Advertising Is a Cancer on Society (2019) • Hacker News Board

Re: Advertising Is a Cancer on Society (2019)

#201

Post by Ukv » Mon, Feb 10, 2025, 3:35 PM UTC

neom wrote: post #161

Const-me wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Advertising is a PURE competitive move in the most fundamental sense in the business playbook, anyone who doesn't understand that doesn't understand business and therefore nor marketing nor sales. Sadly, that is a lot of people out there who profess to understand business.

> Advertising is a PURE competitive move

I think "competition" has to be directed towards a useful end, like improving the product, else it's at danger of just causing enormous waste disproportionate* to any value it is creating, like rigs for Bitcoin mining or microsecond trading.

Say you're playing a game where every minute you can either create a new cube or steal two from your opponent. The direct optimal strategy is for both players to just repeatedly steal - "competing" in a sense, yet wasting time for no progress. The meta-strategy, if we as a society want to increase the number of cubes, would be to punish stealing so that players instead compete by doing useful work (creating cubes).

To me the problem with marketing looks the same. It could make business sense for both Coke and Pepsi to double their marketing budgets to push flyers through every door to take each other's market share back and forth, but doing so wastes disproportionate* resources for little to no gain. Also seems as though it's one factor making it more difficult for potential new competition that has a legitimately better product but doesn't have billions to spend on ads, exclusivity deals, etc.

*: There can be some value created, like slightly faster Bitcoin transactions, or people being very slightly more informed about some products. Just that the zero-sum game aspect allows resources wasted to be far in excess of the value gained (if any at all), even without externalities.

Re: Advertising Is a Cancer on Society (2019)

#202

Post by somenameforme » Mon, Feb 10, 2025, 3:39 PM UTC

someothherguyy wrote: post #193

somenameforme wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wa…

> Your own source would be a good example You say this then go on to shit on it and then only agree with parts that support your argument? > they are unlikely to ever have children This reports the same thing: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/11/19/growing-s... > That study is 'p-hacked' Not typically how p-hacking is used? > Having the age range be 18-49 is illogical It looks like they selected the bucke…

No, you're not understanding. Amongst all people that are not having children there are two subsets - those that plan to never have children, and those that are unsure or plan to have children - just not right now. Those numbers Pew is publishing are only from the former. This is what I meant by saying that their headline is most aptly stated as, "[a very slight majority of] people who don't plan to ever have kids say they don't want to have kids."

This is essentially what p-hacking is. By organizing variables in a certain way, you can create statistically significant results to say basically whatever you want them to say. A huge tell-tale sign of p-hacking is constraining one's sample in ways that don't really make sense and/or are likely to be misleading. The thing we were discussing is 'why people aren't having kids.' This is very different than why 'people who don't plan to ever have kids aren't having kids.'

Re: Advertising Is a Cancer on Society (2019)

#203

Post by keiferski » Mon, Feb 10, 2025, 3:43 PM UTC

somenameforme wrote: post #200

keiferski wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. The study is claiming 50% of all Americans based on a sample size of 2,000. According to a survey of 2,000 Americans conducted by research firm Censuswide, on behalf of Ghostery, a maker of software to block ads and online tracking, 52 percent of Americans now use an ad blocker, up from 34 percent according to 2022 Statista data. 2. Both of them, and indeed all of these studies seem to be funded by ad blocking com…

2000 is a massive sample assuming it's reasonably representative - far larger than you'd see in an average e.g. election poll. Statistics can be counter-intuitive. The surveys are also generally carried out by survey companies, not the first parties. You can corroborate these data pretty much anywhere and everywhere. For a silly one I dug up here's [1] PewdiePie in 2016 talking about already seeing a 40% adblock rate…

I'm really not going to keep arguing about this. I know how statistics work. The studies are clearly biased and make absurd conclusions, and I've listed about ten different problems with them - the foremost being that "ad blocker" is never defined anywhere.

The idea that the number of people using an ad blocker is equivalent to the number of people that drink coffee every morning, subscribe to Netflix, or have a pet makes no sense whatsoever, and if that were the case, you'd see vastly more discussion and general awareness of the concept.

Re: Advertising Is a Cancer on Society (2019)

#204

Post by Const-me » Mon, Feb 10, 2025, 3:44 PM UTC

danaris wrote: post #178

Const-me wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 wi…

> Once consolidation shrinks the number of players down to a handful or less, that's when competition and innovation are stifled.

Yeah, and ads is the main mechanism why. Ban ads of carbonated drinks, and pepsi/coca cola will become no different from any other manufacturer of that stuff. They do have economy of scale for their advantage, but I don’t think it will help them much. The price/weight ratio of their product is rather low, and technically pipes are way more efficient at moving water than semitrailers.

Without marketing, it would make economic sense to produce these drinks locally at smaller scale. An example of similar commodity (in terms of the price/weight ratio) unaffected by ads is concrete. Roughly speaking, there’re 100 coca cola bottling facilities in US, versus 2000 concrete plants.

Re: Advertising Is a Cancer on Society (2019)

#205

Post by robertlagrant » Mon, Feb 10, 2025, 3:48 PM UTC

danaris wrote: post #184

robertlagrant wrote: post #168

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. This seems odd. A corporation in this sense is a group of people deciding what to do. Should a group of people no…

A corporation is a group of people with very specific legal ramifications . If you're going to claim it's "the people making up the corporation" deciding what to do or say, then why can't I sue[0] the individuals who make up the corporation if I think that what they do or say is harmful to society? And conversely, if the group of people thinks that what they're doing and saying is so valuable and normal, why are they…

I think because you're separate people it's hard to know quite what to reply to, but I don't really understand the idea that a corporation should not be allowed to speak. I'm not speaking specifically about the US, so I don't have particular large biases for or against Supreme Court decisions.

I'm more talking practically - what does it mean for a corporation to be silent? A corporation is already held to a higher standard than an individual; e.g. it can be sued for false advertising for anything it says. Given that, shouldn't corporations be able to "speak" (or rather the people in the corporation speak or instruct people to make videos/billboards etc)?

Re: Advertising Is a Cancer on Society (2019)

#206

Post by neom » Mon, Feb 10, 2025, 3:48 PM UTC

Ukv wrote: post #201

neom wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Advertising is a PURE competitive move in the most fundamental sense in the business playbook, anyone who doesn't understand that doesn't understand business and therefore nor marketing nor sales. Sadly, that is a lot of people out there who profess to understand business.

> Advertising is a PURE competitive move I think "competition" has to be directed towards a useful end, like improving the product, else it's at danger of just causing enormous waste disproportionate* to any value it is creating, like rigs for Bitcoin mining or microsecond trading. Say you're playing a game where every minute you can either create a new cube or steal two from your opponent. The direct optimal strateg…

Well here, I'll show you the paradox if you're curious. I do this stuff for a living right? I mean this is my world for the last 20 years, I literally teach it. But, I'm speaking out of 3 sides of my mouth? How can I say on one hand: advertising is a tool in the GTM playbook and a useful one. Say: advertising most useful as competitive tool, And also say: competition is for losers.

Here is how: You have to admit and understand you are competing, you have to have a sense of where your competition is, and then you have to find out how to put yourself around them like chess, so they wake up and realized they lost. Once you have a monopoly, you immediately become susceptible to competition from startups, because realistically monopoly required you to have a product that is generally applicable to very many people. Your horizons and timelines at that scale are 5-10 years into the future, you can't wiggle around easily, you pre-paid $100MM of ads in airport skyways. If you rest on your laurels, you will die, apple is a good example of a business that doesn't compete it just ever-iterated itself with consumer insight, blackberry the other side of that.

That is why late stage business is so complex, you're being attacked everywhere, so you need 10 product lines, 250 features, 300 geographies, localization, etc etc. Say Starbucks totally loses Canada to Tim Hortons, what do they do? Spend $500MM to outcompete Tim Hortons in a market that they can't win or just leave and focus on new markets. This is business, outside of a few lux brands who have it as a strategy, nobody is spending money just to piss people off and annoy them, people who don't want to buy have ALWAYS been annoyed by sales, but that isn't necessarily a sales thing, and it is why targeting matters.

Re: Advertising Is a Cancer on Society (2019)

#207

Post by bitmasher9 » Mon, Feb 10, 2025, 3:52 PM UTC

Zanfa wrote: post #132

acc_297 wrote: post #67

The below section resonates: lately YouTube has figured out I am in my mid-twenties and considering for the first time how best to save money for a secure/stable future. The number of ADs I see now not so subtly implying that I can expect to “lose big” or “rent forever” if I don’t subscribe to QuestTrade/WealthSimple/… It’s just frustrating to know that someone put time and thought into making me and a million other…

> The below section resonates: lately YouTube has figured out I am in my mid-twenties and considering for the first time how best to save money for a secure/stable future. This is funny since YouTube especially has never been able to figure out my demographics. To this day it keeps showing me ads for female hygiene products, cleaning supplies, quick fashion brands or scam ads in Russian, a language I don't speak. Non…

You’re in a minority. As long as YouTube is mostly right the vast majority of the time, running identity based ads is significantly more profitable than running context based ads.

Years and years ago I worked at a company selling context based web ads, and our numbers were significantly lower than identity based ads. There were a few companies willing to pay good money for certain context based ads, that we got good money from, but most went to identity based because CTR was much higher.

There were also some holdout webpages that only served context based ads for privacy concerns, but largely it was a dying niche in the larger online advertising space because of key metrics like Click Through Rate.

Re: Advertising Is a Cancer on Society (2019)

#208

Post by someothherguyy » Mon, Feb 10, 2025, 3:54 PM UTC

somenameforme wrote: post #202

someothherguyy wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Your own source would be a good example You say this then go on to shit on it and then only agree with parts that support your argument? > they are unlikely to ever have children This reports the same thing: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/11/19/growing-s... > That study is 'p-hacked' Not typically how p-hacking is used? > Having the age range be 18-49 is illogical It looks like they selected the bucke…

No, you're not understanding. Amongst all people that are not having children there are two subsets - those that plan to never have children, and those that are unsure or plan to have children - just not right now. Those numbers Pew is publishing are only from the former. This is what I meant by saying that their headline is most aptly stated as, "[a very slight majority of] people who don't plan to ever have kids sa…

> This is essentially what p-hacking is. By organizing variables in a certain way, you can create statistically significant results to say basically whatever you want them to say.

Do you know what statistically significant results means?

Re: Advertising Is a Cancer on Society (2019)

#209

Post by somenameforme » Mon, Feb 10, 2025, 4:00 PM UTC

keiferski wrote: post #203

somenameforme wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2000 is a massive sample assuming it's reasonably representative - far larger than you'd see in an average e.g. election poll. Statistics can be counter-intuitive. The surveys are also generally carried out by survey companies, not the first parties. You can corroborate these data pretty much anywhere and everywhere. For a silly one I dug up here's [1] PewdiePie in 2016 talking about already seeing a 40% adblock rate…

I'm really not going to keep arguing about this. I know how statistics work. The studies are clearly biased and make absurd conclusions, and I've listed about ten different problems with them - the foremost being that "ad blocker" is never defined anywhere. The idea that the number of people using an ad blocker is equivalent to the number of people that drink coffee every morning, subscribe to Netflix, or have a pet…

There is relatively high general awareness of the concept! Just remember that we all live in bubbles. And the slice of life you see and know is going to have its own little biases that are not nationally reflected. For an easy one in tech, did the majority of people you know (who voted) vote for Trump?

Re: Advertising Is a Cancer on Society (2019)

#210

Post by somenameforme » Mon, Feb 10, 2025, 4:05 PM UTC

someothherguyy wrote: post #208

somenameforme wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you're not understanding. Amongst all people that are not having children there are two subsets - those that plan to never have children, and those that are unsure or plan to have children - just not right now. Those numbers Pew is publishing are only from the former. This is what I meant by saying that their headline is most aptly stated as, "[a very slight majority of] people who don't plan to ever have kids sa…

> This is essentially what p-hacking is. By organizing variables in a certain way, you can create statistically significant results to say basically whatever you want them to say. Do you know what statistically significant results means?

Yes, and it doesn't mean "true" as you might think. There's a great demo of p-hacking here. [1] It's based on real data too, which makes it extra fun. Your goal is to prove that one party or another being in power leads to a stronger economy. That statement is almost certainly false as you can quickly see by how awkward it is to "prove" it. But you'll find when you arrange your variables in certain ways you can indeed find statistically significant evidence to "prove" literally whatever you want.

But again the one tell-tale sign somebody like me would notice from your study is 'why in the world would you limit it to that sample'? Well because that sample gives you the answer you want! It's science, baby!

[1] - https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/p-hacking/