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Why I Work on Ads

jefftk.com

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Re: Why I Work on Ads

#611

Post by isoskeles »

whitepaint wrote: post #149
isoskeles wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jobs are not necessarily good for society, nor are cheaper goods. We could have dirt cheap asbestos and cigarettes, that's not good for society. We can have billions of jobs making and filling dirt holes, that's also not good for society. That aside, the effectiveness of ads are orthogonal to the quality or "good"-ness of jobs and products. They just seem, to me, like more of an amoral thing that can be used to sell…

Free markets don't work like that. We would only be having billions of jobs filling dirt holes if it produced more value to the society than it extracted it from.

I'm mainly responding to the part of your comment noting jobs created and cheaper goods as an intrinsically net positive ("good") for society. I agree that the free market does not tend to create completely useless jobs, but such jobs can and do exist in a society. Most economies are not simply free markets, many are partly directed or interfered with (depending on your perspective) by governments. This can result in some pointless jobs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Make-work_job) or mis-allocation of resources toward less productive work (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solyndra).

Or, let's say the jobs created are for producing more cigarettes and asbestos. Do you think that producing more cigarettes and asbestos, which requires more jobs, is "good" for society?

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#612

Post by ryan93 »

andrepd wrote: post #605
Kranar wrote: post #602

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article states the two options: Paywalls vs. ads. Now it's not that those are the only two conceivable options, it's that those are the only two options that are reasonably successful at scale. I'm sure you could think up a donation system, or do something similar to what the Brave browser does, but those do not scale. Of course if you have some alternative approaches that work and produce viable business models,…

What do you mean by "scale" in this context? I fail to see how, having not tried alternative approaches, you conclude that they do not "scale".

So google should give up 180 Billion in revenue because some idea you cant name might work?

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#613

Post by Kranar »

andrepd wrote: post #605
Kranar wrote: post #602

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article states the two options: Paywalls vs. ads. Now it's not that those are the only two conceivable options, it's that those are the only two options that are reasonably successful at scale. I'm sure you could think up a donation system, or do something similar to what the Brave browser does, but those do not scale. Of course if you have some alternative approaches that work and produce viable business models,…

What do you mean by "scale" in this context? I fail to see how, having not tried alternative approaches, you conclude that they do not "scale".

Can you please answer the question about the specific alternative approaches you are proposing?

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#614

Post by shkkmo »

fastball wrote: post #557
shkkmo wrote: post #533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

Personal responsibility is not an excuse for disregarding the suffering of others.

The war on drugs was a fundementally bad approach to fixing the problem. If it had worked and drug use had dropped near zero over a decade or two, you wouldn't see the current level of support for ending it. There are other cases where removing personal choice is not controversial (such as seat belt laws, incarceration,

In fact, the failure of the war on drugs is an argument against relying purely on personal responsibility to solve the problem. Simply punishing people and expecting them to learn enough about the consequences of drug use to make the responsibile decision to stay away failed.

It turns out that sometimes to get people to a place where they can take full personal responsibility, it requires giving them some help.

We should strive to avoid removing personal responsibility and choice. The better job we do of providing the tools and support needed to make good decisions (i.e. ones the deciser will look back on without regret), the more respsibility we can easily allow.

For examole: If we do a good job of protecting amd treating gambling addicts, that facilitates opening up gambling to more people in more locations.

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#615

Post by ChefboyOG »

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.…

There's a famous quote from John Wanamaker that goes something like:

"Half of my advertising budget is wasted. The problem is, I don't know which half."

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#616

Post by nl »

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 never worked before ads.

Prior to Google's purchase they were running at a massive loss, burning investment money. That's not working by any normal definition.

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#617

Post by ajkjk »

gundmc wrote: post #546
ajkjk wrote: post #543

Like others I don't buy this argument. They wrote that the two choices are > Paywalls. You pay with your money. > Ads. You pay with your attention. But that's not quite right. Ads have two options themselves: > Ads. You pay with your money, because the ads get you to buy stuff. > Ads. You pay with your attention, wasted on stuff you'll never buy. Two negatives. Either you buy stuff you otherwise wouldn't (and therefo…

> buying things in general is bad -- bad for you, bad for the human race, and bad for the environment Do you mean to qualify this in any way? This is quite the radical statement that I'm not sure how you can reconcile with human existence any time the last X thousand years.

Not really. I think we should operate such that consumption is slightly negative to begin with.

imo, buying something you need is good, but then you don't need an ad to tell you to do it. Buying something you want is good. Buying something you neither need nor want is bad. Allowing something to manipulate you to want more stuff seems bad compared to it not happening.

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#618

Post by ryan93 »

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,…

Heinous idea to give to Americans going to college instead of starving people or something.

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#619

Post by wpietri »

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…

I agree that's one problem. But even without stalking as a business model, the point of ads is mostly to manipulate people into buying things with little regard as to utility.

Look, for example, at large advertisers like Coca Cola. Coke spends ~$1 billion/year in the US alone on ads. That's not because nobody has heard of them. The point is to shift money into Coke's pockets.

Almost all advertising provides no net benefit to society; it's just an arms race between companies competing to manipulate people. If we banned it, we'd quickly find other ways to get people the minimal information content it contains. We'd definitely find ways to spend the $1tn or so that it consumes now. And that's not even counting the benefits from less waste and market distortion caused by advertising.

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#620

Post by elzbardico »

thrwaeasddsaf wrote: post #124

For me the first big disagreement begins with asking for what's the alternative. I don't think there needs to be an alternative. I think ads are largely responsible for the sorry state of the seo spammed web where finding what you want can be a complete nightmare. (It costs almost nothing to run a website, and if you spam enough ~zero cost sites loaded with ads and affiliate links, you can probably make a buck. This…

Ironically, nowadays it is becoming difficult even to find a specific product that you wanted to buy.
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