521–530 of 882 posts
The late great Bill Hicks perfectly summarized my feelings towards advertisers/marketers. There is nothing wrong with ads per-say, it is the real time bidding and targeted ads that I have problems with. And of course malvertising such as the one which compromised my sisters laptop with a fileless rootkit a few years back. Ads and analytics are not allowed on my home network.
The online ad business generally mystifies me. While an awful lot of the internet, especially the surveillance advertising part, looks to be the greatest misallocation of engineering (and other) talent in the history of the world, ya gotta ask about the efficacy. The only reasonably accurate targeting I've ever run into is the occasional ad for something I just browsed on Amazon. I've never clicked on an internet ad.…
Now-days "Ads" are a watching you.
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> 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…
Even if you think you are immune, you probably agree ads attempting to psychologically manipulate people into buying a product are unethical?
If people were interested in seeing ads, a business of selling pure ad catalogues would actually be a successful venture! As it stands now, you can't even give such material away for free without generating hate. Because people don't want to see ads! It doesn't matter if they're tracked or not. The ad is the problem!
I notice immediately two main points are wrong: > Minimal friction. Fair enough when the site had one ad. Pretty much no site had one ad now. They have lots of them, which is significantly slowing down loading the page. And if you add all tracking and surveillance code, it can inflate a simple site into megabytes of data. There are common sites that load literally hundreds of outside URLs for ad and surveillance mech…
Not to mention how they disproportionately affect "non tech savvy" groups. I almost never see ads, especially not the really obnoxious ones, and I imagine it's the same for most people here. Meanwhile elderly people are being inundated with ads that look like forms and buttons and warnings, and getting tricked into doing who knows what. Even if that's not financially regressive, it still has an outsized impact that is worse for groups that are already having a harder time of it.
The online ad business generally mystifies me. While an awful lot of the internet, especially the surveillance advertising part, looks to be the greatest misallocation of engineering (and other) talent in the history of the world, ya gotta ask about the efficacy. The only reasonably accurate targeting I've ever run into is the occasional ad for something I just browsed on Amazon. I've never clicked on an internet ad.…
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Yeah, there are people who overshop, I'm sorry, but so what? What's the alternative? Ban ads? Let the government decide what should be sold / not sold? I believe it should be left to the individual what they consume and buy with their own earned money. No one has the right to say that they can't buy tobacco, or take a predatory loan. "personal data collection & malware" - you agree to those conditions. In return you…
The point, which you (deliberately?) miss, is that you have simply declared ads to be worthwhile, and are now working backwards to argue your conclusion. You are begging the question.
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I totally agree about the YouTube advertising. YouTube literally has hundreds of hours of my video history to work with, yet the vast majority of the ads I see are completely unrelated to my interests. What's the point of all the tracking if they can't even show me relevant ads on YouTube of all places? Podcast ads tend to be much more relevant, and I can even recall purchases I've made due to them. AFAIK my podcast…
That's because the companies winning bidds on your 'views' are targeting you because of your apparent persona, i.e middle aged man/woman in tech -aka middle class ++ with disposable income, rather than what you are interested in. On top of that, plenty of marketers are absolutely clueless about how to go about their strategy, mostly because unlike previous generations (in online ads), they don't grok the underlying t…
If that's all there is to it, I expect there's a lot of needless work being done under the covers.
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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 brid…
That sounds a lot like a trojan installed in your browser, or perhaps someone who shares your computer has peculiar habits.
Work and personal.
Much more likely explanation IMO (someone please correct me if I am wrong):
Google get paid by the view these days and optimize for the most expensive views.
As the person who originally asked "why" I feel like I ought to respond, though much of it is covered by other comments. I used to work in more trad advertising, so my question wasn't so much an objection to working in advertising itself, but specifically Google's version of advertising, which I see as gross overreach into people's personal lives. In other comments people have mentioned YouTube subscriptions as being…
Unpopular opinion: Ads by themselves are unethical. Whether targeted, contextual, or just randomly applied. Ads are psychological warfare against a populace using their very nature against them. All in an effort to get them to change their behavior in a way that's going to be detrimental to them. Either they stop looking for alternatives, or they make purchases they don't need to (see: toothpaste consumption rates).…
Would you say that Ads are still unethical if they're not paid for? As just an anecdote, I'm always shocked by the amount of advertising at Burning Man. There's always people trying to get you to come to their event or join in their activity. Signs and street barkers are everywhere. There's no money and no bartering allowed, but advertising is everywhere, since ultimately attention is what is in limited supply. If th…