761–770 of 835 posts
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…
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Regarding the kiosk, I wholly expect that an unattended device with YT on auto play will ratchet up the length/frequency of ads as long as they're never skipped. Someone who falls asleep watching YouTube will skip ads, unless they're asleep. The idea is that if YT can infer that someone is asleep (location, no movement, no sound, low light, night) that they can show the longest, most skip-inducing ads that they've go…
Sure, but why would I, as an entity buying advertising space, pay the same amount when YouTube is just going to try to show them to people who are asleep, that can't see the ads, and thus would have no effect anyway?
Because YouTube has a functional monopoly on online video advertising in a huge number of markets.
Enshitification is not just for YouTube's viewers and creators.
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> You make a post on Hacker News titled “Show HN: I made this cool thing called Luminexel, check it out!” So, place an ad in other words.
It’s not an ad if you’re not paying someone to forcibly show it to other people.
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> The UK just banned all TV and online junk food ads Unbelievable, when you consider the sheer volume of betting ads they have.
Yeah but the gov relies on that income. £2.0-£2.5 billion
This is also why taxes on vices should always, always, always be revenue neutral. Lawmakers should never have to choose between reducing demand for a vice and revenue.
They shouldn't be surprised if ads are shown more often.
Yeah - it seems like this will cause a series of 5 second skippable ads that still sums up to >many seconds of unskippable ads (unless that's banned, in which case they will just see ads more often, as you say) I expect it will make the experience worse rather than better because the publishers will try to maintain their inventory (how many seconds of ads they show per minute watched)
I understand there's money involved, but surely those who offer products must see that it's increasingly counterproductive?
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> You make a post on Hacker News titled “Show HN: I made this cool thing called Luminexel, check it out!” So, place an ad in other words.
It’s not an ad if you’re not paying someone to forcibly show it to other people.
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> If your new product solves frustrations present in an incumbent, on a long enough timescale, your product will come out on top. I've got numerous examples where this didn't happen because of other brand awareness. Neato had a very competitive and better bot vacuum to iRobot for years and yet they failed to gain traction. A large part of that would be because everyone knew about iRobot's offerings and yet ask any ra…
How did everyone know about irobot's offering? What if in the stores, botvacs and irobots were presented right next to each other with the same amount of real estate?
Imagine you're a normal random consumer and not an electronics nerd. You've heard people on the morning TV news show talk about these robot vacuums and showed a Roomba. You have a friend that got one last Christmas and said their Roomba was pretty cool. You go to the store, and you see a few Roombas and some other brands you've never heard of. You're probably only going to spend a few minutes looking at the shelf. Which one are you likely to get?
And in the end iRobot managed to coast on that brand connection of "robot vacuum" == "roomba" for a lot of people for nearly 20 years. It really only took until competitors were way cheaper and way better that got people to really start to switch. Their products have not been competitive for over a decade and yet they've only finally died. That power of linking a brand to a specific item or service is powerful, and its not purely push advertising and forced video ads that build it.
Its somewhat the same thing for Google. Sure, they do some amount of advertising especially at top of line events, but overall it seems their direct outbound marketing is kind of low overall. They spend a bunch of defaults and continue to build the connection that to search the internet is to Google, even as they continue to inject more paid results and the quality declines. Other competitors are out there which are comparable or better, but even with them heavily advertising they fail to unseat that brand connection.
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That’s not a problem for the customers though. Capitalism twists our incentives toward prioritizing return on investment over quality of life. Especially now with the internet, I literally never need ads. I just search for the solution to the problem I’m having. No push needed (or wanted).
How do you search? Google? That's typically part of marketing spend. It may not be pure ads as in I pay google, they display my ad. But it's still a company spending money to get their result to the top so you are more likely to see it. Ads solve the discovery problem. Without ads, people still try to solve the discovery problem and try to get your attention. Are those methods still ads?
examples?