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We Never Paid for Journalism

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Re: We Never Paid for Journalism

#121

Post by TeMPOraL »

friendlybus wrote: post #102
sacrificedcapon wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate to burst your bubble, but fundamentally, all advertising is a "scam". It's to get you to buy stuff you really don't need. Also, the print newspaper industry isn't as clean as you think. http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html You shouldn't be trusting any ad, wherever it is. Actually, the most reputable the platform, the more skeptical you should be since you are more trusting of the platform to begin with. The e…

How do you find the stuff you need then? Go to the big product box in the sky?

Brick&mortar stores, Consumer Reports, magazines[0], product catalogs, trade shows, yellow books, discussion groups, word of mouth. Basically, everything that's pull (vs. push) and limits itself to providing information about products and problems they solve (vs. playing on your emotions, or delivering sales tactics).

--

[0] - See this subthread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21348886.

Re: We Never Paid for Journalism

#122

Post by friendlybus »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #121
friendlybus wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you find the stuff you need then? Go to the big product box in the sky?

Brick&mortar stores, Consumer Reports, magazines[0], product catalogs, trade shows, yellow books, discussion groups, word of mouth. Basically, everything that's pull (vs. push) and limits itself to providing information about products and problems they solve (vs. playing on your emotions, or delivering sales tactics). -- [0] - See this subthread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21348886 .

I agree with the dislike for over-extended advertising techniques online. But those are all ads, as such don't really answer my challenge to the parent poster. Ads on some fundamental level provide a service to the recipient.

Re: We Never Paid for Journalism

#123

Post by TeMPOraL »

friendlybus wrote: post #122
TeMPOraL wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brick&mortar stores, Consumer Reports, magazines[0], product catalogs, trade shows, yellow books, discussion groups, word of mouth. Basically, everything that's pull (vs. push) and limits itself to providing information about products and problems they solve (vs. playing on your emotions, or delivering sales tactics). -- [0] - See this subthread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21348886 .

I agree with the dislike for over-extended advertising techniques online. But those are all ads, as such don't really answer my challenge to the parent poster. Ads on some fundamental level provide a service to the recipient.

Some ads provide a service to the recipient. Most ads, as exist today, provide a net disservice.

I don't think the parent poster meant absolutely all ads, just the vast majority of them. But in so far as they meant all ads, it's still a good point you shouldn't trust them - not even the product catalogs you yourself paid for. There's very little legal and social protection from the merchant lying to you, and all the business incentives to do so.

Re: We Never Paid for Journalism

#124

Post by chrisco255 »

tastroder wrote: post #109
chrisco255 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Instagram has nailed this, personally. Their ads get seamlessly placed in your feed, they're usually interesting to look at with high quality graphics and videos, and if I don't want to see them, it's trivial to scroll past them. But the ads have definitely snagged me to make a few impulse purchases this year.

Interesting, I often find the ad selection on Instagram especially abysmal. It might be that my non-US geolocation has a negative effect on this. Most of the ads I get are either generic products for my gender and age range, local industry companies wasting budget on stuff I'm interested in but don't need at scale and won't ever buy through Instagram links, useless recruiting startups aimed at what I assume would be…

I typically get clothing ads, household goods ads, music-related, gadgets, lessons, etc.

Re: We Never Paid for Journalism

#125

Post by Nasrudith »

jbattle wrote: post #19
jagged-chisel wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other major distribution network already visited every addressable location and took packages of varying sizes: the postal service. Newspaper delivery was closer to 'real-time' - it was printed this morning, and arrived for consumption during morning coffee. Many children took paper routes for some cash and delivered on their bikes. You slow down paper delivery when you start sending along multiple shipments, wei…

I never thought of this angle before, but imagine if a SV startup started a distribution model in 2019 depending on young teens riding their bikes around neighborhoods early in the morning before school. There'd be endless articles shaming them for child labor and for foisting their costs on to vulnerable workers. Really not sure what to make of that. Other than maybe our outrage triggers have been honed to a razor's…

I think that points to how most people let norms influence them.

It was perfectly normal in the 19th century along with street children, an unusual artifact in the 20th and blatantly out of place in the 21st.

Re: We Never Paid for Journalism

#126

Post by Nextgrid »

cm2187 wrote: post #116
mrunkel wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The old joke was "We know 50% of our ad buy money is wasted in newspapers, we just don't know which 50%." Now they know, and they also know the amount of waste is much higher. This plus the destruction of classified ads has hit the newspaper industry hard. Now pile on top all the "news" sites that don't really spend any money on editors, research, or reporting (all those sites that post articles about other articles…

I wonder also how much of this ad money isn’t insurance against being treated too harshly by the newspaper. There are ads in newspapers where I just can’t think of any other reason. Like an ad for EADS (don’t remember if it was EADS or an equivalent). I ain’t going to buy an Airbus airliner in my next sunday shopping! And I doubt airlines make decisions based on ads.

Could be brand recognition - subsidised by the airlines (potentially unintentionally, when the price of the marketing is baked into the cost of an airplane) to make you feel somehow better in flying in an Airbus instead of a Boeing.

Re: We Never Paid for Journalism

#127

Post by nitrogen »

friendlybus wrote: post #122
TeMPOraL wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brick&mortar stores, Consumer Reports, magazines[0], product catalogs, trade shows, yellow books, discussion groups, word of mouth. Basically, everything that's pull (vs. push) and limits itself to providing information about products and problems they solve (vs. playing on your emotions, or delivering sales tactics). -- [0] - See this subthread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21348886 .

I agree with the dislike for over-extended advertising techniques online. But those are all ads, as such don't really answer my challenge to the parent poster. Ads on some fundamental level provide a service to the recipient.

I feel it's a bit disingenuous on the part of advertisers to claim that any commercial information source is an ad. This basically makes any discussion impossible because if everything is an ad then nothing is. It's a dirty trick of the ad industry.

did the creator of the X pay a third party to present X? is X an essential part of its context? is the recipient of X seeking X itself or something else?

Re: We Never Paid for Journalism

#128

Post by DrScump »

WalterBright wrote: post #43
jawns wrote: post #18

Former news editor here. I left the journalism world about eight years ago because of the poor shape the business was in. But I still love journalism and hope it finds a viable business model. I wanted to address a point that this blog post brings to mind. There were advertisers then, and there are advertisers now. The advertising market hasn't dried up. So why was the business model robust then and in shambles now?…

> newspaper advertising has always been a low-return-on-investment marketing avenue Back in the 1980s (in the Datalight/Zortech days), the only game in town was advertising in computer magazines. We knew it worked because the day the monthly mag appeared on the shelf, we'd get a big spike in sales, that would then taper off through the month. It was fairly easy to correlate which computer mags mattered, how ad placem…

In SV, anyway, we had two free computing magazines that had a lot of ads: Computer Currents (biweekly) and MicroTimes (monthly).

Re: We Never Paid for Journalism

#129

Post by perl4ever »

jeegsy wrote: post #87
perl4ever wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there is a lot of inadvertent irony/lack of awareness in: "Google, Craigslist and others are (mostly) in the new high-intent advertising market. It's an entirely different type of market based on an entirely different type of moment. The reason newspapers are losing here is because you aren't even in this market to begin with." Not even in the market? Surely anyone who reads about the newspaper business has h…

I heard somewhere that the Craigslist guy first went to newspapers with his ideas and he was basically laughed out of the room

So, they didn't identify it as their market. But it clearly was, with hindsight.
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