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Insane state of today's advertising part 3

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Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#221

Post by strken »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #208
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those ads were relevant though, and (I hope) not doing thousands of requests in the background; it was an IT-related ad, on an IT-related website, targeted at a person working in IT that was interested in new servers - what really is what the better ad providers are looking for. The rest is just idk, shotgunning and hoping something sticks.

I dislike relevant ads the most because they are most likely to influence my behaviour.

There must be a point between "advertisement for useless junk" and "useful advice + an affiliate link" where the two cross over, and as far as I can tell the only differences are relevance and directness.

One example of advertising that I think is acceptable are the ads on the slatestarcodex.com sidebar, which are manually placed there by the author and targeted directly at the niche he writes in. If a computer could achieve the same precision when choosing what ads to run, and based its choices on the publication rather than the user, I think it would also be acceptable to me.

Would you find such ads equally unpalatable?

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#222

Post by gog »

SimeVidas wrote: post #183
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

I’ve switched to Ghostery, and it seems to work fine. Should I go back to uBlock Origin?

I use both. uBlock Origin catches pre-roll ads on YouTube as well as some other things that Ghostery lets through.

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#224

Post by bryanrasmussen »

icebraining wrote: post #217
cft wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think you're being uncharitable, advertising led the company to have a higher degree of competence and understanding.

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#225

Post by bryanrasmussen »

recursive wrote: post #182
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…

Everyone thinks advertising doesn't work on them. And everyone is wrong.

Everyone thinks some specific types of advertising don't work on them, and dependent on their self-knowledge they can be right.

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#226

Post by C4stor »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #208
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those ads were relevant though, and (I hope) not doing thousands of requests in the background; it was an IT-related ad, on an IT-related website, targeted at a person working in IT that was interested in new servers - what really is what the better ad providers are looking for. The rest is just idk, shotgunning and hoping something sticks.

I dislike relevant ads the most because they are most likely to influence my behaviour.

But most persons actually want to be influenced in their behaviours, it's the whole point of researching any subject in the first place.

Any decision we make is the result of a lot of stuff influencing our behaviours, and the border between researching information on a product and being targeted by an ad for this product is not really black and white.

If I had to chose, I'd rather be influenced by logical arguments than by a nude person taking a shower. Which only says so much about my personal values and is not really a good thing per se ^^

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#227

Post by Simon_says »

dhab wrote: post #164

Might be off-topic. It seems a majority of people are against ads. What are the top few reasons why people dislike ads, excluding reasons such as them just being a nuisance? My own guesses are: * People don't like the idea that the platform serving the ads is making money through ads which is not directly tied to the main value they derive from that platform * Maybe people feel that they are also indirectly contribut…

To answer your question, I'm a little extreme in this regard, but I view ads as malware for the human brain. They hijack my limited attention span to make me desire products that I would have a happier life if I never knew existed and that I don't have to spend my limited willpower resisting. It's been an extraordinarily rare event in my life that I see an ad for a product that makes my life better. If I want something, I will proactively research it, or if something is popular enough, my friends will tell me about it.

I view ads in their totality as bad for my mental health, and there's no level of advertising which is acceptable to me. All these issues concerning security, privacy, CPU/network usage are important, but they miss the mark for me.

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#228

Post by nextlevelwizard »

brad0 wrote: post #71
HuginnMuninn wrote: post #56

Has anyone attempted to quantify a rough cost for me to just pay for the http request I'm making and get rid of the middlemen? I look at some of my spur of the moment purchases in shame, yet paying say $0.001 to browse a page somehow is the unthinkable? Most don't like ads, as others have said they add latency and are easily subject to fraudulent clicks for the advertiser. I get the feeling that content-creators and…

I quite like this idea. I run a basic http server with a nodejs backend. It gets ~3000 hits a month. It costs around $6 on AWS. It costs around 0.2c per request. It would be simple to build a system that charges per use - most SaaS companies do this. The problem is that someone is willing to pay for that content and repost it on the "free web". 99% of people will read the free version (see freemium mobile games). Whi…

I would never be willing to pay per page view. I could pay some specified price on yearly basis, but per page is way out of the question.

I'm fine with web sites that use adblocker-blockers. I just don't read their content. Imo that is the way of the future. Obviously these "publications" will lose readers, but maybe we also get rid of most of the junk that's floating around.

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#229

Post by mattmanser »

icebraining wrote: post #217
cft wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Crikey, guy shares an anecdote of how an ad helped him and all you can do is be really nasty about it, it's completely unnecessary.

I bought a piano course from Udemy because of advertising on FB (and then spent an additional £150 on a keyboard). I'm really enjoying it. Please tell me what a horrible human being I am.

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