It's a shame the ads have to either be totally horrible or totally gone. There is nothing wrong with a bit of advertising, but those who do it these days make it so in-your-face and disruptive, that they have dug their own graves. They should have gone a more subtle route, and maybe no one would think ads were such a big problem, and they could still be there. Since moving to Holland, I've actually enjoyed the ads I see on TV and Youtube; compared to American or Asian standards, where I've previously lived, here they are little short films of creative art that always make me laugh with their wit. If all ads had something positive to offer other than "buy me right now", and they could tactfully get out of your face, everybody could be happy. But that's not what happened.
I have such a hate of adverts that I don't have a television. I grew up watching and listening to the BBC, it was a culture shock moving to Holland.
The last time I was on holiday in the US it seemed like the TV shows were just interludes between adverts for expensive brands of anti-depressants and weird painkillers (which turn out to be Paracetamol but for $10 per pack instead of E1).
The movie "Fight Club" has an interesting line just after the narrator moves away from his "normal life" and into the derelict house:
By the end of the first month, I didn't miss TV.
I suspect most people don't understand how subtly addictive TV can be, as it takes at lest that month to break the habit. While I'm not sure if it's part of the same effect, there seems to be something similar for advertising: you don't realize the huge cognitive load it puts on you until you've been away from it for a significant amount of time. Running a firewall isn't free, yet the costs associated with recognizing that something is an ad which should be ignored are often assumed to be trivial.
Agreed. I grew up in a European country where advertising is regulated, you can only have one interruption per movie or TV-show. Breaks are therefore slightly longer (something like 5 minutes), but it means that you can watch a 2 hour movie with only one 5 minute break for ads, and a 5 minute break means that you can actually walk away and do something useful in the mean time.
Moving to the US was such a shock, I can't believe people here just put up with this shit, it is impossible to focus on what you're watching when it's interrupted literally every 5 minutes.
I thought the Adblock Plus approach to this was interesting, where unobtrusive (or "acceptable") ads were whitelisted by default, and they were quite clear about the criteria for this as well.[0]
But the tech community lost their collective shit and threw around loaded terms like "extortion", "mafia" and "protection scheme" (I'm not exaggerating, search for those terms on this domain), which made any nuance impossible.
I don't understand the total allergy to advertising expressed above.
I personally don't like commercial television (I hate interruptions in the middle of a show), or pop-ups that get in the way of me reading a page, or pages that are so plastered with ads that it's hard to find the content.
But when I search on Google for a particular kind of product, and it shows me ads for a new instance of that product (that doesn't yet have the organic PageRank), I'm happy to click on the ad to find out about it.
"A bit of advertising" that's well enough targeted and tastefully presented is absolutely a good thing. Every show in a TV series or movie is an advertisement for the next show or installment. Every book is an advertisement for its sequel. Every blog post is an advertisement for the next blog post. Every blog post, Facebook comment, video, or friend telling you about a product is an advertisement for that product. Many of those aren't paid advertisements, but many secretly are.
Saying that "advertising" is blanket wrong is the same as saying "learning about new things is wrong." Because how could you find out about something new if it weren't advertised somehow? What exactly are you protesting?
> "A bit of advertising" that's well enough targeted and tastefully presented is absolutely a good thing. Every show in a TV series or movie is an advertisement for the next show or installment. Every book is an advertisement for its sequel. Every blog post is an advertisement for the next blog post. Every blog post, Facebook comment, video, or friend telling you about a product is an advertisement for that product. Many of those aren't paid advertisements, but many secretly are.
If you want to include those things in your definition of advertising, fine, but let's be clear here: that's not what most people here are talking about. Ad-blockers don't block those things.
That's certainly not the definition of "advertisement" I use, either. I have no problem with individuals asking me to check out their thing. It's entirely a different thing for someone to tie this request in with a piece of content in a way that isn't easily separable, using psychologically studied manipulation techniques to invade the very chemistry of my brain, and decrease the quality of my overall experience while doing so, invading my space with their noise and light, telling me my girlfriend isn't hot enough, my clothes aren't nice enough, my penis isn't large enough, I don't make enough money. Fuck those people. There's no way that this is subtle enough that I'm going to be okay with it.
You're saying that you define "advertisements" as the things you don't like.
Google ads sometimes miss the mark, but often are for exactly what I'm searching for. Why would I condemn them along with penis enlargement ads?
And ad blockers absolutely block those things -- Google ads in particular. I just saw, in another thread, how one ad blocker would pull out an ad embedded in the page that was tasteful and relevant, just based on its css class. And the ad block developer was proud of doing this, to the point of mocking the web site creator in the same thread.
My point is that advertising is a spectrum, and you can't just "block all ads" without throwing out the good as well. And a related point is that some advertising is good.
What I was responding to was the allegation that all advertising is bad. And until you're willing to pay for the content you create, that advertising is necessary to pay for it.
I pay for Netflix and Amazon Prime to avoid commercials.
> You're saying that you define "advertisements" as the things you don't like.
No, I'm saying that talking about the definition of "advertisements" as if you're too dense to understand what people mean when they say "advertisements" in this context is a distraction.
I'm not arguing for any definition of "advertisement". I don't believe words have inherent meanings. I believe that people should try to understand what people are saying instead of being pedantic.
> Google ads sometimes miss the mark, but often are for exactly what I'm searching for. Why would I condemn them along with penis enlargement ads?
Because they're a failure of Google to provide a good service. If they're exactly what you're searching for, they should be the top search result. And if I come to Google's page looking for good search results, I definitely don't want to see an ad where I would expect to see the top search result.
> My point is that advertising is a spectrum, and you can't just "block all ads" without throwing out the good as well. And a related point is that some advertising is good.
I disagree. There is no situation where I want to be manipulated into buying a service or product I didn't specifically come to a page for. There are no good ads.
> What I was responding to was the allegation that all advertising is bad. And until you're willing to pay for the content you create, that advertising is necessary to pay for it.
All advertising is bad. I'm willing to pay for the content I consume (and I do in many cases where it's possible to do so).
>There is no situation where I want to be manipulated into buying a service or product I didn't specifically come to a page for.
Counterexamples:
* Paid placement on Google Search pages for exactly the thing you're searching for.
* Affiliate link ads for products on pages that review the product.
* Paid reviews of games, or products on Amazon: Many reviews posted on Amazon, and some professional YouTube reviewers, are paid reviews. If I'm in the review section of a web site, I am there to see a review. If I'm searching for a game review on YouTube, I want to see a review. I expect to be told that they got a product for free to do the review, but it's also the primary content. But it's also a paid ad.
Advertising is not just psychological manipulation to prefer Pepsi to Coke. It's also communication of the existence of a product to a potential audience that wants that product.
>There are no good ads.
You're using that term again, and I don't think you know what it means.
If you use the term to mean "ads are anything that I don't want," then the statement is tautological.
If you use the term to mean "ads are anything that is paid content," then that would exclude anything that is relevant but that had been paid to be included on that page. I've seen that happen many times -- that some new product is bootstrapped into organic search results via paid advertising.
What is your definition, if not the above?
And how do you expect a new product to be promoted if not through advertising? You don't just grow organic search results by magic, and waiting for word of mouth to be enough to promote a product is a pretty sure way to kill a company. Even advertising by getting a product placement on blogs tends to be practically worthless in terms of conversion numbers. Are you just saying "no new products are necessary, I'm fine with what I have"?
> Paid placement on Google Search pages for exactly the thing you're searching for.
That's a perfect example of confirmation bias. You're ignoring all the times that fails to justify the times it succeeds. This doesn't change the fact that the heuristic is broken: I don't want the content that the creators paid to be the top result, I want the top result to be what I searched for. If those happen to be the same, that doesn't justify the crappy heuristic. And if the ad produces better results than Google, that's a major fail on Google's part: it still doesn't prove that "whoever paid for the space and vaguely resembles what I want" is the heuristic I want used to produce the top of my Google search results.
> Affiliate link ads for products on pages that review the product.
There are so many things wrong with this. This sort of advertising manipulates reviews and makes them untrustworthy, and it means that only products which can pay for affiliate links get reviewed.
> Paid reviews of games, or products on Amazon: Many reviews posted on Amazon, and some professional YouTube reviewers, are paid reviews. If I'm in the review section of a web site, I am there to see a review. If I'm searching for a game review on YouTube, I want to see a review. I expect to be told that they got a product for free to do the review, but it's also the primary content. But it's also a paid ad.
Paid bias is exactly not what I want when I am looking for a review.
> Advertising is not just psychological manipulation to prefer Pepsi to Coke. It's also communication of the existence of a product to a potential audience that wants that product.
What you're not understanding here is that ads don't add to my knowledge. Just because I don't see ads for 10 products doesn't mean I'm not going to find 10 products I like. It just means I'm going to find different products. And since I'll be finding products using my own toolset rather than whatever crap advertisers smear in my face, I'll get better results. Ads don't make it easier to find products, they add noise to the signal and make it harder to find products.
In short: there's no shortage of information. Ads are just crappy information.
>> There are no good ads.
> You're using that term again, and I don't think you know what it means.
You're being intentionally dense. I'm talking about "stuff that ad blockers can block". If you want to hand-wave and argue about the definition of words as if they have an inherent meaning and as if you aren't intelligent enough to get what I'm saying from context, you're going to be talking to yourself; I'm not going to have a pedantic argument.
> And how do you expect a new product to be promoted if not through advertising? You don't just grow organic search results by magic, and waiting for word of mouth to be enough to promote a product is a pretty sure way to kill a company. Even advertising by getting a product placement on blogs tends to be practically worthless in terms of conversion numbers. Are you just saying "no new products are necessary, I'm fine with what I have"?
This is true now, but it wouldn't be true if we could get rid of advertisers completely and only have word of mouth and organic search results. The reason these very good tools don't work is because advertisers have broken them.
OF COURSE I want new products. But I want ones that become popular because they're good, not because someone paid to shove them in my face when I was looking for something else. Not only do ads not provide that, they make it harder for me to find the good stuff because they clutter up the information stream with crap.
>OF COURSE I want new products. But I want ones that become popular because they're good, not because someone paid to shove them in my face when I was looking for something else.
You want new products, and you want organic search results, but you don't want ads to promote a product.
You just want heuristics that can determine what's a good product (or other search result) and show it to you even when no one has ever seen or evaluated the product before. (If everyone blocked all ads and all spam, how would you bootstrap a new product? Spamming bloggers?)
That's called a nondeterministic algorithm. An algorithm that magically "does the right thing."
>This is true now, but it wouldn't be true if we could get rid of advertisers completely and only have word of mouth and organic search results.
Because no one will ever be able to exploit those magical heuristics you're positing above.
Waiting for word of mouth to promote a product is equally magical thinking, unless you have unlimited money to burn. If someone has put up the investment to create a new product, they don't have time to wait for potentially years for the product to end up popular. You need to fail or succeed quickly.
Just developing a product sometimes needs enough eyes to get the feedback you need to improve your product to be useful, to tune the product to be what people need.
You want the awesome new products, but only after other people have vetted them for you. Other people who have looked at and evaluated product they've found through ads. Which you don't want to look at. Read about Kant's Categorical Imperative to understand my opinion of that behavior.
Advertising has approximately the same "context switch" problem[1] that programmers often complain about. By definition, an advertisement is not the thing I'm currently involved with.
At best, a even a "tasteful" ad requires you to
0. Interrupt whatever you were doing.
1. Parse text or recognize the basic features of an image.
2. Run whatever heuristics you use to decide if the parsed data is an ad.
3. Try to skip past the ad, either temporally or spatially.
4. *Continue* to monitor the ad until you recognize that it no longer
impedes the thing you interrupted in #0.
These are complex behaviors that have non-trivial costs. The only reason you don't see those costs some of the time is because you've invested a lot of time and effort learning these skills. If you abstain from all advertising for a few months, the parsing costs will become much more obvious.
> every
If your definition of "advert" is so broad it includes everything, it's not a particularly useful definition. Ad blockers (and this discussion in general) are talking about ads that are not the content the user requested; otherwise ad blockers would ban the entire page.
>Advertising has approximately the same "context switch" problem[1] that programmers often complain about. By definition, an advertisement is not the thing I'm currently involved with.
No, it doesn't.
A good Google ad will be about the exact thing you're searching for. And yet ad blockers will aggressively attempt to block every such ad.
>Ad blockers (and this discussion in general) are talking about ads that are not the content the user requested; otherwise ad blockers would ban the entire page.
They block Google ads, and so are blocking content that can be useful to the user.
Google ads are often actively malicious to the user.
For example it was the case for a very long time that if you searched for 'firefox' on Google the ad at the top of the results would take you to a site offering downloads of firefox that came bundled with malware[1].
So it's quite possible for Google ads to claim to be "the exact thing you're searching for", but to actually be tricking you. Thus the user needs to think carefully before clicking any Google ad. This is true of search results too of course, but it's vastly harder to game the search results to get your malware into the top spot for a term like firefox, compared to just buying up the adwords inventory, so the chance of getting scammed is much lower.
Google ads are not just text ads of course. Their display ads include many of those big fake download buttons that you find on any software download site. Yet another minefield for users that makes a simple task into a battle of wits and requires constant vigilance. The biggest illustration I had of that was using a fresh Windows VM last year to download some Windows software, and falling for one of those fake download button adsense ads. The reason being that I normally use an ad blocker and I wasn't mentally prepared for the challenge of finding the download link on the page that wasn't a landmine.
Given that Google were happy to serve up ads for malware for years, despite being told about it frequently, I have absolutely no sympathy for them, and I would recommend that everybody I know uses an ad blocker to block ads on Google search results pages.
Who cares? I don't want sites that "bootstrap popularity", I want sites with quality content.
To quote XKCD[1]: "I never trust anyone who's more excited about success than about doing the thing they want to be successful at." If you're more worried about getting your content onto the front page of Google than about having content that's good enough to end up on the front page of Google, you're never going to produce anything I care about.
EDIT: The question "How exactly do you bootstrap popularity?" is the most repugnant, repulsive thing on this thread. I can at least empathize with people who are trying to create content and now have to find a different way to fund it. But you're literally just trying to achieve popularity without doing anything that deserves to be popular. It's people like you that I'm trying to avoid when I use an ad blocker. Your goals are diametrically opposed to mine. I don't want anything to do with whatever crap you want to shove in my face. I want the internet to be a place for people to share art and information that helps push humanity forward, and you want to add noise to the signal. Your small-minded profiteering is literally holding humanity back, and I can't wait for you to go out of business.
I think you've ascribed more malicious intent to the person above you than is fair. Repugnant and repulsive are huge stretches for many genuine businesses starting out.
Let's say you're a plumber in a city. You have a family at home you need to support. You'd like to rank top ten for "plumber in cityx" but you're competing with hundreds of alternatives, including directories and so on.
How do you demonstrate your ability for a decent chance at ranking well? Door knock to get early customers and then rely on word of mouth or reviews? That's advertising with a shotgun approach and could intrude on people when they're at home with their family. Letter box drop? Advertising.
AdWords and decent contextual advertising not an unreasonable option at getting in front of people already interested in your service.
> I think you've ascribed more malicious intent to the person above you than is fair. Repugnant and repulsive are huge stretches for many genuine businesses starting out.
The person wants to bypass actual quality and compete by advertising instead of on merits. They're changing the rules in a bad way, and I don't much care about their intent: they're screwing up the internet and it's repugnant even if they don't intend it to be.
> Let's say you're a plumber in a city. You have a family at home you need to support. You'd like to rank top ten for "plumber in cityx" but you're competing with hundreds of alternatives, including directories and so on.
So either you're not a good enough plumber to be working on your own, or you've worked with an experienced plumber and have built up your reputation that way.
You're talking about this in the context where people need to manipulate their rankings to compete, but the only reason they need to manipulate their rankings is because their competition is manipulating their rankings. I'm saying I would rather remove manipulation from the system and let people compete on their actual merits. Ads are the problem, not the solution.
>The person wants to bypass actual quality and compete by advertising instead of on merits.
The person was me, and you're completely mistaken about what I said, much less the intent. "Actual quality" is not an objective metric, and many ads are promoting new products that are high quality.
>So either you're not a good enough plumber to be working on your own, or you've worked with an experienced plumber and have built up your reputation that way.
I call BS. You've obviously no real experience promoting a product or service from scratch.
You could have 30 years of experience as a plumber and go out on your own as an independent contractor and you'd be starting from ZERO. Not from experience. You can't just take your former employer's customers; that's unethical and typically against your employment contract. So you have to find new customers under a new brand.
And it's arguably worse for promoting other products or services today. I had 20 years of experience when I struck out and started my own company again; that experience opened doors when I made personal connections to work with people, but it meant crap for my indie game release. Most popular games would fail without being propped up by advertising (and some would be less valuable to their players if they weren't as popular -- I'm thinking of games where you play against others, and so the more people who play, the more valuable the game is to everyone. Standard network effect).
>You're talking about this in the context where people need to manipulate their rankings to compete
Ranking in Google isn't magic. It's an algorithm based (in large part) on popularity. You're basically saying no new business or product ever has the right to exist, because anything that isn't popular now has no right to become popular.
How exactly do you expect something to become popular quickly enough for a company not to go out of business without getting the product in front of enough consumers?
> The person was me, and you're completely mistaken about what I said, much less the intent. "Actual quality" is not an objective metric, and many ads are promoting new products that are high quality.
And many aren't. The question is: what heuristic better matches the average person's definition of "actual quality".
Let's look at this as if you were approaching this as a fresh, new problem: you're trying to design a heuristic that finds products that most closely match what people want. You'd have to be an idiot to think that "products that paid me to rank them higher" is a good heuristic. Even very naive heuristics would be better.
Paid advertising serves advertisers and people creating crappy products who can artificially inflate their image. It doesn't serve consumers or people creating quality products.
> Ranking in Google isn't magic. It's an algorithm based (in large part) on popularity. You're basically saying no new business or product ever has the right to exist, because anything that isn't popular now has no right to become popular.
No, I'm saying that advertising breaks popularity as a good metric. If it weren't for ads, organic popularity would be a good metric of quality. But advertising allows people to manipulate popularity in their favor without actually providing quality.
> How exactly do you expect something to become popular quickly enough for a company not to go out of business without getting the product in front of enough consumers?
I don't. I think that creating something good takes time. Why do you think people are entitled to a get-rich-quick scheme?
Exactly - I have worked with countless new small businesses starting out on the web, all with genuine products and services, and all of them find it really challenging to gain traction.
Often Google's model of SEO with the importance placed on backlinks and unique content does little but serve the plumber who does less actual plumbing and more trading links or writing keyphrase-laden blogs or whatever else.
> Exactly - I have worked with countless new small businesses starting out on the web, all with genuine products and services, and all of them find it really challenging to gain traction.
There are two sides to this coin. You could argue that they have a hard time gaining traction because they aren't advertising. But I'm arguing that they are having a hard time gaining traction because other people are advertising.
> Often Google's model of SEO with the importance placed on backlinks and unique content does little but serve the plumber who does less actual plumbing and more trading links or writing keyphrase-laden blogs or whatever else.
Often your model of advertising does little but serve the plumber who does less actual plumbing and more buying ads.
Just because Google also fails doesn't mean that ads are a successful way to find information. Ads and Google's search can both be bad heuristics.
Do you honestly think Google's rankings for "plumber in cityx" are a decent reflection of which plumbers are actually best? Or just which ones spend more time on the net than under a sink?
Or maybe which ones got online back when SEO was trivial. (I once ranked #2 in my country for "make money" with a 5-minute site almost completely devoid of useful info.) Or when keyphrase domains dominated.
For many industries, AdWords is just another layer in the arms race completely detached from the actual product/service.
> Do you honestly think Google's rankings for "plumber in cityx" are a decent reflection of which plumbers are actually best? Or just which ones spend more time on the net than under a sink?
Do you honestly think ads are a decent reflection of which plumbers are actually best? Or just which ones spend more time on advertising than under a sink?
At least when I search, Google is trying to provide me quality search results. I'm not arguing it's perfect: it's obviously not. But ads aren't even trying to serve my interests, they're trying to serve the interests of advertisers.
Well, I don't have a magic machine that allows me to suss out the intent of someone when they make a recommendation.
However, if the recommendation is not truly heartfelt or organic, if the purveyor of the recommendation is a specialist not in the domain of the product but in the domain of making recommendations, it's an "advertisement" and not just a casual recommendation.
And I would prefer a life of haphazard discovery and missing out on a few good products, than a life of having to battle salesmen trying to butt into every aspect of my experience.
Saying that "advertising" is blanket wrong is saying that becoming an expert on selling things regardless of what the things actually are is wrong. It may be a bit of an old-fashioned idea in our age of professional specialization and whatnot, but I stand by it.
Great point. People need to define which ads they are talking about during these sorts of arguments, as "ads" can be thought of as any sort of content that spreads information about a new product or idea as you point out.
I don't think it's a great point, I think it's a point that shows no understanding of context. This thread is about ad blockers. Ad blockers don't block blog posts, books, or any of the things he brought up. If you know what "ads" means here, it's not because people need to define what ads they are talking about, it's because you're not paying attention.
