[apinstein]

This is the big idea I always pitched at hackathons (like startup weekend). I think it’s a great idea. 100% opt-in ads. My tagline was “a sufficiently relevant ad is indistinguishable from content.” It’s meant to be aspirational. The idea is that if you are looking to buy something, awareness of choices or information about that choice should be so valuable that it’s considered to be a benefit by the user. It’s basicallt an inversion of control approach to ads. The cpc’s and cpm’s would be amazing. :)

[Hnrobert42]

Unless I specifically seek them out, I have no interest in learning about new products or services ever. Thus, an ad would never be relevant enough to be content for me.

[magicalhippo]

Well I do. Sometimes there's a product or a service that can provide value in a way I haven't thought about, or I haven't come around to specifically seek out yet. I don't mind seeing ads for such things.

What I do mind is seeing ads for stuff I don't care about at all, and if the ads get in the way of what I'm doing.

[simias]

I've been considering buying a 3D printer lately. I don't have a lot of experience in the domain and I'm not sure where to start, so clearly I'm actively looking about information regarding 3D printers.

What I'm definitely not looking for is ads. Actually I try to avoid anything that might remotely look like one, from official websites (obviously) to comparisons of 3D printers that look like they could be biased one way or an other. Because obviously every company selling 3D printers is going to tell you that theirs is the best you could ever find. Even if they don't outright lie they'll put the emphasis on their strong points while conveniently forgetting to mention the drawbacks.

I really think ads are useless from a consumer perspective. I can believe that there was a time where the best way to reach potential buyers was buying an ad in the newspaper but with the ultra-connected society we're in it's just a waste. Make a great product, send it to a bunch of influential bloggers in the market share you target to review and if it's good the word of mouth will do the rest.

In a society where you can find reviews and recommendations for basically anything online, why on earth would I ever want to see ads? If you need to convince your potential customers that they need your product by spamming them, maybe your product is not that useful in the first place.

Of course the dark side of this is that of course marketing has caught on, now we have "native advertising" and people getting paid to pretend that they like something.

[yorwba]

I think ads are useless when you want to decide within a product category ("Which 3D printer should I buy?") but they can help you become aware of it in the first place ("There are affordable 3D printers now? Maybe I should get one.")

Unfortunately the majority of the consumer market revolves around a few common products and so most ads are about shifting revenue between functionally identical brands.

But I do occasionally see ads for relatively obscure stuff that might cause such an "I didn't know that existed." experience for other people. (I'm apparently hard to target.) For example https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=viva64.com are essentially ads, but they are still interesting to read, and afterwards you might be in the market for a code analysis tool.

[kromem]

You always see high conversion rates for new ad mediums, and those rates reduce over time as marketers abuse consumer's attention.

One of my favorite examples is Amazon reviews. Once you a time, those were legit and you'd see consumers referencing online reviews for products even if buying the product in a store physically, because it was valuable content.

Now, the reviews are so untrustworthy there are multiple sites that automate going through them to flag BS.

The unfortunate thing is that even after an ad medium becomes ignored by the majority of an audience, there's still an audience that's one to two standard deviations below the norm in suggestability that get preyed upon by advertisers. So it's those people that are the 0.1% clicking on general banner ads and purchasing a product. These are the same people that "call now" for those late night TV marketing commercials.

So the cycle for any ad medium is to get the attention of an audience, abuse it until most people stop paying attention, and then prey on the suggestably handicapped. It's a shitty industry, and quite unfortunate as if everyone could agree to not be awful, the fundamental feedback loop is one intrinsically motivated (find out about crap I'm highly likely to enjoy). But we're talking about a class of organizations (corporations) that can't even self regulate when lives and health are on the line, so that's certainly not going to happen for ads.

[falcor84]

>...people getting paid to pretend that they like something

If I remember my history correctly, this is how the very first radio sponsorships started as.

[MoBattah]

Right - a certain segment of the population is incredibly valuable for exactly this service.

I include myself in your description - love seeing relevant ads. There's a sweet spot there between those with high disposable incomes, high open mindedness and high affinity for novelty.

This population is by far the most attractive consumer for advertisers.

[kromem]

So when a friend talks to you about a product they recently used and loved and think you'd love as well (and I don't mean a friend on MLM payroll), you aren't interested in hearing about that recommendation?

And I'm guessing you skip over any HN posts that are about a new product or service you weren't already aware of?

There's a reason word of mouth is the most influential medium for converting to a sale, and it's because a recommendation from a friend is typically not "polluted" by advertisers lacking scruples - so the "pitches" you hear are about things someone who knows you decently well thinks you'll like, and only for products/tv shows/services that the person actually thinks are good.

It's also part of why recommendations motivated by affiliate rewards or MLM sales are seen with such disdain, as it's behavior from a friend that crosses a love for acceptable behavior.

If we only saw ads online for things that matched our interests AND are very good products, we'd have a different attitude about advertising (but that will never happen, as it requires prisoner's dilemma type agreement across too many parties).

[Hnrobert42]

>If we only saw ads online for things that matched our interests AND are very good products

I see your point, but for me, even this is not true. I don’t need to buy things, yet I am susceptible to advertisements. Ads just convince me to buy things I don’t need. The ads you describe would be even worse. I would prefer instead to never hear about new products or services.

[Y_Y]

But you read HN don't you? Can you tell articles from ads here? What about Paul Graham's submarines?

[freeone3000]

Being tricked by false headlines and articles published as news when secretly advertisement doesn't lead me to opt in to more ads.

[snaky]

It depends on how useful the advertising is. It's not the tracking or privacy the regular user is most concerned about, it's the everyday experience that tells him advertising is still stupid and annoying.

Despite all the billion dollars ML systems with gazillion of factors analyzed on petabytes of data, all we've got is 'hey, you googled for a 10uA accuracy bench multimeter yesterday! now for two weeks we will show you all the $15 multimeters ever existed!'.

Look at this (don't worry, it's short one-page) thread for example of how it might be instead - https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/benchtop-dmm-advise-n... - and what if the message from Tek engineer that closed a deal was actually advertising? He just posted a link to relevant appnote, that's it. What if automatical advertising system showed the same link to the same appnote as an advertising to the same user?

[Hnrobert42]

Yes. I don’t know. I don’t know what those are.

[bryanrasmussen]

Do you ever look at HN without knowing what you're going to see?

[idiomatic1]

This is the idea behind the Brave browser, right?

[mtgx]

The cheap CPC and cpm is why Google and Facebook would never consider doing that. Especially Google I've noticed recently that they try to be as misleading as possible to new advertisers to get them to pay a lot of money for crap as targettng. For instance they call what are effectively as interactions as clicks and refer to the cost as CPC even though in all of Google's other as types CPC refers to click to website. But in Gmail campaigns it means ad interactions which convert to almost an order of magnitude fewer clicks to website but the advertisers pay at best only half the cost of regular clicks.