And let's call the advertising business model what it is: a get rich quick scheme. Undercut the straight up competitors that charge for their product by fooling consumers into thinking you're offering what the other guy is offering, but for free. Come on, who could turn down that? Or make something "valuable" that no one is willing to pay for (WTF?), so again make it appear free.
Only the truth is it isn't free. We all pay in the end. The lunch is not only not free, it's costing us more and its loaded with toxic crap.
Admittedly I suck as a writer, but ever time I make my very strong case that advertising may be the primary evil of internet[1], I almost invariably receive a great number of silent downvotes. Upton Sinclair explains why:
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
This is not quite as straightforward, though. One advantage of our ad supported internet is that quality of access to ad-supported services varies very little with one's wealth. A teenager in Mexico (or India, or... you get the idea) with a low end smartphone, coffee shop wi-fi and no credit card gets the exact same Google, Youtube and Facebook services than a Silicon Valley VC with a Mac Book Pro and a huge bank account.
Now, I am not saying I like the surveillance economy, and I don't, by any means, enjoy ads. I also think we are risking a lot by the erosion of privacy as a value in our societies in the name of ad targeting. But I thought I'd point out there are social ills associated with pay services as well.
Freemium is another option, but it quickly becomes about finding a balance between providing a good enough free service that people want to use and thus promote it, and yet crappy enough that enough will upgrade to the pay version.
Note: My paycheck or the future of my current workplace does not depend on ads ;)
Imagine if instead of libraries we made literature accessible to everyone by inserting ads, including "native ads" and product placements in the stories! Egads!
You know what's more important than "quality of access"? Quality content and quality services. The perverse incentives of the ad-supported model results in great quantities of poor if not negative quality crap. The kind of stuff that manipulates and exploits the very people you are speaking up for, those who can least afford it.
Clearly there are other models. It's up to us, the technologists, the so-called innovators. Where are our innovative powers to come up with alternate busniness models? Where are our backbones to stand up against selling out the internet so that we can get rich quick?
"The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks."
– Jeff Hammerbacher, fmr. Manager of Facebook Data Team, founder of Cloudera
We still have the free 'libraries of the internet'. Wikipedia (charity model), and state-provided news sources (like national broadcaster ABC in Aus) do exist and are fairly popular sites.
But we still need a press that's independent from the govt, and we can't expect everyone to run all websites as a charity.
As to Mexico, language barriers are still a thing.
However, the real cost is the content that's not created. If an author is paid by the book then they tend to be of reasonable length. When paid by the page, you get content that never really ends. Compare MMO's with single player games and generally MMO's last much longer, but are less fun while your playing.
Advertising driven content is similarly insidious. You don't want people to spend a lot of time reading or thinking, just click click click.
Most of the platforms that I mentioned are not language specific. It is trivial to use Google, Youtube or FB in Spanish, and the internet has ample content in Spanish, even in U.S. owned services (how could there not be, with 470 million speakers?).
Also, sure, some content works better when each copy is paid. But my point is that a lot of the software platforms themselves: a) seem to be doing quite well on ad revenue, b) wouldn't necessarily be better for most people if they charged fees instead. Again, this applies to software services (search engines, email servers, social networks), more so than produced content itself (books, movies, games). As far as I know, the only real contender for traditional sales in the content space is crowdfunding[1].
News (investigative journalism in particular) is an interesting third case, where it is not clear whether ad supported or subscription are viable at all long term.
[1] Anecdotally, some of my favorite games and comics are crowdfunded, one of my favorite "tv" shows, but none of my favorite movies or books. Even though crowdfunding a book should not be expensive at all.
I don't think all ads are bad- advertisement, at its basic core is letting people know about a product or service that you provide. This can be informative, educational, and even entertaining.
What IS bad, especially with respect to the 'net is the sheer volume, hostility, low quality, and threat to our safety that our current methods of advertising (ab)use. Why should an article on WSJ be megabytes of download? Why is every action I perform with default settings on public sites being tracked with an efficiency and persistence governments could only dream of? Why can't I opt out globally? Because of the hostility of the environment I think it is acceptable, fair, even responsible to do everything in our power to regain control of our identity and information.
The part everyone needs to figure out is, how can I find out about quality products and services in a way that is meaningful and safe. Maybe it is simply to do everything we can to make ads distasteful and rely on word of mouth and hunting for things when we need them, but there's probably a balance in there somewhere.
As someone who tangentially works in the industry, you couldn't be more wrong. Ads literally subsidize the vast majority of content you consume on the internet. More importantly, ads subsidize and promote innovation. Without ads, we wouldn't have sites like youtube, facebook, reddit or pretty much every website that doesn't rely on donations (wikipedia, etc).
It's interesting just how much of a disconnect young people have with this topic (in my experience, older people are skeptical of all the free content on the 'net. My grandmother thought she was going to get a bill from youtube for watching so many videos and not having to pay anything up front). Perhaps it's one of the reasons why they call our generation "the entitled generation". We've always had free content on the internet so we don't appreciate or understand how the people who create that content get paid.
No no no. Your grandmother grew up with free media: radio and television have always been free and ad-supported. In fact, the first thing that likely pissed her off was getting ads on her cable channels, because the "rich" folks paid for cable, which was ad-free (except, I believe, the broadcast channel, but we didn't have it so I'm not sure).
Internet advertising used to be done far less creepily. For example, you can do context-advertising: show me an ad for surfboards when I'm reading about surfing. I have no problem with that. You can guess that I'm interested in surfing if I'm reading the article. You don't need my shopping history for that.
I'd be totally OK with all that subsidy going away if it meant we didn't have to deal with ads anymore. We'll figure it out. People would put more effort into peer-to-peer sharing networks if it weren't for the fact that ad-subsidized "free" services based on giant datacenters are so good at undercutting them.
You're missing the point, perhaps missing the scale. You don't understand just how vital ads are to the internet.
Content itself wouldn't exist for you to view. There would be very little (nothing at all) for you to P2P. The internet would essentially be the IRC. People don't write in-depth articles for the hell of it. They expect to get paid.
Most of what I'm interested in using the internet for worked just fine before ads came along: better, in some cases, because volunteer efforts didn't have to compete with advertising budgets.
Without ads we would have developed alternative revenue streams or different styles of architecture which don't place all of the costs and power in the lap of centralised organisations. Ads have crippled innovation on the Internet, not promoted it.
> Ads have crippled innovation on the Internet, not promoted it.
The internet itself wouldn't even exist without ads. So your premise is wrong. Ads are the biggest driver of innovation on the internet right now. Inherently so. Because people want to get paid so they get more and more creative. Everything from youtube videos to web content, to science articles. They all flourish and exist because of ads, not because of your make believe hypothetical solution. You know, the one that is still not invented, nor have you even explained it. If such a solution was possible, we'd be using that instead. Until then, let's stick to reality, thanks.
"The internet itself wouldn't even exist without ads. So your premise is wrong"
This statement is so laughably and obviously wrong to anyone that is aware of the history of the Internet, or has the abilitiy to think logically.
"Ads are the biggest driver of innovation on the internet right now. Inherently so"
That is completely irrelevant to whether or not the Internet would exist and be good if Ads didn't exist.
"Because people want to get paid so they get more and more creative"
You don't seem to be aware of the difference between "getting paid" and "getting paid by using ads"
"Everything from youtube videos to web content, to science articles. They all flourish and exist because of ads"
Again, this is laughably wrong to anyone with the capability of thinking.
"your make believe hypothetical solution" - You mean, "pay for content". Yay, I know that's crazy! The reason that we don't have good ways to pay for content, is because Ads have made that incredibly difficult, because Ads give the illusion that you're getting something for free. How do you compete with that? You can't. Because Ads are here, and they're ruining the Internet, and they're ruining any innovation that would occur in non-Ad payment methods.
The internet itself wouldn't even exist without ads.
I hope you are joking, or knowingly exaggerating. The internet was around waaaayyyyy before ads. Even when hte internet became a conduit for commerce, the first ads were just banners that advertisers bought on a (usually) related web page. Kind of like newspapers.
Then Google decided that they would show ads based on what people were looking for. Rather than guessing my interests because I'm on the West Marine web page, they will show me ads related to my search inquiry. Starts to get a little creepy, but as long as they don't save my queries it's probably ok.
I suspect you are being downvoted because you are wrong ("all ads are bad" is a pretty extreme position. There are numerous examples I can think of where they are pretty useful. For example I'm interested if a band I'm listening to is coming to town, etc etc..)
Additionally your points are badly argued. I can't follow your argument that advertising is a get rich scheme at all. You seem to be arguing that advertising makes people offer dodgy business models, but the two don't seem to relate at all. For example one area where buyer hostile business models is very common is in enterprise software, and those sales rely very little on advertising and instead on relationships.
In summary, your complaints about being downvoted seem unjustified.
I haven't finished reading all the posts you've referenced to but it seems like an interesting idea. My only concern is that you're not(?) suggesting an alternative for creating awareness on superior products? Ads at least gives the underdog a small chance. But I agree with the social "tax" we pay for "journalists" shoving ads down our throat and call it news.
You realize you are a hypocrite for saying this, right? You cannot on one hand say all ads are bad, and be an advertiser yourself without being a hypocrite. This is probably what leads to the down votes.
My post keeps fluctuating too, it's a very controversial subject. Although I wish the downvoters would also leave a reply - it's the Internet, have your say.
The thing is though: What can they reply with? "Do you feel you deserve the content for free?" is the only argument I ever hear, and that is so old and tired, it's not funny.
I'd be interested in hearing/discussing a solid pro-ad argument, but I've yet to find one.
> a solid pro-ad argument, but I've yet to find one.
That's because there is no argument to be had. Ads subsidize the vast majority of content on the internet, full stop. Just as they did TV stations before cable. That content wasn't free, those ad companies paid for their ad spots, which paid for those television shows. The same is true for the internet, without ads, the internet would look very, very different. Without ads, there would be no innovation, and a hell of a lot less content, 80% or more less. We're talking going back to the mid 1990s, and not in a good way.
So I guess if that's your ideal internet, sure, that's not an argument for ads. But for me, I prefer the current internet. I like my websites like reddit, facebook and youtube. I like having the news at my fingertips. I like being able to watch any TV show I want.
It's a butterfly effect on a massive scale - you remove ads from the equation, the majority of what we know as the internet goes with it because they're directly responsible for the bulk of the innovation.
> ads subsidize the vast majority of content on the internet, full stop
And most of that content is bullshit. I wouldn't miss most of the ad-based sites. Most of the "innovation" is bullshit. I disagree that we'd go back to the mid-90's setup, but I'd even prefer that to what it is today.
The internet did just fine before ads, and it'd do just fine if they disappeared. I stand by my statement of there being no solid pro-ad argument.
I'm not saying you can't like that content, nor support it if you want. I'm not even sure where you got that from. I'm saying that I'm not going to support it. I don't get what your comment it supposed to address?
> It's a butterfly effect on a massive scale - you remove ads from the equation, the majority of what we know as the internet goes with it because they're directly responsible for the bulk of the innovation.
And I say, bring it on. Majority of the Internet is crap. It'll be better to see it go. Most content that's actually valuable is treated either as a loss leader or simply cost to be covered from external sources. The rest can be covered with donations. People who want to share something useful will share something useful. What we will get rid of is all those poor attempts at making a quick buck off people.
I don't use it either. The point is - I don't buy the "Internet will die without ads" argument. What will die is the (what I consider) crap part. So I say, let it die.
There are myriad of other choices than just "ads like now" or "no ads". There are also other revenue streams, other forms of advertising, other forms of commerce. The way you picture the situation has nothing to do with reality of choices.
Here is one - the alternative to ads everyone proposes is people pay for their content directly. Except there are catastrophic barriers to entry for such a business model:
* You need to bind real world money to online browsing, somehow. This means you need some kind of blunt "want to see the content? Pay X money, here are paypal and CC info links".
* People who do not have access to these tools - there is still a sizable chunk of America without a bank account, and often without access to credit cards - are thus cutoff from most web services.
* The Internet was predominantly built on principles of no barrier information exchange. Putting a paywall up is implicitly putting up a barrier to knowledge, which has deeper effects than just bottom lines on culture.
I would absolutely a lot of sites currently ignoring monetiziation and just using ads as a surrogate are making a mistake. I also recognize advertising is predatory and while I am arguing ads open up the Internet to the poor advertising also disproportionately harms the poor by manipulating them into making superfluous purchases they cannot afford.
But I also cannot condone a paywalled experience where you need to pay $3 to watch youtube, or $2 a month for Facebook, or $1 a month to use Twitter. Rent seeking is one of the great threats to civilization in our current era and the fundamental is that all these websites build value off of their exclusivity guaranteed by the state, thus making them the ultimate renteers of the services they offer because by definition nobody else can compete with them at being youtube or facebook or twitter - you can just make alternative products meant to fill the same niche. Its like using hand soap as a substitute for bar soap because someone owns the rights to physical bars of soap. It can do the same job but its not the same product.
Which is why I am extremely wary of pushing a paywalled Internet as a solution.
Now, there are absolutely alternatives to both models - Wikipedia demonstrates an annual fundraiser model akin to Kickstater or Patreon class crowdfunding to keep things running without ads or paywalls - but at the same time there are tons of comments about how Wikipedia should use ads so people don't have to feel guilty about not contributing when they don't have the money to do so while Wikimedia runs the large banner ads in December. Its the same psychological manipulation as ads, except possibly more benign since its from the project itself.
In a perfect world, all our software endeavors would be paid for before we even start writing them so that the code could be free and the servers run forever without worrying about money, but that model doesn't align with western shareholder-value driven markets at all. The whole point is to make something at fixed cost and extract potentially endless revenue from the monopoly IP gives you. For better or worse, that is how this economy is operating now.
> Here is one - the alternative to ads everyone proposes is people pay for their content directly. Except there are catastrophic barriers to entry for such a business model
Not really. Sure, that's an alternate that people propose, but not one I think will ever take off. And honestly, I don't care. I think the "funded" web has a lot of potential, but it has just ended up squandered.
> ...but that model doesn't align with western shareholder-value driven markets at all.
So? I don't really care about that market. For a long time people made software without being paid. I write free (as in beer and speech) software in my spare time. It's cheaper than ever to run your own server. I don't view the "western shareholder-value" market as valuable to the internet as your making it out to be.
Go to Google right now and search for "passport renew" I see twelve sites which offer the service with no affiliation. All they do is ask for sensitive personal information, charge you an additional fee (on top of the passport fee) and file on your behalf.
Unfortunately I've had friends & family fall for this and similar scams (see also "birth certificate copy" "criminal record" "arrest record" "US travel authorisation" "US visa" et al), and sometimes they don't even file on your behalf (just take your money and run).
These things have been going on YEARS, and I can find numerous examples in seconds with no research. When is Google going to put a stop to this?
PS - It is disturbing how many less computer literate people have no concept of what is an advert and what is a result in a search engine. They'll just click the top thing, which is scary for the above examples.
PPS - Bing is much MUCH worse. More scams, and ads are harder to spot (by design?).
That is pretty terrible. When I tried (http://imgur.com/KCpdOFg), there was a legit content snippet from USPS (with graphic) right before the fold, but the rest of the page was ads. The ads should at least be differentiated more from actual search results; the small "Ad" badge is low contrast and easy to overlook.
I receive identical ads on my Android smartphone connected to a completely different network (4G T-Mobile).
So then I RDC-ed into an Azure instance (2012 R2) I have running in the "West US" zone, identical results.
So if I have a malware infection then it has also infected my phone and a virtual machine running half way across the country. Three networks, three operating systems, same results.
If he does, we have the same malware. I am running Chrome 47 with Adblock on Mac OSX and I can reproduce 100% of the time. I can even reproduce it in an incognito window.
> What do you think are additional things that Google could do?
Certain searches should NOT be monetised at all. When people are looking at entering sensitive personal information (e.g. passport, visa, birth certificate, arrest record, tax filing) it is too dangerous to allow adverts which may contain phishing scams into the mix.
Too many people click ads thinking they're search results.
Do you remember when ads were called out in gray? Now most non-techy people I know seem to click on the first entry (the ad), converting good SEO into a payment to Google.
One thing that I can't prove, but is likely true, is that .gov links are highly undervalued by google rankings. There are many many cases where a government web site provides the most obvious best result, but the fact that they don't do SEO or pay google forces the result too far down the page.
I usually find much more valuable information on non .gov sites just because it's not hidden fifty links deep. The only valid reason (imo) to go to a .gov site is to e-file (or whatever they're calling it) something.
- How much money does Google make from 'bad' ads? (Or how much does Alibaba make from 'counterfeit' product ads? Or Amazon, etc.)
- How many false positives will 'good' actors tolerate before they substantially reduce their spending on your platform?
- How many resources do you put on the problem while making sure you continue to earn a large % of revenue from the 'bad' actors while minimizing negative consequences from your users or regulators?
One point I make is that even if Google makes significant money from bad ads, they still may be incentivized to ensure the experience is not substantially diminished (i.e., there's value to their reputation)
That would fall under the third point. However, they have some big advantages that other companies do not get. For example, if you buy a bad iPhone once, that is really bad for Apple.
Google as a search engine falls under a strange category. On one hand, users put more trust in what they see on Google, making the ad inventory more valuable. On the other hand, if something bad happens they understand it isn't from Google -- something which may not be as clear cut as say, purchasing a defective product off Amazon from a third party seller. (Then there is the revenue that comes for display ads, syndicated search feeds, things that 99% of users had no idea it was Google gaining much of the monetary benefit in the first place.)
On top of all of this a large portion of users who do click on ads on Google have no idea they even clicked an ad in the first place.
I just visited the download.com page for Chrome and it has two ads served by Google. Both ads contain fake download buttons: http://i.imgur.com/eAATuwb.png
> With powerful new protections, we disabled more than 10,000 sites offering unwanted software, and reduced unwanted downloads via Google ads by more than 99 percent.
You can't just call it "malvertising" when it's just not what you wanted...
I just went and downloaded the app from that add and compared the checksum against the APK on my phone of the same version (version 42.0.2, downloaded from Google Play)
They both match. (Both SHA256 checksums are D0B5A524ABFD5AD9D73DFF4DA398423CB7B337797FBA0C039F3A44CAE259B4B0, if you want to verify it from me as well)
So that site is providing an untampered download of firefox, so there is no "malware" anywhere.
In fact that site (HTZapps) seems to be a curated list of "safe" apps available to download, an alternative app store much like fdroid or the amazon app store.
It even follows the Adsense guidelines on their download page (clearly called out advertisements, no more than 3 on the page, only one above the fold, they don't interrupt the flow of the page, etc...)
> You can't just call it "malvertising" when it's just not what you wanted...
It's an advertisement which seeks to get users to download software from an unofficial source. The site does not provide links to the official sources.
The advertiser has paid money to get users to go to their site instead of the official source. The advertiser seeks to misdirect users into visiting their site (which is loaded with ads) instead of the official one. I consider this misdirection to be malicious.
Are they official mirrors? Linked from the official site? If not, I'm not trusting them. Incentives are not aligned properly. Also notice, that the more ads are on such a site, the less trustworthy it is. Do you think CNET / download.com are good places to get your software from?
CNET and download used to be, sure. Maybe not so much anymore. I'm just saying official or not, if the checksum matches - it's not malicious. End of story.
You're correct though in that just randomly picking mirrors is a bad idea. I seriously doubt your average person is utilizing checksums.
> I seriously doubt your average person is utilizing checksums.
Sure, if you're utilizing checksums the way they should be then go ahead. But honestly, even I don't care that much - my ad-heuristic was sufficient so far :). I should probably start using them. I guess it's like with all things crypto - the UX sucks so bad that most people don't bother.
Checksums are particularly handy when the original source is inaccessible. In that sort of situation I can google the file name and verify authenticity easily.
>I'm just saying official or not, if the checksum matches - it's not malicious. End of story.
Well...it would take a particularly craft individual and far too much time, but spoofing a malicious MD5 checksum should be considered plausible. The chances of it being malicious, however, are drastically reduced to such a large degree as that it is safe to consider it negligible. (Note: I only make this claim about MD5 checksums, not SHA-1 or SHA-2. I do not consider MD5 secure in any manner and my trust of SHA-1/SHA-2 isn't exactly high either.)
I provide SHA-1 and MD5 checksums of any software I distribute - if only because I think it is the proper thing to do. Even if most people don't bother checking them (let alone know how to check them)
Their home page looks like what i'd expect an app store's home page to look like, full of apps. There's not even any ads on the home page!
And besides, i don't care what it looks like "at first glance". if you are going to call out someone's website as "malware" then you'd better do your damn homework first.
It's not clear that Google are taking this tack, but, as with content, I feel it's time to introduce the concept to the Web.
Author and publisher accountability.
Advertising providers, and advertising publishers, who forward "bad ads" are given a time-out.
Perhaps 10 minutes for the first instance, but increasing durations for repeat ocurrences. Days, weeks, and months for gratuitious violations.
Ad providers and publishers who find they're being timed out for violating standards are, likely, going to clean up their acts, and find ways to ensure that mistakes don't happen. Including direct vetting of content -- on their own if not by Google.
This is in Google's interest, because, as with others on this thread, the way I fought bad ads in 2015 was to install 60,000 lines plus of /etc/hosts entries, uBlock origin, Ghostery, Privacy Badger, uMatrix, and, for added pleasure, Styleish, to rewrite site CSS myself. On all my own platforms.
And across the desktops of users I administer for.
Virtually all advertising is worthless, targeted advertising doubly so, and Google are in for hurt if they cannot reverse this perception. Meantime they're best positioned to buy themselves a few more years of time.
The other end they could try fixing is to make the results of directed product search -- that activity that happens when people are actively seeking products or services -- not suck as abysmally bad as it does now. Boot camp for vendors of how you should, and shouldn't, write ad copy, take product images, etc., might not be out of the question. Not that Google's to blame for all of this (not in the least) -- Amazon's product search pages are as bad as any I've seen online (Ikea, by contrast, does well, the moreso because they showed me what I wanted to look for at the store).
Or maybe it's time for a true Federated Retail initiative.
Video ads are what made me install AdBlock back. They totally destroy normal use flow and actually make YouTube less useful (unsuitable for playing music in the background, especially at a home party).
Christ people, shut up about adblockers. We get it, you use one. Congratulations, I don't care.
But stop spamming every article related to ads with comments about it. Half of HN readers work in a company powered by ad-tech and some of us actually want discussion about the article in question.
I work in AdTech and find it hilariously ironic that you're finding the constant and unmitigated discussion of adblockers in an article that discusses the constant and unmitigated flow of malvertising and dark patterns.
When ads are good, they connect you to products or services you’re interested in and make it easier to get stuff you want.
They don't make anything easier. If I want something, I will get it, otherwise it's just annoying.
It's great that they are working to make ads safer (which is obviously in their interest as well), but they have already lost me (and I guess many others). Even AdSense ads are obnoxious these days (see [1] for a taste). On mobile many websites are completely unusable because of ads.
Other than Ghostery, I guess my ad blocker is myself. If I see anything that resembles an ad, I avert my eyes.
I suppose something subliminal is at work even so, but I imagine there are many more people like who just avoid even donating their eyeballs to an advertisement.
There is value in advertising: as an information source and a mechanism to establish trust. The former value has been diminished by the internet (which some people call the information age). Advertising is still valuable for establishing trust between the two unknown parties though. Ads in Google work partly because of Google the brand name. Ads on Reddit r/HateSomething will not because, well, you know why. So it's in Google's interest to have good and safe ads (or the perception that they do).
There is value in advertising, but it's a very inefficient way of providing that value, because the incentives aren't aligned with that goal at all.
An independent agency is likely to provide consumers with more accurate advice, AND can more effectively establish trust in decent products. I know Which? exists in the UK, and apparently there's something called Consumer Reports in the US. Is it any good?
There is value in advertising for me when I do not know where to buy something I need, or what I need. That however is almost never true for consumer goods, only tech things we need for science. Heck, just knowing the suppliers puts you in some kind of secret club sometimes.
Trust? TRUST? I'm sorry, but are you saying that if I pay to have a claim that my product is best broadcast into everyone's eyeballs or ears, I'm establishing trust?
Allow me to repost a previous comment of mine[1]:
Whenever a debate about advertising pops up on HN, many people defend it as the necessary way for consumers to find out about good products. Healthy free markets depend on informed consumers, but to think that advertising results in informed consumers makes little sense. I find it strange that a community of logic and science oriented people can hold such a notion.
When communities were small, reputation was king. If your town had two bakers, everyone knew which one was good and which one sucked. No amount of advertising would fool the townsfolk into going to the sucky one.
But this doesn't scale to huge cities with tens, hundreds or thousands of choices. We can't know the reputation of such a wide array, and we can easily be fooled by advertising. Internet-based recommendation systems make the grapevine and reputation scalable. I hope we see more innovation. Yelp is a start, but it fails miserably because if I rate a place 5 because I love very authentic Thai food, and another person rates it a 1 because they are used to Americanized Thai, the restaurant gets a 3 (I'm simplifying for illustrative purposes). In other words, Yelp's rating is useless to both me and the other person.
I'm hoping for a future where recommendation systems and collaborative filtering get so good that they render marketing and advertising useless.
My trust in a product and company is usually inversely proportional to the amount of ads they run. The more one is aggressive with their ads, the less I trust them.
I'm not an outlier, I'm just experienced in using the Internet. Something one gains with time.
People do have similar patterns of thinking in the more familiar real world. Which area in the city you think is safer, and has more honest businesses - the clean one, with occasional company name banner, or that with every square meter of vertical surface taken by an ad?
It doesn't matter what I think; I'm also an outlier. ;)
If we extrapolated the view you're describing to the world at large, someone would have already noticed the general lack of correlation between advertising and revenue and the ad industry would be decades dead. As it stands the correlation is pretty solid and advertising is still profitable to be in and sought after by those who want to grow and shape their brand image.
If you shove it in my face, it's not me discovering what I want, it's you telling me what I want and hoping I go along with it. Gets really fucking old when hundreds of people do it to me every day.
Advertisers: please piss off and let me discover the world on my own.
I search for reviews from people I trust, compare the results, and decide on an option. I can't think of the last time I discovered anything I wanted from advertising with the possible exception of movie trailers.
Even before the point where you look for reviews. Like the moment where you learn a product even exists, and you decide you might want to get it. That's the role advertising fills.
I agree with you on the second part. I block all ads on all computers I use, so they're pretty useless to me, but I still understand why they exist and the job they do.
For example, I turn adblock off for Penny Arcade, since they actually vet the games before they run ads for them.
I've found a few games that were actually pretty fun from there.
I wish there was a way I could opt out of all alcohol and gambling ads. Especially when I'm watching Youtube videos with my child.
And this article doesn't mention malgorithms. I do a bit of stuff around suicide prevention, and it's surprising how often rope sellers turn up after a search for [suicide rope], which feels suboptimal.
>When ads are good, they connect you to products or services you’re interested in and make it easier to get stuff you want.
Dear marketing departments, I do not want relevant ads. I don't like unknown third parties influencing my decisions. If I must see ads, I'd rather see ads for tampons and sports cars and business real estate, because I'm not going to buy those things, so you're not manipulating me.
Please stop perpetuating the lie that you're somehow doing me a favor with "relevant ads", they are exactly what I invest a lot of effort blocking.
You think all ads are irrelevant to you? Do you not use goods and services to raise your quality of life?
Don't tell me "I just google for something if I want to consume it," because truly innovative products and services are outside the realm of general imagination, that's what makes them innovative.
And all the great products and services you learned about from word of mouth? Guess how your friends heard about them...
Advertising is annoying as hell, but it has value.
Actually, yes, all ads are irrelevant to me. I have never purchased an item from an ad, and cut out ads form my life as much as possible. I run multiple layers of software to block advertising on all my devices, refuse to use services/apps that force one to use ads, and will leave a restaurant/airport lounge/other public area if they play content with advertising. I won't read print magazines because they have advertisements.
There is nothing an advertiser could do to convince me to listen to, read, or watch their ad. The hidden/in context ads are somewhat unavoidable (eg ads for YC on HN), but I write code to filter out such things when I see patterns. I'm working on releasing an extension that subs out all brand names on the web.
And yet, somehow, I still manage to live a modern life of plenty. If I need something, I'll look for it. In fact, I find that this leads me to higher quality and more innovative products that better fit my needs - if a service spreads through advertising, that's very good evidence that it's both shitty and not targeted at me. If your memory is polluted by advertising, you'll tend to reach for inferior products first. Advertising has negative value for the individual and the ecosystem, because companies compete on marketing and not on product.
>And yet, somehow, I still manage to live a modern life of plenty.
This lifestyle works for you precisely because the vast majority of the rest of the market does not live this way. Capitalist economies (where the consumers are individuals rather than one large buyer like the state) require products and services to get public awareness. The best way to achieve public awareness is through paid for mass communication.
It's the easiest (not the best, IMO) way for companies to reach out to a broad market right now, because consumers as a whole haven't yet figured out that advertising is a negative quality signal and are currently terrible at controlling their information diet. But there are growing segments of the population that are getting better at reading healthy just the same as there's a growing segment concerned about eating healthy.
As more information-savvy and time-sensitive (read: higher-income) consumers reject advertising, companies seeking to target them will have to find alternate methods of reaching out to them. If information distribution continues to be disintermediated, then they might find that the only way to do that is by focusing on building things people legitimately want to use and tell their peers about. Traditional advertising will become even more a ghetto than it already is, and will primarily target low-value consumers.
Public awareness != spamming people with ads till their eyes bleed or manipulating people into buying things they don't need.
I'm pretty sure one could actually reduce your assertion to "capitalist economies require classes of products and services to get public awareness". I don't need to be constantly made aware of a particular brand of juice or a particular barber shop. It's enough I learn that there are things like "juices" and "barber shops". I'll find some when I need them.
Not speaking for the parent, but I have a similar feeling.
Imagine you are thinking about buying a car. You think about your needs, your budget, the different costs involved, the technical choices etc.
You are then bombed with very relevant ads for some car X that is suitable for your needs.
From that point, if you decide to go on searching for the best car matching your needs, you'll be comparing the models to the X car, and your vision will be tinted every time you see it in the results.
Perhaps that X car is actually the one that fits your needs the best. But until you make a choice you'll have to make an effort to discard all the promotion and overselling surrounding X. You'll be spending energy to ignore information thrown at you because you need to think at it independantly to compare with the other choices.
In this sense, I also feel relevant ads are pollution
I like "relevant" ads because they're almost always for something I just bought. "Oh, you got a new lens for your camera? How about buying the exact same lens again, from Amazon!"
This is great because it makes sure most of the ads I see are not offensive and will have no effect on my life.
That is true, but "raising public awareness" is just a very small part of what modern advertising does. For products and services to be successful, one just has to place information about their availability accessible somewhere where people will look.
What it absolutely doesn't require is pushing information. If I need a product or service, I'll look it up. As for potentially useful services I don't even know they exist, I'll discover them when I'm bored and start browsing ad catalogues. Everything that I actually need I'll learn from friends and family anyway (aka. word-of-mouth).
Here is where advertisement stops being useful and starts being malicious: the very core principle of "creating a need". The idea that you need to create a need in customer that they didn't have before. This is wrong, manipulative and malicious. I don't need you to hack my life like this and profit off it. I can discover the world on my own.
"Successful" is such a poorly defined qualifier it makes your statement meaningless. I cannot argue against it, it would be like punching jelly.
Please define it concisely and accurately, using a quantifiable metric and no examples, so that I may either provide counter-examples to your statement or question the societal relevance of the metric you choose.
What they still don't do, as far as I can tell, is make it possible to report malware type ads.
On a clean system I was watching stuff on youtube and got some random malware ad being served up (not a video pre-roll ad, one of the banners that shows up in the video area). It was the typical "Drivers are out of date" type bullshit.
I spent about 20 minutes trying to report that it was malicious,but couldn't find out how to do it. Clicking on the "Ad by Google" link just took me to a random Adsense marketing type page.
Since I've installed uBlock Origin browsing the web is much more pleasing. I used to use AdBlock Plus but it ate a lot of RAM. Occasionally I might also turn JS off, although that sounds like an overkill and some sites don't work at all. I don't mind ads in general but profiling really gets under my skin. You search one thing on Google and then you're barraged by relevant ads all over the web. Thanks but no thanks. I liked the old days when ads were relevant to the content of the site I was visiting.
Not surprised one bit to see most the hacker news comments are negative. But this is seriously impressive. They doing an impressive job to filter hundreds of millions of ads. And they are also taking a stand against stuff that isn't even illegal. Blocking BS alternative medicines, and supplements, for instance. I'm upset when I see ads for "airborne" on TV or in magazines.
"In 2015, we stepped up our efforts to fight phishing sites, blocking nearly 7,000 sites as a result." One of the 7000 "phishing sites" they blocked was a page on my personal site (http://xpda.com/f18ebay/) that has been there more than 10 years and has nothing to do with phishing. It's not an important or high-traffic page, but it was irritating nonetheless to be falsely accused by Google and, as a result, a several other web institutions.
I know very little of how the ad business work, but everything on that blog seemed like "after the fact". Don't they look at the ad first then and approve it?
They make it sound like they maybe run the ad through some automated tests and then just send it out.
A decent human approver of ads would never approve an ad that looks like a big green button that says "Download now".
"Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Taboola are paying the owner of Adblock Plus to unblock ads on their websites at a fee of "30% of the additional ad revenues" they would have made were ads unblocked."
I also hate the heckling coming with ads unrelated to the site content. It's another significant load on my attention. If it was related to the site content, it might even be helpful.
What is up with the popup ads, by the way? I've been seeing them a lot lately when I enable JS, even on my bank's site.
They were, in the past, tried with failure and all major browsers got a built-in blocker.
http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/ (transparent and no overhead, works on Android too!)
https://www.eff.org/privacybadger
https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock (a handful of websites will detect it - you can then switch to visual blocking for that domain to get around it, for FF: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/ublock-origin... )
https://noscript.net/ (overkill for some, a lot of hand tweaking required to keep the Internet working)
Result: 0 (zero) explicit ads
Long term result: more money being poured into covert marketing