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Why I Work on Ads

jefftk.com

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Re: Why I Work on Ads

#551

Post by falcolas »

mbesto wrote: post #503
falcolas wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a vast world of difference between putting out to the public "I sell X" and following you around the internet to auctioning a consumer's eyeballs to the highest ad bidder. Or intentionally changing your behavior with their ads (the toothpaste one being the simplest to understand). Trying to conflate the two as equivalent when someone says "ads are toxic" in the context of the online ad industry is doing the…

> Why search for a brand, and not a high quality, well reviewed USB charger? This is where you lost me. You assume: 1. There is a free service that allows you to search products. PS - it's called Google/Amazon. 2. There is a free service that allows you to read product reviews. PS - it's called Google/Amazon. > To use the original example, googling for "good USB charger" and then buying one via an ad will not give yo…

> where does this perfect search capability exist in the world that allows one to search for goods and services free from all advertising.

That an alternative is not easily available, does not somehow make the existing services ethical.

That said, and the mystical service is called your friends/family/neighbors/colleagues/etc. It ain't perfect, but it's remarkably effective. In the 2-300 people in your first and second degree networks, there's probably a few anecdotes to help you find a good product.

It even has a neat name: word of mouth.

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#552

Post by csa »

kingsuper20 wrote: post #61

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.…

You’ve made some really good points.

Possible explanations that I have seen for inaccurate targeting:

1. Some folks have a ton of money in their budget to spend on marketing, and they frankly don’t care about optimizing their targeting. In some cases, this is a shrewd decision, since the benefits of marginal optimization don’t really justify the cost of optimization. That said, in most cases, it’s just sloth or ignorance combined with the knowledge that they better spend their ad budget or else “bad things” will happen.

2. Lots of people call themselves digital marketers. Most of them who are employees suck, and I mean suck really bad. The reason is that if you are really good at digital marketing, it’s pretty easy to roll your own small business that, at a minimum, makes enough money while still having a lot of latitude in terms of free time or financial upside. Most companies are not willing or are not able to pay highly competent digital marketers what they are worth. Regardless, these employee marketers who suck tend not to do well at optimizing targeting.

3. Most digital marketing agencies suck at targeting. This is largely a byproduct of #2 above. The owner of an agency or the lead marketer might be really good, but they often delegate to people who are not. Streamlining the work of the underlings turns out not to be that important for most of these agencies.

That’s my 2 cents. I would love to hear other opinions.

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#553

Post by pb7 »

Pfhreak wrote: post #139
efa wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>Who gives 50% earned to charity? Perhaps some. But I'm sure they don't brag to the world about it.

Can you advocate for doing an ethical thing like that and not have it be considered bragging? I've often wondered about how to encourage others to give more, volunteer more. If I don't do those things (or don't claim to), people will say, "Why should I do that? You don't do that! Hypocrite." If I do those things, people will say, "You are just bragging/virtue signaling."

Both are defense mechanisms to prevent any responsibility to do something themselves.

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#554

Post by beervirus »

fastball wrote: post #478
beervirus wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spying on users. Running code they didn’t ask for on their computers to spy on them.

Did you not read the second half of the article?

I read it. It’s great that he’s working on something that is alleged to be a little less horrible. Doesn’t make it good, or even acceptable.

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#555

Post by the8bit »

creata wrote: post #55

> but what about all those sites that don't have a strong commercial tie-in? Surely it's okay for sites that "don't have a commercial tie-in" to stick with untargeted ads? I just think that building a giant stalking network is an extreme (and ideally illegal) solution to the "problem" that a couple of sites won't make as much money off their popularity as they'd like. And is it that uncharitable to characterize what…

Each ad serve is not worth that much to start with, facebooks CPMs are about $7-8, so they are getting $0.007 per serve with extensive targeting. The falloff is something around 10x+ for completely non targeted ads which for most sites push them below the level of economic feasibility.

This is also why if you stumble into some parts of the web, they vomit out a billion ads per page to try and compensate.

Really the problem is that there is a tremendous gap between the costs to serve content and users willingness to pay (either directly or via any indirect method). It is a tremendously deep hole we've built with freemium models that will probably require some level of societal agreement to dig back out of.

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#556

Post by fastball »

falcolas wrote: post #541
fastball wrote: post #500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm generally sympathetic to this stance, but the major drawback that has surfaced (when I've had this conversation in the past) is that discovery is a real thing that still needs to happen and ads can in fact help with that. First in the obvious way: there are products that I have found useful that I would not have known existed if not for ads. The idea that you should only ever purchase something because you were s…

Your argument boils down to "content creators need to make money, and the only expedient way for them to make money is to show ads". And you know what? Perhaps it is. Even if that's the case, I still think it's unethical, that a bit more brainpower should be put into a funding model that isn't ads. Even if it increases friction. The most expedient way to expand a country's border is still war, and I believe that's un…

Well you missed the first part of the argument, which is that ads can be intrinsically useful for discovery of things you didn't know you needed but would actually be useful in your life.

With regards to the second part, which you addressed, it's one thing to say "this is bad we should replace it with X". It is an entirely different thing to say "this is bad I have no idea what we should replace it with". Because nothing is black and white, so it doesn't matter how bad ads are if the thing that replaces them is then worse.

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#557

Post by fastball »

shkkmo wrote: post #533
fastball wrote: post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speak for yourself. Instagram gives me fantastically targeted ads, and I appreciate that.

I'm glad you aren't vulnerable to any of the above issues I raise. That doesn't mean there aren't vulnerable and powerless people who are being hurt by this system and your support o it.

Removing personal responsibility from people is in itself a source of many social ills.

For example think about how much better society could've been over the past decades if, instead of saying "people can't reasonably make decisions about [insert drug here] so we're going to illegalize all of them" we'd said "wow, adults can make decisions for themselves".

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#558

Post by fastball »

beervirus wrote: post #554
fastball wrote: post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you not read the second half of the article?

I read it. It’s great that he’s working on something that is alleged to be a little less horrible. Doesn’t make it good, or even acceptable.

Well until you have a better alternative...

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#559

Post by nyczomg »

DogOnTheWeb wrote: post #519
drcongo wrote: post #119

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…

Do you have a position on a better alternative business model, or do you feel that a service like YouTube shouldn't exist? It seems to me that YouTube and many of the ad-supported services out there provide broad benefits to people, and I am swayed by OPs point that a regressively priced business model which restricts these benefits to the global rich is a greater disservice.

I disagree completely with the author's point that the ad model is not regressive. The author points out correctly that charging everyone some $ is regressive, because for some people that amount of money is a lot, and for others that is a little. Totally makes sense.

Then, we go on to ads. Ads charge everyone a similar amount of bandwidth, attention, etc. But you know what? Some people who have more resources or knowhow will understand how to block ads. And they probably won't be paying by the MB on a crappy cell phone plan such that they spend their money on bandwidth to load the ads, while the content they want to read languishes below the fold of the ads and they struggle to navigate to it on their crappy device struggling to render ads.

The costs are more abstract than when paying in actual dollars, but surely we can recognize that the cost of ad supported web pages is also not felt evenly by everyone. As a privileged software engineer, I can guarantee you that the impact of "paying" for things with ads is felt far less by me than many others. That is regressive in my opinion.

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