[shortrounddev2]

I work in retail media. There is a large difference in the kind of value we capture - rather than creating incentives for annoying or addictive behavior, we only show advertisements on ecommerce pages. If you are seeing our ads, you already have the intent to buy a kind of product, but the kinds of ads we show are trying to convince you to buy a specific brand of product.

Perhaps you searched "laptops". You see a handful of results, and at the top a banner says "Dell XPS - 20% off!"

Have we manipulated you in any way? Have we lied to you? The fact that a laptop is 20% off is valuable information to a user who might consider price in their purchase. What we sell is not advertising, but real estate on your screen

Am I in love with what I do? No. But we dont engage in the kind of advertising market described in the OP's article. What we do is the equivalent of a grocery store putting products on the end cap of an aisle and getting paid extra for the valuable real estate

[ndriscoll]

If you're taking money from X to try to push people to buy X instead of saying "our honest opinion is that Y is the best-value product and we recommend it" and putting that front and center, it's safe to say that you are manipulating people. The non-manipulative use of that real estate is showcasing high value products such that you feel it reflects well on your business to point them out. If they were organically there already, they wouldn't need to pay you.

[nrds]

This is the worst kind of advertisement.

Other ads just take up screen space and bandwidth: they displace more useful uses of these scarce resources, but they don't cause any direct harm. By contrast, ads targeting people in the market for a good or service actively displace quality signals. In doing so they make quality uneconomical and thus destroy it. They make the world a worse place.

[porridgeraisin]

The reason behind the banner reveals to us the incentives that drive the way the whole system functions, which in turn decides the quality of the majority of advertisements.

If the reason is "because they paid us to" then it leads to the absolute horror show we all see these days.

And no, papering over this issue by maximizing click-through rate along with revenue in your optimisation problem does not cut it. The only advertisements I will accept are those that dont have any weird incentives backing them. Example that is OK: shopkeeper recommending dell laptops because his previous customers have given good reviews for it. But if the shopkeeper takes even a bottle of wine from a dell salesman, oops, I'm blocking that ad.

In my "analysis", approximately zero advertisements in the internet today run the way I accept them. This can mostly be attributed to the fact that google/meta run most of the ads and they definitely take money from merchants:).

It logically follows from this that I need to use an adblocker everywhere.

Same goes for all of marketing and sales: all forms of deceit (something that we are taught as kids to be morally wrong) that are normalised today. Entire trillion dollars companies' primary product is deceit.

It is possible to do these things without deceit, but the tragedy of the commons dictates that the deceitful win.

[bee_rider]

That seems less evil, at least in the sense that it doesn’t require staking people and collecting dossiers about their personal information.

I’m surprised your business model doesn’t completely dominate over the social media algorithmic nonsense. I’d expect people who searched for something to be actually interested in it.

[shortrounddev2]

It actually does, in a way. Amazon.com (not AWS) doesnt make any money on product sales - it makes almost all of its revenue from sponsored products. Walmart as well makes a huge percentage of its money from promoting products.

My company operates only on small ecommerce sites. Because we have a huge catalog of products, advertisers can come to us and launch a campaign, and we can automatically deliver across dozens of sites. We can connect small ecommerce sites to large advertisers so that they dont need first party relationships with those advertisers. The way I see it, we are helping smaller retailers be more competitive against Amazon by helping them squeeze more blood from the stone, as we like to say in advertising.

What keeps me up at night is who our customers are. Among our advertisers, we sell ads for alcohol. While those who see our ads generally already have high intent to buy alcohol in the first place, I know from family history that even the slightest temptation can put an alcoholic back at step 0. We dont run too many of those but im still struggling with it

[martin-t]

> Amazon.com (not AWS) doesnt make any money on product sales - it makes almost all of its revenue from sponsored products

So you see, it is exploitative. Amazon has an advantageous position thanks to its brand name and it allows it to extract money from companies who want their product sold which in turn is extracted from customers. Meanwhile if a better (in terms of quality/longevity/cost) product existed, it would be unable to compete without also being forced to advertise. It has to spend money on ads which would be better spent improving the product (or making it cheaper in the complete absence of advertising).

EDIT: Btw, I do appreciate the honesty. There are absolutely different levels of severity of anti-social / anti-consumer behavior - the exploitation I pointed out has lower severity but a higher scale/prevalence and your alcohol example is a good example of low scale/prevalence but high severity.