We need legal controls on web advertising • Hacker News Board

Re: We need legal controls on web advertising

#111

Post by marcus_holmes » Mon, Dec 14, 2020, 5:18 PM UTC

stevesearer wrote: post #108

marcus_holmes wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Being paid by someone to publish content that mentions their product", I guess, as a first draft? So, in your examples: Web banners: yes, Sponsored content: yes, Trade shows: no, Sales rep stopping by: no, clothing with logos: yes if the logo isn't the brand of the clothing itself, Hacker News: I have no idea how this site is funded. And I don't even vaguely pretend to know where we should draw the line. I just thin…

Paying a 3rd party to spread a message or information would be an interesting way to define it. In that scenario things like classifieds, craigslist, and job boards would all get the ax too. I like to think about these issues because I make a living selling advertising on my website. We try to have use good practices, have the ads be high quality, targeted toward the content as opposed to the user. On the other hand,…

Good point: the things you mention are definitely (explicitly) advertising, but also not evil.

Maybe a "except in the cases where users/readers/individuals can create adverts, and the entire publication is explicitly devoted to such adverts" clause as well. I'm only a business grad, not a lawyer, so I expect it can be framed better than this.

Re: We need legal controls on web advertising

#112

Post by marcus_holmes » Mon, Dec 14, 2020, 5:21 PM UTC

spaced-out wrote: post #109

marcus_holmes wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know. I've never lived in a world where this stuff wasn't paid for by advertising. I think "means to pay" is relative - Cambodian tuk-tuk drivers get cheaper, better internet access than Berliners. And they watch YouTube on it. If they didn't have access to YouTube for free there would be a huge market in producing Cambodian content for them to watch, priced appropriately for that market.

Before Youtube, many people in that part of the world listened to the radio. How will radio stations survive without ads?

Good question. That's a broadcast medium, though. In the UK, Australia and Germany (amongst others - these are only the countries I've lived in that do this) there is a public broadcaster supported by a tax. It's not popular - irrelevant and annoying in the internet age. But it clearly solved the "how do you get broadcast media without adverts" problem.

Re: We need legal controls on web advertising

#113

Post by marcus_holmes » Mon, Dec 14, 2020, 5:24 PM UTC

umeshunni wrote: post #103

marcus_holmes wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah but we had email before that. It wasn't "free" but it was cheap and worked across everything and no-one stole your personal data.

By we, if you mean a few rich people in the west, sure.

No, I don't. Poor people in (most parts of) the developing world have better internet access and more free stuff with it than we do in the West.

Email is dirt cheap to provide. We probably all still get a free email account with our ISP, except none of us bother because gmail.

Re: We need legal controls on web advertising

#114

Post by marcus_holmes » Mon, Dec 14, 2020, 5:26 PM UTC

jancsika wrote: post #102

ddevault wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strong agree. Advertising should be outlawed entirely. Or rather, corporate propaganda should be outlawed. Psychologically manipulating people for profit is horrible, I cannot comprehend how it's become normalized. This is our brains on capitalism, I guess.

I guess you're getting downvoted because your statement is rather broad. But narrowing a bit to the feedback loop between data collected by the ad machine and the next ad you see based on that and ongoing data collection-- if Las Vegas casino games are regulated then we can certainly regulate that dangerous practice.

I think it's the "our brains on capitalism" bit that got downvoted. To be fair, the communists are no better/worse at this, it's just government propaganda instead of corporate advertising.

Re: We need legal controls on web advertising

#115

Post by samoa42 » Mon, Dec 14, 2020, 5:32 PM UTC

faichai wrote: post #97

marcus_holmes wrote: post #46

I am beginning to believe that advertising (at all, on any medium) is an evil we need to do without. The "free stuff" that we get in return is never without consequences, as we're finding out. The "hey we built a thing you might want to buy" function can be done in different forms, better, I think. Probably by newspapers. I think we could start by taxing all advertising revenue by, say, 50%.

I’ve long thought something along similar lines: in a world with instant search, advertising becomes irrelevant if the search actually helps you to find products. It is in this way that google has actually failed. If you look for a product you get a whole load of dross back. It’s impossible to filter by spec, you can add keywords but this rarely gives you more sensible results these days. The products get lost in the…

one site i frequently consult for electronics is https://geizhals.at because it lets one filter by various product characteristics. it is mainly for DACH region. i guess their business model is whitelabeling for other sites which want to include the functionality, never noticed any bias.

Re: We need legal controls on web advertising

#116

Post by samoa42 » Mon, Dec 14, 2020, 5:37 PM UTC

marcus_holmes wrote: post #112

spaced-out wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Before Youtube, many people in that part of the world listened to the radio. How will radio stations survive without ads?

Good question. That's a broadcast medium, though. In the UK, Australia and Germany (amongst others - these are only the countries I've lived in that do this) there is a public broadcaster supported by a tax. It's not popular - irrelevant and annoying in the internet age. But it clearly solved the "how do you get broadcast media without adverts" problem.

> It's not popular

relatively speaking, no

>irrelevant and annoying in the internet age

disagree strongly

Re: We need legal controls on web advertising

#117

Post by nathias » Mon, Dec 14, 2020, 5:39 PM UTC

The way we make our money makes all the difference for our cultures and general way of life, it seems that we have chosen poorly and we have little recourse. In a world of add-salesmen inoffensiveness becomes the chief value. This value scheme has become central to the modern left and right poles of politics, but instead of affirming or negating it, we should just regulate its conditions out of existence. If we don't achieve this (and we won't), what comes next is an even more aggressive affirmation of inoffensiveness, which will give to an open affirmation of censorship in the name of preventing "harm" and "exclusion" aided by technology. When censorship was historically affirmed, it was to remove the 'wrong' opinion, but what was right was very clearly presented, however, because now the primary value is negatively determined there is no way it can be totalized and presented as something known. This indetermination of negativity, coupled with a new power of technology that can exert control in a much more detailed way, accompanied by a general trend of digitalization of all human activity will make censorship ubiquitous and insidious.

Re: We need legal controls on web advertising

#118

Post by marcinzm » Mon, Dec 14, 2020, 5:42 PM UTC

varispeed wrote: post #100

marcinzm wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>can do much better targeting than yourself. All existing online ad platforms provide very good targeting tools and do automated optimizations on your behalf. On a targeted audience you can easily outcompete big corps with a generic offering as it's not overall budget that matters but how much you're spending per view/click/conversion adjusted for how relevant your ad is.

Big spenders don't have access to the same tools you have. They use dedicated systems with more granular targeting and often have dedicated account managers that oversee the ads on particular platform.

I mean, having used Facebook and Twitters ad systems the targeting is absurdly granular even if you spend no money. I doubt there's much advantage to being more granular in terms of actual ROI. Most of the big spender tools from what I understand are for the logistics of managing such large spend while bound by the rules of the parent company more than improved performance per dollar.

Re: We need legal controls on web advertising

#119

Post by zentiggr » Mon, Dec 14, 2020, 5:52 PM UTC

throwaway13337 wrote: post #105

faichai wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve long thought something along similar lines: in a world with instant search, advertising becomes irrelevant if the search actually helps you to find products. It is in this way that google has actually failed. If you look for a product you get a whole load of dross back. It’s impossible to filter by spec, you can add keywords but this rarely gives you more sensible results these days. The products get lost in the…

So what's the business model? These sorts of listing aggregators (like pc parts sites) have a perverse incentive to always allow those that pay to get top placement. I'm genuinely interested in a business model for this stuff that can support fair placement. Flat subscription fees on the vendor side needs to first solve the chicken and egg problem. Flat subscription fees on the customer side doesn't seem likely to wo…

Typical aggregator sites so far, don't have customer-side "flag this product" or "flag this tag/category as incorrect" feedback.

Allow buyers to push back against bogus, overtagged, or miscategorized items and that aggregator will gain some serious reputation over Amazon and any other venues in the same niche.

And I mean meaningful pushback - not "it's flagged and will be online still until reviewed by the scarce human team gets to it" but "it's flagged and offline until humans review it and reapprove or flush it".

Sure there will always be trolls who flag anything and everything but they can get banned as users under existing abuse terms.

Imagine how quickly Amazon would get flushed clean of bogus listings if user flags pushed them offline until Amazon staff could verify and relist them... they'd have to prioritize restoring actual useful items, or at least start seriously policing the worst actors on the supplier side to stem the tide. Losing "good" items in a sea of flagged bad ones would also be a secondary incentive to clean house and keep it that way.

Re: We need legal controls on web advertising

#120

Post by colechristensen » Mon, Dec 14, 2020, 5:55 PM UTC

faichai wrote: post #97

marcus_holmes wrote: post #46

I am beginning to believe that advertising (at all, on any medium) is an evil we need to do without. The "free stuff" that we get in return is never without consequences, as we're finding out. The "hey we built a thing you might want to buy" function can be done in different forms, better, I think. Probably by newspapers. I think we could start by taxing all advertising revenue by, say, 50%.

I’ve long thought something along similar lines: in a world with instant search, advertising becomes irrelevant if the search actually helps you to find products. It is in this way that google has actually failed. If you look for a product you get a whole load of dross back. It’s impossible to filter by spec, you can add keywords but this rarely gives you more sensible results these days. The products get lost in the…

Then your ad spend becomes your search engine optimization spend and you get even worse results.

It is quite hard for a search engine to fairly treat results which are trying everything to manipulate the system and results that aren’t trying at all.