Why I Work on Ads • Hacker News Board

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#291

Post by falcolas » Thu, May 06, 2021, 4:18 PM UTC

mbesto wrote: post #281

falcolas wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the problem is not with advertising in general I disagree. Advertising is intrusive and designed to convince you to do things you wouldn't normally do. It's large scale psychological manipulation that's only considered ethical because we've been doing it for so long.

> designed to convince you to do things you wouldn't normally do. When I search "good USB charger" in Google and get an ad, click the ad and make a purchase for a USB charger, how was that nothing something I normally would do? There's absolutely deceptive advertising, but to pretend all advertising is "intrusive" and "convincing you to do things you wouldn't normally do" is disingenuous.

How much toothpaste do you use on your toothbrush? Something the size of a pea, or the whole length of your toothbrush? 'Cause all you need is the first, but most people do the second. Why? Ads.

Why do people have such a great impression of John Deere tractors? To the point where there's a whole culture of "green iron" and other companies had huge trouble breaking into the market? Ads. Ads going back to childhood in the form of toys.

Why do folks trust some brands, and not others? Why is brand recognition such an influential thing when it comes to making purchasing decisions? Why do children beg their parents for certain toys? Why do adults pick TGI Friday's over the diner next door?

Ads.

EDIT: I think it's worth flipping the question a bit as well. Why would companies pay for ads if they had no value, if they did not change our behavior? If we'd do something naturally, there would be no need for ads in the first place.

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#292

Post by zihotki » Thu, May 06, 2021, 4:20 PM UTC

cortesoft wrote: post #140

alxlaz wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do all the examples from the advertising industry have such easy-peasy, neutral goods? Fishing equipment. Basket weaving books. Dog food. Targeted advertising hasn't been a blessing just for small businesses selling fishing equipment and organic combucha, but also -- actually, especially , for companies that sell things like: * Potentially addictive subscriptions (for e.g. online casinos or other gambling games)…

You can make similar arguments for almost all jobs. You make cars? You focus on good things like driving to a vacation, but what about all the cars used in drive by shootings? You sell cloud services? You talk about the great websites, but what about all the people who host scam sites on the cloud? You write monitoring software? What about all the people who monitor ad services?

I believe that the key of the message was that the advertisement companies gather a plenty of personal data and vulnerable groups are very easy to find and target. The same private data is also useful for "all the people who host scam sites on the cloud".

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#293

Post by Retric » Thu, May 06, 2021, 4:21 PM UTC

falcolas wrote: post #280

Retric wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A sign outside a gas station is advertising, but it’s hardly going to convince someone to buy a car just to buy gas from them or drove dramatically more. Unfortunately, more widespread and effective advertising has real costs that end up raising prices. Coke’s premium over sugar water is backed up by their advertising spend. Tracking, manipulation, etc are major downsides to advertising. But, even purely informative…

"Last gas station for N miles!" Whether true or not, it will convince you to top off your tank, and potentially purchase some things from the shop.

Yet, they don’t convince you to wildly increase your driving or top up a nearly full tank.

To change how much gas you’re buying in a lifetime it would need to change how far you drive. On the other hand T-Shirt advertising can convince you to buy significantly more clothes in a lifetime.

It’s a qualitative difference even if I didn’t express it well.

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#294

Post by loeg » Thu, May 06, 2021, 4:21 PM UTC

gorpomon wrote: post #46

jefftk wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I started on ads at Google in 2017, and have been donating since 2008: https://www.jefftk.com/donations

Jeff have you ever considered giving to specific people? It's quite ridiculous that college costs what you might give in a year, but $264,727 could concretely allow several people to attend college each year (state schools, community colleges, etc). Or how about removing bad debt, letting people rebuild their credit and start to save. I can think of myriad reasons why this is harder and less desirable (finding them,…

If you click through to some of Jeff's other articles, you can see he's interested in effective altruism. Broadly, at the same total cost, paying for 5-6 globally wealthy people to attend college is going to have lower QALY impact than buying ~132,000 Long-Lasting Insecticidal bed nets ("LLINs") for people in regions with lots of malaria-carrying mosquitoes.

For more on effective altruism broadly, some resources:

https://www.givewell.org/giving101

https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/about-us/#our-mission

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#295

Post by skinkestek » Thu, May 06, 2021, 4:25 PM UTC

jefftk wrote: post #252

Justsignedup wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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")

Since you work at Google, and on ads:

The insanely annoying thing that I have seen for a long time is that despite the fact that you have more information on me than anyone else the ads have been either useless or even insulting for years.

I remember bothering to click through the microscopic x in tve corner and select not relevant or something on Thai mail order brides. What did I get next? Filipino mail orders brides. Out of curiosity I marked a number of them as not relevant and I think I also saw:

- Polish

- Ukrainian

- Chinese

- and possibly a couple of more nationalities

- later I got ads for older women near me

- and then gay cruises

This went on for years.

Last year I finally started seing ads for electronics etc but now I feel no remorse for blocking ads anymore.

I'm just fed up.

Meanwhile Facebook, for all their faults and despite me blocking them for far longer than Google actually has had interesting ads.

Edit: I've nothing against Filipino or Thais or gay people or anyone, but I have something against scantily clad women etc showing up on my monitor both at work and at home and I think it says something about Google that they think this was the most relevant ads they could show me for years.

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#296

Post by bobdosherman » Thu, May 06, 2021, 4:26 PM UTC

A lot of this comes down to preferences, and my preference ordering would be:

Ads that attempt to take me all the way from browsing-->discovery-->potential purchase-->purchase I view as always bad. Leave me alone while I'm browsing. Ads that attempt to take me from discovery-->potential purchase I view as ok but ineffective. At least throw a promo code in that ad next time, please and thank you. Ads that successfully take me from discovery-->potential purchase-->purchase I view as ok since my utility is higher having purchased the product given the payload of the ad (and I wouldn't have purchased the product having not gotten the ad).

One thing then from my (not necessarily everyones) preferences is that displaying an ad to me should only potentially be done if the conditional probability of me being in discovery mode is higher than the conditional probability of me being in browsing mode. And then it comes down to what of me is in that conditioning set. Some very fuzzy anonymous slice of me, well ok. But better not be PI in there...

But these are just my preferences, and they may not be representative. So there's an aggregation problem also. In general I'd also prefer if brands shifted the marginal marketing dollar towards channels where the disutility of showing me an ad when they estimate I'm in discovery mode but I'm actually in browsing mode is lowest - so (in my mind) when possible put more in influencer marketing versus google display network for instance. Ideally this preference is evident in brand's roi calcs so it's internalized.

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#297

Post by goertzen » Thu, May 06, 2021, 4:26 PM UTC

I pay for youtube, support some people on patreon and use an adblocker. But I still think ads a net positive and a clever solution to bootstrapping and continuing to support a relatively open online publishing ecosystem.

Thanks for your work and sharing your thoughts jefftk!

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#298

Post by sangnoir » Thu, May 06, 2021, 4:27 PM UTC

raspyberr wrote: post #82

crumbshot wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why not reject the advertising model and the payment model until something better comes along? The Internet Archive is a great example of this. A non-profit that relies neither on advertising revenue nor subscription revenue from individual users, and instead thrives on income for providing archival services and grants from organisations that recognise the public good it is providing.

I'd like for donation to be the predominant way to support digital work in the future. But paying with a card online is pretty hasslesome and micropayments will cause so many issues anyway that it kind of feels like a pipe dream. Stuff like Signal and Internet Archive are excellent tools that may not make all the money in the world do achieve their goals well whilst, at least for the time being, being financially sta…

Donors aren't always benevolent, especially if there are a few 'whales'.

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#299

Post by coding123 » Thu, May 06, 2021, 4:27 PM UTC

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…

Targeted advertising is great, so long as it targets "the viewer of pages like this" not "this person recently went to all these other web sites".

I think that's what ads should be - exactly like TV.

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#300

Post by tzs » Thu, May 06, 2021, 4:27 PM UTC

bluefirebrand wrote: post #105

mbg721 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The lawyer's defense is "by playing devil's advocate, I make the protection of the law more robust for everyone". A closer equivalent would be a system where every organization had white-hat hackers.

The lawyer's defense is that, in any decent justice system, people have a right to a legal council and are presumed innocent until proven guilty. Even if they have been declared guilty of a crime in the past they might be innocent of this one and still have a right to council.

I heard a lawyer in an interview talking about defending a rapist/murdered in a small town. While eating lunch at the town diner a few people approached to ask how he could defend someone so vile.

He told them about how it is important that defendants are presumed innocent, and that everyone gets a strong defense, in order to make sure that those who are wrongfully accused do not get wrongfully convicted.

They talked about it for something like an hour, and the people were only sort of convinced. And his lunch got cold.

Later, he found himself in another small town, defending another rapist/murdered, eating lunch in a diner and being asked by the people there the same question.

This time he said "his family paid me $100000 to defend him". The crowd accepted that right away as a perfectly fine reason to defend some totally vile criminal, and went back to their lunches.