[cletus]

At this point, the snide dismissal of all things advertising is nothing short of boring.

To be sure there are many forms of advertising annoyance: auto-playing sound/video, remarketing (or what I like to call advertising a product I've already bought), interstitials, popups (to be fair, there are many non-advertising forms of these eg "sign up to our newsletter" dialogs) and so on.

But what made Google a money-printing machine is that search advertising is actually largely aligned with the interests of the user. That is, just by searching for something the user has shown an intent that other advertising doesn't have (where generally it's just attention thievery). Imagine I search for "how do I sleep on an airplane". Isn't a neck travel pillow an appropriate result here?

I get that it's popular to just hate on all advertising but that's just shallow.

As long as search results are marked as ads when they are ads and paying for ads doesn't improve your organic search ranking (aka the Yelp business model) then I'm completely fine with it.

There is a lot of crap in search results and this is a constant battle of whack-a-mole. At one point it was content farms. As someone who has search for a lot of home furnishing stuff recently I can tell you a big problem is affiliate link blogspam. There'll be some real-sounding domain like mattressreviews.com but it becomes pretty clear it's just mass-produced "content" to justify affiliate links.

Honestly, this will probably get to the point (I hope) where Google does the same thing it did to content farms and starts downranking sites with affiliate links (cough Pinterest cough).

[jodrellblank]

> "Imagine I search for "how do I sleep on an airplane". Isn't a neck travel pillow an appropriate result here?"

No?

I mean, seen through the lens of extractive capitalism where "how do I X" is the same as "what product do I buy to do X", and "someone asking about X" is the same as "which product to shove in their face to make them stop asking and extract the most money out of them", maybe yes. Doesn't "information technology" suggest some alternatives? Like, information about sleeping in planes - noise reduction, positions people have found comfortable, stress reduction, light pollution, circadian rhythms, stretches that can be done in a small space or sitting down, etc?

> "As someone who has search for a lot of home furnishing stuff recently I can tell you a big problem is affiliate link blogspam. There'll be some real-sounding domain like mattressreviews.com but it becomes pretty clear it's just mass-produced "content" to justify affiliate links."

This seems to fly in the face of your previous paragraphs: you searched for home furnishing stuff, isn't some generic advertising of a mattress an appropriate result here? You want something better than that for yourself, but think other people don't deserve better and are shallow for complaining?

[jquery]

This should be the top reply.

Google’s advertising may be very profitable and effective, that doesn’t mean it’s in the user’s best interest.

[sobellian]

We know that paid advertising works, so it should not surprise us to discover that paid advertising on the Internet also works. But Google and other search engines seek to organize the world's information, not the world's commercial products and services. For a multi-multi-billion dollar company's core product, I'm somewhat surprised they cannot do a better job killing the blogspam. Given the resources at their disposal, I think most people just assume that they don't care about the blogspam.

[semi-extrinsic]

"We know that paid advertising works" [citation needed]

I mean, the ad business of course likes to throw various metrics around. But as far as I'm aware there are no proper randomized controlled trials that show statistically significant positive ROI of online advertising versus no online advertising.

I mean, it would be really simple to do, right? To provide conclusive proof of the efficiency of ads? Pick a populous state in the US where people enjoy Soft Drink X. Randomly divide the households in the state into two groups. For the next full year, run normal amount of targeted online ads for Soft Drink X in Group 1, no targeted online ads whatsoever in Group 2. Did the sales in Group 2 decrease by more than what the cost of advertising to that group would be, yes or no?

[auntienomen]

There are two significant complications:

1) Google is running many parallel ad campaigns, which may target the same individuals. This in some ways gives opportunities, because one can run 'natural experiments' on the effeciveness of advertising for X by simply selecting the people who never saw the ad for X. But there is also probably some legal peril; Google has to be careful about what promises it makes to people purchasing ads.

2) Google has very little incentive to release the results of any such studies, because -- whether or not advertising works -- they don't need their customers to have accurate side-info about the value of advertising.

[initplus]

They have every incentive to release the results - if they showed that the market was undervaluing advertising.

[oblio]

Advertising has been about what 2? 5? percent of US GDP for more than one hundred years. The odds of advertising naysayers are probably infinitesimal at this point.

[disabled]

This is a thoughtful post. However, the issue is that these advertisements play into your hopes and fears to maximize the likelihood of getting a click from you. The fact that Google (especially) and other adtech companies are playing into your hopes and fears, by microtargeting and hoarding the most private and intimate details about your life is abusive.

I have to say that I am lucky that I have a print-related disability, because I almost never need to go websites with ads.

Services I get access to (no-ads):

* 975,000+ books for $50/year (Bookshare.org)

* 60,000+ professionally narrated audio books for free (US National Library Service)

* 80,000+ volunteer narrated audio books for $135/year (LearningAlly.org)

* Hundreds of Newspapers and Magazines for free (NFB Newsline)

* 99% of the books posted on OpenLibrary.org for free (even books currently "borrowed")

* Virtually all libraries for print-related disabilities around the world (sometimes free, sometimes paid) (I can get books in foreign languages easily)

Additionally, I use the paid audio apps Blinkist, Audm, and Curio, which everyone has access to. I find them to be super helpful. Blinkist in particular is almost 100% of the time a YouTube and TED talk replacement for me. I also use The Economist app, which has the entire weekly edition professionally narrated, along with the vast majority of the rest of its material.

[cratermoon]

Free books? What kind of socialism is that? /s

Seriously though, "Imagine there was no such thing as a library, and that members of the current neoliberal policy consensus were to sit down today and invent it." https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/citizen-coup...

[kingsuper20]

My main problem with advertising and the technologies surround it, aside from the obvious privacy issues and their misuse, is that it seems to suck all the air out of the room.

The birth and dominance of the online advertising business model looks to be the greatest misallocation of engineering talent in the history of humanity.

[p_j_w]

This is a bit how I feel about advertising in general. Human beings' time is being taken and mouths are being fed not to increase overall output, and thus lifting the overall well being of members of society. Instead, Company A hires advertisers to convince the public to buy their product instead of a competing product to Company B. Value is created for Company A, but entirely at the expense of Company B. At no time in the economic... chain?... of events that is advertising is anything actually created, yet vast sums of money, and thus allocation of resources, is put here. It seems INSANELY wasteful.

[imtringued]

>At no time in the economic... chain?... of events that is advertising is anything actually created, yet vast sums of money, and thus allocation of resources, is put here. It seems INSANELY wasteful.

You're forgetting something, companies start off completely unknown. How did they reach the point where the market has been fully saturated and the only real way to gain more customers is to take them from someone else? Oh right, it's because advertising increased the grow rate of your company to the point where there is barely any growth left.

Let's manufacture a completely artificial scenario to illustrate my point:

Person A: So, you're telling me you spent $5 billion on advertising and all you have to show for it is a 5% higher market share than your biggest competitor?

Founder: Yes, we used the advertising budget to grow our market share from less than 1% to 40%. Our next biggest competitor has a 35% market share.

[agalunar]

Right, but there's a difference between connecting a business to a customer who wants the product (which is good!) and influencing the wants and needs of the customer, particularly against the long-term interests of the customer (which is bad).

[I think it's impossible to try and succeed at connecting people with businesses without somewhat influencing their wants and needs, but ideally we limit that.]

Modern ad tech is problematic because it has little regard for people's long-term interest and demonstrably affects people's wants, particularly in the context of searching and automatically-curated feeds: since the internet is so absurdly vast and searches/feeds are the windows to the world, you can partially control the reality in which users live.

[FridayoLeary]

but the advertising industry has almost alone managed to produce google. That's a trillion dollar company that has literally changed the world.

Some perspective is needed. What looks like an evil industry of insane waste is at the end of the day subsidising our most important tools for business, communicating, and relaxing. All thanks to the vast allocations of resources and money into advertising.

[fuball63]

I agree with your point that there is a need for advertisements to inform consumers about available options. I'd generally fall in the "dismissal of all things advertising" box, but I would add a nuance to it that it really depends if it was requested vs. forced upon you.

In both instances you mention as being useful advertising, shopping for furniture or how to sleep on an airplane, you are asking for advertisements. That makes sense. You are looking to solve a problem by purchasing a product.

From my perspective, there are two issues with the current climate of ads: First, that the overwhelming majority of ads are forced upon you. They track you, distract you, and have generally turned the internet into a wasteland. Second, that a search engine/social network/news site is the place to view ads. I would prefer a site dedicated to this use case, not have the use case tacked on to unrelated sites constantly in the way.

I feel the same way about physical ads, too. I don't want uninvited people knocking on my door to sell me their ISP. I don't want those terrible mailers with coupons in them. Billboards are ugly and distracting.

[astrange]

> Imagine I search for "how do I sleep on an airplane". Isn't a neck travel pillow an appropriate result here?

Yes, but advertising doesn't do that. They do retargeting and only show you the most valuable ad for what they know about you. Sometimes that ad is just what the advertiser has paid to show you in particular, like "you left something in your Amazon cart".

[mcguire]

One might suggest that what made Google a money-printing machine is compiling dossiers on as many people as possible.

[guerrilla]

> But what made Google a money-printing machine is that search advertising is actually largely aligned with the interests of the user. That is, just by searching for something the user has shown an intent that other advertising doesn't have (where generally it's just attention thievery). Imagine I search for "how do I sleep on an airplane". Isn't a neck travel pillow an appropriate result here?

This doesn't hold water. It's just being shown because someone paid for it to be, not because it's the best thing to be shown which is what algorithms would be tuned for if they were in the users interest.

> I get that it's popular to just hate on all advertising but that's just shallow.

That's pretty dismissive of all the thought that has gone into criticism of advertising and it's effects on products and services, without even giving a hint of an argument as to why you feel it's shallow.

[cletus]

> This doesn't hold water. It's just being shown because someone paid for it to be, not because it's the best thing to be shown which is what algorithms would be tuned for if they were in the users interest.

You are factually incorrect and this is part of the problem: a lot of proselytizing (and, honestly, virtue-signaling) by people who don't know how advertising actually works.

Display advertising works on a CPM basis (ie paying for the impression) so yes, that's pretty much a case of someone paying to show the ad and that's it. They may be paying for that based on contextual information (eg RTB) or not.

But search advertising, at least how Google does it, it sold on a CPC basis (ie paying for the click not the impression). This actually means Google is motivated to show you the search ads you're most likely to click on because that's some revenue vs just who bid the most.

> That's pretty dismissive of all the thought that has gone into criticism of advertising...

No offense but if you don't know how search advertising works at the highest level then either you haven't put much thought into it or you're simply parroting someone else (who also hasn't) because it fits your world view.

[orhmeh09]

I’ve never clicked on any ad on Google in maybe 20 years of using it. How do the results help me?

[cratermoon]

> "how do I sleep on an airplane". Isn't a neck travel pillow an appropriate result here?

Late to the party, but I want to say here the answer is "maybe". However, the idea that the solution to every problem or need is to buy something is pretty regressive and is kind of at the core of the problem with consumerism and rapacious capitalism.

For a person to buy something, that something has to have been manufactured, shipped, sold, shipped again, etc. All that is extractive and depends on externalities that are too-often finite.

Also, the person buying has to have money, which they made through some kind exchange for labor, possibly fairly, possibly not. For capitalism, incentivizing people to treat a want or need as an opportunity for a financial transaction is essential, even when there are other solutions. Remember, for example, that the Listerine company essentially "invented" bad breath as a problem requiring a product to solve. Not that people didn't legit deal with bad breath before, just that they weren't sold a pre-packaged "cure".

So the question "how do I sleep on an airplane" has many answers other than "buy something".

[solosoyokaze]

I don't see targeted search advertising as user friendly. A search engine should return the most valid results. As soon as you have sponsored results, there's a conflict of interest. What if the competitor to the neck pillow ad people actually have a better pillow? They should be the first result, but won't be since Google's interest is in helping advertisers, not the users of their search engine.

I don't think there's an argument where advertising is pro-user, since a service that focused on the user would return the best results for a search, not who paid for placement.