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Advertising as a source of dissatisfaction: cross-national evidence

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Re: Advertising as a source of dissatisfaction: cross-national evidence

#281

Post by cwkoss »

taffer wrote: post #276
cwkoss wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> companies would use other, hidden means to reach customers' minds. This is currently done extensively, despite advertising existing. So this doesn't seem like a valid counterpoint.

I explain why this is a valid counterpoint in the second sentence of my post: Today in the press we have a more or less clear distinction between advertising and content, and I think if we banned advertising it would create an unintended incentive that could lead to the destruction of unbiased journalism as we know it today.

I think the distinction between advertising and content is a lot more blurry than you realize. The majority of 'news' articles begin from some company's press release, product placement is common in fictional worlds, and journalists frequently self-censor to avoid displeasing advertisers.

Re: Advertising as a source of dissatisfaction: cross-national evidence

#282

Post by return1 »

JohnFen wrote: post #72
cm2012 wrote: post #3

Doubling of advertising expidenture (Which is a massive, sea change) would apparently make people 3% less happy. So basically it has a negligible impact on happiness even if this analysis is true. I highly doubt it is true though. It's a purely correlational study, that says from 1980-2011, advertising increased and people in general got 3% less happy. They say they accounted for GDP when doing their regression, but…

> So basically it has a negligible impact on happiness even if this analysis is true. Not to those 3%, and since advertising provides very little benefit to anyone who isn't in the ad business, I would be happy to that 3%.

Either advertising is so powerful as to rule the world, or it's so useless that nobody benefits from it. I 'd say , without adequate research on the effectiveness of advertising, these correlational studies are only marginally interesting.

Re: Advertising as a source of dissatisfaction: cross-national evidence

#283

Post by ACow_Adonis »

clevep wrote: post #268

This article misses by far the number one benefit of advertising: it makes products and services cheaper. That notion obviously applies to the plethora of "free" (free in quotes because I am not trying to dodge the fact that you are always paying something) websites which everyone frequents, but goes beyond that as well. There's a comment on here complaining about how Hulu shows ads despite the fact that they are pay…

this talking point just doesn't die, and that's not how economics or profit maximising agencies work. It also fails to explain why, over time, advertising encroached on almost all platforms unless actively resisted and why it's so difficult to find a genuinely ad free service.

in short, these platforms work to maximise profit. ads serve to form another income stream, and as long as they don't push sufficient numbers of customers away, it's always in the short term interest of the provider to expand advertising income until the marginal gain equals the marginal loss in marginal revenue from the consumer base.

In most mediums and content/ subject matters, this is at a non-zero level of advertising, especially if everyone else is already advertising.

while advertising does really result in free services (if you do not account for negatives of advertising or assume all increases in consumption generate positive utility), it is not generally the case for most consumers that advertising results in cheaper products, or that you could pay 5% more and be rid of ads.

Re: Advertising as a source of dissatisfaction: cross-national evidence

#284

Post by return1 »

anoncake wrote: post #52
cm2012 wrote: post #3

Doubling of advertising expidenture (Which is a massive, sea change) would apparently make people 3% less happy. So basically it has a negligible impact on happiness even if this analysis is true. I highly doubt it is true though. It's a purely correlational study, that says from 1980-2011, advertising increased and people in general got 3% less happy. They say they accounted for GDP when doing their regression, but…

Happiness is the one thing we should be optimizing for. 3% is not negligible if there is no trade-off.

> Happiness is the one thing we should be optimizing for

here s some more spurious correlations. Countries with very high happiness have some of the highest suicide rates. happiness might be dangerous to the survival of the species. We should optimize against it

https://medium.com/@dtg319/happier-countries-are-more-suicid...

Re: Advertising as a source of dissatisfaction: cross-national evidence

#285

Post by [deleted] »

clevep wrote: post #268

This article misses by far the number one benefit of advertising: it makes products and services cheaper. That notion obviously applies to the plethora of "free" (free in quotes because I am not trying to dodge the fact that you are always paying something) websites which everyone frequents, but goes beyond that as well. There's a comment on here complaining about how Hulu shows ads despite the fact that they are pay…

[deleted]

Re: Advertising as a source of dissatisfaction: cross-national evidence

#286

Post by sonnyblarney »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #149
sesteel wrote: post #66

I view advertising as a form of pollution. In many cases, it erodes the human experience. It is abusive to families with children creating strife where there was none. I spend a lot of time managing expectations and sharing philosophical ideas, like "less is more". I don't mind teaching my children, but I don't like feeling people are trying to take advantage of us all the time. I explain it to them as if it is a gam…

It's good advice, but I find it ironic. Keep your money. Stick it in an index fund. It'll get invested in Google, Facebook, Apple who make money from ... advertising their own or other people's products. To really be minimalist I think it's better (if less lucrative on average) to start your own business that takes a small chunk of business away from the giants, that you have ethical control over. It's getting harder…

Weirdly 'keeping your money' might be bad for the economy!

Your spending is someone else's income.

It's sounds a little nutty to say you're depriving someone else but it's kind of true.

If you see products and or services you like and they have some value to you - and you can reasonably afford - it's good to spend in many ways.

Re: Advertising as a source of dissatisfaction: cross-national evidence

#287

Post by anoncake »

taffer wrote: post #136
anoncake wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you understand what I mean by "there is no trade-off". Those endeavours are only useful if and to the extent they create happiness. Also: Companies need ads to grow because their competitors also have ads. That doesn't mean they'd need ads in if ads didn't exist. The one legitimate purpose ads serve – could easily be served through other mechanisms, e.g. by the press. Maybe the press would have to expan…

If there were no explicit advertising, companies would use other, hidden means to reach customers' minds. Today in the press we have a more or less clear distinction between advertising and content, and I think if we banned advertising it would create an unintended incentive that could lead to the destruction of unbiased journalism as we know it today.

> Today in the press we have a more or less clear distinction between advertising and content,

You have heard of native advertising haven't you? Of course ethical journalists refuse to do this. They will still refuse when ordinary ads have been banned.

On the other hand, ads make the press less independent. No matter how much you try to avoid it: If someone buys ads in your publication they have influence over you. Be too critical of them and they'll withdraw their funding. They won't openly threaten you, of course, because that is not legal and not necessary.

Re: Advertising as a source of dissatisfaction: cross-national evidence

#288

Post by asdff »

Iv wrote: post #251
sesteel wrote: post #66

I view advertising as a form of pollution. In many cases, it erodes the human experience. It is abusive to families with children creating strife where there was none. I spend a lot of time managing expectations and sharing philosophical ideas, like "less is more". I don't mind teaching my children, but I don't like feeling people are trying to take advantage of us all the time. I explain it to them as if it is a gam…

I'd like to add that advertising is also economic pollution that goes against free competition. The theory behind free markets requires that voters are more or less rational and well informed. That they will never spend more on an inferior product. Advertisement distorts that. I suspect that banning advertisement altogether would make the economy gain a lot in terms of market efficiency. Can you imagine a world where…

I don't know if you can ever fix that. Here's a complaint about someone being cheated on a sale, 4000 years ago (1). Probably long before the ad men appeared, but people have always been looking for their angle.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complaint_tablet_to_Ea-nasir

Re: Advertising as a source of dissatisfaction: cross-national evidence

#289

Post by SomeOldThrow »

clevep wrote: post #268

This article misses by far the number one benefit of advertising: it makes products and services cheaper. That notion obviously applies to the plethora of "free" (free in quotes because I am not trying to dodge the fact that you are always paying something) websites which everyone frequents, but goes beyond that as well. There's a comment on here complaining about how Hulu shows ads despite the fact that they are pay…

> What I would like to see is some analysis of how much life satisfaction is earned back if all relevant products become proportionately cheaper.

There’s a reason services refuse to offer paid plans: people would realize how much the functionality of these services are destroyed in service of showing ads—you can see a tiny fraction of this reaction with the hulu anecdote. It’s also at the core of our “screen addiction”: imagine the savings in mental health care alone if ads disappeared....

Re: Advertising as a source of dissatisfaction: cross-national evidence

#290

Post by DoreenMichele »

55555 wrote: post #275
DoreenMichele wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no clear dividing line because lifestyle enhancement isn't imaginary. If you brush your teeth, dress well etc, it actually does improve your sex appeal. So does being able to signal a good income by having certain goods, like a nice car. Homeless men (granted, an extreme example) aren't seeing a lot of action. From what I gather, not owning a car as a man in the US is a serious barrier to having a romantic l…

The clear dividing line is when you feel bad for doing it. But money. So people do it anyway.

I've idealistically written useful information on multiple websites for years and years. People have gushed at me about the wonderfulness of my writing and how it enhances their life, but they mostly don't want to pay me.

Even before the ad blocker wars tanked online advertising generally, the HN crowd used ad blockers more aggressively than most other traffic to my sites. People on HN also routinely post some means to get past paywalls for articles posted here.

I wrote this piece in January: https://raisingfutureadults.blogspot.com/2019/01/the-hand-li...

It took me about two weeks to write it. I have about six years college and years of experience pertinent to the topic, plus years of experience writing for pay.

It has gotten more than 60k page views. It did fairly well on the front page of HN.

It did not make me one thin dime.

I've talked about this on HN for years. I was actually homeless when I began doing product descriptions et al for pay. Every time I comment on this problem space, I get told "quit you're whining and get a real job."

This is not just about me. Local papers are folding left and right, etc. It's an industry wide problem.

The world seems to want high quality writing completely for free with zero means for the creators to pay their bills.

I generally like the writing I do for pay. But even if I didn't, I would have zero moral qualms about it. It isn't like anyone gave a damn about me being homeless and unable to afford a meal at times while they read my writing for free and sometimes cooed about it being good writing while simultaneously telling me to STFU about my problems, which were not their problem.

I would love to have my Patreon well funded so I can write fewer product descriptions and write more stuff like the above piece. But the world simply doesn't want to pay me for that.

I do have clients who love my product reviews. That's how I'm currently keeping food on the table.

People who de facto expect good writing to be done by unpaid slave labor are not people in any position to make me feel bad about writing product descriptions. That's a laugh.

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