data which is mined in a way, depth and scope of any implication is usually abstracted away from the user or hand-waved away in legalese or presented in such an annoying way users have become conditioned to unconditionally accept that which they do not understand, and therefore they likewise usually remain uninformed/ignorant/naive of any implication, security or otherwise, in order to get to the service asap. and this is something absolutely exploited by these companies.
---
do we really want companies, companies who have demonstrated they are not immune to simple mistakes leading to vulnerabilities, or leaked PII, mind you, to be in a position where we the user have no choice, but to trust it won't leak PII to nefarious persons (persons who can then do meaningfully harmful things with even basic PII)?
we are already bleeding enough PII as it is -- when should we truly be concerned with stopping it? if never, and there is no concern as you seem to indicate, then let us arbitrarily share medical information, too.
on that subject, there are also so many instances of arbitrarily collected and shared PII, for the sake of ads, that would almost unequivocally be a HIPA violation in other contexts -- to me it seems asinine to have such well-defined understandings of PII for the protection of the person in some contexts, but yet in the context of ads, suddenly <i>anything</i> goes, and the spiel we always get from the ads advocates is: but it is good for the user and the content creators cannot exist without it, so it must exist as is, unchained.
(un)ironically this is also a psychology presented by abusive relationships where the abuser keeps the abused thinking they need them, and the abuser establishes itself as a (survival) dependency in the abused's mind.
idk, i'm pretty skeptical of the claim that ad tech and the ad industry has good intentions, and i am becoming increasingly of the opinion that most of the advertising models advocates are trying so hard to convince users to enable, are just fucking profit-driven-at-all-costs cancer.
> n this case I see how it's worse for fishing sites, but not how it's bad for consumers: their willingness to buy fishing equipment translates into support for all the sites they visit, and not just the fishing sites.
It's bad for the consumer because their privacy is being violated and their metadata is being sold, in order for advertisers to track them everywhere they go online, so businesses can try and extract all of their spending money as efficiently as possible.
It also is bad for the consumer because it's bad for the collective whole: instead of quality content online everything is being driven by outrage and clickbait in order to serve as many targeted ads as possible.
Personally I don't even want to support that ecosystem or those sites.
It's also bad for the fishing site because now their niche targeted ad slots that used to pay decently in order to target people with an interest in fishing are pushed into the same race to the bottom low return ads that are being automatically targeted. So they lose too.
Only winners are huge publishers that don't have any niche audience to target because now they effectively target every niche. And Google of course. Basically the two groups who I want to win the least.
Is this a new policy? As far as I know Google employs algorithms and bots of different sorts to read emails to identify topics and then use it for ad targeting.
I.e if I send you an email talking about finding a vacation deal to go to Egypt, we will get ads to that effect (obviously it'll vary somewhat).
Jeff contends that '"relevant ads" on a blog about urban planning' solve the problem of funding the blog for you. They allow the blog to not be required to focus on 'fishing equipment' in order to place such ads, only that it attract people known to Google's ad network to like fishing.
I’d prefer the blog shut down or just self-host or find some alternative. Donations work well enough. I’m blocking the ads anyway and if they block me because of that, then that’s fine too.
Ad blockers are a godsend though. I either get to opt-out of ads, or I get to opt-out of sites that rely on ads (for the most part, caveats aside).
Why do all the examples from the advertising industry have such easy-peasy, neutral goods? Fishing equipment. Basket weaving books. Dog food.
Targeted advertising hasn't been a blessing just for small businesses selling fishing equipment and organic combucha, but also -- actually, especially, for companies that sell things like:
* Potentially addictive subscriptions (for e.g. online casinos or other gambling games) -- thus specifically targeting people who are at risk for addiction, unless your targeting settings are crap.
* Snake oil skincare products for teenagers, or potentially dangerous weight loss tablets -- thus compounding peer pressure against young people with poor self esteem.
* Bullshit therapy "options" like German New Medicine, specifically targeting people who are terminally ill, or researching things like cancer treatment for a relative or a friend.
Boy am I glad we're increasing the total amount of funding available for online content!
The author of the post specifically (you read the article, didn't you?) said:
> The thing is, I think advertising is positive, and I think my individual contribution is positive. I'm open to being convinced on this: if I'm causing harm through my work I would like to know about it.
Then goes on to not mention a single example of harm being caused through their work, like virtually all articles that attempt to defend the advertising industry's practices. I thought I'd list a few.
I believe that the key of the message was that the advertisement companies gather a plenty of personal data and vulnerable groups are very easy to find and target. The same private data is also useful for "all the people who host scam sites on the cloud".
This. The more ad platform becomes accurate, the more ads will exploit vulnerabilities in human mind. Some might believe they don't have such vulnerabilities, but there can be some in subconscious level. Ad tech is basically PSYOP and people really should be on guard.
If those are troubling industries (which I agree) it should be illegal to advertise those products. That doesn't mean advertising as a methodology is bad.
What value does advertising produce? I mean it, if advertising magically ceased to exist tomorrow, would anything be worse? Advertising is in itself a manipulative activity, an attempt to pass a worse product as a better one, or to create a demand where there was none, or to persuade someone to do something they otherwise wouldn't.
I think advertising has been crucial to increasing the economic size of the world. It's a valid argument if you think our world is crap, and we should never have switched to bigger civilizations. But the economic growth, driven significantly by increasing the available market for products, has led lots of people out of poverty, spurred innovation, and generally enabled a lot more humans to be born than would have.
I think it's pretty much this, advertising is lubrication for an economy of consumption.
Word of mouth and aggregators (like yelp) can help people find solutions when they know of a problem, but ads inform/manipulate (depending on how you see it) people to know they have a problem in the first place.
Also if you've ever written ad copy it's all pretty structurally similar: hook, problem statement, solution, testimonials, etc.
1) New small businesses (like Shopify stores) can reach customers without going through retail gatekeepers. Ask any Shopify seller, nothing beats FB.
2) New challenger SaaS brands can get in front of customers to compete with mammoth corporate brands with worse software (I see this all the time on my job).
3) Without good ad targeting, only bottom hanging fruit advertisers that appeal to the lowest common denominator can afford to spend. Weight loss, teeth whitening, etc. Good ad targeting means a better user experience with ads.
> In this case I see how it's worse for fishing sites, but not how it's bad for consumers
I have an example loosely inspired by real life.
Let's say I visit a fishing forum using the shared computer of my very, very vegan family. That website has now dropped the "fishing website visitor" cookie, and suddenly all my computer shows are ads for lure and fishing rods. My father is now furious, asking everyone in the house who has been visiting "those" websites.
I want the association between me and fishing gone. But who do I talk to? The website says they had nothing to do with this, the ad network won't even give me the time of day, and if the cookie is a supercookie then clearing history and cache may not be enough. And heavens help me if I get targeted mail, like Target used to do with pregnant women...
That, I believe, is the problem with targeted advertising: that my privacy is taken away in the name of helping somebody's website, it's leaked everywhere, and I have no real way to say "I don't want this".
People who don't know how the sausage is made expect that when they're alone in a room, what they read about or watch or listen to is between them and no one. Imagine for a second your fishing interested potential customer didn't have any digital devices at all. They just asked friends and neighbors for word of mouth recommendations or went to the nearest Bass Pro Shop where they expected the people who work there would know what they're talking about.
Fishing retailers have a choice. They can rely on the strength and quality of their products and organic interest in fishing as a recreational activity. Or they can contract out their marketing to a commercial version of a spy agency that invents a silent, invisible device that follows their customers around when they're otherwise alone, recording everything they ever do to learn how to better predict their future spending preferences.
Surely, even if this resulted in better sales for the fishing industry, lower prices for the consumer, and the ability of niche publications to exist by predicting that their readers also like fishing and charging the fishing industry to sell them this information, you would not find this okay.
You've convinced yourself that this kind of surveillance and profiling is totally okay and different when it takes place on network connected computing devices and that people have even consented to it, but the actual people being monitored do not feel this way.
>I don't know many people who think advertising per se is morally objectionable
Lots of people do. E.g. the first user feedback comment in that article: "Advertising is bad because it’s fundamentally about influencing people to do things they wouldn’t do otherwise. [...]"
And every HN thread about advertising also has a variation of that sentiment.
>And every HN thread about advertising also has a variation of that sentiment.
And it is not just on HN, but across the Internet. Reddit, Forum, Twitter.
Their voice are crystal clear, All ads are bad. And any objection will.... well you know the internet.
It is the same with tracking. Somehow all tracking are bad on the internet.
Another recent example on the Internet. All VCs are bad. ( Although that didn't gain much traction )
Edit: See, Instant downvoting. And if you disagree, go on to read all the comments on HN on the subject and count for yourself how many comments were there to support resonable "ads", and how many were flat out dismissal.
You're dismissing the reasoned arguments against the fundamental value proposition of advertisements without argument against the reasons themselves, which is essentially flamebait.
I agree, this is a common (and justified) sentiment.
I had a high school teacher give us a book about print advertising (this was way before the internet was a common thing) and how it deceives. How they sell cars with sexy women, how instead of selling a product they sell an unrelated image of success (which is not really tied to the product). It was a nice book, with lots of photos and examples, and all about how advertisement is designed to deceive and encourage a "need" that wasn't there before.
Actually advertising works best when it exploits the needs and desires you already feel. The farther away it gets from those, the more expensive it gets. That said, ever since the sixties it does sell things based on people's need to project their status and image, as a way of defining oneself to the outside world. People buy things for what the thing does, plus what owning and using the thing says about your personality. And people seem to be prone to accept these symbolic identifications less critically then they do performance claims about what the product does. Bob Dylan said it best:
Advertising signs that con you\
Into thinking you're the one\
That can do what's never been done\
That can win what's never been won\
Meantime life outside goes on
All around you
But umm, I don't think it's always a bad thing. Or rather, it's not bad by default.
I agree. The point is that many people, including Bob Dylan, my high school teacher and many others seem to think advertisement purposefully misleads (or exploits) in order to sell. I tend to (partially) side with this opinion myself, but that's not the main point of my comment.
I'm supporting jasode's comment that lots of people do consider advertising morally objectionable. I believe this assertion is not controversial regardless of what one personally thinks about ads.
I think that's a relatively small group compared to the group that thinks advertising is fine, while tracking isn't.
Arguing that advertising is somehow inappropriate manipulation isn't consistent with a market economy. Like it or not, efficient markets require marketing. Now, you could be against the market economy of course, but I don't see a lot of the people claiming ads are manipulation also claiming that the market economy is bad (which imo would be more intellectually honest).
I'd say disregard the "all ads are bad" crowd. It's a completely uninteresting discussion. The interesting discussion is the line to be drawn between advertising (which is good, or at least acceptable) and the shady side of adtech with trading in personal information.
One can believe things to be bad or to have negative externalities without calling for a wholesale ban. I find all ads reprehensible but I completely agree that banning ads would be impractical and probably effectively impossible. I don't see a contradiction.
> efficient markets require marketing
The problem with ads is that they fundamentally violate consent. I can't avoid seeing an ad, even if I'm not interested. Ads are not the equivalent of a salesman who's pitching his script to me, they are like an unsolicited robocall.
* Potential security risks (js ads with malware is a thing)
* Potentially gathers a lot of data that could be abused by others
Contextual ads aren't _that_ bad, assuming they're simple enough to not run actual code on the client devices, and the clients can spare the bandwidth/resources in their end. Until that's universally true ads are a nuisance at best and actively hostile at worst.
Lots of people do. When I joined Facebook, I received several death threats from someone in my circle and routinely get called morally bankrupt on the internet. I’ve also had encounters with individuals where they shun me after learning I worked there.
Surprisingly it doesn’t bother me, they are overgeneralizing and don’t know me.. but certainly they find it morally objectionable.
Jeff have you ever considered giving to specific people? It's quite ridiculous that college costs what you might give in a year, but $264,727 could concretely allow several people to attend college each year (state schools, community colleges, etc). Or how about removing bad debt, letting people rebuild their credit and start to save. I can think of myriad reasons why this is harder and less desirable (finding them, funding them, ensuring it has real impact, etc). But curious what your take on this would be.
If you strongly believe there are some unexplored avenues for impactful donations to individuals you should make the case to Givewell. It's what they're all about, and that seems to be what Jeff is mainly giving to (all those Against Malaria donations I assume were the top Givewell recommendation of their year). I think Jeff is doing the smart thing by outsourcing the analysis to Givewell who specialize in it.
If you click through to some of Jeff's other articles, you can see he's interested in effective altruism. Broadly, at the same total cost, paying for 5-6 globally wealthy people to attend college is going to have lower QALY impact than buying ~132,000 Long-Lasting Insecticidal bed nets ("LLINs") for people in regions with lots of malaria-carrying mosquitoes.
For more on effective altruism broadly, some resources:
"appeasing guilt with charity donations" implies something like "ads -> guilt -> donations". That the donations came years before the ads is pretty good evidence otherwise?
I make no judgement as to whether you are or are not attempting to offset guilt with donations, but no, I'm not sure the order of events matters that much.
A person who donates generously may more easily justify dubious money-earning efforts by saying, "it's really not for me so much, it's for the kids!" In other words, it is possible (again, not saying this is case for you) that one might take a job in advertising because they feel their donations provide ethical cover.
Bravo. It's weird sort of moral pretzel to advertise your donations which simultaneously wins you some respect and a whole lot of antipathy for being self-righteous. Unfortunately there's no way I know of to self-advertise your donations without being self-righteous but it's the right thing to do. Ironically you find yourself wondering do you pay more with your pocketbook for the charity or more with your social capital for the charity advertisement (which makes the charity more impactful).
By the way I don't donate anything to charity at the moment, although I plan to someday. So I'm speaking from a no-skin-in-the-game perspective.
The question is, what is the alternative? I see two main
funding models:
Paywalls. You pay with your money.
Ads. You pay with your attention.
I guess That question seems good, but with ads, I don't feel like I'm paying with my attention, I'm paying with my personal data. I'm paying by sharing what I'm doing with a seemingly infinite number of companies who turn around and buy and sell all that data and build profiles on me that are then bought or sold. I'm paying with my privacy, not my attention.
You might be interested in the second half of the post, starting with "But the biggest issue I see people raising is the privacy impact of targeted ads..."? Browsers are getting rid of third-party cookies, and Safari, Edge, and Chrome all have proposals for how ads can do many of the same things they do today without cross-site tracking.
I'd rather get a nickel for every bit of data that I did not give explicitly consent to be collected, and a nickel for anytime that bits cross referenced, sold, shared, lost, transferred, or otherwise handled in a way that was not explicitly defined in the eula..
It's also important to realize that with ads, you also pay with your money, when you later buy some product (whether due to the ad or not). Your attention and personal data are only valuable in this context as a way to access your money. The amount of money you pay with is unclear and varies from person to person, but you still do pay.
I'm always surprised that someone would go through the trouble of justifying their involvement in something prima facie unethical -- in writing, no less -- and fail to address the actual ethical issue. As other have noted in comments, the problem is not with advertising in general, but with the specific way in which Google advertises.
I have a hard time believing the author is unaware of this, so I'm left wondering: why? What was the point of this exercise? The result is closer to a self-indictment than an apology.
> I have a hard time believing the author is unaware of this, so I'm left wondering: why? What was the point of this exercise?
I reckon it was mostly a brag about (1) how he earns over half a million dollars a year for inflicting this upon us all and (2) how much more charitable he is than most of the rest of us.
I have a more charitable interpretation. My impression is that the author is dealing with an ethical dilemma that most of us have not had to contend with, and that this essay is an attempt to resolve it.
The problem is that its selectively truthful, of course, which renders the whole exercise moot. Even though the author landed on a position in which he is not at fault, it's not going to buy him any peace of mind.
> I have a more charitable interpretation. My impression is that the author is dealing with an ethical dilemma that most of us have not had to contend with, and that this essay is an attempt to resolve it.
That's a good point and I agree that the essay does attempt this. But with opening his piece by letting us all know about his huge income and hefty charitable donations, I felt rather overshadowed the rest of his arguments.
(I've been putting my income online since 2008 when my salary was $65k. https://www.jefftk.com/p/salary-publicy for why I think more people should share their incomes.)
I found it interesting that the first thing he says to defend his work with ads is that he gives money to charity. If you feel like you need to donate to charity to justify your actions, maybe your actions are evil? There has to be some level of guilt involved in that decision, at the very least.
Which is to say, I don't blame him for what he does. If someone dangled all that money in my face I can't say I wouldn't be tempted to take it, even if people call me evil.
However, the mental gymnastics to write an article like this does bother me. It's the same stuff probably everyone else in ads and other evil industries does to justify their actions. Reading something non-satirical like this makes me feel less good about the world.
People aren't asking you "why do you choose to work on ads rather than not work at all", they're asking "why do you work on ads rather than a different area". In that context, the fact that you work to donate is not relevant, since you could switch to a different area and continue to donate.
Engineers are not somehow separate from society. When you say "let's get the law to handle it", that "us" includes engineers. Politics is just people, including engineers, figuring out how to organize society.
If you think something is wrong, the first step is to not do it. If you think it's so wrong it should be illegal, you can take the optional second step of trying to change the law.
There are some circumstances where you think something is wrong, but not doing it would be impossible or require really drastic life changes. For example, maybe you think driving a gas-powered car is wrong because it contributes to climate change, but you can't afford to buy an electric car or move somewhere that doesn't require a car. This is not one of those cases. The author has 10 years of experience at Google and could easily find a very well paying job either at another department inside Google, or at another company.
> The author has 10 years of experience at Google and could easily find a very well paying job either at another department inside Google, or at another company.
My point is that quitting or getting a different job accomplishes nothing. With a multinational corporation like Google, they will never struggle to fill roles. If you work in these positions, you at least have influence on product growth, and you can use the massive amount of money earned to lobby against harmful behavior. If you quit, you have no internal influence and have less money to take political action with, meaning the only way you could change things is through legislation.
I don't mean to come across as too forward or rude, and freely admit that I know nothing about you personally. Thank you for making such generous contributions to charity!
The way I look at it is like so:
I think most people want to bring a net positive value to society. One way of doing that is working on something whose intrinsic value to society is neutral or nebulous (or just not thinking about it too hard), and compensating for that giving the money we make to other organizations that are definitely contributing positively. While this is better than not doing so, I think it misses out on the leverage that exists in what we build vs. the money we're paid for it.
For example, despite making over $500k last year, we know your employer thinks you are producing more value than that, because otherwise they wouldn't pay you that much. You would be a drag on their income statement otherwise. What this means is that even if you donated 100% of your salary to charity, you still aren't taking advantage of the leverage of what you can build, vs. the fixed amount you can earn.
If instead, you choose to work on something which is inherently good for society, society at large benefits from that leverage. You might be paid less, say $200k instead of $500k. But since the positive value you produce is leveraged you could be contributing, let's say, $1M of positive value for society - $200k to pay you to live in the bay area ($800k net positive value).
You are contributing 100% of the value to the person, but it is really the person and the situation.
If I increase online sales by 0.1% through optimizing something, I am worth millions of dollars to Amazon and nearly nothing to Joe Schmoe with a small Shopify site.
> If I increase online sales by 0.1% through optimizing something, I am worth millions of dollars to Amazon and nearly nothing to Joe Schmoe with a small Shopify site.
Yes, but software skills are fairly fungible. Just because you currently work on ads doesn't mean that's all your skills are good for, or even that you need to work anywhere in ecommerce.
> If you feel like you need to donate to charity to justify your actions, maybe your actions are evil?
You’re way off base here. The author links to the Effective Altruism page on “giving to earn” one link deep in: https://www.jefftk.com/donations
This is a well established concept, the idea is that in many life situations you can maximize your positive impact by taking a well-paying job and putting that money into charity.
So the arrow of causation is the opposite to what you are claiming; starting with the desire to give to charity, what job optimizes the amount that can be given?
It’s disheartening to see the cynicism that is being directed towards someone that is transparently advocating for making the world a better place, and taking the time to put their thinking in public to seek feedback on it.
Huh? The prima facie part means "at first glance". I deliberately chose that turn of phrase to suggest that it might prove not to be unethical, on closer inspection.
The problem, of course, is that this closer inspection didn't happen.
I disagree. Advertising is intrusive and designed to convince you to do things you wouldn't normally do. It's large scale psychological manipulation that's only considered ethical because we've been doing it for so long.
But so is essentially all interaction with your environment. Every interaction you have with essentially everyone might change your behavior. The only difference is the scale.
The problem is that the power of targeted advertising has been democratized (irony intended) to allow everyone to do it. It is capable enough that it can end peaceful democracies.
Might be a difference of opinion, but what do you propose as an alternative to funding free things like news sites, videos on the internet, and even cable television channels.
I'm not saying that ads are particularly ethical, but I struggle to think of a replacement that isn't more paywalls. This is an easy decision to make for people that have the money, but is much harder for the majority of Americans. A Vox article [1] estimates that this would add an average of $35 a month, assuming every US adult paid this cost (which is a bold assumption).
Only if you think everyone around you is trying to deceive you.
Ads are designed to push you into taking unreasonable and uninformed decisions by showing advantages only and amplifying them and deliberately hiding the cons.
This insidious equivocating between friends recommending things to each-other and companies buying themselves a piece of your attention for profit by advertising apologists is pretty gross.
I saw a Facebook ad for a intro course on FPGA programming. I clicked on it; I paid the guy some money to watch his videos.
It was something I was interested in; I wouldn't have know about it without the advertising. We had an exchange of services for money.
How is this wrong?
Sure there are deceitful practices in advertising, but you're painting everyone with the same broad brush. IMHO, it is best to address the negative aspects of advertising instead of restricting communication from vendors to potential consumers.
A sign outside a gas station is advertising, but it’s hardly going to convince someone to buy a car just to buy gas from them or drove dramatically more.
Unfortunately, more widespread and effective advertising has real costs that end up raising prices. Coke’s premium over sugar water is backed up by their advertising spend.
Tracking, manipulation, etc are major downsides to advertising. But, even purely informative adds on TV aren’t free.
Yet, they don’t convince you to wildly increase your driving or top up a nearly full tank.
To change how much gas you’re buying in a lifetime it would need to change how far you drive. On the other hand T-Shirt advertising can convince you to buy significantly more clothes in a lifetime.
It’s a qualitative difference even if I didn’t express it well.
You’re trying to lump different advertising together. I am specifically talking about gas station signs. People in EV’s don’t suddenly buy gas because they saw a large BP logo. That choice was made when you bought the car.
It’s little different than a hospital sign. People don’t think hey there’s a hospital maybe I should have this gaping chest wound taken care of. Which is why they end up as H’s with a simple arrow rather than list out which specific hospital etc.
> designed to convince you to do things you wouldn't normally do.
When I search "good USB charger" in Google and get an ad, click the ad and make a purchase for a USB charger, how was that nothing something I normally would do?
There's absolutely deceptive advertising, but to pretend all advertising is "intrusive" and "convincing you to do things you wouldn't normally do" is disingenuous.
How much toothpaste do you use on your toothbrush? Something the size of a pea, or the whole length of your toothbrush? 'Cause all you need is the first, but most people do the second. Why? Ads.
Why do people have such a great impression of John Deere tractors? To the point where there's a whole culture of "green iron" and other companies had huge trouble breaking into the market? Ads. Ads going back to childhood in the form of toys.
Why do folks trust some brands, and not others? Why is brand recognition such an influential thing when it comes to making purchasing decisions? Why do children beg their parents for certain toys? Why do adults pick TGI Friday's over the diner next door?
Ads.
EDIT: I think it's worth flipping the question a bit as well. Why would companies pay for ads if they had no value, if they did not change our behavior? If we'd do something naturally, there would be no need for ads in the first place.
> if they did not change our behavior? If we'd do something naturally, there would be no need for ads in the first place.
How would you find a USB charger brand if you were unaware of any to begin with?
> Why do folks trust some brands, and not others?
So then why even have a brand to begin with? Are you suggesting we just ban all advertising altogether? When you start a new company, new market, new idea, then what would you suggest that isn't advertising for a company to do to explain to customers what it is you do and how you may help them?
There is a vast world of difference between putting out to the public "I sell X" and following you around the internet to auctioning a consumer's eyeballs to the highest ad bidder. Or intentionally changing your behavior with their ads (the toothpaste one being the simplest to understand).
Trying to conflate the two as equivalent when someone says "ads are toxic" in the context of the online ad industry is doing the argument no good.
> How would you find a USB charger brand if you were unaware of any to begin with?
Why search for a brand, and not a high quality, well reviewed USB charger? To use the original example, googling for "good USB charger" and then buying one via an ad will not give you any guarantees that the USB charger is good. All it guarantees is that they paid the most to get your eyeballs on that particular search.
> Why search for a brand, and not a high quality, well reviewed USB charger?
This is where you lost me. You assume:
1. There is a free service that allows you to search products. PS - it's called Google/Amazon.
2. There is a free service that allows you to read product reviews. PS - it's called Google/Amazon.
> To use the original example, googling for "good USB charger" and then buying one via an ad will not give you any guarantees that the USB charger is good.
And please do tell me, where does this perfect search capability exist in the world that allows one to search for goods and services free from all advertising.
Even a Turkish Bazaar merchant will tell you that the tube of toothpaste they're selling you last only a month.
> where does this perfect search capability exist in the world that allows one to search for goods and services free from all advertising.
That an alternative is not easily available, does not somehow make the existing services ethical.
That said, and the mystical service is called your friends/family/neighbors/colleagues/etc. It ain't perfect, but it's remarkably effective. In the 2-300 people in your first and second degree networks, there's probably a few anecdotes to help you find a good product.
> Why search for a brand, and not a high quality, well reviewed USB charger?
Tangent, but damn I wish reviews were reliable nowadays. They've fallen to deceitful practices like fake reviews, and are no better than advertising nowadays.
I have similar issues with advertising, but i'd also ask for the following question, because it's a sincere one and I don't have a good answer for it.
I work at a company that is trying to introduce a new kind of product, one that I sincerely believe is intended to help people rather than _just_ make money (this is unusual for me, because i'm usually extremely cynical about motivations). The problem is that most potential customers we could help aren't even aware that what we're offering exists, they may not even think to find out if such a thing exists. How do we create awareness of this thing without advertising?
"involvement in something prima facie unethical" - except that it's not.
Ads are the consumers choice. Given a choice between paying for something or ads, they will chose the ads. So they get ads. That's mostly why we are where we are.
Many of the negative externalisatons are a matter of application, moreover, there are a variety of opinions on what is appropriate and not. For example, I don't care if Facebook uses my behaviour on Facebook to decide what ads to run, as long as that is otherwise anonymous, private and protected. Others will have differing opinions but I think most regular Americans, Europeans etc. have a variety of views but mostly not centred around the notion that ads are inherently evil.
The second paragraph begins with how much the author gives to charity. So I'm assuming that the author is very aware about ethic questions, and the whole piece is about painting the whole privacy intruding industry that dominates the entire world in pinkish colors.
He'd have more take-home income if he worked outside of ad-tech and didn't give 50% of income to charity. So from a utilitarian perspective, I think I'm basically fine with this? Even if ads are "evil" (I am skeptical), they are very much a first-world problem compared with major global problems like malaria, clean drinking water, and hygienic bathrooms.
The trick to the utilitarian calculation is to include the externalities of all the work he's putting in -- an engineer's salary is only a subset of the value they create for the company.
The question is really how do you count all that excess "value", and is it good-value or evil-value. Once upon a time, the culture over there explicitly stated that they didn't want it to be evil... the bikeshedding going on here is opinions about the current implications of it all.
Yes, and in this he contradicts himself because that statement is a tacit admission of the ethical problems, yet the rest is basically a justification of all of it.
The advertising industry is bad enough that it's not necessary to exaggerate by saying things like "dominates the entire world". Unless you do indeed mean that, in which case, how do you define it?
Could you be more specific about what you think the ethical issue is? I've seen many comments describing very different ethical objections, from several perspectives, and I'm not sure which one is yours?
I kinda mean a better alternative to funding all this stuff. As pointed out in the OP, ads are actually a progressive model while the oft-cited alternative ("just charge people for what they use") is fairly regressive.
The is actually what I like about Brave's solution, which is:
- no ads by default.
- if you have money and want to pay for the content you consume, you can load money into the browser and have it automatically dispense to publishers/creators based on which content you consume for how long, determined locally on your machine so no privacy leakage there.
- or if you don't have enough to justify paying all those creators directly you can turn on (again) privacy focused ads, where analysis for targeting only happens locally in the browser.
But from what I've seen, HN really hates Brave so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
Brave seems interesting, although I haven't tried it. Why does HN hate it?
> I kinda mean a better alternative to funding all this stuff.
I tend to think we'd be just fine without this "stuff." The internet still worked when the only advertising was banner ads that didn't run code on my machine. In a lot of ways, it worked better.
To be fair it's not that ads are making anyone physically suffer. It might be an annoyance for some people or even considered a privacy threat. But it's not undisputed. That said, when I was a kid with no credit card ads were the only possibility to register a domain, host a website or for that matter even receive a fax. ;)
I think the problem probably lies with the difference between your point of view versus his.
Advertising is not 'prima facie' unethical. It's actually a societal good. I know this is an unpopular opinion, but if you can set aside your emotions with regards to the discussion, and view it from a distance, it's not too hard to show.
To start off, I've never actually met anyone who doesn't want advertising at all (despite their claims). They just use the term advertising to refer to those kinds of advertisements they don't like, or find too intrusive.
Advertising is, at it's base, finding a way to deliver a message to someone who is doing something else. Thus, getting rid of advertising means no more signs on buildings (yes, being forced to read the name of a store as you walk down the street is a form of advertising). Even if you were willing to accept how difficult this would make it to discover businesses (life harder for the end user), this would make it nigh impossible for new entrants to any market. That means that pretty much all commerce would be funneled into a few catch-all stores, and not only would the economy suffer, but consumer power would be greatly diminished.
Advertising indirectly improves the quality of life of people who have more time than money. (Generally the less money you have in total, the more advertising benefits you.) This is because advertising as a source of revenue is a useful tool to amortize the cost of a product over many users. Free-to-watch TV would be mostly non-existent without advertising, not to mention all of the internet services like search and news; also consider free newspapers like the Metro or 20 Minutes.
That doesn't mean that I don't understand what people really get worked up about. Let's forget spam and obnoxious blinking signs, or having to punch the monkey. It's like how knives are great in the hands of chefs, but not murderers. Crime is crime, and someone like the poster of this article is not trying to defend those kinds of practices.
Let's get into what people tend to get really worked up about: customized advertising. However, it's not the customized advertising that really bothers people, it's the fear of abuse of tracking. In a world where customized advertising was perfected, you would see 95% less ads. Why? Every ad you see that isn't a match is a waste for everyone involved. The business doesn't want to pay, because you aren't interested, and the user doesn't want to see it, because it's distracting and wastes your time.
But still, tracking, that bothers you, right? You don't want an advertiser to know your kink, right?
Well, what if the advertiser is the store that happens to serve whatever your kink is? People shop in adult stores, and they have no problem letting the store know that they're interested in their wares, so clearly it's not just the stores learning that is the problem. The problem is the abuse. People want to choose who they trust to share information with, and don't wish to risk. But... if you're clicking on an ad from some store that delivers your own brand of kink, you're okay sharing that with them, so what's the problem?
Well, as an example, maybe if you're a teacher you don't want your community to know that you like buying purple teddy bears because it might cost you your job. You're okay shopping in a purple teddy bear store... but if the purple teddy bear store had advertising that only targeted teachers, suddenly someone knows that you're a teacher that likes purple teddy bears, and you consider that dangerous.
So yes, abuse is a problem. This is why advertisers actively engage in trying to solve the abuse problem. This is why the advertising industry is looking for ways to move forward.
Yes, they also fight the change, because in their own eyes, they're trustworthy (to at least their own standards), and change is hard and expensi...
Exactly. The greatest problem with ads isn’t the horrible code or even the resource consuming stalking. Those are just symptoms of something long decayed and separated from reality.
The biggest problem is that you are shipping and forcing something users, in most cases, don’t want. It’s like pornography and illicit drugs in that yes eventually there are some beneficial edge case side effects, but almost universally it is bad. In order to increase market penetration you must become more bad and simultaneously sell it as a positive.
This isn’t a universal truth. Users are willing to accept advertising as a payment in exchange for media or something similar. This isn’t evil so long as it isn’t violating privacy, is immediately apparent without deception, and is voluntarily accepted by the audience.
You're criticizing the author for not addressing the "actual ethical issue", yet you yourself are failing to even state what you think it is.
There is absolutely zero societal consensus that advertising is unethical, in the way there is a consensus that fraud or murder are.
To the contrary -- there is vast disagreement around the ethics of online advertising, delicately balancing concerns around societal good, access to information, funding, factuality, bias, tracking, privacy, and consent. The incredible complexity of the issues involved is pretty much proof that there is nothing merely "prima facie" at all.
Can you advocate for doing an ethical thing like that and not have it be considered bragging? I've often wondered about how to encourage others to give more, volunteer more.
If I don't do those things (or don't claim to), people will say, "Why should I do that? You don't do that! Hypocrite."
If I do those things, people will say, "You are just bragging/virtue signaling."
People wo believe that "tool makers aren't responsible for how the tool is misused" (for example, with cryptocurrency), do you feel the same way about adtech?
I find all ads reprehensible regardless of tracking and yes, I believe adtech engineers aren't responsible for that. Specifically, author of OP doesn't have to justify himself. He enjoys his job and I'm happy for him.
Blaming technicians for the negative externalities of their industries is a dark path. Are we going to blame lawyers who defend rapists? General Motors assembly-line workers? Engineers who work for oil companies?
Engineers building unethical things is wildly different than lawyers defending rapists, because a lawyer defending a rapist is behaving ethically according to their career path.
Software engineers agreeing to build awful shit is more like mechanical engineers building weapons. They should know what they are doing is going to cause harm and if they choose to do it anyways I have no issue calling them unethical.
An engineer building effective adtech is similarly behaving ethically according to their own career path.
Lawyers effectively defending awful clients, for example, managing to get them off the hook on a technicality, are likewise generating massive negative externalities for society at large.
It's either both or neither, and I'm not comfortable going down that path.
> An engineer building effective adtech is similarly behaving ethically according to their own career path
The phrase "Effective adtech" is really downplaying the amount of unethical shit involved in building it.
It could be effective without turning the internet into a race to the bottom. It could be effective without third party tracking, it could be effective without vacuuming every bit of data possible from every source imaginable. It could be effective without turning every device we own into an ad platform.
> It's either both or neither, and I'm not comfortable going down that path.
No, its not both or neither. That's absurdly reductive to suggest. It is possible for lawyers to behave unethically in their duties, but just defending the guilty (or prosecuting the innocent) is not unethical on it's own.
Similarly, it's possible for engineers to behave unethically in their duties. Just building software isn't unethical.
Building platforms that are deliberately and systematically eroding our privacy in every corner of our lives in order to make money absolutely is unethical. Turning society into a corporate-controlled panopticon is absolutely unethical. Absolutely scumbags
The core of my argument is that an engineer building the product is performing their duty. You don't have to sell me on the fact that ads are bad. I hate all ads.
I'm a developer myself and I've never faced the dilemma, but I don't feel like blaming others for not wanting to become judges of good and evil. Like in the case of a lawyer, doing your job and doing it well is in and of itself ethical.
I really can't draw a line in the sand where adtech is unacceptable but $something_else is, just because I have such an hatred for advertisement.
> Lawyers effectively defending awful clients, for example, managing to get them off the hook on a technicality, are likewise generating massive negative externalities for society at large.
This is a harmful misunderstanding of how the legal system works. Subjecting laws and procedures to scrutiny, and exposing "loopholes" is exactly the role of a vigorous defence. The fact that the consequences for the state (and society) of miswriting or misapplying the law can be so severe is exactly what keeps the system honest.
The lawyer's defense is "by playing devil's advocate, I make the protection of the law more robust for everyone". A closer equivalent would be a system where every organization had white-hat hackers.
I think that amounts to the same thing; the lawyer thinks "This $#@& is guilty as sin, but the court has to prove it." Few professions have a regular test of that kind.
A lawyer can have their whole career ruined if they are found throwing cases. The justice system itself finds it unethical if they don't prosecute or defend to the best of their ability.
Suggesting that software somehow has that same kind of standard where engineers are required to build anything and everything they are asked to the best of their ability or they can lose their accreditation (as if we even have that in software) is absolutely absurd.
I heard a lawyer in an interview talking about defending a rapist/murdered in a small town. While eating lunch at the town diner a few people approached to ask how he could defend someone so vile.
He told them about how it is important that defendants are presumed innocent, and that everyone gets a strong defense, in order to make sure that those who are wrongfully accused do not get wrongfully convicted.
They talked about it for something like an hour, and the people were only sort of convinced. And his lunch got cold.
Later, he found himself in another small town, defending another rapist/murdered, eating lunch in a diner and being asked by the people there the same question.
This time he said "his family paid me $100000 to defend him". The crowd accepted that right away as a perfectly fine reason to defend some totally vile criminal, and went back to their lunches.
> Are we going to blame lawyers who defend rapists?
Only if such lawyers are unethical in how they go about doing this.
Lawyers who defend accused rapists are a necessity for a well-functioning justice system. The alternative is a process where the accused isn't permitted a legal defence, if they're taken to trial for serious crimes like rape.
Software engineers who spend their days forcing increasingly invasive advertising technology upon us all are not necessary. For the most part, we'd all be better off if they all downed tools.
Are you going out of your way to give the most uncharitable possible interpretation of what I said? I struggle to see how any reasonable reader could infer that I believe what you wrote.
The structure of the argument is: because A is equivalent to B and I'm not comfortable with B, then I'm not comfortable with A either. Resolving the let binding in the variables A and B is left as an exercise to the reader.
EDIT: parent has been edited since this comment was written. Please disregard the belligerent tone, reply to parent no longer applies.
> Blaming technicians for the negative externalities of their industries is a dark path.
Disagree.
> Are we going to blame lawyers who defend rapists?
No, because I want there to be someone who defends that rapist's rights. In contrast, it's easy for me to blame a software engineer who's developing bad technology X, because I want the job of developing X to not exist.
> General Motors assembly-line workers? Engineers who work for oil companies?
Yes, but only if they have better options for earning a living: I can't blame anyone for not wanting to starve. Assembly-line workers often don't have better options, but software engineers usually do.
As much as I hate to defend adtech, I think it's unfair to generalize a whole industry.
A company I worked for was more in the business of improving targeting. Of course people will argue if targeting demographics is bad per se, or better or worse than other parts, but I personally don't care if I get generic ads or ones tailored to me. So for one of our main product, we were reselling and integrating some data for a bigger player, as in, we were 1 of many data points determining if the ad would be interesting for the person who would see the ad or if they'd give them another one.
Yes, it kind of gets into this angle of privacy and user tracking... but I'm ok with the scope we did it in and I thought hard about if I can accept this without a guilty conscience - but for example I'd never knowingly work on trying to bombard the user with even more ads, or popups, or whatever - but just saying "ads shouldn't exist" is maybe aspirational but sadly I don't see it as a valid version of reality in the foreseeable future.
Legally it makes a big difference whether a tool is designed with the specific purpose of being abused or whether it is incidental.
I think morally that's correct as well.
Cryptocurrency is a weird one you bring up coz I don't think anybody is proposing hunting down and jailing Satoshi even if they think Bitcoin ought to be banned.
The author jefftk is getting unfairly downvoted maybe because cynics just see it as a version of, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
I will offer a contrarian opinion as a user whose salary does not depend on advertising: the advertising model for using Google search and watching Youtube videos works better for me as a consumer.
The alternative of paying $9.99/month for Youtube... or micropayments for each search query or a "Google Search Engine yearly subscription" ... or Patreon donations for video content ... are all more user hostile for my use cases. I don't like ads but they are the most friction-free way to consume a wide variety of content.
I've been using Google Search for over 20 years for free which is pretty amazing. Would I rather replay history and pay ~$120 every year (~$2400 ?) to search for web articles? No.
That said, there are also many corrosive aspects of advertising. Advertising should be open and transparent. If the business of ads are truthful, I will sometimes pay to see ads. E.g. I pay $10 ticket for a home & garden convention show so the manufacturers in booths can advertise their wares to me. The opposite and immoral idea of hidden ad tracking is Facebook trying to convince Apple not to show confirmation dialogs about ad IDFA tracking.
You're right - but I find that strange. Most of us are not angry about the pay model for groceries or haircuts. A smaller - but still large - fraction of us are okay paying for other zero-marginal-cost goods like software as well. I wonder why we are so attached to free content online. Maybe because of the historical television model that's been mentally transferred to the internet?
I foresee micropayments being extremely common place in the future. Something like a digital wallet browser extension. And instead of paying 5p to watch a video, you will instead pay 5p to skip 3 minute ads.
People have been saying this for decades. I don’t see a way for this to happen that is both more convenient to users and not open to all manner of automated attacks that would be difficult if not impossible to track down.
Ad fraud is already a huge problem, as are things like ransomware. Micropayments would just give bad actors a direct line to your wallet.
You can allow certain domains to automatically withdraw from your bitcoin wallet and set limits to how much they can withdraw. This is not a technical problem but more of a marketing/adoption one.
There are very smart people working on these: https://socket.money/
And what happens when one of those domains gets hacked and a malicious script injected into their code that takes advantage of a 0-day in the browser to siphon the cash? Not at all a far-fetched situation as it’s how ransomware works today.
The articles said that the industry has been talking about micropayments for 25 years and says it's hard. I think the real issue is that no large-ish tech organization has any incentive to invest in micropayments.
Digital cash saw no uptake for decades either, between Chaum and Satoshi. This may turn out similarly (and it's not as if it's implausible for digital cash to be a prerequisite for micropayments to take off, in practice).
This would be an absolute nightmare experience. It would force you to make small decisions about money constantly. You would have to constantly make the decision "Do I want to pay some money now or do I suffer through this ad? How much have I paid lately? It feels like it might be adding up? But I really can't be bothered, maybe I'll just pay. I feel bad about paying so much though..."
It would be utterly exhausting, which is why it will not happen.
The content people really value is already being paid for.
I didn't hear any outrage at all when several newspapers transitioned to a pay model and threw up a paywall. The parties most upset were the newspapers themselves.
Most of that outcry would be from terrible media outlets who would have to shut down. 95% of the things I click on I wish I hadn't. They would still get an impression (if I weren't adblocked to the teeth.) They're trash that keeps me from the information that I want, and matchmaking stalkery ad markets are the reason for them.
I already hate it with Music and Video content: With music, I pay Youtube Music, but they don't have all the artists I like. I would have to pay for Spotify, Tidal and Youtube Music to get close to it. This means paying $30 USD per month
With video... I pay $70 USD for my cable company (HBO+Star+misc-crap) plus $13 USD for Netflix, plus $12 for disney plus (wife likes a couple shows there), plus $13 Amazon Prime, plus $10 for the local Netflix-like crap in my country (for some local shows).
That means $118 USD for video only, which is 14% of the average income in my country ($843 USD). Imagine if I had to pay $10 dollars a month for each of the internet services we use?
$10 Gmail
$10 google
$10 Reddit
$10 HackerNews
$10 Youtube
$10 Linkedin
$10 Facebook
$10 twitter
$10 Whatsapp
$10 LiChess
$10 Slack
$10 Samsung Health
$10 Google Maps
$10 Podcast Republic
$10 CBS News (The only US channel I like for news)
$10 Home Workout
$10 Discord
And that's at the top of my head, it will be $180 USD, or 21% of the average income of someone in my country.
If that happened, the internet will become "a place for the rich" and pretty much only the north emisphere will use it. Yeah, ads suck... but their are a necessary evil to "monetize" users that are just not monetizable any other way.
Your point is a good one but let me offer some tweaks that make paying for stuff not look as bleak.
1. Bundling multiple subscriptions is a long-time practice and if more services were paid offerings we'd likely all buy some bundle that gave us most of what we wanted at a reasonable price.
2. Paying for services will reduce the number of services around... which may be a good thing when so many offerings are sub-par.
3. With more paid offerings, we will be more deliberate about how we spend our time, which is what advertising-based models make us forget we are really spending. And as you age you realize that the time you spent watching ad-supported drivel was more expensive than if you had just paid directly for the things you really needed and spent the rest of your time on things that matter - friends, family, experiences, learning etc.
Was the web supported by ads before Google? I don't remember.
Does the web have to be supported by ads? If the web was a non-profit service, supported by public funds, managed by academic institutions for example, would we miss 90% of the content that's basically sponsored by someone who wants to sell something?
From my point of view it looks like the web is a giant advertising machine built on top of something that could be ... not a giant advertising machine. Still from my POV, it just happens that the big players on the web are suppoting ads because that's where their revenue comes from and if they weren't the big players, then we wouldn't have a web of ads.
So basically we're not paying for ads that we wouldn't be paying for if google didn't run the web.
I like this point a lot, I do vaguely remember an internet before Google. The distinction was the internet felt built by people who had things to contribute, I think now the internet is a place to extract any and all value possible. We're too deep inside massive monolithic profit generation systems to see an alternative where the value isn't ultimately monetary. The lack of a true commons etc.
* I think AOL making its own internet inside itself was an interesting data point on early-ish internet
I'm probably too nostalgic, but that's what the web used to be... and it was so much better. Most of the content we would lose I wouldn't miss at all. Clickbait and buzzfeed style sites. Already I'm paying for a lot of sites that actually do reporting, for instance, so I already feel like the content of real value is already for-pay or produced completely for free by enthusiasts and academics.
I remember ~2001 or so a lot of the sites I visited were ad supported, but it mostly just made enough to cover hosting costs. At this point hosting costs are so cheap that I don't even think those style of sites would have trouble existing. Most of those sites existed because some people were interested in a hobby or a subject, and would publish news and have bulletin boards and articles and stuff. Sadly those kind of communities don't seem to exist anymore, now those kind of things end up being subreddits or facebook groups and I never feel like those are quite the same, they just don't have the same curation or community feel.
I wonder whether the gradual switch would need to be made possible through something similar to a micropayment subscription model, which is non publisher specific.
I don't want to commit to subscriptions for 5+ publications, but I'd happily buy a days access occasionally. This feels much more akin to buying a newspaper in the old world.
I think we'd end up seeing positive changes. Especially the end of content producers being held to ransom by advertisers and commercial pressures.
>The author jefftk is getting unfairly downvoted maybe because cynics just see it as a version of, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
I don't think that's why people are downvoting. Speaking for myself, it's because his analysis focuses only on the benefits of ads, and conveniently ignores the actual ethical problems (e.g. large-scale collection of personal information).
In other words, I see no fresh insight and perspective in jefftk's writing, and worse still, it bears remarkable semblance to a bad-faith argument. I'm sure he is a decent person (really!), but this particular essay is neither interesting, nor particularly respectable IMHO. As a result, a downvote feels appropriate.
> ignores the actual ethical problems (e.g. large-scale collection of personal information)
I find it ironic to see this brought up as the first example of problems, when this is exactly what Google's FLoC intends to solve. The same FLoC that has so vocally been rejected by HN recently.
Unfortunately, Doubleclick/Google doesn't get the benefit of the doubt when declaring their intention to respect privacy. They burned that bridge. Many, many times.
The criticism of FLoC is that it makes profiling a lot easier because a website can access the ID with javascript.
And there are also a lot of design questions remaining that Google hasn't answered or is not sure about.
Eg. How will ad bidding work with FLoC?
Finally, and most importantly as it relates to this post - Google pays an enormous amount of money to employees to spend their time and intelligence on building better profiling tools. Building profiling tools is something ethically questionable because of the damage that can be done.
I don't work on FLoC, but why wouldn't bidding handle it just like any other signal? For example, here's where it is in the OpenRTB docs: https://developers.google.com/authorized-buyers/rtb/openrtb-... An advertiser could take it into account in considering whether they want to bid and how much.
How would company A know you they wanna bid on the ad? How do they know this FLoC ID represents people with interest in their product?
I think I have an idea. So by visiting site A, A gets your cohort and now there is somewhere a "central store" or register. Using that A can now do ad bids for that entire cohort to reach others.
But where is that central store? Is Google running that?
One way an independent publisher could use FLoC is for "lookalike" targeting. For example, if your best customers often have IDs D4W1 or JQ82, you could choose to target ads at those IDs.
Some entity might choose to run a "store" like you're describing, but there's no reason there would only need to be one.
It looks to me like Chrome is proposing a low-level feature that anyone can build more sophisticated products on top of.
Many of us believe that targeted ads without prior opt-in are unethical regardless of how they're implemented. Creating new ways to track users without opt-in is just as unethical.
>In other words, I see no fresh insight and perspective in jefftk's writing,
May be I am living in my bubble, but most of the site I visit, mostly mainstream media news in tech, along with most of the social media post, has a flat out dismissal of Ads in general.
So while ads works to pay for X isn't a "fresh" insight, it was never really pointed out ( enough ) in most of the discussions. If the discussion in general was even slightly balanced in pros and cons, then pointing out ads do serve some usefulness wouldn't even be what OP labeled as "contrarian opinion".
>and conveniently ignores the actual ethical problems (e.g. large-scale collection of personal information).
In the context of Ads. Not all ads are large-scale collection of personal information. Which is what FloC was ( AFAIK ) trying to solve. As Apple did with their differential privacy. I often wondered if Google didn't decide to invent a new term called FloC and instead follow Apple and call it differential privacy would the backlash still be the same. But I think at the end of the day it is just a matter of trust. Whether you Trust Google or Apple. ( Or Facebook )
Yes, I agree. That is indeed another unoriginal, stale perspective.
The question for me isn't so much whether hear from one side more than the other, but whether there is some new idea. For me, intellectual content matters much more than equal representation in (social) media.
By this measure, the OP's post is equally trite.
>In the context of Ads. Not all ads are large-scale collection of personal information.
We're talking about Google ads here. Let's stop pretending otherwise.
>Which is what FloC was ( AFAIK ) trying to solve.
Leaving my skepticism aside for a moment, this may have been an opportunity for OP to provide some insight into how the adtech market is evolving, and make the case that it is headed in an ethical direction. He did not. There is no insight here, either.
So again, I think a downvote is a pretty reasonable and measured response. The OP's post was unconvincing and cliched. No big deal. I've written plenty of stuff like that, myself.
> this may have been an opportunity for OP to provide some insight into how the adtech market is evolving, and make the case that it is headed in an ethical direction. He did not
There's a section of post with "build browser APIs that will allow this kind of well-targeted advertising without sending your browsing history to advertisers, and then get rid of third-party cookies"; I'm curious what you think of it?
I personally am of the opinion that "targeted advertising" _is_ the problem.
Random generic advertising is fine. It isn't as profitable but it doesn't exploit a person's mental weaknesses. Targeted advertising is straight up exploitation.
Kids being bombarded with ads for plastic surgery nonestop on TikTok, radicalized individuals being targeted with fear-based ads. This is super toxic. And while advertising is a tale as old as human commerce, such insane targeted advertising is not.
I agree those are bad, but those don't seem to be unique to user targeting? You would have the same thing with contextual ads (since what page someone is on is still pretty correlated with generic demographics like "is a kid" or "is a radicalized individual")
The insanely annoying thing that I have seen for a long time is that despite the fact that you have more information on me than anyone else the ads have been either useless or even insulting for years.
I remember bothering to click through the microscopic x in tve corner and select not relevant or something on Thai mail order brides. What did I get next? Filipino mail orders brides. Out of curiosity I marked a number of them as not relevant and I think I also saw:
- Polish
- Ukrainian
- Chinese
- and possibly a couple of more nationalities
- later I got ads for older women near me
- and then gay cruises
This went on for years.
Last year I finally started seing ads for electronics etc but now I feel no remorse for blocking ads anymore.
I'm just fed up.
Meanwhile Facebook, for all their faults and despite me blocking them for far longer than Google actually has had interesting ads.
Edit: I've nothing against Filipino or Thais or gay people or anyone, but I have something against scantily clad women etc showing up on my monitor both at work and at home and I think it says something about Google that they think this was the most relevant ads they could show me for years.
That gets tricky. But at the least it would help me not see radicalized ads when I am generally searching. And that doesn't mean ads based on my search either.
Yes it doesn't drive as much engagement, but that's the point. Over-optimizing for engagement is a bad thing. We have seen repeated evidence of this.
There should be general overarching categories: News site, food site, movie site, game site. But not "news site for radical right-wingers who believe in tucker carlson and think gun control is communism" which doesn't really require user tracking, but I think still falls on the bad side of things.
"Is a kid" is interesting. There's literally laws to prevent children from receiving too much advertising on TV _for good reasons_ their brains aren't developed enough to counter it. But on the internet? ANYTHING GOES!
TV based advertising is also bad tbh. There used to be ads related to fairness cream which is effectively virtue signaling you should use this cream to look white and beautiful. And there are ads related to soft drinks claiming you will be strong etc.
Ads sucks and it is alive due to economic incentive from ads. And we know where there is economic incentive its hard to stop (eg. bitcoin mining economic incentive)
While it might be true that ads just suck. It's heavily ingrained in culture. There are a few cultures that do not use ads, even today (Amish?). However, I don't see a transition from where we are today to that. So instead of just saying, ads suck, what is the alternative?
Those parade of horribles raise an awkward question - couldn't the lack of targetting of advertising make it even worse in several senses? We had the "punch the monkey/click here for viruses" in the past instead to monetize general targets when it was more niche. People forget /why/ Google won web advertising like they did.
The "badness" of the ads results from the selecting function and what becomes sustainable and favored. Infamously with spam and phone calls it can include outright crime.
> May be I am living in my bubble, but most of the site I visit, mostly mainstream media news in tech, along with most of the social media post, has a flat out dismissal of Ads in general.
I'd apply the same logic here: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
Ad supported models on news paper websites have nearly killed publications like NYTimes. A lot of smaller news papers have died. Only after the paywall model really took off have they been able to survive and thrive.
So there's nothing you can say to the media that will convince them that there's value in ads.
To them, ads and big tech in general are evil entities and must be criticized at every possible turn.
NY Times also has inventory for digital advertising. If you read it on the app in your phone, you will see ads. If you view it in a browser, with ad blocker turned off, you will see ads. Their revenue also comes from a subscription model, but they also sells ads.
> that's literally all you have to say on the subject
Not at all! First I talk about the economic benefit of targeted ads ("Most products are a much better fit for some people than others..."), then how it works today ("Historically, ads like this have been built on top of third-party cookies..."), then how it can work without cross-site tracking ("build browser APIs that will allow this kind of well-targeted advertising without sending your browsing history to advertisers, and then get rid of third-party cookies...")
Sorry, that's still attempting to justify the unjustifiable. The only ethical way of targeting is content relevance, which allows inference of the audience interest without using any audience data other than what they're currently looking at.
Targeting based on content fundemenally allows everyone access to ad content. It makes content providers more responsible for the Ads they carry. It allows me to avoid sites that show me bad Ads (such as mail order brides).
Targeting Ads based on anything else is invasive, discriminatory, and enables even higher levels of manipulation. If I get targeted by content independent targeted ads, it can be almsot impossible to avoid those Ads as they will follow you everywhere you go.
I'm glad you aren't vulnerable to any of the above issues I raise. That doesn't mean there aren't vulnerable and powerless people who are being hurt by this system and your support o it.
Removing personal responsibility from people is in itself a source of many social ills.
For example think about how much better society could've been over the past decades if, instead of saying "people can't reasonably make decisions about [insert drug here] so we're going to illegalize all of them" we'd said "wow, adults can make decisions for themselves".
Personal responsibility is not an excuse for disregarding the suffering of others.
The war on drugs was a fundementally bad approach to fixing the problem. If it had worked and drug use had dropped near zero over a decade or two, you wouldn't see the current level of support for ending it. There are other cases where removing personal choice is not controversial (such as seat belt laws, incarceration,
In fact, the failure of the war on drugs is an argument against relying purely on personal responsibility to solve the problem. Simply punishing people and expecting them to learn enough about the consequences of drug use to make the responsibile decision to stay away failed.
It turns out that sometimes to get people to a place where they can take full personal responsibility, it requires giving them some help.
We should strive to avoid removing personal responsibility and choice. The better job we do of providing the tools and support needed to make good decisions (i.e. ones the deciser will look back on without regret), the more respsibility we can easily allow.
For examole: If we do a good job of protecting amd treating gambling addicts, that facilitates opening up gambling to more people in more locations.
Your original comments were that you wanted to outlaw certain types of ads entirely, war-on-drugs style. Not "take care of people who might be adversely affected by certain types of ads", but rather "these ads shouldn't exist", even if (from the broader perspective) that approach could cause more harm than good.
1. As previously noted, I find ads targeted based on my personal information useful, when done well. The harm is that ads become less relevant to me (and others). If I have to see ads anyway, I would prefer them to be as relevant as possible.
2. Banning ads targeted on personal info makes advertising a less effective/lucrative funding method for free services. This in turn increases the likelihood that such services will have to move to more regressive funding models, like subscriptions.
1. I'm sure you have a good example then? One where the benefits are commensurate with the non-consensual destruction of privacy that was committed to allow that Ad to be shown?
2. Citation please? The "progessivity" of ad supported services is debatable... especially when there aren't paid alternatives. Advertising is mostly a zero sum game so if a loss of tracking reduces effectiveness just means that other mediums that don't provide tracking wiol pick up market share.
"Targeting based on content fundemenally allows everyone access to ad content."
Can you be more precise about what you mean and why the current system doesn't have it? You're saying that everyone should see ads, even ads they won't like? Forgive me if this isn't a hill I'm interested in dying on.
"It makes content providers more responsible for the Ads they carry. It allows me to avoid sites that show me bad Ads (such as mail order brides)."
Not in a meaningful way. If the ads are generated automatically based on the content, the site might not have much to do with it. Example: Suppose there's a wedding planning site, and a content-based targeting system notices the word "bride" on the site a lot and serves mail order bride ads. Yes, you could avoid the wedding planning site because of this, but is there any reason to punish them? It's not their fault.
"If I get targeted by content independent targeted ads, it can be almsot impossible to avoid those Ads as they will follow you everywhere you go."
Isn't there a menu that lets you select "I don't want to see this ad"?
You can't simulatously argue that Ads offer value to customers and that limiting access to those Ads to a certain subset of customers doesn't harm them. You have to pick one. There are specific areas (housing discrimination) where the harm is obvious enough that we have been able to gather sufficient support to make this illegal.
> Yes, you could avoid the wedding planning site because of this, but is there any reason to punish them? It's not their fault.
It is absolutely their fault. Content providers should face full responsibility for the Ads they allow to appear on their website.
One of the ways that the current Ad targeting system is awful is that it allows advertisers to pretend to foist this responsibility onto Ad companies that are much more insulated from consumer blow back.
> Isn't there a menu that lets you select "I don't want to see this ad"?
Those menus often don't stop other Ads of that type from being shown and there is no legal obligation to do so. All they really do is give the advertiser more information about you.
If the only recourse you have to abusive behavior is to politely ask them to stop, someone is going to keep abusing you to make money.
> Not at all! First I talk about the economic benefit of targeted ads
I wish that my ads would be more relevant to what I like especially when it comes to music. What does youtube do? I search for a specific video because somebody told me it's there. I find it and sit through the whole length of 50+ mins and after I'm done navigate back to the YT frontpage. What do I see? A recommendation of the video I just watched. And it'll stay there for the next 6 weeks.
The other extreme for me is watching something from the other camp simply because I want to learn what they're being exposed to. In my bubble this means conservative stuff like videos of people debating Ayn Rand or a Jordan Peterson. And I swear I'll have to fight for the next 6 months to get similar shit off my timeline. In fact it's easier to throw myself into the rabbit hole of watching Foucault, Zizek, Philosophy genre and fighting my way into content that is dominated by the likes of Tucker Carlson (and what used to be Alex Jones, Brietbart and others) than it is to shed the conservative label that YT has filed me under. And with conservative I mean seriously questionable stuff like Q-anon, climate change denying, cray-cray type of things.
Because of this I now have different accounts for when I want to see the other side of the coin/polarization.
Not sure if I should be blaming YT/Google with this since society is so polarized that the algorithm just reflects that reality. But it's not like the algo hasn't played a major role in creating this dystopian reality in the first place.
It sounds like you would be happier to see the next sentence get into greater detail about how targets ads impact privacy today. But the article does in fact do so (look at the paragraph that starts "This model has some major drawbacks..."), and the next paragraph you refer to ("Most products are a much better fit...") builds to that point by explaining why targeted ads exist at all.
I think that advertising in general, pre-internet, was perhaps a pain. It was unsightly to have stuff plastered all over buses, trains, any available space someone was trying to show something in your face, to get their brands name in your eyeline.
Now they are still doing that, but they have compounded the awfulness, because now they track where you are visiting and push more of those ads in your eyeline. Switched device, tough, the ads do too. The advertiser now also knows who looked at the ad, where they came from to see the ad, where the left to after they saw the ad. And then what they did for the next 2 weeks, so now they can make sure their ad is in front of your eyes whenever they want because they tracked your browsing habits.
Advertising was bad before, now it is insidious tracking and monitoring of users, under the pretense of advertising. /rant
I’m only 29, but the impression I have received from my youth, from parental and grandparental anecdotes, and from photographic records is that offline advertising in at least Melbourne, Australia is worse than it was, with a key tipping period being somewhere around 15 years ago. As the most significant example, public transport vehicles and locations had no-to-minimal advertising 20 years ago; now they have extensive advertising surfaces, inside and out, and the big posters at most of the train stations cycle between multiple ads and blah blah blah. Awful stuff.
My guess is that offline advertising has become cheaper and so they do more of it.
I live out in the country now. There are no outdoor ads here. I like it.
(The local weekly paper is called The Advertiser: an apt name, for it’s about ¾ ads. But I don’t look at it. My life is basically completely ad-free except when I go down to Melbourne.)
It wouldn’t surprise me if the pervasiveness of online advertising creeping in at the fringes of our attention normalized an increase in the amount of ads that do this in the physical world.
It's funny but i actually like the ads on the trains in Japan and when I was visiting other countries who's transit systems had no ads I thought it was boring.
Some of the ads are hilarious. Some are for the services that are not common in the USA. Nintendo has some where they add in a trivia Q&A, the format being, Question->Ad->Answer and I usually find them interesting and I'm often happy to learn about whatever new Nintendo game they are showing off. Often there are ads for theater plays, concerts, museum events that I only find out about because I saw them on the train.
I also like some of the campaigns where they decorate an entire station or the entire train, the entire car.
small data points from here compared to the big lot..
friend unsure about her marriage.. getting ads to sell her wedding ring via fbook.. they divorced 2 months later. Guess what the first thing she did was?
A friend's father.. gambling addiction and an android phone - sleeps on the streets and eats via dumpsters, still keeps that addictive android device running.
Google sending data on people to fusion centers.. maybe none of those people were ever hurt by that - or the sharing of info from location data dumps, or the vids from nest cams.. I would assume there is a probability that at least one person was hurt when actions via gun toting state came knocking on at least one door, maybe more - and that stuff 100% coming from collection of data.
Just because journalists aren't interviewing these people to see if they were hurt, does not mean it's not happening.
I have no way to opt people out of alcohol ads.. I've seen them so I know others have.. does a sale on the new pink-liqour at 10am lead someone to drink out of juice boxes before noon at a kid's soccer practice? I can't say for sure.. it's just a coincidence they are drinking the new advertised thing - maybe it was an ad on the liqour store window that did it - there won't be hard evidence there.
I can think of more, but I know these are small data points from here. I'm glad you have not witnessed such things.
- Are you suggesting that your friend got divorced so that she could sell her ring, because an ad told her she could sell her ring? I doubt that was the straw that broke the camels back.
- The android phone has utility beyond it's addictiveness. Yes homeless people need a phone.
- Re fusion centers: ads targeting data is a relatively shitty surveillance too, the three letter agencies have much better ways of collecting this data.
- Targeted alcohol advertising I'll agree is an issue, but if you're an alcoholic, you can't really escape the ubiquity of alcohol everywhere.
I think the adverse privacy impact of targeted advertising is pretty overblown, but it so happens that ad targeting is so effective it has the illusion of being surveillant. The actual data being collected is anonymized and not personal.
Those two are not mutually exclusive. You an ban images of alcohol while allowing adds for alcohol and bars (as long as they don't have images of alcohol.)
I suspect there may different rules for different jurisdictions/markets which might explain differences in your experiences.
I am pretty sure I have some screenshots of google ads for alcohol when scrolling through my google news feed - I have not seen many - but it struck a nerve a time or two I am pretty sure - and I think I screenshotted them. I will check on this.
I would love it if they would ban such - I am not a prohibitionist, but also think people should be able to request a "non-alchohol ads on the table section", much like people once chose to sit in smoking / non-smoking..
when trying to cater to folks who struggled with such, indeed the options were limited for dining out.. IHop and waffle bouse two of the options I recall.
I appreciate that these are weak examples, just trying to point out a couple off the top of my head - surely there are many more.
The ring thing - I think it was the straw that broke the camels back honestly.. and hey that might have been a good thing - it certainly wasn't the two-ton elephant on top - but I do think it was the thing that made an easy / quick escape possible - maybe that's a good thing - some religious folks may feel otherwise - I'm on the fence about it - but it does point to a weird thing that probably should not be happening with social network data imho.
the fusion centers / requests for locations / emails / search history - all other data.. I agree ads are shitty surveillance generally - however the mass amounts of data being collected to make the ads more valuable - the location data, the emails, the search history - all of that has been quite valuable in many cases from what I have seen on the news..
when it's a murderous ex lover people may cheer - but how much reporting is done on the requests for data that just pry into people's lives and cause them to lose time and money and threats of being shot - that don't go to trials / convictions / wrong person...
so this is more of a reply to the parent comment to consider about harm from mass surveillance they could not think of any.. well there are some - and really many.. certainly many more than my weak top of the head considerations. Not just specifically ads themselves.
I think there are some places where alcohol ads on billboards are banned - and part of me thinks that's a good thing, the free speech absolutist in me says it's not.. but if we ban nudes or gore or whatever on billboards cuz public safety - well sadly alcohol and tobacco probably should also be included there - and gambling.. and addictive technology.. I mean maybe not in Vegas.. I dunno. I hate the alcohol ads on the tables at restaurants and the immediate upsell by waiters/resses with great drink specials.. they should ask if you want a "dry" experience at the table imho.
I agree targeted ads are very good in many ways - I just think people should get more control to 'stop showing X ad cuz Y (already bought it / decided I hate it / have an addiction / whatever) - turn off all targeted cuz it's a shared device and fam is seeing presents.. whatever..
I must disagree about the data being collected though - sure a third party advertiser on yahoo may not be collecting a ton of info about someone - but google does collect a ton of personally identifiable info including emails, gps / locations traveled, search history and much more I am sure.
That data can be used to harm people, by the state, by divorce attorneys.. one could say the hernandez location data led to him being jailed and suicided - I think most would argue that catching him with tech was a good thing - but the demanding of data from big G is not always used for such things, and it can be abused or just used to fish expedition into lives.
There are many ways to harm using the data collected.. oh yeah - the insurance fraud people in new york demanding all stored info about people while they fished for people pretending to be disabled.. I mean, doing good was thier goal - but some people's privacy was slayed that were not doing fraud - is that harm? People seem to lean towards certain other pics of people being shared re-harms victims - so I dunno.
It's not just the ads - it's the other data collected to enable highly targeted ads that can and is used to harm.
How many arrests have been made using google data? How many investigations to peer into lives that did not lead to an arrest? How many give us all cell phones near location X during Y-Z time so we can look into them.. How many times has google taken info and sent it voluntarily to agencies with guns? I'd love to see that in a transparency report.
I know both F and G occasionally push back in requests from d...
My Instagram ads seem to be laser-focused on my insecurities. I don’t buy the shit they’re selling by they definitely make me feel bad about myself, so mission half accomplished!
If you are a woman have fun seeing ads for makeup and fashion all the time. There is a reason female users are hot commodity for any ad driven company, companies are willing to pay way more to advertise to women.
Targeted ads supports the status quo instead of exposing everyone to stuff they might want.
Targeted ads are much better at exposing people to new products they could want to try than non targeted ads, which appeal to the lowest common denominator. You're actually asking for better targeted ads for your gf
Targeted ads and analytics are not opt-in by default. This leads to shadow profiles and my data being handled by corporations I don't trust. I don't need facebook and all its stalkers to know where I live, for instance.
Not to mention targeted ads just don't work for me. They always show crap I'd never use, within my domain of knowledge, and never show interesting things outside my domain. Overall I'm more than glad to block ads because I gain nothing from them. They are a liability. Anonymization I don't believe in, what's the difference between my SSN and a MD5 of my SSN?
The first link is not a credible worry. Ad targeting is not even close to 100% accurate, no ad can out you. You can just brush it off.
Links 2 and 3 are concerning. The FB and Google do have a way to stop that though - you can click an ad and say it doesn't interest you or you don't like it, that signal is insanely strong and the platforms will turn off the spigot.
The rest is not actual harm to people, its people concerned about the idea of targeting being harmful. Cambridge Analytica was a laughable scandal btw, absolutely no one was actually impacted by it.
FB does enforce the fair housing act and other laws. The platform is actually quite strict nowadays and catches lots of innocent ads in their filters for protected categories. Ad platforms should follow the law, that's working as planned.
As a side note, it's funny how people say that ads are terrible, but also its terrible if certain groups of people don't get to see ads.
Same as saying that the draft is terrible, but having a gender-specific draft is even worse. We'd rather have no ads, but until that's possible, the least we can do is stop them from worsening social inequities.
A week later - and an HN discussion about ads on google that impersonate government web sites.. reminded me of a few more things where people get hurt by big surv-ad-capitalism -> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27152524
It seems like you didn't bother to read the entire article because the author does go into the ethical and privacy related concerns about ads. It is always interesting to read about people's opinions on topics such as this, and the fact that you dismissed it outright with such ignorance as to call it a bad-faith argument tells me you are not open to hearing opinions that differ from your own. As a result, a downvote of your comment feels appropriate (if I had the points to do so). But hey, at least you're probably a decent person (really!).
There is no mention of ethics, and the privacy discussion ends with "I don't think my work in advertising is something harmful to offset." The author seems to think there are some good ideas to increase privacy that he is working on, but the existing problems are not serious enough to be considered "harmful".
> This model has some major drawbacks from a privacy perspective. Typically, the vendor doesn't just get that you are interested in cars, they get the full URL of the page you are on. This lets them build up a pretty thorough picture of all the pages you have visited around the web. Then they can link their database with other vendors databases, and get even more coverage.
In between that claim and the end of the article I describe how I'm working on https://github.com/WICG/turtledove etc to build well-targeted advertising without sending your browsing history to advertisers
I understand, and I'm glad you're thinking about it, but you could not have been more clear: "I don't think my work in advertising is something harmful to offset." Did you misspeak? Do you think it is harmful but turtledove might reduce the harm?
Oh, that was not clear from the essay, and honestly might change my opinion a little. Is your position "targeted ads cause harmful privacy violations, but my work is exclusively devoted to reducing the privacy impact, so I don't believe my work is harmful"? If so I would encourage you to edit the essay, because that's not at all how it comes across right now, at least to readers who aren't familiar with your work. I had assumed turtledove was one of many projects you're involved with.
>Speaking for myself, it's because his analysis focuses only on the benefits of ads, and conveniently ignores the actual ethical problems (e.g. large-scale collection of personal information).
Most people have no issue with the collection of personal information in itself. They only start caring when others start to make money off of it. If Google completely got rid of ads as a revenue source and still made the exact same services for free, they would still collect nearly as much sensitive data (e.g. location tracking for better routing). However, a lot fewer people would care. Privacy activists would still exist, but I doubt that regular people bother to listen to them.
There’s probably truth to that but I think it stems from what seems to be a quite commonly held opinion that ads are hostile to humans. They clutter our browsing and viewing experiences, not to mention our physical world. They use malicious tactics to steal our attention from what we would otherwise choose for ourselves. And the industry spends vast physical and intellectual resources which could almost certainly be spent in a more beneficial / less societally harmful way.
So it’s hardly a surprise to me that people see it as ok for Google to use their information to provide them a service like routing, but disapprove of their using that data to enable an industry they see as harmful. I don’t think the problem is exclusively that Google makes money but rather that they make money as the kingpin of an industry most people feel negatively impacts their lives.
I think you are deep in a bubble if you believe that thinking ads are harmful is a common viewpoint in general instead of in niche. You won't see newspapers calling ads in general that way for one, they have to add targetted to not look like obvious flaming hypocrites.
The opposing view would call "harmful" downright hysterical in the same way teens would nigh universally roll eyes at Tipper Gore's claims of music as harmful or Jack Chick's anything.
As for claims that the effort and money at Google could be spent in less harmful ways? No it couldn't, not the money they received - except as operating as a take the money and run scam which hardly qualifies as less harm as an instant zeroing of account values. The "harm" is why they got the money in the first place. You have to give the people paying money what they want to keep receiving money to get what you need to fulfill the demands.
I disagree, if Google stopped selling Ads and still offered free services, it would be blantantly obvious that they were selling our personal information.
Now, if Google spun off a non-profit foundation to offer those services for free without Ads, more people might accept trusting them with all that personal info.
Evolution has bestowed on us the great gift of Cognitive Dissonance. When I look at what I do on a day-to-day basis, there are probably a hundred things that don't align with my own internal belief system. The only way I don't go mad is to find plausible justifications for what I do.
I work in a different industry with its own issues and impacts on the society and the environment. I try not to think about it and even look at the positive things to gloss over the bad impact.
I think it's harsh to call it a bad faith argument. Say you were having a conversation with jefftk, and he makes the points in the article. Wouldn't you just say they're the start of a conversation, with room to move? Also, do you normally downvote articles that don't have a fresh perspective? There's not that many things new under the sun.
Anyway one thing I haven't seen mentioned yet about ads is that it encourages the unrestrained growth of ad space itself. There are just a billion articles on the internet written for the sole purpose of grabbing your attention and selling it. A lot of these sites have no real value, one of each ("How do I do X") on the internet would be more than enough. A lot of them ought to just be headlines that I can skip ("Man Utd interested in a teenager" would in the old days just say the guy's name).
The real argument against the article is that the calculus of paywall vs ads is not quite as straightforward as proposed. Either mode of operation has reflexive influence on what the internet looks like, and that's maybe where to dig deeper for an argument. How do the different options encourage different interests to behave?
Because it's much easier to have constructive outputs when you focus on a single problem with a clear definition. But people usually conflate multiple topics into single and take advantages from this intentional ambiguity, irrespective of whether you're a proponent or a critic.
Because everybody is complaining to everybody else that they aren't discussing the real ethical problem. This is being pointed at OP as well as commenters. It makes conversations difficult to have because as soon as people start talking about one thing, somebody jumps in and says "but you aren't talking about the real problem".
I have also noticed this in other HN discussions. Everyone seems to assume everyone else agrees with their view on the topic and there is never any open discussion about it. Usually people just talk past each other and it's never pointed out.
Yes there is, because none of what you mentioned is “the problem”, the problem is that all these practices are deliberately put into practice without users consent, or by trying to trick users into inadvertently give consent.
I don't know if it was mentioned here but another issue that many people have with Google specifically is it's perceived monopoly position and market power.
Here is a genuine question, if one I cannot help but deliver in an acid tone:
what does it mean to be a "decent" person, if one is willfully, or disingenuously, ignorant of participation in an unethical system?
Decent is a stand-in for ethical; this is a contradiction at a logical level,
but to answer my own question,
in contemporary American culture, not least in the readership of HN,
there is disturbing dance between "moving fast and breaking things" (like the law, or social contracts, or presumption of civility) when that is convenient,
and a contradictory but also embraced enthusiasm for giving people benefit of doubt and analogously, as in this case, presumption that intention excuses offense.
I.e. that having "earnest intentions" born in some degree of perhaps bad-faith ignorance, excuses amoral consequence.
That is the sort of wishful/fuzzy/poor thinking that has led our industry into its current state of moral bankruptcy and crises.
By no definition is Jeff a decent person. (Really!)
He is a decent person by at least a consequentialist definition - that the harm of ads (if any) due to him is offset by the amount of salary he is able to devote to doing good in the world.
What? I want to put together a yo dawg meme for this but I’m too lazy. This is just another corporate cog rationalization.
Unless your company is rocketing toward bankruptcy, your salary is by definition a (much) smaller number than the impact your work has on the world. You cannot offset your day job even by what seems to you a large fraction of your personal income.
It's a Peter Singer rationalization and is essentially another version of the shallow pond parable. Instead of destroying a nice pair of shoes, Jeff is, arguably, making the world worse by working on ads. But he's making it more better by using his salary to help people.
I would argue it's the reverse that's true. He's making it significantly worse than his relatively speaking small contributions make better.
If I design advanced weapons, but donate my salary to charity. The good I do is temporary, but the advanced weapon technology can kill, and repress indefinitely.
It seems like it would depend on the details. In your example, I might agree that there is net harm to the world. But in other cases, and maybe Jeff's, the harm done by working on ads may be more than offset by the lives saved.
Since Jeff is a thoughtful guy and this is important to him, I'm inclined to think that he is producing net good. If you can convince him otherwise, he'd probably change what he's doing.
At best his work is annoying to a lot of peoole. At worst, he profits (a great deal, I might add) from a industry that exploits, manipulates, and coerces.
It's not really my or anyone elses job to convince him.
There are plenty of good ads. And Ads is also news in a sense, it is there to solve discovery problem. Just like your $10 ticket to see all the latest wares, which are all Ads.
We know what bad ads are, not in terms of ads quality but the amount of tracking and personal information gathered and sold across different companies.
I would prefer the payment model if it means I get the things I expect from other premium models: hand-on user support that is motivated to keep me paying, features that actually enrich me instead of sap me further, and an internal culture of working for the customers instead of working for the shareholders.
But this model is the reason something like Trump and Russian/Chinese medelling happens. Why not reject the advertising model and the payment model until something better comes along? Businesses aren't people. They'll just work out how to make money eventually.
> Why not reject the advertising model and the payment model until something better comes along?
The Internet Archive is a great example of this. A non-profit that relies neither on advertising revenue nor subscription revenue from individual users, and instead thrives on income for providing archival services and grants from organisations that recognise the public good it is providing.
I'd like for donation to be the predominant way to support digital work in the future. But paying with a card online is pretty hasslesome and micropayments will cause so many issues anyway that it kind of feels like a pipe dream. Stuff like Signal and Internet Archive are excellent tools that may not make all the money in the world do achieve their goals well whilst, at least for the time being, being financially stable.
After realizing how often I use youtube i got premium and I'm not looking back.
I grew up with "free internet services" but I can't complain on one side about ads and consuming stuff and in the other side not just paying for those services directly and it's a monthly thing. Easy to cancel much better than all those 1 year contracts for stuff like paytv.
I find the "ads are useful" argument frustratingly disingenuous. It's a transparent and deliberate attempt to move the discussion away from what people actually take issue with in modern internet advertising - tracking and data collection - and instead tries to frame it as something far more benign.
The ads. Aren't. The problem. The stalking is.
Ads can be useful. But no one is saying they aren't! So why is it constantly the case that when internet users make the simple and reasonable request "Please, can you just not stalk us everywhere we go?" the response is "but we're helping you!"
The parasitic advertising industry likes to pretend we're in a symbiotic relationship while conveniently ignoring the actual symbiotic solution (see e.g., DDG) because it won't make them nearly as much money.
Exactly. If you want online ads done right, look no further than how podcasts do it. The medium doesn't allow for stalking. Podcast producers often stake their own reputation by voicing the ads themselves. That editorial freedom lets them be creative and respectful of their audiences. And advertisers can use podcast-specific coupon codes to attribute ad campaigns to sales. It's a win-win for everyone.
Huh. Are you sure? I don't know anything about how podcast advertising works, but it sounds like you're assuming the full audio track, complete with ads, is the same everywhere and always.
Spotify is a bit of an oddball in the podcast world in that they're an all-in-one closed platform with a player and a production arm. They can easily feed user behavior data back to their podcast producers and advertisers.
Most podcasts and players operate on RSS feeds though. While they can very well target things via IP addresses and user-agent (no getting around that), podcasters and their advertisers don't have the capability to read/write persistent tracking data on the client, at least as far as I know. An advertiser would be hard-pressed to see that I personally listen to Stuff You Should Know and This American Life, even if the advertiser had contracts with both. The medium really hobbles how much tracking can be done.
Traditionally, podcasts worked like radio and everyone got the same ad. Recently, people have been trying to "innovate" by ruining podcasts like how the web was ruined and use dynamic ad insertion. AFAICT, it still hasn't totally caught on yet. Anecdotally, I used to hear it on one of my shows, but then they changed networks and it went away.
The issue is that you cannot have good online advertising without a little bit of the stalking. Do you listen to podcasts? Their ads are shite. I don't want to hear another ad about "Coroner" on Netflix. The only reason they are making money is because podcasts are "hot" right now and everyone is throwing money at them. That money pile will slowly deplete in due time and they'll find a way to introduce ads that are more targeted towards the individual that's listening and guess what, we'll be right back here with the same supposed problem.
> The issue is that you cannot have good online advertising without a little bit of the stalking.
The usual answer to this is to use the context rather than personal information and browsing history. You bring less value to the company advertising their product, but I'd argue that most people are fine with this approach.
The problem is that current incentives lead to a race to the bottom: if some advertisers are less ethical, they can arguably bring more value to their clients, and the ethical advertiser cannot compete anymore.
I hate to be cynical, but I think the reason why online advertisers keep harping on about the "benefits" of personalized ads is that it justifies their existence. They can keep trying to sell whiz-bang audience profiling and attribution technology, even if it doesn't work all that well.
Contextual advertising, on the other hand, is simple. It shifts the focus away from technology and toward people: recognizing your audience and crafting a message to them, instead of trying to have a computer do it for you. It's old-fashioned marketing.
Well, Slate Star Codex and its sidebar of ads was a good counterexample. I would routinely click through to find out more, because its ads were a) aesthetically pleasing (they had a consistent style, for example) and b) highly relevant to my interests (because a very consistent type of person is interested in the ads on that particular site). To a lesser extent, I think the human-delivered ads given by the presenters of The Magnus Archives podcast were decent enough, though the algorithmic ones were predictably useless.
It's possible to target ads to a specific audience by exploiting the selection effect that led to your audience existing. This doesn't favour general-audience communities, sure, but I'd honestly be happy with the answer "general-audience things just aren't how the future looks".
What's strange is that podcasts and baked into video ads are far more effective on me. I'll block any alternative ad source I can, so if it's not baked into the content I don't see it.
But I have no clue what would distinguish (to me) a non-shit ad? Is it saving me money on something I was already going to buy?
> But I have no clue what would distinguish (to me) a non-shit ad? Is it saving me money on something I was already going to buy?
Yes. I've been looking for weight equipment over the past year because of the pandemic and gyms being closed and the majority of ads on Instagram are now exercise equipment. I ended up seeing an ad for a company in my country with fairly decent prices and bought a new squat stand. The price difference between the one I bought and the ones I was looking at from companies in the area was around $200. I give up some privacy, they give me targeted ads. Please give me more.
Sure. FB knows your ethnicity. In violation of US federal law, this information is used to show you different apartment ads. This makes it harder for black people to live in integrated communities.
Similar things happen with jobs and ethnicity, jobs and gender, with jobs and age discrimination, etc.
FB does enforce the fair housing act and other laws. The platform is actually quite strict nowadays and catches lots of innocent ads in their filters for protected categories. Ad platforms should follow the law, that's working as planned.
FB may do so now but that's only because of lawsuits as recently as 2019. It wasn't something they volunteered to do.
But you asked how targeted ads hurt people, and I showed a fairly recent example. Something that wouldn't exist without targeted advertising. How does that not prove my point?
Its not like FB has ever let advertisers "exclude black people" before. The critics said it may be possible that protected categories get less ads for housing, employment, etc due to algorithmic bias. That is a subtle danger, and honestly hard to technically implement at scale, but I think FB has always given a good faith effort in this area.
No, you have never been able to target by race. NY times is referring to algorithmic targeting that incidentally correlated to race, which FB cleaned up in 2019.
There is no difference between "filter out black people" and "filter out X, (X correlates 99% with black people)". And I mean that legally, morally and practically.
But, you seem to be shifting the goalposts pretty significantly. So, do you agree with the base point that targeted ads can produce pretty bad results?
The collection is per se harmful as long as warrants exist.
Beyond that, it's an open secret (as in: it's been mentioned several times in available documents, but never deliberately disclosed or extensively discussed publicly, so far as I know) that since at least the mid or late 00s the US government has had contracts with multiple major tech companies that have a high level of access to citizen Internet traffic to basically search their databases of Internet activity at will. Which companies these are, I'm not sure—I suspect it's mostly telcos, personally—but it's another reason the existence of these datasets is inherently dangerous, and that they should not be permitted to exist at all, no matter who holds them.
Fair enough, I should have chose wording better. In any case I would posit that the police using search engine history in evidence for cases is not a bad thing.
There are so many examples readily available that I have a hard time believing any HN user claiming to be unaware of them is anything other than willfully ignorant. It’s probably discussed here every single day if not multiple times each day.
Cambridge analytica, brexit (economically) hurt a lot of people. Similarly the regime changes in 3rd world countries that these guys engaged in probably physically hurt quite a few people.
I mean there are so many examples it's difficult to believe this is a genuine question. It sort of like asking in 1984 did anyone really get hurt by big brother watching?
I was shocked at the Cambridge story because I thought everybody already knew that hundreds of thousands of 3rd parties had full access to that sort of data, with the only protection being Facebook had a policy that you weren't supposed to make a copy & pass it around.
My primary work is on https://github.com/WICG/turtledove (discussed in the post), which allows well-targeted advertising without sending your browsing history to advertisers
So, at the very least, the ad network will be able to see your IP and know that you like athletic shoes and visited www.wereallylikeshoes.com. If you visit some other domain first-ad-network.com owns with the same IP whithin a small window of time, it can be pretty confident it's the same person and even store some client side data at that point. It feels like they can construct a reasonably good profile about their users by using that technique. That's considering the browser doesn't leak out any other potentially identifying information.
Then, the actual ad owner could have something in the URL that identifies which campaign you ultimately came from, as they probably know which interest groups they were targeting. So, when you click on the ad, they know one interest about you and, if you clicked in ads from other campaigns they run, they may reconstruct your profile well.
> at the very least, the ad network will be able to see your IP and know that you like athletic shoes and visited www.wereallylikeshoes.com. If you visit some other domain first-ad-network.com owns with the same IP it within a small window of time, it can be pretty confident it's the same person and even store some client side data at that point. It feels like they can construct a reasonably good profile about their users by using that technique.
Yes, there are a lot of user identifying bits in an IP address. Chrome has two proposals: https://github.com/bslassey/ip-blindness I'm not sure what other browsers are thinking?
> That's considering the browser doesn't leak out any other potentially identifying information.
Which they definitely do. All the browsers are working on figuring out how to thwart fingerprinting, and it's really hard. I am glad, at least, that we were able to get Google Ads to publicly commit to not fingerprinting.
> when you click on the ad, they know one interest about you and, if you clicked in ads from other campaigns they run, they may reconstruct your profile well
Yes, when people click on ads in Turtledove the advertiser does learn something. This is a huge improvement to the status quo where advertisers learn things just by bidding, or an intermediate stage where advertisers learn things when they win an auction -- users don't click on ads very often, so the amount of information leaked this way is very low.
Exactly how much information the advertiser is able to learn on a click is still very much up in the air, so if you have views on this you might consider participating on the repo?
I agree that it mitigates the problem, but it does not seem to solve the root cause of it. Aren't ads and ad targeting the main reason why companies want to store and sell that data? Other uses of user data is considered a lot shadier and respectful companies will not engage in them. If we start considering ad targeting to be a shady business practice, we may actually end the incentives for big conglomerates to want to store user data in the first place and thus end up with a system where user profiles are the exception rather than the norm.
In a less techinical point of view, ads are probably a net negative for society. People are buying things they don't need, spending time they could be doing other things and just having a worse experience they could have were not for content farms and other practices incentivised by ads. I do see the value of ads bringing services to people who wouldn't have money to pay for them otherwise, it's income distributions of sorts, but I think we can do better.
Anyway, interesting read about ip blindness. As long as the CDNs and proxies are not controlled by the same company that owns the ad networks, then it could work out. Though it's hard to find the correct incentives for the right people to own the right parts of the network. Another alternative would be something like onion, which is more distributed (although quite wasteful of resources).
The stalking is the problem, but the ads are too. Ads have been a problem well before tracking was a thing.
Since at least the 1920s (I’m thinking of Edward Bernays but there are probably earlier examples) the goal of advertising is to manipulate consumers into making irrational decisions. The majority of ads make us feel inadequate to get us to buy something, like the only the thing that will make us whole is a new instant pot or whatever.
> The majority of ads make us feel inadequate to get us to buy something
I know it's hard to disprove but I don't think adverts have that effect on me, partially it's because I don't see many adverts and partly because that kind of blatant manipulation is so hilariously blatant.
I acknowledge that someone might be running a really effective advertising campaign on me but since I basically don't buy anything I don't actually need I can't imagine what that would be.
Do you have a new $gadget/$smartphone/$tablet/$whatever? What about your SO/father/niece? (You might not, but I bet a lot of people reading this and agreeing do buy a bunch of stuff they don't need without realizing it).
Nope, mobile is three years old, desktop is nearly three, ThinkPad is nearly four.
Haven't bought anything techie for about 18mths and when I do mostly shop on specs, reviews from sources I trust.
I viscerally loathe advertising, I don't like been manipulated in any context so I run a background process mentally watching for it :).
I'm an advertisers nightmare, I'll not only ignore your advertising I'll go to significant technical lengths to block it for myself and everyone in my family.
I’m going to conflate packaging with advertising here but I think it’s the same idea and a little easier to visualize:
Our cogniitive biases act as shortcuts to save energy when making decisions, and advertisers exploit those shortcuts. If you’re on high alert while shopping, catching and recalibrating for your biases at every step of the way then yeah you can probably escape most marketing but for most people that doesn’t come naturally.
If you’re not careful I bet you too slip up sometimes. I know I’ve caught myself at the grocery store reaching for one product over another just because it’s in unbleached cardboard packaging (signaling to me that it’s somehow more local or organic or whatever).
These tricks become obvious when you consciously work through them (ex: obviously some megacorp can package their items in cardboard the same way mom and pop small businesses can) but most of the time we aren’t processing consciously, and that’s how marketing works.
Fair points, as I mentioned elsewhere I have a pathological loathing of been manipulated so I do pay attention to everything u buy - the missus however likes brands and does most of the food ordering.
Exactly. For the most part I'm also immune to the ads, but not because of the ads. It takes a huge mental effort to constantly stay aware of all the bullshit that these scum are trying to manipulate me into buying. And it's even more infuriating that all these 'people' who have no morals and ethics whatsoever try to convince everyone that we actually want to see ads!
If people were interested in seeing ads, a business of selling pure ad catalogues would actually be a successful venture! As it stands now, you can't even give such material away for free without generating hate. Because people don't want to see ads! It doesn't matter if they're tracked or not. The ad is the problem!
But ads are the problem. Ads are the robbery of your time and attention. On a screen they steal screen real estate, consume CPU cycles, consume bandwidth, etc. And all of the stalking and tracking is a direct consequence of ads themselves, further cementing ads as the problem.
One of the other replies note that podcasts do ads right. I hugely disagree. Not only does it steal the listener's time and focus (presuming they don't just scrub past it, which I presume most people do unless they put little value on their own time, and think a host is being sincere when they pitch some snake-oil supplement, pillow or VPN), it puts a dirty veneer over the whole realm where everyone becomes half-bit hucksters.
Many of the primary use-cases for podcasts (exercising/driving/doing chores) don't put people in a position where they have the free hands to scrub past the ads.
Yes. That's the problem. Make less money from ads --> make less content/riskier to make content (same thing). The more money ads make, the fewer of them you have to see to fund the same amount of content (or, alternatively, you get more/higher quality content for a given (fixed) quantity of ads).
That's not how it plays out though. More effective/profitable ads does not lead to less ads being shown. In fact, it's the opposite. As ads have become more targeted, and theoretically more profitable according to this argument, we have more of them.
There is no set "amount of effectiveness," so to speak. If ads are more profitable, advertisers are still going to spend just as much or more on them, precisely because they have a higher ROI.
So you see more ads, the people publishing content make more money (more ads + better ads --> more valuable eyeballs --> more valuable content), and then the ROI for making content is higher, so people make + publish more of it. You get more, more valuable content.
Now, you may argue that the privacy cost is higher than the reward of more/better content, but I think that it probably isn't. Especially because it's hard (not impossible) to match your browsing history with your IRL identity and no one really cares about you, I think that the privacy cost is smaller than the reward. You might disagree.
1. You don't necessarily get more valuable content. A lot of times the higher ROI leads to gamification of the whole system and you get more content, but it's all spam or varying levels of quality. This spam varies from complete trash to fairly polished, but none of it is actually valuable.
2. Even if we concede the point and assume that we get purely more valuable content, there is a limit to the amount of content anyone can consume in a day. And the advertising itself competes for your attention with even that valuable content. So the benefit from an increased amount of valuable content has a natural limit. The harm from the increase of ads is not so naturally bounded. So even if the balance of cost/benefit starts on the side you think, where the benefit of the content outweighs the cost of advertising, it will naturally, eventually trend towards the cost outweighing the benefit.
You are correct that in my view, personally, the cost already far outweighs the benefit. We can argue whether that's true on the whole for most people, but there is no argument when it comes to me personally. It's not worth it. There is a lot of content I only consume because I'm blocking ads. If I was unable to block ads and had to pay that cost, I would certainly forgo the content.
The problem here is really just general flaws in capitalism. The main thing I hate about ads is the broken corporate incentive -- companies want to earn as much as possible and the feedback loop of worse customer experience is weak.
So annoyingly while it is true that ads are a currently necessary part of funding the internet, it is also true that a perverse incentive exists to just keep hammering the $ button once you find a model that works. It is a good argument for why we probably should want to pay directly for content. Or y'know, just topple capitalism on account of it generating toxic localized optimizations literally everywhere.
We should research how much ads contribute to overconsumption and hence the demise of the planet. If the connection becomes clear, then there really is no excuse left for ads.
Many people have a favorite TV ads. People watch the Super Bowl for the ads. People sing radio jingles to themselves. College kids put nice magazine ads on their dorm walls. People pay money for clothes with logos that are essentially just ads for themselves. People watch videos of influencers unboxing/using/reviewing products they are paid to unbox/use/review. Etc. People love all kinds of ads.
No one likes banner ads. It is failed ad format and should be replaced. No one likes direct targeting. It should be made illegal. There are lots of other ad formats and methods that work great. Those two are the problem.
People like well-made thoughtful creative ads. Algorithmic targeting misses the point completely. It's the human element that doesn't scale that's valuable.
I agree that's one problem. But even without stalking as a business model, the point of ads is mostly to manipulate people into buying things with little regard as to utility.
Look, for example, at large advertisers like Coca Cola. Coke spends ~$1 billion/year in the US alone on ads. That's not because nobody has heard of them. The point is to shift money into Coke's pockets.
Almost all advertising provides no net benefit to society; it's just an arms race between companies competing to manipulate people. If we banned it, we'd quickly find other ways to get people the minimal information content it contains. We'd definitely find ways to spend the $1tn or so that it consumes now. And that's not even counting the benefits from less waste and market distortion caused by advertising.
There are many, many cases where users choose pay options over `free'-but-ad-supported options. The pay options usually have a better/more honest financial model, and more aligned interests with their users.
And there certainly is a universe where we would pay for search, in the same way that we pay for countless other things. Google's business model scorched Earth the realm, though, so there isn't a lot of potential for that now, but it's a universe I could easily imagine.
"the advertising model for using Google search and watching Youtube videos works better for me as a consumer."
Do you use an ad blocker? I certainly do, as does most of HN. Layers of ad blockers. It works for me because I get the content for free and I don't have the scourge of ads, so sure it's a fine model.
When that podcast starts with six minutes of promos I just scrub right past them. I don't believe I've clicked on a single ad online in decades, at least not intentionally. I honestly don't even understand how that industry survives. My gut instinct is that it's a giant illusion and effectively a massive fraud.
A major reason many of us have such a laissez-faire attitude towards the detritus of the ad world is that it's something that other people endure.
Things being paid from advertising, rather than from user's pocket, is also patronizing. When things are paid from user's pockets, it's the user who controls whether the expense is made, to whom and how much. If things are paid through ads, it is companies (and their management) that make the decisions, not their customers. I argue that paying from your own pocket is a more free system.
However, I understand that if this had to change, the income would have to shift, too.
I suspect most people's attitudes towards ads are more nuanced than either "I am fine with ads" vs. "I am not fine with ads." And, frankly, most web users probably just don't understand how ad tracking works, rather than being Laissez-faire.
I understand it pretty well. I pay for a variety of services for the value they provide me and to ensure they remain viable. I use a lot of free, ad-supported tools without an ad-blocker.
I make a small amount of money from ad-supported sites. I make more money from user-supported sites.
I tend to be more concerned with the user experience. I don't mind ads that don't get in the way of my intent for using a tool or site. I have backed out of many sites that show me more ads than content, especially if presented in a way that make them more likely to be clicked accidentally than out of actual interest. They loose me as a user. That's a choice I get to make.
I enjoy physical magazines (or digital versions of physical magazines). I pay for several subscriptions, but I know they are making much more money from advertising. I wouldn't pay more for a version without ads. I like many of the ads. They are well-targeted and visually appealing. But I am free to ignore them and I am free to stop subscribing if the advertising diminishes the value I get from it.
Ad-supported sites are important to the ecosystem. Can they be done better? Yes! Can we make choices as consumers as to whether or not we patronize a site based on their advertising behavior? Yes! Ad blockers may play a role in that. Perhaps both will help push the industry in a more privacy-centric direction.
Privacy is more commonly seen as a feature these days. I have a few services I promote as both free and privacy-focused; no ads, no or minimal analytics, etc. And with enough interest I would hope to eventually charge for them to make them sustainable without ads.
Maybe it's personal taste, but signing into an account is much more pleasant for me than watching an ad. As for the monetary cost, it only takes one ad per year that works on you to lose as much money anyway.
> Advertising should be open and transparent. If business of ads are truthful
Ads are not truthful because they are highly incentivized to lie
> I will sometimes pay to see ads. E.g. I pay $10 ticket for a home & garden convention show so the manufacturers in booths can advertise their wares to me.
I have to honestly ask why? What do you feel you are measuring other than the advertising budget of the sellers? Granted, such a convention would also allow you to evaluate the wares to some extent, but doing that is to ignore the ads.
> it only takes one ad per year that works on you to lose as much money anyway
Only if you regret the purchase, no? For example, I subscribed to CBS (now Paramount+) because I saw ads for a show I was interested in watching (Picard).
(I realize lots of advertising does not follow this model)
In my experience, I always come to regret anything I ever bought from ads. To the point that now I use an adblocker. For people who are unaffected by ads, it's just a minor annoyance. For people who actually affected by ads, I'd say it's a net negative, not a net positive for their lives.
advertising is the primary driver for clickbait and emotion-driven content. it enables The Daily Mail, it results in youtube's algorithm hell, it's why facebook exists. 'clicks = money' is bad for mental health. as long as wikipedia et al are free, give me subscription-based web all day.
Good point, but I think headline writers that don't need clicks for advertising money would still write headlines that make people click - the popularity of a writer or article is one measure of success.
yes but amplification matters -- there's been at least one study which measured the clickbaity-ness of headliness of paid vs ad-based news sites and the difference was sth like an order of magnitude. i'll see if i can find the link.
As someone who has worked in ads in the past, this is exactly what it sounds like.
In advertising, context matters. Ads when you’re in discovery mode looking for things to consume? Great, ads are usually unobtrusive in that context. But there are only so many discovery scenarios but lots of ad money to be made.
Advertising is a zero-sum game to dominate the human attention span. This has negative effects on our social lives and mental health. Is saving a few dollars a month worth the societal impact that constant advertising entails? In my opinion this constant barrage of ads is a big part of why we as a society can disagree about basic facts about the world: we’ve been conditioned to consume media that is promoted by virtue of its ability to draw eyeballs through being controversial / shocking, rather than the veracity or value of the information. Ads create a perverse incentive for publishers to operate at the edge of truth because those stories / media get more views.
Why are these user-hostile? I see very little friction to any of them - $10/year YT subscription disappears into the background (that's, what, two moderately expensive coffee drinks? if you spend just a single day watching educational content, the obtained value will easily exceed $10), per-search microtransactions would be so cheap that you could just turn on the "always transparently pay for this" feature, and any YouTube video of reasonable size that is worth watching is definitely worth spending the few seconds of time to assess and then click the "donate to get access" button.
What, you're saying that these things don't exist? Then that's a problem with currently available implementations of microtransactions, not the concept of microtransactions itself.
It's easy, from a technical perspective, to design a low-friction microtransaction system.
> Would I rather replay history and pay ~$120 every year (~$2400 ?) to search for web articles?
That's a price problem, not a pricing model problem. Microtransactions/subscriptions are irrelevant - that price is so far above the actual cost of your Google searches that the equivalent in terms of the current model (you pay with your data) is that Google demands your SSN in order for you to search - and the results in both cases will be the same: users will use a different product.
Edit: Because this comment has gotten strawmanned in the same way repeatedly: I did not say that the ad-funded model should go away, nor do I believe that - my comment was purely a response to the idea that microtransactions are infeasible, and nobody carefully reading it would think otherwise.
You seem to be implying that solutions to problems succeed on their technical merit alone. This is trivially false. I used the phrasing "from a technical perspective" very intentionally, for a reason.
And, in the specific case of microtransactions, it's well-known that consumers like cheap and free things - which causes them to flock to ad-funded services because said services make it as difficult as possible to see what data you're paying for those services with.
The reason why microservices have failed is largely due to the negative externalities (e.g. massive personal information harvesting and sale) being concealed from users. If you showed users how much of their data was being harvested, and who it was being sold to (transitively), how many do you think would continue to use an ad-supported product if a reasonably-priced paid alternative was available?
Edit: to provide a specific example of a somewhat-low-friction microtransaction system (that could easily be scaled to "extremely low friction" with non-architectural UI tweaks) that I've had experience with, I present to you Blendle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blendle
If we are using micropayments to let users directly pay a site for views of that site's articles or for skipping ads on those articles, then the jurisdiction that the user is in is likely to consider that a sale in their jurisdiction and want the site to collect VAT or sales tax. If people from 50 different countries purchase articles, you might end up having to deal with taxes in 50 different countries! (Even countries that have thresholds of the form "no tax unless total sales in the country are above $X" might require you to register there and fill out a form each quarter saying you didn't meet the threshold).
The site doesn't have that problem if instead they sell ads and get their money from the advertisers or from the ad network. That money is taxed, but it is taxed as income in the location of the site, not as a sale where the users are. Having people visit your site from 50 different countries doesn't increase the complexity of your tax situation.
Assuming we can't get widespread adoption of more micropayment friendly rules for online purchased of content access and/or ad skipping, there is a way to use micropayments for that while avoiding the tax jurisdiction explosion.
That is the imposition of a middleman service. It sounds like Blendle might be such a middleman.
You buy articles from the middleman, making your micropayment to the middleman. The middleman license the content for resale from the publishers and pays a royalty based on volume.
If you arrange this right when the user buys an article the middleman is the seller for VAT or sales tax purposes and so it is the middleman that has to deal with all the different jurisdictions. The publishers only have to deal with their own jurisdiction and perhaps the jurisdiction of the middleman.
But then you have the issue of who will be the middleman? I don't think we want it to end up like streaming movies, where we've got Netflix and Disney+ and Peacock and Hulu and Prime and Google and HBO Max and a whole bunch of others and you need to use more than one of them to see all the content you want.
We probably need at most 3 or 4 big middlemen that are easy enough for publishers to use that most sites that want to offer a pay per article option are signed up with all of those middlemen.
My guess is that it might end up being the same companies that provide "sign on with" services that end up providing micropayment middlemen services and/or companies that already provide big online stores that sell internationally.
That would be Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google.
Those who need the $10/year can decide to instead give up their personal data using the ad-funded model, which I explicitly did not say should be abolished, because I don't believe that. I was making an argument against the idea that microtransactions are themselves somehow infeasible/bad - nothing more.
> I see very little friction to any of them - $10/year YT subscription disappears into the background
So there are several problems with this:
1. You restated the above commenter's cost from $10/month to $10/year for some reason. For context, Google's annual revenue seems to be $180B. That makes $10/month far closer to the likely alternative;
2. That $10/year or $10/month "disappears into the background" for you. That's a far more significant cost for the majority of Internet users who are in the developing world. Cost aside, there may be issues with even having the payment infrastructure to actually pay for that (eg due to sanctions or US foreign policy).
I agree with the post's author: there are significant benefits to an ad-supported model and high on that list is low friction (paying for any service is a huge point of friction) and that those in the developing world get highly-equivalent services to the developed world.
There are definitely problems with advertising. The over-collection of data is of course one. But it seems convenient and disingenuous to overlook the benefits as they're inconvenient to a shallow anti-advertising diatribe.
>You restated the above commenter's cost from $10/month to $10/year for some reason.
fyi... That was my fault because I later edited it without realizing others had quickly quoted it. I made a typo "$10/year" which was clearly a mistake because no mainstream service for videos/music/books charges 84 cents a month.
> 1. You restated the above commenter's cost from $10/month to $10/year for some reason.
Parent's comment originally read $10/year.
> For context, Google's annual revenue seems to be $180B. That makes $10/month far closer to the likely alternative
I don't see how the first part of your statement at all supports the second. Google's revenue now, with many different services in wildly varying stages of profitability, has very little connection to the hypothetical subscription price that would be applied to a service that is now ad-funded - you seem to be engaging in wild speculation.
> 2. That $10/year or $10/month "disappears into the background" for you.
First, YouTube is a luxury service. Second, I specifically addressed the problem of "it's too expensive" later on in my comment, with "That's a price problem, not a pricing model problem." - which still holds. Third, market segmentation is a thing. Fourth, those in the developing world will pay with their personal information - which can be far more devastating if e.g. they're a dissident living in an oppressive regime. Fifth, I never said the ad model should be removed.
You seem to be making the assumption that I am suggesting that the ad-funded model be replaced with the subscription/microtransaction models - I do not, and my comment was carefully worded to not make that claim. I specifically believe that models where payment is made in money should always be available, with ads as an option - not that the former should be completely removed.
> paying for any service is a huge point of friction
False. I can relatively easily design a microtransaction service that has very little friction for payment. Meanwhile, there already exist many extremely low-friction payment services. If you have a credit card in the US with the new contactless payment technology, it's extremely easy to pay for things - you just swipe your card. If you have a Google Play account, it's similarly easy to purchase a new app. If you have a subscription service with auto-renew, paying for another month/year is literally frictionless - there's absolutely no interaction necessary.
> But it seems convenient and disingenuous to overlook the benefits as they're inconvenient to a shallow anti-advertising diatribe.
See previous statement about your mistaken assumption that I said that advertising should be eliminated. Attacking a strawman does nobody any good.
I agree with you although I feel you might be seeing things to simplistically?
Showing ads is the first level and from that perspective I suppose it's fine.
At the next level is harvesting data from those ads and sharing that data with third parties. I feel that's where things get very, very messy.
Because if ads can be targeted based on a person's profile, so can other manipulations. Especially if that data is available with an authoritarian government.
Since most companies showing ads don't play fairly, users in turn choose to block ads completely.
> I've been using Google Search for over 20 years for free which is pretty amazing. Would I rather replay history and pay ~$120 every year (~$2400 ?) to search for web articles? No.
I feel the main point is, no you haven't got this for free.
If you were to pay $2400 dollars, Google would also need to pay you for your attention during this time
> The author jefftk is getting unfairly downvoted maybe because cynics just see it as a version of, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
It reads a lot like that.
Jeff posits that advertising is competing only with paywalls and brushes aside hobby work, people producing content for the pure benefit of it, as if that is not impacted.
If I produce something creative with real value as part of a hobby, I know there is a high chance it will be copied/stolen by a slick advertiser who will then out-compete me.
So, I'm net less motivated to participate in the whole system of creating content.
If "The alternative of paying $9.99/year for Youtube" was really an option - I would buy it for at least 4 kids I know, and two adults that need it, to remove the horrible ads, especially on mobile.
Get me started on the ads that come with play store apps and "free games".
however at $12/month that would be $864 per year to help them. I would jump at $60 / year for 6 people.. heck that would save me on comcast overages several months of the year.
We still pay for some searches by paying the ad costs of the places we spend money, but that's another thing to figure.. $120 / year for search? I doubt my clicks amount to that for any advertiser. I'd pay 20 for ad free, zero tracking searches, but not 100.
A quick search (haha) shows that google pulls in $182/year per user and 90% of that is from advertising. So yes google makes a lot more than people think from ads. I also suspect that is heavily lopsided, with certain demographic being more sought after by advertisers. If they were to offer a flat opt out rate, would need to account for those people switching away and losing a very lucrative market. I would even imagine kids are unfortunately a target for advertisers because they can be very impressionable, and become lifelong customers if convinced early on.
In addition, a flat fee could lead to a slow on googles growth, as once a users pays, they can not find new ways to monetize that user.
Don't get me wrong, I love the option to pay a fee to opt out of certain ads. It really helps align the incentives of the user with the company, but unfortunately it would have to be expensive to average out the more lucrative ads.
My family pays for youtube premium (https://www.youtube.com/premium/family), it's $18/month for 5 people. They also get access to "youtube music premium", which is basically a spotify clone (so unlimited music with no ads). It's quite a good deal imo
thanks for this info - I was not aware - it does not work for my six - as two are here and two west of town and two south of town.. some fosters.. so not same household.. but glad this is a thing.
The other day to prevent a young one from replaying the same soundtrack over and over via youtube - (bandwidth repeatedly counting against and lots of ads for the same repeated songs oh my) - I just popped over to amazon and bought the album and popped it onto a usb stick for them.
I picked up a couple of gift cards for their bday this week - one of them was a google play card - then I remembered G killed the music section of the play store, so I put it back and got an amazon card instead.
that premium would be a great deal if we had one more in the household here. we've got three chromecasts - two with the google tv - but not the gtv plan - sheesh the ads via youtube with that are a drain, and I wonder about the compression for music - but they still use them for convenience and the other things like discovery+ which is affordable.
Oh if only they would plex-like into a win7 box on the network and pull my collection of mp3s.
Maybe all this is going in a good direction. Fingers crossed.
It's funny, in the past about 99.999999 percent of the time ads never interested me. I think I might have clicked one in a decade.
Recently, just from my youtube subscriptions I think, my youtube ads have been surprisingly relevant, for things like cnc routers or various embedded tools or what not -- ads that are actually for things I might be interested in buying. (Granted there's still a ton of obnoxious get rich quick schemes that I have to skip).
I have to admit, seeing ads that actually are of interest to me does change my mindset on advertising a little bit. I still find it super creepy being tracked, and I'd like the ability to know what they know about me, and erase it if I don't like it (is that even possible?), but it is kind of nice to get ads that don't suck if I have to sit through ads.
I would like that. Or even a scheme where they can collect data, but it's stored on my local computer so I can edit it and delete it (granted I know there's a ton of issues with that, but there is w/ the current scheme also)
But you don't need to run a giant spying system to make that happen, so the companies whose moat is their giant spying system don't want to even try that. They also happen to have all the users/eyeballs (they need them for their spying system, in addition to serving ads to them). So it's hard for anyone else to try it to see how well it works.
Information is not passively processed by the brain!
The cost of advertising is not your attention; it is your perception. Advertisements fundamentally alter your perception of the world in favor of whatever the advertiser is showing you. You are choosing to have your view of the world shaped in a way that may change your behavior. Note that this change occurs on an emotional level and cannot simply be discarded by your rational mind even if you don't believe / care about the ad at a conscious level.
This is a really underrated comment. People here tend to oversubscribe to their own capacity for rational behavior. Just because you can be hyper-rational it in one context doesn’t mean you aren’t human. It does mean that as people with better understanding you have a greater responsibility to protect others still capable of believing the internet has one old weird trick.
> don't track every single fucking thing I do online to do it.
Yes. However...
I have found 0.001% of what I wanted because of an ad. That's something like one item in a decade. I don't think that's worth the costs of tracking to privacy and bandwidth. Certainly not worth the obtrusiveness of contemporary ad space which is the result of the inevitable runaway arms race between the flitting attention of users and the desperate need of businesses to sale their wares.
I don't see any resolution to the waste other than abandoning tracking for ads. Good enough demographics can be found by the content being consumed. Please, let's leave it at that.
True, but by the same logic, how much each of us pays for ad funded services depends on how much each of us can spend. I.e. wealthy people pay more per Google search than poor people.
And there's another issue. Even if all online services switched to a subscription model tomorrow, companies would not suddenly stop spending money on promoting their products. They would just do it differently and we would pay twice.
The problem with YouTube Premium is unnecessary and anticompetitive bundling.
They ask €11.99/month for Premium (no ads) + YouTube Music.
Or €9.99/month just for YouTube Music.
Given that I already pay for another service, I don't want either of these plans.
It's not possible to get only YouTube Premium (avoid ads), even if the marginal cost of ad-free YouTube experience is only €2/month, according to Google. I think €24/year is a very reasonable price to pay for YouTube, €144 is not.
You wouldn't pay $2400 for 20 years of a user-centric search engine that is actively trying to find you the best results, rather than try to consume your attention for as long as possible so that it can show you more ad impressions?
The other side of this is that someone has actively spent $2400 worth of ad-buy to show you ads for the last 20 years.
I don't think the other-side of the argument has been explored well enough; I'd love to see what is possible without these ulterior motives controlling what you see and hear.
Are you saying there is something specifically about ads that make using these products friction-free or non-hostile? Or are you just saying that you like that the products are free?
> The alternative of paying $9.99/month for Youtube...
I do pay for YouTube Red, and it's worth it to not see ads.
> micropayments for each search query or a "Google Search Engine yearly subscription"
I would pay for this, too.
> ... or Patreon donations for video content ...
I do it for music. It feels really good to support creators directly.
Ads are the worst, and I adblock everything.
I'd happily pay for web content if there were microtransactions. Either that, or a content marketplace that disburses based on views or some other accounting.
Making doughnuts and soft drinks available to everyone for free is superficially a huge win for people. They are valuable (as determined by marketplace) and lowering the cost makes them more available to everyone.
But measuring the net societal impact of a cheap stopped at that point is basically worthless. There are many 2nd and 3rd order impacts that must be included. The obvious is health, but others include the marginal cost considerations of where the money will go that is "saved". Or what alternative food would be purchased (if it's deep fried Twinkies, maybe free doughnuts are a health win).
Any work that makes the ad marketplace more efficient (easier for creation and deployment of effective ads or ad instrumentation) has huge effects on relative competitiveness of startups vs. conglomerates. Just as one example. And those effects directly affect consumers.
I can avoid ad surveillance to some degree, but am powerless to help a business that can't survive in an ad-driven economy. I can't single-handedly keep my local hardware store in business against the threat from conglomerates capable of operating indefinitely on zero margins.
Where does the money you seemingly save come from? You pay for them whenever you buy something that was advertised. If Google Search was $10/month, the average Google user would save about that much spread across all the products they buy.
Short term yes, not paying for things feels better than paying for things. Long term, we end up in the situation when most people recognize current model leads to gross distortions, perverse initiatives, and many sites being next to unusable.
> I've been using Google Search for over 20 years for free which is pretty amazing. Would I rather replay history and pay ~$120 every year (~$2400 ?) to search for web articles? No
I would absolutely pay that.
Search is incredibly valuable and has deteriorated as has the web as a whole largely because of ads and this terrible business model.
It’s not even slightly ‘free’, your attention is being wasted on stuff that other people are paying for you to see.
> I've been using Google Search for over 20 years for free which is pretty amazing. Would I rather replay history and pay ~$120 every year (~$2400 ?) to search for web articles? No.
And that is the point, where I would say: "No, you have not been using Google for free. You have paid with something. That something is your personal data and privacy of others."
Why privacy of others? Well, because by using Google, you are actually supporting their business model, which is online stalking and selling info about you basically.
If no one was using their search (and other services), then what would be the point for businesses to throw money at them for placing ads there? Every user counts in the end. Many people keep thinking, that they alone will not make any difference, but that is, where people go wrong in many scenarios. The typical: "But if only I do x then it wont be so bad." or "If only I stop doing x, it wont change the big picture." If everyone thinks that way, then nothing ever will change of course. It is a feedback loop, or vicious cycle, or whatever it is called. The right idea is to start doing, what one can do oneself. And that is to stop using services such as Google search.
Personally, if I had the choice between paying money every year to have a non-stalker Internet search for the whole world, ensuring everyone's privacy when searching, I would rather choose that Internet. I would prefer it over an Internet, which we have today, where I need to arm up my browser to the teeth, to avoid being tracked everywhere, being unable to access a lot of content, because knowingly or unknowingly people put it behind stalker-walls and paywalls. I also think that your suggested numbers of 120 or even 2400$ are wildly exaggerated. It would probably be much more like an Internet tax, that everyone had to pay and that is lowered or increased based on your personal economical situation.
I think the fact people like HN's readership are living in a golden age is underappreciated. Think about it: we block ads while the people who don't subsidize our digital lifestyle. Sooner or later the providers are going to decide we're getting too much for free. Instead of an easily-blocked separate video, the YouTube ad will be part of the video stream and the server will refuse to send any part of the video until such time as the ad has had time to play. You might be able to blank the player for the ad but you'll get a fifteen second black screen instead of a fifteen second video.
So I resolved to sit back and enjoy what time I have left for getting a great experience.
A Google subscription would likely need to cost over $20/m - considering how many people wouldn't pay even one dollar for paid search. Google had $186Bn in revenue last year and ~1.8Bn monthly active users. The revenue comes almost entirely from search - with 1.2Tn searches per year - that's $0.15 per search - hardly anyone would pay that - and to get the same amount of revenue and profit with less users - they'd have to charge many many multiples of that. It's just not feasible.
If Google had a paid, ad-free option for more then just YouTube and some drive space I would be happy to pay it. I don't know if I would shell out for paid Google searches but I would at-least like to see an alternative option.
Ads on podcasts don't bug me as much as the ads Google/Facebook does. Nor do the ads that are sponsored inside videos (see LTT). I don't mind the ads that DDG does (which just uses key words in your search).
I don't like this dichotomy of ads vs no ads, I'm not sure that's really the right framework. I turn off ads everywhere I go because I can't trust ads. But I don't bother skipping through ads on my podcasts or in videos. So it isn't the ad part that's the problem.
> Would I rather replay history and pay ~$120 every year (~$2400 ?) to search for web articles? No.
But that's an outrageous sum. I'm sure you also wouldn't sacrifice your first-born son on Google's altar either. Meanwhile, would you pay $5-10/year ($100-$200 total)? That would probably cut Google's revenue by two-thirds - one-third, but still they would have plenty. I believe FB averaged under $10/year/active user in all the years I looked at (which ignores the most recent years).
Meanwhile, I guess I'll just leave my adblocker installed and take the subsidy.
> I don't like ads but they are the most friction-free way to consume a wide variety of content.
That might be true in the beginning but long term ad's add a lot of friction and frustration e.g. having to wait X amount of seconds before getting access to the content.
I have been a YouTube Premium user since day one and I can't imagine not using it.
What I would love to see more is having a choice of having a free ad supported version and the option to upgrade and pay to remove those ads.
You (me, all of us) are (indirectly) paying for Google ads in the same way that we are (indirectly) paying for merchant credit card processing fees. If you paid for search, some businesses might be able to lower the cost of their products because they don’t have to pay for advertising.
Companies wouldn't stop paying for advertisement if we banned internet advertising, they'd have to spend more in other advertisement spaces and now those spaces aren't funding the search which we'd have to pay for.
Your idea about paying a yearly subscription vs having advertising presents a false dichotomy. Since the internet is a public good, search functionality could be reasonably delivered for cents on the dollar by a public utility.
Jeff is defending shareholders and not ads as a revenue model. Without shareholders Google would be free to pursue alternate strategies. Not as profitable but better for the user.
It doesn't mean I hate people who work on ads / ad software. It doesn't mean I want to cancel them. You, and the others in that field, don't have to justify yourself. You don't have to donate to charity to feel better about what you're doing (it doesn't mean "stop donating NOW", it's just.. do what you feel is good, like you are doing now).
There's a lot of bad going on in the world. Ads are shady-grey area. I know how to fight it and have my internet ad-free. You're ok, don't let negative comments get to you. Cheers!
Yeah, I still don't like it. I used to not mind ads because they were just images, but then came the ones that moved, then the ones that made sound, then the ones that injected malicious JavaScript. Then I installed an adblocker, then I installed a script blocker, then I installed a proxy. Now most websites won't work and I'm fine with that.
Just wanted to mention I appreciate seeing a different perspective here.
I know there's a lot of negative reaction to it, and I can empathize with that because there's a long history of negative behavior by the advertising industry. But there's no doubt that there are benefits too, and seeing some nuance on HN is always a win.
So its immoral for a math tutor to post a flyer about his services in a local coffee shop?
Advertising is a very wide spectrum and I think its way too heavy handed to say it is all intrinsically immoral. Some is, maybe even most of it, but surely not all is immoral.
I'd argue that advertising in general is a good thing, but that there are a few parts that are bad. One bad part is the vast surveillance and privacy intrusion of modern digital advertising is what is bad. Another are the advertising tactics used to manipulate people into buying things they shouldn't.
Perhaps what is immoral is when the volume of advertising and the workload it places on the brain becomes too much.
The coffee shop with far too many flyers or 7 by the same local tutor becomes very hard to handle. With experience you fight through the flyers to read the menu and get to the counter to order that coffee.
There is so much 'opportunity' in the world at any moment for which the provider of the opportunity's ad thinks that it could be relevant to me. I can accept a little of that every day without it being bad, but patience wears very fast.
Working in adtech and trying to convince yourself (and others) you are doing the world a favor is a real equilibrium exercise.
The false dichotomy between ads/paywall is not really useful, when the reality is that you often get a paywall and ads after you agree to pay. The advertisement industry is a cancerous blight of our societies, its sole purpose is to sell us stuff we do not need to increase a company’s profit. The fact that this is done on the web by plundering our personal data with no regard for our privacy is just the cherry on top. Ads business is unhinged capitalism and a social and ecological disaster, and advocating in its favor today is short-sighted at best.
It’s fine to work a job you like in an unethical industry, but it is not necessary to try to sell it to other people.
> but what about all those sites that don't have a strong commercial tie-in?
Surely it's okay for sites that "don't have a commercial tie-in" to stick with untargeted ads? I just think that building a giant stalking network is an extreme (and ideally illegal) solution to the "problem" that a couple of sites won't make as much money off their popularity as they'd like.
And is it that uncharitable to characterize what Facebook and Google are building as a giant stalking network?
Each ad serve is not worth that much to start with, facebooks CPMs are about $7-8, so they are getting $0.007 per serve with extensive targeting. The falloff is something around 10x+ for completely non targeted ads which for most sites push them below the level of economic feasibility.
This is also why if you stumble into some parts of the web, they vomit out a billion ads per page to try and compensate.
Really the problem is that there is a tremendous gap between the costs to serve content and users willingness to pay (either directly or via any indirect method). It is a tremendously deep hole we've built with freemium models that will probably require some level of societal agreement to dig back out of.
The online ad business generally mystifies me. While an awful lot of the internet, especially the surveillance advertising part, looks to be the greatest misallocation of engineering (and other) talent in the history of the world, ya gotta ask about the efficacy.
The only reasonably accurate targeting I've ever run into is the occasional ad for something I just browsed on Amazon. I've never clicked on an internet ad. Youtube advertising might as well be targeted to an alien race. What in the hell keeps this whole business afloat at it's current level? Am I being programmed to buy that mechanic's vise because they threw up an after-the-browse ad?
No doubt there's some sort of backend telemetry that proves the value of all this trouble, but I just don't see it. Maybe the emperor really is nekkid.
edit: It may well be that the real marketing genius in the advertising industry is not it's value in increasing sales, whether it's old school print media/OTA/tradeshows or the newfangled spying-on-you internet variety, but in convincing it's customers of advertising's value. Anything beyond pushing you up a search engine's ranking strikes me as a sketchy proposition.
I have tracking blockers set up all over, so I rarely get ads targeted at me.
Instead I get ads targeted at people who share my IP. I can often tell what my girlfriend has been browsing for from the ads I'm hit with, for instance, which is somewhat creepy.
> I can often tell what my girlfriend has been browsing for from the ads I'm hit with, for instance, which is somewhat creepy.
I've had ads for medication that I'm prescribed, or could be prescribed, play on other people's devices when they use my network. It's likely targeted because I don't get ads for other types of prescriptions at all at home.
I'm also pretty sure of some of the medical conditions my friends and family have based on the ads I consistently see in their homes.
I wouldn't be surprised if Adwords is a net loss for the majority of Google's customers. The whole thing is full of dark patterns. Personally I got so fed up with the abusive nature of it that I abandoned it several years ago.
I like to think of google ads the IRS of the internet. I pay my ad agency to minimize my google ads tax, not to grow business, same instructions I give to my tax accountant. Google will argue that everyone wins if you grow and pay more google tax, but many have tested this and proved it not to be true. Said another way, how good of a job your tax accountant is doing is orthogonal to growing your business.
> No doubt there's some sort of backend telemetry that proves the value of all this trouble.
And it seems like unless you go to a lot of trouble, you're essentially relying on the ad network's own metrics for efficacy... Which when you consider the sheer quantity of money at stake, seems like it will end in a massive fraud at least once. I could be wrong about the perverse incentive though, it seems almost too obvious so I would assume that people who know the ad industry better than me would have a response to it.
> unless you go to a lot of trouble, you're essentially relying on the ad network's own metrics for efficacy
There's a whole ecosystem of "buyside verification vendors" that advertisers contract with to validate that they're getting what they paid for. Buyers don't just take the seller's word for it, or at least enough of them don't that shady sellers are kept in check.
I totally agree about the YouTube advertising. YouTube literally has hundreds of hours of my video history to work with, yet the vast majority of the ads I see are completely unrelated to my interests. What's the point of all the tracking if they can't even show me relevant ads on YouTube of all places? Podcast ads tend to be much more relevant, and I can even recall purchases I've made due to them. AFAIK my podcast player isn't tracking me or using targeted ads.
That's because the companies winning bidds on your 'views' are targeting you because of your apparent persona, i.e middle aged man/woman in tech -aka middle class ++ with disposable income, rather than what you are interested in.
On top of that, plenty of marketers are absolutely clueless about how to go about their strategy, mostly because unlike previous generations (in online ads), they don't grok the underlying tech at all.
If you turn off personalized ads, that's basically what you'll see.
Although for me, it's a 50/50 split between topic-related and ads that appear to target a generic male audience, which is a very good guess for some topics.
Advertising is throwing darts at the board with your eyes closed, whenever it lands somewhere on the board and nets you point is good enough for most.
Typical conversion rates are under the 1% threshold so you accept that a lot of your spend is not efficient but when it is, you make your money back and some, if you are any good at it.
> AFAIK my podcast player isn't tracking me or using targeted ads.
Some podcasts use "dynamic ad insertion", where the ads are inserted when you download the podcast rather than when the podcast file is created and uploaded. [0] Discovered my podcasts were tracking me when I traveled and then heard ads for an out-of-state regional chain after I returned home, clearly because I had downloaded the episodes while traveling.
Overcast added privacy & tracking info, to show whether each podcast uses dynamic ad insertion or (possibly) tracks IP etc. [1].
The most successful ads looks very similar to the organic content and tend to have very similar targeting mechanisms. Search ads that look like search results. Product ads on amazon that look like product search results. Facebook ads that look like Facebook posts. In my experience all those ads are quiet close to content I'd like and I've clicked on quiet a few without realizing it's an ad.
I'd argue further that the most successful are not at all distinguishable as adds. They masquerade as content but are paid placements or placed just for the sake of advertising.
While I personally agree with you when it comes to YT advertising which at times could not be more irrelevant, Google search ads and Facebook/Instagram ads seem to be the place where most money is spend. And in case of Google search the whole thing is basically a prisoners dilemma. You and your competitors are probably among the first results for the relevant keywords anyway and could save a lot on advertising if none of you advertised. But once a single competitor starts buying ads the whole sector has to move until the expense on Google ads is equal to the former profit margin. This in turn leads to monopolization as only the competitor with the highest profit margin at baseline will still be making a profit. It’s hard to believe that Google pushing its apps and a single search/navigation bar on users is but an attempt to get businesses to pay for results they would already rank pretty well for, thereby diverting the profit of entire industries to Google and not offering any benefits to users.
> You and your competitors are probably among the first results for the relevant keywords anyway and could save a lot on advertising if none of you advertised. But once a single competitor starts buying ads the whole sector has to move until the expense on Google ads is equal to the former profit margin. This in turn leads to monopolization as only the competitor with the highest profit margin at baseline will still be making a profit.
Granted, incumbents are likely to score high on organic search results. If somebody new comes up with a better product, which can deliver more value at a lower price, the page rank algorithm isn’t going to do much for them. But the newcomer’s superior unit economics mean they can afford to bid higher for an ad, which allows them to get market share from the incumbent. In that sense, ads can make the market more liquid, and speed adoption of improved products and more efficient manufacturing or business processes.
The ad publisher does end up capturing a big chunk of this value, and it’s valid to ask if that’s fair and if we as a society should allow it.
Generally yes but Instagram ads are somehow amazingly well-targeted towards me.
Literally every ad I say to myself "wow, that is actually something I would consider buying" and in certain instances, I have. Outside of Instagram it is exceedingly rare that I would purchase something based on an ad.
I'm in the same boat, and think it's just that I don't see any typical big advertiser ads like FMCG companies, whereas the traditional media is full of them.
On the other side there are Google Play ads with mouth open guys - I'm never going to play one of those vile games, ever.
From what I keep reading on HN, Facebook ad network ads (which includes Instagram) are by far the best and most precise in terms of targeting, it doesn't even get close.
And from my anecdotal experiences, I have to agree with both you and what I see on HN in that regard. Not only they get the advertisers right up my alley, they even get the exact products I want to click on.
For a specific example: I don't get easily baited by random no-name "hip" clothing startups (that are mostly just alibaba dropship sort of places), so instagram keeps giving me ads for Adidas products as well. And the thing is, not only does it get correctly that I am likely to be interested in Adidas products, the specific products from Adidas that get suggested to me in those ads are the exact kind of products from Adidas that I would be interested in. Which is very impressive and surprising, given how wide the range of Adidas products is, and how most of their general stuff isn't super appealing to me. It is hard to describe to the point where I am struggling myself to define what exactly I am looking for if I am navigating Adidas website. But somehow Instagram ads get it right on target most of the time.
The only time when those ads let me down big time was when I saw an Adidas tracksuit advertised with the design I just liked a ton. Without looking at the details, I ordered it, only to realize a bit later that it was in "kids" section of their website, and I have no kids (and neither do I fall under the typical "people who might have kids" demographic by any metric; e.g., I don't search for any items even tangentially related to children, not a part of any FB groups that are heavily populated by parents or children, etc.). But damn, I would be lying if I said that Instagram didn't get the exact idea of what I wanted perfectly correct, sizing issues aside lol.
With the story of Target figuring out daughter was pregnant before the daughters father, it gives rise to all kinds of "Movie plot" plausible sounding scenarios.
Movie plot: Two people meet up, have fun, then go their separate ways. 9 months later she has a kid, dad doesn't know. But FAANG knows...
The problem with "plausible movie plots" is they are often overrated in terms of % chance of happening.
With linked graphs and relationship trees, it doesn't seem impossible "The Algorithm" could figure out you have kids before you do, or at least base it's Advertising results on a % chance guess.
Which is crazy, but often does happen. I have a nephew and niece, so I've bought baby / small-child stuff, but mainly just around major holidays and their birthdays. And yet I still get plenty of random product suggestions on Amazon for kid-related products, even during the 95% of the year that I'm not looking for that stuff.
be aware of the conversations you have in a 24hr to 48hr period, see if "targeted" ads appear in your feed, which relate to things shared in those conversations.
I've seen things go from saying things in a conversation to targeted advert on Twitter, for example, in under 1hr routinely (although not always). Many of my peers have reported the same. While I've reproduced this on multiple devices (Android + iPhone) over many tests, I've been unable to isolate the app(s) doing this and how it works.
It's baffling how it's done and at scale, but somehow a few organizations seem to have extremely advanced adtech in production.
I still don’t believe audio surveillance exists at this scale, and I still haven’t seen any evidence that these events are anything but coincidence.
It seems to me that Facebook is extremely good at targeting me with ads (via Instagram) for products I might be interested in. I’m also much more likely to talk about products I’m interested in. I’m also much more likely to notice the spooky scenarios where the ads match what I was talking about, but not so likely to notice the ads unrelated to my conversations.
There are so many ways we could detect such surveillance. Power consumption, network usage, mic activity indicators, etc. but I still have seen no such evidence.
I had a hard time believing it myself and came to terms with it after reproducing it consistently over many months, despite using everything from pihole to on-device firewalls running as root.
Unfortunately, this topic tends to be routinely brushed off as coincidence and I believe it's partially because the level of surveillance underway would cause panic and outrage, if it becomes widely known. Although I have have exposure to adtech and ML, it's difficult to grasp how this sort of activity is being done at scale.
My current theory is audio may be heavily compressed prior to occasional uploads to a trusted domain, which could be obfuscated by cloudfront or similar service. It's also possible some on-device speech to text is happening, which would make the files trivial to upload. That said, on device ML itself would be a quite a feat, especially to be running on mobile devices with high degree of accuracy to isolate keywords to be used in prod, for ad targeting.
yet not even one whistleblower has stepped forward? Not one person has been able to detect something which would be so obviously detectable? Come on, man.
> I still haven’t seen any evidence that these events are anything but coincidence
My feeling here is that it's just like when someone in your family buys a particular make/model of car, you start noticing the same car on the road and are surprised that you never noticed how many of them there are.
That same ad for a set of Bose headphones might show up in your feed once a week, but one of those days you just happen to have a conversation about headphones with a friend, and it feels weird.
The paranoia in me sometimes wants to believe that my phone is listening to me all the time and is extracting ad keywords from everything I say, but I have a hard time figuring out how it would work.
Uploading voice clips, even using a good compressor like Opus, would still be noticeable. Maybe not by me, personally, but someone would have noticed that by now. Doing on-device voice recognition is possible (uploads of compressed text might not be noticeable), but my intuition is that would be a huge drain on the battery if it was running all day, processing everything it hears.
But who knows. Maybe it is possible, and there's a novel, but secret technology that enables it. It's a little far-fetched, though, I think.
Just my anecdote, but when I used Instagram (stopped probably 2 years ago), the ad targeting was pretty terrible for me. Occasionally they would get something completely on the nose (to the point that it was a little creepy), but most of the time (>90% probably), the ads were completely irrelevant to me, either for things I already have and have no need to replace, or for things I don't think I'd ever conceivably buy.
I get your point, but this is inaccurate. Advertizing has always been targeted based on the demographic most likely to see them - deciding to air a TV ad during Saturday morning cartoons, during a football match, or during a soap opera has very meaningful differences. The only change now is that the granularity of information available for targeting has increased.
It used to be surveys few could voluntarily filled out that were interpolated onto similar demographics, or based on purchases.
Now advertisers can track you directly where/when you go, without your permission. Your search and purchase history forever remembered, your location verified, your friends identified.
With such level detail we will soon have custom pricing to maximize profits.
I've always thought that the value provided was in comparison to old-school advertising techniques, such as through physical media or broadcast-style presentation formats. Nowadays, even if some Youtube ads seem like a crapshoot, it's still much more focused than television.
The value proof in the backend that convinces advertisers to throw more many at this? Mostly rule of thumb heuristics with a fair amount of overselling. So no, in most cases the telemetry just doesn't prove much.
I've seen the thesis that all this advertising revenue - even if poorly spent - subvents large portions of exciting research in deep learning etc. at the likes of Google and Facebook. So all that talent wouldn't entirely be lost to advertising.
Possible explanations that I have seen for inaccurate targeting:
1. Some folks have a ton of money in their budget to spend on marketing, and they frankly don’t care about optimizing their targeting. In some cases, this is a shrewd decision, since the benefits of marginal optimization don’t really justify the cost of optimization. That said, in most cases, it’s just sloth or ignorance combined with the knowledge that they better spend their ad budget or else “bad things” will happen.
2. Lots of people call themselves digital marketers. Most of them who are employees suck, and I mean suck really bad. The reason is that if you are really good at digital marketing, it’s pretty easy to roll your own small business that, at a minimum, makes enough money while still having a lot of latitude in terms of free time or financial upside. Most companies are not willing or are not able to pay highly competent digital marketers what they are worth. Regardless, these employee marketers who suck tend not to do well at optimizing targeting.
3. Most digital marketing agencies suck at targeting. This is largely a byproduct of #2 above. The owner of an agency or the lead marketer might be really good, but they often delegate to people who are not. Streamlining the work of the underlings turns out not to be that important for most of these agencies.
That’s my 2 cents. I would love to hear other opinions.
Perhaps it is not so much a question of whether online ads work nor how profitable the business is (or the costs to society of all the surveillance), but instead the question is why the author cannot or will not work on something else. Is the work he does truly valuable in a general sense. This question might help us gauge the veracity of his statements.
If the web were 100% ad-free, it would still exist. It would still be growing. People would still spend countless hours working on computer programming. People would still be endlessly tinkering with the internet. This is reality, I saw it in the 80's and 90's. However, they would not be, as the author is today, asking for forgiveness, pledging to donate half their "earnings" to charity. Online ads may be an efficient way to make money but it also may be the only efficient way to make money from such "work" (experimentation, fun). The folks who are profiting from online ads will say anything to avoid that reality check.
The emperor may indeed be naked, but the amount of money and infrastructure these companies have to bury the truth is enormous. They will not allow the world to ever again experience a web without pervasive advertising. The person who started the web already had a real job. He did not try to make money with online ads. That world was fun while it lasted. There were so many possibilities.
Thanks to this author's "work", the possibilities now appear to be mostly dystopian. Compare this post "Why I work on Ads" to the original paper from Brin and Page that described the influence of advertising on web search as undesirable and a primary motivation for creating Google.
It's amazing to see the amount of people in this post that don't click ads. I really try to avoid to click them, I quite often open an incognito window to search for product I've just seen in an ad (I'm sure Google will find a way to figure out that an incognito user with the same IP as me is... me, but it feels better to try).
But I do click ads in my work, if the top (ad) link on Google is something relevant I might click it if I don't care for the company. I try to avoid clicking links for companies I really like since I work in a very ad heavy industry and know how much CPC can cost.
One of the interesting things about advertising is that nobody really knows if it works, and there's a growing body of evidence that it largely doesn't work.
We are sold on the idea that they work, because someone clicks this ad, we track them, they buy the product, and we attribute the sale to that ad.
But we don't know whether the customer would have bought anyway. And some research suggests that, for the most part, they would have.
Steve Tadelis at Berkeley wrote a paper in 2013 demonstrating little to no efficacy of nine figures of ad spend at eBay.
This may not be true of all ads - ads for little-known brands, for example, may reach people who would have never heard of it. But the bulk of advertising bought by large brands may largely be a waste.
Advertisers still spend money because almost nobody is getting paid to rain on the parade. There's an endless stream of ad agencies, paid search marketers, marketing department staff themselves, CMOs, media properties, ad nauseam who are all invested in continuing marketing spend. A CMO will almost never declare that his department is useless. So they continue to make the case for their continued relevance.
I partially disagree: fake (paid) "organic" mentions and fake reviews are the most effective form of marketing. And, obviously, they're much easier for a company to achieve than the real thing. How unsurprising is it that the most effective class of ad spend is the most scummy? The reason (fake) organic marketing is effective is exactly because it fools people into thinking that it isn't marketing.
Take paid Amazon reviews for example. This is advertising, just one of the most scummy possible forms of it. It's effective because people like me look to reviews to provide a third-party take on whether or not a product is any good. If I have a choice between two otherwise equivalent products, I'll pick the one with better reviews. But usually this just means rewarding the company that paid more to "advertise" on Amazon.
I realize you're probably talking about "real" organic mentions, but those are growing increasingly harder to find. A good example is the last time I bought headphones. I got suckered by a bunch of small review sites that had either been paid or gotten free samples in exchange for reviews. I bought two pairs, and when they arrived the sound from both was distorted. One pair broke within a few months. It was clearly trash that had been pumped using fake organic marketing. When I went back to find the sites that had provided the reviews in the first place, a few of them did mention (in very tiny print) that the reviews were paid. Me, suckered by advertising?! More likely than you'd think.
Back in the day, Johnny Carson reading an ad was convincing to the median consumer because they could be led to believe that the ad really was an endorsement of the product. That doesn't work any more, or not nearly as much at any rate. The basic strategy hasn't changed: it's still an attempt to find someone the consumer will trust. This is why, in my opinion, ads have always been and always will be bad, an attempt to subvert human rationality. Johnny Carson endorsing a product didn't mean that the product was good, it meant he was paid to endorse it. A review site endorsing a product nowadays doesn't mean that the product is good, it means they're paid to endorse it. In both cases the breakdown between what the consumer believes is happening and what is actually happening is the very thing advertising is trying to create, its raison d'être.
I generally agree with your gist; however, I would point out that there are niche review sites run by enthusiasts (whether computer parts, cameras, tools, gadgets, clothing, and so on.) and there are the SEO types that are near-worthless. Enthusiast sites have a range of community-only and not ads, some have affiliate links and some have paid reviews and so on. So you have to know how the site operates and take that into account.
The niche ones have mods which allow genuine dissent as well as other recommendations from competing solutions.
I am thinking about the car enthusiast sites/forums (where you can search for information how to fix minor issues), also places like cpubenchmark, tomshardware, anadtech, dpreview, shoptoolreview and so on. You have to get to know the forum and how they make money, whether it's a labor of love or main source of income, how transparent they are about sponsorship, etc.
Smart marketers don't try to get you to buy from an ad click. They want to move you one step down the funnel, which is usually getting your email/contact info if it's the type of product that has a longer nurturing process and sales cycle.
Digital marketing performance is increasingly measurable and there's more data than ever proving that it can be extremely effective.
You can certainly waste a lot of money doing it too. Getting the right message in front of the right user at the right time is a lot harder than people think it is.
The above is where there's a lot of smoke and mirrors in ad tech. But for advertising as a whole, it's not a massive industry because it doesn't work.
>Getting the right message in front of the right user at the right time is a lot harder than people think it is.
Guess that's why we need those brightest minds of our generation on the problem, as the saying goes, right?
That sentence gives me extreme Matthew McConaughey-in-Wolf of Wall Street vibes. After seeing you wrote that, I immediately assumed you very likely work in advertising. Sure enough...
I have no clue whether anything you've written there is accurate or not. Either way, this whole thing and this whole industry just looks, sounds, and feels gross and intrinsically empty. I get a much better and more wholesome feeling from the cryptocurrency industry, even.
If the greatest minds of society are going for the easiest payday perhaps they are not really our greatest minds. Perhaps they are the smart ones by cashing in but the great minds with the great ideas they are not.
Ad-tech involves big data, lots of volume, and tons of innovation and interesting challenges. There's usually a good paycheck too, because there are lots of companies that need smart people to work on the above.
Greatest minds? Maybe there are some, you'll find them everywhere. But I'd worry that the greatest minds are toiling away in academia chasing grants or working on things that they don't want to work on.
In the paraphrased words of Don Draper (Mad Men character), nobody grows up wanting to be in advertising. It just kind of happens.
And then, there is a good chance our generation's Tesla or Einstein or Mozart currently herds livestock in the Mongolian desert and will for all their life.
There are hucksters in every industry, and if you ask me, crypto has some next-level hucksterism.
The core of advertising is just getting some message about your product or service to a relevant audience.
A lot of companies offer that service, some more effective than others.
But yes, I started an ad-tech company that supports indie news publishers. Before that, I was offered a great gig at Yahoo (when it was still kind of cool) where I got into it. I honestly didn't seek it out but I guess I liked it enough to stick with it.
>There are hucksters in every industry, and if you ask me, crypto has some next-level hucksterism.
It's certainly hard to compare entire industries apples-to-apples. The worst parts of the cryptocurrency industry are definitely worse than the worst parts of the advertising industry. However, I personally feel like in an "average", "net", or "expected value" sense, advertising may be worse. But maybe it isn't; either way, all I was trying to say is I really just don't like advertising or ad tech, and I wanted to use a rather extreme comparison to viscerally convey that. (Perhaps a little like a kind of "bullshit-industry" analogue of Godwin's law - my comparison was somewhat tongue-in-cheek and bad faith, basically, but also kind of not, because I do like some aspects of cryptocurrencies while I like zero aspects of advertising.)
>that supports indie news publishers
Sure, and maybe someone else could've started one that supports starving children. (The originally posted article similarly mentions that one of their reasons for working on ads is "I give half of what I earn to the most effective charities I can find, and the more I earn the more I can give".)
These all feel like cop-outs to me. I could significantly support independent creators or starving children by running a cryptocurrency Ponzi scheme, but it still doesn't make it positive on net. The difference is that you and the article author simultaneously say that you feel like the work is inherently positive, too, which in my book just makes it delusional rather than dissonant or contradictory.
So I absolutely don't think you're at all behaving knowingly unethically; just unknowingly. I think part of the issue here is that it's generally only a tiny bit unethical, so it takes a lot for it to add up to being a-lot-unethical, and humans (including myself) usually aren't so good at perceiving these potential cumulative effects when they're upstream of it all.
>The core of advertising is just getting some message about your product or service to a relevant audience.
At the same time, I can't not acknowledge this. How can I fault a small business owner for wanting people to know they exist? There's some cognitive dissonance of my own, here. And at the moment I'm resolving the dissonance by disliking the advertising and ad tech industries rather than disliking businesses who place ads. (As long as the ads they place aren't annoying, deceptive, or malicious in any way.)
Maybe my opinion on all this will eventually shift a bit, though, because a lot of it's certainly more emotional than logical. At a very deep, subjective level, I just strongly dislike advertising and everything about it. It gives me nothing but negative feelings. Most of the cryptocurrency industry gives me negative feelings, too - but the industry as a whole doesn't give me nothing but negative feelings. Some part of it gives me neutral or positive feelings.
> which in my book just makes it delusional rather than dissonant or contradictory.
Not to get off track, but ultimately it's a subjective position. I could easily take the view that anyone working for Facebook is actively helping erode the privacy of internet users. Or, that anyone working for Google is furthering its anticompetitive agenda and stifling innovation on the open web.
Without my platform, there are some towns and cities across the US that wouldn't have a local news outlet or reporter to follow local government and uncover corruption. I have case studies on my website where the publishers say it themselves.
From someone else's point of view I could be deluded, but from my standpoint, I'm doing something very positive. I don't think someone has to actively seek out the most cynical perspective on their line of work.
> there's more data than ever proving that it can be extremely effective
Can you provide some pointers to that data (as the parent did for the contrary position)? Forgive me, but it seems you work in advertising, so I'm not sure if you're the most unbiased person to assert something like this without evidence.
With most advertising mediums, you can only show correlation.
But with many parts of digital, you can show certain pages of your website exclusively to those who have clicked on ads (ie. hide those pages from regular browsers).
In this way you can directly measure the direct effects of the advertising spend.
There are many businesses, including three that I own, that have grown as a sole consequence of social media advertising. We have not promoted these businesses in any other way (no SEO, no trade shows, nothing).
I'm not going to share my advertising accounts with you; I'm just going to ask you to trust that when I get my laptop out and show my results to my 'marketing skeptical' friends, they stop being skeptical.
Actual words, from one of these friends: "wow. That is like a money printing machine."
Consider for a second: how many advertisers that are actually succeeding are going to publicly call attention to their success? Would you?
The only hint is Facebook and Google's revenues. They go up, and I am one of the people who makes their revenues go up.
"I'm not going to share my advertising accounts with you; I'm just going to ask you to trust that when I get my laptop out and show my results to my 'marketing skeptical' friends, they stop being skeptical."
I'm not publishing a paper in the comments. This is HN. Regardless, you cherry picked one aspect of my comment, and it's very hard from my perspective to see that it was done in good faith.
I'd like to be proven otherwise, so, here are my key points, which you didn't contend with:
-> It's possible to completely isolate the effect of advertising spend, thereby making the effectiveness (or not) measurable.
-> I pointed to growing revenues on Google/FB's platforms, two platforms which make isolated measurement feasible.
In terms of _externally_ verifiable facts, that's the best I'll be able to give you.
The rest, you (and others) have to take on a/ good faith b/ using basic logic, that I'm telling the truth.
> Digital marketing performance is increasingly measurable
Yes, I believe this is true. But also, I've heard that payouts per impression are going down precipitously. Desperate news sites are chock full of heavy ads because each impression pays less and less. Popular Youtube channels increasingly run their own integrated promotional content instead of depending on youtube ad revenue which keeps falling, even as viewership rises.
It's reasonable to suspect that as ad performance becomes perfectly measurable, payouts to content creators will asymptotically approach zero, because most ads don't work. Consumers spend most of their time looking at ads that don't work at all. That the occasional well crafted and placed ad does work isn't much consolation.
Ad network CPMs are seasonal, but I agree that it's a race to the bottom there. Ad networks (including Google's) are designed to maximize profit for ad-tech, not the publisher. The publisher/creator is always the last on line to get paid.
Direct sold digital advertising (OG, cutting ad networks out) is a different story.
Imagine, for example, that HN said they would auction off a single ad slot beneath the navbar to the highest bidder for the year.
How much do you think that would command? Do you think there could be sincere branding value (and actual performance) for the advertiser? I think it could be worth north of 1MM just to promote open jobs at a company.
If it was a clean, tasteful ad, and it was simply to support the cost of running HN, I'm pretty sure most of the audience would put up with it.
The common perception of digital advertising is network advertising. But the type of advertising that is the least annoying and most beneficial to both the advertiser and publisher is direct sold.
For user acquisition you are completely right, however for the incrementality of purchases and sales, this is highly questionable and needs to be measured on case by case basis.
We definitely know that it works. We generate petabytes everyday proving it does.
That being said there’s plenty of waste due to politics, bureaucracy, bad tech and general mismanagement. It’s important to separate the concept from the implementation.
As a consumer, why does it very strongly feel like in my case, it never, ever works, then? And why does pretty much everyone else I've ever heard talk about this say the exact same thing?
Are we being 5D-chess'd and it's working on all of us subliminally and subconsciously and we just think we're immune? Or is there some other huge population of people out there it's working on who actually somehow are real manifestations of the unfathomably-cringeworthy-to-utter "sheeple" / "NPC" trope or something?
One area I can see is more subtle word-of-mouth kinds of influence (organic or astroturfed), where someone may see a lot of their friends or people they admire using and recommending something. I can definitely be influenced in that way in some cases - that's kind of how interest in almost anything works, isn't it? (For a non-profit example, would I have become interested in Rust if I didn't see it positively mentioned thousands of times on websites I use for the past decade? Probably not.) But for traditional ads like banners and commercials and billboards, I perceive zero efficacy in my own case.
I used to think like you, but now I think it's 5D chess. Marketing is like air, so ever present you can't even see it. If you don't buy anything and live off your homesteading, then marketing probably doesn't have any effect on you. If you live a life anything like the average westerner, you spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on things you had to be taught to desire. It's in your TV shows, your news articles, your Instagram feed, your word of mouth, your everything unless you are in the forest (but not looking at anyone else's hiking gear brands). Our economy is based on you consuming many many times more goods and services than your great grandparents, and it wasn't cheap to train you to do that.
>It's in your TV shows, your news articles, your Instagram feed, your word of mouth, your everything unless you are in the forest
I think I, and some decent percentage of HN readers, may kind of be "in the forest". I don't watch TV, I don't read news articles, I've never had an Instagram account or any kind of social media account (besides more "pseudonymous" social media like HN and reddit), I have comprehensive ad blockers, etc.
I also don't really buy products. I buy food, maybe I'll upgrade to a new laptop or phone every 4 - 5 years, but otherwise I don't think I really "consume" new things.
The only thing I can think of that ads have consciously made me do is pay to get rid of them. For example, I pay for YouTube Premium so I can never see ads. (Ad blocking gets tough for mobile devices and casting to other screens.) They got me there, because I watch a lot of YouTube (which I acknowledge is kind of "the new TV") and in some ways it's the best $12/month I've ever spent. It doesn't cover video makers including sponsored content, but I use crowdsourced browser extensions to identify and skip those.
Do you buy your clothes at the thrift store or at the mall? If you buy them at the mall, how did you choose those stores? Did you buy those clothes to make sure you were meeting other people's expectations? Were those people's expectations shaped by advertising, marketing and branding? If you wear flour sacks, then my humble apologies and sincere congratulations.
It's kind of close to the equivalent of flour sacks for me; I don't shop in either thrift stores or malls or think about expectations, and I buy new clothes very rarely. When I do, I order the same cheap generic solid-color clothes off of Amazon, and sometimes one or two other low-cost generic brands (based simply on what's cheapest when I sort by price, as long as the ratings aren't way below the rest). I admit I'm probably being influenced by Amazon's brand and the prioritizing of their "Amazon Basics" items in search results, though.
You would admit, then, that you're not the norm, and that your experience - while interesting, certainly - does not appear to extrapolate very well to others?
It is difficult to reflect on how we’re influenced, but yes, you are almost certainly being impacted to nudge you to purchase one thing or another. Unless you’re using solely cash payments and also do not own a cell phone, then you’re in the data ecosystem. In your case, it is probably likely that you don’t get advertisements or emails for luxury items, even if your income would allow such a purchase.
The great misunderstanding of this industry is that what ads you see are just as important as the ads you don’t see, which allows for profit maximization.
In your circumstance, it may be true that bank transactions are farmed and analyzed to be additive to data gathering on the web, which in turn is additive to the offline data gathering offered by various companies. Every transaction made is analyzed for location, merchant, purchase category, amount, date & time, and more.
Most of the other commenters who are claiming and linking to articles that ads don’t work aren’t in the industry. This is an important distinction because what we’re talking about here are the machines that crunch all this data are considered trade secrets and/or intellectual property. Also, slightly off topic, but it’s important to understand that ads != marketing. Ads are a child component of marketing. When you look at the overall function of marketing (of which product management is a discipline, no matter how desperately some attempt to align it to technology), then consider how much of a factor data analysis and operationalization of data is a driver of success for Fortune 500 companies. Almost any company in consumer technology (e.g. FAANG), consumer healthcare (CVS), telecommunications (AT&T), FMCG or retail (Walmart, Costco), and retail banking (Chase, Wells Fargo) are using these techniques to build better products, sharpen communications, and win new customers.
It’s like CGI graphics in movies. If it looks good then it just looks good and you definitely notice when it looks bad. Your average TV show probably has half the stuff on the screen being CG in some way but millions of watchers never know.
oh my god discussions about advertising on hackernews are like a bunch of plumbers talking about software engineering. these threads should honestly just be used as Dunning-Kruger honeypots. we should post about advertising once a week and then just ban everyone who says "there is no evidence that advertising works."
I have a pixel on my thank-you page. I manually delete placements and optimize creatives and angles and funnels and demographic targeting until it goes from making no sales to ludicrously profitable. This is an entire industry you know nothing about.
Big brands can be dumb but they do mostly have the tools to not be.
Not really correct. Advertising incrementality is pretty easy to determine by in-market tests and statistical modeling or causal inference techniques. Feature Engineering for effective model construction does require a body of significant domain knowledge and so your average academic Post-Doc or FAANG data science type tends to struggle in this space unless they learn quickly (I've hired from both before). The space is dominated by large research vendors, specialist consultancies or in-house teams with accumulated institutional knowledge. All this costs though and pays out only if your marketing budgets are in the tens to hundreds of millions of dollars zone.
In a lot of Tech industry firms, the in-house expertise just isn't there to do this stuff and that possibly breeds skepticism. I've had fairly junior members of my teams head out to FAANG who've been shocked at how limited the depth of knowledge is.
There's an extremely well defined industry surrounding conversion lift. Which is exactly what you're talking about. Advertisers use holdout groups to test what % lift was correlated to an ad. Using large enough datasets, it's possible to have strong statistical confidence in the effects of ads on user behavior.
c. a portion of the industry is based on a delusion
Given that some industries (or movements, ideologies, etc.) could credibly be based on delusions, what do you think is the upper limit for how big such an industry could get?
The ad industry is an easily verifiable one, just go ask any of your small business running friends to see if they have generated more profit than they've spent on ads.
People track conversions - click through URLs contain tracking query params which track the source. If you convert (download a resource, request a demo, start a trial, buy a product) it gets reported back to Facebook.
There's definitely accountability. The problem is that you can't always blame FB or Google because maybe your targeting is off, your ad copy sucks, you dumped the user off the front page of your website and they bailed, etc. There's a lot more to performance and accountability.
First of not every ad is targeted to you. A large majority will just be lightly targeted or remnant inventory where it’s better to show you something than waste an impression. You probably don’t notice the ones that are well targeted because they just work.
The vast majority of ad revenue and spending goes into the pockets of Facebook (openly hostile to the idea of an open web) and Google (sneakily hostile to the open web, and busy working on replacing the web with all things Google).
Actual open web partially supported by advertisement? I don't think it ever existed. And when it did, it sure as hell didn't require pervasive 24/7 surveillance of everyone.
That one annoyed me as well, but for a different reason. The open web doesn't require funding, the commercial web does.
Advertising on the net doesn't bother me as much as it once did, but I also see less of it. I don't really visit news sites, mostly the ones already funded by my tax money or the subscription I pay for.
The best blogs rarely have ads. 20 years ago any random blog would have ads, not so any more. Search engines, at least DDG have a reasonable ad policy, even though I have reported a large number of questionable ads. Google is a little useless, because actual result drown in ads for some searches.
I think contextual ads should be preferred over those based on a users past behaviour online. It's really only news sites and social media that needs the ads based on tracking users.
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[ 0.69 ms ] story [ 320 ms ] threadAlso there was a comment somewhere I can't find right now "There are 2 ways to make money in the internet - bundling and unbundling" with this I think there is value of a paywall that bundles, see Apple News. In the end I don't like the way AdTech works right now, I am not sure about what's next. I don't think explicit regulation is the way, especially since Internet is international and law is as a rule local. But either we will sell our data to monopolies or we will die in bills for selfhosting everything and even though involuntarily our internet histories will be sold.
tbh kinda seems like a paywall with extra steps for buy in
>I must be fun at parties
Parties with ads, or any paid "guests" are not fun...
So no, "because of the salary" doesn't explain any of it, and you should read the blog post before posting insulting comments like these.
Let's say someone wants to sell fishing equipment. The traditional way of doing this is to buy ads on fishing sites. So now my fishing equipment purchases make there be more writing about fishing; yay!
Then one of the fishing websites decides to put a tracking pixel on their site to drop "fishing website visitor" cookies (or, in a future without third-party cookies, a turtledove interest group). They make a deal with a third party provider and get paid a small amount per visitor. Then fishing retailers have a new choice: instead of buying ads on fishing sites they can instead buy ads on any site for users who have one of the "fishing website visitor" cookies. If there were a monopoly fishing site, then this would increase their earnings: while the ad space on their site isn't as valuable, they will set the pixel price high enough that they come out ahead. It's not a monopoly, though, so the price of the pixel gets driven down through competition, and money that would go to fishing sites instead goes to the publishers that people who spend money on fishing equipment visit.
In this case I see how it's worse for fishing sites, but not how it's bad for consumers: their willingness to buy fishing equipment translates into support for all the sites they visit, and not just the fishing sites.
But there are also many niches that don't have economic tie-ins, or have ones that are far weaker than "writing about fishing" and "buying fishing equipment". In a world with targeted advertising, these niches do better, because of overlap between audiences. A "let's have better housing policy" blog can show ads for fishing equipment, vacations, HVAC supplies, or whatever else visitors have shown interest in on other sites.
Additionally, targeted advertising increases the total amount of funding available for online content, because people with niche interests are available to be advertised to in more places. Seeing ten fishing ads once a week when you visit a fishing site vs seeing twenty fishing ads spread over the course of the week, etc.
So while niche publishers in lucrative niches would likely make more money if we only had context-based advertising, I don't think niche publishers overall, publishers overall, or consumers would be better off.
(This is modified from a comment I originally posted on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21620763)
You seem to be deliberately focusing on the beneficial parts of advertising, at the exclusion of the harmful bits. If you want to maintain your credibility -- let alone give the impression of someone striving to live ethically -- you'll need to give that second part its due attention.
Addendum:
If I were offered a generous salary to work on Google ad technology, I might accept. I'm not 100% sure, but the temptation would very real. As such, I want to make it clear that my criticism does not stem from any feeling of moral superiority, but rather from deep-seated respect and sympathy for someone engaged in an ethical dilemma.
I believe the comments would be much more charitable had your position been something along the lines of "I do it because it's good money, and I sometimes struggle with the dilemma. Here is the nature of the issue as I see it." As a general rule, people respect earnest introspection. Not so with playing ostrich.
Maybe I'm just terribly dense, but I seriously can't think of any reasonable objection to what google does. The best I personally can come up with is that most people don't understand what google is doing and if they did know some of them might object.
When I google "the individual and collective consequences of mass data collection" I get results that talk about the NSA and human rights -- this doesn't seem to have much to do with what google is doing though. When I add "google" to that search I get a rambling article on "How surveillance changes people's behavior".
Please help me out here -- how am I or anyone else being harmed by google knowing what sites I visit?
I don't think the author is being disingenuous. I do think there is a sizable subset of privacy advocates who have become so stringently ideological about this issue they would downvote even thoughtful replies and are so caught up in their bubble that they seemingly can't have a conversation with anyone outside of it.
Yes, let's. I'm not an expert, so I don't have any insight. Do you?
Still, this question seems like an essential part of essay about the ethics of working in the ad industry.
Perhaps you meant to direct your sarcasm towards the author?
to me it seems really bad to mine and centralize PII (note: this PII is also arbitrarily being shared with third-parties, usually without explicit or informed consent from user).
---
ie: this is data which is mined in a way, depth and scope of any implication is usually abstracted away from the user or hand-waved away in legalese or presented in such an annoying way users have become conditioned to unconditionally accept that which they do not understand, and therefore they likewise usually remain uninformed/ignorant/naive of any implication, security or otherwise, in order to get to the service asap. and this is something absolutely exploited by these companies.
---
do we really want companies, companies who have demonstrated they are not immune to simple mistakes leading to vulnerabilities, or leaked PII, mind you, to be in a position where we the user have no choice, but to trust it won't leak PII to nefarious persons (persons who can then do meaningfully harmful things with even basic PII)?
we are already bleeding enough PII as it is -- when should we truly be concerned with stopping it? if never, and there is no concern as you seem to indicate, then let us arbitrarily share medical information, too.
on that subject, there are also so many instances of arbitrarily collected and shared PII, for the sake of ads, that would almost unequivocally be a HIPA violation in other contexts -- to me it seems asinine to have such well-defined understandings of PII for the protection of the person in some contexts, but yet in the context of ads, suddenly <i>anything</i> goes, and the spiel we always get from the ads advocates is: but it is good for the user and the content creators cannot exist without it, so it must exist as is, unchained.
(un)ironically this is also a psychology presented by abusive relationships where the abuser keeps the abused thinking they need them, and the abuser establishes itself as a (survival) dependency in the abused's mind.
idk, i'm pretty skeptical of the claim that ad tech and the ad industry has good intentions, and i am becoming increasingly of the opinion that most of the advertising models advocates are trying so hard to convince users to enable, are just fucking profit-driven-at-all-costs cancer.
It's bad for the consumer because their privacy is being violated and their metadata is being sold, in order for advertisers to track them everywhere they go online, so businesses can try and extract all of their spending money as efficiently as possible.
It also is bad for the consumer because it's bad for the collective whole: instead of quality content online everything is being driven by outrage and clickbait in order to serve as many targeted ads as possible.
Personally I don't even want to support that ecosystem or those sites.
It's also bad for the fishing site because now their niche targeted ad slots that used to pay decently in order to target people with an interest in fishing are pushed into the same race to the bottom low return ads that are being automatically targeted. So they lose too.
Only winners are huge publishers that don't have any niche audience to target because now they effectively target every niche. And Google of course. Basically the two groups who I want to win the least.
This is exactly what I'm working on changing; have a look at the second half of the post?
(Or read https://github.com/WICG/turtledove)
Before digital advertising or Google reading emails to find out you're going on a fishing trip, how did people buy fishing equipment?
Whatever we did then, we can probably go back to and be much better off.
Like why do I need "relevant ads" on a blog about urban planning? What problem does that solve for me?
We can use the web to bring those in the fishing community into wider contact with each other.
Or use it to create communities vulnerable to ads. I know which one I prefer.
I.e if I send you an email talking about finding a vacation deal to go to Egypt, we will get ads to that effect (obviously it'll vary somewhat).
Official documentation:
https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6603?hl=en#:~:text=Th....
Appreciate it
Ad blockers are a godsend though. I either get to opt-out of ads, or I get to opt-out of sites that rely on ads (for the most part, caveats aside).
Targeted advertising hasn't been a blessing just for small businesses selling fishing equipment and organic combucha, but also -- actually, especially, for companies that sell things like:
* Potentially addictive subscriptions (for e.g. online casinos or other gambling games) -- thus specifically targeting people who are at risk for addiction, unless your targeting settings are crap.
* Snake oil skincare products for teenagers, or potentially dangerous weight loss tablets -- thus compounding peer pressure against young people with poor self esteem.
* Bullshit therapy "options" like German New Medicine, specifically targeting people who are terminally ill, or researching things like cancer treatment for a relative or a friend.
Boy am I glad we're increasing the total amount of funding available for online content!
You make cars? You focus on good things like driving to a vacation, but what about all the cars used in drive by shootings?
You sell cloud services? You talk about the great websites, but what about all the people who host scam sites on the cloud?
You write monitoring software? What about all the people who monitor ad services?
The author of the post specifically (you read the article, didn't you?) said:
> The thing is, I think advertising is positive, and I think my individual contribution is positive. I'm open to being convinced on this: if I'm causing harm through my work I would like to know about it.
Then goes on to not mention a single example of harm being caused through their work, like virtually all articles that attempt to defend the advertising industry's practices. I thought I'd list a few.
You cannot be in good-faith with these kinds of arguments.
But advertising mental health apps or government intervention programs doesn't seem intrinsically unethical within limits.
It's almost like the actual unethical item should be regulated!
Advertising expands markets for goods.
Word of mouth and aggregators (like yelp) can help people find solutions when they know of a problem, but ads inform/manipulate (depending on how you see it) people to know they have a problem in the first place.
Also if you've ever written ad copy it's all pretty structurally similar: hook, problem statement, solution, testimonials, etc.
2) New challenger SaaS brands can get in front of customers to compete with mammoth corporate brands with worse software (I see this all the time on my job).
3) Without good ad targeting, only bottom hanging fruit advertisers that appeal to the lowest common denominator can afford to spend. Weight loss, teeth whitening, etc. Good ad targeting means a better user experience with ads.
I have an example loosely inspired by real life.
Let's say I visit a fishing forum using the shared computer of my very, very vegan family. That website has now dropped the "fishing website visitor" cookie, and suddenly all my computer shows are ads for lure and fishing rods. My father is now furious, asking everyone in the house who has been visiting "those" websites.
I want the association between me and fishing gone. But who do I talk to? The website says they had nothing to do with this, the ad network won't even give me the time of day, and if the cookie is a supercookie then clearing history and cache may not be enough. And heavens help me if I get targeted mail, like Target used to do with pregnant women...
That, I believe, is the problem with targeted advertising: that my privacy is taken away in the name of helping somebody's website, it's leaked everywhere, and I have no real way to say "I don't want this".
Fishing retailers have a choice. They can rely on the strength and quality of their products and organic interest in fishing as a recreational activity. Or they can contract out their marketing to a commercial version of a spy agency that invents a silent, invisible device that follows their customers around when they're otherwise alone, recording everything they ever do to learn how to better predict their future spending preferences.
Surely, even if this resulted in better sales for the fishing industry, lower prices for the consumer, and the ability of niche publications to exist by predicting that their readers also like fishing and charging the fishing industry to sell them this information, you would not find this okay.
You've convinced yourself that this kind of surveillance and profiling is totally okay and different when it takes place on network connected computing devices and that people have even consented to it, but the actual people being monitored do not feel this way.
What many people find reprehensible is all the invasive spyware and tracking that comes with modern ad tech (largely pioneered by Google).
Lots of people do. E.g. the first user feedback comment in that article: "Advertising is bad because it’s fundamentally about influencing people to do things they wouldn’t do otherwise. [...]"
And every HN thread about advertising also has a variation of that sentiment.
I wish that was the case, but it is not.
>And every HN thread about advertising also has a variation of that sentiment.
And it is not just on HN, but across the Internet. Reddit, Forum, Twitter.
Their voice are crystal clear, All ads are bad. And any objection will.... well you know the internet.
It is the same with tracking. Somehow all tracking are bad on the internet.
Another recent example on the Internet. All VCs are bad. ( Although that didn't gain much traction )
Edit: See, Instant downvoting. And if you disagree, go on to read all the comments on HN on the subject and count for yourself how many comments were there to support resonable "ads", and how many were flat out dismissal.
I had a high school teacher give us a book about print advertising (this was way before the internet was a common thing) and how it deceives. How they sell cars with sexy women, how instead of selling a product they sell an unrelated image of success (which is not really tied to the product). It was a nice book, with lots of photos and examples, and all about how advertisement is designed to deceive and encourage a "need" that wasn't there before.
I'm supporting jasode's comment that lots of people do consider advertising morally objectionable. I believe this assertion is not controversial regardless of what one personally thinks about ads.
Arguing that advertising is somehow inappropriate manipulation isn't consistent with a market economy. Like it or not, efficient markets require marketing. Now, you could be against the market economy of course, but I don't see a lot of the people claiming ads are manipulation also claiming that the market economy is bad (which imo would be more intellectually honest).
I'd say disregard the "all ads are bad" crowd. It's a completely uninteresting discussion. The interesting discussion is the line to be drawn between advertising (which is good, or at least acceptable) and the shady side of adtech with trading in personal information.
> efficient markets require marketing
The problem with ads is that they fundamentally violate consent. I can't avoid seeing an ad, even if I'm not interested. Ads are not the equivalent of a salesman who's pitching his script to me, they are like an unsolicited robocall.
* Wasting large amounts of resources
* Potential security risks (js ads with malware is a thing)
* Potentially gathers a lot of data that could be abused by others
Contextual ads aren't _that_ bad, assuming they're simple enough to not run actual code on the client devices, and the clients can spare the bandwidth/resources in their end. Until that's universally true ads are a nuisance at best and actively hostile at worst.
Tbh, that kinda seems like a minority opinion (that I share, but still) around these parts
For more on effective altruism broadly, some resources:
https://www.givewell.org/giving101
https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/about-us/#our-mission
A person who donates generously may more easily justify dubious money-earning efforts by saying, "it's really not for me so much, it's for the kids!" In other words, it is possible (again, not saying this is case for you) that one might take a job in advertising because they feel their donations provide ethical cover.
imo, honest hearts never need to publicize their altruism to the world.
Publicizing altruism helps build a culture of altruism.
By the way I don't donate anything to charity at the moment, although I plan to someday. So I'm speaking from a no-skin-in-the-game perspective.
I have a hard time believing the author is unaware of this, so I'm left wondering: why? What was the point of this exercise? The result is closer to a self-indictment than an apology.
I reckon it was mostly a brag about (1) how he earns over half a million dollars a year for inflicting this upon us all and (2) how much more charitable he is than most of the rest of us.
The problem is that its selectively truthful, of course, which renders the whole exercise moot. Even though the author landed on a position in which he is not at fault, it's not going to buy him any peace of mind.
That's a good point and I agree that the essay does attempt this. But with opening his piece by letting us all know about his huge income and hefty charitable donations, I felt rather overshadowed the rest of his arguments.
nit: that's my family's joint income. My individual income is at https://www.jefftk.com/money
(I've been putting my income online since 2008 when my salary was $65k. https://www.jefftk.com/p/salary-publicy for why I think more people should share their incomes.)
Which is to say, I don't blame him for what he does. If someone dangled all that money in my face I can't say I wouldn't be tempted to take it, even if people call me evil.
However, the mental gymnastics to write an article like this does bother me. It's the same stuff probably everyone else in ads and other evil industries does to justify their actions. Reading something non-satirical like this makes me feel less good about the world.
The reason that I work (as opposed to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FIRE_movement) is so I can donate, which is why I start with that piece of the explanation.
Let's not blame engineers for what is effectively a political issue. If ads are an issue, let's get the law to handle it.
If you think something is wrong, the first step is to not do it. If you think it's so wrong it should be illegal, you can take the optional second step of trying to change the law.
There are some circumstances where you think something is wrong, but not doing it would be impossible or require really drastic life changes. For example, maybe you think driving a gas-powered car is wrong because it contributes to climate change, but you can't afford to buy an electric car or move somewhere that doesn't require a car. This is not one of those cases. The author has 10 years of experience at Google and could easily find a very well paying job either at another department inside Google, or at another company.
My point is that quitting or getting a different job accomplishes nothing. With a multinational corporation like Google, they will never struggle to fill roles. If you work in these positions, you at least have influence on product growth, and you can use the massive amount of money earned to lobby against harmful behavior. If you quit, you have no internal influence and have less money to take political action with, meaning the only way you could change things is through legislation.
The way I look at it is like so:
I think most people want to bring a net positive value to society. One way of doing that is working on something whose intrinsic value to society is neutral or nebulous (or just not thinking about it too hard), and compensating for that giving the money we make to other organizations that are definitely contributing positively. While this is better than not doing so, I think it misses out on the leverage that exists in what we build vs. the money we're paid for it.
For example, despite making over $500k last year, we know your employer thinks you are producing more value than that, because otherwise they wouldn't pay you that much. You would be a drag on their income statement otherwise. What this means is that even if you donated 100% of your salary to charity, you still aren't taking advantage of the leverage of what you can build, vs. the fixed amount you can earn.
If instead, you choose to work on something which is inherently good for society, society at large benefits from that leverage. You might be paid less, say $200k instead of $500k. But since the positive value you produce is leveraged you could be contributing, let's say, $1M of positive value for society - $200k to pay you to live in the bay area ($800k net positive value).
Just something to think about.
If I increase online sales by 0.1% through optimizing something, I am worth millions of dollars to Amazon and nearly nothing to Joe Schmoe with a small Shopify site.
Yes, but software skills are fairly fungible. Just because you currently work on ads doesn't mean that's all your skills are good for, or even that you need to work anywhere in ecommerce.
He specifically said he doesn't do that. Did you finish the article?
https://genius.com/Bill-hicks-on-advertisers-and-marketing-a...
You’re way off base here. The author links to the Effective Altruism page on “giving to earn” one link deep in: https://www.jefftk.com/donations
This is a well established concept, the idea is that in many life situations you can maximize your positive impact by taking a well-paying job and putting that money into charity.
So the arrow of causation is the opposite to what you are claiming; starting with the desire to give to charity, what job optimizes the amount that can be given?
It’s disheartening to see the cynicism that is being directed towards someone that is transparently advocating for making the world a better place, and taking the time to put their thinking in public to seek feedback on it.
The problem, of course, is that this closer inspection didn't happen.
I disagree. Advertising is intrusive and designed to convince you to do things you wouldn't normally do. It's large scale psychological manipulation that's only considered ethical because we've been doing it for so long.
The problem is that the power of targeted advertising has been democratized (irony intended) to allow everyone to do it. It is capable enough that it can end peaceful democracies.
My every interaction with my environment doesn't involve millions of trained professionals bent to the sole purpose of influencing my actions.
Outside of ads, that is.
I'm not saying that ads are particularly ethical, but I struggle to think of a replacement that isn't more paywalls. This is an easy decision to make for people that have the money, but is much harder for the majority of Americans. A Vox article [1] estimates that this would add an average of $35 a month, assuming every US adult paid this cost (which is a bold assumption).
[1] https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/6/24/18715421/internet-free-...
It was something I was interested in; I wouldn't have know about it without the advertising. We had an exchange of services for money.
How is this wrong?
Sure there are deceitful practices in advertising, but you're painting everyone with the same broad brush. IMHO, it is best to address the negative aspects of advertising instead of restricting communication from vendors to potential consumers.
Unfortunately, more widespread and effective advertising has real costs that end up raising prices. Coke’s premium over sugar water is backed up by their advertising spend.
Tracking, manipulation, etc are major downsides to advertising. But, even purely informative adds on TV aren’t free.
Whether true or not, it will convince you to top off your tank, and potentially purchase some things from the shop.
To change how much gas you’re buying in a lifetime it would need to change how far you drive. On the other hand T-Shirt advertising can convince you to buy significantly more clothes in a lifetime.
It’s a qualitative difference even if I didn’t express it well.
> To change how much gas you’re buying in a lifetime it would need to change how far you drive.
City/state/national tourism bureaus are taking care of that part. With help from the automobile industry's marketing arm.
It’s little different than a hospital sign. People don’t think hey there’s a hospital maybe I should have this gaping chest wound taken care of. Which is why they end up as H’s with a simple arrow rather than list out which specific hospital etc.
When I search "good USB charger" in Google and get an ad, click the ad and make a purchase for a USB charger, how was that nothing something I normally would do?
There's absolutely deceptive advertising, but to pretend all advertising is "intrusive" and "convincing you to do things you wouldn't normally do" is disingenuous.
Why do people have such a great impression of John Deere tractors? To the point where there's a whole culture of "green iron" and other companies had huge trouble breaking into the market? Ads. Ads going back to childhood in the form of toys.
Why do folks trust some brands, and not others? Why is brand recognition such an influential thing when it comes to making purchasing decisions? Why do children beg their parents for certain toys? Why do adults pick TGI Friday's over the diner next door?
Ads.
EDIT: I think it's worth flipping the question a bit as well. Why would companies pay for ads if they had no value, if they did not change our behavior? If we'd do something naturally, there would be no need for ads in the first place.
How would you find a USB charger brand if you were unaware of any to begin with?
> Why do folks trust some brands, and not others?
So then why even have a brand to begin with? Are you suggesting we just ban all advertising altogether? When you start a new company, new market, new idea, then what would you suggest that isn't advertising for a company to do to explain to customers what it is you do and how you may help them?
Trying to conflate the two as equivalent when someone says "ads are toxic" in the context of the online ad industry is doing the argument no good.
> How would you find a USB charger brand if you were unaware of any to begin with?
Why search for a brand, and not a high quality, well reviewed USB charger? To use the original example, googling for "good USB charger" and then buying one via an ad will not give you any guarantees that the USB charger is good. All it guarantees is that they paid the most to get your eyeballs on that particular search.
This is where you lost me. You assume:
1. There is a free service that allows you to search products. PS - it's called Google/Amazon.
2. There is a free service that allows you to read product reviews. PS - it's called Google/Amazon.
> To use the original example, googling for "good USB charger" and then buying one via an ad will not give you any guarantees that the USB charger is good.
And please do tell me, where does this perfect search capability exist in the world that allows one to search for goods and services free from all advertising.
Even a Turkish Bazaar merchant will tell you that the tube of toothpaste they're selling you last only a month.
That an alternative is not easily available, does not somehow make the existing services ethical.
That said, and the mystical service is called your friends/family/neighbors/colleagues/etc. It ain't perfect, but it's remarkably effective. In the 2-300 people in your first and second degree networks, there's probably a few anecdotes to help you find a good product.
It even has a neat name: word of mouth.
Tangent, but damn I wish reviews were reliable nowadays. They've fallen to deceitful practices like fake reviews, and are no better than advertising nowadays.
The minimum advertisement is essentially: "we sell ____."
I guess that could be called manipulative but without it, I'm not sure the economy could exist.
my take on this is to call advertisements/marketing as "lies" on regular conversations. "I watched a lie from nike the other day..."
I work at a company that is trying to introduce a new kind of product, one that I sincerely believe is intended to help people rather than _just_ make money (this is unusual for me, because i'm usually extremely cynical about motivations). The problem is that most potential customers we could help aren't even aware that what we're offering exists, they may not even think to find out if such a thing exists. How do we create awareness of this thing without advertising?
Ads are the consumers choice. Given a choice between paying for something or ads, they will chose the ads. So they get ads. That's mostly why we are where we are.
Many of the negative externalisatons are a matter of application, moreover, there are a variety of opinions on what is appropriate and not. For example, I don't care if Facebook uses my behaviour on Facebook to decide what ads to run, as long as that is otherwise anonymous, private and protected. Others will have differing opinions but I think most regular Americans, Europeans etc. have a variety of views but mostly not centred around the notion that ads are inherently evil.
"My sins are forgiven as long as I tithe some of my profits". Buys your way out of the issue, doesn't change the lifestyle.
The question is really how do you count all that excess "value", and is it good-value or evil-value. Once upon a time, the culture over there explicitly stated that they didn't want it to be evil... the bikeshedding going on here is opinions about the current implications of it all.
Could you be more specific about what you think the ethical issue is? I've seen many comments describing very different ethical objections, from several perspectives, and I'm not sure which one is yours?
The is actually what I like about Brave's solution, which is:
- no ads by default.
- if you have money and want to pay for the content you consume, you can load money into the browser and have it automatically dispense to publishers/creators based on which content you consume for how long, determined locally on your machine so no privacy leakage there.
- or if you don't have enough to justify paying all those creators directly you can turn on (again) privacy focused ads, where analysis for targeting only happens locally in the browser.
But from what I've seen, HN really hates Brave so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
> I kinda mean a better alternative to funding all this stuff.
I tend to think we'd be just fine without this "stuff." The internet still worked when the only advertising was banner ads that didn't run code on my machine. In a lot of ways, it worked better.
Some might find
1. all advertising unethical
2. targeted advertising unethical
3. not consider advertising unethical
4. consider the product that is being advertised
Advertising is not 'prima facie' unethical. It's actually a societal good. I know this is an unpopular opinion, but if you can set aside your emotions with regards to the discussion, and view it from a distance, it's not too hard to show.
To start off, I've never actually met anyone who doesn't want advertising at all (despite their claims). They just use the term advertising to refer to those kinds of advertisements they don't like, or find too intrusive.
Advertising is, at it's base, finding a way to deliver a message to someone who is doing something else. Thus, getting rid of advertising means no more signs on buildings (yes, being forced to read the name of a store as you walk down the street is a form of advertising). Even if you were willing to accept how difficult this would make it to discover businesses (life harder for the end user), this would make it nigh impossible for new entrants to any market. That means that pretty much all commerce would be funneled into a few catch-all stores, and not only would the economy suffer, but consumer power would be greatly diminished.
Advertising indirectly improves the quality of life of people who have more time than money. (Generally the less money you have in total, the more advertising benefits you.) This is because advertising as a source of revenue is a useful tool to amortize the cost of a product over many users. Free-to-watch TV would be mostly non-existent without advertising, not to mention all of the internet services like search and news; also consider free newspapers like the Metro or 20 Minutes.
That doesn't mean that I don't understand what people really get worked up about. Let's forget spam and obnoxious blinking signs, or having to punch the monkey. It's like how knives are great in the hands of chefs, but not murderers. Crime is crime, and someone like the poster of this article is not trying to defend those kinds of practices.
Let's get into what people tend to get really worked up about: customized advertising. However, it's not the customized advertising that really bothers people, it's the fear of abuse of tracking. In a world where customized advertising was perfected, you would see 95% less ads. Why? Every ad you see that isn't a match is a waste for everyone involved. The business doesn't want to pay, because you aren't interested, and the user doesn't want to see it, because it's distracting and wastes your time.
But still, tracking, that bothers you, right? You don't want an advertiser to know your kink, right?
Well, what if the advertiser is the store that happens to serve whatever your kink is? People shop in adult stores, and they have no problem letting the store know that they're interested in their wares, so clearly it's not just the stores learning that is the problem. The problem is the abuse. People want to choose who they trust to share information with, and don't wish to risk. But... if you're clicking on an ad from some store that delivers your own brand of kink, you're okay sharing that with them, so what's the problem?
Well, as an example, maybe if you're a teacher you don't want your community to know that you like buying purple teddy bears because it might cost you your job. You're okay shopping in a purple teddy bear store... but if the purple teddy bear store had advertising that only targeted teachers, suddenly someone knows that you're a teacher that likes purple teddy bears, and you consider that dangerous.
So yes, abuse is a problem. This is why advertisers actively engage in trying to solve the abuse problem. This is why the advertising industry is looking for ways to move forward.
Yes, they also fight the change, because in their own eyes, they're trustworthy (to at least their own standards), and change is hard and expensi...
The biggest problem is that you are shipping and forcing something users, in most cases, don’t want. It’s like pornography and illicit drugs in that yes eventually there are some beneficial edge case side effects, but almost universally it is bad. In order to increase market penetration you must become more bad and simultaneously sell it as a positive.
This isn’t a universal truth. Users are willing to accept advertising as a payment in exchange for media or something similar. This isn’t evil so long as it isn’t violating privacy, is immediately apparent without deception, and is voluntarily accepted by the audience.
Citation needed.
You're criticizing the author for not addressing the "actual ethical issue", yet you yourself are failing to even state what you think it is.
There is absolutely zero societal consensus that advertising is unethical, in the way there is a consensus that fraud or murder are.
To the contrary -- there is vast disagreement around the ethics of online advertising, delicately balancing concerns around societal good, access to information, funding, factuality, bias, tracking, privacy, and consent. The incredible complexity of the issues involved is pretty much proof that there is nothing merely "prima facie" at all.
2. There are worst jobs to have like working for the auto industry.
3. He's definitely a better person than I am with better values. Who gives 50% earned to charity?
Perhaps some. But I'm sure they don't brag to the world about it.
If I don't do those things (or don't claim to), people will say, "Why should I do that? You don't do that! Hypocrite."
If I do those things, people will say, "You are just bragging/virtue signaling."
(Written years before I started on ads at Google)
- high QPS feeds
- massive volumes of data
- interesting problems to solve everyday
It's an industry that doesn't stand still.
Blaming technicians for the negative externalities of their industries is a dark path. Are we going to blame lawyers who defend rapists? General Motors assembly-line workers? Engineers who work for oil companies?
Software engineers agreeing to build awful shit is more like mechanical engineers building weapons. They should know what they are doing is going to cause harm and if they choose to do it anyways I have no issue calling them unethical.
Lawyers effectively defending awful clients, for example, managing to get them off the hook on a technicality, are likewise generating massive negative externalities for society at large.
It's either both or neither, and I'm not comfortable going down that path.
The phrase "Effective adtech" is really downplaying the amount of unethical shit involved in building it.
It could be effective without turning the internet into a race to the bottom. It could be effective without third party tracking, it could be effective without vacuuming every bit of data possible from every source imaginable. It could be effective without turning every device we own into an ad platform.
> It's either both or neither, and I'm not comfortable going down that path.
No, its not both or neither. That's absurdly reductive to suggest. It is possible for lawyers to behave unethically in their duties, but just defending the guilty (or prosecuting the innocent) is not unethical on it's own.
Similarly, it's possible for engineers to behave unethically in their duties. Just building software isn't unethical.
Building platforms that are deliberately and systematically eroding our privacy in every corner of our lives in order to make money absolutely is unethical. Turning society into a corporate-controlled panopticon is absolutely unethical. Absolutely scumbags
I'm a developer myself and I've never faced the dilemma, but I don't feel like blaming others for not wanting to become judges of good and evil. Like in the case of a lawyer, doing your job and doing it well is in and of itself ethical.
I really can't draw a line in the sand where adtech is unacceptable but $something_else is, just because I have such an hatred for advertisement.
This is the kind of rhetoric that is used to justify doing war crimes. It is absolutely not a defense of unethical behavior.
This is a harmful misunderstanding of how the legal system works. Subjecting laws and procedures to scrutiny, and exposing "loopholes" is exactly the role of a vigorous defence. The fact that the consequences for the state (and society) of miswriting or misapplying the law can be so severe is exactly what keeps the system honest.
Sorry for the low signal answer, but you're the second to raise this objection and I wanted to clarify I don't actually think that.
Even if they have been declared guilty of a crime in the past they might be innocent of this one and still have a right to council.
Suggesting that software somehow has that same kind of standard where engineers are required to build anything and everything they are asked to the best of their ability or they can lose their accreditation (as if we even have that in software) is absolutely absurd.
He told them about how it is important that defendants are presumed innocent, and that everyone gets a strong defense, in order to make sure that those who are wrongfully accused do not get wrongfully convicted.
They talked about it for something like an hour, and the people were only sort of convinced. And his lunch got cold.
Later, he found himself in another small town, defending another rapist/murdered, eating lunch in a diner and being asked by the people there the same question.
This time he said "his family paid me $100000 to defend him". The crowd accepted that right away as a perfectly fine reason to defend some totally vile criminal, and went back to their lunches.
Only if such lawyers are unethical in how they go about doing this.
Lawyers who defend accused rapists are a necessity for a well-functioning justice system. The alternative is a process where the accused isn't permitted a legal defence, if they're taken to trial for serious crimes like rape.
Software engineers who spend their days forcing increasingly invasive advertising technology upon us all are not necessary. For the most part, we'd all be better off if they all downed tools.
The structure of the argument is: because A is equivalent to B and I'm not comfortable with B, then I'm not comfortable with A either. Resolving the let binding in the variables A and B is left as an exercise to the reader.
EDIT: parent has been edited since this comment was written. Please disregard the belligerent tone, reply to parent no longer applies.
Disagree.
> Are we going to blame lawyers who defend rapists?
No, because I want there to be someone who defends that rapist's rights. In contrast, it's easy for me to blame a software engineer who's developing bad technology X, because I want the job of developing X to not exist.
> General Motors assembly-line workers? Engineers who work for oil companies?
Yes, but only if they have better options for earning a living: I can't blame anyone for not wanting to starve. Assembly-line workers often don't have better options, but software engineers usually do.
This path looks pretty well-lit to me.
A company I worked for was more in the business of improving targeting. Of course people will argue if targeting demographics is bad per se, or better or worse than other parts, but I personally don't care if I get generic ads or ones tailored to me. So for one of our main product, we were reselling and integrating some data for a bigger player, as in, we were 1 of many data points determining if the ad would be interesting for the person who would see the ad or if they'd give them another one.
Yes, it kind of gets into this angle of privacy and user tracking... but I'm ok with the scope we did it in and I thought hard about if I can accept this without a guilty conscience - but for example I'd never knowingly work on trying to bombard the user with even more ads, or popups, or whatever - but just saying "ads shouldn't exist" is maybe aspirational but sadly I don't see it as a valid version of reality in the foreseeable future.
I think morally that's correct as well.
Cryptocurrency is a weird one you bring up coz I don't think anybody is proposing hunting down and jailing Satoshi even if they think Bitcoin ought to be banned.
I will offer a contrarian opinion as a user whose salary does not depend on advertising: the advertising model for using Google search and watching Youtube videos works better for me as a consumer.
The alternative of paying $9.99/month for Youtube... or micropayments for each search query or a "Google Search Engine yearly subscription" ... or Patreon donations for video content ... are all more user hostile for my use cases. I don't like ads but they are the most friction-free way to consume a wide variety of content.
I've been using Google Search for over 20 years for free which is pretty amazing. Would I rather replay history and pay ~$120 every year (~$2400 ?) to search for web articles? No.
That said, there are also many corrosive aspects of advertising. Advertising should be open and transparent. If the business of ads are truthful, I will sometimes pay to see ads. E.g. I pay $10 ticket for a home & garden convention show so the manufacturers in booths can advertise their wares to me. The opposite and immoral idea of hidden ad tracking is Facebook trying to convince Apple not to show confirmation dialogs about ad IDFA tracking.
If groceries used to be free, but suddenly cost money, people would riot.
Thus: if groceries used to be free, but suddenly cost money, people would riot.
Arguably: why would people riot about not-free Youtube?
Free services like YouTube have provided me with an immense amount of value, but I would still be hesitant to pay for them unless I absolutely had to.
Ad fraud is already a huge problem, as are things like ransomware. Micropayments would just give bad actors a direct line to your wallet.
It would be utterly exhausting, which is why it will not happen.
I didn't hear any outrage at all when several newspapers transitioned to a pay model and threw up a paywall. The parties most upset were the newspapers themselves.
With video... I pay $70 USD for my cable company (HBO+Star+misc-crap) plus $13 USD for Netflix, plus $12 for disney plus (wife likes a couple shows there), plus $13 Amazon Prime, plus $10 for the local Netflix-like crap in my country (for some local shows).
That means $118 USD for video only, which is 14% of the average income in my country ($843 USD). Imagine if I had to pay $10 dollars a month for each of the internet services we use?
$10 Gmail $10 google $10 Reddit $10 HackerNews $10 Youtube $10 Linkedin $10 Facebook $10 twitter $10 Whatsapp $10 LiChess $10 Slack $10 Samsung Health $10 Google Maps $10 Podcast Republic $10 CBS News (The only US channel I like for news) $10 Home Workout $10 Discord
And that's at the top of my head, it will be $180 USD, or 21% of the average income of someone in my country.
If that happened, the internet will become "a place for the rich" and pretty much only the north emisphere will use it. Yeah, ads suck... but their are a necessary evil to "monetize" users that are just not monetizable any other way.
Sh, it's OK, everyone does it, you are not alone :P
1. Bundling multiple subscriptions is a long-time practice and if more services were paid offerings we'd likely all buy some bundle that gave us most of what we wanted at a reasonable price.
2. Paying for services will reduce the number of services around... which may be a good thing when so many offerings are sub-par.
3. With more paid offerings, we will be more deliberate about how we spend our time, which is what advertising-based models make us forget we are really spending. And as you age you realize that the time you spent watching ad-supported drivel was more expensive than if you had just paid directly for the things you really needed and spent the rest of your time on things that matter - friends, family, experiences, learning etc.
Does the web have to be supported by ads? If the web was a non-profit service, supported by public funds, managed by academic institutions for example, would we miss 90% of the content that's basically sponsored by someone who wants to sell something?
From my point of view it looks like the web is a giant advertising machine built on top of something that could be ... not a giant advertising machine. Still from my POV, it just happens that the big players on the web are suppoting ads because that's where their revenue comes from and if they weren't the big players, then we wouldn't have a web of ads.
So basically we're not paying for ads that we wouldn't be paying for if google didn't run the web.
* I think AOL making its own internet inside itself was an interesting data point on early-ish internet
I remember ~2001 or so a lot of the sites I visited were ad supported, but it mostly just made enough to cover hosting costs. At this point hosting costs are so cheap that I don't even think those style of sites would have trouble existing. Most of those sites existed because some people were interested in a hobby or a subject, and would publish news and have bulletin boards and articles and stuff. Sadly those kind of communities don't seem to exist anymore, now those kind of things end up being subreddits or facebook groups and I never feel like those are quite the same, they just don't have the same curation or community feel.
I wonder whether the gradual switch would need to be made possible through something similar to a micropayment subscription model, which is non publisher specific.
I don't want to commit to subscriptions for 5+ publications, but I'd happily buy a days access occasionally. This feels much more akin to buying a newspaper in the old world.
I think we'd end up seeing positive changes. Especially the end of content producers being held to ransom by advertisers and commercial pressures.
I don't think that's why people are downvoting. Speaking for myself, it's because his analysis focuses only on the benefits of ads, and conveniently ignores the actual ethical problems (e.g. large-scale collection of personal information).
In other words, I see no fresh insight and perspective in jefftk's writing, and worse still, it bears remarkable semblance to a bad-faith argument. I'm sure he is a decent person (really!), but this particular essay is neither interesting, nor particularly respectable IMHO. As a result, a downvote feels appropriate.
I find it ironic to see this brought up as the first example of problems, when this is exactly what Google's FLoC intends to solve. The same FLoC that has so vocally been rejected by HN recently.
Same here:
- Google and Facebook have turned ads into 24/7 surveillance of everything people do
- Now Google roll backs some of it by saying, "with FLoC we can only surveil groups of people 24/7"
- we are expected to praise them for finding a "solution"
And there are also a lot of design questions remaining that Google hasn't answered or is not sure about.
Eg. How will ad bidding work with FLoC?
Finally, and most importantly as it relates to this post - Google pays an enormous amount of money to employees to spend their time and intelligence on building better profiling tools. Building profiling tools is something ethically questionable because of the damage that can be done.
I don't work on FLoC, but why wouldn't bidding handle it just like any other signal? For example, here's where it is in the OpenRTB docs: https://developers.google.com/authorized-buyers/rtb/openrtb-... An advertiser could take it into account in considering whether they want to bid and how much.
I think I have an idea. So by visiting site A, A gets your cohort and now there is somewhere a "central store" or register. Using that A can now do ad bids for that entire cohort to reach others.
But where is that central store? Is Google running that?
Might also work fundamentally different.
Some entity might choose to run a "store" like you're describing, but there's no reason there would only need to be one.
It looks to me like Chrome is proposing a low-level feature that anyone can build more sophisticated products on top of.
I don’t see irony there!
May be I am living in my bubble, but most of the site I visit, mostly mainstream media news in tech, along with most of the social media post, has a flat out dismissal of Ads in general.
So while ads works to pay for X isn't a "fresh" insight, it was never really pointed out ( enough ) in most of the discussions. If the discussion in general was even slightly balanced in pros and cons, then pointing out ads do serve some usefulness wouldn't even be what OP labeled as "contrarian opinion".
>and conveniently ignores the actual ethical problems (e.g. large-scale collection of personal information).
In the context of Ads. Not all ads are large-scale collection of personal information. Which is what FloC was ( AFAIK ) trying to solve. As Apple did with their differential privacy. I often wondered if Google didn't decide to invent a new term called FloC and instead follow Apple and call it differential privacy would the backlash still be the same. But I think at the end of the day it is just a matter of trust. Whether you Trust Google or Apple. ( Or Facebook )
Yes, I agree. That is indeed another unoriginal, stale perspective.
The question for me isn't so much whether hear from one side more than the other, but whether there is some new idea. For me, intellectual content matters much more than equal representation in (social) media.
By this measure, the OP's post is equally trite.
>In the context of Ads. Not all ads are large-scale collection of personal information.
We're talking about Google ads here. Let's stop pretending otherwise.
>Which is what FloC was ( AFAIK ) trying to solve.
Leaving my skepticism aside for a moment, this may have been an opportunity for OP to provide some insight into how the adtech market is evolving, and make the case that it is headed in an ethical direction. He did not. There is no insight here, either.
So again, I think a downvote is a pretty reasonable and measured response. The OP's post was unconvincing and cliched. No big deal. I've written plenty of stuff like that, myself.
There's a section of post with "build browser APIs that will allow this kind of well-targeted advertising without sending your browsing history to advertisers, and then get rid of third-party cookies"; I'm curious what you think of it?
Random generic advertising is fine. It isn't as profitable but it doesn't exploit a person's mental weaknesses. Targeted advertising is straight up exploitation.
Kids being bombarded with ads for plastic surgery nonestop on TikTok, radicalized individuals being targeted with fear-based ads. This is super toxic. And while advertising is a tale as old as human commerce, such insane targeted advertising is not.
The insanely annoying thing that I have seen for a long time is that despite the fact that you have more information on me than anyone else the ads have been either useless or even insulting for years.
I remember bothering to click through the microscopic x in tve corner and select not relevant or something on Thai mail order brides. What did I get next? Filipino mail orders brides. Out of curiosity I marked a number of them as not relevant and I think I also saw:
- Polish
- Ukrainian
- Chinese
- and possibly a couple of more nationalities
- later I got ads for older women near me
- and then gay cruises
This went on for years.
Last year I finally started seing ads for electronics etc but now I feel no remorse for blocking ads anymore.
I'm just fed up.
Meanwhile Facebook, for all their faults and despite me blocking them for far longer than Google actually has had interesting ads.
Edit: I've nothing against Filipino or Thais or gay people or anyone, but I have something against scantily clad women etc showing up on my monitor both at work and at home and I think it says something about Google that they think this was the most relevant ads they could show me for years.
Work and personal.
Much more likely explanation IMO (someone please correct me if I am wrong):
Google get paid by the view these days and optimize for the most expensive views.
Yes it doesn't drive as much engagement, but that's the point. Over-optimizing for engagement is a bad thing. We have seen repeated evidence of this.
There should be general overarching categories: News site, food site, movie site, game site. But not "news site for radical right-wingers who believe in tucker carlson and think gun control is communism" which doesn't really require user tracking, but I think still falls on the bad side of things.
"Is a kid" is interesting. There's literally laws to prevent children from receiving too much advertising on TV _for good reasons_ their brains aren't developed enough to counter it. But on the internet? ANYTHING GOES!
This is "mainstream Republican" and it's about 1.5bits of information after "is UA resident".
Tucker is one of the most popular people in the USA.
I think that's what ads should be - exactly like TV.
Ads sucks and it is alive due to economic incentive from ads. And we know where there is economic incentive its hard to stop (eg. bitcoin mining economic incentive)
(If you said it was signaling race or wealth or something I would understand, but virtue?)
The "badness" of the ads results from the selecting function and what becomes sustainable and favored. Infamously with spam and phone calls it can include outright crime.
I'd apply the same logic here: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
Ad supported models on news paper websites have nearly killed publications like NYTimes. A lot of smaller news papers have died. Only after the paywall model really took off have they been able to survive and thrive.
So there's nothing you can say to the media that will convince them that there's value in ads.
To them, ads and big tech in general are evil entities and must be criticized at every possible turn.
Ignores? That's what the entire second half of the post is about ;)
Starting at "But the biggest issue I see people raising is the privacy impact of targeted ads..."
Yes, that's literally all you have to say on the subject.
The very next paragraph is about how this helps keep ads relevant...
Not at all! First I talk about the economic benefit of targeted ads ("Most products are a much better fit for some people than others..."), then how it works today ("Historically, ads like this have been built on top of third-party cookies..."), then how it can work without cross-site tracking ("build browser APIs that will allow this kind of well-targeted advertising without sending your browsing history to advertisers, and then get rid of third-party cookies...")
Why?
Targeting Ads based on anything else is invasive, discriminatory, and enables even higher levels of manipulation. If I get targeted by content independent targeted ads, it can be almsot impossible to avoid those Ads as they will follow you everywhere you go.
Instagram gives me fantastically targeted ads, and I appreciate that.
For example think about how much better society could've been over the past decades if, instead of saying "people can't reasonably make decisions about [insert drug here] so we're going to illegalize all of them" we'd said "wow, adults can make decisions for themselves".
The war on drugs was a fundementally bad approach to fixing the problem. If it had worked and drug use had dropped near zero over a decade or two, you wouldn't see the current level of support for ending it. There are other cases where removing personal choice is not controversial (such as seat belt laws, incarceration,
In fact, the failure of the war on drugs is an argument against relying purely on personal responsibility to solve the problem. Simply punishing people and expecting them to learn enough about the consequences of drug use to make the responsibile decision to stay away failed.
It turns out that sometimes to get people to a place where they can take full personal responsibility, it requires giving them some help.
We should strive to avoid removing personal responsibility and choice. The better job we do of providing the tools and support needed to make good decisions (i.e. ones the deciser will look back on without regret), the more respsibility we can easily allow.
For examole: If we do a good job of protecting amd treating gambling addicts, that facilitates opening up gambling to more people in more locations.
Your original comments were that you wanted to outlaw certain types of ads entirely, war-on-drugs style. Not "take care of people who might be adversely affected by certain types of ads", but rather "these ads shouldn't exist", even if (from the broader perspective) that approach could cause more harm than good.
This isn't about banning any type of ad, this is about removing a destructive way of targeting ads.
2. Banning ads targeted on personal info makes advertising a less effective/lucrative funding method for free services. This in turn increases the likelihood that such services will have to move to more regressive funding models, like subscriptions.
2. Citation please? The "progessivity" of ad supported services is debatable... especially when there aren't paid alternatives. Advertising is mostly a zero sum game so if a loss of tracking reduces effectiveness just means that other mediums that don't provide tracking wiol pick up market share.
Can you be more precise about what you mean and why the current system doesn't have it? You're saying that everyone should see ads, even ads they won't like? Forgive me if this isn't a hill I'm interested in dying on.
"It makes content providers more responsible for the Ads they carry. It allows me to avoid sites that show me bad Ads (such as mail order brides)."
Not in a meaningful way. If the ads are generated automatically based on the content, the site might not have much to do with it. Example: Suppose there's a wedding planning site, and a content-based targeting system notices the word "bride" on the site a lot and serves mail order bride ads. Yes, you could avoid the wedding planning site because of this, but is there any reason to punish them? It's not their fault.
"If I get targeted by content independent targeted ads, it can be almsot impossible to avoid those Ads as they will follow you everywhere you go."
Isn't there a menu that lets you select "I don't want to see this ad"?
> Yes, you could avoid the wedding planning site because of this, but is there any reason to punish them? It's not their fault.
It is absolutely their fault. Content providers should face full responsibility for the Ads they allow to appear on their website.
One of the ways that the current Ad targeting system is awful is that it allows advertisers to pretend to foist this responsibility onto Ad companies that are much more insulated from consumer blow back.
> Isn't there a menu that lets you select "I don't want to see this ad"?
Those menus often don't stop other Ads of that type from being shown and there is no legal obligation to do so. All they really do is give the advertiser more information about you.
If the only recourse you have to abusive behavior is to politely ask them to stop, someone is going to keep abusing you to make money.
I wish that my ads would be more relevant to what I like especially when it comes to music. What does youtube do? I search for a specific video because somebody told me it's there. I find it and sit through the whole length of 50+ mins and after I'm done navigate back to the YT frontpage. What do I see? A recommendation of the video I just watched. And it'll stay there for the next 6 weeks.
The other extreme for me is watching something from the other camp simply because I want to learn what they're being exposed to. In my bubble this means conservative stuff like videos of people debating Ayn Rand or a Jordan Peterson. And I swear I'll have to fight for the next 6 months to get similar shit off my timeline. In fact it's easier to throw myself into the rabbit hole of watching Foucault, Zizek, Philosophy genre and fighting my way into content that is dominated by the likes of Tucker Carlson (and what used to be Alex Jones, Brietbart and others) than it is to shed the conservative label that YT has filed me under. And with conservative I mean seriously questionable stuff like Q-anon, climate change denying, cray-cray type of things.
Because of this I now have different accounts for when I want to see the other side of the coin/polarization.
Not sure if I should be blaming YT/Google with this since society is so polarized that the algorithm just reflects that reality. But it's not like the algo hasn't played a major role in creating this dystopian reality in the first place.
Now they are still doing that, but they have compounded the awfulness, because now they track where you are visiting and push more of those ads in your eyeline. Switched device, tough, the ads do too. The advertiser now also knows who looked at the ad, where they came from to see the ad, where the left to after they saw the ad. And then what they did for the next 2 weeks, so now they can make sure their ad is in front of your eyes whenever they want because they tracked your browsing habits.
Advertising was bad before, now it is insidious tracking and monitoring of users, under the pretense of advertising. /rant
My guess is that offline advertising has become cheaper and so they do more of it.
I live out in the country now. There are no outdoor ads here. I like it.
(The local weekly paper is called The Advertiser: an apt name, for it’s about ¾ ads. But I don’t look at it. My life is basically completely ad-free except when I go down to Melbourne.)
Some of the ads are hilarious. Some are for the services that are not common in the USA. Nintendo has some where they add in a trivia Q&A, the format being, Question->Ad->Answer and I usually find them interesting and I'm often happy to learn about whatever new Nintendo game they are showing off. Often there are ads for theater plays, concerts, museum events that I only find out about because I saw them on the train.
I also like some of the campaigns where they decorate an entire station or the entire train, the entire car.
friend unsure about her marriage.. getting ads to sell her wedding ring via fbook.. they divorced 2 months later. Guess what the first thing she did was?
A friend's father.. gambling addiction and an android phone - sleeps on the streets and eats via dumpsters, still keeps that addictive android device running.
Google sending data on people to fusion centers.. maybe none of those people were ever hurt by that - or the sharing of info from location data dumps, or the vids from nest cams.. I would assume there is a probability that at least one person was hurt when actions via gun toting state came knocking on at least one door, maybe more - and that stuff 100% coming from collection of data.
Just because journalists aren't interviewing these people to see if they were hurt, does not mean it's not happening.
I have no way to opt people out of alcohol ads.. I've seen them so I know others have.. does a sale on the new pink-liqour at 10am lead someone to drink out of juice boxes before noon at a kid's soccer practice? I can't say for sure.. it's just a coincidence they are drinking the new advertised thing - maybe it was an ad on the liqour store window that did it - there won't be hard evidence there.
I can think of more, but I know these are small data points from here. I'm glad you have not witnessed such things.
- Are you suggesting that your friend got divorced so that she could sell her ring, because an ad told her she could sell her ring? I doubt that was the straw that broke the camels back.
- The android phone has utility beyond it's addictiveness. Yes homeless people need a phone.
- Re fusion centers: ads targeting data is a relatively shitty surveillance too, the three letter agencies have much better ways of collecting this data.
- Targeted alcohol advertising I'll agree is an issue, but if you're an alcoholic, you can't really escape the ubiquity of alcohol everywhere.
I think the adverse privacy impact of targeted advertising is pretty overblown, but it so happens that ad targeting is so effective it has the illusion of being surveillant. The actual data being collected is anonymized and not personal.
I suspect there may different rules for different jurisdictions/markets which might explain differences in your experiences.
when trying to cater to folks who struggled with such, indeed the options were limited for dining out.. IHop and waffle bouse two of the options I recall.
The ring thing - I think it was the straw that broke the camels back honestly.. and hey that might have been a good thing - it certainly wasn't the two-ton elephant on top - but I do think it was the thing that made an easy / quick escape possible - maybe that's a good thing - some religious folks may feel otherwise - I'm on the fence about it - but it does point to a weird thing that probably should not be happening with social network data imho.
the fusion centers / requests for locations / emails / search history - all other data.. I agree ads are shitty surveillance generally - however the mass amounts of data being collected to make the ads more valuable - the location data, the emails, the search history - all of that has been quite valuable in many cases from what I have seen on the news..
when it's a murderous ex lover people may cheer - but how much reporting is done on the requests for data that just pry into people's lives and cause them to lose time and money and threats of being shot - that don't go to trials / convictions / wrong person...
so this is more of a reply to the parent comment to consider about harm from mass surveillance they could not think of any.. well there are some - and really many.. certainly many more than my weak top of the head considerations. Not just specifically ads themselves.
I think there are some places where alcohol ads on billboards are banned - and part of me thinks that's a good thing, the free speech absolutist in me says it's not.. but if we ban nudes or gore or whatever on billboards cuz public safety - well sadly alcohol and tobacco probably should also be included there - and gambling.. and addictive technology.. I mean maybe not in Vegas.. I dunno. I hate the alcohol ads on the tables at restaurants and the immediate upsell by waiters/resses with great drink specials.. they should ask if you want a "dry" experience at the table imho.
I agree targeted ads are very good in many ways - I just think people should get more control to 'stop showing X ad cuz Y (already bought it / decided I hate it / have an addiction / whatever) - turn off all targeted cuz it's a shared device and fam is seeing presents.. whatever..
I must disagree about the data being collected though - sure a third party advertiser on yahoo may not be collecting a ton of info about someone - but google does collect a ton of personally identifiable info including emails, gps / locations traveled, search history and much more I am sure.
That data can be used to harm people, by the state, by divorce attorneys.. one could say the hernandez location data led to him being jailed and suicided - I think most would argue that catching him with tech was a good thing - but the demanding of data from big G is not always used for such things, and it can be abused or just used to fish expedition into lives.
There are many ways to harm using the data collected.. oh yeah - the insurance fraud people in new york demanding all stored info about people while they fished for people pretending to be disabled.. I mean, doing good was thier goal - but some people's privacy was slayed that were not doing fraud - is that harm? People seem to lean towards certain other pics of people being shared re-harms victims - so I dunno.
It's not just the ads - it's the other data collected to enable highly targeted ads that can and is used to harm.
How many arrests have been made using google data? How many investigations to peer into lives that did not lead to an arrest? How many give us all cell phones near location X during Y-Z time so we can look into them.. How many times has google taken info and sent it voluntarily to agencies with guns? I'd love to see that in a transparency report.
I know both F and G occasionally push back in requests from d...
Targeted ads supports the status quo instead of exposing everyone to stuff they might want.
Not to mention targeted ads just don't work for me. They always show crap I'd never use, within my domain of knowledge, and never show interesting things outside my domain. Overall I'm more than glad to block ads because I gain nothing from them. They are a liability. Anonymization I don't believe in, what's the difference between my SSN and a MD5 of my SSN?
https://www.intomore.com/you/facebook-ads-outed-me/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2018/12/12/dear-tec...
https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2020/4/9/21204425/targeted-ads...
https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-lets-advertisers..., https://www.propublica.org/article/hud-sues-facebook-housing..., https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-advertising-disc...
https://themarkup.org/citizen-browser/2021/04/29/credit-card...
https://themarkup.org/news/2021/04/13/how-facebooks-ad-syste...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Ana...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-03-27/ad-scamme...
etc. etc. etc.
Links 2 and 3 are concerning. The FB and Google do have a way to stop that though - you can click an ad and say it doesn't interest you or you don't like it, that signal is insanely strong and the platforms will turn off the spigot.
The rest is not actual harm to people, its people concerned about the idea of targeting being harmful. Cambridge Analytica was a laughable scandal btw, absolutely no one was actually impacted by it.
As a side note, it's funny how people say that ads are terrible, but also its terrible if certain groups of people don't get to see ads.
via (Ads Are Impersonating Government Websites in Google Results, Despite Ban - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27150407 )
> This model has some major drawbacks from a privacy perspective. Typically, the vendor doesn't just get that you are interested in cars, they get the full URL of the page you are on. This lets them build up a pretty thorough picture of all the pages you have visited around the web. Then they can link their database with other vendors databases, and get even more coverage.
Most people have no issue with the collection of personal information in itself. They only start caring when others start to make money off of it. If Google completely got rid of ads as a revenue source and still made the exact same services for free, they would still collect nearly as much sensitive data (e.g. location tracking for better routing). However, a lot fewer people would care. Privacy activists would still exist, but I doubt that regular people bother to listen to them.
So it’s hardly a surprise to me that people see it as ok for Google to use their information to provide them a service like routing, but disapprove of their using that data to enable an industry they see as harmful. I don’t think the problem is exclusively that Google makes money but rather that they make money as the kingpin of an industry most people feel negatively impacts their lives.
The opposing view would call "harmful" downright hysterical in the same way teens would nigh universally roll eyes at Tipper Gore's claims of music as harmful or Jack Chick's anything.
As for claims that the effort and money at Google could be spent in less harmful ways? No it couldn't, not the money they received - except as operating as a take the money and run scam which hardly qualifies as less harm as an instant zeroing of account values. The "harm" is why they got the money in the first place. You have to give the people paying money what they want to keep receiving money to get what you need to fulfill the demands.
Now, if Google spun off a non-profit foundation to offer those services for free without Ads, more people might accept trusting them with all that personal info.
I work in a different industry with its own issues and impacts on the society and the environment. I try not to think about it and even look at the positive things to gloss over the bad impact.
Anyway one thing I haven't seen mentioned yet about ads is that it encourages the unrestrained growth of ad space itself. There are just a billion articles on the internet written for the sole purpose of grabbing your attention and selling it. A lot of these sites have no real value, one of each ("How do I do X") on the internet would be more than enough. A lot of them ought to just be headlines that I can skip ("Man Utd interested in a teenager" would in the old days just say the guy's name).
The real argument against the article is that the calculus of paywall vs ads is not quite as straightforward as proposed. Either mode of operation has reflexive influence on what the internet looks like, and that's maybe where to dig deeper for an argument. How do the different options encourage different interests to behave?
1. All ads in general.
2. Targeted advertisement, regardless of the privacy implications.
3. Data collection for targeted advertisement.
4. Data collection for anything.
5. Whether or not users consent to all of the above.
So I don't really think it is fair for anybody to insist that there is a single agreed upon actual ethical problem in web advertising.
what does it mean to be a "decent" person, if one is willfully, or disingenuously, ignorant of participation in an unethical system?
Decent is a stand-in for ethical; this is a contradiction at a logical level,
but to answer my own question,
in contemporary American culture, not least in the readership of HN,
there is disturbing dance between "moving fast and breaking things" (like the law, or social contracts, or presumption of civility) when that is convenient,
and a contradictory but also embraced enthusiasm for giving people benefit of doubt and analogously, as in this case, presumption that intention excuses offense.
I.e. that having "earnest intentions" born in some degree of perhaps bad-faith ignorance, excuses amoral consequence.
That is the sort of wishful/fuzzy/poor thinking that has led our industry into its current state of moral bankruptcy and crises.
By no definition is Jeff a decent person. (Really!)
Unless your company is rocketing toward bankruptcy, your salary is by definition a (much) smaller number than the impact your work has on the world. You cannot offset your day job even by what seems to you a large fraction of your personal income.
If I design advanced weapons, but donate my salary to charity. The good I do is temporary, but the advanced weapon technology can kill, and repress indefinitely.
Since Jeff is a thoughtful guy and this is important to him, I'm inclined to think that he is producing net good. If you can convince him otherwise, he'd probably change what he's doing.
It's not really my or anyone elses job to convince him.
Did you read the section starting from "This model has some major drawbacks from a privacy perspective"?
We know what bad ads are, not in terms of ads quality but the amount of tracking and personal information gathered and sold across different companies.
The Internet Archive is a great example of this. A non-profit that relies neither on advertising revenue nor subscription revenue from individual users, and instead thrives on income for providing archival services and grants from organisations that recognise the public good it is providing.
I grew up with "free internet services" but I can't complain on one side about ads and consuming stuff and in the other side not just paying for those services directly and it's a monthly thing. Easy to cancel much better than all those 1 year contracts for stuff like paytv.
The ads. Aren't. The problem. The stalking is.
Ads can be useful. But no one is saying they aren't! So why is it constantly the case that when internet users make the simple and reasonable request "Please, can you just not stalk us everywhere we go?" the response is "but we're helping you!"
The parasitic advertising industry likes to pretend we're in a symbiotic relationship while conveniently ignoring the actual symbiotic solution (see e.g., DDG) because it won't make them nearly as much money.
Exactly. If you want online ads done right, look no further than how podcasts do it. The medium doesn't allow for stalking. Podcast producers often stake their own reputation by voicing the ads themselves. That editorial freedom lets them be creative and respectful of their audiences. And advertisers can use podcast-specific coupon codes to attribute ad campaigns to sales. It's a win-win for everyone.
Huh. Are you sure? I don't know anything about how podcast advertising works, but it sounds like you're assuming the full audio track, complete with ads, is the same everywhere and always.
Spotify will use everything it knows about you to target podcast ads https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/8/21056336/spotify-streaming...
Most podcasts and players operate on RSS feeds though. While they can very well target things via IP addresses and user-agent (no getting around that), podcasters and their advertisers don't have the capability to read/write persistent tracking data on the client, at least as far as I know. An advertiser would be hard-pressed to see that I personally listen to Stuff You Should Know and This American Life, even if the advertiser had contracts with both. The medium really hobbles how much tracking can be done.
The usual answer to this is to use the context rather than personal information and browsing history. You bring less value to the company advertising their product, but I'd argue that most people are fine with this approach.
The problem is that current incentives lead to a race to the bottom: if some advertisers are less ethical, they can arguably bring more value to their clients, and the ethical advertiser cannot compete anymore.
Contextual advertising, on the other hand, is simple. It shifts the focus away from technology and toward people: recognizing your audience and crafting a message to them, instead of trying to have a computer do it for you. It's old-fashioned marketing.
It's possible to target ads to a specific audience by exploiting the selection effect that led to your audience existing. This doesn't favour general-audience communities, sure, but I'd honestly be happy with the answer "general-audience things just aren't how the future looks".
But I have no clue what would distinguish (to me) a non-shit ad? Is it saving me money on something I was already going to buy?
Yes. I've been looking for weight equipment over the past year because of the pandemic and gyms being closed and the majority of ads on Instagram are now exercise equipment. I ended up seeing an ad for a company in my country with fairly decent prices and bought a new squat stand. The price difference between the one I bought and the ones I was looking at from companies in the area was around $200. I give up some privacy, they give me targeted ads. Please give me more.
Perhaps today, but not if we design browser APIs that allow targeting without cross-site tracking: https://github.com/WICG/turtledove https://github.com/WICG/privacy-preserving-ads/blob/main/Par...
1. Facebook tracks users across the internet to enrich the profiles of their users
2. Data leaks.
3. Users are now in trouble.
I can come up with many more if you ask and then give me a sec.
Similar things happen with jobs and ethnicity, jobs and gender, with jobs and age discrimination, etc.
But you asked how targeted ads hurt people, and I showed a fairly recent example. Something that wouldn't exist without targeted advertising. How does that not prove my point?
Here's a list of ways around "cannot filter by race". It took 2 seconds on google: https://www.searchenginewatch.com/2011/12/06/how-to-target-e...
But, you seem to be shifting the goalposts pretty significantly. So, do you agree with the base point that targeted ads can produce pretty bad results?
Beyond that, it's an open secret (as in: it's been mentioned several times in available documents, but never deliberately disclosed or extensively discussed publicly, so far as I know) that since at least the mid or late 00s the US government has had contracts with multiple major tech companies that have a high level of access to citizen Internet traffic to basically search their databases of Internet activity at will. Which companies these are, I'm not sure—I suspect it's mostly telcos, personally—but it's another reason the existence of these datasets is inherently dangerous, and that they should not be permitted to exist at all, no matter who holds them.
A simple search here for “facebook data” will get you started: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=facebook+data
I mean there are so many examples it's difficult to believe this is a genuine question. It sort of like asking in 1984 did anyone really get hurt by big brother watching?
My primary work is on https://github.com/WICG/turtledove (discussed in the post), which allows well-targeted advertising without sending your browsing history to advertisers
* Ads render inside "fenced frames" where they cannot learn what page they are on and the page cannot learn what ad is being shown
* Reporting is available, but it is aggregate-only
> GET https://first-ad-network.com/.well-known/fetch-ads?interest_...
So, at the very least, the ad network will be able to see your IP and know that you like athletic shoes and visited www.wereallylikeshoes.com. If you visit some other domain first-ad-network.com owns with the same IP whithin a small window of time, it can be pretty confident it's the same person and even store some client side data at that point. It feels like they can construct a reasonably good profile about their users by using that technique. That's considering the browser doesn't leak out any other potentially identifying information.
Then, the actual ad owner could have something in the URL that identifies which campaign you ultimately came from, as they probably know which interest groups they were targeting. So, when you click on the ad, they know one interest about you and, if you clicked in ads from other campaigns they run, they may reconstruct your profile well.
Yes, there are a lot of user identifying bits in an IP address. Chrome has two proposals: https://github.com/bslassey/ip-blindness I'm not sure what other browsers are thinking?
> That's considering the browser doesn't leak out any other potentially identifying information.
Which they definitely do. All the browsers are working on figuring out how to thwart fingerprinting, and it's really hard. I am glad, at least, that we were able to get Google Ads to publicly commit to not fingerprinting.
> when you click on the ad, they know one interest about you and, if you clicked in ads from other campaigns they run, they may reconstruct your profile well
Yes, when people click on ads in Turtledove the advertiser does learn something. This is a huge improvement to the status quo where advertisers learn things just by bidding, or an intermediate stage where advertisers learn things when they win an auction -- users don't click on ads very often, so the amount of information leaked this way is very low.
Exactly how much information the advertiser is able to learn on a click is still very much up in the air, so if you have views on this you might consider participating on the repo?
In a less techinical point of view, ads are probably a net negative for society. People are buying things they don't need, spending time they could be doing other things and just having a worse experience they could have were not for content farms and other practices incentivised by ads. I do see the value of ads bringing services to people who wouldn't have money to pay for them otherwise, it's income distributions of sorts, but I think we can do better.
Anyway, interesting read about ip blindness. As long as the CDNs and proxies are not controlled by the same company that owns the ad networks, then it could work out. Though it's hard to find the correct incentives for the right people to own the right parts of the network. Another alternative would be something like onion, which is more distributed (although quite wasteful of resources).
Since at least the 1920s (I’m thinking of Edward Bernays but there are probably earlier examples) the goal of advertising is to manipulate consumers into making irrational decisions. The majority of ads make us feel inadequate to get us to buy something, like the only the thing that will make us whole is a new instant pot or whatever.
I know it's hard to disprove but I don't think adverts have that effect on me, partially it's because I don't see many adverts and partly because that kind of blatant manipulation is so hilariously blatant.
I acknowledge that someone might be running a really effective advertising campaign on me but since I basically don't buy anything I don't actually need I can't imagine what that would be.
Haven't bought anything techie for about 18mths and when I do mostly shop on specs, reviews from sources I trust.
I viscerally loathe advertising, I don't like been manipulated in any context so I run a background process mentally watching for it :).
I'm an advertisers nightmare, I'll not only ignore your advertising I'll go to significant technical lengths to block it for myself and everyone in my family.
Our cogniitive biases act as shortcuts to save energy when making decisions, and advertisers exploit those shortcuts. If you’re on high alert while shopping, catching and recalibrating for your biases at every step of the way then yeah you can probably escape most marketing but for most people that doesn’t come naturally.
If you’re not careful I bet you too slip up sometimes. I know I’ve caught myself at the grocery store reaching for one product over another just because it’s in unbleached cardboard packaging (signaling to me that it’s somehow more local or organic or whatever).
These tricks become obvious when you consciously work through them (ex: obviously some megacorp can package their items in cardboard the same way mom and pop small businesses can) but most of the time we aren’t processing consciously, and that’s how marketing works.
If people were interested in seeing ads, a business of selling pure ad catalogues would actually be a successful venture! As it stands now, you can't even give such material away for free without generating hate. Because people don't want to see ads! It doesn't matter if they're tracked or not. The ad is the problem!
But what about the manipulation?
One of the other replies note that podcasts do ads right. I hugely disagree. Not only does it steal the listener's time and focus (presuming they don't just scrub past it, which I presume most people do unless they put little value on their own time, and think a host is being sincere when they pitch some snake-oil supplement, pillow or VPN), it puts a dirty veneer over the whole realm where everyone becomes half-bit hucksters.
Yes. That's the problem. Make less money from ads --> make less content/riskier to make content (same thing). The more money ads make, the fewer of them you have to see to fund the same amount of content (or, alternatively, you get more/higher quality content for a given (fixed) quantity of ads).
There is no set "amount of effectiveness," so to speak. If ads are more profitable, advertisers are still going to spend just as much or more on them, precisely because they have a higher ROI.
So you see more ads, the people publishing content make more money (more ads + better ads --> more valuable eyeballs --> more valuable content), and then the ROI for making content is higher, so people make + publish more of it. You get more, more valuable content.
Now, you may argue that the privacy cost is higher than the reward of more/better content, but I think that it probably isn't. Especially because it's hard (not impossible) to match your browsing history with your IRL identity and no one really cares about you, I think that the privacy cost is smaller than the reward. You might disagree.
There's a couple of non-sequitors here.
1. You don't necessarily get more valuable content. A lot of times the higher ROI leads to gamification of the whole system and you get more content, but it's all spam or varying levels of quality. This spam varies from complete trash to fairly polished, but none of it is actually valuable.
2. Even if we concede the point and assume that we get purely more valuable content, there is a limit to the amount of content anyone can consume in a day. And the advertising itself competes for your attention with even that valuable content. So the benefit from an increased amount of valuable content has a natural limit. The harm from the increase of ads is not so naturally bounded. So even if the balance of cost/benefit starts on the side you think, where the benefit of the content outweighs the cost of advertising, it will naturally, eventually trend towards the cost outweighing the benefit.
You are correct that in my view, personally, the cost already far outweighs the benefit. We can argue whether that's true on the whole for most people, but there is no argument when it comes to me personally. It's not worth it. There is a lot of content I only consume because I'm blocking ads. If I was unable to block ads and had to pay that cost, I would certainly forgo the content.
So annoyingly while it is true that ads are a currently necessary part of funding the internet, it is also true that a perverse incentive exists to just keep hammering the $ button once you find a model that works. It is a good argument for why we probably should want to pay directly for content. Or y'know, just topple capitalism on account of it generating toxic localized optimizations literally everywhere.
Many people have a favorite TV ads. People watch the Super Bowl for the ads. People sing radio jingles to themselves. College kids put nice magazine ads on their dorm walls. People pay money for clothes with logos that are essentially just ads for themselves. People watch videos of influencers unboxing/using/reviewing products they are paid to unbox/use/review. Etc. People love all kinds of ads.
No one likes banner ads. It is failed ad format and should be replaced. No one likes direct targeting. It should be made illegal. There are lots of other ad formats and methods that work great. Those two are the problem.
Look, for example, at large advertisers like Coca Cola. Coke spends ~$1 billion/year in the US alone on ads. That's not because nobody has heard of them. The point is to shift money into Coke's pockets.
Almost all advertising provides no net benefit to society; it's just an arms race between companies competing to manipulate people. If we banned it, we'd quickly find other ways to get people the minimal information content it contains. We'd definitely find ways to spend the $1tn or so that it consumes now. And that's not even counting the benefits from less waste and market distortion caused by advertising.
And there certainly is a universe where we would pay for search, in the same way that we pay for countless other things. Google's business model scorched Earth the realm, though, so there isn't a lot of potential for that now, but it's a universe I could easily imagine.
"the advertising model for using Google search and watching Youtube videos works better for me as a consumer."
Do you use an ad blocker? I certainly do, as does most of HN. Layers of ad blockers. It works for me because I get the content for free and I don't have the scourge of ads, so sure it's a fine model.
When that podcast starts with six minutes of promos I just scrub right past them. I don't believe I've clicked on a single ad online in decades, at least not intentionally. I honestly don't even understand how that industry survives. My gut instinct is that it's a giant illusion and effectively a massive fraud.
A major reason many of us have such a laissez-faire attitude towards the detritus of the ad world is that it's something that other people endure.
However, I understand that if this had to change, the income would have to shift, too.
I understand it pretty well. I pay for a variety of services for the value they provide me and to ensure they remain viable. I use a lot of free, ad-supported tools without an ad-blocker.
I make a small amount of money from ad-supported sites. I make more money from user-supported sites.
I tend to be more concerned with the user experience. I don't mind ads that don't get in the way of my intent for using a tool or site. I have backed out of many sites that show me more ads than content, especially if presented in a way that make them more likely to be clicked accidentally than out of actual interest. They loose me as a user. That's a choice I get to make.
I enjoy physical magazines (or digital versions of physical magazines). I pay for several subscriptions, but I know they are making much more money from advertising. I wouldn't pay more for a version without ads. I like many of the ads. They are well-targeted and visually appealing. But I am free to ignore them and I am free to stop subscribing if the advertising diminishes the value I get from it.
Ad-supported sites are important to the ecosystem. Can they be done better? Yes! Can we make choices as consumers as to whether or not we patronize a site based on their advertising behavior? Yes! Ad blockers may play a role in that. Perhaps both will help push the industry in a more privacy-centric direction.
Privacy is more commonly seen as a feature these days. I have a few services I promote as both free and privacy-focused; no ads, no or minimal analytics, etc. And with enough interest I would hope to eventually charge for them to make them sustainable without ads.
Maybe it's personal taste, but signing into an account is much more pleasant for me than watching an ad. As for the monetary cost, it only takes one ad per year that works on you to lose as much money anyway.
> Advertising should be open and transparent. If business of ads are truthful
Ads are not truthful because they are highly incentivized to lie > I will sometimes pay to see ads. E.g. I pay $10 ticket for a home & garden convention show so the manufacturers in booths can advertise their wares to me.
I have to honestly ask why? What do you feel you are measuring other than the advertising budget of the sellers? Granted, such a convention would also allow you to evaluate the wares to some extent, but doing that is to ignore the ads.
Only if you regret the purchase, no? For example, I subscribed to CBS (now Paramount+) because I saw ads for a show I was interested in watching (Picard).
(I realize lots of advertising does not follow this model)
In advertising, context matters. Ads when you’re in discovery mode looking for things to consume? Great, ads are usually unobtrusive in that context. But there are only so many discovery scenarios but lots of ad money to be made.
Advertising is a zero-sum game to dominate the human attention span. This has negative effects on our social lives and mental health. Is saving a few dollars a month worth the societal impact that constant advertising entails? In my opinion this constant barrage of ads is a big part of why we as a society can disagree about basic facts about the world: we’ve been conditioned to consume media that is promoted by virtue of its ability to draw eyeballs through being controversial / shocking, rather than the veracity or value of the information. Ads create a perverse incentive for publishers to operate at the edge of truth because those stories / media get more views.
Why are these user-hostile? I see very little friction to any of them - $10/year YT subscription disappears into the background (that's, what, two moderately expensive coffee drinks? if you spend just a single day watching educational content, the obtained value will easily exceed $10), per-search microtransactions would be so cheap that you could just turn on the "always transparently pay for this" feature, and any YouTube video of reasonable size that is worth watching is definitely worth spending the few seconds of time to assess and then click the "donate to get access" button.
What, you're saying that these things don't exist? Then that's a problem with currently available implementations of microtransactions, not the concept of microtransactions itself.
It's easy, from a technical perspective, to design a low-friction microtransaction system.
> Would I rather replay history and pay ~$120 every year (~$2400 ?) to search for web articles?
That's a price problem, not a pricing model problem. Microtransactions/subscriptions are irrelevant - that price is so far above the actual cost of your Google searches that the equivalent in terms of the current model (you pay with your data) is that Google demands your SSN in order for you to search - and the results in both cases will be the same: users will use a different product.
Edit: Because this comment has gotten strawmanned in the same way repeatedly: I did not say that the ad-funded model should go away, nor do I believe that - my comment was purely a response to the idea that microtransactions are infeasible, and nobody carefully reading it would think otherwise.
Oh? People have been trying since at least https://www.w3.org/Conferences/WWW4/Papers/246/ (1995)
And, in the specific case of microtransactions, it's well-known that consumers like cheap and free things - which causes them to flock to ad-funded services because said services make it as difficult as possible to see what data you're paying for those services with.
The reason why microservices have failed is largely due to the negative externalities (e.g. massive personal information harvesting and sale) being concealed from users. If you showed users how much of their data was being harvested, and who it was being sold to (transitively), how many do you think would continue to use an ad-supported product if a reasonably-priced paid alternative was available?
Edit: to provide a specific example of a somewhat-low-friction microtransaction system (that could easily be scaled to "extremely low friction" with non-architectural UI tweaks) that I've had experience with, I present to you Blendle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blendle
These are not hard technical problems.
If we are using micropayments to let users directly pay a site for views of that site's articles or for skipping ads on those articles, then the jurisdiction that the user is in is likely to consider that a sale in their jurisdiction and want the site to collect VAT or sales tax. If people from 50 different countries purchase articles, you might end up having to deal with taxes in 50 different countries! (Even countries that have thresholds of the form "no tax unless total sales in the country are above $X" might require you to register there and fill out a form each quarter saying you didn't meet the threshold).
The site doesn't have that problem if instead they sell ads and get their money from the advertisers or from the ad network. That money is taxed, but it is taxed as income in the location of the site, not as a sale where the users are. Having people visit your site from 50 different countries doesn't increase the complexity of your tax situation.
Assuming we can't get widespread adoption of more micropayment friendly rules for online purchased of content access and/or ad skipping, there is a way to use micropayments for that while avoiding the tax jurisdiction explosion.
That is the imposition of a middleman service. It sounds like Blendle might be such a middleman.
You buy articles from the middleman, making your micropayment to the middleman. The middleman license the content for resale from the publishers and pays a royalty based on volume.
If you arrange this right when the user buys an article the middleman is the seller for VAT or sales tax purposes and so it is the middleman that has to deal with all the different jurisdictions. The publishers only have to deal with their own jurisdiction and perhaps the jurisdiction of the middleman.
But then you have the issue of who will be the middleman? I don't think we want it to end up like streaming movies, where we've got Netflix and Disney+ and Peacock and Hulu and Prime and Google and HBO Max and a whole bunch of others and you need to use more than one of them to see all the content you want.
We probably need at most 3 or 4 big middlemen that are easy enough for publishers to use that most sites that want to offer a pay per article option are signed up with all of those middlemen.
My guess is that it might end up being the same companies that provide "sign on with" services that end up providing micropayment middlemen services and/or companies that already provide big online stores that sell internationally.
That would be Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google.
I used to live off of $7,000 a year. $10/year is something I'd seriously think about.
I'd be careful about generalizing a fixed cost subscription's impact. Typically, it will hit poorer communities harder than wealthy communities.
So there are several problems with this:
1. You restated the above commenter's cost from $10/month to $10/year for some reason. For context, Google's annual revenue seems to be $180B. That makes $10/month far closer to the likely alternative;
2. That $10/year or $10/month "disappears into the background" for you. That's a far more significant cost for the majority of Internet users who are in the developing world. Cost aside, there may be issues with even having the payment infrastructure to actually pay for that (eg due to sanctions or US foreign policy).
I agree with the post's author: there are significant benefits to an ad-supported model and high on that list is low friction (paying for any service is a huge point of friction) and that those in the developing world get highly-equivalent services to the developed world.
There are definitely problems with advertising. The over-collection of data is of course one. But it seems convenient and disingenuous to overlook the benefits as they're inconvenient to a shallow anti-advertising diatribe.
fyi... That was my fault because I later edited it without realizing others had quickly quoted it. I made a typo "$10/year" which was clearly a mistake because no mainstream service for videos/music/books charges 84 cents a month.
Parent's comment originally read $10/year.
> For context, Google's annual revenue seems to be $180B. That makes $10/month far closer to the likely alternative
I don't see how the first part of your statement at all supports the second. Google's revenue now, with many different services in wildly varying stages of profitability, has very little connection to the hypothetical subscription price that would be applied to a service that is now ad-funded - you seem to be engaging in wild speculation.
> 2. That $10/year or $10/month "disappears into the background" for you.
First, YouTube is a luxury service. Second, I specifically addressed the problem of "it's too expensive" later on in my comment, with "That's a price problem, not a pricing model problem." - which still holds. Third, market segmentation is a thing. Fourth, those in the developing world will pay with their personal information - which can be far more devastating if e.g. they're a dissident living in an oppressive regime. Fifth, I never said the ad model should be removed.
You seem to be making the assumption that I am suggesting that the ad-funded model be replaced with the subscription/microtransaction models - I do not, and my comment was carefully worded to not make that claim. I specifically believe that models where payment is made in money should always be available, with ads as an option - not that the former should be completely removed.
> paying for any service is a huge point of friction
False. I can relatively easily design a microtransaction service that has very little friction for payment. Meanwhile, there already exist many extremely low-friction payment services. If you have a credit card in the US with the new contactless payment technology, it's extremely easy to pay for things - you just swipe your card. If you have a Google Play account, it's similarly easy to purchase a new app. If you have a subscription service with auto-renew, paying for another month/year is literally frictionless - there's absolutely no interaction necessary.
> But it seems convenient and disingenuous to overlook the benefits as they're inconvenient to a shallow anti-advertising diatribe.
See previous statement about your mistaken assumption that I said that advertising should be eliminated. Attacking a strawman does nobody any good.
Showing ads is the first level and from that perspective I suppose it's fine.
At the next level is harvesting data from those ads and sharing that data with third parties. I feel that's where things get very, very messy.
Because if ads can be targeted based on a person's profile, so can other manipulations. Especially if that data is available with an authoritarian government.
Since most companies showing ads don't play fairly, users in turn choose to block ads completely.
I feel the main point is, no you haven't got this for free.
If you were to pay $2400 dollars, Google would also need to pay you for your attention during this time
It reads a lot like that.
Jeff posits that advertising is competing only with paywalls and brushes aside hobby work, people producing content for the pure benefit of it, as if that is not impacted.
If I produce something creative with real value as part of a hobby, I know there is a high chance it will be copied/stolen by a slick advertiser who will then out-compete me.
So, I'm net less motivated to participate in the whole system of creating content.
Get me started on the ads that come with play store apps and "free games".
however at $12/month that would be $864 per year to help them. I would jump at $60 / year for 6 people.. heck that would save me on comcast overages several months of the year.
We still pay for some searches by paying the ad costs of the places we spend money, but that's another thing to figure.. $120 / year for search? I doubt my clicks amount to that for any advertiser. I'd pay 20 for ad free, zero tracking searches, but not 100.
In addition, a flat fee could lead to a slow on googles growth, as once a users pays, they can not find new ways to monetize that user.
Don't get me wrong, I love the option to pay a fee to opt out of certain ads. It really helps align the incentives of the user with the company, but unfortunately it would have to be expensive to average out the more lucrative ads.
The other day to prevent a young one from replaying the same soundtrack over and over via youtube - (bandwidth repeatedly counting against and lots of ads for the same repeated songs oh my) - I just popped over to amazon and bought the album and popped it onto a usb stick for them.
I picked up a couple of gift cards for their bday this week - one of them was a google play card - then I remembered G killed the music section of the play store, so I put it back and got an amazon card instead.
that premium would be a great deal if we had one more in the household here. we've got three chromecasts - two with the google tv - but not the gtv plan - sheesh the ads via youtube with that are a drain, and I wonder about the compression for music - but they still use them for convenience and the other things like discovery+ which is affordable.
Oh if only they would plex-like into a win7 box on the network and pull my collection of mp3s.
Maybe all this is going in a good direction. Fingers crossed.
Recently, just from my youtube subscriptions I think, my youtube ads have been surprisingly relevant, for things like cnc routers or various embedded tools or what not -- ads that are actually for things I might be interested in buying. (Granted there's still a ton of obnoxious get rich quick schemes that I have to skip).
I have to admit, seeing ads that actually are of interest to me does change my mindset on advertising a little bit. I still find it super creepy being tracked, and I'd like the ability to know what they know about me, and erase it if I don't like it (is that even possible?), but it is kind of nice to get ads that don't suck if I have to sit through ads.
Just let the users set their own advertising profiles! Always relevant ads, no tracking needed.
with our own set profiles, we could opt out of gambling, loot boxes, and alcohol ads too. I've been suggesting this for some time now.
The cost of advertising is not your attention; it is your perception. Advertisements fundamentally alter your perception of the world in favor of whatever the advertiser is showing you. You are choosing to have your view of the world shaped in a way that may change your behavior. Note that this change occurs on an emotional level and cannot simply be discarded by your rational mind even if you don't believe / care about the ad at a conscious level.
Ads are fine. Stalking people to “optimise” those ads isn’t.
You advertise to me, You don't track every single fucking thing I do online to do it.
If we agree to that then I'll turn my adblocker/pi-hole off - otherwise enjoy the null-hole.
Yes. However...
I have found 0.001% of what I wanted because of an ad. That's something like one item in a decade. I don't think that's worth the costs of tracking to privacy and bandwidth. Certainly not worth the obtrusiveness of contemporary ad space which is the result of the inevitable runaway arms race between the flitting attention of users and the desperate need of businesses to sale their wares.
I don't see any resolution to the waste other than abandoning tracking for ads. Good enough demographics can be found by the content being consumed. Please, let's leave it at that.
When you say "I'm using Google for free because it's supported by ads", what it means is:
- some companies are buying (expensive) ads on Google
- they are therefore increasing their marketing budget
- which mechanically increases the price of their services and products
- which you ultimately have to pay
so no, the "free ads" are not free for the consumers, you pay them as a "marketing tax" on each product and service that you pay for
And there's another issue. Even if all online services switched to a subscription model tomorrow, companies would not suddenly stop spending money on promoting their products. They would just do it differently and we would pay twice.
They ask €11.99/month for Premium (no ads) + YouTube Music. Or €9.99/month just for YouTube Music. Given that I already pay for another service, I don't want either of these plans.
It's not possible to get only YouTube Premium (avoid ads), even if the marginal cost of ad-free YouTube experience is only €2/month, according to Google. I think €24/year is a very reasonable price to pay for YouTube, €144 is not.
The other side of this is that someone has actively spent $2400 worth of ad-buy to show you ads for the last 20 years.
I don't think the other-side of the argument has been explored well enough; I'd love to see what is possible without these ulterior motives controlling what you see and hear.
Sure, your use cases. Not other people's though, and we don't get a choice.
I do pay for YouTube Red, and it's worth it to not see ads.
> micropayments for each search query or a "Google Search Engine yearly subscription"
I would pay for this, too.
> ... or Patreon donations for video content ...
I do it for music. It feels really good to support creators directly.
Ads are the worst, and I adblock everything.
I'd happily pay for web content if there were microtransactions. Either that, or a content marketplace that disburses based on views or some other accounting.
But measuring the net societal impact of a cheap stopped at that point is basically worthless. There are many 2nd and 3rd order impacts that must be included. The obvious is health, but others include the marginal cost considerations of where the money will go that is "saved". Or what alternative food would be purchased (if it's deep fried Twinkies, maybe free doughnuts are a health win).
Any work that makes the ad marketplace more efficient (easier for creation and deployment of effective ads or ad instrumentation) has huge effects on relative competitiveness of startups vs. conglomerates. Just as one example. And those effects directly affect consumers.
I can avoid ad surveillance to some degree, but am powerless to help a business that can't survive in an ad-driven economy. I can't single-handedly keep my local hardware store in business against the threat from conglomerates capable of operating indefinitely on zero margins.
I would absolutely pay that.
Search is incredibly valuable and has deteriorated as has the web as a whole largely because of ads and this terrible business model.
It’s not even slightly ‘free’, your attention is being wasted on stuff that other people are paying for you to see.
I value that at way more than $120 per year.
And that is the point, where I would say: "No, you have not been using Google for free. You have paid with something. That something is your personal data and privacy of others."
Why privacy of others? Well, because by using Google, you are actually supporting their business model, which is online stalking and selling info about you basically.
If no one was using their search (and other services), then what would be the point for businesses to throw money at them for placing ads there? Every user counts in the end. Many people keep thinking, that they alone will not make any difference, but that is, where people go wrong in many scenarios. The typical: "But if only I do x then it wont be so bad." or "If only I stop doing x, it wont change the big picture." If everyone thinks that way, then nothing ever will change of course. It is a feedback loop, or vicious cycle, or whatever it is called. The right idea is to start doing, what one can do oneself. And that is to stop using services such as Google search.
Personally, if I had the choice between paying money every year to have a non-stalker Internet search for the whole world, ensuring everyone's privacy when searching, I would rather choose that Internet. I would prefer it over an Internet, which we have today, where I need to arm up my browser to the teeth, to avoid being tracked everywhere, being unable to access a lot of content, because knowingly or unknowingly people put it behind stalker-walls and paywalls. I also think that your suggested numbers of 120 or even 2400$ are wildly exaggerated. It would probably be much more like an Internet tax, that everyone had to pay and that is lowered or increased based on your personal economical situation.
So I resolved to sit back and enjoy what time I have left for getting a great experience.
Ads on podcasts don't bug me as much as the ads Google/Facebook does. Nor do the ads that are sponsored inside videos (see LTT). I don't mind the ads that DDG does (which just uses key words in your search).
I don't like this dichotomy of ads vs no ads, I'm not sure that's really the right framework. I turn off ads everywhere I go because I can't trust ads. But I don't bother skipping through ads on my podcasts or in videos. So it isn't the ad part that's the problem.
I completely agree - until you have kids watching Youtube the Ads are much better in general.
I am however extremely concerned with the amount of data being collected on my family to then aggregate and sell.
But that's an outrageous sum. I'm sure you also wouldn't sacrifice your first-born son on Google's altar either. Meanwhile, would you pay $5-10/year ($100-$200 total)? That would probably cut Google's revenue by two-thirds - one-third, but still they would have plenty. I believe FB averaged under $10/year/active user in all the years I looked at (which ignores the most recent years).
Meanwhile, I guess I'll just leave my adblocker installed and take the subsidy.
That might be true in the beginning but long term ad's add a lot of friction and frustration e.g. having to wait X amount of seconds before getting access to the content.
I have been a YouTube Premium user since day one and I can't imagine not using it.
What I would love to see more is having a choice of having a free ad supported version and the option to upgrade and pay to remove those ads.
But people don't like to pay for software. So we alternatives.
It doesn't mean I hate people who work on ads / ad software. It doesn't mean I want to cancel them. You, and the others in that field, don't have to justify yourself. You don't have to donate to charity to feel better about what you're doing (it doesn't mean "stop donating NOW", it's just.. do what you feel is good, like you are doing now).
There's a lot of bad going on in the world. Ads are shady-grey area. I know how to fight it and have my internet ad-free. You're ok, don't let negative comments get to you. Cheers!
I know there's a lot of negative reaction to it, and I can empathize with that because there's a long history of negative behavior by the advertising industry. But there's no doubt that there are benefits too, and seeing some nuance on HN is always a win.
Advertising is a very wide spectrum and I think its way too heavy handed to say it is all intrinsically immoral. Some is, maybe even most of it, but surely not all is immoral.
I'd argue that advertising in general is a good thing, but that there are a few parts that are bad. One bad part is the vast surveillance and privacy intrusion of modern digital advertising is what is bad. Another are the advertising tactics used to manipulate people into buying things they shouldn't.
The coffee shop with far too many flyers or 7 by the same local tutor becomes very hard to handle. With experience you fight through the flyers to read the menu and get to the counter to order that coffee.
There is so much 'opportunity' in the world at any moment for which the provider of the opportunity's ad thinks that it could be relevant to me. I can accept a little of that every day without it being bad, but patience wears very fast.
* I see contraception as intrinsically immoral...
* I see gun ownership as intrinsically immoral...
* I see capitalism as intrinsically immoral...
Which are all sort of arguments by normative value and probably not very convincing to those who don't share the same values.
There most certainly are doubts that there are any benefits. Online ads aren't any more beneficial than billboards.
I think we would do well to follow the example of Sao Paulo.
The false dichotomy between ads/paywall is not really useful, when the reality is that you often get a paywall and ads after you agree to pay. The advertisement industry is a cancerous blight of our societies, its sole purpose is to sell us stuff we do not need to increase a company’s profit. The fact that this is done on the web by plundering our personal data with no regard for our privacy is just the cherry on top. Ads business is unhinged capitalism and a social and ecological disaster, and advocating in its favor today is short-sighted at best.
It’s fine to work a job you like in an unethical industry, but it is not necessary to try to sell it to other people.
There's a wide range from honest honorable work to complete scumbag devil.
Surely it's okay for sites that "don't have a commercial tie-in" to stick with untargeted ads? I just think that building a giant stalking network is an extreme (and ideally illegal) solution to the "problem" that a couple of sites won't make as much money off their popularity as they'd like.
And is it that uncharitable to characterize what Facebook and Google are building as a giant stalking network?
This is also why if you stumble into some parts of the web, they vomit out a billion ads per page to try and compensate.
Really the problem is that there is a tremendous gap between the costs to serve content and users willingness to pay (either directly or via any indirect method). It is a tremendously deep hole we've built with freemium models that will probably require some level of societal agreement to dig back out of.
The only reasonably accurate targeting I've ever run into is the occasional ad for something I just browsed on Amazon. I've never clicked on an internet ad. Youtube advertising might as well be targeted to an alien race. What in the hell keeps this whole business afloat at it's current level? Am I being programmed to buy that mechanic's vise because they threw up an after-the-browse ad?
No doubt there's some sort of backend telemetry that proves the value of all this trouble, but I just don't see it. Maybe the emperor really is nekkid.
edit: It may well be that the real marketing genius in the advertising industry is not it's value in increasing sales, whether it's old school print media/OTA/tradeshows or the newfangled spying-on-you internet variety, but in convincing it's customers of advertising's value. Anything beyond pushing you up a search engine's ranking strikes me as a sketchy proposition.
Instead I get ads targeted at people who share my IP. I can often tell what my girlfriend has been browsing for from the ads I'm hit with, for instance, which is somewhat creepy.
I've had ads for medication that I'm prescribed, or could be prescribed, play on other people's devices when they use my network. It's likely targeted because I don't get ads for other types of prescriptions at all at home.
I'm also pretty sure of some of the medical conditions my friends and family have based on the ads I consistently see in their homes.
And it seems like unless you go to a lot of trouble, you're essentially relying on the ad network's own metrics for efficacy... Which when you consider the sheer quantity of money at stake, seems like it will end in a massive fraud at least once. I could be wrong about the perverse incentive though, it seems almost too obvious so I would assume that people who know the ad industry better than me would have a response to it.
There's a whole ecosystem of "buyside verification vendors" that advertisers contract with to validate that they're getting what they paid for. Buyers don't just take the seller's word for it, or at least enough of them don't that shady sellers are kept in check.
On top of that, plenty of marketers are absolutely clueless about how to go about their strategy, mostly because unlike previous generations (in online ads), they don't grok the underlying tech at all.
If that's all there is to it, I expect there's a lot of needless work being done under the covers.
Although for me, it's a 50/50 split between topic-related and ads that appear to target a generic male audience, which is a very good guess for some topics.
Advertising is throwing darts at the board with your eyes closed, whenever it lands somewhere on the board and nets you point is good enough for most.
Typical conversion rates are under the 1% threshold so you accept that a lot of your spend is not efficient but when it is, you make your money back and some, if you are any good at it.
Some podcasts use "dynamic ad insertion", where the ads are inserted when you download the podcast rather than when the podcast file is created and uploaded. [0] Discovered my podcasts were tracking me when I traveled and then heard ads for an out-of-state regional chain after I returned home, clearly because I had downloaded the episodes while traveling. Overcast added privacy & tracking info, to show whether each podcast uses dynamic ad insertion or (possibly) tracks IP etc. [1].
[0] https://themarkup.org/ask-the-markup/2020/10/08/podcast-priv... [1] https://9to5mac.com/2020/09/03/podcast-privacy-alerts/
The most successful ads looks very similar to the organic content and tend to have very similar targeting mechanisms. Search ads that look like search results. Product ads on amazon that look like product search results. Facebook ads that look like Facebook posts. In my experience all those ads are quiet close to content I'd like and I've clicked on quiet a few without realizing it's an ad.
Granted, incumbents are likely to score high on organic search results. If somebody new comes up with a better product, which can deliver more value at a lower price, the page rank algorithm isn’t going to do much for them. But the newcomer’s superior unit economics mean they can afford to bid higher for an ad, which allows them to get market share from the incumbent. In that sense, ads can make the market more liquid, and speed adoption of improved products and more efficient manufacturing or business processes.
The ad publisher does end up capturing a big chunk of this value, and it’s valid to ask if that’s fair and if we as a society should allow it.
Literally every ad I say to myself "wow, that is actually something I would consider buying" and in certain instances, I have. Outside of Instagram it is exceedingly rare that I would purchase something based on an ad.
On the other side there are Google Play ads with mouth open guys - I'm never going to play one of those vile games, ever.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AndroidGaming/comments/cv4ezs/mouth...
And from my anecdotal experiences, I have to agree with both you and what I see on HN in that regard. Not only they get the advertisers right up my alley, they even get the exact products I want to click on.
For a specific example: I don't get easily baited by random no-name "hip" clothing startups (that are mostly just alibaba dropship sort of places), so instagram keeps giving me ads for Adidas products as well. And the thing is, not only does it get correctly that I am likely to be interested in Adidas products, the specific products from Adidas that get suggested to me in those ads are the exact kind of products from Adidas that I would be interested in. Which is very impressive and surprising, given how wide the range of Adidas products is, and how most of their general stuff isn't super appealing to me. It is hard to describe to the point where I am struggling myself to define what exactly I am looking for if I am navigating Adidas website. But somehow Instagram ads get it right on target most of the time.
The only time when those ads let me down big time was when I saw an Adidas tracksuit advertised with the design I just liked a ton. Without looking at the details, I ordered it, only to realize a bit later that it was in "kids" section of their website, and I have no kids (and neither do I fall under the typical "people who might have kids" demographic by any metric; e.g., I don't search for any items even tangentially related to children, not a part of any FB groups that are heavily populated by parents or children, etc.). But damn, I would be lying if I said that Instagram didn't get the exact idea of what I wanted perfectly correct, sizing issues aside lol.
According to their algorithm, you do now.
Movie plot: Two people meet up, have fun, then go their separate ways. 9 months later she has a kid, dad doesn't know. But FAANG knows...
The problem with "plausible movie plots" is they are often overrated in terms of % chance of happening.
With linked graphs and relationship trees, it doesn't seem impossible "The Algorithm" could figure out you have kids before you do, or at least base it's Advertising results on a % chance guess.
I've seen things go from saying things in a conversation to targeted advert on Twitter, for example, in under 1hr routinely (although not always). Many of my peers have reported the same. While I've reproduced this on multiple devices (Android + iPhone) over many tests, I've been unable to isolate the app(s) doing this and how it works.
It's baffling how it's done and at scale, but somehow a few organizations seem to have extremely advanced adtech in production.
It seems to me that Facebook is extremely good at targeting me with ads (via Instagram) for products I might be interested in. I’m also much more likely to talk about products I’m interested in. I’m also much more likely to notice the spooky scenarios where the ads match what I was talking about, but not so likely to notice the ads unrelated to my conversations.
There are so many ways we could detect such surveillance. Power consumption, network usage, mic activity indicators, etc. but I still have seen no such evidence.
What do you think could be going on?
Unfortunately, this topic tends to be routinely brushed off as coincidence and I believe it's partially because the level of surveillance underway would cause panic and outrage, if it becomes widely known. Although I have have exposure to adtech and ML, it's difficult to grasp how this sort of activity is being done at scale.
My current theory is audio may be heavily compressed prior to occasional uploads to a trusted domain, which could be obfuscated by cloudfront or similar service. It's also possible some on-device speech to text is happening, which would make the files trivial to upload. That said, on device ML itself would be a quite a feat, especially to be running on mobile devices with high degree of accuracy to isolate keywords to be used in prod, for ad targeting.
My feeling here is that it's just like when someone in your family buys a particular make/model of car, you start noticing the same car on the road and are surprised that you never noticed how many of them there are.
That same ad for a set of Bose headphones might show up in your feed once a week, but one of those days you just happen to have a conversation about headphones with a friend, and it feels weird.
The paranoia in me sometimes wants to believe that my phone is listening to me all the time and is extracting ad keywords from everything I say, but I have a hard time figuring out how it would work.
Uploading voice clips, even using a good compressor like Opus, would still be noticeable. Maybe not by me, personally, but someone would have noticed that by now. Doing on-device voice recognition is possible (uploads of compressed text might not be noticeable), but my intuition is that would be a huge drain on the battery if it was running all day, processing everything it hears.
But who knows. Maybe it is possible, and there's a novel, but secret technology that enables it. It's a little far-fetched, though, I think.
Now-days "Ads" are a watching you.
Now advertisers can track you directly where/when you go, without your permission. Your search and purchase history forever remembered, your location verified, your friends identified.
With such level detail we will soon have custom pricing to maximize profits.
I've seen the thesis that all this advertising revenue - even if poorly spent - subvents large portions of exciting research in deep learning etc. at the likes of Google and Facebook. So all that talent wouldn't entirely be lost to advertising.
Possible explanations that I have seen for inaccurate targeting:
1. Some folks have a ton of money in their budget to spend on marketing, and they frankly don’t care about optimizing their targeting. In some cases, this is a shrewd decision, since the benefits of marginal optimization don’t really justify the cost of optimization. That said, in most cases, it’s just sloth or ignorance combined with the knowledge that they better spend their ad budget or else “bad things” will happen.
2. Lots of people call themselves digital marketers. Most of them who are employees suck, and I mean suck really bad. The reason is that if you are really good at digital marketing, it’s pretty easy to roll your own small business that, at a minimum, makes enough money while still having a lot of latitude in terms of free time or financial upside. Most companies are not willing or are not able to pay highly competent digital marketers what they are worth. Regardless, these employee marketers who suck tend not to do well at optimizing targeting.
3. Most digital marketing agencies suck at targeting. This is largely a byproduct of #2 above. The owner of an agency or the lead marketer might be really good, but they often delegate to people who are not. Streamlining the work of the underlings turns out not to be that important for most of these agencies.
That’s my 2 cents. I would love to hear other opinions.
If the web were 100% ad-free, it would still exist. It would still be growing. People would still spend countless hours working on computer programming. People would still be endlessly tinkering with the internet. This is reality, I saw it in the 80's and 90's. However, they would not be, as the author is today, asking for forgiveness, pledging to donate half their "earnings" to charity. Online ads may be an efficient way to make money but it also may be the only efficient way to make money from such "work" (experimentation, fun). The folks who are profiting from online ads will say anything to avoid that reality check.
The emperor may indeed be naked, but the amount of money and infrastructure these companies have to bury the truth is enormous. They will not allow the world to ever again experience a web without pervasive advertising. The person who started the web already had a real job. He did not try to make money with online ads. That world was fun while it lasted. There were so many possibilities.
Thanks to this author's "work", the possibilities now appear to be mostly dystopian. Compare this post "Why I work on Ads" to the original paper from Brin and Page that described the influence of advertising on web search as undesirable and a primary motivation for creating Google.
http://research.google.com/pubs/archive/334.pdf
"Half of my advertising budget is wasted. The problem is, I don't know which half."
Me neither, but marketing is significantly about awareness, not just the clicks.
If you've seen it, it is at some level "in you", and the brand has (fractionally) been built.
I know this doesn't apply to all ads by any means, but it's important to remember that advertising also works this way.
But I do click ads in my work, if the top (ad) link on Google is something relevant I might click it if I don't care for the company. I try to avoid clicking links for companies I really like since I work in a very ad heavy industry and know how much CPC can cost.
We are sold on the idea that they work, because someone clicks this ad, we track them, they buy the product, and we attribute the sale to that ad.
But we don't know whether the customer would have bought anyway. And some research suggests that, for the most part, they would have.
Steve Tadelis at Berkeley wrote a paper in 2013 demonstrating little to no efficacy of nine figures of ad spend at eBay.
http://conference.nber.org/confer/2013/EoDs13/Tadelis.pdf
This may not be true of all ads - ads for little-known brands, for example, may reach people who would have never heard of it. But the bulk of advertising bought by large brands may largely be a waste.
Advertisers still spend money because almost nobody is getting paid to rain on the parade. There's an endless stream of ad agencies, paid search marketers, marketing department staff themselves, CMOs, media properties, ad nauseam who are all invested in continuing marketing spend. A CMO will almost never declare that his department is useless. So they continue to make the case for their continued relevance.
On the other hand, brand recognition I do believe has value but is hard to quantify.
I also never click on an internet ad EXCEPT if it links to a price -not to buy.
Take paid Amazon reviews for example. This is advertising, just one of the most scummy possible forms of it. It's effective because people like me look to reviews to provide a third-party take on whether or not a product is any good. If I have a choice between two otherwise equivalent products, I'll pick the one with better reviews. But usually this just means rewarding the company that paid more to "advertise" on Amazon.
I realize you're probably talking about "real" organic mentions, but those are growing increasingly harder to find. A good example is the last time I bought headphones. I got suckered by a bunch of small review sites that had either been paid or gotten free samples in exchange for reviews. I bought two pairs, and when they arrived the sound from both was distorted. One pair broke within a few months. It was clearly trash that had been pumped using fake organic marketing. When I went back to find the sites that had provided the reviews in the first place, a few of them did mention (in very tiny print) that the reviews were paid. Me, suckered by advertising?! More likely than you'd think.
Back in the day, Johnny Carson reading an ad was convincing to the median consumer because they could be led to believe that the ad really was an endorsement of the product. That doesn't work any more, or not nearly as much at any rate. The basic strategy hasn't changed: it's still an attempt to find someone the consumer will trust. This is why, in my opinion, ads have always been and always will be bad, an attempt to subvert human rationality. Johnny Carson endorsing a product didn't mean that the product was good, it meant he was paid to endorse it. A review site endorsing a product nowadays doesn't mean that the product is good, it means they're paid to endorse it. In both cases the breakdown between what the consumer believes is happening and what is actually happening is the very thing advertising is trying to create, its raison d'être.
The niche ones have mods which allow genuine dissent as well as other recommendations from competing solutions.
Smart marketers don't try to get you to buy from an ad click. They want to move you one step down the funnel, which is usually getting your email/contact info if it's the type of product that has a longer nurturing process and sales cycle.
You can certainly waste a lot of money doing it too. Getting the right message in front of the right user at the right time is a lot harder than people think it is.
The above is where there's a lot of smoke and mirrors in ad tech. But for advertising as a whole, it's not a massive industry because it doesn't work.
Guess that's why we need those brightest minds of our generation on the problem, as the saying goes, right?
That sentence gives me extreme Matthew McConaughey-in-Wolf of Wall Street vibes. After seeing you wrote that, I immediately assumed you very likely work in advertising. Sure enough...
I have no clue whether anything you've written there is accurate or not. Either way, this whole thing and this whole industry just looks, sounds, and feels gross and intrinsically empty. I get a much better and more wholesome feeling from the cryptocurrency industry, even.
Greatest minds? Maybe there are some, you'll find them everywhere. But I'd worry that the greatest minds are toiling away in academia chasing grants or working on things that they don't want to work on.
In the paraphrased words of Don Draper (Mad Men character), nobody grows up wanting to be in advertising. It just kind of happens.
The core of advertising is just getting some message about your product or service to a relevant audience.
A lot of companies offer that service, some more effective than others.
But yes, I started an ad-tech company that supports indie news publishers. Before that, I was offered a great gig at Yahoo (when it was still kind of cool) where I got into it. I honestly didn't seek it out but I guess I liked it enough to stick with it.
It's certainly hard to compare entire industries apples-to-apples. The worst parts of the cryptocurrency industry are definitely worse than the worst parts of the advertising industry. However, I personally feel like in an "average", "net", or "expected value" sense, advertising may be worse. But maybe it isn't; either way, all I was trying to say is I really just don't like advertising or ad tech, and I wanted to use a rather extreme comparison to viscerally convey that. (Perhaps a little like a kind of "bullshit-industry" analogue of Godwin's law - my comparison was somewhat tongue-in-cheek and bad faith, basically, but also kind of not, because I do like some aspects of cryptocurrencies while I like zero aspects of advertising.)
>that supports indie news publishers
Sure, and maybe someone else could've started one that supports starving children. (The originally posted article similarly mentions that one of their reasons for working on ads is "I give half of what I earn to the most effective charities I can find, and the more I earn the more I can give".)
These all feel like cop-outs to me. I could significantly support independent creators or starving children by running a cryptocurrency Ponzi scheme, but it still doesn't make it positive on net. The difference is that you and the article author simultaneously say that you feel like the work is inherently positive, too, which in my book just makes it delusional rather than dissonant or contradictory.
So I absolutely don't think you're at all behaving knowingly unethically; just unknowingly. I think part of the issue here is that it's generally only a tiny bit unethical, so it takes a lot for it to add up to being a-lot-unethical, and humans (including myself) usually aren't so good at perceiving these potential cumulative effects when they're upstream of it all.
>The core of advertising is just getting some message about your product or service to a relevant audience.
At the same time, I can't not acknowledge this. How can I fault a small business owner for wanting people to know they exist? There's some cognitive dissonance of my own, here. And at the moment I'm resolving the dissonance by disliking the advertising and ad tech industries rather than disliking businesses who place ads. (As long as the ads they place aren't annoying, deceptive, or malicious in any way.)
Maybe my opinion on all this will eventually shift a bit, though, because a lot of it's certainly more emotional than logical. At a very deep, subjective level, I just strongly dislike advertising and everything about it. It gives me nothing but negative feelings. Most of the cryptocurrency industry gives me negative feelings, too - but the industry as a whole doesn't give me nothing but negative feelings. Some part of it gives me neutral or positive feelings.
Not to get off track, but ultimately it's a subjective position. I could easily take the view that anyone working for Facebook is actively helping erode the privacy of internet users. Or, that anyone working for Google is furthering its anticompetitive agenda and stifling innovation on the open web.
Without my platform, there are some towns and cities across the US that wouldn't have a local news outlet or reporter to follow local government and uncover corruption. I have case studies on my website where the publishers say it themselves.
From someone else's point of view I could be deluded, but from my standpoint, I'm doing something very positive. I don't think someone has to actively seek out the most cynical perspective on their line of work.
Can you provide some pointers to that data (as the parent did for the contrary position)? Forgive me, but it seems you work in advertising, so I'm not sure if you're the most unbiased person to assert something like this without evidence.
But with many parts of digital, you can show certain pages of your website exclusively to those who have clicked on ads (ie. hide those pages from regular browsers).
In this way you can directly measure the direct effects of the advertising spend.
There are many businesses, including three that I own, that have grown as a sole consequence of social media advertising. We have not promoted these businesses in any other way (no SEO, no trade shows, nothing).
I'm not going to share my advertising accounts with you; I'm just going to ask you to trust that when I get my laptop out and show my results to my 'marketing skeptical' friends, they stop being skeptical.
Actual words, from one of these friends: "wow. That is like a money printing machine."
Consider for a second: how many advertisers that are actually succeeding are going to publicly call attention to their success? Would you?
The only hint is Facebook and Google's revenues. They go up, and I am one of the people who makes their revenues go up.
spoken like a true used car salesman
I'd like to be proven otherwise, so, here are my key points, which you didn't contend with:
-> It's possible to completely isolate the effect of advertising spend, thereby making the effectiveness (or not) measurable.
-> I pointed to growing revenues on Google/FB's platforms, two platforms which make isolated measurement feasible.
In terms of _externally_ verifiable facts, that's the best I'll be able to give you.
The rest, you (and others) have to take on a/ good faith b/ using basic logic, that I'm telling the truth.
Though I don't doubt that you are right on the whole, this is a poor argument; homeopathy and other snake-oil are a massive industry as well.
Yes, I believe this is true. But also, I've heard that payouts per impression are going down precipitously. Desperate news sites are chock full of heavy ads because each impression pays less and less. Popular Youtube channels increasingly run their own integrated promotional content instead of depending on youtube ad revenue which keeps falling, even as viewership rises.
It's reasonable to suspect that as ad performance becomes perfectly measurable, payouts to content creators will asymptotically approach zero, because most ads don't work. Consumers spend most of their time looking at ads that don't work at all. That the occasional well crafted and placed ad does work isn't much consolation.
Direct sold digital advertising (OG, cutting ad networks out) is a different story.
Imagine, for example, that HN said they would auction off a single ad slot beneath the navbar to the highest bidder for the year.
How much do you think that would command? Do you think there could be sincere branding value (and actual performance) for the advertiser? I think it could be worth north of 1MM just to promote open jobs at a company.
If it was a clean, tasteful ad, and it was simply to support the cost of running HN, I'm pretty sure most of the audience would put up with it.
The common perception of digital advertising is network advertising. But the type of advertising that is the least annoying and most beneficial to both the advertiser and publisher is direct sold.
That being said there’s plenty of waste due to politics, bureaucracy, bad tech and general mismanagement. It’s important to separate the concept from the implementation.
Are we being 5D-chess'd and it's working on all of us subliminally and subconsciously and we just think we're immune? Or is there some other huge population of people out there it's working on who actually somehow are real manifestations of the unfathomably-cringeworthy-to-utter "sheeple" / "NPC" trope or something?
One area I can see is more subtle word-of-mouth kinds of influence (organic or astroturfed), where someone may see a lot of their friends or people they admire using and recommending something. I can definitely be influenced in that way in some cases - that's kind of how interest in almost anything works, isn't it? (For a non-profit example, would I have become interested in Rust if I didn't see it positively mentioned thousands of times on websites I use for the past decade? Probably not.) But for traditional ads like banners and commercials and billboards, I perceive zero efficacy in my own case.
>It's in your TV shows, your news articles, your Instagram feed, your word of mouth, your everything unless you are in the forest
I think I, and some decent percentage of HN readers, may kind of be "in the forest". I don't watch TV, I don't read news articles, I've never had an Instagram account or any kind of social media account (besides more "pseudonymous" social media like HN and reddit), I have comprehensive ad blockers, etc.
I also don't really buy products. I buy food, maybe I'll upgrade to a new laptop or phone every 4 - 5 years, but otherwise I don't think I really "consume" new things.
The only thing I can think of that ads have consciously made me do is pay to get rid of them. For example, I pay for YouTube Premium so I can never see ads. (Ad blocking gets tough for mobile devices and casting to other screens.) They got me there, because I watch a lot of YouTube (which I acknowledge is kind of "the new TV") and in some ways it's the best $12/month I've ever spent. It doesn't cover video makers including sponsored content, but I use crowdsourced browser extensions to identify and skip those.
The great misunderstanding of this industry is that what ads you see are just as important as the ads you don’t see, which allows for profit maximization.
In your circumstance, it may be true that bank transactions are farmed and analyzed to be additive to data gathering on the web, which in turn is additive to the offline data gathering offered by various companies. Every transaction made is analyzed for location, merchant, purchase category, amount, date & time, and more.
Most of the other commenters who are claiming and linking to articles that ads don’t work aren’t in the industry. This is an important distinction because what we’re talking about here are the machines that crunch all this data are considered trade secrets and/or intellectual property. Also, slightly off topic, but it’s important to understand that ads != marketing. Ads are a child component of marketing. When you look at the overall function of marketing (of which product management is a discipline, no matter how desperately some attempt to align it to technology), then consider how much of a factor data analysis and operationalization of data is a driver of success for Fortune 500 companies. Almost any company in consumer technology (e.g. FAANG), consumer healthcare (CVS), telecommunications (AT&T), FMCG or retail (Walmart, Costco), and retail banking (Chase, Wells Fargo) are using these techniques to build better products, sharpen communications, and win new customers.
It’s like CGI graphics in movies. If it looks good then it just looks good and you definitely notice when it looks bad. Your average TV show probably has half the stuff on the screen being CG in some way but millions of watchers never know.
I have a pixel on my thank-you page. I manually delete placements and optimize creatives and angles and funnels and demographic targeting until it goes from making no sales to ludicrously profitable. This is an entire industry you know nothing about.
Big brands can be dumb but they do mostly have the tools to not be.
In a lot of Tech industry firms, the in-house expertise just isn't there to do this stuff and that possibly breeds skepticism. I've had fairly junior members of my teams head out to FAANG who've been shocked at how limited the depth of knowledge is.
a. A $300 billion dollar industry is based entirely on a delusion.
b. You are an outlier.
Given that some industries (or movements, ideologies, etc.) could credibly be based on delusions, what do you think is the upper limit for how big such an industry could get?
Google / FB just say they show your ad to a XXXX million people. You owe them $XXXX.
"We suspect X million people watch this TV show (based on highly inaccurate Nielsen ratings) and then stayed around for the ad break, pay XX dollars."
"XXX people passed by your billboard, XX saw it, X people visited your website and made a purchase, pay XX dollars."
Plus you can go watch TV and see that it's actually been on there. Or walk down the street, or pick up a newspaper.
There's definitely accountability. The problem is that you can't always blame FB or Google because maybe your targeting is off, your ad copy sucks, you dumped the user off the front page of your website and they bailed, etc. There's a lot more to performance and accountability.
Nope. Ads are not funding the open web.
The vast majority of ad revenue and spending goes into the pockets of Facebook (openly hostile to the idea of an open web) and Google (sneakily hostile to the open web, and busy working on replacing the web with all things Google).
Actual open web partially supported by advertisement? I don't think it ever existed. And when it did, it sure as hell didn't require pervasive 24/7 surveillance of everyone.
Advertising on the net doesn't bother me as much as it once did, but I also see less of it. I don't really visit news sites, mostly the ones already funded by my tax money or the subscription I pay for.
The best blogs rarely have ads. 20 years ago any random blog would have ads, not so any more. Search engines, at least DDG have a reasonable ad policy, even though I have reported a large number of questionable ads. Google is a little useless, because actual result drown in ads for some searches.
I think contextual ads should be preferred over those based on a users past behaviour online. It's really only news sites and social media that needs the ads based on tracking users.
Tracking me is not.
Are we talking ad-tech, or tracking-tech?