Why I Work on Ads

As much as search used to suck, I kind of long for the days where I could organically find products by searching.

Much of the financial sector. M&A firms. Lobbying. SEO. Fake web traffic generators. App/game companies that only clone others. Content mills. Collection agencies. Old growth loggers. Ticket scalpers.

It's a little tricky because the most common scenario provides benefit to somebody, even if the overall social cost is far higher than that benefit. The customers of drug dealers want the product. Sleazy personal injury lawyers' clients gain from their services. Crypto miners.

>> And that's the reality we presently live in. It's not holes, it's watching ads and reading things that aren't worth our time and buying things that don't provide us value. Click on a link, dig a hole. Read the mindless alarm-inducing article, fill the hole in. > What are you proposing? That some entity tells what to read, what to buy, what to do? Why not just leave it to individuals to figure it out?

Uh, I'm not sure how you got there from what I said. I could make an argument for regulation, but I didn't.

We live an existence of partial information, and that's very exploitable. "Clickbait" is pejorative because it works but the expected payoff is not there. We are where the "free" market put us, though the market is not very free -- there's regulatory capture, information inequalities, and massive externalities that would not exist without the previous two.

I don't need to propose a guaranteed-effective fix in order to make the point that much economic activity provides zero or negative value.

If I had to point in the direction of a solution, I'd say that antitrust laws are vaguely the right idea, except they are based on very outdated notions of harm to consumers, and are also subject to regulatory capture. We need to make serious attempts at capturing more externalities. Even something as straightforward as a carbon tax is hard to define and implement, but it's the right idea; we need something similar for the massive damage done to people's time and attention, to civil society, to the commons. Capitalism got us here; it won't get us out. Although it's one of the tools that can and should be used.

I'm surprised the author focused singularly on the "funding the open web" stance, and did not discuss the alleged negative externalities created by advertising-driven business incentives. The top comments of the blog comments (e.g. https://www.jefftk.com/p/why-i-work-on-ads#lw-Nvd9ZHJLxZpNZD...) also point this out.

For instance, The Netflix documentary "The Social Dilemma" discusses these at length, and it forms a lot of the political zeitgeist around regulation of adtech companies (e.g. driving polarization, radicalization, depression and such).

> The question is, what is the alternative? I see two main funding models:

It's possible to simultaneously believe that ads are currently the effective way to lower barrier of entry to accessing content, and also believe that ads are a detriment to people's mental health.

One alternative would be an ad-supported system that performs less-personalized ad-targeting, and in doing so influences people's behavior less but generates enough revenue to keep the lights on with a reasonable profit margin. The government has laws for regulating natural monopolies like this, where they prevent utility companies from price gouging but grant them a certain amount of margin.

2) New challenger SaaS brands can get in front of customers to compete with mammoth corporate brands with worse software (I see this all the time on my job).

3) Without good ad targeting, only bottom hanging fruit advertisers that appeal to the lowest common denominator can afford to spend. Weight loss, teeth whitening, etc. Good ad targeting means a better user experience with ads.