[bee_rider]

Advertising has always felt zero-sum to me. Like, I already want shoes, the ad isn’t going to wear holes in the soles of my old ones, the holes are there already, so the ad will just push me one way or another.

So, I guess it is not just a tax on the poor and stupid. Everyone has to pay, company A buys ads, company B burns an equally large pile of money to cancel it out, and we’re just back where we started.

[JumpCrisscross]

> Advertising has always felt zero-sum to me

Your attention is valuable. Your data, your preferences, your identity--these are valuable. (They may be the only thing about humans that, economically, is.)

When you see an ad, your brain deploys coping mechanisms [1]. The tax isn't paid with money, but with time and neurology.

[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/363287602_Coping_wi...

[5e92cb50239222b]

I have personally seen people pushed into buying crap they don't need (and didn't even think about a few minutes before) by ads they saw on the internet. I don't like playing tech support for others, but installing ad blockers for technically illiterate friends and acquaintances now feels like a socially responsible thing to do.

[Thorrez]

If you're a new company, buying ads can help you get customers who would otherwise have bought something from your older, more well-known competitor.

Disclosure: I work for Google, but not on ads.

[vxNsr]

Hmmm… my impression was that Google is an ad company, wasn’t aware they did anything but collect data for ads and deliver ads, I’m curious to hear what you work on that isn’t “ads”

[Thorrez]

Currently I work on internal security. Preventing hackers from stealing data, like[1]. I worked on GCP for a while.

My point isn't that my paycheck doesn't come from ads or that I've washed my hands from that dirty ad business. What I meant was that I don't really have internal knowledge about ads, I'm not an authority, and also I don't speak for Google's ad business.

However, after I posted my comment I realized my statement, while true literally, was misleading, because I did intern in ads in 2015, which I had forgotten about when I posted my previous comment. So I'm sorry for that mistake.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Aurora

[abind]

Ever heard of google cloud?

[vxNsr]

Didn’t think it was a real business. But regardless isn’t that also just the services they use internally just externalized for general consumption. So still in many ways supporting the ad business.

[kridsdale3]

It may not be market leader (IIRC it's a distant 3rd) but it is a profitable self-sustaining business unit that employed tens of thousands of engineers.

[bee_rider]

Unless the older, more well-known company has a larger ad budget, which seems… very likely.

[Thorrez]

Without ads the big company gets 100% of the mindshare and the small one gets 0%.

With ads the big company gets 99% of the mindshare and the small one gets 1%.

[Thorrez]

I just came across this example of how ads help (or at least helped) small and medium businesses: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37662179