Why I Work on Ads • Hacker News Board

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#711

Post by mc32 » Fri, May 07, 2021, 1:11 AM UTC

bscphil wrote: post #702

mc32 wrote: post #654

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Organic mentions are the best ads; aside from that dedicated niche review sites which I’ll hit to look at the review and the comments. On the other hand, brand recognition I do believe has value but is hard to quantify. I also never click on an internet ad EXCEPT if it links to a price -not to buy.

I partially disagree: fake (paid) "organic" mentions and fake reviews are the most effective form of marketing. And, obviously, they're much easier for a company to achieve than the real thing. How unsurprising is it that the most effective class of ad spend is the most scummy? The reason (fake) organic marketing is effective is exactly because it fools people into thinking that it isn't marketing. Take paid Amazon r…

I generally agree with your gist; however, I would point out that there are niche review sites run by enthusiasts (whether computer parts, cameras, tools, gadgets, clothing, and so on.) and there are the SEO types that are near-worthless. Enthusiast sites have a range of community-only and not ads, some have affiliate links and some have paid reviews and so on. So you have to know how the site operates and take that into account.

The niche ones have mods which allow genuine dissent as well as other recommendations from competing solutions.

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#712

Post by fomine3 » Fri, May 07, 2021, 1:12 AM UTC

filoleg wrote: post #593

jonny_eh wrote: post #573

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 w…

For additional paid feature, change the Facebook logo to "Facebook Premium" and bundle music subscription service.

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#713

Post by meowface » Fri, May 07, 2021, 1:13 AM UTC

nyolfen wrote: post #688

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.

At least you're getting something out of it when it isn't ads, though. If it's a game (like Candy Crush, mentioned in another comment), at least you're getting some tiny dopamine hit, no matter how repetitive and empty. For social media, at least you're getting that slight bit of humor or outrage bait.

I don't like these things at all, but they're something. With an ad, you're solely siphoning off a portion of my infinitesimally fleeting existence. It's like getting stuck in traffic, except deliberate and with malice aforethought.

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#714

Post by S_A_P » Fri, May 07, 2021, 1:13 AM UTC

Justify it however you want, its not (IMHO) adding value to society and has created perverse incentives on the internet. Donating to "efficient" charities does not excuse what you do for a living. That was thrown out there first to virtue signal, but something tells me if that is your first argument you know that what you are doing isnt good for society. I honestly would feel better about the guy if he just said 'I work on ads. They pay me a shit ton of money. I know its a dirty business, but right now I want to get paid'.

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#715

Post by meowface » Fri, May 07, 2021, 1:24 AM UTC

manigandham wrote: post #686

mediaman wrote: post #645

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As a consumer, why does it very strongly feel like in my case, it never, ever works, then? And why does pretty much everyone else I've ever heard talk about this say the exact same thing?

Are we being 5D-chess'd and it's working on all of us subliminally and subconsciously and we just think we're immune? Or is there some other huge population of people out there it's working on who actually somehow are real manifestations of the unfathomably-cringeworthy-to-utter "sheeple" / "NPC" trope or something?

One area I can see is more subtle word-of-mouth kinds of influence (organic or astroturfed), where someone may see a lot of their friends or people they admire using and recommending something. I can definitely be influenced in that way in some cases - that's kind of how interest in almost anything works, isn't it? (For a non-profit example, would I have become interested in Rust if I didn't see it positively mentioned thousands of times on websites I use for the past decade? Probably not.) But for traditional ads like banners and commercials and billboards, I perceive zero efficacy in my own case.

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#716

Post by futureshock » Fri, May 07, 2021, 1:27 AM UTC

jimmaswell wrote: post #706

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…

My ability to concentrate, learn, or get shit done has only ever been hindered by an ad to the extent that it's annoying waiting for the ad to finish. I can't imagine most people don't just tune ads out most of the time. Still better than having to pay every website a subscription. It's nice having the option though, for example I personally find YouTube Premium worth the money.

There's a very important piece you're missing here and once you get it, it's hard to see the world in the same way. A product you pay for doesn't care how often you use it. The tennis racket sits there. It doesn't matter how much you use it, that's your choice.

A product you pay for with your attention has a voracious appetite for your attention. The more you use it, the more valuable it is to the company that made it. It would be best if you were using it All The Time. It would be best if it was incredibly addictive so you would never get tired of it and move on to something else. It would be best if the maker of this product could measure how much of your time they were capturing so they could make sure to capture even more in the future.

And in fact, if you look at time use studies, we pretty much spend all of our waking lives using a phone, tv or computer. There is literally no time left, so an advertising company is trying to invent a self driving car so you can keep using your phone during your commute, the last sliver of waking life left unconquered. Our dreams will surely be next.

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#717

Post by meowface » Fri, May 07, 2021, 1:30 AM UTC

wmf wrote: post #701

alex_young wrote: post #693

Here's an honest question: Why should a search engine cost so much? Look at Wikipedia - it's a search engine and content repository for all of the world's knowledge, and its operating expenses are around $100M / year. The Internet Archive has an annual budget of $10M / year. Google on the other hand, has annual revenues of $181B / year, or about 2000 times Wikipedia's spending. Is the crawling part hard? The folks at…

Ah yes, the "how much could it cost" comment. "Businesses should keep adding engineers to work on optimization until the cost of adding an engineer equals the revenue gain plus the cost savings at the margin. This is often many more engineers than people realize." https://danluu.com/sounds-easy/

Yeah, I think the amount of Google employees is completely rational if you consider it for what it is.

The key takeaway from that article:

>Businesses that actually care about turning a profit will spend a lot of time (hence, a lot of engineers) working on optimizing systems, even if an MVP for the system could have been built in a weekend.

Google's goal is to make as much profit as possible. Wikipedia's isn't. If Google had stayed a non-profit search engine the whole time (as proposed in the original paper for Google), then its costs would probably be not too different from Wikipedia's.

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#718

Post by propogandist » Fri, May 07, 2021, 1:31 AM UTC

bigyikes wrote: post #699

propogandist wrote: post #691

Earlier quoted context omitted.

be aware of the conversations you have in a 24hr to 48hr period, see if "targeted" ads appear in your feed, which relate to things shared in those conversations. I've seen things go from saying things in a conversation to targeted advert on Twitter, for example, in under 1hr routinely (although not always). Many of my peers have reported the same. While I've reproduced this on multiple devices (Android + iPhone) over…

I still don’t believe audio surveillance exists at this scale, and I still haven’t seen any evidence that these events are anything but coincidence. It seems to me that Facebook is extremely good at targeting me with ads (via Instagram) for products I might be interested in. I’m also much more likely to talk about products I’m interested in. I’m also much more likely to notice the spooky scenarios where the ads match…

I had a hard time believing it myself and came to terms with it after reproducing it consistently over many months, despite using everything from pihole to on-device firewalls running as root.

Unfortunately, this topic tends to be routinely brushed off as coincidence and I believe it's partially because the level of surveillance underway would cause panic and outrage, if it becomes widely known. Although I have have exposure to adtech and ML, it's difficult to grasp how this sort of activity is being done at scale.

My current theory is audio may be heavily compressed prior to occasional uploads to a trusted domain, which could be obfuscated by cloudfront or similar service. It's also possible some on-device speech to text is happening, which would make the files trivial to upload. That said, on device ML itself would be a quite a feat, especially to be running on mobile devices with high degree of accuracy to isolate keywords to be used in prod, for ad targeting.

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#719

Post by cpfohl » Fri, May 07, 2021, 1:37 AM UTC

weasel_words wrote: post #197

redleggedfrog wrote: post #8

That sure sounds like appeasing guilt with charity donations.

...and good old fashion virtue signaling https://www.jefftk.com/donations imo, honest hearts never need to publicize their altruism to the world.

Worked with Jeff ages ago. I promise you you've got the wrong read on him

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#720

Post by lolinder » Fri, May 07, 2021, 1:38 AM UTC

m3at wrote: post #683

notJim wrote: post #565

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't know if the comment has been edited (I doubt it), but I don't see where GP said they quit out of disgust. In fact, this line really does seem to be giving traditional advertisers a pass:

> I used to work in more trad advertising, so my question wasn't so much an objection to working in advertising itself...

(Not commenting on whether they should be given a pass, just noting that GP really did seem to be doing so.)