[moltensodium]

Maybe this is just a generational thing, but I still have never clicked on an ad. I hate ads. I don't know anyone who likes them. I don't know anyone who has intentionally clicked on them.

I have literally never met anyone who places any value in advertising at all. Everyone hates it with 100% of their being. It is the garbage we all just sort of accept exposure to as some sort of fee for existing online.

Who are all these people that subverted technology and turned it into advertising-tech?

[doctorpangloss]

The kind of person who clicks on ads also buys stuff. The negative, "if you don't click on ads, you don't buy stuff," may not be true in the strictest sense, but may be true for so many ways that matter.

Facebook is full of ads, you know Facebook users. Instagram has the most effective ads on the planet, maybe the only inventory on Earth where brand advertising works. You know plenty of Instagram users. YouTube's ad value is an open question, but I think their brand advertising also works. You can't block their ads in the apps, which is how people use them.

Sure, I get it, you're talking about banner ads. The kind of person who clicks on banner ads buys stuff!

[excursionist]

> The kind of person who clicks on ads also buys stuff.

Everybody who has money buys stuff. People that click on ads are probably more easily persuaded into buying shit they don't need. I don't have any data on this, but it's highly questionable whether an ad-clicker buys more stuff in general.

[hnick]

Yeah I think Facebook and Instagram ads work great because people are there trying to fill empty time. They don't mind where it leads them. Whereas on YouTube they often want to watch that particular video and they will view advertising as a greater annoyance.

In my experience (helping a family member with a small niche e-commerce store) FB advertising works. To the point that if the ads stop, the revenue stops almost entirely. We tried it last month when stock ran low and sales dried up until the supplier came through and the ads started again.

[colechristensen]

I have clicked on ads.

I wish ads were better or more relevant, I find myself spending unreasonable amounts of time looking for things which should be more easily found - a problem which could be solved with better advertising.

You could advertise books/shows/movies to me (based on your current search, your wish list, your past purchases, you might be interested in ...) because I'm certain there are plenty of books I would be interested in which I don't know exist ... but you would have to actually have a good model for what I would like and not just some NYT best seller / top 40 / whatever crap is popular and overpromoted.

The problem there is I'm generally only going to be interested in long tail items, and those are much harder to target and often nobody is interested in promoting them.

If I'm searching for restaurants or coffee shops, likewise I would be happy to see paid advertisements along with organic search results.

If I'm reading an electronics design blog, I would be happy to see ads for electronics tools, new components, suppliers, etc.

There are lots of potential ads I would click, many I wouldn't mind seeing at all. The problem I have with advertising is that what I get exposed to most is either completely irrelevant (become a member of AARP today!), promoting obvious products (drink Coke!), or promoting shoddy products or outright scams.

Here's an example of a site with sidebar ads I appreciate: https://www.eevblog.com/

>Who are all these people that subverted technology and turned it into advertising-tech?

Microsoft who started bundling "free" things with Windows to squash their competition. Everyone else who had to find a way to compete with them (and in turn everyone who wanted to compete with those companies, etc). Every customer who expects things to be "free".

[JohnFen]

> I wish ads were better or more relevant

I honestly don't. I actively don't want ads to be tailored to me, and not just because doing that requires spying on me.

In the past, most of the value that ads have given me have been as indicators of the target audience for content. For instance, I can leaf through a magazine I've never heard of and know, based on the ads, whether its a magazine I'm likely to enjoy.

Targeted ads completely destroy this value proposition, leaving ads without much value to me at all.

[graycat]

> there are plenty of books I would be interested in which I don't know exist ...

> The problem there is I'm generally only going to be interested in long tail items, ...

Yup. For that problem, did some original applied math based on some advanced pure math prerequisites and wrote the software for the math and for the corresponding Web site -- software appears to run as intended. Need to add some data and do an alpha test.

So, I am regarding your problem as a need for better Internet content (yes, including information about books, etc. not strictly ON the Internet) discovery and recommendation, and I'm regarding those as special cases of a much more general approach to Internet content search.

My work is to give you the content with the meaning -- artistic, utilitarian, political, technical, etc. -- you have in mind. So, I believe I've made progress on the meaning of content; a key here is some of the pure math.

Yes, my techniques should do much better at getting you the meaning YOU (extreme personalization) want than any top 40 style lists.

My view is that Google and Bing do REALLY well on about 1/3rd of the problem; I'm going for the other 2/3rds. Where Google and Bing work well, my work is NOT better. My work should be better in the 2/3rds.

I intend to announce an alpha test here on HN ASAP. Will look forward to the HN reactions.

At least initially, my site won't be very comprehensive. I intend to concentrate initially on fine arts, finance, nature, and a few more.

Yes, my Web site will be free to users and ad supported with my unique (methods and data) and hopefully especially effective ad targeting.

Yes, my work stands to be relatively good on user privacy: There are no logins; I make no use of HTTP cookies; and search results for a user have nothing to do with any history about the user; e.g., any two users doing the same search at the same time (before I update the data, say, say once a week) will get the same results.

Maybe someone will like it!!

[vbsd]

I’ve first read posts about your website many months ago, and I’ve been intrigued ever since. Could you share a planned release date, even if approximate and preliminary?

Also, it’s seems that your product has been “almost ready” for some time now, just out of curiosity, what are the main blockers?

[graycat]

I got interrupted by unpredictable exogenous events. Somehow when I get the last one handled, some more come along.

None of these events have anything to do with the project. The project is in good shape, and the work on the project that is uniquely mine has all been fast, fun, and easy.

I had a motherboard fail. I moved. And many more.

I better understand the advice to entrepreneurs -- "Never quit". Well, I don't want to quit, and I don't have to. Actually now my bank balance is growing nicely.

Most recently I've been setting up my new office -- it was a lot of work but looks good, efficient, functional, etc.

I'll get the nonsense out of the way and get back to the work.

The work to do now is reasonable. What has not been reasonable are the unpredictable exogenous interruptions.

Thanks for your interest.

[sp332]

Not that many people click banner ads. Banner ad click-through rate in North America is about 0.14% https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/290285/north-... 60% of those clicks are mistakes https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/268266/60-of-... 1/3 of clicks are by bots. https://adage.com/article/digital/ad-fraud-eating-digital-ad... 8% of users account for 85% of all banner ad clicks https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2101163

[slg]

When people say that advertising doesn't work on them they are generally only focused on being immediately motivated to action by the ad. However advertising serves a wide range of functions beyond that. No one sees one Mercedes ad and goes out to purchase a $75k car. That doesn't mean that Mercedes is stupid for still buying TV ads. The ad is instead meant to do things like keep consumers updated on the latest product line, establish the brand of the company, and to keep that brand in the back of consumer's mind when an eventual buy decision does come up potentially years down the road.

[mehh]

Aspiration is a large part of advertising. It's not just that you won't go out but that Mercades, most of us never will be able to afford one, but we all know its a luxurious product, a sign of wealth and 'doing well'. That's in large part because of the brand image, if you bought the same car with a Ford badge would they be able to charge as much?

[graycat]

Yes, and it would be good to try to measure that effect also, and for that the statistics and optimization stand to be more difficult and advanced. E.g., the main input is not just some ads and clicks but a stochastic process, that is, random variables indexed by time.

Uh, go measure something and get a number. You now have the value of a random variable. The sense in which the number is random or unknowable in advance, unpredictable, independent of something else, etc. is left open. Collect such data once, say, over 3 months, and now have a sample path of the stochastic process. Do it again and get another sample path, etc.

[Ididntdothis]

I never click on ads either but when I see an ad often enough (even if I don’t pay attention) my mind gives that product more credibility.

[didericis]

That effect seems highly relative to the context in which you see an ad, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it was intentionally exaggerated when studied. Certain contexts increase credibility with certain people, others decrease credibility.

What it does do is actually put the product in front of your face. People won’t buy your thing if they’ve never seen or heard of it. So I agree there’s value to ads even if people don’t click on them in that moment.

That doesn’t mean their value isn’t inflated.

[jasode]

>I have literally never met anyone who places any value in advertising at all. Everyone hates it with 100% of their being.

I like ads -- but only if they're relevant to my interests. There lies the problem: 99% of all ads are not relevant to my interests. For online ads, 99.99% of ads are not relevant to me. So, I use a DNS blocker to filter out ads.

[criddell]

> For online ads, 99.99% of ads are not relevant to me.

This is what pisses me off about ads based on user tracking and surveillance the most. Google (and others) have been building very detailed profiles of us for two decades now and the ads still suck.

The ads that work are the ones that pop up when you search for a particular topic (e.g. "plumbers in austin"). They don't need a user profile to serve those.

[w457uiw4gftyi]

I like ads if they're relevant to my interests AND they match the mental mode I'm in at the moment. If I'm flipping through an outdoorsy magazine and I see an ad for a neat new camping tool, I might be happy to have seen that ad. If I'm perusing a photography website and I see an ad for a cool new camera, I might be happy to have seen that ad.

I'm not happy if I'm reading a tech blog and I see ads for a car I was researching yesterday. I'm not happy if I'm checking my local newspaper's website and I see ads for the necklace I just bought my wife. These are like the non-chill guy who loudly approaches you at work, "HEY I HEAR YOU'RE LOOKING FOR A NEW JOB!".

Context is important.

[jerkstate]

The other problem is in order to figure out which ads are relevant to your interests, advertisers have to collect, store, and analyze tons and tons of data about you. Personally, I'd rather see ads that are not relevant to me.

[MuffinFlavored]

> So, I use a DNS blocker to filter out ads.

If everybody used a DNS blocker to filter out ads, would online advertising exist as a business?

[jasode]

>If everybody used a DNS blocker to filter out ads, would online advertising exist as a business?

Absolutely. Companies would get more clever about cloaking advertising with inscrutable domain names that's hard to filter with regex. Youtube is a good example of ads that are hard to block using pure DNS. (But that doesn't stop people from trying new variations of regexes for pihole that youtube eventually breaks.[0])

The other technique is native advertising. (But native ads are actually more "relevant" so somewhat more tolerable and more people would actually pay attention to them.) E.g. I just saw a Linus Tech Tips (the computer tech channel) and the pre-roll ad is for D-CON mouse traps (not relevant to me since I don't have a mouse infestation that requires rodent traps) or girls dolls[1] -- but the native ad is Linus acting as spokesperson for the Ring Doorbell Camera Kit[2]. That's more relevant since it's a techie gadget. I won't buy the Ring kit but it's more relevant than the mouse trap ad.

[0] last time I tried many of these DNS regex ideas, youtube stopped working: https://www.google.com/search?q=pihole+regex+block+youtube+a...

[1] ads for girls dolls probably ignored by 99% of audience demographic of Linus' video: https://imgur.com/a/gPcxOJ3

[2] https://youtu.be/hiLlNzxDfAg?t=19m12s

[criddell]

Sure. The ads don't have to come from a third party.

[azinman2]

If you really do like ads, there are plenty of platforms that will let you input your interests and customize your ads — Facebook, google, and I believe even Hulu will let your do so (I think there’s a 3rd party service called AdChoice or so that will do the same across smaller networks).

Something tells me that still won’t be enough to have you undo ad blocking...

[jermaustin1]

> I don't know anyone who has intentionally clicked on them.

Hi there! Glad to meet you. My name is Jeremy!

I click on ads when I see something that makes me want to click on it. Could be a retargeting pixel picked me up after I left some random ecomm site after not buying (but still intending to), or more likely a new direct-to-consumer brand that looks appealing (allbirds, freshly, barkbox, etc).

I don't hate ads. I don't like ads. Ads are ads. If I didn't get ads, I would really have no way of knowing that something out there exists that I had no idea I might want.

[nitwit005]

You have to keep in mind how cheap advertising is. An ad campaign that affects one in a hundred thousand can be successful.

In some areas, you'll find a ton of billboards for personal injury lawyers. Right off the bat, maybe only one in several thousand people is a potential client, and it's totally irrelevant to the remainder. Of the relevant population, most of them have the common sense not to hire a lawyer purely based on an advertisement. But those billboards are still worth it. They know because they ask people how they learned about them, making it simple to calculate their value.

[rifung]

I'm not sure what generation you're a part of but I appreciate ads when they actually tell me something I didn't know about that I do want to buy. For example I've been shopping for beds and dont mind ads for brands I hadn't heard of. Some of them I would have bought had they been in my budget but this to me isn't so much a problem with ada in general as it is about as targeting.

[magashna]

If I'm diving into buying something like a bed, I'm never looking at regular advertising. I'm trawling through forums and old message boards, looking at sites that do direct sales, reading reviews, looking at pictures, going to an actual store to touch and see a thing. Advertising is a skewed view of something I want to buy where they try to convince me it's 110% beyond my wildest dreams and expectations. It's not, never will be. I just want something that's about 80% there and to confidently know it's good enough.

[alkonaut]

I’m way past accepting ad-network ads. If an ad shows for a product I’m really interested in I’d rather google it on a different browser/device than click the ad. But mostly I’m disappointed that the company in question even uses ad-network (ie tracking/targeted) ads.

(I’m from the 70’s and TV didn’t have ads when I grew up, that could make a difference I don’t know?)

I want to be shown no ads or ads for products completely irrelevant to me because seeing (well-)targeted ads makes me feel watched and tracked.

[JohnFen]

> I appreciate ads when they actually tell me something I didn't know about that I do want to buy.

I can't remember the last time I even saw an ad that did this (at all, not just online).

Oh wait, I lie, I do remember -- ads for electronics and computers in the technical journals of old used to do this, because they included actual information about the products they were selling. I haven't seen a useful ad in decades, though.

[notelonmusk]

Annoyance is one thing.

Weaponization is another.

Can Ads Read My Password?: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20638662 for example. Malvertising for another. Fingerprinting...

[thrower123]

The only ads I ever click are from sales flyers that I have signed up for that show up in my email inbox. Those are genuinely useful.

Display ads? Meh. I find that they generate more distaste for the advertised service in me than anything else.

[saalweachter]

It's not really generational; people have always hated advertising. They hated it in the newspapers, on buildings, on TV, before movies, inside of movies, in magazines.

I don't really see advertising in general going away short of legislation preventing it; that doesn't mean that online advertising will always be as profitable as it is now, but there's a question of "where else will people advertise?" People advertise where people are; online advertising will lose its value when people spend time elsewhere.

[perl4ever]

I have clicked on an ad now and then. I can't remember the last time, though. Probably cars, but of course I can't buy a new car every day.

The thing is, though, if something is truly new to me, even if it seems like just the thing, I'm not going to buy it without doing market research. It's ingrained in me that anything that is brought to you is almost certainly garbage.

[riffraff]

I keep ublock on all the time except on some sites. Sometimes, there is a worthy ad (e.g. one month free audible, cause I visited the site).

I don't resent ads, I am totally fine with them, and if they help sustain some site I use, I am happy.

The problem is when they are taking over the whole experience.

[JohnFen]

I have never clicked on an ad, and I can't imagine anything that would get me to be willing to click on an ad.

But I don't hate ads. I only hate the tracking that comes with them.

[buboard]

> that subverted technology and turned it into advertising-tech

What actually happened is that technology replaced the publishing industry. Publishing always had ads.

[gerbilly]

> but I still have never clicked on an ad

Do you use Instagram and follow accounts on it? If so you're clicking on ads.

[stvswn]

But, you like accessing content for free, correct? That content doesn't exist and then ads are layered on, the context exists BECAUSE of ads. Like, no one would produce the content without the plan to make their money back via ads.

This is how mass media has worked from the get-go. Radio stations were built by advertisers for the purpose of advertising. Entire genres of popular music wouldn't have happened otherwise.

Online advertising did not create the notion of advertising being the predominant media funding model.

And, just because you'd rather ads not exist, it doesn't mean there's something "evil" or whatever about a business promoting itself. I'm going to guess that if you ever find yourself needed to market a business you'll be happy if there's an option to advertise effectively.

[retzkek]

> no one would produce the content without the plan to make their money back via ads.

What is your plan? You just produced content, on a site with no ads, and no links to other ways to capitalize off it. I'd argue most content is created by people who just want to share something they are passionate about. Maybe a lot of it is low quality, and "you get what you [or someone else] pay for" can apply, but a world without ad-supported distribution models would not be without content.

> Radio stations were built by advertisers for the purpose of advertising

Radio stations and other traditional mass media also require substantial investment and resources; putting a web page on the internet does not (unless we make it, by putting all our "pages" on a couple giant sites, who then need revenue to provide those services, hence serve ads).

[shantly]

> But, you like accessing content for free, correct?

Meh. The best online content's fully paid, donationware (Wikipedia), or simply free. 100% of the ad-supported stuff could go away tomorrow and my quality of life would suffer not at all. Hell, might go up. Meanwhile spyvertising-paid "free" services & software are sucking the air out of the room for paid and open-source alternatives (and protocols—god is that ecosystem bad for protocols) alike, for a variety of things I might like to buy or use or contribute to.

I don't get the "but think of what the Web would look like without ad money!" doom & gloom. It'd be fine. Go ahead, outlaw them. I do not care even a little.

[ACow_Adonis]

Your post is literally the content I'm reading that you claim no one would produce without ads, and it's unsupported by ads.

And again (I feel like a broken record on this site), that's a totally inaccurate history of the internet.

Content arrived first, THEN the advertising companies arrived.

[cameronbrown]

Hacker News is not mass media. Plus don't forget Y Combinator funded many ad-based platforms. HN isn't free either.

[ACow_Adonis]

A fair point.

So I see two takeaway questions: would we be fine/better off without mass media funded by advertising(it's obvious what my answer to this would be since I don't generally listen to it or watch it, though I acknowledge it going away won't likely happen).

And the second, would content we like to consume/ be worthy of consumption be produced anyway, and my contention is that it would still, just like it did in the past and continues in the current (some free, some paid for), as can be seen in the history of books, early internet, street art, leisure, bloggers, hobbyists, cinema, documentaries, etc.

There might be a third point of mine, which is that we're actually suffering from a glut of content and competition for eyeballs: so to me, worrying about that content disappearing is a bit like worrying about dying of thirst while drowning in a freshwater lake.

[cameronbrown]

I don't know, really. I don't want to go back to a time where artists struggle to eat, to make a metaphor. Independent creators are using advertising revenue now too.

[etblg]

> But, you like accessing content for free, correct?

I'm really not sure about that anymore.

I pay for The Athletic, I was hesitant at first but now I really enjoy getting access to top quality sports articles with no ads and a nice clean experience.

I pay for Google Play Music (for however long that lasts) and I'm really happy I can just listen to music without needing to hear more fucking ads in my life.

I support a few Youtube channels on Patreon because the advertising money on Youtube isn't enough for them to cover their bills. At this point there's a good number of channels I would rather pitch a few dollars at each month than have to sit through ads (which are adblocked anyway, whoops) and have their content threatened by what Youtube determines advertisers care about.

I pay for Netflix and never have to watch ads (so far) while watching TV. Whenever I watch live TV it drives me crazy how many breaks they take to show me the same stupid commercials over and over again for stuff I will never buy.

You see it with online sports packages that don't have the rights to show TV feeds online -- so when it's time for commercials, it just switches over to a silent image saying "Commercial Break in Progress". I pay $20 a month for DAZN and I'm not sure how much longer I can stand watching the awful commercials that keep getting shown at every break.

I donate a small amount every once in a while to Wikimedia and in return we all get access to a free encyclopedia that stays eternally relevant without advertising.

We can live in a world where we pay for content and be happy. We can live in a world without advertising. It's really not that bad paying a little to get a much better experience.

[hyperdimension]

Actually, that's not (historically) the case. From The Attention Merchants (a great book, by the way), page 12:

>"Day's idea was to try selling a paper for a penny...he felt sure he could capture a much larger audience than his 6-cent rivals. But what made the prospect risky...was that Day would then be selling his paper at a loss. What Day was contemplating was a break with the traditional strategy for making profit: selling at a price higher than the cost of production. He would instead rely on a different but historically significant business model: reselling the attention of his audience, or advertising. What Day understood--more firmly, more clearly than anyone before him--was that while his readers may have thought themselves his customers, they were in fact his product" (emphasis original)

His paper ended up being the New York Sun.

Just something to think about. It wasn't always like this.

[rch]

Actually, I'm aggressively looking for higher quality content that I can pay for, like (e.g.) nzz.ch for news. I was also a Google Contributor subscriber, before it required an opt-in for site operators.

What I would really like is to pay for the Google Feed (aka Google Now) on my Pixel instead of having to ignore the ads that have recently started to show up there.

[dorkinspace]

Does Google Now still not respect "I'm not interested" flagging?

I've tried to use it many times, but I'll keep seeing the same stories I've marked as not interested. One easy example is any Marvel release. I'll say not interested in "move title". Then the same story will pop up in the Marvel category. I'll repeat the process for Marvel, and the same story will show up as entertainment, repeat until I close the app.

[rch]

I've had good results from consistently tuning my feed over the last few years, particularly by excluding low quality sources altogether.

I have seen the phenomena you're talking about though. For me it might be a political scandal that I mark as uninteresting, which then shows up again under some peripherally related category.

[jerkstate]

for some reason, they think I love baseball, so I get a ton of baseball alerts. I need to accept notifications to the Google app because that's how I auth to gmail. Pretty stupid that the same app sends necessary and completely useless alerts, but I'm sure that's intentional.

[criddell]

Advertising isn't the big problem (IMHO), it's the tracking and surveillance. We give up too much for what we get back.

[perl4ever]

I literally just tried to order some pants on the internet, and I couldn't because the retailer's site broke when interacting with my ad blocker.

I don't care what conditions someone wants to put on using their website, per se, and agree they have the right. The problem is, that I can't easily selectively interact with the part of the internet that isn't polluted by unreasonable advertising.

The evil part is the mixing of the unwanted or dangerous ads with the general internet. If it was segregated so you could choose which area you wanted to be in, then it would be genuinely voluntary.

[JohnFen]

> Online advertising did not create the notion of advertising being the predominant media funding model.

True, but online ads did create the notion that spying on everyone should be part of the business model. That's what I object to. If the price to make that stop is that there is no more "free" content (scare quotes because it's not really free), I'm fine with that. I don't think that's the price, though.

[xenocyon]

This is true for newspapers, pro YouTube channels, etc. But even today, the majority of internet content is created by people for free - this includes comments on HN, Reddit discussion, original Facebook posts, amateur YouTube content, and much more.