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People in Silicon Valley Don’t Click on Ads

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Re: People in Silicon Valley Don’t Click on Ads

#81
post #76
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Paying $0.001-$.01 to bypass a paywall is arguably a very low barrier. Allowance for children, poor people, etc would be needed, of course. Maybe amusing image-mapping captchas would be workable. That could even be an income stream, Mechanical Turk style.

The cost is just not money, but also time. It takes some time to fill in payment information, even if only a minute, and even if only once per website.

Consider the huge ecosystem that has developed for serving ads. Each advertiser need not make arrangements with each site owner.

Re: People in Silicon Valley Don’t Click on Ads

#82
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Paying $0.001-$.01 to bypass a paywall is arguably a very low barrier. Allowance for children, poor people, etc would be needed, of course. Maybe amusing image-mapping captchas would be workable. That could even be an income stream, Mechanical Turk style.

Paywalls also have a negative effect in the linkability of the Web. If I suggest you to go to some page, and you have to pay for it, then independently if the price, I have a much higher responsibility for the content actually being relevant for you.

As it is now, whenever you recommend pages that host third-party ads, you may be pointing people at malware.

Re: People in Silicon Valley Don’t Click on Ads

#83

I'm glad there is real data on this. I kept explaining to people that our email and social habits in SV are a complete outlier vs. the rest of the world.

So, before knowing there was reliable data, you constantly made unfounded claims?

You made a good guess. Is that something to brag about? An opinion that you feel the need to "constantly explain to people" borders on ranting... (an embarassing past-time of my own)

Re: People in Silicon Valley Don’t Click on Ads

#84

"Silicon Valley people don’t click on ads... Similarly, they appear not to be commenting or liking posts as frequently" The most successful drug dealers don't use their own stuff, I hear. Edit: I think I sounded a little snarky here. To be clear, I'm a huge fan of silicon valley. But I thought the analogy was humorous and thought provoking so I thought I'd share.

On that note, does anyone know anything about the impact of internet use in drug addiction (and crime)? I have a very speculative hypothesis that internet (social networks, porn, etc) might work as a super-crack, competing with (and crowding out) other addictions because it's cheap, abundant, and instant.

Same effect, but different mechanism (and causal route):

http://www.stuartmcmillen.com/comics_en/rat-park/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park

Re: People in Silicon Valley Don’t Click on Ads

#85
post #53
post #18

I think this has a large effect on opinions in an often revisited internet topic "moving away from ads". Whenever a service starts to offer a paid alternative, or people get on the topic of tracking, or micropayments comes up, it's always struck me that commenters seem used to effectively free content and seem to just ignore that there are people subsidizing their internet usage by clicking on ads comparatively all t…

> An internet where we pay for it instead of it being supported by user targeted ads isn't going to be covered by paying 10 cents per article you really liked. There's Google Contributer, which lets you pay several pennies per article rather than see ads. It could work if existing ad networks let you opt out of ads and cover the display impressions. Edit: It also shows you pictures of cats instead of ads - http://i.i…

Google is the biggest ad network but still does not run most of the ads you actually see on any given webpage. The price is a lot higher if you really want to subsidize everything.

Re: People in Silicon Valley Don’t Click on Ads

#86

"Silicon Valley people don’t click on ads... Similarly, they appear not to be commenting or liking posts as frequently" The most successful drug dealers don't use their own stuff, I hear. Edit: I think I sounded a little snarky here. To be clear, I'm a huge fan of silicon valley. But I thought the analogy was humorous and thought provoking so I thought I'd share.

On that note, does anyone know anything about the impact of internet use in drug addiction (and crime)? I have a very speculative hypothesis that internet (social networks, porn, etc) might work as a super-crack, competing with (and crowding out) other addictions because it's cheap, abundant, and instant.

Non-substance addictions (including internet use) lack the physical dependence created by drugs like cocaine. So, it would be hard to compare them to "super-crack".

I could certainly see how, for example, repeatedly checking your phone could mirror the behavioral aspect of smoking cigarettes. However, losing your phone won't cause withdrawal symptoms like headache, nausea, or fatigue.

Also, I'd agree that social behavior being focused around online interaction could potentially serve as a deterrent (or at least distraction) from drug use / crime. Based on Todd Kendall's paper [Pornography, Rape, and the Internet](http://idei.fr/sites/default/files/medias/doc/conf/sic/paper...), porn has been responsible in some part for the decreasing rate of rape, but not other crimes. I can't find much research on non-rape crime being affected by internet use, but the St. Helena TV study by Tony Charlton did show that aggressiveness in children was reduced by the introduction of TV. Obviously TV is far less interactive than web-browsing, but it's the most similar study I can find. :P

Re: People in Silicon Valley Don’t Click on Ads

#87

"Silicon Valley people don’t click on ads... Similarly, they appear not to be commenting or liking posts as frequently" The most successful drug dealers don't use their own stuff, I hear. Edit: I think I sounded a little snarky here. To be clear, I'm a huge fan of silicon valley. But I thought the analogy was humorous and thought provoking so I thought I'd share.

On that note, does anyone know anything about the impact of internet use in drug addiction (and crime)? I have a very speculative hypothesis that internet (social networks, porn, etc) might work as a super-crack, competing with (and crowding out) other addictions because it's cheap, abundant, and instant.

Addictions can be multiplied, cross addiction is common. Substance abuse and internet addiction can go hand in hand.

Re: People in Silicon Valley Don’t Click on Ads

#88

"Silicon Valley people don’t click on ads... Similarly, they appear not to be commenting or liking posts as frequently" The most successful drug dealers don't use their own stuff, I hear. Edit: I think I sounded a little snarky here. To be clear, I'm a huge fan of silicon valley. But I thought the analogy was humorous and thought provoking so I thought I'd share.

I find your edit extremely disappointing. The fact that you need to automatically defend yourself against the accusation of not liking Silicon Valley is telling of a diffuse perception of how one should pose one's opinion to please the audience. Horrid.

Re: People in Silicon Valley Don’t Click on Ads

#90
post #18

I think this has a large effect on opinions in an often revisited internet topic "moving away from ads". Whenever a service starts to offer a paid alternative, or people get on the topic of tracking, or micropayments comes up, it's always struck me that commenters seem used to effectively free content and seem to just ignore that there are people subsidizing their internet usage by clicking on ads comparatively all t…

Just like someone reading playboy for the articles, I typically read news aggregator sites for the comments.

Major news organisation provide a couple of paragraphs about the latest development and the interesting part is not the journalists opinion, but what the thousands of people reading the article have to say about it.

This holds for good sites, for e.g. youtube and some others - the comments are mostly worthless.

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