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by bhousel
5227 days ago
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I don’t know if Google can come up with a way to make quadrillions of dollars and to keep me from being sad. Maybe my feelings are simply a cost of doing business, or maybe what I want is impossible. But I think my sadness is independent of the attraction the ad holds for me personally. My issue is with the relationship between the ad and the content. I don't think there can be another way. Advertising necessarily extracts value out of your attention, while simultaneously devaluing your browsing/watching/listening/driving/etc experience. Attention is a (mostly) zero-zum game. If Google could find a way to put subliminal advertising on the web (and those glasses would sure be a pretty badass way to go about it), maybe it wouldn't make you as sad? |
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While it it usually, maybe even almost always, does, I don't think advertising is required to be a distraction.
If I'm searching for information on a product, say, a pair of headphones for my wife or a diet for myself, and I see ads for headphones or diet books, then that advertising can be very beneficial.
The problem comes when, like in the article at hand, there's a product or service, totally unrelated to what I'm searching for, that's being injected in my attention stream.
Arguably, Google's incredible financial success is founded on making that information infinitesimally more likely to be useful to the reader compared to, e.g., prime-time television.