241–250 of 611 posts
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> Advertising is fundamentally corrosive to society Interesting, why?
They incentivize collecting sensitive data about people. They incentivize businesses to maximize for engagement which generally promotes harmful content over informational content. Empty informational calories.
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If you grew up in Europe, I promise that when you visit the US for the first time, you will be SHOCKED by America's advertising standards (or lack of them.) Advertising is everywhere, everywhere, everywhere, everywhere, to an extent far beyond what you're used to from home. Posters, billboards, fliers, TV commercials, product placement, celebrity endorsements - you can barely step outside without being bombarded by y…
You get used to it in a few days, and it's part of the reason why businesses grow so much faster in the US (especially online). People who want your product find out about it much faster. For example I buy SaaS, and the way I hear about most tools are ads. I choose what to buy via references and evaluation, but ads are often how to get things on my radar. Without Ads, I would have bought worse software in the past
I don't even know how to reply to that, but I feel the need to call it out as, potentially, the most creepy-as-fuck quote-unquote justification of literally anything.
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> We always paid for magazines and newspapers and saw ads despite paying just because that happened doesn't mean it has to keep happening, we can do better
> do better Which is what? > just because that happened The subtleties matter. The ads were purchased per issue or over several issues. The publication solicited the advertisers business and not the other way around. The rates were set per publication and were equal for all potential buyers. The ads were static and approved by the publisher before being included for distribution. Then you get doubleclick now swallowe…
> Which is what?
UBI.
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They aren't all ads, because the situation gets really muddy. If a website talks about an upcoming movie is that an ad? What if they were shown the movie before its release?
It's an ad if and only if it is mixed into an article that is not about the movie. If I click a link that says that the article behind it is about the movie, it's not an ad. If I click on a link to a comparison of PC networking equipment, then it's an ad because a movie is not PC networking equipment. This doesn't mean the movie article (or indeed the hardware comparison) can't be sponsored. It just means the ad shou…
So, is another page, that links to that page also an ad? Because maybe the homepage that runs Cisco-sponsored reviews might also have a cisco-sponsored banner. And even if not, maybe over time they become associated as "the thing that reviews things were cisco always wins"...
Oh, and what if it wasn't a sponsorship. What if instead Cisco just gave them the hardware to test at a discount? Or for free? Would you not write a slightly more favourable review for nvidia if they gifted you their top-tier GPU? What if instead of gifting you the GPU, they just give it to you at a discount? Or earlier than normal customers? Or they just have nvidia-stickers for your kids in the box?
Ads are an extremly slipperly slope, they're part of human nature; everyone I ever met is trying to tell me about (=market) themselves, their beliefs, their current hobbies, that new burger place down the road, ....
I did not think about blocking it, did not mind, did not care. That's how ads should have stayed instead of this giant annoying/spyware/loud/popup/... mess. Nowadays I would not use anything without ublock and i am considering storing everything locally so I dont have to visit most websites and only scrape the news.
It's especially sad since back in the day making a website, having a webserver etc. was vastly more expensive and difficult while these days it costs literally less than 10$ / month for something that can handle millions of views.
How is it possible that something was sustainable 20 years ago is not sustainable now?
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But with zero ads the internet would be a smaller, exceedingly beautiful place.
It's why I use Firefox and avoid situations where I might get exposed to annoying ads. I was watching some Amazon Prime recently (the new rings of power season). Pretty OK and completely ad free experience. Except I noticed these weird cuts every few minutes. It took me quite a while to realize that Amazon introduced ads some time ago for Amazon prime and uBlock origin was doing a great job of simply blocking them. H…
> I use Firefox and avoid situations where I might get exposed to annoying ads.
> I don't pay any websites/blogs for subscriptions for articles either.
While some content creators do it for love, art, whatever, others do need an income stream to keep going. I'm fine with blocking annoying ads (pop-ups, forced interstitials, autoplaying audio, …) but basic image-and-some-text-on-the-page adverts are fine, as are sponsored sections (if correctly identified as such) in content (if I've heard it before I can just skip manually). There must be a middle ground somewhere that doesn't irritate most viewers but nets the content makers some income.
I'm not against advertising as such, where it is relevant to what I am looking at (or even when it is arbitrary/random), what I object to is the stalking that is inherent in the current adtech world. I wouldn't want Amazon following me into the pub to say “I saw you looking at poo bags the other day, take a look at these beauties” in real life and I don't want it online. Over the top advertising is annoying too, but not nearly as disquieting as the feeling of being followed by hundreds of little corporate drones everywhere I go.
I don't mind paying a small amount for things either, like a couple of the podcasts I regularly listen to (though some of those are somewhat unrealistic, I'm not going to pay to a TV subscription or two worth for an ad-free slightly-longer version of a weekly podcast!), but like the point of the article I disagree with paying and still getting adverts probably with the tracking that this implies.
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They aren't all ads, because the situation gets really muddy. If a website talks about an upcoming movie is that an ad? What if they were shown the movie before its release?
Reviews are ads. Thats why these people call themselves "influencers".
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Did you know that YouTube does not make a profit, but only covers its own expenses? What if it becomes unprofitable because of ad blockers? What will remain? Paid cinemas? Do you want to pay money from your own pocket? And you will remember the times when you could pay by watching ads without money. Think about it! No one will do anything for you for free. Try to take a taxi or a train without money? Try to steal bre…
Why do you stop at looking at ads? Why not compelling viewers to actually support the advertisement by buying their stuff? Letting them pay your way through life without buying their products is tantamount to stealing. All this free money from ads, do you get free money from the grocery store? From a taxi driver? No. So why do you take it from advertisers without buying whatever they offer?
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Regarding The Verge, I wish something like Apple News existed in this space. I'd happily throw in $10/mo into a pool that distributed money towards a bunch of different smaller tech reporting/blogs/YouTube channels. I just can't justify paying $X/mo individually to 20 different sources. Though, I dislike that Apple News now runs ads in it's offering and would happily pay a little more to completely get rid of them, b…
Then that'd be Apple News Premium, or whatever. But the curve of how many subscribers need to go premium, how much subscription to charge them and how many/few ads do both sides find acceptable has to be discovered by experimentation (like Netflix's 'Standard with ads' tier). See also recent articles on "Apple TV+ is a failure despite making great content and $20b investment, Apple is about to make cuts". (The compar…
Does it make great content? I've only watched 3 series and then cancelled because it was annoying (but all three were fairly popular), and the more they progressed, the more underwhelming they got. The premise was always good, but scenario was meh and getting meh-er by the episode, everything was kept superficial. Kind of like to tick a box "we talked about X", but without actually exploring the topic. And it was the exact same thing over and over again in 3 separate series - be it the gay footballer in Ted Lasso or the relationship with religion while in climate catastrophe in Extrapolations. No real depth, no real thought provoking discussions, no nothing. Just a quick mention, and jump on to the next topic to gloss over.
It seems to me that they spend a lot on big name actors, had some good initial ideas on what to do, but the actual execution was pretty meh.