American Airlines and The Points Guy are suing each other • Hacker News Board

Re: American Airlines and The Points Guy are suing each other

#161

Post by peterburkimsher » Thu, Jan 20, 2022, 8:23 PM UTC

Manuel_D wrote: post #157

matheusmoreira wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. Advertising ruins everything. Everything. They are directly and indirectly responsible for the poor state of consumer technology today. Privacy violations? Advertising. Borderline unusable websites? Advertising. Deliberately addictive social media? Advertising. Almost everything that's wrong with computing today is fueled by this industry's entitlement to our attention. > Imagine how more efficient things could…

Devil's advocate: Advertising allows people to invest large amounts of money into products that don't charge end users. It allows largely equitable access to hugely powerful and complex information systems like Google search at no direct monetary cost to users. Most people put the value of Google search on the order of thousands of dollars per year [1]. Imagine Google was a paid service: think of the academic dispari…

Compromise suggestion: product placement?

Mix the ads inside the content so that the ad delivery mechanisms don't get in the way.

Re: American Airlines and The Points Guy are suing each other

#162

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jan 20, 2022, 8:25 PM UTC

Manuel_D wrote: post #157

matheusmoreira wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. Advertising ruins everything. Everything. They are directly and indirectly responsible for the poor state of consumer technology today. Privacy violations? Advertising. Borderline unusable websites? Advertising. Deliberately addictive social media? Advertising. Almost everything that's wrong with computing today is fueled by this industry's entitlement to our attention. > Imagine how more efficient things could…

Devil's advocate: Advertising allows people to invest large amounts of money into products that don't charge end users. It allows largely equitable access to hugely powerful and complex information systems like Google search at no direct monetary cost to users. Most people put the value of Google search on the order of thousands of dollars per year [1]. Imagine Google was a paid service: think of the academic dispari…

[deleted]

Re: American Airlines and The Points Guy are suing each other

#163

Post by adventured » Thu, Jan 20, 2022, 8:25 PM UTC

alexpotato wrote: post #135

arcticbull wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well first you're going to have to convince people to pay for the things they use. History has shown us they have practically zero interest in doing so. People would rather trade their attention for free stuff than their money for priced goods and services. The industry has grown out of this human behavior, not vv. [edit] Humans have a limited capacity for making purchasing decisions. This is why in 20+ years nobody…

> People would rather trade their attention for free stuff than their money for priced goods and services. How would you explain the fact that people paid for cable and premium cable channels (e.g. HBO) in the past when free network TV has always been an option?

> How would you explain the fact that people paid for cable and premium cable channels (e.g. HBO) in the past when free network TV has always been an option?

The issue you're failing to separate out is that you're talking about entertainment with television. Websites are largely not comparable in entertainment value, and most are not entertaining at all. People will pay a lot for entertainment. That's why blogs are worth $... today and Netflix is worth $226 billion. If people would pay so much for eg blogs (or, again, any other comparable content), there'd be a $100 billion company extracting that monthly payment for producing volumes of written content on websites. Some blog network would have actually succeeded and become a global content juggernaut.

Most of the content online is not of high quality and people will not pay for it, or they'll pay so little for it as to be a sad joke.

Which website compares to the joy and value people extracted from Friends, Seinfeld, MASH, Fresh Prince, I Love Lucy, and dozens of other prominent TV shows from the past ~50 years. Much less the even higher production shows like Sopranos or Game of Thrones. There may be a select few and they're billion dollar services like Reddit with huge volumes of low value content. Do millions of people still talk lovingly about some websites from 2006 like they do decades later about I Love Lucy? Hell no they don't, only a tiny niche group of people does that.

People go back and watch movies over and over again for decades. They listen to the same songs/bands/albums regularly for decades.

Does the average person go back and dig up long dead websites and go through them start to finish on Archive.org, like they do old TV shows they enjoyed (Quantum Leap, ALF, Golden Girls, whatever). Hell no they don't, again, only a very very tiny group of people would do such a thing.

Most online text content is not very entertaining, even in the best case scenarios, that's the difference between the concepts.

Is there lots of funny, amusing, entertaining text content on eg Reddit? You bet. And people will pay pennies for it - if at all - because it's of low value compared to high quality, higher production value entertainment. They'll pay what it's worth, a pittance.

Re: American Airlines and The Points Guy are suing each other

#164

Post by bastardoperator » Thu, Jan 20, 2022, 8:25 PM UTC

chrismeller wrote: post #3

I honestly don’t know who to root for here. TPG is one of my favorite sites, but American is one of my favorite airlines.

You have a favorite Airline? I view them all with contempt given their poor business practices. Who's your favorite serial killer?

Re: American Airlines and The Points Guy are suing each other

#165

Post by asxd » Thu, Jan 20, 2022, 8:26 PM UTC

learc83 wrote: post #153

alexpotato wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or at least offer an option to pay to remove the annoyances. HBO was a great example of this in the pre-streaming days. "Want to see great shows and movies with no commercials, pay the extra for cable + HBO and you won't have to seem them again.!" This default, "it's all free BUT you have to see ads and there are no alternatives" seems to be the problem. The apps described in the article are effectively recognizing t…

The problem is that once you segment your customers into paying and non paying. The non paying customers become much less valuable to advertisers and the paying customers become much more valuable. So the service needs to charge even more, which makes paying customers even more valuable in a feedback loop. The usual result is that eventually the service can’t help themselves and starts showing paying customers “a few…

> The non paying customers become much less valuable to advertisers

I can see this being true, but I'm curious why. Is this because the advertisers know the paying customers have the cash to pay for the service?

Re: American Airlines and The Points Guy are suing each other

#166

Post by Nextgrid » Thu, Jan 20, 2022, 8:27 PM UTC

alexpotato wrote: post #134

Nextgrid wrote: post #35

> The interest was monetization of customer eyeballs, an American Airlines source shared that they wanted customers checking accounts at AA.com where they could be marketed to. It seems like so many problems, annoyances and inconvenience in modern society are artificially created/maintained just to enable this disgusting industry. Imagine how more efficient things could be if this cancer was eradicated once and for a…

Or at least offer an option to pay to remove the annoyances. HBO was a great example of this in the pre-streaming days. "Want to see great shows and movies with no commercials, pay the extra for cable + HBO and you won't have to seem them again.!" This default, "it's all free BUT you have to see ads and there are no alternatives" seems to be the problem. The apps described in the article are effectively recognizing t…

The problem with advertising is that the price of an ad view directly correlates with how wealthy the viewer is. Being able to opt-out would essentially make the advertising platform worthless as the only audience would be broke people who can't afford to pay to opt-out and are thus very unlikely to be able to afford your product.

The only way would be if regulation either mandates a reasonably-priced ad-free tier (priced at the average revenue from an ad-viewing user) or other restrictions (GDPR but actually enforced, the website being liable for the ads it shows, etc) that would make advertising completely unprofitable.

> The apps described in the article are effectively recognizing this consumer surplus/need and acting on it.

Presumably, AA is pissed off because the people that value their time enough and have the skills to set up and use an alternative are people they'd very much want looking at their ads, much more so than the plebs who already use the website and see the ads.

Re: American Airlines and The Points Guy are suing each other

#167

Post by matheusmoreira » Thu, Jan 20, 2022, 8:27 PM UTC

Manuel_D wrote: post #157

matheusmoreira wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. Advertising ruins everything. Everything. They are directly and indirectly responsible for the poor state of consumer technology today. Privacy violations? Advertising. Borderline unusable websites? Advertising. Deliberately addictive social media? Advertising. Almost everything that's wrong with computing today is fueled by this industry's entitlement to our attention. > Imagine how more efficient things could…

Devil's advocate: Advertising allows people to invest large amounts of money into products that don't charge end users. It allows largely equitable access to hugely powerful and complex information systems like Google search at no direct monetary cost to users. Most people put the value of Google search on the order of thousands of dollars per year [1]. Imagine Google was a paid service: think of the academic dispari…

Google? You mean the billion dollar company that subverts web standards and gets away with it due to their browser monopoly? The one that nearly kills websites the second some advertiser becomes "concerned" over some content? The one that demonetizes actual creators for arbitrary reasons?

They are very much part of the problem. Google search? It's bad and gets worse every day because of advertising -- Google has stopped trying to fight SEO spammers.

Re: American Airlines and The Points Guy are suing each other

#168

Post by Nextgrid » Thu, Jan 20, 2022, 8:28 PM UTC

asxd wrote: post #165

learc83 wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that once you segment your customers into paying and non paying. The non paying customers become much less valuable to advertisers and the paying customers become much more valuable. So the service needs to charge even more, which makes paying customers even more valuable in a feedback loop. The usual result is that eventually the service can’t help themselves and starts showing paying customers “a few…

> The non paying customers become much less valuable to advertisers I can see this being true, but I'm curious why. Is this because the advertisers know the paying customers have the cash to pay for the service?

Outside of a very few markets that prey on desperate people's last dollars (payday loans, etc), most advertising's objective is to get people to buy something - advertising to those who can't afford it is useless.

Re: American Airlines and The Points Guy are suing each other

#169

Post by staticassertion » Thu, Jan 20, 2022, 8:28 PM UTC

nybble41 wrote: post #103

paxys wrote: post #62

Interesting that AA frames it as TPG's app stealing confidential customer data, while it is the customer who set up the app and willingly provided their credentials in the first place. Will AA be able to find a single customer who has a problem with what TPG does? What is their case then exactly? Would they similarly sue the app if customers were copy pasting data into it, rather than accessing it programmatically? F…

> What is their case then exactly? Speculating, but TOS generally say that you're not allowed to share your password with anyone. Assuming that's true for the AA site, AA might argue that TPG is encouraging users to break their TOS ("tortious interference"). Though if app doesn't actually share the password with TPG and just uses it locally there may well be a question of whether entering your password into a third-p…

I doubt that part of a TOS is enforceable as it restricts speech.

edit: No it doesn't, brain fart.

Re: American Airlines and The Points Guy are suing each other

#170

Post by kevinob11 » Thu, Jan 20, 2022, 8:29 PM UTC

arcticbull wrote: post #121

matheusmoreira wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. Advertising ruins everything. Everything. They are directly and indirectly responsible for the poor state of consumer technology today. Privacy violations? Advertising. Borderline unusable websites? Advertising. Deliberately addictive social media? Advertising. Almost everything that's wrong with computing today is fueled by this industry's entitlement to our attention. > Imagine how more efficient things could…

Well first you're going to have to convince people to pay for the things they use. History has shown us they have practically zero interest in doing so. People would rather trade their attention for free stuff than their money for priced goods and services. The industry has grown out of this human behavior, not vv. [edit] Humans have a limited capacity for making purchasing decisions. This is why in 20+ years nobody…

While I agree that killing advertising is effectively impossible I'm not sure I agree that the problem is that people aren't willing to pay for things.

I think advertising dollars paying for services that users use is a convenient excuse that companies use to justify it, but it isn't an imperative for why it should exist.

If you can't get people to pay for your service when they know the real price maybe your service shouldn't exist, or shouldn't exist at the scale it does now.

That being said your main point that the industry grew organically based on human behavior certainly seems true. Banning advertising (like banning lobbying or corporate contributions to elected officials) is an impossible game of whack-a-mole. It can't be defined tightly enough to be outright banned (are you going to ban telling people you sell something they might like?) and the value derived from it is large enough that people will get creative when you ban the outcomes.

That being said I do think the most egregious versions should be regulated. Ads to kids, deceptive mail or email ads that look like invoices or bills, ads that are obviously lying about features or benefits, but enforcement is incredibly difficult. I'm not especially optimistic.