>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.
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"?