Digital advertising may be causing almost 2% of global carbon emissions
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Re: Digital advertising may be causing almost 2% of global carbon emissions
#2I wonder how this compares to the manufacture of the things being advertised.
Re: Digital advertising may be causing almost 2% of global carbon emissions
#3I wonder how this compares to the manufacture of the things being advertised.
hehe, came here to say something similar, i.e. it would be hard to quantify the amount of resources wasted on convincing people to buy things they don't need.
Re: Digital advertising may be causing almost 2% of global carbon emissions
#4I wonder how this compares to the manufacture of the things being advertised.
hehe, came here to say something similar, i.e. it would be hard to quantify the amount of resources wasted on convincing people to buy things they don't need.
Define "things you don't need" ? That's a very subjective qualification. Even things which may only bring joy to the end consumer but very little objective value otherwise still have the effect of raising the spirits of said consumer a little (or a lot).
Like are Magic the gathering cards "something you need"? No. Do they bring endless joy to people who enjoy playing MTG, do they help build supportive communities, etc? Probably. Is that net good for the world? Probably.
This reminds me of the rant of a friend of mine who works on movies and TV shows. Someone was telling him the entertainment industry was useless and doesn't bring value to the world. He replied "cool so if we took away all your streaming platforms, all your music and all your books you'd be totally cool with that?" . Obviously the answer was no.
Re: Digital advertising may be causing almost 2% of global carbon emissions
#5This doesn't pass a cursory sniff test: Web traffic is 17% of Internet traffic, so even if we accept 25% of that is ads (I'm dubious) that would be 4.5% of traffic. That would add up to 0.3% of emissions.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/271735/internet-traffic-...
Re: Digital advertising may be causing almost 2% of global carbon emissions
#6Wait until you see how much physical advertising contributes. :D
Especially if you consider branding, which I don't know why it wouldn't be in this, it is tough to compete with shenanigans like how merchandising for the losing side of stuff like the super bowl are dealt with.
Re: Digital advertising may be causing almost 2% of global carbon emissions
#7Earlier quoted context omitted.
hehe, came here to say something similar, i.e. it would be hard to quantify the amount of resources wasted on convincing people to buy things they don't need.
Define "things you don't need" ? That's a very subjective qualification. Even things which may only bring joy to the end consumer but very little objective value otherwise still have the effect of raising the spirits of said consumer a little (or a lot). Like are Magic the gathering cards "something you need"? No. Do they bring endless joy to people who enjoy playing MTG, do they help build supportive communities, et…
> Define "things you don't need" ?
Things you wouldn't seek out unless you were first shown an ad.
MTG is a great example of the opposite. You seek out something fun to do with your friends. You happen to see an ad for MTG as fulfilling that need. Fantastic! Advertising works as it should.
But if I buy a print-on-demand mug as a gag for my sister's birthday, do I really need to spend the rest of my life looking at ads for novelty mugs? The gag is done. Nobody needs more mugs.
Re: Digital advertising may be causing almost 2% of global carbon emissions
#8I was recently thinking about going back to the idea of Butter (https://butter.sonnet.io) and expanding it a little bit. Can we build a proof-of-concept of a universal ad blocker™ running on your phone? It uses AI (it's very fancy):
- model 1: use screen capture to detect ads
- model 2: once an ad is detected, hide it in a context specific way (e.g. if it's the native YT app, find and click the skip button, if it's a podcast, seek past the sponsored segment etc...)
both model 1 and model 2 gradually learn, perhaps share knowledge between users, in a manner similar to blocklists.
Perhaps in 3-5 years our devices (mobile G/CPUs and batteries) will get powerful enough to support this. Imagine the possibilities!
It's a ridiculous idea. I also think it's possible we'll see something like this in the future, because it feels like a simpler solution than dealing with the systemic issues related to advertising.
Re: Digital advertising may be causing almost 2% of global carbon emissions
#9This doesn't pass a cursory sniff test: Web traffic is 17% of Internet traffic, so even if we accept 25% of that is ads (I'm dubious) that would be 4.5% of traffic. That would add up to 0.3% of emissions. https://www.statista.com/statistics/271735/internet-traffic-...
As per your link, many of those other categories listed such as Video and Social media also contain as much as, if not more, advertisement load than perhaps even pure 'web traffic'.
The article was using the % of advertising resources in web pages – which came to 24% – as a proxy for the overall advertising resources across all internet traffic (which is difficult to accurately ascertain).
So, yes, this is a rough approximation... and the actual % of advertising resources on all internet traffic may be more or less.
However it is stating all digital advertising may be the cause 2% of global carbon emissions, not just due to the advertising on web pages.
Re: Digital advertising may be causing almost 2% of global carbon emissions
#10This doesn't pass a cursory sniff test: Web traffic is 17% of Internet traffic, so even if we accept 25% of that is ads (I'm dubious) that would be 4.5% of traffic. That would add up to 0.3% of emissions. https://www.statista.com/statistics/271735/internet-traffic-...
As per your link, many of those other categories listed such as Video and Social media also contain as much as, if not more, advertisement load than perhaps even pure 'web traffic'. The article was using the % of advertising resources in web pages – which came to 24% – as a proxy for the overall advertising resources across all internet traffic (which is difficult to accurately ascertain). So, yes, this is a rough ap…
That's a bad way to estimate that, unless one's goal is to come up with an absurdly high number which doesn't pass the sniff test. In which case they succeeded. It doesn't.