Why I Work on Ads • Hacker News Board

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#781

Post by 55555 » Fri, May 07, 2021, 3:38 AM UTC

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…

oh my god discussions about advertising on hackernews are like a bunch of plumbers talking about software engineering. these threads should honestly just be used as Dunning-Kruger honeypots. we should post about advertising once a week and then just ban everyone who says "there is no evidence that advertising works."

I have a pixel on my thank-you page. I manually delete placements and optimize creatives and angles and funnels and demographic targeting until it goes from making no sales to ludicrously profitable. This is an entire industry you know nothing about.

Big brands can be dumb but they do mostly have the tools to not be.

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#782

Post by hisnameismanuel » Fri, May 07, 2021, 3:39 AM UTC

sunsipples wrote: post #778

hisnameismanuel wrote: post #769

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With most advertising mediums, you can only show correlation. But with many parts of digital, you can show certain pages of your website exclusively to those who have clicked on ads (ie. hide those pages from regular browsers). In this way you can directly measure the direct effects of the advertising spend. There are many businesses, including three that I own, that have grown as a sole consequence of social media a…

"I'm not going to share my advertising accounts with you; I'm just going to ask you to trust that when I get my laptop out and show my results to my 'marketing skeptical' friends, they stop being skeptical." spoken like a true used car salesman

What about the rest of the post? Is it too much to ask you to engage constructively?

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#783

Post by sunsipples » Fri, May 07, 2021, 3:43 AM UTC

hisnameismanuel wrote: post #782

sunsipples wrote: post #778

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I'm not going to share my advertising accounts with you; I'm just going to ask you to trust that when I get my laptop out and show my results to my 'marketing skeptical' friends, they stop being skeptical." spoken like a true used car salesman

What about the rest of the post? Is it too much to ask you to engage constructively?

if you mean make claims with no evidence to back them up, yes I can engage more with you.

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#784

Post by Tumblewood » Fri, May 07, 2021, 3:47 AM UTC

Advertisement is mostly a zero-sum game, competing for a limited amount of spending. If one player in a market advertises, they gain while the other players lose roughly the same amount. If the advertising world kept operating as normal, but the ads never displayed anywhere—blank sidebars, blank sponsored content, blank billboards—it would be more pleasant for consumers, and the market as a whole would not be any worse off for it.

Then why stop there? No one needs to make the ads. Everyone employed to design, shoot, and display the ad can serve others instead of working to manipulate them. As long as the transactions keep going as normal, it's a huge win for everybody.

Of course, this is business. Corporations wouldn't spend that money just to subsidize newspapers, television, and page views. In a world without advertisement, tons of content would suddenly lose its revenue stream, without an easy way to monetize attention. Attention would not be profitable on its own.

That's a negative thing on the face, but I believe content which cannot survive by donation or by subscription deserves to die. Netflix survives already without (third-party) advertisement; Facebook, on the other hand, would collapse. But a social network does not need as many engineers as Facebook does. Without competing against ad-based sites, a less bloated, less attention-sucking social network could replace Facebook. And so on for other sites. SEO blogspam would die, whereas useful and interesting newsletters would survive (as demonstrated by Substack). High-quality TV could survive, but game shows and reality TV would be forced to greatly pare down their offerings. Valuable, accurate subscription news would survive, whereas clickbait news would have no more reason to bait clicks.

The alternative to the status quo is that many forms of content would become unprofitable, and I don't think that's a bad thing.

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#785

Post by fellowniusmonk » Fri, May 07, 2021, 3:48 AM UTC

dkersten wrote: post #737

I’m against advertisement, in my opinion it’s the worst thing to happen to the internet. However, I have a problem with Google adverts specifically and that is that they’re absolute hot garbage. Google has advertised to me: outright scams, malware, gambling, mobile games with extremely exploitative monetisation. And they are working to take away any privacy I might have to keep showing me this shit. In my opinion, Go…

When I was a impoverished kid, how else was I supposed to get internet and email accept for with Juno, then NetZero or stealing internet? Yeah I used gophernet through a local library dialup and it was not the internet.

I mean, my brother once bought a "personal fan" for $1 and that was the most coveted possession we had for about 6 months.

As someone who grew up extremely poor and effectively dumpster dived for my first computer what pragmatic alternative is there?

I don't want to be uncharitable but this seems like a very middle class and annoyed wealthy problem to have, I haven't seen any non regressive approaches accept for MAYBE from crypto browsers.

Maybe the wealthy and middle class are just tired of subsidizing the internet and the content on it. As a broke child ads got me to a place where I could download html, learn to program and code and break out of an insane degree of poverty. The borland turbo c books at the library never seemed to have code that would compile.

It may just be my personal experience but all of this feel like pulling up the ladder behind me and I haven't seen anyone articulate practical alternatives that address this issue.

edit: Even mass surveillance and government control seems like an orthogonal near strawman issue to me, as far as I'm aware the most restricted countries on earth like China and NK don't need or use ad networks for their lockdowns. Frankly if you can't scrape data off my hard drive, don't have the power of incarceration (or feed data to those who do), and don't tie it to my credit score or ability to bank (I think we should pass legislation explicitly banning that on the banking side) and don't make it illegal to use ad blockers, I don't see the problem.

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#786

Post by hisnameismanuel » Fri, May 07, 2021, 3:49 AM UTC

sunsipples wrote: post #778

hisnameismanuel wrote: post #769

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With most advertising mediums, you can only show correlation. But with many parts of digital, you can show certain pages of your website exclusively to those who have clicked on ads (ie. hide those pages from regular browsers). In this way you can directly measure the direct effects of the advertising spend. There are many businesses, including three that I own, that have grown as a sole consequence of social media a…

"I'm not going to share my advertising accounts with you; I'm just going to ask you to trust that when I get my laptop out and show my results to my 'marketing skeptical' friends, they stop being skeptical." spoken like a true used car salesman

I'm not publishing a paper in the comments. This is HN. Regardless, you cherry picked one aspect of my comment, and it's very hard from my perspective to see that it was done in good faith.

I'd like to be proven otherwise, so, here are my key points, which you didn't contend with:

-> It's possible to completely isolate the effect of advertising spend, thereby making the effectiveness (or not) measurable.

-> I pointed to growing revenues on Google/FB's platforms, two platforms which make isolated measurement feasible.

In terms of _externally_ verifiable facts, that's the best I'll be able to give you.

The rest, you (and others) have to take on a/ good faith b/ using basic logic, that I'm telling the truth.

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#787

Post by testific8 » Fri, May 07, 2021, 3:52 AM UTC

cm2012 wrote: post #665

klelatti wrote: post #580

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Despite their whining, most people want free stuff, and ads are almost free (a small attention cost). > Most consumers cannot afford to pay for software or news subscriptions. > Don’t work for adtech, block all your ads, pay for everything. All this is false. Growth hacking has created products that are addictive and which people don't really need. These are then justified by saying that consumers can't afford to p…

"In my ultimate wisdom, I know what people need better than they do. Products I don't like shouldn't be allowed to exist"

Are you quoting the opinion of Advertisers? Advertising could only be benifical to society if advertisers knew better about what a person needed then the person itself.

Certainly if this were not the case, people seek out advertisements themselves (classifieds).

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#788

Post by dbenamy » Fri, May 07, 2021, 3:53 AM UTC

There's a lot of talk in the comments here about how ads are terrible, Jeff is terrible, etc. Eg "I personally have a very low opinion of anyone who works for a company that does that and even lower of anyone who actually works on serving those adverts."

According to https://www.jefftk.com/donations, Jeff and Julia have donated about $1.5m. GiveWell top rated charities are estimated [1] to save a life for each $3,000 - $5,000 donated. For a ballpark analysis, let's call that $4,000 and ignore secondary factors (eg inflation over their donation history).

Jeff and Julia have saved something like 375 lives, many of them likely children.

Please keep that in mind while forming and communicating your views.

[1] https://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#789

Post by creato » Fri, May 07, 2021, 4:00 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…

Why doesn't (or does?) this apply to youtube, spotify, or other similar services?

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#790

Post by Gatsky » Fri, May 07, 2021, 4:05 AM UTC

Fair enough argument.

I do note that this chap has put his actual salary numbers on the internet. This definitely places him in the minority in terms of willingness to share private data. Most people don't have this level of comfort I would guess. This should probably be taken into account when considering his opinions on targeted advertising.