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Vietnam bans unskippable ads

saigoneer.com

311–320 of 835 posts

Re: Vietnam bans unskippable ads

#311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have fallen asleep watching youtube many times. I swear i have woken up in the middle of 20+ minute ads. I thought it was a news article about china when it was an ad. Who knows when the skip button appeared. The few times i have seen these, it has always been a literal fake news show about china.

Shortly before I started paying for YouTube, I remember seeing one of those ultra-long ads. The ad seemed interesting, so at first I didn't want to skip it. As soon as I saw that it was a looooong ad I got into the habit of checking the length of an ad before I even considered if it's worth watching. Now I just pay for Youtube. I'm a lot happier that way.

Time is money. Ten minutes of daily YouTube ads adds up to 5 hours a month. Premium costs $14, roughly an hour's work at minimum wage. Trade one hour of labor for four hours of free time. That's 48 hours back each year for $168. It's a no brainer. Even if your wage is half of 14 dollars, you would still gain 24 hours back and it would still be worth it.

Re: Vietnam bans unskippable ads

#312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I, personally, am drowning in "content". Until the content is utterly captivating and speaks to your soul in a way even your closest friends and partners can't, we haven't hit peak content. You know that one movie you see every decade or so that you can't get out of your head? The one that left you flabbergasted, that you've watched at least half a dozen times, and that you frequently and fondly remember? It touche…

Why would you ever expect or even want us to be 'swimming' in such emotionally activating content? The reality is that people will just get desensitized and there will be the same proportion of dreck and the same discoverability problems as ever. Your argument is dopamine junkie logic, sitting around waiting for a dealer to bring you something stronger instead of putting effort into searching out or making things tha…

Because I want to.

I don't care what you want. I know what I want.

Re: Vietnam bans unskippable ads

#313
post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe. Or maybe we could fund those services from all the money we'd save without advertising.

Assuming a zero sum economy, which is a pretty poor assumption.

We aren’t even mining asteroids near Earth’s orbit. Space colonization is a ketamine dream. There’s no extraterrestrial economy. Earth is all we have. One pie.

Re: Vietnam bans unskippable ads

#314
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Second order effects. Many advertisers may avoid advertising or lower their ad budgets. This means the tech platform makes less revenue. This means the platform and the video creator both make less revenue. This means less videos get created. All of these happen at the population level. I hate ads, but regulations that are for things that aren't public health (including mental health), anti-monopolization, etc. are p…

If your revenue comes from parasitical strategies it's negative sum and the economy is better off without it.

Are you seriously trying to argue the world is better off without YouTube?

I derive incredible value from YouTube. It wasn't always great, but it is recently full of extremely good educational content, tech talks, independent journalism, how-tos, independent film and animation, and so much more.

I'd wager that you use and benefit from a lot of services that are paid for via advertising. Even public transit is subsidized by advertising.

Re: Vietnam bans unskippable ads

#315
post #42

I just uninstalled a game from my mobile phone this morning that had heavy ad usage. It was interesting to note the different ad display strategies. From least to most annoying: - display a static ad, have the "x" to close appear soon (3-10 seconds) - display an animated ad, have the "x" to close appear soon (3-10 seconds) - display a static ad, have the "x" to close appear after 20-30 seconds - display an animated a…

If are using Android, it's easy to block these ads with apps like Netguard or even PCAPDroid

Then can use the game without annoyance of ads

As it happens, the data collection, surveillance and ad serving strategies of the mobile OS vendors and their unpaid "app developer" independent contractors are still subservient to application firewalls and/or user-controlled DNS

This could change one day, it's within the control of the mobile OS vendors, but I have been waiting over 15 years and it still hasn't

Re: Vietnam bans unskippable ads

#316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As much as I hate ads, I don’t know that it’s so simple. There are products that do solve legitimate problems people have. Maybe there is less of that now, but in this past this was very true, and advertising helped make people aware that solutions to their problems have been developed. The first washing machine, for example. The problem comes when the advertisement manufacturers problems that didn’t previously exist…

This is what a fucking store is for . They have catalogs. You could ask for one. If they think people will want something they will try to sell it and will tell you about it if you go looking . I see this pro-ads argument all the time and it’s so obviously-stupid that I’m truly baffled. Is this the kind of lie ad folks tell themselves so they can sleep at night?

There are no successful economies without ads.

Ads are a necessary evil for effective market discovery. They should be heavily regulated but you can't effectively operate a market economy without one.

Re: Vietnam bans unskippable ads

#317

Is this just a really ubiquitous typo (google finds multiple headlines with the same spelling), or is the rendering of "Vietnam" into English spelling somewhat unstable?

The only real results on Google are the article and this HackerNews post...

Did you search "vienam" with the quotes? duck duck go turns up a number of articles (albeit in at least one case the typo is in the metadata, not the article itself)

Re: Vietnam bans unskippable ads

#318
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Second order effects. Many advertisers may avoid advertising or lower their ad budgets. This means the tech platform makes less revenue. This means the platform and the video creator both make less revenue. This means less videos get created. All of these happen at the population level. I hate ads, but regulations that are for things that aren't public health (including mental health), anti-monopolization, etc. are p…

I would argue that limiting the amount of unrequested product evangelism shoved into users' eyeballs is a valuable public and mental health initiative. I wish we could have seen the alternate reality where ad-revenue was not the most lucrative business model for the internet.

Regulation is always too slow and too stupid. By doing this, you'll chase the ads into embedding themselves into the content itself. And that's just the start. Creators are already doing this, and now we're seeing tooling emerge to support it. Wait until the platforms get in on the game.

I say this as a proponent of antitrust regulation against tech giants and a privacy advocate against tracking, storing, and correlating user activity.

Everything needs to be kept in balance. Regulation is a blunt instrument and is better used to punish active rule breaking rather than trying to predict how markets should work.

Break up Google. Don't tell content marketplaces how to run ads. They know their customers far better than old politicians do.

If ads become onerous, alternatives emerge. Different channels, platforms, ad blocking. It's a healthier ecosystem that doesn't grow ossified with decades old legalese. Regulations that actively stymie the creation of new competition.

Now every new video and social startup in Vietnam has to check a bunch of boxes.

Re: Vietnam bans unskippable ads

#319
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The world would definitely be better without ads. All ads are poisonous. All of them first convince you that you and your life as it is is not good enough, and that in order to be happy again you need to spend money to buy a $product.

As much as I hate ads, I don’t know that it’s so simple. There are products that do solve legitimate problems people have. Maybe there is less of that now, but in this past this was very true, and advertising helped make people aware that solutions to their problems have been developed. The first washing machine, for example. The problem comes when the advertisement manufacturers problems that didn’t previously exist…

Word of mouth. It is okay for a system to be inefficient, especially when the tradeoff for efficiency is a poison pill (ad tech is definitely this).

Re: Vietnam bans unskippable ads

#320
post #13

I've often wondered whether the world would be better without ads. The incentive to create services (especially in social media) that strive to addict their users feels toxic to society. Often, it feels uncertain whether these services are providing actual value, and I suspect that whether a user would pay for a service in lieu of watching ads is incidentally a good barometer for whether real value is present. Don't…

Billboards are outlawed in Alaska.
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