Thus, there is a monetary cost if the advertiser succeeds. Google is just a middleman, taking a cut of those prospective sales.

The sad part of online ads is that the internet allows an advertiser, with Google's help, to potentially annoy hundreds of millions of people in order to make some small number of sales. The "solution" to this inefficiency is "targeting" and "stickiness", and that is where the whole business becomes far too intrusive and counterproductive.

In the earlier days of the internet people knew ads were not what they wanted to see on the network. I remember the first ad someone posted to Usenet. IIRC it was an immigration lawyer. Brin and Page originally said when they announced Google in 1998 that they wanted to offer an alternative to a black box web search engine that is funded by advertising.

The only thing that has changed since then is that new users are less critical, they have no idea what the internet is like without the advertising. Imagine if every household had to participate in an AC Nielson study just to watch TV. There are generations of users now that have no idea what those times were like, when people expected privacy and there were boundaries. They cannot fully appreciate what has been lost because they never experienced it to begin with. It is not too late to reclaim what is being stolen.

This sentence suddenly made me see all online ads as essentially modern, “intelligent” robocalls at scale.

As much as we like to imagine our minds to be impenetrable bastions of rationality, they are not. We can easily be enticed and manipulated to do things we wouldn't otherwise do, to see things differently than we otherwise would, to consider things we wouldn't consider, and all of that is exactly what the advertisers are paying for.

I don't think advertising does work well on everybody nor does it have to. Maybe not even half of us need to be susceptible for it to be as profitable as it is.

I have noticed some people are much more susceptible to suggestion than others. These people are probably responsible for a disproportionate amount of commercial profits and probably more likely to be taken in by paid political campaigning.

Furthermore, I reckon if we could hold a mirror up to many of these people they might reconsider their behavior (it probably would work better than shouting at them at thanksgiving or over Facebook).

And maybe abolishing democracy

Political manipulation ads, helping an authoritarian rise to power.

But ads for buying what I just searched for: "buy new running shoes", aren't like that -- they can be helpful instead :-). It's mainly social network ads like on Facebook that are dangerous for society?

From the article:

> I think advertising is positive

It's both? Ads are different from ads, just like different things one can eat are different, like potatoes (running shoe ads) versus poisonous mushrooms (nation states abolishing democracy in the US via political manipulation on Facebook)

I looked at my competitors and saw that most of them were obviously shilling for the company that was paying them the most, which was never the best. I figured by being the most honest I could be the most trusted and win out.

The trouble is, the best companies would rely upon word of mouth. Promoting them wouldn't get me paid a dime. Honesty would benefit them, but not me.

Getting traffic, meanwhile, I realized would cost me money.

That's when I realized that the only way to get a non negative margin in that industry was to sacrifice your objectivity (which is what everyone did).

Theoretically you could charge users for this I guess, like Which? magazine does but I couldn't see a straightforward route to that point that wouldn't involve burning a lot of capital I didn't have. The chicken/egg problem rose its ugly head again.

I gave up soon after.

The competing sites would tend to either pretend that these companies don't exist, or if that wasn't possible coz the brand was strong would subtly try to indicate that they weren't all that hot compared to [site that pays a LOT for new customers].

I don't mean to suggest that the challenge was insurmountable, but I couldn't figure out a way to make honesty pay, particularly given the high cost of acquiring traffic.

Moreover, if you acquired some sort of trust (which many parties did) or a high spot in google through an aged domain or something, the incentive to exploit it for profit would inevitably take over.

It was clearly something users cared about coz they complained about it, but there was something akin to a tragedy of the commons going on.

These market dynamics are fairly common across many industries. I don't think the one I chose was particularly special.

Consulting or something might have been possible but at that point it's basically giving up and joining an entirely different industry - which is what I ultimately did.

I really really tried to make honesty pay but I couldn't.

Besides, how could he prove his honesty either way?

I guess he could arrange commission with all companies, hope that his favourite brand isn't also the one paying the most, and then disclose all the commissions.

I think so too

> hope that his favourite brand isn't also the one paying the most, and then disclose all the commissions.

I'm thinking that if the site visitors have a way to see that usually the site promotes other brands than the highest paying, then that'd be good enough. At the same time, why would they trust the disclosure info :-)

Another thought: if his/her favorite brand didn't pay enough, s/he could just disclose the commissions, but not write any review. (To encourage that brand to pay more)

Those sneaker ads probably aren't destroying our democracy[1], they're just costing the society things that are hard to quantify. They induce me to buy what's most profitable to the sellers, not what's best for me. They take away business from actually helpful resources, and from those who don't advertise on Google.

[1] They are enabling the existence of a search monopoly (along with other factors), so you know, "probably" is the strongest word I'd go with here.

The whole system incentivises ads that match the intent of the user, any deviation from this is extremely difficult and not profitable for the advertiser in most cases.

But if the user buys from the ad, that doesn't say anything about whether the ad was useful (or counter-productive) to the user, it only means that this transaction was profitable to Google and the advertiser.

Ads not matching the search query are not the issue. They are neither profitable nor helpful, so you can't use that criterion to distinguish the two goals.

I’m pretty sure there are better criteria for those results than the amount of money paid to end up in that list.

But alas, that’s not what modern search engines use, because they are advertisers first and foremost. Not reputable search providers anymore.

A product you pay for with your attention has a voracious appetite for your attention. The more you use it, the more valuable it is to the company that made it. It would be best if you were using it All The Time. It would be best if it was incredibly addictive so you would never get tired of it and move on to something else. It would be best if the maker of this product could measure how much of your time they were capturing so they could make sure to capture even more in the future.

And in fact, if you look at time use studies, we pretty much spend all of our waking lives using a phone, tv or computer. There is literally no time left, so an advertising company is trying to invent a self driving car so you can keep using your phone during your commute, the last sliver of waking life left unconquered. Our dreams will surely be next.

The sweet spot is likely a little different for everyone, and is whatever amount of attention keeps them subscribed, but no more.

Additionally, I have a customer-vendor relationship with Netflix. With a random ad-supported website or something like Facebook, I'm the product, not the customer. I would much much much rather be a customer than a product.

All else being equal, given a choice between a change that makes people watch more minutes per month or less, Netflix will always choose more.

Does Netflix license content on a per play basis? All the info over the years I’ve read, although not official, indicate they were paying the content owners a flat amount for a certain time period.

For example

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/04/business/media/netflix-fr...

I used to believe that. Nope, they want all your attention all the time. If they lose it, another streaming service might gain some market share, and the stock price will lose billions.

So while Netflix wants all your TV time, they derive no extra benefits if all your time us TV time. This is absolutely not true of advertising supported services that make more from you the more time you spend.

"Most" means "not all".

For example, Slack is a growth focused company that uses a subscription model for revenue and has no incentive to maximize time spent in their App.

You are correct that advertising, microtransactions and gambling lead to very similar business model incentives.

There's the aesthetic cost. If I see an ad on or near a nicely designed or produced website or video, it immediately detracts from the visual appeal.

There's the annoyance cost. I'm personally immediately irritated and annoyed when I see or hear an ad. It affects my mood and my impression of whatever I'm trying to look at or listen to. (I despise it when I'm away from my computer and have a podcast on which ends and instantly transitions to some loud peppy ad for a fast food restaurant and I have to interrupt whatever I'm doing to walk over and shut the thing off.)

For some, there's the cost of paying for a product or service that an ad misled them about. They may pay more than they should have or get something which is portrayed a certain way in an ad which doesn't hold up in reality.

There's the psychological and sociological cost. Ads (especially in video or audio form) present a certain clinical and biased world frame. People usually talk and act in unnatural or "perfect" ways. A young person exposed to, say, hundreds of ads per week and thousands of ads per year may eventually start to subconsciously find that frame normal and expected. Even though they know they're ads rather than non-fiction, I think those things can potentially seep in in some cases.

There are the conflicts of interest and the effects caused by suspicion of conflicts of interest. If I see a "sponsored search result" or "sponsored article", I expect that the source will be less likely to show things which might propose a competing narrative or say anything negative about the sponsor. "Okay, I can't trust this source for anything related to [X], now."

As a corollary to the annoyance cost, there's the fakeness/sincerity dissonance cost. If I'm reading an article or listening to a podcast that's presented as, or may very well be, sincere and truthful, it's a little bit jarring for it to be interrupted with some fake, artificial, marketer-crafted bullshit with superlatives about how [X] will change your life and is the best thing ever. A little hard to take the rest seriously at that point.

I feel like I could list at least ten more. From a purely subjective and personal perspective, I don't even mind the egregious privacy implications as much as all these other things. I just fucking hate seeing and hearing ads.

This is a big one. Something being free with advertisements doesn't mean that we're not paying for it, just that the way we're paying for it is hidden. Companies don't pay Google money for altruistic reasons, they're paying because they can earn more.

If you think about it, we're actually likely to pay more when we pay through ads. Google wants X dollars. In a subscription model, we pay X. In an ad model, a company gives Google X, because they think they can make X + P (profits). So they get us to buy a product we don't need, and in order to recoup their loss we need to be paying the manufacturing cost M (we'll pretend other costs like transportation and retail markups are included in here as well), plus X, plus P. Otherwise the advertising isn't worth it. Instead of us paying X to Google to us their products, now we're paying X+P+M for their products in a very roundabout way, and then calling it free.

Banner blindness. It's been proven that people have become used to ignoring banner ads. Their eyes jump over them as soon as they're recognized. Since there may be false positives, this habit has implications for user interface design: an actual user interface element that looks like a banner ad will be ignored by most people. On the other hand, sites have also begun to style their ads exactly like their main content in order to make it harder for users to distinguish them.

For example: “we’re rolling out a new tool. It takes only fifteen minutes to learn!” when 100,000 people have to learn it.

Developers working in advertising aren’t just exhibiting this disorder; they are consumed by it.

Time is the most valuable commodity anyone possesses. Stealing it is diabolical.

That is, you are incentivized to significantly reduce the pleasure obtained from your product, as the attention demanded by ads competes with the attention of your readers/viewers.

But if you are selling a good for money, while you are also incentivized to keep raising prices until the marginal cost of the product is equal to the marginal benefit, the money you charge doesn't reduce the quality of the product. A beautiful car may be painful to buy, but it's still a beautiful car. There is no such thing as a beautiful website with ads, the product is intentionally made awful.

And that situation of destroying value creates really weird long and short-run equilibria. For example, ads incentivize the kind of products for which attention is more easily shared: you wont find a lot of deep-think pieces that are ad-supported because the ads are too distracting. Instead, you find a lot of short-attention span pieces as these work better with ads. Thus the staccatto assaults of 9 weird tricks to do X, where you read a weird trick and then look at a couple of ads and go to the next weird trick. You can feel the presence of the ads in the work itself. In the Old TV era, episodes would encounter these cliff-hangers when the detective walks into a room, points a gun, you hear the sound of a woman screaming, and then it cuts to a commercial. They needed to create this peak of interest so you'd stick around to see what was in the room. But that peak also artificially disrupted the story. Online, all that is compressed into a few seconds of recognition, it is constant disruption.

In terms of long-run equilibria, there is this ratchet effect: As people flee the ad-sponsored world the ones who remain are more insentitive to ads and so the number of ads increases. In other words, the quality of the writing gets worse over time, in an ad-supported eco-system.

So no, ads are not just an alternate way of paying for content, they are a way of shaping content, and for the worse.

I don't like these things at all, but they're something. With an ad, you're solely siphoning off a portion of my infinitesimally fleeting existence. It's like getting stuck in traffic, except deliberate and with malice aforethought.

For that and several other reasons, I strongly prefer independent solo journalists (or very small independent self-operating teams) rather than ones that work for publications. I think Substack and Patreon are far better solutions here than advertising is, for example.

In other comments people have mentioned YouTube subscriptions as being an alternative, it really isn't - OK, you don't see any adverts, but they're still harvesting and selling you. That a privately owned corporation is allowed to read your messages and sell what they find to the highest bidder is vile and honestly makes me wonder how we got here.

I quit advertising after only a couple of years because it blackened my soul. If I was helping to harvest people's personal lives for private profit I can only imagine it would have been worse.

> I used to work in more trad advertising, so my question wasn't so much an objection to working in advertising itself...

(Not commenting on whether they should be given a pass, just noting that GP really did seem to be doing so.)

It seems to me that YouTube and many of the ad-supported services out there provide broad benefits to people, and I am swayed by OPs point that a regressively priced business model which restricts these benefits to the global rich is a greater disservice.

Then, we go on to ads. Ads charge everyone a similar amount of bandwidth, attention, etc. But you know what? Some people who have more resources or knowhow will understand how to block ads. And they probably won't be paying by the MB on a crappy cell phone plan such that they spend their money on bandwidth to load the ads, while the content they want to read languishes below the fold of the ads and they struggle to navigate to it on their crappy device struggling to render ads.

The costs are more abstract than when paying in actual dollars, but surely we can recognize that the cost of ad supported web pages is also not felt evenly by everyone. As a privileged software engineer, I can guarantee you that the impact of "paying" for things with ads is felt far less by me than many others. That is regressive in my opinion.

Keep in mind people are still paying in actual dollars. Companies spend money on advertisement because they want something in return, and that comes from the people being targeted from the ads. I wouldn't be surprised if the poor end up paying much more than the rich in the end. It might even be more regressive than a subscription model.

Also worth noting that their are other negative externalities as well. Health for example - the poor tend to have a much worse diet that leads to bad health conditions, and there's likely a large connection between this and the advertisements for unhealthy products.

Sure! Thanks for asking. One idea I like is this: you pay a small, fixed subscription on top of your internet bill. This amount is then given proportionally to the services you visit.

This is nice for several reasons: even a small amount (~3-5$) gives a similar or higher revenue for content creators than ads do (a very rough back-of-the-envelope estimate based on youtube CPM). Plus, there's no problem with the friction of paying for things: you pay the same, regardless of watching 1 or 1000 videos (the netflix model, the cable tv model, heck any subscription model). Plus of course: no ads :)

Why are ads the way to generate revenue? Like I don't care about buying a coffee grinder. Ads not only help contribute to needless purchases but also directly affect the environment cause of that.

Prior to Google's purchase they were running at a massive loss, burning investment money. That's not working by any normal definition.

[0]: You can see what those looked like here https://www.versionmuseum.com/history-of/youtube-website. Youtube added its first advertisements in mid 2007.

tell me how you want to pay for 500h++ of video uploaded to a platform every minute

If I sound judgy there, note that you are condemning a lot of people. Not me, actually, but I still take issue because the basis of your condemnation doesn't even make sense to me...

I think ads are a decent way to pay for a service and I prefer targeted ads to generic ads, especially since they are more effective (and if the idea is to pay for the service you are using, that is relevant).

So the issue is the data, and so the fact that Google has never sold or lost their user's data - you seem to imply otherwise - is extremely relevant, and is why I'm OK with them storing my data. In this industry that is very rare, and yet you consider Google the worst - I'm having a hard time squaring that.

[I work at Google too, not on ads though] Could you clarify what you mean by this.

A natural reading of these two things ("reading your messages" and "selling to the highest bidder") aren't true. There are lots of things you could mean (reading messages could mean reading emails, reading comments on Youtube, reading hangouts messages, and harvesting that data to sell ads) So I'm curious what things Google does that you mean by that.

> you don't see any adverts, but they're still harvesting and selling you

This is concretely untrue, even by the stretchy definitions. Google (and generally most ad companies) don't sell your data. Sometimes people mean sell your eyeballs, in that they gather data and then use it to sell your attention, and some people find that just as bad.

But if you aren't seeing ads, they're not even doing that. There's no one they're selling anything of yours to. Not your data, not your attention, nothing.

Does Google collect information about what websites you visit (via Chrome / Google Analytics / Google account cookies) and what search queries you make and what search results you click on and provide or sell that information to advertisers in some shape or form? (Where advertisers includes not just third parties but also Google / Google subsidiaries themselves.)

If so, that's definitely "harvesting and selling you", IMO. I'm not sure what other form of "harvesting and selling you" would be possible, even?

>A natural reading of these two things ("reading your messages" and "selling to the highest bidder") aren't true. There are lots of things you could mean (reading messages could mean reading emails, reading comments on Youtube, reading hangouts messages, and harvesting that data to sell ads) So I'm curious what things Google does that you mean by that.

I assume one of the things they mean is reading Gmail email messages and showing you ads based on the contents of those email messages. My understanding is that Google indeed isn't doing this - but that they did do exactly that up until 2017, which wasn't that long ago.

If you're using "provide" in the common sense, then no I don't think so. No one gets a "Josh is a hackernews reader" report. I just get ads for things that appeal to HN users.

There are arguments that you can use this for sort of targeted attacks to get more info, for example if you have a website and can correlate an ad request with a username, you can then put together that "joshuamorton" is interested in things HN users like. But I'm not sure how real those kinds of attacks are (I think a major limiting factor is that they're expensive, since if your goal is to only gain information, you have to compete but also never win a bid, and that's very difficult and like in practice its just cheaper to do your own tracking).

> My understanding is that Google indeed isn't doing this - but that they did do exactly that up until 2017, which wasn't that long ago.

Yes but my recollection is that even before then (at least for some time), gmail data was siloed. It was only used to serve ads in gmail, so this was very much a first party only sort of thing (same as if I run a forum and serve interest based ads on different parts of that forum).

It's just much hard to explain that than to explain "not used at all", so we stopped entirely.

I can definitely feel this - I worked in mobile gaming for a little while. The camaraderie was amazing, I keep in touch with a number of coworkers from that job - the company was terrible (like gaming companies tend to be) but the fact that I was devoting part of my life to building a system I knew was deeply immoral and taking advantage of people's addiction is what pushed me away from it in the end.

I really try to avoid judging people over their career or life choices since nobody is as simple as a statistic, but advertising and mobile gaming is where I break this rule - I definitely don't judge marketers as categorically evil, but the vocation is poisonous. In the article the author calls out that...

> One answer is that I'm earning to give: I give half of what I earn to the most effective charities I can find, and the more I earn the more I can give.

As a response to people asking why they're in marketing and I think this is a really bad sign. If you need to justify your work by calling out the charity you're doing with the earnings then I think you, internally, have identified that what you're doing is causing harm to society.

I understand and sympathize with the fact that brands with poor visibility can struggle to break into established markets but these positives seem quite limited when stacked up against over-consumption, addiction exploitation, decreased general attentiveness, a weakening of what objective truths are and leaving a gigantic security hole in our society for disinformation to easily penetrate deep into folks' hearts and minds.

Advertising, at it's most basic, is trying to change the minds of consumers - you're attempting to take someone who is thinking wrong and make them think right - where right is the mindset that leads them to purchase your product. I think that advertising is really an emotional manipulation at its core.

There is probably a distinction between purely informational marketing that's done to increase general awareness of your brand and marketing that's targeting increasing the chances that an uninterested party will impulse buy your product (the later is what can lead to the over consumption of high sugar products and spur on obesity). I, honestly, couldn't draw a line between the two so if we have to throw out the baby with the bathwater so be it.

I've tried to write this up with a calm head and in an even manner, but my apologies in advance if it's too strong - it's a subject I personally have extremely strong feelings on.

You're misunderstanding the author's intent here. He's saying he works so that he can donate to charities. That part of his answer would remain no matter what type of work he did. Charity is important to him. He was giving a large fraction of his income before he ever started working on ads.

I think that because you believe ads are harmful, you're assuming that the author must also internally feel that ads are harmful. That may be your own bias. What seems obvious to you may not seem true to others. The author explained why he feels ads are a net benefit to society (and also acknowledged some negatives of ads).

I could say that I specifically play board games because I need to repay my student loan - maybe board games are a slightly more economic choice than playing MMORPGs but these two qualities are only tangentially related and, if I made that statement - you'd probably be awfully curious why I thought playing board games was a tactic specifically related to paying off my student loan.

I definitely do feel they're harmful so while I'll try to remain neutral in logic I won't downplay the fact that I'm very much not emotionally neutral - but that sort of a statement specifically rings false to me, it sounds like someone trying to make an excuse.

He's not donating to charity out of guilt from working on ads. We know this because he was giving large amounts to charity well before he started work on ads. His behaviour hasn't changed.

I understand you're interpreting it as, "Really, I'm just doing this (distasteful) job to make money." That isn't how the author meant it. It's more like, "Ultimately, the reason I work at any job is to make money. But here's why I think this job in particular makes the world better."

I'm curious though. If you didn't think he was working for the money, and you also think he feels that ads are bad, then why do you think he chose that job?

a user makes an http request to a domain. the current accepted response is to send back ads and trackers, pillage and extract as much value from that user as possible, immediately. as a user I feel I should be prompted:

"this site is funded by ads. by continuing, you agree to the following..."

its just a sort of zero permission adulteration of the web - guaranteed ad revenue from a click begets more crap clickbait content and so on. in fact, perhaps ads and tracking mechanisms should be treated by browsers the same as zero click JS malware. no content til the user agrees to have ads delivered to them.

i get it, of course prompting a user would create friction and decrease revenue. its the user's machine, data. they are entitled to the optionality of rejecting an HTTP response if it contains unwanted/unwelcome crap.

The big problem is that most people do not use a browser that is truly their agent--they use a browser that is an agent of an advertising company. The result is entirely predictable: Chrome acts in the best interests of its client, and loads the ads and trackers.

If we want to change the status quo with regards to advertising, we don't need to change the technology at all: we have to change the way people see a web browser. We need to help people to make the paradigm shift from "Chrome is how you consume content on the internet" to "a browser is an agent that acts on my behalf in the digital realm".

I don't care one bit if ad supported sites just vanish, no need for an alternative. Yes please, clean up the web. What's left is the stuff that is worth enough for people to pay for.

I bucketed the responses to something along the lines of greater than $1, $.75, $.5, $.25, $.01 or nothing.

What I was (secretly) hoping was that people would be willing to pay something like a cent for a page view, since I was building a prototype for a more user friendly anti-adblocker, seeing that many websites started to deploy their own back then, and hating that there was no middle ground.

However, what I found was that people were unwilling to pay anything for a page view. I think the author actually mentions this as a failed alternative model.

Point being it really seems like people have decided/agreed that they prefer the ad model to anything else. Even if it means that the cost of serving ads is actually higher (in terms of bandwidth) than what it would cost to just pay a cent or two cents or whatever for pageviews.

I'm not sure how you mean this but what you say comes dangerously close to implying that people want ads. That may be true if you force them into a false dichotomy (pay or have ads).

I think it's more just that people don't want to pay. If it's on the web, they read it for free, period. If it's not on the web, then it isn't and they don't read it. If you look at it from this perspective, ads aren't even part of the discussion. I think people prefer the "someone pays for it" model to anything else.

The dichotomy is only real if you construct a hypothetical scenario about some ad-or-paywall site that absolutely must exist and that people absolutely want to read and for which no alternative can emerge if that site stops existing.

I see it often, but it is honestly the most laughably selfish opinion to believe that one should be entitled to the internet as it exists today, but also not pay directly or indirectly to be able to use those services.

Which is true. If its not on the web, then I don't read it, and don't miss it - by and large.

A huge number of people seem to believe that 95% of the internet is of any value - yet the existence of HN itself shows that's not true. This whole site exists to turn "the internet" into a selection of high quality links, and even then the front page is maybe 20% interesting to me on a day by day basis.

So how much of the internet matters to me? 6 links out of 30, selected by a community which completely avoids all the "major" sites.

This is especially true if we want high quality content. So the dichotomy is only false if you assume people are willing to accept "stop consuming content" which, by and large, they aren't.

Seems to me that creators are getting a dreadful deal from the current set up and that FB etc are the ones gaining massively.

Clough42 for example is a software engineer, and makes metalworking & 3D-printing videos that I enjoy watching; he certainly gets ad money (O(100ks) subscribers) but I'd guess he spends more on equipment, tools, etc. (and would despite the income) - certainly if you counted lost earnings from 'he could be doing contract work instead' - because that's not the point, it's a hobby, and a secondary hobby is putting it on YouTube for me (and millions of others) to enjoy.

(I'm sort of hesitant to single someone out - especially someone who's probably on HN, heh - but I that's the impression I get anyway. If it's not totally true for him I'm sure it is for others.)

As for quality, it's all opinion, I guess, but the only form that seems to have gotten better recently is prestige television, but even there I'd say it so far peaked around 2010. Film and pop music peaked in the 60s and 70s. Instrumental music, literature, and painting peaked centuries ago. Artists have created perfectly good art for as long as humans have existed without the need to track their consumers private behavior to develop targeted ad profiles.

> That was fine for centuries...

I always assumed that this was an artifact of recording technology: if you can record a movie or music, then you can have a handful of actors and musicians service the entire world, but without that each city needs its local musicians and theater troupes. If that's correct then we've been in this state for maybe 1 century.

For writers though it's been centuries, since writing enabled distribution of content in many places.

People pay for an internet connection, and e.g. will pay more to get a faster connection or higher quota. There is value, its just not in the casual attention model that the ad driven internet has developed. Even the term "browser" implies how we interact with most content, and to me doesn't evoke "I'll pay by the page"

A partial parallel is radio. Would you pay for local FM radio without ads? Unlikely, but some might pay for satellite radio because of the bundled content and national accessibility. And even more would pay for spotify. These are not just the old radio with ads swapped for direct cash, they provide something better. Paid internet will have to be the same.

I work in the ads business at FB. I do so because I personally like ads and my biggest gripe is that ads are not relevant and personalized enough. I want better ads.

Ultimately ads support a robust ecosystem of free software and content that keeps many creators going. Consumers can also choose to buy their software and content, or donate, but most don’t. Despite their whining, most people want free stuff, and ads are almost free (a small attention cost).

I think people comparing ads to guns, plagues, and locusts need to check their own values. Ads support free stuff for the poor and middle classes. Rich coastal elites can tell themselves they will pay for everything, and that’s great (most don’t). Most consumers cannot afford to pay for software or news subscriptions. Ad models fill out the spectrum of options.

Is the current ads ecosystem perfect? Clearly not. There’s a lot we need to do to educate users, get consent, and increase control and transparency. On the flip side, this needs to be simple and easy: consent needs to be an understandable and low friction process to avoid consent fatigue. They are also plenty of privacy enhancing technologies like differential privacy and local caching to deal with data sharing issues.

If you hate ads, lean into that. Don’t work for adtech, block all your ads, pay for everything. I support you and respect that! I just think it’s mean and shortsighted to think that everyone else is like you and to aggressively attack adtech engineers, platforms, businesses, and the billions of consumers who aren’t as rich as you and will happily watch ads to get free stuff. The internet is great because a lot of high quality stuff like software, news, videos, etc is free for anyone, anywhere. Ads make that possible and I’m proud of it.

Until i can ACTUALLY opt out by paying money, you need to get off your high horse. My data is clearly more valuable to you than my dollars - otherwise I'd have a choice.

> If you hate ads, lean into that. Don’t work for adtech, block all your ads, pay for everything. I support you and respect that!

I do, pls continue to support me by:

1. making it possible to not have my data constantly collected and sold by facebook in exchange for dollars.

2. Stop tracking me after my account has been deleted.

3. Stop acting like you are part of something good while I don't have a "no surveilance" option. Until then, YOU are the problem.

Alternatively, people are just not that willing to pay money to avoid ads. FB's revenue per user in the US is ~$5/month, but users who would pay to avoid ads tend to be richer, so to break even FB might need to charge, say, $20/month. I'd bet too few people are willing to pay $20/month to justify the costs and complexity of offering an ad free product. Especially when you consider the bad publicity that would come from offering something "overpriced".

"FB's revenue per human datum in the US is ~$5/month, but discrete datums who both know they are tracked by Facebook and are rich enough to pay protection money for privacy are few. To protect everyone, they would need to pay $20/month."

People are misdirecting their hatred towards ad-tracking towards ad developers when in reality the people who decide to use ad trackers in their websites should be asked questions.

I understand some giant sites will always come with "we will track you" (Facebook is the easiest example) but even those Facebook spy buttons appear on websites because the developer of the site agreed to it and embedded it there.

> Most consumers cannot afford to pay for software or news subscriptions.

> Don’t work for adtech, block all your ads, pay for everything.

All this is false.

Growth hacking has created products that are addictive and which people don't really need. These are then justified by saying that consumers can't afford to pay for them (fact is that they wouldn't do because deep down they know they're not worth much). And in the meantime society suffers the consequences whilst FB etc profits hugely.

Certainly if this were not the case, people seek out advertisements themselves (classifieds).

On the other hand, a fixed fee would cap the incentive to push the upper bounds of user time on site, thereby respecting users time and inherent interest in whatever platforms offer, absent addictive designs that try to alter that inherent interest.

Features that nag you to invite people into groups, add non-friends via PYMK, push low quality notifications to reengage, show you outrage-inducing content, push you to constantly engage or share private details of your life, check out related groups and drive you deeper down rabbit holes, etc wouldn’t have the same oxygen if the fixed fee model was used. And a service to chat with and find out what your friends were up to wouldn’t be costly at scale; likely pennies per month [1].

I appreciate your thoughtful comment and the logic you’ve laid out but disagree. I believe we’ve settled on a lucrative, low friction, easy to implement incentive model with ads but it is far far from the ideal model with way too many negative externalities.

Note this only goes for ad models with unlimited appetite for user time. I wouldn’t have a problem with ad models that have an upper bounds, eg 5 ad impressions a day max.

[1] see: WhatsApp $1/yr model prior to FB acquisition

I have heard the opposite, which is people getting creeped out due to things like getting ads for infant products before they've told their family they're pregnant (presumably inference from browsing).

I'm pretty sure ads don't support the cell phone industry, or at least didn't support its exponential growth phase, yet the middle class and poor have cell phones.

Android destroyed its competition by having excellent support for Google's "free" software and because of their huge ad income they can pay to develop it further.

So yeah I believe the modern phone industry has to thank the freemium adtech world for pushing Android into the world.

I'm still not convinced that even smartphones would have been stillborn. The apps might have been more klunky, but I'm not sure that's important. For instance, I would be happy to receive my daily news in a giant flat text file, and don't need the features that generate "engagement" or tell me what other people are reading. People who are "in the know" about computing tend to use less flashy interfaces, and more of the terminal window.

But of course the ultimate answer is... I don't know.

It's interesting that the freemium model kind of contradicts that idea that we benefit from ads, since we are willing to pay money to get rid of them, rather than the other way around. Maybe the industry could be funded by making ads available to those who want them, for a price.

I sense A LOT of misdirected anger towards ad companies when the "enablers" of ad companies – the web developers willing to monetise traffic with ads – are not getting any blame directed at them.

As long as you guys at Facebook are transparent about what happens if you embed your like buttons or comment sections in blogs and forums etc. the onus is on the developers to serve their visitors with safe content.

Why doesn't FB offer a "premium" tier for people to buy their way out of ads?

Warning: here goes my armchair theory.

Because as soon as you put a price tag on it, people will instantly see that they can actually get that "premium" tier for free by using an adblocker, which will lead to more people using adblockers.

If something is just free, most people don't really care for it. But if it is something that is free while it is normally not free, people will flock to it. Just think about random just that people wouldn't care to buy normally, but end up buying it because it is on a "90% off sale" (even if the "sale" price is the same as it would've been without a "sale").

Which sort of makes sense with FB, because you get a clear price tag attached and you feel bad for spending those money, when you can get the exact same experience "for free".

If I watch a Youtube video and it gets interrupted by an ad, I am stuck until it is over and cannot consume my content. Same with Spotify. So understandably, people would be willing to pay for the premium tier. I, myself, pay for premium on those services to not deal with ads, as they steal my time and interrupt my normal usage of those services.

With FB, ads aren't interrupting the experience. They are just there, but you are welcome to completely ignore them and proceed consuming your content. I wouldn't pay premium to get rid of FB ads, even if it was just $1/mo. Especially given that, more than once, I got genuinely useful ads that helped me with making a good purchasing decision (the final decision came down to me doing my independent research before buying, but the ads pointed me towards the type of stuff I was looking for). So I don't gain much by getting rid of FB ads (as they are non-interruptive), while potentially losing out on some stuff.

I think the last bit I mentioned is kind of the key to FB strategy. They don't want to offer the "no-ads" premium tier, because they don't want to pose their ads as an annoyance you have to pay to get rid of, they want to pose them as a value add. Not trying to argue whether it is indeed a value add for users or not, just theorizing how FB product team sees it and tries to pose it.

P.S. I don't work in ads or anything even tangentially related. And neither do I have a stake in FB or any other ad-related business. Just describing my genuine user experience.

I may be in the minority on this belief, but I think advertising -- any kind of advertising -- is inherently bad. To me, it's just psychological manipulation. I never want to see any ads, ever. If I could wear a pair of contact lenses that removed things like billboards from my vision, I would wear them in a heartbeat, even though billboards are far less harmful than internet-based ads.

I sometimes hear arguments that advertising isn't all bad because when someone actually is planning to make a particular kind of purchase, advertising can help them figure out which brand/model/etc. to buy. The problem with that is that the ads have no interest in satisfying anyone's particular needs in the best way. Someone could easily be swayed by a slick ad for a product that is not as good for their use as another product that had a less-engaging/less-manipulative ad.

The worst thing about internet advertising is of course the erosion of privacy. If ad networks were merely paying for people's eyeballs, that might not be too nefarious. But they're paying to track people and build intimate profiles about them, and that's not ok. I have very little faith that any of these initiatives that will supposedly make ad targeting privacy-preserving will actually work. All they do is make it appear that a company is doing something, so they can point to it when they get in trouble, claiming that they tried really hard to help preserve privacy, but it just didn't work out.

I'm just not interested in any of this crap. I know micropayments and pay-per-article and such are really hard to do, and really hard to get adopted, but that is the only model I will accept if people want me to pay in some way for web content. Making me pay for a $30/month subscription for the three or four articles I'll end up reading on your site per month is not something I'm interested in doing. And I will not pay through psychological manipulation and erosion of privacy.

Look at Wikipedia - it's a search engine and content repository for all of the world's knowledge, and its operating expenses are around $100M / year.

The Internet Archive has an annual budget of $10M / year.

Google on the other hand, has annual revenues of $181B / year, or about 2000 times Wikipedia's spending.

Is the crawling part hard? The folks at Common Crawl (https://commoncrawl.org/) crawl the entire web every month and release it free of charge.

What about the search algorithms? Well, you can do a bunch with TFIDF and PageRank, for which patient protection has expired.

For the sake of argument, let's assume that the cost of hosting a ubiquitous search engine would be double Wikipedia's annual costs. Still about a thousand times less expensive than Google.

Ads don't pay for a search engine. They pay for vast amounts of excess.

What keeps such a solution from us? Here are a few of many reasons:

* Google pays billions of dollars a year to make it the default option on browsers.

* Exclusive deals with portals such as LinkedIn which exclude open engines such as Archive.org from their content.

* Limits on peer-to-peer connections perpetuated by IPv4 which prevent us from hosting a distributed engine ourselves.

Posing the problem as one of "there's no other way to pay for this expensive machine" is pretty lame isn't it?

"Businesses should keep adding engineers to work on optimization until the cost of adding an engineer equals the revenue gain plus the cost savings at the margin. This is often many more engineers than people realize." https://danluu.com/sounds-easy/

The key takeaway from that article:

>Businesses that actually care about turning a profit will spend a lot of time (hence, a lot of engineers) working on optimizing systems, even if an MVP for the system could have been built in a weekend.

Google's goal is to make as much profit as possible. Wikipedia's isn't. If Google had stayed a non-profit search engine the whole time (as proposed in the original paper for Google), then its costs would probably be not too different from Wikipedia's.

Let's say someone wants to sell fishing equipment. The traditional way of doing this is to buy ads on fishing sites. So now my fishing equipment purchases make there be more writing about fishing; yay!

Then one of the fishing websites decides to put a tracking pixel on their site to drop "fishing website visitor" cookies (or, in a future without third-party cookies, a turtledove interest group). They make a deal with a third party provider and get paid a small amount per visitor. Then fishing retailers have a new choice: instead of buying ads on fishing sites they can instead buy ads on any site for users who have one of the "fishing website visitor" cookies. If there were a monopoly fishing site, then this would increase their earnings: while the ad space on their site isn't as valuable, they will set the pixel price high enough that they come out ahead. It's not a monopoly, though, so the price of the pixel gets driven down through competition, and money that would go to fishing sites instead goes to the publishers that people who spend money on fishing equipment visit.

In this case I see how it's worse for fishing sites, but not how it's bad for consumers: their willingness to buy fishing equipment translates into support for all the sites they visit, and not just the fishing sites.

But there are also many niches that don't have economic tie-ins, or have ones that are far weaker than "writing about fishing" and "buying fishing equipment". In a world with targeted advertising, these niches do better, because of overlap between audiences. A "let's have better housing policy" blog can show ads for fishing equipment, vacations, HVAC supplies, or whatever else visitors have shown interest in on other sites.

Additionally, targeted advertising increases the total amount of funding available for online content, because people with niche interests are available to be advertised to in more places. Seeing ten fishing ads once a week when you visit a fishing site vs seeing twenty fishing ads spread over the course of the week, etc.

So while niche publishers in lucrative niches would likely make more money if we only had context-based advertising, I don't think niche publishers overall, publishers overall, or consumers would be better off.

(This is modified from a comment I originally posted on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21620763)

You seem to be deliberately focusing on the beneficial parts of advertising, at the exclusion of the harmful bits. If you want to maintain your credibility -- let alone give the impression of someone striving to live ethically -- you'll need to give that second part its due attention.

Addendum:

If I were offered a generous salary to work on Google ad technology, I might accept. I'm not 100% sure, but the temptation would very real. As such, I want to make it clear that my criticism does not stem from any feeling of moral superiority, but rather from deep-seated respect and sympathy for someone engaged in an ethical dilemma.

I believe the comments would be much more charitable had your position been something along the lines of "I do it because it's good money, and I sometimes struggle with the dilemma. Here is the nature of the issue as I see it." As a general rule, people respect earnest introspection. Not so with playing ostrich.

Maybe I'm just terribly dense, but I seriously can't think of any reasonable objection to what google does. The best I personally can come up with is that most people don't understand what google is doing and if they did know some of them might object.

When I google "the individual and collective consequences of mass data collection" I get results that talk about the NSA and human rights -- this doesn't seem to have much to do with what google is doing though. When I add "google" to that search I get a rambling article on "How surveillance changes people's behavior".

Please help me out here -- how am I or anyone else being harmed by google knowing what sites I visit?

I don't think the author is being disingenuous. I do think there is a sizable subset of privacy advocates who have become so stringently ideological about this issue they would downvote even thoughtful replies and are so caught up in their bubble that they seemingly can't have a conversation with anyone outside of it.

Yes, let's. I'm not an expert, so I don't have any insight. Do you?

Still, this question seems like an essential part of essay about the ethics of working in the ad industry.

Perhaps you meant to direct your sarcasm towards the author?

to me it seems really bad to mine and centralize PII (note: this PII is also arbitrarily being shared with third-parties, usually without explicit or informed consent from user).

---

ie: this is data which is mined in a way, depth and scope of any implication is usually abstracted away from the user or hand-waved away in legalese or presented in such an annoying way users have become conditioned to unconditionally accept that which they do not understand, and therefore they likewise usually remain uninformed/ignorant/naive of any implication, security or otherwise, in order to get to the service asap. and this is something absolutely exploited by these companies.

---

do we really want companies, companies who have demonstrated they are not immune to simple mistakes leading to vulnerabilities, or leaked PII, mind you, to be in a position where we the user have no choice, but to trust it won't leak PII to nefarious persons (persons who can then do meaningfully harmful things with even basic PII)?

we are already bleeding enough PII as it is -- when should we truly be concerned with stopping it? if never, and there is no concern as you seem to indicate, then let us arbitrarily share medical information, too.

on that subject, there are also so many instances of arbitrarily collected and shared PII, for the sake of ads, that would almost unequivocally be a HIPA violation in other contexts -- to me it seems asinine to have such well-defined understandings of PII for the protection of the person in some contexts, but yet in the context of ads, suddenly <i>anything</i> goes, and the spiel we always get from the ads advocates is: but it is good for the user and the content creators cannot exist without it, so it must exist as is, unchained.

(un)ironically this is also a psychology presented by abusive relationships where the abuser keeps the abused thinking they need them, and the abuser establishes itself as a (survival) dependency in the abused's mind.

idk, i'm pretty skeptical of the claim that ad tech and the ad industry has good intentions, and i am becoming increasingly of the opinion that most of the advertising models advocates are trying so hard to convince users to enable, are just fucking profit-driven-at-all-costs cancer.

Targeted advertising hasn't been a blessing just for small businesses selling fishing equipment and organic combucha, but also -- actually, especially, for companies that sell things like:

* Potentially addictive subscriptions (for e.g. online casinos or other gambling games) -- thus specifically targeting people who are at risk for addiction, unless your targeting settings are crap.

* Snake oil skincare products for teenagers, or potentially dangerous weight loss tablets -- thus compounding peer pressure against young people with poor self esteem.

* Bullshit therapy "options" like German New Medicine, specifically targeting people who are terminally ill, or researching things like cancer treatment for a relative or a friend.

Boy am I glad we're increasing the total amount of funding available for online content!

You make cars? You focus on good things like driving to a vacation, but what about all the cars used in drive by shootings?

You sell cloud services? You talk about the great websites, but what about all the people who host scam sites on the cloud?

You write monitoring software? What about all the people who monitor ad services?

You cannot be in good-faith with these kinds of arguments.

Advertising expands markets for goods.

Word of mouth and aggregators (like yelp) can help people find solutions when they know of a problem, but ads inform/manipulate (depending on how you see it) people to know they have a problem in the first place.

Also if you've ever written ad copy it's all pretty structurally similar: hook, problem statement, solution, testimonials, etc.

2) New challenger SaaS brands can get in front of customers to compete with mammoth corporate brands with worse software (I see this all the time on my job).

3) Without good ad targeting, only bottom hanging fruit advertisers that appeal to the lowest common denominator can afford to spend. Weight loss, teeth whitening, etc. Good ad targeting means a better user experience with ads.

  *  HIV meds
  *  LGBT*A forums
  *  politically charged sites
  *  cancer/heart disease/diabetes pages

Before digital advertising or Google reading emails to find out you're going on a fishing trip, how did people buy fishing equipment?

Whatever we did then, we can probably go back to and be much better off.

Like why do I need "relevant ads" on a blog about urban planning? What problem does that solve for me?

I.e if I send you an email talking about finding a vacation deal to go to Egypt, we will get ads to that effect (obviously it'll vary somewhat).

Official documentation:

https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6603?hl=en#:~:text=Th....

Appreciate it

Ad blockers are a godsend though. I either get to opt-out of ads, or I get to opt-out of sites that rely on ads (for the most part, caveats aside).

We can use the web to bring those in the fishing community into wider contact with each other.

Or use it to create communities vulnerable to ads. I know which one I prefer.

I have an example loosely inspired by real life.

Let's say I visit a fishing forum using the shared computer of my very, very vegan family. That website has now dropped the "fishing website visitor" cookie, and suddenly all my computer shows are ads for lure and fishing rods. My father is now furious, asking everyone in the house who has been visiting "those" websites.

I want the association between me and fishing gone. But who do I talk to? The website says they had nothing to do with this, the ad network won't even give me the time of day, and if the cookie is a supercookie then clearing history and cache may not be enough. And heavens help me if I get targeted mail, like Target used to do with pregnant women...

That, I believe, is the problem with targeted advertising: that my privacy is taken away in the name of helping somebody's website, it's leaked everywhere, and I have no real way to say "I don't want this".

Fishing retailers have a choice. They can rely on the strength and quality of their products and organic interest in fishing as a recreational activity. Or they can contract out their marketing to a commercial version of a spy agency that invents a silent, invisible device that follows their customers around when they're otherwise alone, recording everything they ever do to learn how to better predict their future spending preferences.

Surely, even if this resulted in better sales for the fishing industry, lower prices for the consumer, and the ability of niche publications to exist by predicting that their readers also like fishing and charging the fishing industry to sell them this information, you would not find this okay.

You've convinced yourself that this kind of surveillance and profiling is totally okay and different when it takes place on network connected computing devices and that people have even consented to it, but the actual people being monitored do not feel this way.

It's bad for the consumer because their privacy is being violated and their metadata is being sold, in order for advertisers to track them everywhere they go online, so businesses can try and extract all of their spending money as efficiently as possible.

It also is bad for the consumer because it's bad for the collective whole: instead of quality content online everything is being driven by outrage and clickbait in order to serve as many targeted ads as possible.

Personally I don't even want to support that ecosystem or those sites.

It's also bad for the fishing site because now their niche targeted ad slots that used to pay decently in order to target people with an interest in fishing are pushed into the same race to the bottom low return ads that are being automatically targeted. So they lose too.

Only winners are huge publishers that don't have any niche audience to target because now they effectively target every niche. And Google of course. Basically the two groups who I want to win the least.

This is exactly what I'm working on changing; have a look at the second half of the post?

(Or read https://github.com/WICG/turtledove)

I know there's a lot of negative reaction to it, and I can empathize with that because there's a long history of negative behavior by the advertising industry. But there's no doubt that there are benefits too, and seeing some nuance on HN is always a win.

Advertising is a very wide spectrum and I think its way too heavy handed to say it is all intrinsically immoral. Some is, maybe even most of it, but surely not all is immoral.

I'd argue that advertising in general is a good thing, but that there are a few parts that are bad. One bad part is the vast surveillance and privacy intrusion of modern digital advertising is what is bad. Another are the advertising tactics used to manipulate people into buying things they shouldn't.

The coffee shop with far too many flyers or 7 by the same local tutor becomes very hard to handle. With experience you fight through the flyers to read the menu and get to the counter to order that coffee.

There is so much 'opportunity' in the world at any moment for which the provider of the opportunity's ad thinks that it could be relevant to me. I can accept a little of that every day without it being bad, but patience wears very fast.

* I see contraception as intrinsically immoral...

* I see gun ownership as intrinsically immoral...

* I see capitalism as intrinsically immoral...

Which are all sort of arguments by normative value and probably not very convincing to those who don't share the same values.

There most certainly are doubts that there are any benefits. Online ads aren't any more beneficial than billboards.

I think we would do well to follow the example of Sao Paulo.

> Minimal friction.

Fair enough when the site had one ad. Pretty much no site had one ad now. They have lots of them, which is significantly slowing down loading the page. And if you add all tracking and surveillance code, it can inflate a simple site into megabytes of data. There are common sites that load literally hundreds of outside URLs for ad and surveillance mechanics.

Which brings us to point 2:

> Non-regressive. Paywalls, like other fixed costs, are regressive

Ad costs are regressive too - if you have weak computer and low bw connection, if your connection is unstable or expensive, if your only internet device is a mobile phone with less than excellent bandwidth - which is commonly the case in low income communities - then the last thing you want is to be hit with megabytes of ad data which have zero relationship to what you want to get. Of course, for people sitting on optical gigabit networks with latest-greatest hardware their employer paid for is not much of a problem...

If it was just a paid service, you could work out a deal - maybe it could be cheaper for your country, or have some kind of library or per-provider setup that could make it easier for you to get to it - but you don't have this option, it's megabytes of ad everywhere.

Not to mention how they disproportionately affect "non tech savvy" groups. I almost never see ads, especially not the really obnoxious ones, and I imagine it's the same for most people here. Meanwhile elderly people are being inundated with ads that look like forms and buttons and warnings, and getting tricked into doing who knows what. Even if that's not financially regressive, it still has an outsized impact that is worse for groups that are already having a harder time of it.

According to https://www.jefftk.com/donations, Jeff and Julia have donated about $1.5m. GiveWell top rated charities are estimated [1] to save a life for each $3,000 - $5,000 donated. For a ballpark analysis, let's call that $4,000 and ignore secondary factors (eg inflation over their donation history).

Jeff and Julia have saved something like 375 lives, many of them likely children.

Please keep that in mind while forming and communicating your views.

[1] https://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities

I estimate that while he is still earning income, the upper bound for person-years saved will be 550_000 (30 more working years, 19_000_000$ total donations, a lifetime is worth 100 years and costs 3_500$). I estimate the lower bound for person-years destroyed will be 24_000 person-years (50_000_000 people affected, each losing 365 seconds every year over 42 years). These numbers are inconclusive.

I cannot answer the big philosophical question whether he shares responsibility with the other people working in advertisements, so we would divide the total destruction person-years by the number of people working in advertisements. If yes, this would certainly make the donation scheme very favourable/positively utilitarian.

Even then, while this kind of individual calculus is at least tractable, there is also the concern of large-scale cultural drift, as in the net impact of the world's smartest people collectively working on things like ad targeting, engineering synthetic financial derivatives, and figuring out how to manufacture scarcity out of abundance so speculators can get rich off of modern tulip mania, compared to what good might have come from whatever else they could have collectively accomplished. It's entirely possible that if Google and Facebook are as good at identifying uniquely talented and intelligent people as they think they are, they could have figured out how to entirely eradicate malaria if that is where they chose to direct the effort rather than figuring out how to predict the spending habits of most people in the world and using some of the profit to buy nets.

I'm not saying this for sure comes out against working for personal profit, of course. Louis Pasteur effectively proved the germ theory of disease, enabling the population explosion of the post-industrial age and possibly the most good ever done, while trying to figure out how to make better wine so he could patent and sell the process. But scant historical knowledge though I have, I'm having trouble thinking of historical examples of great good done by people just being wealthy and giving money to others who then do good, as opposed to direct work on technological good multipliers even when doing good is not the intention. At first, I was thinking maybe Da Vinci, but he might even be a counterexample in that he had little to no direct impact on science and engineering in the centuries to come despite conceiving of quite a few novel devices that were eventually invented. Perhaps if the patrons of Renaissance era Europe had paid their greatest minds to work on engineering instead of art, we could have had the industrial age centuries earlier.

Every time I hear/read a "net offset" justification like in the greatgrandparent comment my brain only hears

  I'm gonna sell heroin/meth/crack to fund a rehab clinic; 
  AND 
  if more persons are rehabbed than addicted 
  then the whole endeavour is a good thing;
  AND 
  I am a good person; call me "one of the good ones.

Some see the nature of advertising as neutral, some even see it as good, some see it it as evil. I see it as too impractical to wield as intended; rare-times good, some-times neutral and most-times bad.

Although we can measure air water and noise pollutions, we still have wild disagreements over how much to allow. Given that we suck at measuring the mental pollution produced by advertising-based business models, it is natural that disagreement is even greater over mental pollution.

Where is the startup that shows folks the pollution-free mental spaces that they didn't know they wanted_needed, but that they will never let-go once experienced. Sadly, most minds are limited to imagining the same sad choices jefftk listed. I for one choose to believe that people exist who see how to "fund the web" sans advertising. To them I leave this future message: "Hurry up dammit. We need you. The jefftk's of this world are making the most ungodly of big messes."

> (…)

> So: why is advertising good? (…) The question is, what is the alternative?

“I can’t think of a better alternative than the status quo, thus the status quo is positive” isn’t a sound conclusion. Every sufficiently ingrained societal negative we’ve abolished since was likely reasoned in that manner at one point.

I see an annoying ad in public space? I might get in contact with them to complain about that ad.

I think it is just fair to tell someone my honest opinion as soon as they take the time and effort to target me.

I'm totally lost on why we support generic unrelevant ads in public spaces. It makes our cities ugly.

Some of the states that care a lot about their communities have done so, like Maine and Vermont.

However, I have a problem with Google adverts specifically and that is that they’re absolute hot garbage. Google has advertised to me: outright scams, malware, gambling, mobile games with extremely exploitative monetisation.

And they are working to take away any privacy I might have to keep showing me this shit. In my opinion, Google is basically evil these days.

I personally have a very low opinion of anyone who works for a company that does that and even lower of anyone who actually works on serving those adverts.

I mean, my brother once bought a "personal fan" for $1 and that was the most coveted possession we had for about 6 months.

As someone who grew up extremely poor and effectively dumpster dived for my first computer what pragmatic alternative is there?

I don't want to be uncharitable but this seems like a very middle class and annoyed wealthy problem to have, I haven't seen any non regressive approaches accept for MAYBE from crypto browsers.

Maybe the wealthy and middle class are just tired of subsidizing the internet and the content on it. As a broke child ads got me to a place where I could download html, learn to program and code and break out of an insane degree of poverty. The borland turbo c books at the library never seemed to have code that would compile.

It may just be my personal experience but all of this feel like pulling up the ladder behind me and I haven't seen anyone articulate practical alternatives that address this issue.

edit: Even mass surveillance and government control seems like an orthogonal near strawman issue to me, as far as I'm aware the most restricted countries on earth like China and NK don't need or use ad networks for their lockdowns. Frankly if you can't scrape data off my hard drive, don't have the power of incarceration (or feed data to those who do), and don't tie it to my credit score or ability to bank (I think we should pass legislation explicitly banning that on the banking side) and don't make it illegal to use ad blockers, I don't see the problem.

But perhaps I have not noticed very much because I mostly use an ad-blocker. When I don't use an ad-blocker, I notice ads are mostly on crappy click-baity sources and social media (youtube, forums, etc.).

educational information is usually just text, so it's easy to host I suppose. wikipedia, for example is only a couple hundred gigabytes. But the stuff most people want to spend their time on is video and image forums, which are expensive to host.

Scholarly articles and research have been behind paywalls (jstore, etc.) if you don't have access through a university (which I never have.)

Alternatively, everything is free if you pirate the content, I just don't think the numbers add up to having that be a lasting funding model.

The most helpful "free" content for doing home electrical work, car repair, etc. which make a big difference for people on near $0 budgets is media on youtube.

I think the argument could be made for publicly subsidized video, media hosting and other "utility" style services, but the mass adoption and accessibility of the internet for the poor wasn't built on that (as far as memory serves from my experience of being on BBSs and then online in the 90s.) and I think killing ads without an alternative feels like a regressive cart before horse approach.

But I think the advertising industry as currently constituted is a misuse of attention, money, and other resources.

I haven't solved this dilemma for myself, but I don't ignore the conflict just because of the positives. Hopefully I'll find the courage to do more than gripe.

I recently started paying creators on Patreon and subscribing to news outlets I wanted to support. But within a year, I realized that this was inefficient, I didn't like/read/watch most of the content that my subscriptions were supporting. As much as I wanted to support the content creators and quality journalism, I questioned the value of my subscriptions and cancelled - I felt like I signed up for a gym membership on Jan 1st that I wasn't using anymore.

Ads allow me "to pay" with my attention for only the content that I value. I don't like ads, I generally use an ad-blocker, but I appreciate the post and the perspective.

Thanks for your work and sharing your thoughts jefftk!

Surely it's okay for sites that "don't have a commercial tie-in" to stick with untargeted ads? I just think that building a giant stalking network is an extreme (and ideally illegal) solution to the "problem" that a couple of sites won't make as much money off their popularity as they'd like.

And is it that uncharitable to characterize what Facebook and Google are building as a giant stalking network?

This is also why if you stumble into some parts of the web, they vomit out a billion ads per page to try and compensate.

Really the problem is that there is a tremendous gap between the costs to serve content and users willingness to pay (either directly or via any indirect method). It is a tremendously deep hole we've built with freemium models that will probably require some level of societal agreement to dig back out of.

It also corrupts what products get built because the incentives between the users of the software and the funders of the software are not aligned (even though ad devs pretend they are by pretending users like relevant ads). To test if users truly find 'relevant ads' as value-add: make two products, one with ads and one without and charge for the one with ads - see how many people buy it.

Why doesn't Hulu charge more many for their streaming service with ads instead of their service without? The behavior of these companies suggests they know on some level this value-add nonsense is a rationalization. Even if you say it's only value-add when compared to un-targeted ads - let users choose to have un-targeted ads without giving up their data privacy. I'd bet money on what choice they'd make.

The truth is targeted ads work and make enormous amounts of money for the ad companies - that's why they do them. The twisted narratives of why this is actually good for people or society are just another example that there is no limit to humanity's ability to rationalize anything when it's in their interest to do so.

--

"“In the beginning not everyone tended to their free data farms. Many did not know what to do with them, some only planted one or two tweets and then abandoned them entirely. This disappointed the earls of our kingdom. If they don’t encourage growth, their share of the data harvest is smaller, there’s no one to hear their pronouncements, and all of the land they spent time cultivating is wasted. They realized that not only do they need to make the land easy to cultivate, but they need to make the serfs want to cultivate it. They experimented for a while and learned that new types of controversial, viciously competitive crops are great for encouraging data farming - they call this type of encouragement ‘engagement’.”"

https://zalberico.com/essay/2020/07/14/the-serfs-of-facebook...

For more on effective altruism broadly, some resources:

https://www.givewell.org/giving101

https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/about-us/#our-mission

A person who donates generously may more easily justify dubious money-earning efforts by saying, "it's really not for me so much, it's for the kids!" In other words, it is possible (again, not saying this is case for you) that one might take a job in advertising because they feel their donations provide ethical cover.

Publicizing altruism helps build a culture of altruism.

It doesn't mean I hate people who work on ads / ad software. It doesn't mean I want to cancel them. You, and the others in that field, don't have to justify yourself. You don't have to donate to charity to feel better about what you're doing (it doesn't mean "stop donating NOW", it's just.. do what you feel is good, like you are doing now).

There's a lot of bad going on in the world. Ads are shady-grey area. I know how to fight it and have my internet ad-free. You're ok, don't let negative comments get to you. Cheers!

First, users do not currently have that choice. Sure, you can pay for some things (e.g. youtube premium), but it does nothing for your privacy. If you buy youtube premium you'll very likely see more ads for youtube premium (if you're not already blocking ads).

Second, The real benefit of ads is that it lets small sites that might get a single one-time visit from a user monetize that visit. A blog with a trending post is not going to be able to sell micro-subscriptions to one-time users, but they can get some ad revenue. The only current alternative here is begging for donations. That takes some effort and can piss off readers.

Ironically, although Kaufman mentions that micropayments are hard, Google is one of the few companies currently situated to implement them in a way that would actually improve user privacy. e.g. If a user paid a "Premium Internet" monthly fee, Google Ads could have a flag that turns it's data collection/sharing off and replaces it with micropayments to any site that user visits that are running Google Ads.

Of course, it does seem a little bit like a mafia protection racket for a company devoted to invading user privacy and selling their data to turn around and offer to stop doing that if paid by users!

Really? I have youtube premium and I can't recall seeing ads for it. Why would they advertise a product to people that already have that product?

> Google Ads could have a flag that turns it's data collection/sharing off and replaces it with micropayments to any site that user visits that are running Google Ads.

FWIW, this flag already exists, except you don't have to do micropayments: https://adssettings.google.com/

I guess you still see ads with this setting, they're just not personalized. Hypothetically you could imagine a "stronger" setting that doesn't just do away with personalization, it does away with ads altogether by allowing the user to "outbid" any advertiser. But I suspect there will be some surprised users who get a bill for hundreds of dollars by doing some particularly high-value searches like "personal injury lawyer" or "mortgage" or something.

And if it were a flat rate, my intuition is that the fee would have to be much higher than most would expect or be willing to pay.

Google built this, it was called Contributor, and it wasn't very popular.

It's not exactly what you're describing, but they've tried several (unsuccessful) approaches along these lines with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Contributor

(speaking only for myself)

Have you thought about the possibility that there actually was a choice and it just miserably failed. Or we can call it a "natural selection". One example would be https://contributor.google.com/, which never has gained enough traction since publishers don't like it. This is simply a hard problem. You can build another big tech if you can provide a meaningful, scalable alternative.

This doesn't make sense. I mean, you might see ads for YouTube premium on other sites, but you aren't seeing them on YouTube. You're paying to remove ads on YouTube, not the whole web. (Nor does it prevent people from stalking you IRL)

That would be horrible! Data collection and sharing should be off by default, and I never want to see a "Premium Internet" experience.

2. There are worst jobs to have like working for the auto industry.

3. He's definitely a better person than I am with better values. Who gives 50% earned to charity?

Perhaps some. But I'm sure they don't brag to the world about it.

If I don't do those things (or don't claim to), people will say, "Why should I do that? You don't do that! Hypocrite."

If I do those things, people will say, "You are just bragging/virtue signaling."

(Written years before I started on ads at Google)

Trying every way possible to track and record every second of my life online and in the physical world is evil.

I'm surprised the author focused singularly on the "funding the open web" stance, and did not discuss the alleged negative externalities created by advertising-driven business incentives. The top comments of the blog comments (e.g. https://www.jefftk.com/p/why-i-work-on-ads#lw-Nvd9ZHJLxZpNZD...) also point this out.

For instance, The Netflix documentary "The Social Dilemma" discusses these at length, and it forms a lot of the political zeitgeist around regulation of adtech companies (e.g. driving polarization, radicalization, depression and such).

> The question is, what is the alternative? I see two main funding models:

It's possible to simultaneously believe that ads are currently the effective way to lower barrier of entry to accessing content, and also believe that ads are a detriment to people's mental health.

One alternative would be an ad-supported system that performs less-personalized ad-targeting, and in doing so influences people's behavior less but generates enough revenue to keep the lights on with a reasonable profit margin. The government has laws for regulating natural monopolies like this, where they prevent utility companies from price gouging but grant them a certain amount of margin.

I will offer a contrarian opinion as a user whose salary does not depend on advertising: the advertising model for using Google search and watching Youtube videos works better for me as a consumer.

The alternative of paying $9.99/month for Youtube... or micropayments for each search query or a "Google Search Engine yearly subscription" ... or Patreon donations for video content ... are all more user hostile for my use cases. I don't like ads but they are the most friction-free way to consume a wide variety of content.

I've been using Google Search for over 20 years for free which is pretty amazing. Would I rather replay history and pay ~$120 every year (~$2400 ?) to search for web articles? No.

That said, there are also many corrosive aspects of advertising. Advertising should be open and transparent. If the business of ads are truthful, I will sometimes pay to see ads. E.g. I pay $10 ticket for a home & garden convention show so the manufacturers in booths can advertise their wares to me. The opposite and immoral idea of hidden ad tracking is Facebook trying to convince Apple not to show confirmation dialogs about ad IDFA tracking.

The ads. Aren't. The problem. The stalking is.

Ads can be useful. But no one is saying they aren't! So why is it constantly the case that when internet users make the simple and reasonable request "Please, can you just not stalk us everywhere we go?" the response is "but we're helping you!"

The parasitic advertising industry likes to pretend we're in a symbiotic relationship while conveniently ignoring the actual symbiotic solution (see e.g., DDG) because it won't make them nearly as much money.

Exactly. If you want online ads done right, look no further than how podcasts do it. The medium doesn't allow for stalking. Podcast producers often stake their own reputation by voicing the ads themselves. That editorial freedom lets them be creative and respectful of their audiences. And advertisers can use podcast-specific coupon codes to attribute ad campaigns to sales. It's a win-win for everyone.

Huh. Are you sure? I don't know anything about how podcast advertising works, but it sounds like you're assuming the full audio track, complete with ads, is the same everywhere and always.

Spotify will use everything it knows about you to target podcast ads https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/8/21056336/spotify-streaming...

Most podcasts and players operate on RSS feeds though. While they can very well target things via IP addresses and user-agent (no getting around that), podcasters and their advertisers don't have the capability to read/write persistent tracking data on the client, at least as far as I know. An advertiser would be hard-pressed to see that I personally listen to Stuff You Should Know and This American Life, even if the advertiser had contracts with both. The medium really hobbles how much tracking can be done.

It's possible to target ads to a specific audience by exploiting the selection effect that led to your audience existing. This doesn't favour general-audience communities, sure, but I'd honestly be happy with the answer "general-audience things just aren't how the future looks".

But I have no clue what would distinguish (to me) a non-shit ad? Is it saving me money on something I was already going to buy?

Yes. I've been looking for weight equipment over the past year because of the pandemic and gyms being closed and the majority of ads on Instagram are now exercise equipment. I ended up seeing an ad for a company in my country with fairly decent prices and bought a new squat stand. The price difference between the one I bought and the ones I was looking at from companies in the area was around $200. I give up some privacy, they give me targeted ads. Please give me more.

The usual answer to this is to use the context rather than personal information and browsing history. You bring less value to the company advertising their product, but I'd argue that most people are fine with this approach.

The problem is that current incentives lead to a race to the bottom: if some advertisers are less ethical, they can arguably bring more value to their clients, and the ethical advertiser cannot compete anymore.

Contextual advertising, on the other hand, is simple. It shifts the focus away from technology and toward people: recognizing your audience and crafting a message to them, instead of trying to have a computer do it for you. It's old-fashioned marketing.

Perhaps today, but not if we design browser APIs that allow targeting without cross-site tracking: https://github.com/WICG/turtledove https://github.com/WICG/privacy-preserving-ads/blob/main/Par...

Since at least the 1920s (I’m thinking of Edward Bernays but there are probably earlier examples) the goal of advertising is to manipulate consumers into making irrational decisions. The majority of ads make us feel inadequate to get us to buy something, like the only the thing that will make us whole is a new instant pot or whatever.

I know it's hard to disprove but I don't think adverts have that effect on me, partially it's because I don't see many adverts and partly because that kind of blatant manipulation is so hilariously blatant.

I acknowledge that someone might be running a really effective advertising campaign on me but since I basically don't buy anything I don't actually need I can't imagine what that would be.

Our cogniitive biases act as shortcuts to save energy when making decisions, and advertisers exploit those shortcuts. If you’re on high alert while shopping, catching and recalibrating for your biases at every step of the way then yeah you can probably escape most marketing but for most people that doesn’t come naturally.

If you’re not careful I bet you too slip up sometimes. I know I’ve caught myself at the grocery store reaching for one product over another just because it’s in unbleached cardboard packaging (signaling to me that it’s somehow more local or organic or whatever).

These tricks become obvious when you consciously work through them (ex: obviously some megacorp can package their items in cardboard the same way mom and pop small businesses can) but most of the time we aren’t processing consciously, and that’s how marketing works.

If people were interested in seeing ads, a business of selling pure ad catalogues would actually be a successful venture! As it stands now, you can't even give such material away for free without generating hate. Because people don't want to see ads! It doesn't matter if they're tracked or not. The ad is the problem!

Haven't bought anything techie for about 18mths and when I do mostly shop on specs, reviews from sources I trust.

I viscerally loathe advertising, I don't like been manipulated in any context so I run a background process mentally watching for it :).

I'm an advertisers nightmare, I'll not only ignore your advertising I'll go to significant technical lengths to block it for myself and everyone in my family.

One of the other replies note that podcasts do ads right. I hugely disagree. Not only does it steal the listener's time and focus (presuming they don't just scrub past it, which I presume most people do unless they put little value on their own time, and think a host is being sincere when they pitch some snake-oil supplement, pillow or VPN), it puts a dirty veneer over the whole realm where everyone becomes half-bit hucksters.

Many people have a favorite TV ads. People watch the Super Bowl for the ads. People sing radio jingles to themselves. College kids put nice magazine ads on their dorm walls. People pay money for clothes with logos that are essentially just ads for themselves. People watch videos of influencers unboxing/using/reviewing products they are paid to unbox/use/review. Etc. People love all kinds of ads.

No one likes banner ads. It is failed ad format and should be replaced. No one likes direct targeting. It should be made illegal. There are lots of other ad formats and methods that work great. Those two are the problem.

Look, for example, at large advertisers like Coca Cola. Coke spends ~$1 billion/year in the US alone on ads. That's not because nobody has heard of them. The point is to shift money into Coke's pockets.

Almost all advertising provides no net benefit to society; it's just an arms race between companies competing to manipulate people. If we banned it, we'd quickly find other ways to get people the minimal information content it contains. We'd definitely find ways to spend the $1tn or so that it consumes now. And that's not even counting the benefits from less waste and market distortion caused by advertising.

Yes. That's the problem. Make less money from ads --> make less content/riskier to make content (same thing). The more money ads make, the fewer of them you have to see to fund the same amount of content (or, alternatively, you get more/higher quality content for a given (fixed) quantity of ads).

There is no set "amount of effectiveness," so to speak. If ads are more profitable, advertisers are still going to spend just as much or more on them, precisely because they have a higher ROI.

So you see more ads, the people publishing content make more money (more ads + better ads --> more valuable eyeballs --> more valuable content), and then the ROI for making content is higher, so people make + publish more of it. You get more, more valuable content.

Now, you may argue that the privacy cost is higher than the reward of more/better content, but I think that it probably isn't. Especially because it's hard (not impossible) to match your browsing history with your IRL identity and no one really cares about you, I think that the privacy cost is smaller than the reward. You might disagree.