Why I Work on Ads • Hacker News Board

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#811

Post by pydry » Fri, May 07, 2021, 9:51 AM UTC

nikitaga wrote: post #767

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…

With ads you're not just paying with your "attention" (waste of time and focus), you're also paying with changes in your behaviour, perceptions, and attitudes. As much as we like to imagine our minds to be impenetrable bastions of rationality, they are not. We can easily be enticed and manipulated to do things we wouldn't otherwise do, to see things differently than we otherwise would, to consider things we wouldn't…

>As much as we like to imagine our minds to be impenetrable bastions of rationality, they are not. We can easily be enticed and manipulated to do things we wouldn't otherwise do

I don't think advertising does work well on everybody nor does it have to. Maybe not even half of us need to be susceptible for it to be as profitable as it is.

I have noticed some people are much more susceptible to suggestion than others. These people are probably responsible for a disproportionate amount of commercial profits and probably more likely to be taken in by paid political campaigning.

Furthermore, I reckon if we could hold a mirror up to many of these people they might reconsider their behavior (it probably would work better than shouting at them at thanksgiving or over Facebook).

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#812

Post by pydry » Fri, May 07, 2021, 9:57 AM UTC

cutemonster wrote: post #803

nikitaga wrote: post #767

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With ads you're not just paying with your "attention" (waste of time and focus), you're also paying with changes in your behaviour, perceptions, and attitudes. As much as we like to imagine our minds to be impenetrable bastions of rationality, they are not. We can easily be enticed and manipulated to do things we wouldn't otherwise do, to see things differently than we otherwise would, to consider things we wouldn't…

> not just paying with your "attention" And maybe abolishing democracy Political manipulation ads, helping an authoritarian rise to power. But ads for buying what I just searched for: "buy new running shoes", aren't like that -- they can be helpful instead :-). It's mainly social network ads like on Facebook that are dangerous for society? From the article: > I think advertising is positive It's both? Ads are differe…

I tried starting a website a while back that would give reliable, unbiased information on a certain class of goods and services.

I looked at my competitors and saw that most of them were obviously shilling for the company that was paying them the most, which was never the best. I figured by being the most honest I could be the most trusted and win out.

The trouble is, the best companies would rely upon word of mouth. Promoting them wouldn't get me paid a dime. Honesty would benefit them, but not me.

Getting traffic, meanwhile, I realized would cost me money.

That's when I realized that the only way to get a non negative margin in that industry was to sacrifice your objectivity (which is what everyone did).

Theoretically you could charge users for this I guess, like Which? magazine does but I couldn't see a straightforward route to that point that wouldn't involve burning a lot of capital I didn't have. The chicken/egg problem rose its ugly head again.

I gave up soon after.

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#813

Post by nikitaga » Fri, May 07, 2021, 9:59 AM UTC

cutemonster wrote: post #803

nikitaga wrote: post #767

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With ads you're not just paying with your "attention" (waste of time and focus), you're also paying with changes in your behaviour, perceptions, and attitudes. As much as we like to imagine our minds to be impenetrable bastions of rationality, they are not. We can easily be enticed and manipulated to do things we wouldn't otherwise do, to see things differently than we otherwise would, to consider things we wouldn't…

> not just paying with your "attention" And maybe abolishing democracy Political manipulation ads, helping an authoritarian rise to power. But ads for buying what I just searched for: "buy new running shoes", aren't like that -- they can be helpful instead :-). It's mainly social network ads like on Facebook that are dangerous for society? From the article: > I think advertising is positive It's both? Ads are differe…

Just googled that to see if the ads are helpful. They weren't. Not surprising, because Google ads are ranked by profitability, not helpfulness, and those metrics don't correlate as much as Google would like you to think. The ads just took my attention away from organic results, which are the ones that are supposed to be ranked by helpfulness.

Those sneaker ads probably aren't destroying our democracy[1], they're just costing the society things that are hard to quantify. They induce me to buy what's most profitable to the sellers, not what's best for me. They take away business from actually helpful resources, and from those who don't advertise on Google.

[1] They are enabling the existence of a search monopoly (along with other factors), so you know, "probably" is the strongest word I'd go with here.

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#814

Post by underlines » Fri, May 07, 2021, 10:08 AM UTC

nikitaga wrote: post #813

cutemonster wrote: post #803

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> not just paying with your "attention" And maybe abolishing democracy Political manipulation ads, helping an authoritarian rise to power. But ads for buying what I just searched for: "buy new running shoes", aren't like that -- they can be helpful instead :-). It's mainly social network ads like on Facebook that are dangerous for society? From the article: > I think advertising is positive It's both? Ads are differe…

Just googled that to see if the ads are helpful. They weren't. Not surprising, because Google ads are ranked by profitability, not helpfulness, and those metrics don't correlate as much as Google would like you to think. The ads just took my attention away from organic results, which are the ones that are supposed to be ranked by helpfulness. Those sneaker ads probably aren't destroying our democracy[1], they're just…

No, Google Ads are not ranked for highest bidder. There's Quality Score that affects the decision a lot. If I have a website about running shoes and want to bid on the keyword "second hand cars" two things happen: first my bid gets astronomically high, because it's not matching the user's intent. secondly from all those people who click and leave google search but come back after a few seconds, google figures out that the quality score of the website is so bad (wrong intent) that the bid for that advertiser even gets more astronomically high and at one point even gets stopped.

The whole system incentivises ads that match the intent of the user, any deviation from this is extremely difficult and not profitable for the advertiser in most cases.

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#815

Post by nonameiguess » Fri, May 07, 2021, 10:27 AM UTC

bmn__ wrote: post #805

dbenamy wrote: post #788

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 $3,00…

If you really want to be utilitarian about it, then you must weigh the lives saved by donations against the lives destroyed by advertisements. If Jeff does not comes out ahead, he is terrible. The Less Wrong creed "shut up and multiply" is relevant, I ask commenters be sure to understand what I mean before replying to my argument. I estimate that while he is still earning income, the upper bound for person-years save…

That isn't how to evaluate a career choice. You evaluate it against all other choices, not in a vacuum. Choosing to work in advertising only comes out ahead if the excess of the good you do with the money you earn over the harm done by the job exceeds the excess good you could have done with money earned over harm of the job from any other job you could have chosen. Net good is better than net harm, but it's not better than even more net good.

Even then, while this kind of individual calculus is at least tractable, there is also the concern of large-scale cultural drift, as in the net impact of the world's smartest people collectively working on things like ad targeting, engineering synthetic financial derivatives, and figuring out how to manufacture scarcity out of abundance so speculators can get rich off of modern tulip mania, compared to what good might have come from whatever else they could have collectively accomplished. It's entirely possible that if Google and Facebook are as good at identifying uniquely talented and intelligent people as they think they are, they could have figured out how to entirely eradicate malaria if that is where they chose to direct the effort rather than figuring out how to predict the spending habits of most people in the world and using some of the profit to buy nets.

I'm not saying this for sure comes out against working for personal profit, of course. Louis Pasteur effectively proved the germ theory of disease, enabling the population explosion of the post-industrial age and possibly the most good ever done, while trying to figure out how to make better wine so he could patent and sell the process. But scant historical knowledge though I have, I'm having trouble thinking of historical examples of great good done by people just being wealthy and giving money to others who then do good, as opposed to direct work on technological good multipliers even when doing good is not the intention. At first, I was thinking maybe Da Vinci, but he might even be a counterexample in that he had little to no direct impact on science and engineering in the centuries to come despite conceiving of quite a few novel devices that were eventually invented. Perhaps if the patrons of Renaissance era Europe had paid their greatest minds to work on engineering instead of art, we could have had the industrial age centuries earlier.

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#816

Post by matheusmoreira » Fri, May 07, 2021, 10:27 AM UTC

nikitaga wrote: post #767

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…

With ads you're not just paying with your "attention" (waste of time and focus), you're also paying with changes in your behaviour, perceptions, and attitudes. As much as we like to imagine our minds to be impenetrable bastions of rationality, they are not. We can easily be enticed and manipulated to do things we wouldn't otherwise do, to see things differently than we otherwise would, to consider things we wouldn't…

Yes, completely agree. Advertising is essentially mind hacking. Companies pay advertisers to introduce their brands into the minds of consumers. It's inherently hostile.

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#817

Post by andrepd » Fri, May 07, 2021, 10:41 AM UTC

robbrown451 wrote: post #600

andrepd wrote: post #598

This whole post assumes the only options which can conceivably exist for monetising content are: (1) ads, or (2) paying for single pageviews (and (3) doing it for free). Obviously this is a fallacy: there are numerous alternative ways to do things.

Maybe you could list ones you think could work...? I've heard several proposed, none of them make a lot of sense to me. Patreon? Government grants? Or what?

Sure! 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 websites/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 based on youtube CPM). Plus, there's no problem with the friction of paying for things: you pay the same, regardless of watching 1 or 1000 videos (the netflix model, the cable tv model, heck any subscription model). Plus of course: no ads :)

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#818

Post by andrepd » Fri, May 07, 2021, 10:41 AM UTC

Kranar wrote: post #613

andrepd wrote: post #605

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I already did elsewhere in this thread, see the sister comment.

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#819

Post by andrepd » Fri, May 07, 2021, 10:42 AM UTC

ryan93 wrote: post #612

andrepd wrote: post #605

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I don't think "but company wants to make money" is a reasonable argument for anything.

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#820

Post by matheusmoreira » Fri, May 07, 2021, 10:57 AM UTC

meowface wrote: post #709

sidlls wrote: post #692

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just the cost in attention--those ads are produced with the price of our privacy included in the cost.

I feel like there are other costs beyond attention and privacy, too. Costs of malware and fraud are also common, but for the sake of argument we can just focus on somewhat more "legitimate" / "non-malicious" ads. (Emphasis on the scare quotes.) There's the aesthetic cost. If I see an ad on or near a nicely designed or produced website or video, it immediately detracts from the visual appeal. There's the annoyance cos…

Usability costs. Ads are by definition content users didn't want but are receiving anyway. They use up the bandwidth of users. They take up space on the interface and distract the user, taking attention away from more important things. They make sites uglier and harder to use. They lower the signal to noise ratio.

Banner blindness. It's been proven that people have become used to ignoring banner ads. Their eyes jump over them as soon as they're recognized. Since there may be false positives, this habit has implications for user interface design: an actual user interface element that looks like a banner ad will be ignored by most people. On the other hand, sites have also begun to style their ads exactly like their main content in order to make it harder for users to distinguish them.