Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Advertising Is a Cancer on Society (2019)

jacek.zlydach.pl

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 286 posts

Re: Advertising Is a Cancer on Society (2019)

#171

Post by DrScientist »

EncomLab wrote: post #146
canadaduane wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do we know if "this level of speed and content online" is net good?

This really depends on the content you are seeking and consuming as the user. I am constantly pulling data sheets, reading papers, researching reference designs, interacting on official (and unofficial) product forums, and countless other information queries which at the start of my career were largely conducted at either company or university libraries, in person meetings, or attending conferences. That may sound gr…

So most content you consume isn't funded by advertising.

So I'm confused as to why you think advertising has driven the development of the internet[1]. Take for example investments in bandwidth - that's largely to meet the needs of TV/video and later gaming [2] - both with direct revenue streams independent of advertising ( and any advertising revenue they traditionally got has been eroded, not enhanced by the internet ).

The other major sites where things like Amazon or existing media outlets.

Note I don't include youtube in the above - as the most popular content is in effect stolen ( music, old TV shows etc ), and then resold with ads.

[1] Internet companies yes, the internet less so.

[2] When BBC iplayer went live in the UK ( ~2007 ) ISPs complained that it was taking up to a third of their entire bandwidth and they wanted the BBC to fund their capacity expansion. The BBC said, nope - it's you that made you bandwidth availability promises to your customers.

Re: Advertising Is a Cancer on Society (2019)

#172

Post by EncomLab »

barrkel wrote: post #152
EncomLab wrote: post #85

Most of the arguments made are not about "advertising" per se, but the methods that SOME forms of advertising take and other methods (data mining, phishing, scams) that are either not advertising or are things that are already regulated/illegal but which enforcement actions against are low/non-existent. In the book "Fire in the Valley" about the development and early days of the internet there is a great deal of disc…

The underlying point is game theoretical: ads are driven to these methods because within their niches, they're zero sum games (and negative sum for society at large due to externalities). > Honestly it's hard to see how we get to this level of speed and content online without it having been funded by advertising. I don't understand what this means. Most content online that isn't user generated (forums, blogs, wikiped…

All of that "free" and "cheap" stuff has not always been free or cheap - even a decade ago. In the mid-late 90's when these decisions were being made even hosting a minimal site was incredibly expensive and largely the realm of universities and big business.

Re: Advertising Is a Cancer on Society (2019)

#173

Post by danaris »

keiferski wrote: post #61
jonnycat wrote: post #28

I fully agree with the sentiment, and yet marvel at the apparent lack of alternatives for so many business models. I'm mildly surprised, for example, that micro-payments for web content are still not a (widespread) thing. Consumers hate ads, but they hate paying for things even more apparently.

It's not really clear to me that consumers hate ads. It seems like more of a tech niche opinion; most people are perfectly fine with watching TV commercials (and look forward to them at the Super Bowl) and don't mind using ad-tier streaming plans. Ad blockers are used by a tiny, tiny percentage of total browser users. And so on.

Even ignoring the sibling comment debunking your "tiny, tiny percentage"...

There's a huge difference between extremely-high-production-value Superbowl ads and regular TV ads.

There's another huge difference between regular TV ads and some of the ads you can get on YouTube (example: someone I follow decided, For Science™, to actually watch the entirety of a 5-hour ad they got on YouTube for...I think it was one of the Lego Movies? It consisted entirely of an endless repetition of the same 3-minute-ish song).

There's also a huge difference between what people are willing to tolerate in order to reduce some of the often-absurd financial burden they're being put under, and what people actually like, or are genuinely content with.

"Revealed preference" theory is a bunch of motivated reasoning.

Re: Advertising Is a Cancer on Society (2019)

#174

Post by DrScientist »

A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #63

Like cancer, I think it's possible to split ads into two categories: Benign and malignant. Benign ads are like ads for toothpaste, Febreeze, or airlines. Malignant ads are, to give but two examples, for things like gambling and pharmaceuticals. The pharmaceutical business, in particular, was much more widely trusted and had far higher public favorability ratings in the old days when their advertising to the public wa…

Here in the UK, it's still illegal to advertise prescription only drugs to the consumer. You can promote them to health care professionals ( prescribers ), but in a very rightly regulated way.

Re: Advertising Is a Cancer on Society (2019)

#175

Post by keiferski »

somenameforme wrote: post #164
keiferski wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not really clear to me that consumers hate ads. It seems like more of a tech niche opinion; most people are perfectly fine with watching TV commercials (and look forward to them at the Super Bowl) and don't mind using ad-tier streaming plans. Ad blockers are used by a tiny, tiny percentage of total browser users. And so on.

Look at literally any poll on the topic - people hate ads universally, with advertisers not far behind. And ad blocker usage has skyrocketed. It's now up to ~30% of all internet users [1] with younger people starting to approach a majority. And it should go without saying that the only reason that's not near 100% of users is because most people don't know they exist and/or don't feel comfortable installing one. [1] -…

This link claims that 39% of people over the age of 56 use an ad blocker. Sorry, but color me skeptical. I could but wrong, but I am highly skeptical of that statistic.

This report also doesn't seem to clarify what is meant by "ad blocker," specifically, which makes the whole thing pretty suspect. Looking into the sources they provide, at least one of them doesn't mention ad blockers at all, even though the related image is about people blocking ads. So, yeah, I'm not considering this to be reliable information.

Re: Advertising Is a Cancer on Society (2019)

#177

Post by EncomLab »

DrScientist wrote: post #171
EncomLab wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This really depends on the content you are seeking and consuming as the user. I am constantly pulling data sheets, reading papers, researching reference designs, interacting on official (and unofficial) product forums, and countless other information queries which at the start of my career were largely conducted at either company or university libraries, in person meetings, or attending conferences. That may sound gr…

So most content you consume isn't funded by advertising. So I'm confused as to why you think advertising has driven the development of the internet[1]. Take for example investments in bandwidth - that's largely to meet the needs of TV/video and later gaming [2] - both with direct revenue streams independent of advertising ( and any advertising revenue they traditionally got has been eroded, not enhanced by the intern…

"So most content you consume isn't funded by advertising."

You are conflating the content and the delivery method. It's like saying "most of the stuff you buy can be delivered by a bicycle, so interstate highways are not important.

Re: Advertising Is a Cancer on Society (2019)

#178

Post by danaris »

Const-me wrote: post #153
neom wrote: post #92

I teach people how to advertise for a living. This is how I teach it: an advert is simply the ability to buy a knock on someones front door. That is literally all you are doing when you buy an advert. All business activity you experience today is an abstraction of business we have already done, I'm sure back in the day people thought door to door sales people were annoying, and I'm sure sometimes they were not. From…

> competition drives improvement Are you saying ads helping competition? How? > customer choice is central to a functioning market, leading to innovation. Ads suppress customer choice, along with innovations. Can you recall any recent innovative carbonated drink? Marketing budgets of pepsi/coca cola make competition and innovation impossible.

While I dislike advertising a lot...

> Ads suppress customer choice, along with innovations. Can you recall any recent innovative carbonated drink? Marketing budgets of pepsi/coca cola make competition and innovation impossible.

...I don't think this is actually reasonable to ascribe to advertising.

This is a problem with hyperconsolidation.

Competition is driven by having many players in the market who are all within spitting distance of each other's overall size, however you want to measure it. Once consolidation shrinks the number of players down to a handful or less, that's when competition and innovation are stifled.

You say it yourself: the problem isn't that there's advertising. It's the marketing budgets of Pepsi and Coke. Which are (probably, didn't look it up) larger than the annual budgets of some countries. That couldn't happen if they weren't utterly unchallengeable juggernauts.

Re: Advertising Is a Cancer on Society (2019)

#179

Post by somenameforme »

someothherguyy wrote: post #138
somenameforme wrote: post #123

One critical possibility was unmentioned. There seems to be a very strong argument that it's advertising that is driving declines in fertility rates. The entire point of the modern advertising machine is to generate endless desires and wants that one might not otherwise have, always chasing the next product - basically to create consumerist societies. The most common reason middle class+ people say they aren't having…

> The most common reason middle class+ people say they aren't having children is because they don't have enough money, but it's simply untrue. Source? https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2024/07/25/the-exp... This seems to say because they "don't want to"

Your own source would be a good example. That study is 'p-hacked' to create a headline. They inexplicably limit the group they're talking about to those who say that they are unlikely to ever have children, which is a subset of the people who are not having children. It looks like they had to cull off about 60% of their sample. So a more accurate headline would be "people who don't plan to have kids say they don't want to have kids."

Most people are going to think they're talking about all people, as you did here. The age sample is also probably intentionally biased. Having the age range be 18-49 is illogical. The reasons for an 18 year old not planning to have kids matter far less (from a social point of view), and have far less meaning/certainty, than an e.g. 30 year old saying the same. Most studies are broken into reasonable age buckets because of this. 18-49 is not reasonable for fertility issues.

Even with their heavily biased sample, they only get 57% of their "young" group saying they just don't want to (and only 31% of the older group), whereas you get 79% saying they want to "afford the things they want", 75% saying "saving for the future", and so on.

Re: Advertising Is a Cancer on Society (2019)

#180

Post by cess11 »

keiferski wrote: post #139
cess11 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you mean the US Supreme Court, they could just stop being insane and change that ruling, because, as I pointed out, corporations aren't people. They are fictions. It's like claiming it is a free speech issue that people in the Wheel of Time books aren't allowed to name the evil threatening the world. Why not in the same way it's determined for product information on the packaging? No, it just requires the state to…

So your solution is to have the government control all communications coming from corporations? This is again, extremely draconian. Corporations aren't fictions, they are organizations of people and resources...just like the government. You also didn't answer my question: where is the line between art and advertising drawn? If I make a movie and use BMWs in it, and BMW gives me those cars for free to use, am I breaki…

No, that's something you dreamt up for no good reason. There are a lot of constraints on corporate communication, especially for publicly traded corporations. This does not mean "the government control[s] all communications coming from corporations".

It's common all over the world to regulate content in advertising. In many places corporations manage to self-regulate, in some the state steps in instead. Ads aimed at kids being prohibited is an obvious example, ads for gambling being heavily regulated another.

That's not an ad in the sense I've discussed, but yeah, if you ask me you should pay for the cars.

You're inventing consequences for restricting ads that are quite unnecessary so I'm not so sure I'm the one with a nonsense problem.

Post reply on HN