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Why I Work on Ads

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Re: Why I Work on Ads

#681

Post by XorNot »

the8bit wrote: post #542
thrwaeasddsaf wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Point being it really seems like people have decided/agreed that they prefer the ad model to anything else. I'm not sure how you mean this but what you say comes dangerously close to implying that people want ads. That may be true if you force them into a false dichotomy (pay or have ads). I think it's more just that people don't want to pay. If it's on the web, they read it for free, period. If it's not on the web…

If you remove pay models, a vast majority of the internet will just disappear. (I think you) in a previous comment mention that it is 'cheap' to run a site, which is generally true on a per user basis for primarily text sites. But cheap != free. I see it often, but it is honestly the most laughably selfish opinion to believe that one should be entitled to the internet as it exists today, but also not pay directly or…

That's not what they were saying though. It's one way to read it, sure, but another way is "most content on the web is so low value that if it ceased existing users would not care".

Which is true. If its not on the web, then I don't read it, and don't miss it - by and large.

A huge number of people seem to believe that 95% of the internet is of any value - yet the existence of HN itself shows that's not true. This whole site exists to turn "the internet" into a selection of high quality links, and even then the front page is maybe 20% interesting to me on a day by day basis.

So how much of the internet matters to me? 6 links out of 30, selected by a community which completely avoids all the "major" sites.

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#682

Post by nonameiguess »

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.

Does YouTube need to exist? I think most of us were alive before 2007 and I don't remember it being some kind of apocalyptic hellhole in which I could never find information or entertainment.

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#683

Post by m3at »

notJim wrote: post #565
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…

I'm not sure why traditional advertising should get a pass here. Traditional advertising finds whatever fears and insecurities you have and exploits them to sell you stuff. If you're worried you're not manly enough, better buy an $80k truck with at least a V-6. If you're worried you're not a good enough parent, better give your kids some sugary crap. Exploiting people's psychology like this is also an overreach.

GP said he worked in traditional advertising then quit after a few years out of disgust, I don't think he's giving traditional advertisers a pass.

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#684

Post by masalachai »

The problem of scattered attention is one that philosophers have been pointing to since thousands of years. Most practices like mindfulness, meditation, yoga help primarily with more conscious attention management. That attention is scattered/captured is not new. What it gets captured by probably changes every decade.

I dislike seeing ads, especially when they are poorly or intentionally designed to block you from doing what you came to site for. And I do have a concern about the amount of detail these companies end up accruing about a user and its implications. I also get distracted by them - but only when I don't have an intention or strong need to focus on the task at hand.

This does not make me think that ads themselves or the model itself is fundamentally bad. A model, ultimately is, as good or bad as its implementation. GMail, Google Maps, Android are some of the things that have changed the landscape in significant and positive ways, and all of them were made possible by ad tech.

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#685

Post by imwillofficial »

If ads were simply “paying with attention” like in the 90s, generally people wouldn’t mind as much. But when ads bring a ton of privacy violating, subtly manipulating, resource hogging baggage, people get angry. So I find His arguments disingenuous at best.

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#686

Post by manigandham »

mediaman wrote: post #645
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.…

One of the interesting things about advertising is that nobody really knows if it works, and there's a growing body of evidence that it largely doesn't work. We are sold on the idea that they work, because someone clicks this ad, we track them, they buy the product, and we attribute the sale to that ad. But we don't know whether the customer would have bought anyway. And some research suggests that, for the most part…

We definitely know that it works. We generate petabytes everyday proving it does.

That being said there’s plenty of waste due to politics, bureaucracy, bad tech and general mismanagement. It’s important to separate the concept from the implementation.

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#687

Post by manigandham »

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.…

First of not every ad is targeted to you. A large majority will just be lightly targeted or remnant inventory where it’s better to show you something than waste an impression. You probably don’t notice the ones that are well targeted because they just work.

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#688

Post by nyolfen »

adriand wrote: post #647

The author writes that you can either pay with money or you can “pay with your attention”. What’s left unsaid is the cost of that attention. I believe that cost is very high and it isn’t just ads, it’s the design of countless products including social media sites, games and even the site you’re reading this on right now. It’s all designed to extract as much attention as possible, and the cost is people’s ability to c…

products subject to direct market forces are incentivized by this as well. you don't pay for crack with popups.

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#689

Post by nonameiguess »

joshuamorton wrote: post #501
thrwaeasddsaf wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Point being it really seems like people have decided/agreed that they prefer the ad model to anything else. I'm not sure how you mean this but what you say comes dangerously close to implying that people want ads. That may be true if you force them into a false dichotomy (pay or have ads). I think it's more just that people don't want to pay. If it's on the web, they read it for free, period. If it's not on the web…

I think you're missing that content creators (whether they be small or large) need to be able to subsist off of their work. This is especially true if we want high quality content. So the dichotomy is only false if you assume people are willing to accept "stop consuming content" which, by and large, they aren't.

No, they don't. Creative jobs have always been boom or bust, following a power law where ten people earn a living directly off of it and everyone else waits tables by day and hopes to someday catch a break. That was fine for centuries. The world didn't collapse prior to the invention of widescale cross-site tracking of user behavior to create intelligent targeted ads, and I'm not sure it was worse for "content creators," either. Maybe they're just being old and grumpy, but the actual most talented people in creative industries seem to yearn for yesteryear when they were allowed to actually be creative and all the major publishers and studios weren't in an unwinnable death race to the bottom with Netflix and Amazon seemingly generating true crime docs and superhero stories by algorithm.

As for quality, it's all opinion, I guess, but the only form that seems to have gotten better recently is prestige television, but even there I'd say it so far peaked around 2010. Film and pop music peaked in the 60s and 70s. Instrumental music, literature, and painting peaked centuries ago. Artists have created perfectly good art for as long as humans have existed without the need to track their consumers private behavior to develop targeted ad profiles.

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#690

Post by devenblake »

latexr wrote: post #649

> I think advertising is positive > (…) > So: why is advertising good? (…) The question is, what is the alternative? “I can’t think of a better alternative than the status quo, thus the status quo is positive” isn’t a sound conclusion. Every sufficiently ingrained societal negative we’ve abolished since was likely reasoned in that manner at one point.

To me the article read like they were trying to justify working at Google to themself. It never explains why it's acceptable that ads target themselves at consumers in the first place when such a thing would have been considered dystopian fifty years ago (selling flower ads on a flower show is okay, but showing flower ads on a car show the next week because the consumer watched a flower show last week could have been the plot of a Twilight Zone episode), instead it just talks about how they're trying to protect privacy while using principally privacy-hostile ad targeting technology.
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