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We need legal controls on web advertising

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Re: We need legal controls on web advertising

#91

Post by marcus_holmes »

megaman821 wrote: post #73
marcus_holmes wrote: post #46

I am beginning to believe that advertising (at all, on any medium) is an evil we need to do without. The "free stuff" that we get in return is never without consequences, as we're finding out. The "hey we built a thing you might want to buy" function can be done in different forms, better, I think. Probably by newspapers. I think we could start by taxing all advertising revenue by, say, 50%.

Taking away that "free stuff" is not without consequence either. Now people without means can't read the news, watch tv, connect with friends and family online, play casual games, etc. Are ads more evil than taking away free access for those without the means to pay?

I don't know. I've never lived in a world where this stuff wasn't paid for by advertising.

I think "means to pay" is relative - Cambodian tuk-tuk drivers get cheaper, better internet access than Berliners. And they watch YouTube on it. If they didn't have access to YouTube for free there would be a huge market in producing Cambodian content for them to watch, priced appropriately for that market.

Re: We need legal controls on web advertising

#92

Post by ouid »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #46

I am beginning to believe that advertising (at all, on any medium) is an evil we need to do without. The "free stuff" that we get in return is never without consequences, as we're finding out. The "hey we built a thing you might want to buy" function can be done in different forms, better, I think. Probably by newspapers. I think we could start by taxing all advertising revenue by, say, 50%.

I think there's value in describing advertising for what it actually is, paying someone else to lie for you. You can talk about how it's necessary for businesses to let the "public know about their products", but you can't really get around this description of it. It's pretty inconsistent with the idea of free speech, but supposed defenders of free speech don't seem to have any problem with paid speech.

A lot of advertising is negative, not in the sense of attack ads, but in what it is that you agree not to say, for money. When advertisers pull "funding" when a platform doesn't censor "swear words", the lack of swear words is now an advertisement. Do we really think that there is a consistent definition of free speech which is compatible with advertising?

Freedom and anarchy are different.

Re: We need legal controls on web advertising

#93

Post by marcus_holmes »

megaman821 wrote: post #90
snarf21 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes

Well, I am sure millions of less fortunate people in this world are glad you have no say in deciding these things. Millions of people using Whatsapp to stay in contact with their friends and family for free, many who couldn't afford to pay for the service, but shut it down because snarf21 saw an ad he didn't like.

yeah but we had email before that. It wasn't "free" but it was cheap and worked across everything and no-one stole your personal data.

Re: We need legal controls on web advertising

#94

Post by xkde »

xkde wrote: post #75
oblio wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Corporate malfeasance with corporate malfeasance. How are they not comparable? The incentives are not aligned: corporate profit vs the commons.

Dumping chemicals in shared rivers/air vs placing ads in a privately owned space that users have the option of visiting. Not comparable. The fact that more people use Gmail than Protonmail / others is a testament to their willingness to trade their eyeballs on ads for a service they don't have to spend their monetary resources on. It's also worth asking - what makes you so confident about an absence of malfeasance fr…

> They stalk you, collect data and build a profile

Again, not generally a problem when using paid services.

Re: We need legal controls on web advertising

#95

Post by Supermancho »

superkuh wrote: post #70

Legal controls? You mean you want to bring in government regulation so that all the players down to the smallest personal website will have to do all the things required of even the most giant corporations? So that once this onerous system of centralized control is set up it'll soon be bought and co-opted by the very people it was meant to regulate originally? No. We've already seen this game play out over and over,…

Imagine a system that's so technologically complex, that lawmakers can't even create laws to codify the system, much less controls on the dependent systems.

We already have that in the W3C browsers. This idea of "legal controls" on advertising will have to start with well understood systems before online advertising is affected, imo.

Re: We need legal controls on web advertising

#96

Post by marcinzm »

danaris wrote: post #81
marcinzm wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>can do much better targeting than yourself. All existing online ad platforms provide very good targeting tools and do automated optimizations on your behalf. On a targeted audience you can easily outcompete big corps with a generic offering as it's not overall budget that matters but how much you're spending per view/click/conversion adjusted for how relevant your ad is.

I mean...sure, that's what they promise. But whenever they actually study these things, from all I've seen, the benefits of targeted-to-the-individual advertising fail to materialize. Targeting by the content of the site can work (eg, advertising cake decorating tools on a blog about cake decorating), but at least the vast, vast majority of all the privacy-invading, personal-data-aggregating "targeted" advertising on…

I mean, there's no good way to advertise on a site like Facebook or Twitter without user based personalization. Everything is a feed so there's not really discrete pages for various topics. And a large percentage of advertising is on those platforms nowadays.

Re: We need legal controls on web advertising

#97

Post by faichai »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #46

I am beginning to believe that advertising (at all, on any medium) is an evil we need to do without. The "free stuff" that we get in return is never without consequences, as we're finding out. The "hey we built a thing you might want to buy" function can be done in different forms, better, I think. Probably by newspapers. I think we could start by taxing all advertising revenue by, say, 50%.

I’ve long thought something along similar lines: in a world with instant search, advertising becomes irrelevant if the search actually helps you to find products.

It is in this way that google has actually failed. If you look for a product you get a whole load of dross back. It’s impossible to filter by spec, you can add keywords but this rarely gives you more sensible results these days. The products get lost in the noise.

Most of the time what would be better would be a structured directory of product information enabling you to zero in on the product you want without the crap. This directory would be independent of any specific vendor. All new products would be released into the directory so you can track all new products in certain categories to stay informed. Gaming of the directory would be policed ensuring equal standing of all products.

The only thing this doesn’t handle well is new product categories. But sure there’s ways to handle it.

Re: We need legal controls on web advertising

#99

Post by oblio »

xkde wrote: post #75
oblio wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Corporate malfeasance with corporate malfeasance. How are they not comparable? The incentives are not aligned: corporate profit vs the commons.

Dumping chemicals in shared rivers/air vs placing ads in a privately owned space that users have the option of visiting. Not comparable. The fact that more people use Gmail than Protonmail / others is a testament to their willingness to trade their eyeballs on ads for a service they don't have to spend their monetary resources on. It's also worth asking - what makes you so confident about an absence of malfeasance fr…

> It's also worth asking - what makes you so confident about an absence of malfeasance from the largest, unbreakable corporate entity (ie. the government)?

I'm not confident in that either.

But in a democracy, the government is the people. It's voted by the people, replaced by the people. The government may be corrupted but at least its stated goal and the way it works is to serve the people.

Corporation don't even have that as a goal. They only serve their shareholders.

So on one hand we have one party which has a stated goal to serve the people and another one which has goals that can directly contravene this, and nobody will bat an eye.

Which party is closer to what we want and need?

Re: We need legal controls on web advertising

#100

Post by varispeed »

marcinzm wrote: post #62
varispeed wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the playing field is not level. You will compete for ad space against big corps that can easily spend millions on advertising and can do much better targeting than yourself.

>can do much better targeting than yourself. All existing online ad platforms provide very good targeting tools and do automated optimizations on your behalf. On a targeted audience you can easily outcompete big corps with a generic offering as it's not overall budget that matters but how much you're spending per view/click/conversion adjusted for how relevant your ad is.

Big spenders don't have access to the same tools you have. They use dedicated systems with more granular targeting and often have dedicated account managers that oversee the ads on particular platform.
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