401–404 of 404 posts
OK, so this guy is complaining about a cancer inflicted on us by advertisers like Google, while posting on a site that (speaking of cancers nobody is talking about) requires a Google login to view. I agree with his point, but the obliviousness to the problem caused by his choice of blogging platform is a bit rich.
Doesn't require a Google login for me...
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You've said the same thing several times in all the advertising related threads. While I understand some of the sentiment, let me be as blunt as possible: Advertising will never go away. The fundamental model of advertising giving free access to content is great and works for pretty much everyone. It's fast, simple, egalitarian, requires no commitment and is very scalable. Adblocking tech will never cover 100% of ads…
>The fundamental model of advertising giving free access to content is great and works for pretty much everyone. It's fast, simple, egalitarian, requires no commitment and is very scalable. Is it? Step back from the Internet. How many people keep things laden with adverts? Cars, magazine and appliances come covered in advertising crap. Better quality things suffer a less from this. We throw things away that are cover…
A former coworker posted a picture of her baby on Instagram wearing a GAP tshirt. That's an advert that's only going to get thrown away when the kid outgrows it.
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I'm already paying that? I would never opt into advertising like that were it available. Most of the sites on the internet can just die for all I care. I'd still do online banking, buy stuff from amazon, read news on the BBC's sites. I don't mind paying individual sites if they ever wake up and offer that possibility but i'm not holding my breath. But as long as the choice is "streaming video/running javascript/annoy…
Advertising has costs. They're paid by consumers. My "you" is statistical, but yes, generally, of the $500 billion spent on ads worldwide, the industrialised world, about 1 billion people, pay for it. If my maths check out, that's $500/year. Amazon is Google's largest single advertiser. I'll see if I cant find an excellent HN comment made a ways back (and not by me). Ah, here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=748…
The bit about advertising and its effects on society at the end is the bit I come closest to agreeing with, and it's a shame that the author of that past thought to start it with a quote from a terrible book and not, say, Noam Chomsky. I have no problem with advertising in principle; just the way it's been co-opted to sell lies and dreams. Ads on the web - in contrast to the sorts of ads you get offline - seem to be old fashioned, telling you about specific products and services, rather than showing you what your life could be like if only you owned this or that brand of fridge.
I'm a bit shocked about the state of advertising. When I was making websites (~early 2000s), there were a lot more options to choose from, it seems. Now you basically just have Google and this opaque network of algorithmic auctions. Back then, you had a bunch of small business ad networks that you could choose from. I found you could also choose more different formats. OK, there was no video (thank God), but you coul…
One alternative to the current situation would be for sites to serve their own ads (from their own servers). I wonder why this isn't done at least from big sites? There's no way to prove that you've served a particular number of ads to real humans. That's why all these ridiculous brokers and third-party fragments of javascript exist: it would otherwise be trivial for the publisher to defraud the advertiser.
Ideally for advertiser would be to pay per conversion, but then we need to defraud the other side.