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Why I Work on Ads

jefftk.com

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Re: Why I Work on Ads

#241

Post by srg0 »

jasode wrote: post #29

The author jefftk is getting unfairly downvoted maybe because cynics just see it as a version of, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." I will offer a contrarian opinion as a user whose salary does not depend on advertising: the advertising model for using Google search and watching Youtube videos works better for me as a consumer . The alternati…

The problem with YouTube Premium is unnecessary and anticompetitive bundling.

They ask €11.99/month for Premium (no ads) + YouTube Music. Or €9.99/month just for YouTube Music. Given that I already pay for another service, I don't want either of these plans.

It's not possible to get only YouTube Premium (avoid ads), even if the marginal cost of ad-free YouTube experience is only €2/month, according to Google. I think €24/year is a very reasonable price to pay for YouTube, €144 is not.

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#242

Post by overgard »

tnzm wrote: post #191
overgard wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny, in the past about 99.999999 percent of the time ads never interested me. I think I might have clicked one in a decade. Recently, just from my youtube subscriptions I think, my youtube ads have been surprisingly relevant, for things like cnc routers or various embedded tools or what not -- ads that are actually for things I might be interested in buying. (Granted there's still a ton of obnoxious get rich q…

Everyone ignores the elephant in the room. Just let the users set their own advertising profiles! Always relevant ads, no tracking needed.

I would like that. Or even a scheme where they can collect data, but it's stored on my local computer so I can edit it and delete it (granted I know there's a ton of issues with that, but there is w/ the current scheme also)

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#243

Post by savanaly »

gorpomon wrote: post #46
jefftk wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I started on ads at Google in 2017, and have been donating since 2008: https://www.jefftk.com/donations

Jeff have you ever considered giving to specific people? It's quite ridiculous that college costs what you might give in a year, but $264,727 could concretely allow several people to attend college each year (state schools, community colleges, etc). Or how about removing bad debt, letting people rebuild their credit and start to save. I can think of myriad reasons why this is harder and less desirable (finding them,…

If you strongly believe there are some unexplored avenues for impactful donations to individuals you should make the case to Givewell. It's what they're all about, and that seems to be what Jeff is mainly giving to (all those Against Malaria donations I assume were the top Givewell recommendation of their year). I think Jeff is doing the smart thing by outsourcing the analysis to Givewell who specialize in it.

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#244

Post by fouric »

cletus wrote: post #143
fouric wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> all more user hostile for my use cases Why are these user-hostile? I see very little friction to any of them - $10/year YT subscription disappears into the background (that's, what, two moderately expensive coffee drinks? if you spend just a single day watching educational content, the obtained value will easily exceed $10), per-search microtransactions would be so cheap that you could just turn on the "always tran…

> I see very little friction to any of them - $10/year YT subscription disappears into the background So there are several problems with this: 1. You restated the above commenter's cost from $10/month to $10/year for some reason. For context, Google's annual revenue seems to be $180B. That makes $10/month far closer to the likely alternative; 2. That $10/year or $10/month "disappears into the background" for you . Th…

> 1. You restated the above commenter's cost from $10/month to $10/year for some reason.

Parent's comment originally read $10/year.

> For context, Google's annual revenue seems to be $180B. That makes $10/month far closer to the likely alternative

I don't see how the first part of your statement at all supports the second. Google's revenue now, with many different services in wildly varying stages of profitability, has very little connection to the hypothetical subscription price that would be applied to a service that is now ad-funded - you seem to be engaging in wild speculation.

> 2. That $10/year or $10/month "disappears into the background" for you.

First, YouTube is a luxury service. Second, I specifically addressed the problem of "it's too expensive" later on in my comment, with "That's a price problem, not a pricing model problem." - which still holds. Third, market segmentation is a thing. Fourth, those in the developing world will pay with their personal information - which can be far more devastating if e.g. they're a dissident living in an oppressive regime. Fifth, I never said the ad model should be removed.

You seem to be making the assumption that I am suggesting that the ad-funded model be replaced with the subscription/microtransaction models - I do not, and my comment was carefully worded to not make that claim. I specifically believe that models where payment is made in money should always be available, with ads as an option - not that the former should be completely removed.

> paying for any service is a huge point of friction

False. I can relatively easily design a microtransaction service that has very little friction for payment. Meanwhile, there already exist many extremely low-friction payment services. If you have a credit card in the US with the new contactless payment technology, it's extremely easy to pay for things - you just swipe your card. If you have a Google Play account, it's similarly easy to purchase a new app. If you have a subscription service with auto-renew, paying for another month/year is literally frictionless - there's absolutely no interaction necessary.

> But it seems convenient and disingenuous to overlook the benefits as they're inconvenient to a shallow anti-advertising diatribe.

See previous statement about your mistaken assumption that I said that advertising should be eliminated. Attacking a strawman does nobody any good.

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#245

Post by rpdillon »

It's curious that neither the OP nor the comments address the incentives funding via advertising creates. While I strongly agree about issues surrounding the data collection and tracking systems used to target ads, I'm thinking about the publisher's side.

For a subscription service (paywalled), users are making an up-front decision to pay for the content an outlet publishes because they believe in some sense that the writing is worth it. This is a pretty intellectual thing to do, since you have to actually enter payment details and select a plan. It's fundamentally a premeditated act.

The advertising-based model is closer to the lizard-brain, I think. To a first approximation, it seems that ad-based funding created the whole world of "click bait": low quality articles with catchy headlines designed to increase ad views by tapping into peoples' curiosity. This model is the opposite of premeditated: it's almost subconscious and driven by moment-to-moment impulse. And I think web-based advertising incentivizes this greatly, to the point that the low-quality content designed to be engaged with impulsively is driving who gets elected.

I don't have high conviction that my thinking here is correct, but the dots do seem to connect, and I don't see it discussed much. I raise it here because while I abhor the data gathering associated with ad targeting, if I'm honest with myself, I think the harm coming from click-bait content online is more tangible today than the harm from the data collection.

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#246

Post by defaultname »

elliekelly wrote: post #88
jasode wrote: post #29

The author jefftk is getting unfairly downvoted maybe because cynics just see it as a version of, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." I will offer a contrarian opinion as a user whose salary does not depend on advertising: the advertising model for using Google search and watching Youtube videos works better for me as a consumer . The alternati…

I find the "ads are useful" argument frustratingly disingenuous. It's a transparent and deliberate attempt to move the discussion away from what people actually take issue with in modern internet advertising - tracking and data collection - and instead tries to frame it as something far more benign. The ads. Aren't. The problem. The stalking is. Ads can be useful. But no one is saying they aren't! So why is it consta…

But ads are the problem. Ads are the robbery of your time and attention. On a screen they steal screen real estate, consume CPU cycles, consume bandwidth, etc. And all of the stalking and tracking is a direct consequence of ads themselves, further cementing ads as the problem.

One of the other replies note that podcasts do ads right. I hugely disagree. Not only does it steal the listener's time and focus (presuming they don't just scrub past it, which I presume most people do unless they put little value on their own time, and think a host is being sincere when they pitch some snake-oil supplement, pillow or VPN), it puts a dirty veneer over the whole realm where everyone becomes half-bit hucksters.

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#247

Post by kleer001 »

noir_lord wrote: post #230
jasode wrote: post #29

The author jefftk is getting unfairly downvoted maybe because cynics just see it as a version of, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." I will offer a contrarian opinion as a user whose salary does not depend on advertising: the advertising model for using Google search and watching Youtube videos works better for me as a consumer . The alternati…

There is a middle ground. You advertise to me, You don't track every single fucking thing I do online to do it. If we agree to that then I'll turn my adblocker/pi-hole off - otherwise enjoy the null-hole.

> don't track every single fucking thing I do online to do it.

Yes. However...

I have found 0.001% of what I wanted because of an ad. That's something like one item in a decade. I don't think that's worth the costs of tracking to privacy and bandwidth. Certainly not worth the obtrusiveness of contemporary ad space which is the result of the inevitable runaway arms race between the flitting attention of users and the desperate need of businesses to sale their wares.

I don't see any resolution to the waste other than abandoning tracking for ads. Good enough demographics can be found by the content being consumed. Please, let's leave it at that.

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#248

Post by aflag »

> Typically, the vendor doesn't just get that you are interested in cars, they get the full URL of the page you are on.

I'd say that knowing you're interested in cars is also a violation of your privacy. Knowing that people that are in car festivals may be interested in cars is ok, but knowing that a person attended to a car festival is not ok.

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#249

Post by topaz0 »

NilsIRL wrote: post #134

It's not because it's funded by advertising that it's cheaper for the user, in the end, the consumer pays for the advertising when they purchase something

I came here to say this. I don't think that advertising is inherently unethical, but profit makes unethical behavior in advertising inevitable. The article talks about the scenario where I have a product that I think people will want but don't know about, so I'm giving them information about it. Win/win/win -- the site gets some money for the work they put into the content that they care about, I get (net positive) money from my customer, the customer gets a product that they wanted anyway, and access to the site they were interested in reading. But it's almost always more like I have some money and want more, and it's much more profitable to use shady means to manipulate people who don't really want my product that they do, so I will pay site owners to facilitate the manipulation, both by giving me user data and optimizing for their attention instead of the content that they care about (more manipulation), and the user/customer loses many times over, because they have a product that they didn't want, paid more for it than it was worth, had degraded browsing experience of the content they were interested in, and have sacrificed privacy in the process.

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#250

Post by savanaly »

jefftk wrote: post #225
weasel_words wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...and good old fashion virtue signaling https://www.jefftk.com/donations imo, honest hearts never need to publicize their altruism to the world.

Completely disagree: https://www.jefftk.com/p/make-your-giving-public Publicizing altruism helps build a culture of altruism.

Bravo. It's weird sort of moral pretzel to advertise your donations which simultaneously wins you some respect and a whole lot of antipathy for being self-righteous. Unfortunately there's no way I know of to self-advertise your donations without being self-righteous but it's the right thing to do. Ironically you find yourself wondering do you pay more with your pocketbook for the charity or more with your social capital for the charity advertisement (which makes the charity more impactful).

By the way I don't donate anything to charity at the moment, although I plan to someday. So I'm speaking from a no-skin-in-the-game perspective.

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