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by nileshtrivedi 4726 days ago
> (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... )
1 comments
mfjordvald 4726 days ago
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.

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nileshtrivedi 4726 days ago
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.
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mfjordvald 4726 days ago
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.

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