Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Insane state of today's advertising part 3

plus.google.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 435 posts

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#211

Post by PeachPlum »

robryan wrote: post #190
eveningcoffee wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Preroll ads are valuable because people are mostly paying attention. eg you went to youtube to watch X, and they show you 15 seconds of swiffer beforehand. Personal anecdote time. Preroll ads are the main force for me behind installing the adblocker. I just can not stand something that manipulates my flow. I call it televication of the Internet. It is unbearable. If for some reason I am not able to block them then…

Twitch gets me which is unfortunate because they are generally providing a good service. They hit you with one of these ads pretty much every time you change channels, no matter how frequently.

Even when you press "pop-out" on the player

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#213

Post by icelancer »

stale2002 wrote: post #200
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends. How many products are you using which you first heard from via HN? That's a form of advertising too, albeit a lot less sleazy.

Aggregation sites, that use crowd sourcing to bubble up interesting content and products is a fundamentally different beast than paid advertising.

Is it? Can you easily differentiate fake "bubbled up" content? That is what the best advertising agencies have their hands around and have for some time.

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#214

Post by vanderZwan »

fourneau wrote: post #204
stale2002 wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course advertising works. And this is a very bad thing, not a good thing.

Can you explain why it's a bad thing? From my perspective, I've found various things via advertising that I would have never come across by other means. A lot of people argue that "you'll just search for what you want" except I'm tired of searching for "shirt" and then scrolling for days looking for something that may work. Every once in a while I'm hit with a really good ad, and I'll click it, and maybe even buy.

> From my perspective, I've found various things via advertising that I would have never come across by other means.

If you want to make a fair comparison, that should be compared to all the things you didn't find because useless ads took up your time and mental space.

Also, whether or not you found something through an ad is not the point; one isn't not going to convince a smoker to quit smoking by trying to convince them that nicotine doesn't make them feel good - it's the other shit about it that is bad.

In the case of advertising, there's a lot of cynical manipulation going on. The nagging factor in children's advertising comes to mind as one really evil example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hi63rXnuWbw

I've been TV- and ad-free since 2001 (yes, yes, I know: the "how do you know someone doesn't watch TV? They'll tell you"-smugness curse strikes again). In my case it was accidental however: I was living in a student appartment with no access to TV and Internet for over a year, having only books to read and rented movies to watch. Even when forced upon you you start noticing the difference pretty quickly, and wondering how you ever was capable of considering this normal. Nowadays ads just feel invasive, like strangers shouting at me on the street claiming they want to have a conversation while really they just want to get into my pockets.

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#215

Post by DamonHD »

bonqis wrote: post #207
DamonHD wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would like to chat further. As CTO in a previous "fintech" start-up I tried to make something like that work: a tiny-pay-per-view is indeed something like the right goal for funding content.

Sure, drop me an mail at linus at flattr

Done.

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#216

Post by PeachPlum »

SerLava wrote: post #40
gradys wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe not with the techniques they're using now, but if humans can tell it's an ad, then an ad blocker with say an image recognition model can too.

Easy- just make ads that humans can't tell are ads. Also helps if you make ads that the FCC can't tell are ads! As they've been doing.... sigh.

First page impression :

I'm just going to sip from my delicious cup of Niscafe coffee, the best around, while I write this review of the Nvodua graphics card.

Next page impression

I'm just going to dab my brow with the silky smooth Kloonix napkin, the best around, while I write this review of the Nvodua graphics card.

etc.

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#217

Post by icebraining »

cft wrote: post #156
oasfboasbfos wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only good ad is a dead one. With very few exceptions, especially in the consumer space, you won't need advertising if you actually need something. You'll search it out or your friends will tell you what to buy. Advertising serves as a way for the capitalist class to exert veto power over other aspects of society by yanking funding at opportune moments (see the current Google snafu or Bill O'Reilly's departure fro…

An anecdote from 2010: my company had racks of Rackable Systems servers. Every month a server went dead- power supply, board or some such. Rackable Systems were unreliable. Then on Slashdot I saw a square ad for IBM System X servers (unfortunately they have been sold to Lenovo a couple of years ago). That somehow made me do research- although I was aware of IBM System X before. Between 2010 and 1013 we bought perhaps…

Maybe I'm being uncharitable, but what I read from that story is that advertising saved your company from its own incompetence, since it should have someone responsible for managing those servers and subsequently for doing research upon noticing the problems.

For me, that example actually serves as an extra argument against ads.

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#218

Post by PeachPlum »

Spivak wrote: post #82
loeg wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Native content can be really difficult for humans to distinguish.

Surely there will be an eventual crackdown of sponsored content that isn't marked as such.

Product placement is legal in TV, why not papers published on arxiv?

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#219

Post by icebraining »

fourneau wrote: post #204
stale2002 wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course advertising works. And this is a very bad thing, not a good thing.

Can you explain why it's a bad thing? From my perspective, I've found various things via advertising that I would have never come across by other means. A lot of people argue that "you'll just search for what you want" except I'm tired of searching for "shirt" and then scrolling for days looking for something that may work. Every once in a while I'm hit with a really good ad, and I'll click it, and maybe even buy.

Fine, then you won't mind installing an extension or enabling an option that opts you in into being served ads while you browse. I'm sure most of us anti-ads advocates have no problem with that.

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#220

Post by romanovcode »

aorth wrote: post #96

In related news, uBlock Origin has finally (today) been converted to a WebExtension and is now fully compatible with Firefox 57 and beyond. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin

It means it will work in Edge out of the box as well?
Post reply on HN