Why I Work on Ads • Hacker News Board

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#591

Post by andrepd » Thu, May 06, 2021, 9:52 PM UTC

smsm42 wrote: post #508

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…

Also regarding regressivity: poorer and/or less informed people are more at-risk for predatory advertising: think scratch lotteries, payday loans, etc. Also of course the "YOU HAVE [241] VIRUSES DETECTED, DOWNLOAD SUPER CLEANER SX"

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#592

Post by aridiculous » Thu, May 06, 2021, 9:52 PM UTC

angarg12 wrote: post #588

I work in ads, not particularly because I like the domain, but because it's a great tech challenge. I got the chance to work in large scale systems and solve hard problems using fun technologies. As an engineer, it's my favourite job so far. Beyond that, people who ask such things are just taking the moral high ground.

Perhaps they are. Or perhaps they’re just taking a moral position at all.

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#593

Post by filoleg » Thu, May 06, 2021, 9:53 PM UTC

jonny_eh wrote: post #573

hermesfeet wrote: post #571

Thanks for laying out your logic. I work in the ads business at FB. I do so because I personally like ads and my biggest gripe is that ads are not relevant and personalized enough. I want better ads. Ultimately ads support a robust ecosystem of free software and content that keeps many creators going. Consumers can also choose to buy their software and content, or donate, but most don’t. Despite their whining, most p…

> Ads support free stuff for the poor and middle classes. Rich coastal elites can tell themselves they will pay for everything, and that’s great (most don’t). Why doesn't FB offer a "premium" tier for people to buy their way out of ads?

>Why doesn't FB offer a "premium" tier for people to buy their way out of ads?

Warning: here goes my armchair theory.

Because as soon as you put a price tag on it, people will instantly see that they can actually get that "premium" tier for free by using an adblocker, which will lead to more people using adblockers.

If something is just free, most people don't really care for it. But if it is something that is free while it is normally not free, people will flock to it. Just think about random just that people wouldn't care to buy normally, but end up buying it because it is on a "90% off sale" (even if the "sale" price is the same as it would've been without a "sale").

Which sort of makes sense with FB, because you get a clear price tag attached and you feel bad for spending those money, when you can get the exact same experience "for free".

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#594

Post by gonehome » Thu, May 06, 2021, 9:54 PM UTC

Ads are a corrupting influence on the web - the issue with framing this as more open access compared to for-pay services is that it sidesteps how the model corrupts the content of the services itself. There are the data collection and privacy issues as well, but it's the corruption of the content that's a really serious destructive force. In the end you can't even pay for the original non-ad supported content anymore because the content itself is an ad created entirely for the purpose of driving engagement. (There are some exceptions to this e.g. Substack).

It also corrupts what products get built because the incentives between the users of the software and the funders of the software are not aligned (even though ad devs pretend they are by pretending users like relevant ads). To test if users truly find 'relevant ads' as value-add: make two products, one with ads and one without and charge for the one with ads - see how many people buy it.

Why doesn't Hulu charge more many for their streaming service with ads instead of their service without? The behavior of these companies suggests they know on some level this value-add nonsense is a rationalization. Even if you say it's only value-add when compared to un-targeted ads - let users choose to have un-targeted ads without giving up their data privacy. I'd bet money on what choice they'd make.

The truth is targeted ads work and make enormous amounts of money for the ad companies - that's why they do them. The twisted narratives of why this is actually good for people or society are just another example that there is no limit to humanity's ability to rationalize anything when it's in their interest to do so.

--

"“In the beginning not everyone tended to their free data farms. Many did not know what to do with them, some only planted one or two tweets and then abandoned them entirely. This disappointed the earls of our kingdom. If they don’t encourage growth, their share of the data harvest is smaller, there’s no one to hear their pronouncements, and all of the land they spent time cultivating is wasted. They realized that not only do they need to make the land easy to cultivate, but they need to make the serfs want to cultivate it. They experimented for a while and learned that new types of controversial, viciously competitive crops are great for encouraging data farming - they call this type of encouragement ‘engagement’.”"

https://zalberico.com/essay/2020/07/14/the-serfs-of-facebook...

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#595

Post by joshuamorton » Thu, May 06, 2021, 9:54 PM UTC

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…

> That a privately owned corporation is allowed to read your messages and sell what they find to the highest bidder is vile and honestly makes me wonder how we got here.

[I work at Google too, not on ads though] Could you clarify what you mean by this.

A natural reading of these two things ("reading your messages" and "selling to the highest bidder") aren't true. There are lots of things you could mean (reading messages could mean reading emails, reading comments on Youtube, reading hangouts messages, and harvesting that data to sell ads) So I'm curious what things Google does that you mean by that.

> you don't see any adverts, but they're still harvesting and selling you

This is concretely untrue, even by the stretchy definitions. Google (and generally most ad companies) don't sell your data. Sometimes people mean sell your eyeballs, in that they gather data and then use it to sell your attention, and some people find that just as bad.

But if you aren't seeing ads, they're not even doing that. There's no one they're selling anything of yours to. Not your data, not your attention, nothing.

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#596

Post by heavyset_go » Thu, May 06, 2021, 9:55 PM UTC

pydry wrote: post #91

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.…

I have tracking blockers set up all over, so I rarely get ads targeted at me. Instead I get ads targeted at people who share my IP. I can often tell what my girlfriend has been browsing for from the ads I'm hit with, for instance, which is somewhat creepy.

> I can often tell what my girlfriend has been browsing for from the ads I'm hit with, for instance, which is somewhat creepy.

I've had ads for medication that I'm prescribed, or could be prescribed, play on other people's devices when they use my network. It's likely targeted because I don't get ads for other types of prescriptions at all at home.

I'm also pretty sure of some of the medical conditions my friends and family have based on the ads I consistently see in their homes.

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#597

Post by joshuamorton » Thu, May 06, 2021, 9:56 PM UTC

Datsundere wrote: post #590

andrepd wrote: post #570

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do you have a position on a better alternative business model Sure! Thanks for asking. One idea I like is this: you pay a small, fixed subscription on top of your internet bill. This amount is then given proportionally to the services you visit. This is nice for several reasons: even a small amount (~3-5$) gives a similar or higher revenue for content creators than ads do (a very rough back-of-the-envelope estimate…

Ads should not exist period. Youtube worked without ads before and it can work without ads. I don't need to be paying a premium to use a service. Why are ads the way to generate revenue? Like I don't care about buying a coffee grinder. Ads not only help contribute to needless purchases but also directly affect the environment cause of that.

Youtube only existed without ads for around a year. It's not clear that a youtube post, say 2008, could exist without ads or a subscription fee.

[0]: You can see what those looked like here https://www.versionmuseum.com/history-of/youtube-website. Youtube added its first advertisements in mid 2007.

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#598

Post by andrepd » Thu, May 06, 2021, 9:56 PM UTC

This whole post assumes the only options which can conceivably exist for monetising content are: (1) ads, or (2) paying for single pageviews (and (3) doing it for free). Obviously this is a fallacy: there are numerous alternative ways to do things.

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#599

Post by qsort » Thu, May 06, 2021, 9:57 PM UTC

version_five wrote: post #534

qsort wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An engineer building effective adtech is similarly behaving ethically according to their own career path. Lawyers effectively defending awful clients, for example, managing to get them off the hook on a technicality, are likewise generating massive negative externalities for society at large. It's either both or neither, and I'm not comfortable going down that path.

> Lawyers effectively defending awful clients, for example, managing to get them off the hook on a technicality, are likewise generating massive negative externalities for society at large. This is a harmful misunderstanding of how the legal system works. Subjecting laws and procedures to scrutiny, and exposing "loopholes" is exactly the role of a vigorous defence. The fact that the consequences for the state (and so…

I completely agree with that. My argument rests on the fact that I agree that lawyers should do that, consequences be damned.

Sorry for the low signal answer, but you're the second to raise this objection and I wanted to clarify I don't actually think that.

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#600

Post by robbrown451 » Thu, May 06, 2021, 9:59 PM UTC

andrepd wrote: post #598

This whole post assumes the only options which can conceivably exist for monetising content are: (1) ads, or (2) paying for single pageviews (and (3) doing it for free). Obviously this is a fallacy: there are numerous alternative ways to do things.

Maybe you could list ones you think could work...? I've heard several proposed, none of them make a lot of sense to me. Patreon? Government grants? Or what?