Poorly thought out and family subscription to YouTube premium in Vietnam is $6/month USD. Google is just going to pull a different lever to compensate, like just displaying more shorter ads per session.
That’s not bad but better would be to require a default of chronological order for showing content with an option for “discover” other content but only on demand.
I've often wondered whether the world would be better without ads. The incentive to create services (especially in social media) that strive to addict their users feels toxic to society. Often, it feels uncertain whether these services are providing actual value, and I suspect that whether a user would pay for a service in lieu of watching ads is incidentally a good barometer for whether real value is present.
Don't get me wrong, I'm well aware this is impractical. But it's fun to think about sometimes.
- Improved incentive for the IT and medias industry. Users and viewers are the customers again.
- Removal of the culture of normalized lying that infects everyone to the point people don't see it anymore.
- Natural selection of product by actually asking people for money. Can't pay 2 euros / month for facebook? It deserves to die.
- Redirection of resources from marketing to useful things. Billions going back to R&D, quality control, etc.
- Brand forced to rely on quality and word of mouth again. No more temporary product trick. No more "one month brand lifetime" hack. No more "PR will save this disaster".
- Improved skin in the game. And you will see less reputation-damaging behavior because of this. Think twice about doing A/B testing, fake sales, use too many notifications. You need those saavy power users to spread the word now.
- Disappearance of old and new artificial social norms solely created by marketing firms to sell stuff that parasites our reality. No need for everybody to look the same, no need for diamonds for engagement rings, no "whole white family having breakfirst in a big house and everything is clean and they are all happy and hot" to sell coffee, no "big red guy with a beard" created by coca cola.
- Getting back on specs. You can't sell perfume and cars on an vague idea anymore.
- Children won't get conditioned from a young age to want stuff they don't need, think ideas they don't really have, and adopt behaviors that are harmful for them just so that a marketer can get 3% more engagement.
- Creating massive volume of bad content will not be a successful strategies anymore, since it's not about displaying ads. So content quality go up.
- Streets get nicer, with no more ads display. Clothes as well, with no more big logo making you look like a billboard.
- No more ads in your mail box! And you can redirect the money from the gov marketing budget to actually find email spammers as well.
- Removal of a huge means of accumulation and centralization of power. Right now, it's pay to win, and the more money you have, the more you can run ads, the more you can sell. Which means a small local shop cannot easily compete with a big one. But without ads, it's actually close to its own clients, and has an advantage to get their attention organically.
- People get back some part of their attention span.
The benefits are not superficial; they are immense!
Ads are a plague on our societies.
Evolving as humans requires us to find a way to ban them.
I doubt I will see it in my lifestyle, but we need to get rid of this parasite if we want to go to the next level.
You're dead right, it would be the one killer move to remove a lot of perverse incentives, fix the internet, possibly even social media, and all live in a happier world. The whole economy would stop paying the ad tax to Google and Meta.
And it's not that impractical : just make a consumer-run search engine for products and services.
Not a great regulatory move, in my opinion. But I really wish ad companies would implement this rule across the board. If you can't sell me on your ad in 5 seconds, it's unlikely you can sell me on your product in 15 or 30 seconds. And if your product is of any interest to me whatsoever, I'm happy to continue watching the ad. I sit through movie trailers and tech ads all the time, even with an option to skip. But I have no use for seeing the entire Dawn dish soap's aw-shucks, faux-folksy ad play out. In five seconds, you can remind me that dawn exists, fulfilling the main purpose of the ad, and I can get on with the content I'm actually interested in.
Yeah. I'm happy to watch ads if I'm interested in the product. Sometimes i even want to rewind to see a part i missed but youtube doesnt let me. No idea why
When it comes up the 10th time though there’s no way I’ll be watching the film it advertises, no matter how much I might have done after the first time.
> Not a great regulatory move, in my opinion.
> But I really wish ad companies would implement this rule across the board.
You don't see how these are conflicting viewpoints? What do you think would compel a company to act in some way that is not in line with its short term financial interests? Sheer luck?
Requiring skip is good, but the part about focusing on illegal ads is better. If all ads were for soda, cars, and other legitimate products, that would be one thing, but so many ads are for straight up scams these days.
Marketing for cars and soda isn't that far off from actual scams. Ads are a big part of why (especially American) car and food culture is so toxic. The ad-driven demand for sugary drinks and large, impractical, environmentally unconscientious cars has almost certainly caused more death and misery than many actual scams.
I just uninstalled a game from my mobile phone this morning that had heavy ad usage. It was interesting to note the different ad display strategies. From least to most annoying:
- display a static ad, have the "x" to close appear soon (3-10 seconds)
- display an animated ad, have the "x" to close appear soon (3-10 seconds)
- display a static ad, have the "x" to close appear after 20-30 seconds
- display an animated ad, have the "x" to close appear after 20-30 seconds
- display several ads in succession, each short, but it automatically proceeds to the next; the net time after which the "x" to close appears after 20-30 seconds
- display several ads in succession, each lasts for 3-10 seconds but you have to click on an "x" to close each one before the next one appears
I live in the USA. The well-established consumer product brands (Clorox, McDonalds, etc.) almost all had short ads that were done in 3-5 seconds. The longest ads were for obscure games or websites, or for Temu, and they appeared over and over again, making me hate them with a flaming passion. The several-ads-in-succession were usually British newspaper websites (WHY???? I don't live there) or celebrity-interest websites (I have no interest in these).
It seems like the monkey's-paw curse for this kind of legislation is to show several ads in a row, each allowing you to skip them after 5 seconds.
Some time ago, Google AdMob started using a new format ads - two videos, one immediately after another, unskippable for the first 60s, sometimes more. You know how they called them? "High-engagement ads".
On some level, it's hilarious.
There's also the tactic where the layout of the page/app reflows after a second or two, changing where the ads are. It drives me up the wall. Go to tap on a button, SURPRISE, an ad popped in where the button used to be 10ms before you touched the screen and now you're forced into some company's site whether you wanted to see it or not.
And just so we're attacking the problem from both sides: the dark pattern on the advertisers side is the inability to easily opt out of in-app ads when advertising on Google's display network. For the reasons you listed, in-app ads generate an incredible amount of low quality clicks, yet Google makes it very hard to exclude yourself from that ad inventory.
The only way I've found to do it so far is to manually exclude yourself from every individual app category. IIRC there are over a hundred categories and you need to manually go through and select every category to exclude your ads from mobile apps.
> It seems like the monkey's-paw curse for this kind of legislation is to show several ads in a row, each allowing you to skip them after 5 seconds.
We should just ban all online ads then. I honestly think we would be better off. Yes, some things that used to be completely free would start costing a little bit, but I don't think we would lose much of value, really. And there would still be lots of different ways that consumers could discover goods and services if we didn't have online ads, it would just be via directories where consumers could go and search for products instead of consumers being bombarded with information noise all the time.
The freemium ad-revenue model is a local maximum which results in a whole lot of shittiness.
My most favorite annoying thing about ads is the 'x' close button. They make it very small almost impossible to be perfect. I end up clicking the ads 50% of the times. Been running PiHole at home network for almost 8yrs happily. The ads come into play only when I am traveling.
For people with iPhones I recommend an "Apple Arcade" subscription, especially if you have kids. All games included in Arcade are ad free. They have a big enough collection.
My favorite mobile game ad was for Jeep, which was 3 seconds of the word JEEP on a black background. My wife and I laugh about it, but we remember it. It was actually really effective in that regard.
My second favorite was for some pirate game, but the ads were basically the setup for an adult movie, with tons of hammy overacting. I thought they were so funny, I was really sad when they stopped.
I not too long ago received an ad on YouTube that was an entire episode of the UK reality TV program 'Made In Chelsea'. I think it was skippable but I couldn't believe that a) someone set up an ad campaign to do this, and b) YouTube didn't detect it.
I always wondered about traditional television. People like my dad still have it. It still has a shitload of ads. They're unskippable. People don't really seam to care about those for some reason though.
Pet peeve: Skip/close button appears after a few seconds - bht it only leads to another view whose close button is hidden for a few seconds too, and sometimes in a different corner.
Interesting coming from a developing nation. One thing I've always thought is, it may be vible to replace ad-funded free services with paid services in developed nations where residents may be able to afford it, but developing nations may be much more reliant on such free services and could get priced out.
117 comments
[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 76.7 ms ] threadDon't get me wrong, I'm well aware this is impractical. But it's fun to think about sometimes.
- Improved incentive for the IT and medias industry. Users and viewers are the customers again.
- Removal of the culture of normalized lying that infects everyone to the point people don't see it anymore.
- Natural selection of product by actually asking people for money. Can't pay 2 euros / month for facebook? It deserves to die.
- Redirection of resources from marketing to useful things. Billions going back to R&D, quality control, etc.
- Brand forced to rely on quality and word of mouth again. No more temporary product trick. No more "one month brand lifetime" hack. No more "PR will save this disaster".
- Improved skin in the game. And you will see less reputation-damaging behavior because of this. Think twice about doing A/B testing, fake sales, use too many notifications. You need those saavy power users to spread the word now.
- Disappearance of old and new artificial social norms solely created by marketing firms to sell stuff that parasites our reality. No need for everybody to look the same, no need for diamonds for engagement rings, no "whole white family having breakfirst in a big house and everything is clean and they are all happy and hot" to sell coffee, no "big red guy with a beard" created by coca cola.
- Getting back on specs. You can't sell perfume and cars on an vague idea anymore.
- Children won't get conditioned from a young age to want stuff they don't need, think ideas they don't really have, and adopt behaviors that are harmful for them just so that a marketer can get 3% more engagement.
- Creating massive volume of bad content will not be a successful strategies anymore, since it's not about displaying ads. So content quality go up.
- Streets get nicer, with no more ads display. Clothes as well, with no more big logo making you look like a billboard.
- No more ads in your mail box! And you can redirect the money from the gov marketing budget to actually find email spammers as well.
- Removal of a huge means of accumulation and centralization of power. Right now, it's pay to win, and the more money you have, the more you can run ads, the more you can sell. Which means a small local shop cannot easily compete with a big one. But without ads, it's actually close to its own clients, and has an advantage to get their attention organically.
- People get back some part of their attention span.
The benefits are not superficial; they are immense!
Ads are a plague on our societies.
Evolving as humans requires us to find a way to ban them.
I doubt I will see it in my lifestyle, but we need to get rid of this parasite if we want to go to the next level.
And it's not that impractical : just make a consumer-run search engine for products and services.
When it comes up the 10th time though there’s no way I’ll be watching the film it advertises, no matter how much I might have done after the first time.
You don't see how these are conflicting viewpoints? What do you think would compel a company to act in some way that is not in line with its short term financial interests? Sheer luck?
- Vietnam get 50 % tariffs
- Change the ban
- Easy peasy for Tech bros.
- display a static ad, have the "x" to close appear soon (3-10 seconds)
- display an animated ad, have the "x" to close appear soon (3-10 seconds)
- display a static ad, have the "x" to close appear after 20-30 seconds
- display an animated ad, have the "x" to close appear after 20-30 seconds
- display several ads in succession, each short, but it automatically proceeds to the next; the net time after which the "x" to close appears after 20-30 seconds
- display several ads in succession, each lasts for 3-10 seconds but you have to click on an "x" to close each one before the next one appears
I live in the USA. The well-established consumer product brands (Clorox, McDonalds, etc.) almost all had short ads that were done in 3-5 seconds. The longest ads were for obscure games or websites, or for Temu, and they appeared over and over again, making me hate them with a flaming passion. The several-ads-in-succession were usually British newspaper websites (WHY???? I don't live there) or celebrity-interest websites (I have no interest in these).
It seems like the monkey's-paw curse for this kind of legislation is to show several ads in a row, each allowing you to skip them after 5 seconds.
The only way I've found to do it so far is to manually exclude yourself from every individual app category. IIRC there are over a hundred categories and you need to manually go through and select every category to exclude your ads from mobile apps.
We should just ban all online ads then. I honestly think we would be better off. Yes, some things that used to be completely free would start costing a little bit, but I don't think we would lose much of value, really. And there would still be lots of different ways that consumers could discover goods and services if we didn't have online ads, it would just be via directories where consumers could go and search for products instead of consumers being bombarded with information noise all the time.
The freemium ad-revenue model is a local maximum which results in a whole lot of shittiness.
My second favorite was for some pirate game, but the ads were basically the setup for an adult movie, with tons of hammy overacting. I thought they were so funny, I was really sad when they stopped.
You can rearrange the deck chairs, sure, but more ads might be more annoying than fewer longer ones.