[md224]

It's interesting that people are upset about Google being able to pay to get their content around certain barriers, when this is essentially what Google AdWords is: a system for advertisers to pay to get their content displayed in prominent locations rather than relying on position in organic search. And yet nobody really takes it seriously as a Real Problem.

Not trivializing your complaint, btw... just pointing out that using money to get your message to the forefront is kind of the point of advertising itself, so the fact that Google is paying to get their advertising displayed is kind of... meta?

I'd love to have a discussion on HN about the necessity of advertising in the Information Age. I think we would all like to live in a world where purchasing decisions are based on reviews from people that have actually used a good or service, and I would think that the ubiquity of the web has made this kind of crowdsourced intelligence quite feasible.

Does advertising provide a valuable service beyond subsidizing information flow? If not, are there alternate viable strategies for subsidizing information flow, such as Wikipedia's donation model? Is a post-advertising world possible, or even desirable?

[bpatrianakos]

I don't want to live in an ad-free, review-only world myself. Advertising and reviews serve two different purposes. The one gets the word out about a product or service and lets the creator point out why their audience would like it. A review's purpose is to let others know if the product or service lives up to the advertising and lets you gauge how good a fit a given product is in relation to competitors or on its own.

We need both. Advertising can be unethical at times but its no reason to do away with it all together. Reviews cAn be flawed too.

As far as AdBlock goes, I'm still uncertain of why people dislike advertising so much to begin with. Okay, they collect information about you. I understand the desire to not want to be tracked like that. But lets imagine for a moment that advertisers are collecting your information but they're not doing anything unethical with it. They're just trying to show you add that are relevant. In that situation I really don't care if I see advertisements online at all. I also think the definition of unethical comes into play here too though. For me, advertisers sharing my data with each other is something I don't see as unethical. Others I suspect do. Living the lifestyle I live, I can't think of anything advertisers could know about me that would be at all harmful. I suppose everyone's mileage may vary.

My question is, in the end, what part of online advertising is so distasteful to everyone? Is it the data collection or is it seeing the ads?

[ronaldx]

>The one gets the word out about a product or service and lets the creator point out why their audience would like it.

I've heard this argument countless times but I'm fed up with it and I want to call it out: the constant and worldwide glut of Coca-Cola advertising suggests this is not primarily what advertising is about.

Advertising never tells me about a new product that I care about and I'm not already aware of: in an age when I can research what I like on the internet and I hear about interesting new products through curated content such as this forum.

If you can, please come up with a better argument in favour of advertising.

Until then, I will continue to believe that modern advertising is perhaps the biggest waste of our greatest minds and resources.

[gaadd33]

Coca-Cola advertising isn't product advertising, its brand advertising. The intent is to keep their brand in your mind when you are shopping so when deciding between two essentially equivalent products you will lean towards the one you remember better. This sort of advertising tends not to have a strictly measured ROI in my experience since its hard to measure the "value" of wrapping a subway car in Jameson ads.

Product advertising is advertising a specific product and the ROI on it is usually closely measured when it comes to channels that can do that such as banner ads. While you are quite well informed and get information about all the new products you care about via other channels, most people are not hence the need to make people aware.

Without making "the masses" aware you end up with product usage/growth spreading virally which while it might be "better" is a lot harder to predict or model production levels or possible ROI on an initiative. For example, the Taco Bell Doritos Taco would have probably become popular after a while but that would lengthen the payback period for redesigning the menus/training staff/etc, alternatively you could do partial rollouts but that defeats the economies of scale.

While its not perfect, or anywhere near, advertising does serve a useful purpose and until the economy changes to not reward advertising initiatives we will sadly have to deal with it.

[disgruntledphd2]

Well, in their defence, Facebook appear to have made an attempt to measure brand advertising: http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2013/03/...

Its an interesting approach, but that might just be because I'm a data nerd.

[nileshtrivedi]

This.

> Advertising never tells me about a new product that I care about and I'm not already aware of.

Even if it does that, it does so by interrupting me when I'm doing something else - which is not acceptable to me. Considering that we have search and social recommendations, advertising is not "beneficial for the user".

A very nice consequence of rejecting interruptive ads is that marketers won't need to collect data about me and build huge behavioral profiles. I'll come to you when I need you. And when I knock on your door, you would be certain that I am interested in talking to you. So there is no need to track/profile me.

[md224]

Sincere question: do you feel that you, personally, have gained useful information from advertisements? Was it about a new kind of product or service that you didn't previously know about, or just a brand that was better than the ones you currently knew about?

Your point about product discovery is well-taken. In the case of discovery of new product types, it seems to be a valid issue. For product types that a person already has knowledge of, however, I would think it would be preferable to skip the ads and simply compare reviews. In other words, if I'm searching for a hammer, looking at ads for hammers will not give me the best information.

I do wonder if there are other ways to enable product discovery besides paid placement, but I'm not sure.

[bpatrianakos]

I think that's a difficult question for most people but I can honestly say yes. Sometimes its hard to tell what exactly motivated you to buy a certain thing. My first car was a Volkswagen Jetta. The advertisements made me aware of the brand and its personality. That sounds superficial but its a real part of the appeal of a lot of products. It's hard to be zen and take your ego out of buying decisions. Sometimes it can be one of the few differentiating points of a product. For me, a car is made to drive from point A to point B. I don't care about performance or most tech specs. So to me, without the advertising there's no difference between a VW, Chevy, or Mercedes. They're all cars that'll get me where I want to go and all 3 have some model that looks nice to me. So I identified with the brand personality of VW and chose it. Reviews came into play in the one area where the ads were, to me, misleading: reliability. I heard great things about the reliability of VWs from reviews and that clinched it.

I learned about DigitalOcean from advertisements. I saw the ad, read the site, and their advertising convinced me to try them. They were much newer at the time so I didn't have anything else to go on and never heard of them before. To me, for my preferences, DO is a strong competitor to Linode but what kept me from moving my important projects to DigitalOcean was the reputation of the Linode brand. So its hard to separate the advertising from other information from other sources.

Apple's "it just works" campaign led to me getting my first Mac. I identified with the issues they brought up in the ads, switched, and found out I really did like Macs better. Now, Macs aren't without their own set of problems so when it comes to what would make me choose a Mac over a Windows PC, those intangible, marketing-speak little things is what gets me.

A lot of people try to act like they're above all that but I can't believe that. I know we all hate to think we're swayed by advertising because we want to protect our individuality. I feel like I can still be an individual even if I buy into some marketing.

[Retric]

I see vary few advertisements and as a result I don't buy much stuff. Sure, I have missed out on say video games I would have enjoyed playing, but at the same time it's also removed a lot of disappointment and stress from my life. Generally, when I walk into a store brands mean nothing to me so I make some random choice and then decide to either stick with it or try something new. And honestly most big brands are good enough that there is not much difference between them so avoiding the cognative overhead of playing all those advertizing jingles as I get groceries is a great thing.

I also tend to buy brands that spend less on advertizing because they end up as a better deal for your money.

[bpatrianakos]

You're kind of implying that being advertised to means you automatically end up buying more than you want it need. I think that can be true but not necessarily. I see tons of advertisements but buy very rarely. For example, I see tons of advertising for tablets. As a developer and the owner of the iPad 1 I don't feel the need to upgrade at all. Mine still does what I want it to. When I find it becomes a nuisance then I'll be glad for the ads. Clothes are another example. I happen to buy somewhat expensive clothes. But I've found what I like (via advertising) and I stick with it. I don't buy more when I see there's a sale, only when they get worn out.

My point is that I don't relate to the stress that people feel from advertising. I'm definitely swayed by it but only when it lines up with a real desire I have. The desire comes first and the advertising shows me the way toward fulfilling it. It doesn't both create and satisfy my desires. Well, not always. For example, after I saw iOS 7 I totally wanted it. Luckily I will but if I had to pay for it I might. Now, I'm wondering - did the advertising create the desire for that or did I just see something I liked and it happened to be a good match? Is there always a difference?

[frankster]

Perhaps the point is...you have an ipad 1.

[md224]

Thanks for the honest answer. Definitely food for thought.

[nileshtrivedi]

> (Advertising) gets the word out about a product or service and lets the creator point out why their audience would like it.

The problem is that it does this by interrupting users when they were doing something else. Ads, except those that are shown when the user is explicitly performing a search, are not "relevant" enough - because they ignore the user's context. When I'm reading guitar tabs for a song, I do NOT want to see ads for guitars. Interruptive ads can never be relevant enough.

From my point of view, search and social recommendations are enough to hear about new products and services which might be useful to me. "Interruptive advertising is beneficial for the user" is just advertisers trying to give an ethical justification to the fact that they are basically being jerks.

The second part ("lets the creator point out why their audience would like it") is easily solved by maintaining a landing page. Be accessible when I search and have enough information for me to learn more about the product.

(I had written about this on my blog a few years back: http://www.nileshtrivedi.com/search-results-are-the-only-rel... )

[mfjordvald]

Is it really fair to complain about ads not being relevant enough when we're all doing so much to not allow them to track us?

Relevant ads or privacy, choose one.

[nileshtrivedi]

I am saying that ads can never be relevant or useful "enough" (because they interrupt). Product discovery is now solved because of search and social recommendations. So there is no need to give up on privacy.

[mfjordvald]

Perhaps. I think it's a naive point of view, though.

Search is terrible still, the other day I searched for "cheap mechanical keyboard" and the first two results were basically pure spam. Even then, only the first 5 results get any decent traffic and results on the 2nd page get almost none.

Social recommendations work only if your product is either really damn good or you play unfair and game the system. People are designed to not care about things they haven't heard of before.

There's a saying in selling that says a person needs to see your brand/product 7 times before they're ready to buy. As a new person on the capitalist market I don't see how I'd do that while playing fair and without going bankrupt in the mean time.

[dendory]

But that has nothing to do with this. Reasons don't matter here. If someone is using Adblock Plus, it's because they made the choice to use their technical knowledge to not see ads. There's no question here that by doing this, Google and the extension maintainer knew full well that this was going against user wishes.

[celeritas9]

They are a distraction. I feel annoyed when they appear. If I want looking at a particular web page and 30% of the web page is filled with useless/unnecessary ads then I'd be annoyed big time. I have been using internet since last 9+ years. And I haven't found a single useful advert since then. I think that would be the case with most of us.

[jojolebobo]

You said advertising can be unethical at times. Can you illustrate your point with an example of advertising being ethical ?

[belorn]

Advertising is fine so long its an opt-in model. Advertising that goes in the physical mailbox has for quite a while become an opt-in model (Sweden), and that system is working fine. Companies with "membership" cards has been also using a opt-in model... for as long as I has lived. There people accept advertising in trade for special offers.

Sending advertising to people who actually want advertising is perfectly fine way. Sending advertising to people who do not want advertising, has ended in intrusive, tracking, bandwidth wasting, and CPU hogging mess that people want to escape. If I see advertisement being thrown in my face against my will, I instantly gets a dislike for what ever company/product being displayed. I would never, EVER, click or buy it.

[ippisl]

Does advertising provide a valuable service beyond monetizing other things? My guess is mostly, no.

In a world with search engines that know everything about you and can recommended great products and services for you, there's no need for wrong incentives in the form of money to be part of this recommendation process.

And regarding brand advertising : some marketing people say that advertising do offer people some psychological value that gets implanted in the product., which makes them enjoy the product more. For example the axe deodorant ads causes some people to wonder whether using axe did helps with attraction, which changed their internal experience.

The problem again with such claims is the perverse incentives that money play here, which we see in the effects of advertising on female body image.

Really the only case I think ads are usefull are in cases they are used by non profits or the states to achieve public goals, like anti smoking ads.

[sandossu]

"I think we would all like to live in a world where purchasing decisions are based on reviews from people that have actually used a good or service, and I would think that the ubiquity of the web has made this kind of crowdsourced intelligence quite feasible."

Would you really like all advertising to move in that direction? You should realize it's impossible to know if a person really owns and likes a product or it's just a sponsorship. Nobody would be trusted anymore.

[md224]

That's a good point to raise. Two questions:

Would you agree that opinion manipulation in online reviews is already taking place?

If so, would reducing the presence of explicitly-labelled advertisements result in an increase in covert opinion manipulation?

I'm pretty sure there are already issues with regard to the trustworthiness of online reviews. But if we define the value of testimonial by impartiality, then ads are pretty worthless by default. It could be better to rely on sources that at least have the potential of impartiality. I admit this is definitely a complex issue.

I can also understand the ethical argument that it's better to allow sponsored content because otherwise companies would resort to more illegal methods. It's sort of like the drug legalization argument: companies are going to market anyway, so we might as well focus on harm reduction. But it still feels suboptimal in this case. I guess I'd prefer if we focused on preventing misinformation rather than a strategy of appeasement.

[cLeEOGPw]

Yes and yes. That's why I often look not at reviews themselves, but about questions that asks about problems of the product. Reading the answers you can tell if a problem is real or not, removing the possibility of fame questions about non-existing problems, in case this strategy ever would become widely used.