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Why I Work on Ads

jefftk.com

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Re: Why I Work on Ads

#251

Post by burkaman »

jefftk wrote: post #200
bogwog wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I found it interesting that the first thing he says to defend his work with ads is that he gives money to charity. If you feel like you need to donate to charity to justify your actions, maybe your actions are evil? There has to be some level of guilt involved in that decision, at the very least. Which is to say, I don't blame him for what he does. If someone dangled all that money in my face I can't say I wouldn't b…

> the first thing he says to defend his work with ads is that he gives money to charity The reason that I work (as opposed to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FIRE_movement ) is so I can donate, which is why I start with that piece of the explanation.

People aren't asking you "why do you choose to work on ads rather than not work at all", they're asking "why do you work on ads rather than a different area". In that context, the fact that you work to donate is not relevant, since you could switch to a different area and continue to donate.

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#252

Post by jefftk »

Justsignedup wrote: post #211
jefftk wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> this may have been an opportunity for OP to provide some insight into how the adtech market is evolving, and make the case that it is headed in an ethical direction. He did not There's a section of post with "build browser APIs that will allow this kind of well-targeted advertising without sending your browsing history to advertisers, and then get rid of third-party cookies"; I'm curious what you think of it?

I personally am of the opinion that "targeted advertising" _is_ the problem. Random generic advertising is fine. It isn't as profitable but it doesn't exploit a person's mental weaknesses. Targeted advertising is straight up exploitation. Kids being bombarded with ads for plastic surgery nonestop on TikTok, radicalized individuals being targeted with fear-based ads. This is super toxic. And while advertising is a tal…

I agree those are bad, but those don't seem to be unique to user targeting? You would have the same thing with contextual ads (since what page someone is on is still pretty correlated with generic demographics like "is a kid" or "is a radicalized individual")

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#253

Post by ExtraE »

elliekelly wrote: post #88
jasode wrote: post #29

The author jefftk is getting unfairly downvoted maybe because cynics just see it as a version of, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." I will offer a contrarian opinion as a user whose salary does not depend on advertising: the advertising model for using Google search and watching Youtube videos works better for me as a consumer . The alternati…

I find the "ads are useful" argument frustratingly disingenuous. It's a transparent and deliberate attempt to move the discussion away from what people actually take issue with in modern internet advertising - tracking and data collection - and instead tries to frame it as something far more benign. The ads. Aren't. The problem. The stalking is. Ads can be useful. But no one is saying they aren't! So why is it consta…

> it won't make them nearly as much money.

Yes. That's the problem. Make less money from ads --> make less content/riskier to make content (same thing). The more money ads make, the fewer of them you have to see to fund the same amount of content (or, alternatively, you get more/higher quality content for a given (fixed) quantity of ads).

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#254

Post by qsort »

alkonaut wrote: post #120
jasode wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I don't know many people who think advertising per se is morally objectionable Lots of people do. E.g. the first user feedback comment in that article: "Advertising is bad because it’s fundamentally about influencing people to do things they wouldn’t do otherwise. [...]" And every HN thread about advertising also has a variation of that sentiment.

I think that's a relatively small group compared to the group that thinks advertising is fine, while tracking isn't. Arguing that advertising is somehow inappropriate manipulation isn't consistent with a market economy. Like it or not, efficient markets require marketing. Now, you could be against the market economy of course, but I don't see a lot of the people claiming ads are manipulation also claiming that the ma…

One can believe things to be bad or to have negative externalities without calling for a wholesale ban. I find all ads reprehensible but I completely agree that banning ads would be impractical and probably effectively impossible. I don't see a contradiction.

> efficient markets require marketing

The problem with ads is that they fundamentally violate consent. I can't avoid seeing an ad, even if I'm not interested. Ads are not the equivalent of a salesman who's pitching his script to me, they are like an unsolicited robocall.

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#255

Post by fouric »

jefftk wrote: post #125
fouric wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> all more user hostile for my use cases Why are these user-hostile? I see very little friction to any of them - $10/year YT subscription disappears into the background (that's, what, two moderately expensive coffee drinks? if you spend just a single day watching educational content, the obtained value will easily exceed $10), per-search microtransactions would be so cheap that you could just turn on the "always tran…

> It's easy, from a technical perspective, to design a low-friction microtransaction system. Oh? People have been trying since at least https://www.w3.org/Conferences/WWW4/Papers/246/ (1995)

You seem to be implying that solutions to problems succeed on their technical merit alone. This is trivially false. I used the phrasing "from a technical perspective" very intentionally, for a reason.

And, in the specific case of microtransactions, it's well-known that consumers like cheap and free things - which causes them to flock to ad-funded services because said services make it as difficult as possible to see what data you're paying for those services with.

The reason why microservices have failed is largely due to the negative externalities (e.g. massive personal information harvesting and sale) being concealed from users. If you showed users how much of their data was being harvested, and who it was being sold to (transitively), how many do you think would continue to use an ad-supported product if a reasonably-priced paid alternative was available?

Edit: to provide a specific example of a somewhat-low-friction microtransaction system (that could easily be scaled to "extremely low friction" with non-architectural UI tweaks) that I've had experience with, I present to you Blendle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blendle

These are not hard technical problems.

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#256

Post by overgard »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #151
ipaddr wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The outcry would be huge if everything went to a pay model.

Was the web supported by ads before Google? I don't remember. Does the web have to be supported by ads? If the web was a non-profit service, supported by public funds, managed by academic institutions for example, would we miss 90% of the content that's basically sponsored by someone who wants to sell something? From my point of view it looks like the web is a giant advertising machine built on top of something that…

I'm probably too nostalgic, but that's what the web used to be... and it was so much better. Most of the content we would lose I wouldn't miss at all. Clickbait and buzzfeed style sites. Already I'm paying for a lot of sites that actually do reporting, for instance, so I already feel like the content of real value is already for-pay or produced completely for free by enthusiasts and academics.

I remember ~2001 or so a lot of the sites I visited were ad supported, but it mostly just made enough to cover hosting costs. At this point hosting costs are so cheap that I don't even think those style of sites would have trouble existing. Most of those sites existed because some people were interested in a hobby or a subject, and would publish news and have bulletin boards and articles and stuff. Sadly those kind of communities don't seem to exist anymore, now those kind of things end up being subreddits or facebook groups and I never feel like those are quite the same, they just don't have the same curation or community feel.

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#257

Post by username90 »

cm2012 wrote: post #150
omginternets wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The author jefftk is getting unfairly downvoted maybe because cynics just see it as a version of, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." I don't think that's why people are downvoting. Speaking for myself, it's because his analysis focuses only on the benefits of ads, and conveniently ignores the actual ethical problems ( e.g. large-scale collect…

I've never seen any evidence of anyone hurt by the large scale collection of personal data by Google and FB.

If you are a woman have fun seeing ads for makeup and fashion all the time. There is a reason female users are hot commodity for any ad driven company, companies are willing to pay way more to advertise to women.

Targeted ads supports the status quo instead of exposing everyone to stuff they might want.

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#258

Post by ExtraE »

noir_lord wrote: post #239
jjj1232 wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The stalking is the problem, but the ads are too. Ads have been a problem well before tracking was a thing. Since at least the 1920s (I’m thinking of Edward Bernays but there are probably earlier examples) the goal of advertising is to manipulate consumers into making irrational decisions. The majority of ads make us feel inadequate to get us to buy something, like the only the thing that will make us whole is a new…

> The majority of ads make us feel inadequate to get us to buy something I know it's hard to disprove but I don't think adverts have that effect on me, partially it's because I don't see many adverts and partly because that kind of blatant manipulation is so hilariously blatant. I acknowledge that someone might be running a really effective advertising campaign on me but since I basically don't buy anything I don't a…

Do you have a new $gadget/$smartphone/$tablet/$whatever? What about your SO/father/niece? (You might not, but I bet a lot of people reading this and agreeing do buy a bunch of stuff they don't need without realizing it).

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#259

Post by Sholmesy »

jasode wrote: post #29

The author jefftk is getting unfairly downvoted maybe because cynics just see it as a version of, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." I will offer a contrarian opinion as a user whose salary does not depend on advertising: the advertising model for using Google search and watching Youtube videos works better for me as a consumer . The alternati…

You wouldn't pay $2400 for 20 years of a user-centric search engine that is actively trying to find you the best results, rather than try to consume your attention for as long as possible so that it can show you more ad impressions?

The other side of this is that someone has actively spent $2400 worth of ad-buy to show you ads for the last 20 years.

I don't think the other-side of the argument has been explored well enough; I'd love to see what is possible without these ulterior motives controlling what you see and hear.

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#260

Post by fouric »

Pfhreak wrote: post #132
fouric wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> all more user hostile for my use cases Why are these user-hostile? I see very little friction to any of them - $10/year YT subscription disappears into the background (that's, what, two moderately expensive coffee drinks? if you spend just a single day watching educational content, the obtained value will easily exceed $10), per-search microtransactions would be so cheap that you could just turn on the "always tran…

> $10/year YT subscription disappears into the background I used to live off of $7,000 a year. $10/year is something I'd seriously think about. I'd be careful about generalizing a fixed cost subscription's impact. Typically, it will hit poorer communities harder than wealthy communities.

Those who need the $10/year can decide to instead give up their personal data using the ad-funded model, which I explicitly did not say should be abolished, because I don't believe that. I was making an argument against the idea that microtransactions are themselves somehow infeasible/bad - nothing more.
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