Advertising Is a Cancer on Society

http://jacek.zlydach.pl/blog/2019-07-31-ads-as-cancer.html

by TeMPOraL • 7 years ago

692 640 7 years ago

jacek.zlydach.pl

starpilot• 7 years ago

We get rid of it, Google/Facebook/etc. shut down. While social media is of arguable benefits, Google has provided incalculable value to the world. Ads are the magic money fountain that give them the power to organize all of human knowledge, a phenomenal resource anyone can tap.

aqme28• 7 years ago

I'm not convinced that there's no other possible business model for a search engine.

starik36• 7 years ago

What do you suggest?

dzader• 7 years ago

excited to see the new search engine you build then!

bthrn• 7 years ago

That sounds fairly alarmist. I'm sure there's a (small) subset of users who'd be willing to pay for services like those if there weren't any creepy advertising tricks happening in the background. Would the business model change? Certainly. But shut down? Probably not.

Google/Facebook are big and motivated enough that they could probably figure out how to make money.

magashna2• 7 years ago

But we've always gotten the milk for free. In fact, the milk has gotten better and better, they're also offering cheeses, yogurts, and steaks. Why would anyone start paying now?

I know why (privacy and ethics), but most people won't and don't care.

themacguffinman• 7 years ago

And regress to a world where access to the best tools and information is denied to those who can't afford it? No thanks. I consider the alignment of profits with breadth of access to be one of the biggest engines of progress in the modern age.

StavrosK3• 7 years ago

Google is the easiest thing in the world to sell ads for. You literally have a user telling you exactly what they're looking for. Why do you need to track them or do any of that shady stuff? When I search for "gaming laptop", just show me ads for gaming laptop. You don't even need to know who I am!

Google will be fine.

marcosdumay2• 7 years ago

Google used to do just that, and the ads used to be so good that often I queried things there just for them.

Nowadays neither the ads nor the results have any relation to what you search.

choward• 7 years ago

If they know more about you they can show you one at the top of your price range. Or maybe they know you like to finance things and they can show you a monthly payment. They could also show you one that happens to be your favorite color. Or if they know your political affiliation they can show you the limited "MAGA" model.

_petronius2• 7 years ago

Google has provided incalculable value to the world

I'm not convinced by this statement, and I'd be genuinely interested to hear your reasoning behind it. Is it specific products? Specific technologies? Although Google has built some interesting stuff, I can't think of anything off the top of my head that they've done that was either a) something that couldn't have been invented without them, or b) only unique due to their ability to scale it out, rather than a true innovation.

ziddoap2• 7 years ago

The problem with arguing your viewpoint is that no one can prove something wouldn't have been invented without Google. So, no matter what is listed, you can just say "someone else might have invented that".

And regarding your second point, what would the practical difference be to the consumer if the innovation happened because of their ability to scale out, or "true innovation"?

You don't need to like Google to admit they have added value to the world.

summerlight2• 7 years ago

a) something that couldn't have been invented without them

Are you suggesting that order of magnitude improvements on information accessibility in a planetary scale is nothing?

b) only unique due to their ability to scale it out, rather than a true innovation

Scaling out search engine to the entire globe is THE innovation. You need to realize that any kind of innovation doesn't freely come from a bunch of idea guys, but from execution.

cameronbrown16• 7 years ago

With your logic none of the great inventors mattered, because their stuff could've been discovered/created by others.

RobLach• 7 years ago

Search would have gotten built without advertising. Literally hundreds of companies were taking a stab at it.

Google search now has a revenue driven development target, not a feature driven one, purely because of its advertising lifeblood. It's a shame.

erentz• 7 years ago

If people value it then at a certain point they’ll pay for it. What we might find out however is that a lot of these free services aren’t valued and no one will pay for it. And I think that just reinforces the point of the article: those services are cancers, literally no one values them, they’re just manipulated into using them.

Things like search engines will be able to survive because they’re necessary. They may look different (e.g. wrapped up in a subscription package with gmail and gdocs). We are used to paying $X per month for an internet connection, it’s absurd to believe people won’t add on $Y per month for the over the top services that make that internet connection useful.

wpietri18• 7 years ago

Your hypothetical is poorly considered. We'd find another way to fund it. Things that are of incalculable value generally get paid for.

And I'll note that Google, etc, only take a fraction of the money flowing through the ad system. So if we got rid of ads, we could not only afford Google, but a number of other valuable things of Google's size.

tacos_supreme• 7 years ago

Ok, great, it provided incalculable value to the world. At what point do we decide it is just existing as a barnacle and pumping money into making billionaires richer? How do we move past Googles dominant position and reclaim that monetary stream for better causes? Like you said, it is incalculably valuable, kind of like you might consider some public services to be.

irrational5• 7 years ago

The web existed before Google, Facebook, etc. and, as you might recall, it worked just fine.

readams• 7 years ago

Though it was really hard to find anything.

marcosdumay2• 7 years ago

I can't agree that the web worked just fine before Google. It was something completely different and much less useful.

mrob• 7 years ago

Wikipedia provides more value to me than Google, and it doesn't rely on adverts.

And static websites with mostly text are very cheap to host now, and there are lots of people willing to share their knowledge without adverts. That was how it was usually done before the rise of web advertising, and old-fashioned websites still exist. You don't even need search engines to find them; there are volunteer-run directory projects like Curlie (successor to Open Directory Project and DMOZ).

Bloated websites full of video and megabytes of Javascript are probably too expensive to host without adverts, but I think the web would probably be better without them. I'd miss Youtube, but how many Youtube videos are really the best way to present the content and a good use of your time? A non-commercial web is possible.

robbrown4513• 7 years ago

Are the "please donate" notices on Wikipedia not ads?

dymk2• 7 years ago

Wikipedia almost goes under every year if their banners are to be believed. They have to beg for money to stay open. That's not a ringing endorsement of an "ad-less" model.

cousin_it4• 7 years ago

If projects as large as Linux or Wikipedia can thrive without ads, I'm sure a Google-quality search engine can do the same. So far it hasn't been done because the ad-supported model is promising more money to anyone who tries; but if the ad-supported model goes away, you'll see a good non-ad-supported search engine soon enough. It could be P2P and free (like Mastodon, which proved that social networks don't have to rely on ads), or it could be paid (like your Windows license or your internet connection).

yellowapple9• 7 years ago

The Linux Foundation's sponsorships are technically ads. Not particularly intrusive ads, so I generally don't mind them (much like I don't necessarily mind sponsorships of other things, like sports arenas and NASCAR drivers), but still ads nonetheless.

scarface7412• 7 years ago

How many Linux contributors are paid by companies who make money by advertising?

zentiggr3• 7 years ago

So we split Google, Facebook, etc into two parts - content with no ads, and the "yellow pages" that are ads only, for when you want to go find product info.

2nd option... add a useful/not useful flag to every search result, so users can flag blogspam, content farms, etc and help keep the results useful.

jknoepfler• 7 years ago

Pegging the viability of a searchable index to ad revenue is a deeply perplexing move.

The technology to run and maintain a web index is not new. Paid indexes have existed in specialized domains (academia, law, news) for decades.

Wikipedia is a vast, self-indexed resource supported by donations. It's also indexed by Google, and it's availability over the public internet makes them (Google) an enormous amount of money. The labor of creating Wikipedia (the actual labor of organizing human knowledge) was done for free, and the maintenance of Wikipedia is funded by donation.

Every paid ISP prior to Google maintained its own index, which was paid for by user fees.

Expert communities (which often can't depend on commercial indexes) maintain encyclopedic curated sets of links.

The internet - a vast decentralized web of self-published information - is what people want. It drives people to the internet in droves. One strategy for capitalizing on that hunger is to index everything, offer a pretty good index for "free," then sell access to those eyeballs. It is far from the only way to make the internet more accessible.

The only thing I use google for right now is a glorified phone book, because I'm too stupid to remember urls and too lazy/forgetful to bookmark them. So sometimes (sadly), I'll google the twoplustwo forums for poker, or "hacker news" because I forgot news.ycombinator.com. But it's the expert communities that I want, not Google's inscrutible index.

No one has really succeeded in substituting attentional transactions with actual micro-payments, but it's certainly not impossible. There's obviously a demand.

a1369209993• 7 years ago

Google [...] shut down.

Good riddance; it's been most of a decade since Google provided anything of value to the world. They're ruining HTML with AMP, their sponsorship of YouTube has crippled torrent-based video distribution, their search engine is a sick joke, and ReCaptcha puts large chunks of the web behind a Kafka-shrouded spyware-wall.

asark3• 7 years ago

Ads are the magic money fountain that give them the power to organize all of human knowledge, a phenomenal resource anyone can tap.

They're not too great at the "all" part. Or the "organize" part, anymore.

solidsnack90002• 7 years ago

Maybe some of it...but without any advertising at all it would be really hard to know what products or out there or even that there is a restaurant on the other end of the block.

OrgNet2• 7 years ago

reducing consumption would be a benefit if you think about it from a climate change angle...

For restaurants, I usually search for them in a directory and not in ads...

nrb• 7 years ago

That directory is almost invariably funded with money from advertisements

spullara• 7 years ago

How do you think that directory makes the money necessary to produce and maintain it? Generally, ads.

alephnan4• 7 years ago

In NYC, there are many pop up events including food events, which wouldn’t show up in a food directory site, but they do show up on Instagram ads.

JoshTriplett2• 7 years ago

without any advertising at all it would be really hard to know what products or out there or even that there is a restaurant on the other end of the block

There's a huge difference between reviews, directories, and advertising. You can seek out information without being pushed advertisements. Another facet: whether payment from the entity being promoted is involved and affects placement.

cm20127• 7 years ago

Most review sites and directories are funded by advertising.

mdorazio• 7 years ago

A good portion of advertising is probably a net negative to society in the form of promoting consumption beyond healthy/financially responsible levels. However, anyone who's ever started a product business knows that advertising is often the only effective way to get new customers, even if your product is amazingly helpful to people. It's difficult to draw the line between advertising that is helpful and advertising that is harmful.

gdulli• 7 years ago

One of the best concerts I ever saw, I only knew about because of a TV commercial. In theory I could have found out about it another way, but I don't follow music news closely.

I generally mute/fast-forward commercials. Those are the best kinds of ads we can hope for because they're easy to skip and they're completely distinct from content. I'd rather fast-forward through an anonymous, non-targeted commercial for diapers than have Netflix manipulate me into watching what's profitable for them with their browse interface, based on my viewing and internet history, and then there's Coca-Cola all over the show itself.

philwelch7• 7 years ago

A restaurant on the end of the block can be discovered with even a minimal amount of awareness of one’s surroundings. Products can be displayed in stores or listed in catalogues.

solidsnack90002• 7 years ago

One doesn't have that awareness when one is traveling. Many a time I've been helped by a well designed ad, posted on a wall or in the street, in a language I don't know but with an arrow and clear pictures of food and coffee.

autoexec4• 7 years ago

Yeah, I've been so effective at cutting out ads from my life that I do regularly find that I'm behind on some stuff I'd be interested in and I wish there was a better way to stay on top of things. I try to follow certain blogs and subreddits to help, but it is something I've noticed.

The reality though is that even without ads I'm never lacking for things to spend my money/time on. In fact, without ads my main problem is still more often the finite nature of my time/money than a lack of options.

tathougies• 7 years ago

No its not. I had to move quickly last week. Needed to find someone who could take some stuff. Remembers the 1800gotjunk commercials. They fixed my problem. I guess I could have used google but without ads google wouldn't exist so...

smt885• 7 years ago

I would be happy to pay Google for ad-free search. Even $5/mo from me would be much more than they get from me now, and it would cover costs for thousands of unpaid users.

criddell4• 7 years ago

I don't know what Google's average revenue per user is, but Facebook supposedly is around $8 / month. I would expect Google to be in the same ball park.

$5/mo probably isn't enough for Google.

t345433• 7 years ago

Phone books still exist.

falcrist• 7 years ago

I don't know what they're like these days, but when I was younger, the vast majority of the phone book was a series of advertisements for various businesses.

johnward• 7 years ago

Um. Phonebooks are a form of advertising...

socalnate1• 7 years ago

"Businesses are made of people, and people have ethics. If you're running one, consider the way you advertise. Are you aiming at making mutually beneficial transactions, or are you just trying to milk you users out of their hard-earned cash? Not all advertising is inherently harmful to individuals or society. "

So, some kinds of cancers are OK. It's hard to take this sort of article too seriously when it undermines it's own point so effectively.

GavinMcG• 7 years ago

I think you're reading "is" in a particular (and reasonable) way, but there are other ways of reading it. For example "is" can mean "is essentially" or fundamentally, or it could mean "is currently".

The fact that advertising doesn't have to be a cancer is compatible with the claim that it is one at this point in history.

kyruzic4• 7 years ago

Some kinds are ads arent inherently harmful. Advertising is still cancer though.

Some kinds of mold aren't harmful. That doesn't mean mold isn't a bad thing.

alephnan4• 7 years ago

Targeted Instagram ads have been very useful to me recently. I just moved apartments, and the ads have been showcasing products that I wouldn’t have otherwise known about.

The argument can be made that maybe I didn’t need these things in the first place. But I want them, it makes me happy, and these ads have saved me time.

smt885• 7 years ago

This is a pretty rare ad experienced. They're much more commonly used to generate desire that doesn't need to exist; to manipulate public opinion in a harmful way; to sell dangerous products; to astroturf; etc.

The fact that people attempt to ignore most ads, with varying degrees of success, tells you that they're net-harmful.

blodovnik7• 7 years ago

This is a dogmatic viewpoint I think often seen in very technical people who are unwilling to see the interconnectedness of how our society works.

I bet there's any number of things this person values that simply wouldn't exist without advertising.

It's a childish and immature opinion really.

Anyone who hates advertising this much should show their commitment by working at an organization that does not advertise. Loathing advertising and at the same time depending on it for income is deeply hypocritical.

smt885• 7 years ago

What valuable things wouldn't exist without advertising?

blodovnik7• 7 years ago

Computers. And if you want to be pedantic, you'll say but they would exist for military etc!!!!!

But if you're not being pedantic you'll agree that most stuff relating to computing exists in its current form in lockstep with yhe ability of companies to sell and therefore advertise their products.

Not just computers but everything related to them too.

dymk2• 7 years ago

Name a consumer good that you've bought, that was never advertised

drak0n1c• 7 years ago

There are small family restaurants that I never would have discovered or thought of going to if I hadn't received a postcard ad in the mail.

cm20127• 7 years ago

Almost all new inventions and start-ups in the last 50 needed effective marketing for people to find out about them and use them.

anbop4• 7 years ago

I have a SaaS business which exists ONLY because of advertising. It’s highly niche, really the only product that does what it does, and a few dozen people a day click through from Google Ads and find that I have a product to automate something they had been spending hundreds of hours on. You should see the effusive thank you notes I get if you think advertising is pointless. This product wouldn’t exist without Google Ads because I would have no way to find the 50 people a day worldwide who need it.

dwild17• 7 years ago

Anything that is free on the internet?

My SO escape room wouldn't exist without advertising either... I'm pretty sure that's true for PLENTY of business.

colemorrison• 7 years ago

Indeed. We remove advertising, how many folks lose their jobs that are allowing them a level of self-actualization where they can analyze advertising effects on society at large?

alanbernstein• 7 years ago

There is a wide range of aggression in advertising tactics, and the arguments made in the article apply in proportion to that aggressiveness. It is not necessary to eliminate all advertising to start recognizing and addressing these problems.

kelnos• 7 years ago

There must be a way to do advertising that respects the consumer, and doesn't use some form of sketchy manipulation to achieve the desired goal. And yet the vast majority of advertising is (to me) offensive.

Anyone who hates advertising this much should show their commitment by working at an organization that does not advertise.

That's a rather childish and immature rejoinder. The world of employment simply doesn't work that way, and people's job mobility is not infinite and frictionless.

blodovnik7• 7 years ago

People were offended by advertising in the same way in the 1970s.

Advertising offendees will always be offended no matter where advertising sophistication is at.

lbrito2• 7 years ago

I bet there's any number of things this person values that simply wouldn't exist without advertising.

That isn't relevant regarding the truthfulness of the author's claim.

Whether or not ads are vital for any industry, product or technology (an extremely complex question by the way, not to be easily dismissed with a dogmatic "X would not exist without advertising") has no logical relation whatsoever to any opinion one might have about ads.

archy_2• 7 years ago

Maybe they're valuing inferior products they only prefer due to advertisements?

Imagine how much better our world would look without advertising. Will some adtech devs lose their job? Yes, but honestly it would probably be worth it. They'll find work in a non-scummy industry and can be a net positive for humanity.

nxc18• 7 years ago

I've worked at an organization that failed to advertise its products, causing massive inefficiency & waste - lots of people have access to our technology but don't know about it and end up implementing the same basic CRUD app over and over.

Don't underestimate the economic loss caused by people just not knowing there's a better way.

yellowapple9• 7 years ago

Right, but there's a difference between the occasional text or non-animated static image ad and the sorts of browser-fingerprinting spyware prevalent today.

There's also a time and place for ads, and the article's examples (like actual medical documents) are neither.

LeifCarrotson2• 7 years ago

The main thesis of the article:

Real world advertising is not about informing, it's about convincing. Over time, it became increasingly manipulative and dishonest. It also became more effective. In the process, it grew to consume a significant amount of resources of every company on the planet.

There's a huge difference between informational advertising, which I support, and manipulative advertising, which is reprehensible. Telling people that their custom CRUD app could be ready quicker, cheaper to support, and contain fewer bugs if they used your product is great. Bombarding people who already know about your product and its half dozen competitors with subconscious messages that your competitors are evil and that if they use your product their sex appeal will increase is dishonest and stupid.

I work at an organization that does almost no marketing; we mostly spread by word of mouth. We have no shortage of customers or work, and growth would be harmful to the quality of our product, so we're pretty content with our place in the market.

Retra• 7 years ago

Informing people about your product is not the same as manipulating them into buying it.

randcraw8• 7 years ago

Informational promotion is not the same thing as advertising. A PSA is not an ad. There are many ways to inform the public of services or resources other than interrupting a media stream with ill-targeted spots. Getting someone credible to favorably review your product would be a far better way to differentiate your innovation than web ads or TV spots.

The waste you speak of sounds the result of misjudging demand rather than spamming too little. Or maybe people were informed about the merits of your better mousetrap, but just didn't care. Startups often guzzle that kool-aid.

Advertising is the last place I'd go to learn if someone's novelty is better. Who trusts ads?

autoexec4• 7 years ago

I bet there's any number of things this person values that simply wouldn't exist without advertising.

There aren't many things that can only exist because of advertising. Most of the things people things think depend on advertising already existed in some form before advertising took over and would continue to exist in some form if ads went away.

blodovnik7• 7 years ago

I note the author is very much involved in companies projects and social media platforms that all depend on advertising.

http://jacek.zlydach.pl/index.html

I'd respect his position more if he was not on LinkedIn or Facebook and did not work on commercial projects.

AlexandrB• 7 years ago

Do I really need to link Mr. Gotcha on HN[1]?

I think LinkedIn is despicable but I have a LinkedIn account because it’s basically expected that you have one for recruiting purposes by many employers.

[1] https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha

Lendal• 7 years ago

This argument that you can't criticize anything if you benefit from it is absurd. If he didn't use any technology that comes from companies that advertise, he would never be able to communicate his message in the first place. In fact he wouldn't even be able to leave his home or feed himself, unless he just farmed off the land and made his own clothing. Ridiculous.

TeMPOraL20• 7 years ago

I'm not involved in those, I merely use them for obvious reasons almost everyone uses them - network effect. Facebook is the XXI century rolodex (also, I was very young when I got on it, and it looked differently then); LinkedIn account I maintain for the off chance it could be useful in finding a job. Also, that doesn't mean I like how these services work.

I fortunately avoided being ever involved in anything directly related to adtech, and I plan on staying that way.

subjectsigma• 7 years ago

Found the ad tech guy.

We do not have to accept the current state of advertising because it may or may not have had good effects in the past (practically by accident). Wanting things to change for the better is the opposite of dogma, and I daresay most advertising is much more childish and immature than this blog post. It is not hypocritical to hate ads and be subjected to them/benefit from them as they are so pervasive as to be unavoidable; they can also still have a net harm even if you think that orgs "depend" on them for income, which is dubious.

And just for the record, I work for a nonprofit who advertises minimally, and definitely not to the public.

cameronbrown16• 7 years ago

The problem is nobody is having a proper discourse on how to make ads better. There is a real problem here that we can fix and need to fix if we want to keep the internet economy from eventually collapsing when everyone gets too sick of ads to avoid adblockers.

TheCapn• 7 years ago

He doesn't directly call for the completely abolishment of marketing/advertising and actually recognizes the free markets have a place for advertising but is using that blog as a place to complain about the cancer it has become.

"It's a malignant mutation of an idea that efficient markets need a way to connect goods and services with people wanting to buy them. Limited to honestly informing people about what's available on the market, it can serve a crucial function in enabling trade. In the real world however, it's moved way past that role."

Its definitely one of those pieces that merely points out the flaws without suggesting any solutions. You can take those articles how you will but I think its dishonest to take his overall message as being advertising is bad entirely and without exception.

iamaelephant2• 7 years ago

My brother has the same view of advertising as this author but also loves MotoGP and other motorsports and doesn't see the conflict staring him right in the face as sponsor-branded bikes fly past. I agree it's childish and short-sighted, and I'm certain the author would have a different viewpoint if the time came to market his own small business.

blodovnik7• 7 years ago

Does he own any motorbike brand related stuff?

picometer• 7 years ago

On the contrary, I think the author addresses this via the "cancer" metaphor:

It's a malignant mutation of an idea that efficient markets need a way to connect goods and services with people wanting to buy them.
Over time, it became increasingly manipulative and dishonest. It also became more effective. In the process, it grew to consume a significant amount of resources of every company on the planet.

I interpret the loose analogy as: if controlled advertising is like normal cell growth, then out-of-control resource-consuming advertising is like cancerous cell growth.

It's much easier to control advertising if its deployment has more friction, e.g. in a physical newspaper or billboard. On the internet, it's different. We haven't figured out how to control advertising on the internet yet, such that it doesn't have all the harmful side effects cited by the author.

I bet that if we do figure it out, it will be because we've made significant technological advancements in customer<=>product matchmaking* combined with an unrelenting focus on preserving humane values.

* This will also probably entail us, as a society, somehow reframing the way that customer<=>product matchmaking happens, putting more control into the customer's hands.

I think there is room for a bit of optimism here, but it means admitting that there are serious problems with the current system.

davidivadavid9• 7 years ago

That analogy applies to literally anything that can grow. Great. Startups are a cancer. Technology is a cancer.

ameister144• 7 years ago

Yeah, the problem with that is it's a completely flawed premise.

"It's a malignant mutation of an idea that efficient markets need a way to connect goods and services with people wanting to buy them."

No, it isn't. It's an expansion of the idea that people are more likely to buy things they have heard of. If it was just to connect people with what they already want to buy, there would be no product development, no product roll-outs, because people don't know they want to buy something that has never existed before.

Also 'over time it became increasingly manipulative and dishonest' is a joke. It's been dishonest since the start. Criers lying about the effectiveness of some tonic, the attractiveness of some woman, the strength and wisdom of some leader.

killjoywashere• 7 years ago

What makes the current system suboptimal? I mean, the markets are Dutch auctions, which penalize overvaluation. Compared to my youth, I'm definitely exposed to far less advertizing.

khawkins• 7 years ago

"Dogmatic viewpoints" are the real cancer on society. Actually "lupus" might be a more apt comparison.

Take a very broad issue like "advertising", which nearly everyone has had a negative experience with but performs a vital function. Highlight some damaging anecdotes and envision a world free from the issue. Thus, we have laid the groundwork that the issue is actually a problem. The stated or unstated solution is obviously to get rid of the problem, but the specifics of how to accomplish this are hazy at best. The conclusion boils down to anything which helps get rid of the issue must be good, and anything which supports the issue is bad. The resulting actions of true believers attack everything blindly because the moral logic has been simplified.

Lupus causes the immune system to start attacking your own tissue in the same way. Instead of identifying specific problems and working to eliminate them, it starts attacking everything, making the body weaker as it destroys an otherwise healthy organ.

perfunctory4• 7 years ago

Anyone who hates advertising this much should show their commitment by working at an organization that does not advertise. Loathing advertising and at the same time depending on it for income is deeply hypocritical.

It's the same as saying that living in China and criticising communism is deeply hypocritical.

I believe it's actually the opposite. It takes courage to criticise something your livelihood depends on.

davidivadavid9• 7 years ago

It's the average opinion of people who are uninformed, and who've never had to sell anything for a living. They live in a fantasy world where ad people are wizards who can control people's brains and make them buy things they don't need by making them sad.

Absolute nonsense that wouldn't survive a 5 minute test in reality. Unfortunately it's more convenient to let other people at your company do that "dirty job", while mocking the "stupid sales jocks" and their "suits", while assuming you have a great understanding of what they're doing.

It's really the mirror image of nerd bullying, and it's not any better.

m463• 7 years ago

Advertising should still be regulated for the stability of society, but regulation is always behind, and is frequently distorted by the folks being regulated.

examples where better regulation is needed: robocalling, pervasive tracking and data sharing, dark advertising patterns, drug marketing, etc.

tantalor• 7 years ago

In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, "I don't see the use of this; let us clear it away." To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: "If you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton%27s_fence

gatherhunterer5• 7 years ago

The author clearly understands the use of advertising.

anoncake9• 7 years ago

I bet there's any number of things this person values that simply wouldn't exist without advertising.

Those are outweighed by the things that don't exist because due to advertising, resources are allocated to less valuable things instead.

Anyone who hates advertising this much should show their commitment by working at an organization that does not advertise. Loathing advertising and at the same time depending on it for income is deeply hypocritical.

The classic non-argument of conservatives defending the status quo. People who don't depend on advertising for their income just get criticized for selfishly demanding the stop of a practice that doesn't benefit them instead.

forgottenpass• 7 years ago

This is a dogmatic viewpoint I think often seen in very technical people who are unwilling to see the interconnectedness of how our society works.

You're asking him to argue against himself rather than put a strong case forward for a position. And you're framing the fact he doesn't as a mental limitation. You're denying the authors agency by asserting it wasn't even a stylistic choice about presentation; he didn't present what you would have so therefore his brain must be broken.

bassman9000• 7 years ago

Businesses are made of people, and people have ethics. If you're running one, consider the way you advertise. Are you aiming at making mutually beneficial transactions, or are you just trying to milk you users out of their hard-earned cash? Not all advertising is inherently harmful to individuals or society. Choose the ethical option. It may cost your company some lost profits, but then again, you may gain loyal customers who'll want to reward a honest business.

bluetwo• 7 years ago

I would say the theft of attention and concentration is a cancer on society, but I agree overall.

To those who say there is no other model, you are not correct.

jkeuhlen• 7 years ago

What are the other models that exist and are currently working? As someone who is looking to build a free consumer product, I don't know what else exists that can offset my costs other than advertising. I hate paywalls just as much as advertising, so I'm opposed to just charging for access.

klum• 7 years ago

If you expect income, you're not really looking to build a free product, are you? Seems to me, a paywall (or similar) is the honest way; those who get value from your product give value back, in the most direct and transparent way possible.

(I know I'm trivializing the question; I'm not in your situation and I don't know the perfect model for your product. But I disagree with just lumping together "paywalls" and "advertising" in the same category of "non-desirable things".)

philwelch7• 7 years ago

It’s not a product unless people are willing to pay for it. That’s the long and short of it.

cameronbrown16• 7 years ago

I'd say provide both models but be light on ads. If people are going to use adblock, you can't stop them and they'd never click on ads anyway. If people aren't using adblock then treat them with respect like most of the modern web isn't. Put focus on making your premium experience better because these are obviously your most loyal customers.

_virtu3• 7 years ago

I haven't read the article yet, but I was thinking about this yesterday. I was sitting in my car and a sign that had "RENT TO OWN" on it where "RENT TO" was flashing. I felt offended by the fact that my attention was taken from me all for the sake of drawing me in to spend my money on something I didn't care about or need to know about during that time. I know that there are physical limitations on what you can say is or is not acceptable for an advert; the implications on free speech would probably be too much to ever be able to pass any meaningful changes, but, to me, advertising is an assault on your senses that you have no control over.

It made me think of a future where AR is highly prevalent. What will your life be like? Will you have to pay to not have adverts stuck in your face all the time? To me human attention is valuable and it should be protected. I'm concerned for future generations as technology is going to progress further.

I don't have a full argument formed, but in my opinion we should rethink what should be allowed in regards to advertising in the internet age. Why is advertising required at this point with services like google? Could you just have a regulated service directory that operates similarly to google instead?

To those of you that are reading, I get it, yeah we wouldn't have services today without advertising, but now that we have technology, isn't most advertising antiquated? If I really do need something, I'll look for it and let technology bring the service or product to me.

buboard13• 7 years ago

that is making the case for targeted advertising

specialist• 7 years ago

I also believe we live in an attention economy.

The OC is a good rant, list of grievances.

Missing from his cancer analogy is the feedback loop.

The cancer is monetization and preferential attachment (recommendation engines) leading to outrage culture.

Any remedy, mitigation would interrupt or add friction to that feedback loop. No more retweets. Require all statements to be sourced. Hinkley's notion (elsewhere) of not allowing ads to be treated as biz expense. And so forth.

None of those things will happen. Until...

Advertising today is like petroleum wildcatting in the early days. The bottom will fall out when everyone wises up to the con. Then investors will demand US Govt intervene with regulation, to save the market.

buboard13• 7 years ago

The internet is not ready to give up on ads/it depends on it. Subscriptions can be scammy - and they need a lot of advertising themselves ironically : paywalls - “support us on patreon” - “please call between 1 and 2pm australia time to cancel your subscription”.

We could try micropayments, probably in the form of crypropayments, probably unaccounted for tax purposes (which is the main obstacle to their acceptance. They can be accounted for via alternative means, eg. by correlating traffic statistics). Until then ads are the most democratic to monetize small websites in the absence of VC money. Unless you can suggest better ways - i d love to try them.

t345433• 7 years ago

If you stop watching ads for awhile and go back to it you’ll see how mind numbing it all really is.

I aggressively block ads - no exceptions.

magashna2• 7 years ago

I went and visited my parents who still have cable. I sat and watched for a little while and was dumbstruck by the ads every few minutes. It was unbearable. I don't know how anyone can deal with it unless you don't know better

irrational5• 7 years ago

We were at a rented condo and my 6 year old told me that paw patrol was broken, she said it kept stopping and starting. I had to go watch it with her before realizing she was talking about advertisements. She had never seen advertisements before (having only ever watched shows like paw patrol on DVDs checked out from the library) and didn't understand what was going on. It was really eye opening for me.

_virtu3• 7 years ago

It pains me so much. Every time I visit the in-laws I find myself thinking this. Their living room is centered around a tv, that is on no matter the time even if no one is watching. During get togethers, you'll hear adverts blasting. It just feels offensive knowing that this has become their norm.

To be fair to the in-laws, my parents do the same as well. It's mind numbing.

dudul3• 7 years ago

When I moved from Europe to the US I just couldn't believe it. In my home country there is one commercial break during a 2 hour movie. It's a little longer than the breaks in the US, but there is only one. There is also one during a 45minute TV show, and none during a 20minute show.

I can't tell you the shock when I started watching American TV. I couldn't believe people were putting up with this.

mental1896• 7 years ago

A lot of people don't anymore.

archy_2• 7 years ago

I wish America would group TV ads together, it would make them much easier to skip and would remove the need for forced cutoffs (you really notice them when watching on non-cable sources)

Freak_NL• 7 years ago

Back when television shows made in the US were still made for cable and had to facilitate a bunch of advertisement blocks it used to be really obvious when you watched one of those shows in a country that didn't advertise quite as much. The show would wrap up a scene to prepare for a pause, and then instantly resume with a small recap of the action it ended with. That was the queue for us non-US viewers to know when viewers in the US must have had an ad break.

Of course with streaming services this phenomenon is mostly gone.

jerf2• 7 years ago

"I can't tell you the shock when I started watching American TV. I couldn't believe people were putting up with this."

A lot of us aren't. I suspect that causes the TV companies to try to squeeze more out of who is left, which is a slow-motion death spiral.

Even if you were raised with it, as I basically was, it's gotten a lot worse. I sometimes buy shows that air on prime time on the legacy networks (ABC, CBS, etc.), and over the last few years I've been watching their run times creep steadily downwards. My current record so far is 19min of runtime for a 30min show with a popular 2019 release that I don't want to name to derail the conversation, plus of course the networks tend to shave off the front & back 30 seconds nowadays. If somebody told me they found a 16 I wouldn't be that shocked. By contrast, looking at MASH season 1 (1972) on Amazon, the runtimes are all 26 minutes. Syndication usually ran some cut versions for a bit more time, but, still. That's over 25% less time for a "half hour" timeslot.

stronglikedan4• 7 years ago

I used to just ignore them. Now I click the shit out of the ones with pretty women modelling skimpy clothing. More and more, those types of ads dominate my targeted ad stream and it's beautiful.

dwaltrip7• 7 years ago

Did you drop the "/s"?

gatherhunterer5• 7 years ago

Many of the blog posts found on Hacker News are ads in disguise. They are targeting people who block ads.

buboard13• 7 years ago

How else will you grab the attention of people already locked into their networks and very resistant to change? Small startups dont have enormous budgets to pay google for it

TeMPOraL20• 7 years ago

Blatant ads get flagged with impunity. There's a standard here - you can promote your stuff as long as it's genuinely useful and relevant in context. If this was the standard for advertising in general, we wouldn't have to have this discussion.

See also: https://xkcd.com/810/.

greycol• 7 years ago

Since I don't generally see ads I honestly don't mind watching them the first time they come on in the rare cases I'm watching TV.

Then of course less than 10 minutes later (or 4 when I'm in America and that's just horrendous) the same ad gets shown again. That's the bit that is truly mind numbing and turns me off ads, the share the copious repetition of low information drivel.

wpietri18• 7 years ago

He doesn't quite say it by name, but most advertising is a classic arms race. Especially given how the internet now makes information easily available, a great deal of advertising is about manipulating consumers to pick company A's products over those from competitors B, C, and D. This forces those other companies to spend to get and keep customers. It's pure waste.

For example, everybody on the planet is now familiar with soft drinks. If anybody has never tasted Coke, it's not by accident. But Coke's ad budget is enormous. If all soft drink companies stopped advertising tomorrow, society would not be worse off. And we'd have billions of dollars [1] to spend on something useful.

Like the author, I won't work on ad tech. I don't like manipulation and I don't like waste, and most advertising is both.

[1] e.g., https://notesmatic.com/pepsico-advertising-and-marketing-bud... https://www.investopedia.com/articles/markets/081315/look-co...

GauntletWizard• 7 years ago

If you were to take away all of the coke tomorrow, the first thing I'd spend all that extra money (and more!) on would be to try to invent a new cola.

jniedrauer2• 7 years ago

Why? They're a net negative to society (soft drinks themselves, that is)

wpietri18• 7 years ago

Nobody's talking about taking away soda. People would still buy soda if there weren't ads for it.

irrational5• 7 years ago

They aren't saying get rid of coke. They are saying get rid of coke advertising. Everyone already knows about coke and is indoctrinating the rising generations without the need for additional advertisement.

rifung• 7 years ago

For example, everybody on the planet is now familiar with soft drinks. If anybody has never tasted Coke, it's not by accident. But Coke's ad budget is enormous. If all soft drink companies stopped advertising tomorrow, society would not be worse off. And we'd have billions of dollars [1] to spend on something useful.

Not that I disagree, but where do you draw the line? Sure, if Coke stopped advertising we'd have billions of dollars to spend on something "useful". On the other hand, if Coke stopped making soft drinks, we'd have billions of dollars to spend on something "useful" AND significantly decreased obesity.

If you are going to make the argument that having soft drinks improves life somehow, then that implies it's better for people to know about soft drinks, and how will they know? Advertising.

joshgel• 7 years ago

As a doctor, I'm all for banning soft drinks, recognizing that it probably will never happen.

But, the health externalities associated with drinking such beverages should get priced in and be used to offset eventual health complications. This is not easy because no one likes taxes, but you get what you pay for.

wpietri18• 7 years ago

Soft drinks aren't an arms race where most of the money spent is pure waste. When I buy a soft drink, I value it directly, so it isn't waste.

that implies it's better for people to know about soft drinks, and how will they know? Advertising.

Are you really saying the only way you have ever known about a product is advertising? I honestly have trouble believing that, but if that's the case please consider that you're an outlier.

Me, I avoid ads vigorously and have for decades. I have no trouble learning about new products.

TeMPOraL20• 7 years ago

I didn't use the term "arms race", but I tried to communicate this point in few places, calling out the zero-sum and negative-sum properties of advertising, and the waste it creates. I'll update the post later on to make the arms race aspect more visible.

derg• 7 years ago

I constantly think about how the world would look if even a fraction of the people doing creative for ads were free to be creative elsewhere.

scarface7412• 7 years ago

And if all of the people doing creative elsewhere didn’t advertise, how would they get the word out about their work?

buboard13• 7 years ago

They are free to. There s just no money in that.

FroshKiller• 7 years ago

Every single day, new people are born who actually do not know what Coca-Cola is and thus have never bought a Coca-Cola.

rabidrat4• 7 years ago

The same is true of cocaine. Yet without advertising the people who 'need' cocaine manage to learn about it and acquire it, often at great personal cost.

megaman8213• 7 years ago

You don't think they have ever tried that. They stopped ad spend in certain locations and in those locations sales went down.

People don't have time to research every single choice in their lives. At some point you just go with brand trust. When I see Uncle Floyd's Cola and CocaCola, I just go with what I know. Advertising establishes brand trust.

chipperyman573• 7 years ago

That's part of the problem imo, these companies have done nothing to earn trust (and often are significantly worse than companies that actually try to earn trust by being trustworthy), because they can just rely on the ads to build it for them.

cousin_it4• 7 years ago

Some advertising, like Superbowl ads, does establish brand trust - because you know a fly-by-night company couldn't afford a Superbowl ad. But targeted advertising, which is the whole point of adtech, cannot do that - because you never know if it was shown to a million people or just you.

Super_Jambo• 7 years ago

This is why the problem cannot be solved without regulation of the market.

Each individual actor is working in their best interest, but as a society it creates unimaginable amounts of waste.

RealityVoid• 7 years ago

Yes, they did that and sales went down because competitors did not stop advertising. I doubt that if all advertising stops tomorrow that globas usage would stop. Who would suffer would be companies that rlie on hype instead of quality.

Advertisement is a zero sum game.

wpietri18• 7 years ago

People don't have time to research every single choice in their lives. At some point you just go with brand trust. Advertising establishes brand trust.

This is a non-sequitur. Brands existed long before advertising, and regardless they aren't the only way to solve the problem of choosing what to buy.

If you really care about making things easier for purchasers, you'd be eager to eliminate advertising, which a) adds a great deal of confusion and distraction, and b) reduces the value of earned brands in favor of whomever can spend the most money.

Aperocky• 7 years ago

How do you define "Something useful" though? The advertisement money eventually makes it to Google, broadcasters, sites, TV-channels, sports events and people running those organization in term gets more money to spend on [Potentially useful stuff]. It's not like the money magically vanishes to never be seen again, and business to business transaction like this make the money flow faster instead of slower.

Economy is basically production vs consumption, money is just the grease to keep the cycle flowing, to follow the money isn't getting to the base cause of our problems.

zentiggr3• 7 years ago

It's not like the money magically vanishes to never be seen again

No, it remains in corporate budgets, which, without all the marketing spend, can be shifted to better wages, charity work, capital investments, better wages, safety and health initiatives, better wages...

acomjean• 7 years ago

I find advertising useful mainly when it’s an event I didn’t know was happening and aren’t always checking for. Usually for consumer products I find it not so useful.

logfromblammo2• 7 years ago

If Coke does not buy the large ad campaign, the available advertising resources can be used by the next-highest bidder, and that bidder might potentially be selling something with a higher social utility function value. Since the ad infrastructure does not get as much money from that transaction, less is then reinvested into ad infrastructure. If McDonald's stopped advertising on billboards, billboard advertising would be cheaper in the short run, and then there would be fewer billboards in the long run.

Zarath• 7 years ago

The money itself doesn't vanish obviously, but the work does magically vanish, in the form of human consumption. The sheer amount of useful energy and resources required to feed those people, power their computers, etc. is being "burned" in the same sense that bitcoin mining "burns" something. It's millions of hours of work for simply redistribution of demand.

Bill Gates could pay 10000 people $10/hour to dig a hole and 10000 people $10/hour to fill the hole back with dirt. Obviously this money doesn't "vanish", but millions of hours are wasted (and the food and resources needed to power this work).

wpietri18• 7 years ago

This is basically the broken window fallacy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window

If I go around smashing windows, I will make money move faster. The people who install replacement windows will have more money to spend. It's not like the money magically vanishes! But it's still a terrible idea, because all this economic activity is based on systemic waste. It's the same for most advertising.

tsimionescu2• 7 years ago

A lot of advertising money is actually lost from the economy to profit for advertisers, stock buybacks, bonuses for the ultra-rich etc.

amiune2• 7 years ago

If every company stopped advertising then google and facebook and twitter will disappear. Are all these companies pure waste? How do you fund a replacement for them? Should these services be provided by governments?

kyruzic4• 7 years ago

Each of those companies has a FOSS competitor that does not rely on advertising money yet still exists.

hutzlibu• 7 years ago

I do not have the sources by hand, but I think google and co make only about some $ per user per year.

In other words, most users could easily afford it.

And yes, here is the current problem, the mindset of the people. Not willing to pay for services and rather get it for "free" and accept manipulation and time waste. On the other hand, where services are adfree avaiable, like netflix, users indeed do pay. So I am positive that it is about to change.

rowanG0772• 7 years ago

Facebook and twitter are pure waste. Google is 90% waste. Google should just be a search engine and live on donations like Wikipedia.

asark3• 7 years ago

It wouldn't be that big a deal. Ad-funded commercial services like Facebook and Twitter would probably just be protocols, if not for all those ad dollars incentivizing moat-creation and jealous user capture. We'd figure something out to replace google—the need's too strong not to. The replacement(s) probably wouldn't make $3,000,000/employee or whatever Google does, though. Which is fine.

amiune2• 7 years ago

It seems that the cancer creates, allows or at least sustain a coordination that society can't achieve by other ways.

tetraca• 7 years ago

If every company stopped advertising then google and facebook and twitter will disappear.

I don't see the downside.

ensignro2340• 7 years ago

While I’ll agree he never uses the phrase “arms race”, he does say this:

The growth of advertising is fueled by the enormous waste it creates. In any somewhat saturated market - which, today, is most of them - any effort you spent on advertising serves primarily to counteract the combined advertising efforts of your competitors.

crimsonalucard5• 7 years ago

Ah only a strong central government could redirect resources and restrict freedom of speech in such a manner.

In theory this works, in practice it doesn't. Nobody is quite sure about what the dichotomy is between the theory and actual results. Basically by allowing commercial interests to control the direction of capital you get useless areas of inn-efficiency like advertising. The weird thing is, these types of economies still thrive. However, when you restrict and redirect resources in a centrally controlled manner, the economies tend not to thrive.

Nobody really knows why. However there are hints as to why it works. Google, gmail, search, google docs, hangouts and google maps would not exist if it wasn't for advertising. Google and the services and technologies they provide to the world would not exist if they did not receive revenue from ads.

anoncake9• 7 years ago

That's why a strong central government is important. To make sure resources are allocated to useful purposes rather than garbage like advertising.

UnFleshedOne3• 7 years ago

I heard a hypotheses that one reason planned economies failed was available computing power and communication speed at the time. To manually calculate how many screws each little shop will need takes an ever growing army of bureaucrats, is prone to mistakes and lags a lot.

So lots of uneven distributions (anybody growing up in USSR will know what I mean), and lots of overhead.

A modern networked infrastructure could mitigate that. A general AI could solve it (but that has its own drawbacks, great if you like your paper clips though).

Markets in a sense create that distribution system organically, but they pay efficiency costs (comparing to a strictly optimal solution). One of those operational costs is advertising.

Market has its own deficiency/glut profile too -- instead of whole city lacking butter and drowning in socks, we have individual people lacking everything evenly and others having abundance.

dheera3• 7 years ago

I'd really love to have an AR real-life ad blocker. Replace all billboards with works of art.

Separately I think advertising will have to find new forms of expression that are less repulsive. I won't want to block ads if they are actually fun and interesting.

w-ll• 7 years ago

What makes you think the company that makes the best AR wouldn't put ads in it. The top 3 in the field Microsoft, Facebook, and Google to some extent, would never let you disable ads let alone override them with something you wish.

justaguyhere• 7 years ago

I am not sure this is a technology problem, this is more of a societal problem. This city had the will to experiment with removing ads, and it had good results

https://99percentinvisible.org/article/clean-city-law-secret...

How many cities have the will to even attempt something like this? Maybe a handful.

I understand the irony of that page having multiple ads :P

alexott• 7 years ago

There are examples when companies are doing well without advertising: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oettinger_Brewery

pearapps• 7 years ago

The wikipedia page literally lists them as a sponsor of a team:

"From 2006 until 2018, Oettinger was the official sponsor of Rockets, a professional basketball club based in Gotha. The Rockets played as "Oettinger Rockets" in Germany's first distribution, the Basketball Bundesliga.[5]"

Gibbon12• 7 years ago

but most advertising is a classic arms race.

Small brained primate thought du jour; advertising shouldn't be an allowed business expense.

0xEFF• 7 years ago

I'm no fan of ads, but that would only result in making ads ~30 to 50% more expensive for pass-through small businesses and ~14% more expensive for most [1] large US companies.

[1] https://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/investing/tax-rate-paid/

dwild17• 7 years ago

I would have agreed in the past but now that my SO has started an escape room, if your ideal world existed, she would be bankrupt right now.

Most ads isn't about manipulation, it's just about getting your attention and reminding you that this product exists.

Ads are the only way to reach her market. You could argue that search is a good one too (which is true), but sadly people have trouble paying to watch videos online, there's no way they would pay for a search engine. We are still not really high in the search result after a year of existence either and paying for ads is a good way to get people on the website (which I'm sure will help our position in search results).

EDIT: In case it's not clear, I don't believe she deserve to be higher than other escape room in the search result, we have actually almost no competition close to us and it's pretty much why she started that business. Simply that Google have no metric to know that her website has to be higher than another one, so clicks are needed to provide some.

She always asks people what they think of the experience once they are done and recently one even said that we are not visible enough. It's a pretty great feedback, we are lucky that's our main issue, but sadly ads are the only way to become visible to others.

Ads are almost amazing by allowing investment into market that people aren't ready to pay for but yet provide great entertainment, learning experience or a great service. Without ads, I probably wouldn't be the developper that I am today because the guy that did the great tutorial that create the passion in me wouldn't have time to works full time on them.

skummetmaelk3• 7 years ago

If the current ad model of the popular search engine(s) was made extinct by law. I would be extremely surprised if search simply disappeared rather than move to a paid model. Who wouldn't pay to have any information in the world reachable in the 30 seconds it takes to craft a query and scan the first page of results? It is a huge competitive advantage.

Fnoord13• 7 years ago

I would have agreed in the past but now that my SO has started an escape room, if your ideal world existed, she would be bankrupt right now.

In the old days, if her product -in this case escape room- would be good, she'd get enough customers by word of mouth alone.

necovek6• 7 years ago

I would disagree with the proposition that "most ads [aren't] about manipulation" (especially if we are talking about "most exposure time" rather than majority of ads being created regardless of the number of times they've been viewed).

Of course, I don't have data to prove my statement, but I doubt you have any to prove yours either.

And without ads and that "great tutorial", maybe you'd be something of greater value to society rather than the "developer you are today". (Just saying that what-ifs are even less of a support for any thesis)

Note that the original article does not complain about informative ads, but about manipulative ones.

Zeklandia16• 7 years ago

If you have to tell people they need something then they don't need it. Escape rooms are an entertainment luxury. When there is essential work that needs to be done (infrastructure, healthcare, education, &c.), it makes sense that it takes psychological manipulation to convince people that what they really need to do with their time and effort is temporary entertainment. If you want more customers, provide something that people find more necessary, like childcare.

jiveturkey• 7 years ago

Most ads isn't about manipulation, it's just about getting your attention and reminding you that this product exists.

I'd wager you're wrong, unless of course you are an ad executive which it doesn't sound like you are?

Maybe, maybe, most ads by dollar spent is about brand awareness.

But for sure, most ads by quantity are about manipulation.

flukus3• 7 years ago

Most ads isn't about manipulation, it's just about getting your attention and reminding you that this product exists.

That is manipulation. If they weren't actively thinking about visiting one or actively looking for things to do and your advertising convinced them to do it then you've manipulated them into doing something the otherwise wouldn't have.

arendtio• 7 years ago

Yes, you are right, there are (at least) two effects of advertising:

1. Education (let people know a company/product exists)

2. Manipulation (by various means)

From a moral point of view, the first effect is not bad. It actually helps people to make better decisions and extend their knowledge about available products and services.

However, the second effect is the harmful one. Since companies are trying to make money, they want as many people as possible to buy their products. So they start lying, leaving the negative aspects of their products out, use visual material that creates yearning contexts, present the information at a higher frequency than relevant and so on. So saying it is just about getting your attention is a huge understatement.

Simply put, the advertising industry tries to find human vulnerabilities on a daily basis. Sadly, not to inform and help protect us, but to exploit them. If advertising was actually about helping society, the spending would be more like a tax (independent from the effect), the visual appearance would be standardized and the process of presenting ads would be strictly controlled by a neutral entity. Furthermore, everybody would be allowed to not participate. Maybe the receivers of that valuable, educating information should even pay to have access to it.

And I am sure, at this point you are with me, that the majority of ads aren't about educating people but about placing information in their heads.

neop1x3• 7 years ago

I would pay for the search and to watch videos as long as the price were reasonable. I already pay for SlingTV and Netflix for example. Yet there is free to watch PlutoTV, filled with annoying ads. There should at least be an option to pay for ad-free, tracking-free, service.

wpietri18• 7 years ago

if your ideal world existed, she would be bankrupt right now

[citation needed]

You're making a couple of mistakes here. One is imagining that in a world without ads, her experience would be the same as her not advertising. The other is that something that is bad for a given business is something that's bad for society. Both of these are at best unproven.

Most ads isn't about manipulation

For every ad you see today, ask yourself how much useful new information you have gained from it. I've done that a few times and it's pretty close to zero. Note that the biggest spenders on ads are brands you've already heard of, suggesting that your theory needs some revision.

mijamo• 7 years ago

I don't think that is true at all. Without advertising you would just have the information elsewhere. Let's take an example similar to your girlfriend's case: entertainment. In Paris you have plenty of events, of all kinds. And that did not start with the internet. And promoters can be very small and have a marketing budget of around 0. Now how did they get people without advertising? You had a collaborative newspaper every week showing all the events with a small comment. Everyone interested in going out had access to it, either because they bought it or read it at school/work/library/press stand. You also have informative stands for small theaters in the metro. No advertising does not mean no information. At last, the majority of ads budget is taken by huge corporations with famous products, like Unilever, and really don't bring anything to society, not even information.

kiliantics• 7 years ago

It's pure waste.

And yet capitalism is still lauded as the most efficient economic system...

chrismcb• 7 years ago

I would argue that society would be worse off. There are a lot of things we enjoy, for free or cheap, because of advertising. Tv, radio, street fair, among other things

And no, we wouldn't have billions of dollars to spend on other things. The soft drink companies would have billions of dollars more profit. And fewer people would have jobs

The cost of drinks wouldn't go down. Basically the only thing that would change is we would lose a lot of free things, and fewer people would have money.

remeq• 7 years ago

"we'd have billions of dollars [1] to spend on something useful." - If companies stopped advertising tomorrow the people doing those ads wouldn't go building space rockets.

_nalply• 7 years ago

But Coke could be sold for less.

cm20127• 7 years ago

Advertising (Which appears to be defined in your broad doc as anything that gets your attention without asking for it first) is the worst way to get people to pay attention to things, except for all the other ways. The alternative to "advertising" is the rate of people discovering new things dropping to 1% of what it is now.

1% of products have natural virality and will be found on their own. The other 99% of products and services in existence, no matter the quality, needs to be promoted so people can find them and use them.

Say you make an app that helps plumbers do their job well. If every plumber used it, plumber productivity would go up 50%, making life easier for all. It cost you years of your time and lots of money to make this great app, and you need a lot of plumbers to buy it to afford to continue working on it.

There's a big plumber app on the market already, but yours is way better.

How do you get plumbers to hear about your product?

1) The press? Uninterested. Plumber magazines or sites? Very low traffic - no way to scale.

2) Call or knock on doors of every plumber near you? If everyone did this, the spam would be unreal. Also inefficient and not scalable.

3) Referrals? You get some, but most plumbers aren't chomping at the bit to help their competitors. And because you started with so few, referrals are a snails pace and by no means exponential.

4) Organic postings and SEO? The big plumber app is way ahead of you. And 100 other worse apps clog up the listings. No one sees your posts.

See the problem? Without ads, you can't grow many many categories of genuinely valuable products. Even if no one else is advertising, you can't really grow without them.

This is barely a hypothetical by the way. I've worked with a dozen companies with similar situations.

Here's a real life example:

I was just hired to scale marketing for a particular app. This app currently has over 100 real reviews online, averaging 4.9 stars out of 5. Retention is nuts - 98% of people who ever started using the product (which has a monthly fee) are still using it. The company is three years old.

Perfect to take off, right? But few industries are actually viral. We just doubled the number of new customers per month using FB ads in the first two months of scaling it out, and we'll scale much further over the next 3.

Anyone who works in start-up growth will tell you the same things I am.

wpietri18• 7 years ago

1% of products have [...] 99% of products and services [...] plumber productivity would go up 50% [...]

Did know that 97% of statistics are made up on the spot?

The problem with your fictions here is that they're based in a world with a lot of advertising. In your fantasy, people just sit around dying of thirst because there's nobody to advertise water at them. But in reality, people would still find ways to get what they need.

I find great new products all the time despite living an ad-free life. I find them through friends. Through internet discussion like Hacker News. And through sites like Wirecutter and Consumer Reports. I don't find my life particularly lacking.

Would ending ads mean it would be harder for businesses to manipulate their growth numbers? Sure. So I can get why you feel panicked at the thought. But you're used to a world where everybody's burning investor money to get attention, so it's required to do the same. Maybe think about the world where nobody can do that. I promise you, it'll keep on turning.

cm20127• 7 years ago

My job is talking to start-ups and established companies that want to grow. It's not a fiction to say that most companies don't grow if they don't promote themselves.

lostlogin2• 7 years ago

Anyone who works in start-up growth will tell you the same things I am.

Some who works in adverting values advertising? Yes, you’re well placed to judge, but I’ve little time for adverts and actually dedicate time to avoiding Facebook (blockers, Pihole etc).

If I miss the odd product or service, so be it. The current situation is toxic.

RivieraKid3• 7 years ago

This is a valid point but.. advertising seems like a very inefficient way to solve that problem. In an ideal world, people would have knowledge of all available products and services and also the ability to pick optimally among them.

Something that could possibly replace the function of advertising would be an independent organization that would provide tools for picking the best product given your situation. And information channels for new high-quality products (i.e. there's a new restaurant in your neighbourhood).

hinkley4• 7 years ago

Long, long ago, someone suggested their extremely simple fix for advertising: stop letting companies declare it as a business expense.

The Law of Unintended Consequences always gets you in weird ways, and I'm not a lobbyist or a public policy person, nor do I know anyone highly placed in those fields.

But one of the ways companies slowly fail is by choosing to sell harder instead of making their product better. If we lower the rate of return on advertising dollars by 15%, won't that shift some more money into R&D, logistics and other divisions that provide something approximating value (although one unintended consequence I can see is an increased focus on strip-mining the Third World, literally and figuratively).

thorwasdfasdf4• 7 years ago

there's a better way. Just have consumers stop buying products that are advertised. it's so easy.

i can only imagine that consumers love the advertisements, otehrwise, why would they buy the product?

hinkley4• 7 years ago

No such thing has been proven. Brand recognition is higher even for brands whose ads piss you off. Over time you forget why you were so mad.

I had a coworker who insisted you could just chose not to participate. My argument to him was the same I’ll make to you: the other side is using psychological warfare. It’s privatization of propaganda tactics. That requires something a bit more vigorous in response than taking your ball and going home.

dwaltrip7• 7 years ago

It's a tragedy of the commons. The best solution to such problems is regulation, which is often difficult to do well.

Fortunately, there isn't a law of the universe that says we can't get better at implementing effective and fair regulations where appropriate.

webninja• 7 years ago

Great idea, I think you’re on to something! How do we prevent it from hurting good advertising which informs, such as trailers for good movies which you might not have otherwise known about?

natalyarostova• 7 years ago

Anyone else find the user of 'cancer' in these terms to be frustrating? Having had to experience the pain of people I care about having cancer, it immediately just makes me feel like shit. I guess maybe I'm just sensitive...

hinkley4• 7 years ago

You could try bringing the word 'blight' back, but some farmers and foresters might get their jimmies rustled.

gilbetron• 7 years ago

I've had cancer, and I've had people close to me die of cancer, so I can see where you're coming from. Even the mention of it would freak me out - I remember when my mom was dying of cancer, and I was being treated for it, watching an episode of Stargate to escape from it - and one of the characters in the episode was dying of cancer - so much for escape!

But, then again, somethings really are as virulent and aggressive as cancer, and I'm ok with them being compared to it. I'm fine with the (needed, imo) reaction.

epicide• 7 years ago

Totally a valid concern and this usage should probably be limited or eradicated. However, I think there is some legitimacy to it in this case considering how negative of an impact ads can have on lives.

In other words, it's obviously figurative, but not necessarily (meant as) hyperbole.

ufo• 7 years ago

I was diagnosed with cancer this week. I couldn't bring myself to read the article and came here only to see if I needed to make this exact comment myself or if someone like you already had.

ssully• 7 years ago

It's incredibly lazy, but unsurprising. I find the people who talk about advertisements so dramatically on HN intersect really nicely with the kind of people whose day is ruined because the free bagels their company provided that day didn't include their favorite cream cheese flavor.

buboard13• 7 years ago

Yep unfortunately, cancer has become a cancerous meme. It's bad taste language, i dont know who started the trend but i hope it ends soon.

wallflower• 7 years ago

I’ve always wondered about the hundreds of millions spent on election (mainly TV) advertising in the U.S.

Is all that money paid for airtime an indirect subsidy or transfer of wealth to those who own media companies?

sjh2• 7 years ago

I recall watching, some years ago, a documentary about the making of Tetris in which one of the contributors noted how much less colourful public spaces were in the advertising-free Soviet Union compared to the West.

Which isn't to say that a better balance couldn't be struck (in the West and elsewhere) now, but 'cancer' is the sort of thing you want to eradicate rather than moderate.

kyruzic4• 7 years ago

So you think the reason the Soviet union was less colourful was because there wasn't ads?

You realize that advertising isn't what created coloured paints or what allows us to plant flowers right?

sjh2• 7 years ago

So you think the reason the Soviet union was less colourful was because there wasn't ads?

I think it can have been a contributory but not a determinative factor. Mainly, I was just relaying an interesting observation, about the impact of advertising on public spaces, that I hadn't heard elsewhere, or previously, which prompted me to think that eradicating advertising probably isn't an optimum solution.

Lerc• 7 years ago

I would imagine the authoritarian nature of the Soviet Union would suppress other displays of colour also. Much of the colour in my city is street art

https://www.christchurchnz.com/christchurch/arts-and-culture...

president• 7 years ago

I would be okay with advertising if they were at least truthful. There are too many false claims and statistics. Business should not be based on misleading people but somehow that's where we are today.

rhema• 7 years ago

Anyone know the old Bill Hicks joke? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4Mn2NbjlqU I think advertising is part of the human condition. Once people want something, they tend to change how they relate the facts to better fit their self interest. I see this as an evolution-created short cut. So, while it is valuable to recognize it, demonizing it may not turn out to be that useful. Instead, if we take that advertising is as inevitable a phenomena as language, we can try to avoid its pitfalls as consumers and producers.

datadata• 7 years ago

What if advertising spend was taxed at an incredibly high rate?

Would this reduce the overall amount of advertising and cause the remaining advertising to be smarter and more effective? Could this even be implemented? Could it be subverted?

13415• 7 years ago

I'd rather be worried about whether advertising is (cost-)effective. Couldn't there be an advertising industry bubble? I block all ads online nowadays, but when I didn't, I found it hard to believe that they could be worth the money.

kristopolous• 7 years ago

The bubble theory on ads is interesting.

Around 2009 I saw it as "unprofitable venture backed companies advertising on unprofitable venture backed platforms" as if it's some kind of matryoshka doll system that works as a baton passing from one generation of bad investments to the next - no revenue is trading hands, just poorly placed investor money:

A kafkaesque anarchy of people siloed at companies named after adjectives spelled without vowels passing pixels for sale among each other hoping that some unicorn will fall out of their back pocket.

lioeters• 7 years ago

I see how invasion of privacy fits into this self-reinforcing kafkaesque matryoshka bubble: massive collection and statistics of people's personal data are being used as advertisement for the advertisers.

formalsystem• 7 years ago

I honestly wish I could get a data only phone without a dedicated phone number. I get an average of 10 calls a day from random spammers claiming I'm owed $5,000 to IRS etc...

Only thing stopping me is a lot of companies have moved to 2FA via my call phone number as opposed to an authenticator app.

raister• 7 years ago

"You Promised Me Mars Colonies. Instead, I Got Facebook." Buzz Aldrin

alephnan4• 7 years ago

Thoughts on NYC Subway ads? They are sort of entertaining sometimes, when there isn’t cell signal underground.

jborichevskiy• 7 years ago

Strong dislike. I'm already paying $2.75 per ride - how much are the ads subsidizing my ride by? I couldn't find anything on it with a cursory search but my guess is not much - far less than the psychological cost of getting toothbrushes, mattresses, food delivery services, and who knows what other ads shoved into my face any direction I look. I think the worst ones are the TV show/movie ones lining the subway walkways where I feel like I'm walking through some sort of physical channel directory.

I do think the space should be reserved and used for advertising city services such as 311 information, elderly housing services, housing rights etc. It's a great way of educating the city residents about benefits and rights they might not otherwise be aware of.

smitty1e• 7 years ago

"What can be done about it? I honestly have no good ideas"

One possibility would be setting up some sort of cloud/container solution that isn't really trying to TOR is up, but does manage to obscure and filter traffic enough to harden us mortal targets.

Up from there, perhaps there is some tarted up proxy as a business model that supports doing social media and searching in a low-fingerprint way.

These ideas must have been explored already, so tell me who has some good products, HN.

autoexec4• 7 years ago

"There's really nothing stopping any government from tapping into this total surveillance infrastructure other than lack of will."

Why assume a lack of will at this point? We know they routinely approach companies about collecting the data the company collects. They've clearly demonstrated the will to collect our data regardless of legality. (Does/did this site have a warrant canary?)

At this point I treat all ads as hostile. As much as websites try to make you feel guilty for blocking their ads I feel zero obligation to allow or support their efforts to manipulate me or compromise my privacy and security.

perfunctory4• 7 years ago

Compulsory quote

"Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our great war is a spiritual war. Our great depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars, but we won't."

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Fight_Club_(film)

paulcole3• 7 years ago

Maybe I'm misinterpreting but didn't the movie show that everything Tyler does and says is 100% wrong?

mike_ivanov• 7 years ago

Of course not, what he says is incidental. This could have been set in a completely different context without much loss. As I understood it, it's all about a split, obsessed soul figuring how to become whole - mostly in wrong ways.

dudul3• 7 years ago

How did you get that from the movie?

alexashka• 7 years ago

No. The movie shows a very real problem that many people experience. It goes on to show a partial solution of getting in touch with your primal emotions (beating the shit out of each other). It then turns into a cult and cults have a tendency to go off the rails.

It's a multi-layered story that resists simplistic interpretations, which is why it is so beloved by so many.

autoexec4• 7 years ago

I've always liked this one:

"People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.

You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.

Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.

You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs."

    – Banksy

megaman8213• 7 years ago

I feel this is a new trend among people.

* I don't like something. * Why do people do it? It is not even effective. * It should be outlawed.

If you and a bunch of other people like you think advertising is a waste of money, what is preventing you from starting your own company that does not use advertising? I promise you the government will not come and force you to buy commercial time or Facebook ads.

stronglikedan4• 7 years ago

It's not a new trend. There's always people that think big, regulatory government is the answer to everything, and people just cannot be held accountable for their own actions. It just seems worse now that they can spout their nonsense to the masses, but good thing they're still a (very) vocal minority.

oneil5123• 7 years ago

Without ads we wouldn't have a way to incentive free content creation. Simple as that.

criddell4• 7 years ago

The only reason we call it content is because it's just filler for the spaces between ads. I understand why ad tech and platform people call it that, but it kind of bugs me when people call themselves content creators.

oneil5123• 7 years ago

No, literally all free content, videos, media, blog posts, whatever you want to call it, has to rely on advertising if they want to make a profit.

TeMPOraL20• 7 years ago

Agreed. Thanks for articulating it so nicely; I've felt the same for a long time, but couldn't find words to describe it.

"Content" to me is like corporations calling people "human resources". It's a grouping word which removes all that makes elements of the group valuable in the first place.

japhyr• 7 years ago

I live in a small town in southeast Alaska, and we are exposed to much less advertising than people in more densely populated parts of the US. We have no billboards, we don't have any large box stores, and we don't have cable TV in our house. When we travel, my 8yo is fascinated by all the advertising around us. He finds a lot of it funny because he hasn't been overexposed to all the standard tricks that advertisers pull.

But, he is already deeply frustrated by the intrusiveness of online ads. He is old enough and informed enough to be aware that he's being manipulated, but not old enough yet to consistently spot the manipulation that online advertisers use on his own.

A little advertising is a good thing. Inundation is not a good thing, and we are far past the inundation stage.

carapace• 7 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays

Edward Louis Bernays ... was an Austrian-American pioneer in the field of public relations and propaganda, referred to in his obituary as "the father of public relations".
Of his many books, Crystallizing Public Opinion (1923) and Propaganda (1928) gained special attention as early efforts to define and theorize the field of public relations. Citing works of writers such as Gustave Le Bon, Wilfred Trotter, Walter Lippmann, and his own double uncle Sigmund Freud, he described the masses as irrational and subject to herd instinct—and outlined how skilled practitioners could use crowd psychology and psychoanalysis to control them in desirable ways.

beautifulfreak• 7 years ago

I highly recommend the documentary, Century of the Self, which details how Bernays' theories about advertising were put to use by Nazis. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnPmg0R1M04 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Century_of_the_Self

jdietrich2• 7 years ago

There's good advertising and bad advertising. Calling all advertising "cancer" is ludicrous.

My YouTube subscription feed is full of stuff that is some form of advertising - music instrument retailers demonstrating new products, advertorial content from tool manufacturers, tutorials from software companies and so on. It's all paid for out of the marketing budget, it's all intended to sell more product, but it's also a useful service to me as a consumer.

Back in the day, I bought computer and music magazines in large part because of the advertising. It's how I kept up to date with the industry, it's how I learned about new products that weren't necessarily available in my town and it's how I found out the market price for products.

How do consumers find out about new products without some form of advertising? How do manufacturers find a market without some form of advertising?

Xixi3• 7 years ago

I really have a dual view on advertising: as a person I hate being on the receiving end of ads (especially when the ads follow me through my browsing....), on the other hand as an entrepreneur I'm quite happy to have means of advertising my tea subscription service [1]. "Build it and they will come" doesn't quite work. People have to hear about your product somehow.

I don't do much advertising at all for Tomotcha as our churn is low and I am quite content with the number of subscribers right now. But from time to time we send a tea to an "influencer" or run an adword campaign. It helps.

[1] When I mention my tea subscription service (https://tomotcha.com) right here on HN, does it count as advertisement? It should, because it is, thankfully HN as a community of entrepreneurs is rather forgiving about self-promotion. Other communities (some subreddits) can be very hostile towards it...

arkades2• 7 years ago

And here I go rewarding your self promotion, but when else do I get to ask directly?

I just skimmed your site. It looks like it’s all greens. Is that correct?

Xixi3• 7 years ago

We send very different kind of teas, but they are all Japanese teas. So for instance we only sent black tea once [1] so far because wakocha is pretty rare, though it is gaining in popularity among tea producers. I recently found a very good one produced in Tanegashima, we may send it soon. Otherwise most teas will fall in either the roasted family (hojicha), or in the non-roasted family (sencha, gyokuro, etc.), with sometimes teas that are really infusions, not actual teas (like Zaracha).

But taking just non-roasted green teas, there is a lot of variations. Depending on the way green tea is prepared, it will taste very different. Difference can come from the steaming (asamushi -> futsumushi -> fukamushi, from light and quick to deep and long), from the shading, or lack of shading (sencha -> kabusecha -> gyokuro from no shading to a lot of shading). Then there are teas prepared with different part of the tea plant: my favorite tea is actually called karigane, and is made of twigs instead of tea-leaves.

The teas are definitely all quite different, there are many to try.

[1] https://tomotcha.com/en/blog/2018-012-wakocha-toyama/

robbrown4513• 7 years ago

I'd like to see solutions offered, that aren't just of the "do things that are against your own self interest" variety. Anything that requires you do something that individually hurts yourself in a tangible, measurable way, while not giving you benefit in a tangible, measurable way, falls under this. For example, if you boycott, you notice the impact on yourself because it is undiluted, but almost never will you notice the impact of your actions because it will be spread among everyone.

So here's a radical suggestion. Legislation that says: any web site or app that shows ads should offer an option to view the site without ads, by paying for access, and that is priced reasonably (approximately equal revenue as ads) and with options for "a la carte" vs. bundling. Any provider of ads (adSense, etc) has to provide this service as well.

It's complex legislation, I'm sure, and tricky to get right. But it's better than tilting at windmills, as this article leaves me feeling it is doing.

maximente• 7 years ago

author mentions AdNauseum but also that there's significant fake click detection: anyone have any idea as to how effective defeating AdNauseum by advertisers is?

c3534l3• 7 years ago

I wanted to mention that advertising kills the ecosystem for free and cheap stuff. People say things like "TV wouldn't exist without advertising," but TV would probably be better without it since networks would have to convince you to pay them, rather than just stop you from flipping through the channels. Certainly the news would be better because TV news tries to tease the viewer to watch past the commercial break with intentionally false and misleading statements.

Advertising isn't free, its costs are just hidden. They wouldn't spend money if it didn't relieve you of yours. People who watch TV do pay for it, it's just that the mechanism by which it happens is a magic trick of persuasion. The only question is do advertisers provide a legitimate service to society that is worth paying for and enough to support what we pay to adertisers. That's the only way advertising can be "free" - if it is self-funded service worth value in and of itself.

IMHO, marketing is a good thing, and advertising can be when it's sufficiently targetted. Getting the word out about a new product is fine. But most traditional advertising that tries to sell an image or feeling is a blight.

scarface7412• 7 years ago

So how do over the air networks convince people to pay for them? Do you want them to encrypt the signals and sell a decryption box? So instead of having information that anyone can access for free, people who can’t afford a monthly subscription should lnt watch tv?

jerf2• 7 years ago

"Do you want them to encrypt the signals and sell a decryption box?"

You sound like you think this is some sort of impossibility, but that's exactly how cable provided multiple packages back in the analog days....

The reason OTA networks aren't allowed to do that is that the spectrum is considered a public resource and the government made that a term of their lease. There's nothing impossible about that idea.

matis140• 7 years ago

npr is always doing fun drives...they are annoying, but the content used to be worth a donation. they are still around. don't see why it wouldn't work for others. places like HBO already don't have an issue getting people to pay for their content, but are not freely available over the air either.

buboard13• 7 years ago

Advertising isn't free, its costs are just hidden.

I'm pretty sure its net effect is positive in the economy. The alternative - banning advertising would slow down the economy and make everyone poorer.

libertine• 7 years ago

Advertising is as much of a cancer as any form of communication.

What's happening is that the barrier of entry - better yet let's use the industry terms: the cost reach of advertising campaigns is low thanks to the internet that drove the cost of distribution of information close to 0.

So you're just seeing what was once a privileged tool open to the masses - and it's bad. Anyone can have access to it with a credit card.

Now just because there's a lot of bad advertising, probably the great majority of it, doesn't mean it's a cancer. Else everything that's abused in a bad way is a cancer.

k__• 7 years ago

We need to decouple advertisement from money.

Why should someone with more money get to show off more?

More money doesn't mean a better product.

But what is the alternative?

A nationalized ad network? Like public healthcare, you pay X% of ... IDK ... your sales or something... but the amount of money doesn't determine what you get.

In public healthcare, your medical needs determine what you get, what would be an equivalent in business?

cletus• 7 years ago

I really detest the general "hate" of advertising. Don't get me wrong: I'm a zealous ad blocker, largely because advertising can (and does) go over the line of being intrusive. Also I think the dirty secret of ad tech is ad personalization has pretty limited value.

But advertising in general is how people find out about things they might need or want. There might be a bakery 2 miles away you'll really enjoy. How will you find out about it if they don't advertise? Being strictly reliant on word-of-mouth is woefully naive (IMHO).

Take Google search, the user is literally looking for something. Why isn't an ad an appropriate response to someone searching for a search for "ozark jetski for hire"? As long as ads and organic search results are clearly differentiated, IMHO this is totally fine.

Certain behaviours obviously need to be restricted, like I'm a big fan of outright outlawing advertising to children. But advertising in general? In what world is that reasonable?

luckylion3• 7 years ago

But advertising in general is how people find out about things they might need or want.

That's in the article. He's arguing the exact point that advertising has a legitimate function in a market to inform about products. They've outgrown that, he continues, and now they do not inform, they convince (and often lie to do so).

RivieraKid3• 7 years ago

There must be a better way to solve the problem of helping people make better market decisions. For example a public service that notifies you about new high quality products or services, tailored for your location and interests.

neop1x3• 7 years ago

How would you know? I could see it in a map or recommendation sites. Even user-contributed projects like OpenStreetMap could do. This is how I discovered couple of places. There doesn't have to be advertising to discover something. On the other hand, advertising may work better for less smart people who don't even know how to use internet properly and live within Facebook for example. :( Unless something pops over their screen they won't notice it.

paultopia• 7 years ago

This is the first I've learned about things like the "Evercookie," and now I'm wondering if there's a U.S. Attorney out there who would be interested in a CFAA prosecution.

I utterly fail to see how it could be the case that website scraping arguably violates the CFAA (though I have my doubts there), but this kind of malware deliberately designed to violate the expressed intent of people to remove data from their own machines, for the purpose of accessing identity information, doesn't.

Interestingly, if you try to download the zip file of the evercookie repo from github, Chrome detects it as malware and blocks it. That makes me rather more confident in the security model of Chrome.

fsloth• 7 years ago

Modern advertising is propaganda and agitation. While commercial entities have advertised their wares for as long as there have been commerce[0], the modern mass hallucination inducing form became the norm only after the world wars.

The essence of propaganda is to weave a story and engage the target population in an action that creates commitment to the story and creates secondary effect due to social proof as people see other people committing.

This is the essence of modern marketing as well.

Cancer is not really a well thought out way to describe it, it sounds a bit fanatical.

There is nothing conspiracy like about this. This is all well known and researched.

General public is just kept ignorant of it. I don't know why. Maybe it's because the more you know about how propaganda works the less effective it is? Thus teaching people en mass how propaganda works would make even benevolent attempts at mass mind control less effective.

[0] Branding is nothing new. In the viking age particular german swords were very well thought off - and they had particular inscription on the blade. The brand was so strong that blacksmiths around baltic created "pirate" copies of the blades by writing the same inscription - or, as some were illeterate, attempted to copy the markings resulting in almost-but-not quite correct spellings. As their clients were likely illiterate as well I don't think it mattered for business.

perfunctory4• 7 years ago

Maybe it's because the more you know about how propaganda works the less effective it is

Actually propaganda is so effective exactly because it works even when you know that it's propaganda. People remember the message but not the source of the message.

Zeklandia16• 7 years ago

You are not immune to propaganda. No one is.

RivieraKid3• 7 years ago

I remember thinking years ago that advertising would slowly disappear because we would have tools which would help us make optimal market decisions, so people would just use those and ignore the ads.

Basically, I imagined a website where you pick the type of service or good that you're interested in, fill out some sort of questionnaire and then get a list of recommendations which are optimal for your situation.

dan-robertson• 7 years ago

I wonder why we don’t see any kind of tax on advertising (or maybe we do?). It seems to me like a way to recoup some of the social cost of advertising. It also seems like it could be popular with eg some European governments as a way to get companies like google and Facebook to pay some tax on the profits they make. If the tax were per estimated impression then it would encourage more accurate estimates of volume (or at least it could curb the inflation of the estimates) as companies offering advertising would be incentivised by taxation to keep estimates low, and by competition to keep estimates high. Perhaps instead there would be some kind of gdpr inspired tax on collecting unneeded information to cover the societal cost of breaches and leaks and tracking in general.

A few reasons that we don’t see this:

1. It seems a slightly weird thing to tax. On the other hand, sugar taxes are becoming a thing in some places.

2. Elected governments may not want to piss off the media companies who they feel elected them.

3. Maybe people don’t care about advertising and so would feel like such a tax was for some hidden purpose. São Paulo (iirc) banned almost all public advertising. I wonder how the people there feel about it.

Saephoed• 7 years ago

Advertising is good [for all]; making stuff hard to evaluate and compare isn't [for consumers]

thorwasdfasdf4• 7 years ago

Advertising never works on me unless it's for a product I already wanted in the first place in which case i would've gotten it anyways. But other than that, I'm completely immune. I've calculated, less than 0.25% of my earnings go towards a product that was advertised to me.

I have no idea what brand my clothes/shoes are, if any. None of the food I buy has any branding whatsoever. ever seen a branded cucumber? nope, neither have I. I only buy new eletronics when the old one breaks, and I almost always get the cheapest one. Other than that, almost all of the rest of my spending goes to housing and savings/assets.

If everyone was like me, the advertising industry might not exist, or at least be much smaller.

neop1x3• 7 years ago

the thing is that maybe you are smarter than average. Maybe most people buy impulsiely, who knows..

dgudkov• 7 years ago

I guess, the next step now should be declaring "Sales Is a Cancer on Society". I believe one could draft a similar list of downsides for sales and sales tactics.

Jokes aside, advertisement itself maybe not a "cancer on society", but click-based advertisement is definitely ruining the internet and damaging the society. Can't wait until its era is over.

joekrill2• 7 years ago

This discussion always makes me think of one of my favorite NewRadio scenes:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YhrnMbhMgmw

It makes a really important point, though: where do you draw the line at what is considered "advertising"? It's a pervasive part of humanity.

Real world advertising is not about informing, it's about convincing.

That's life, though, isn't it? Me convincing my employer I'm the best person for the job. Convincing my wife I'm the best choice for a husband. Ultimately, everything becomes a sort of "advertisement". It's a very slippery slope.

It's even more interesting that this article even says:

When I say "advertising", I use this term somewhat loosely...

Which is a problem when you want to make bold claims like "Advertising as cancer".

perfunctory4• 7 years ago

Me convincing my employer I'm the best person for the job

To do that I presume you would actually have to believe that you are the best person for the job. Otherwise you would fill emotional distress, as normal people do when they lie. Professional marketers on the other hand don't have to believe in what they sell.

joekrill2• 7 years ago

They don't have to believe it. But I think many do (Whether they are lying to themselves is another thing). Most sales/marketing folks I've worked with actually do believe their product is superior and the best.

I don't think it's really as black-and-white as your suggesting, though. In the "employee/employer" context: there are plenty of employees who do think they are the best person for a job. In most cases that's probably just not true, given the size of a candidate pool. Are they lying to themselves?

annadane• 7 years ago

At the risk of much hate and downvotes, this is I feel the prototypical example of one of the issues with HN. Disagreeing is fine, but this is a pretty long, detailed article yet half the comments here are "the author is wrong, there's nothing wrong with advertising"

casualm• 7 years ago

How much free reign does anyone have when it comes to advertisement? I feel that the biggest issue is not only the volume / spam of advertisement, but how much misinformation it projects.

If the quantity of advertisement can be curbed in such a way that corporates are more conscious of how much space they have on television with advertisements (time limiting law), as well as what message they can convey, this starts discouraging and treating in-your-face advertisement less of a prioritiezed form of pitching a product.

albertop• 7 years ago

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is an eye opening book related to this subject. The ads are only a first and small step.

galfarragem• 7 years ago

I prefer to say: Advertising is the heart of Capitalism. Ads pump the blood (comsumption) to keep Capitalism alive.

necovek6• 7 years ago

I prefer to simply say "marketing today is immoral": it is using scientifically proven methods to manipulate us into doing something we would otherwise not be inclined to do.

I don't mind informative advertising: "hey, we are making this thing which can help with this" is ok. But that's a rare breed of ads nowadays. One of the eye-openers for me was when I noticed in my early student (and shaving :)) days how all Nivea shaving products were branded as being for sensitive skin (does your skin turn red if you pull razor over it?): I've simply stopped buying their products. They've scaled back on that, but I didn't "forgive" them their attempt to manipulate me.

As a cancer survivor myself, I don't mind the analogy and term, it just seems to not be explicit enough about what the trouble is with ads today: you have to work backwards to establish parallels from "cancer" to "advertising".

davidivadavid9• 7 years ago

Curious to know what's so problematic about the Nivea claim that it's for sensitive skin?

necovek6• 7 years ago

As I mentioned, all of their products were being marketed as being for "sensitive skin". Eg. a skin that turns red and/or itches after you shave with a very sharp razor: I would generally expect that almost everyone's skin behaves like this. So by saying "sensitive", they were attempting to manipulate me into thinking how my (and everybody else's) skin is sensitive so I need their "special" products.

stevesearer• 7 years ago

My site https://officesnapshots.com doesn't really fit into the box the author writes about here.

Our ads are self-hosted, static images that basically just show pictures of office design products. We also have an area that is literally just a listing of office design products which works kind of like a catalog.

We also sell the ads ourselves and do not participate in ad networks. The only 3rd party scripts we use are a google font and google analytics and the site still works if you block them.

While we are an exception, I'd like to see more people take the approach we do.

gatherhunterer5• 7 years ago

Most comments are referring to a claim that the author did not make: that all advertising and the practice of business marketing should be abolished unconditionally.

davidivadavid9• 7 years ago

That's probably because the author uses loaded language, and bases the whole article on an analogy with cancer, which has a slight tendency to evoke the worst kind of crap people can think of and want to entirely get rid of at all costs.

gatherhunterer5• 7 years ago

What loaded language? Loaded language appeals to a stereotype, this is just a provocative analogy. The use of an attention-grabbing title does not mean that one should be excused for creating a straw man instead of debating the actual content.

raz32dust• 7 years ago

Advertising is not a bad thing in itself. Think of newspaper advertisements (paper edition). I think I owe a lot of my success to a newspaper ad I saw which led me to apply to join for advanced math and science classes. We have had it for centuries, and there will always be some form of advertising around. A "ban" on advertising is neither practical nor fruitful. What is bad is specific, targeted advertising based on user behavior or deep knowlege about the user. This is somewhat vague, of course - if I buy a car magazine, I expect to see car ads which the publishers have posted because they know that the people who buy the magazine are car enthusiasts. It is a question of precision - I am ok with ads targeted at IPs from, say Queens area in New York, but not ads that use my precise location or street. Age should be completely out of bounds except for general statistics like - readers of this newspaper tend to be 20-30 year olds.

dennisgorelik• 7 years ago

On most content websites I strongly prefer advertising over paywall.

Occasionally I make an exception and signup for premium services (e.g. Netflix and YouTube Premium).

buboard13• 7 years ago

There is one part of the anti-advertising rhetoric which has to do with the fact that we spend so much time online and advertising is very visible there - after all Google, an advertising company, is the largest and most important internet company. That's unfortunate of course. There is another part though that is not just fed up with advertising, but comes from a certain trends towards protecting "my safe space". It's more prominent in the latest generations and it's a knee-jerk reaction to anything that might spread speech that is not explicitly desired (not just acceptable). It's the same aversion that sometimes makes people intolerant to their neighbors who don't share their own views. I think the article similarly slid quickly from advertising to all forms of manipulation, forgetting that paid advertising (pamphlets) is what enabled a number of positive revolutions in societies, from martin luther to french revolution to the bolsheviks.

Zeklandia16• 7 years ago

There is a difference, whose significance seems to be lost on you, between peer-to-peer, voluntary communication and centralized, forced distribution.

You are not forced to read pamphlets nor do they insert the content of the pamphlets into your newspapers and letters. Typically the only thing you are forced to do by someone distributing pamphlets is to tell them whether you'd like to take one. If advertisements had to ask whether you wanted to see them, the entire industry would collapse.

Pamphlets are also not magically distributed to everyone. People have to decide to help distribute them, which means other people have to cooperate with you to help you spread your message. It is also easier for others to interfere in your efforts, as, unlike online, people can see who and where the information is coming from, and they can also more easily and directly inhibit distribution. On the other hand, any individual can buy a Facebook ad and, with enough money, shove it in millions of people's faces with little to no oversight. Hence, it is easier to spread misinformation (like anti-vaccine propaganda) through Facebook than in real life.

buboard13• 7 years ago

If advertisements had to ask whether you wanted to see them, the entire industry would collapse.

Online ads - and most ads tbh - don't force you to do that either. They want to attract your attention but you re free to ignore them. I used pamphlets as the equivalent of advertising in older times, i m sure people would consider them just as pushy/spammy back then as we consider online ads now. They are not peer-to-peer by definition - there is no point preaching to the choir.

habosa• 7 years ago

There is certainly too much advertising, and a large portion of it is the worst kind: distracting, privacy-invading, or both.

However some advertising is very good. I go to work to make money and I want to spend it ... how do I know what to buy? I like video games, an ad that tells me there's a new game coming out for a console I own is really useful to me! I'm not embarrassed to be a consumer and to be open to influence.

dwaltrip7• 7 years ago

It doesn't seem that impossible to implement clear regulations that would significantly mitigate the overwhelming amount of aggressive advertising that we are surrounded by today.

Obviously, it wouldn't be perfect. But we don't need perfection here.

It also seems fairly obvious that there are plenty of alternative ways -- both existing currently and those that could be developed -- for informing people about various products or solutions to problems.

ajflores1604• 7 years ago

I'd say silver lining of advertising as it's done today is that the budgets are so high, I know many artists that would not survive without it.

My behance feed is full of artists doing amazing things, being supporded by ad company budgets. GMUNK actually has a great talk on this, I think it's 'pearl 5' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F93CP8UjRxk

There would have to be a fundamental shift in our economic system, not just 'advertising', for artists to be able to have a support system outside of corporate sponsorship and gigs.

Bayart• 7 years ago

We're just piggybacking on the Adnet for content and a smidgen of productivity, aren't we ?

cavneb• 7 years ago

I agree with many of the ideas with the comparison, however to call “advertising” as a whole is cancer is out of touch. I believe what should be said is “modern-day digital advertising”. I speak with advertisers all the time and they choose us because we display ethical ads (website is codefund.io). We do not track, profile, or collect information. All of our ads are chosen and displayed solely based on the context of the site.

We all need advertising in order to enjoy the free services we all use. Cancer is something that nobody should have to live with. Advertising is something we can all live with if done ethically and responsibly.

joantorres2• 7 years ago

The real cancer on society are religions. Not only they are totally useless, but they have been obstructing critical thinking and the progress of sciencific development for thousands of years.

dang• 7 years ago

We don't want religious flamewars on HN, so could you please not post like this here?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

joantorres2• 7 years ago

Sorry, understood.

w1nst0nsm1th• 7 years ago

He could ad : ads kill information.

As an example, google "cbd oil vs cbd isolate" or "why is cbd isolate in powder form...", in order to understand the difference and the relation betweens the 2 components (knowing Canabidiol should already be an oil, as its name suggest) and why cbd isolate is under the form of powder and not liquid as CBD oil.

Everything that come in the first results pages are fake blog posts from commercial sites or commercial offers. We quickly understand one contains the other after reading the first 3 pages from the result. But we never find an article explaining the actual chimical nature of cbd isolate (or pure form of cbd) or even an actual scientific study about cbd.

It's only the same and repeated argument, "article" after "article" about one pure form contained in another... and that for the first several result pages from a meta-search engine like searx (searx.be in this example with setting settle to include in general results Bing, Google, Yahoo, Yandex, DuckDuckGo and StartPage).

The good information has been covered under a thick layer of low density infomertial bullshit.

It's like trying to watch a movie in the middle of car traffic : You can't hear anything from the movie original soundtrack.

It take to further research, like "why is cannabidiol a powder", to have access in the first result page to actual independant articles for cbd, but under the form of its less "commercial" name, "cannabidiol"... to learn that lot of claims about cbd are not founded on actual scientific researches.

In short, the word CBD have been hijacked by commercial entities for profit and lost the biggest chunk of its actual meaning.

Information is lost in the process.

And I still don't know why cbd isolate is in powder form.

godDLL2• 7 years ago

While I understand both the purpose (cultivate desire, entice, inform) and the necessity (forward movement, economy, business) of advertising, I'd still like to get about my life without it. Unhindered by it.

The noise to signal ratio of the modern Internet is such that I, as a technical person, someone that finds it preferable to read instead of listen or watch; I still find myself on Youtube 99% of the time. Almost all of my web browsing is now Youtube. AND I HATE IT.

godDLL2• 7 years ago

What I'd like to see is an HTMLx that addresses the core needs of the Web-using entities, and an ecosystem of Web extensions that expand on the capabilities of it. So, something like what smartphones with their apps and markets are doing. Basic call and message capabilities, but then there's TrueCaller and WhatsApp and the like.

"Please support our project by enabling advertising on this domain [OK] [Later] [Never]" "For Youtube Movies please install DRM/x264 package from the market [OK] [Later] [Never]" "You will need to enable storage, code, and gaming modules to use Itch [OK] [Later] [Never]"

Because browser extensions suck. Browsers suck. Mobile browsers suck. The experience of the Web sucks, for anyone that knows better. Shopping, gaming, streaming, syndication and publishing all suck big time.

araneae• 7 years ago

How old is your daughter?

This is why my kid isn't going to watch YouTube. If and when we decide to show her any children's show, it'll be from a manually curated set of videos downloaded and streamed from a NAS.

Until what age? I doubt this resolve will last until 18, particularly when they become old enough to know what their friends are watching. The vast majority of video content isn't legally downloadable, and even illegal downloading is a bit difficult because children's shows aren't as widely shared as content aimed at adults. (Even really popular shows like Paw Patrol have surprisingly limited availability.)

If you want to limit ad exposure, using subscription services like Netflix is more practical, as does purchasing shows on a per show basis on YouTube (which granted gets very expensive). Public broadcasting is also typically ad free; in the UK we have iplayer which has ad-free children's programming available for streaming.

Zeklandia16• 7 years ago

This article, that came out today, shows to what degree advertising is a cancer: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/d3naek/how-to-make-a-phon...

Advertising Is a Cancer on Society

Related Stories