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Comment by el_dot | Hacker News Reader

Exactly. There is a major opportunity lurking here. Online ads suck, actually ads in general suck, but how does one fix them? Sounds like a good challenge.

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A small number of boutique advertising networks have successfully tackled this challenge and are making quite a lot for their trouble.

For instance, The Deck (http://decknetwork.net/): 30 ad spots per month, currently $7,900/ad, equals $237,000/mo (and they're always booked solid.) This doesn't even count their "roadblock" ads which are an additional $7,900/day. The best part about their ads are they're good. I've found quite a few excellent products through them over the years.

If only all online advertising were half as good as The Deck.

That's like wishing for all cars to be as good as Porsches. While I share your sentiment, The Deck is high-end advertising for a small batch of high-end advertisers.. people won't/can't/don't want to pay those rates everywhere.

I doubt it's possible to fix. Advertising is by its nature an attempt to manipulate people, by grabbing their attention, bombarding them with information, and eliciting emotional responses in them. Unsolicited advertisement is inherently disrespectful to the people being advertised at. There's no way to do it nicely, you can only hope people are too apathetic to complain about it.

Advertising is actually more about providing information that the viewer did not know.

It's actually a pretty useful service y'know?

Advertising is about moving product. Just a quick perusal of advertising techniques indicates that just "providing information" is a rarely used methodology. Biased information isn't very useful anyhow.

It's about telling you about a product/service you might be interested in.

The movie trailers I watch in frontrow on OSX. They're advertising. I love them. They inform me of new movies that are coming out. Useful no?

Indeed. Putting a scantily-clad lady up on the TV screen isn't giving me any information. It's treating me like an animal, hoping my sex drive overrides the part of my brain that says "You don't really need to buy this crap".

Loud noises, cute kittens, catchy songs, scary consequences, status symbols, repetition until you can't forget the company's name if you tried. That's not any information I need.

Those things get peoples attention, and make some % remember you.

Obviously not every advert works on everyone. It'd be silly if it did. But when taken as a whole, they do work. Astoundingly well.

I remember a few years back when everyone was asking this questions and then we got Adwords and Adsense. Those worked great for a while, then we ended up almost back to where we started. It'll be interesting to see how thing go this time around.

Only a tiny amount of people think ads suck. It's a very small minority.

Hmm, if you mean people opposing the very concept of advertising, then I agree, most people don't. But I hear complaints about the increasingly offensive/intrusive nature of online ads in particular from pretty much everyone I know, including elderly relatives. I think a lot more people would use AdBlock if they knew it existed / knew how to install it.

I disagree. It's a small niche thing. Like people who don't own a TV.

adBlock is fundamentally bad for the web. I think a lot less people would use it if they understood that.

If you're going to make a TV comparison, I'd say it's more like people who own a TiVO.

Well it's a big enough minority that ars technica is noticing it. And most people just tend to tolerate ads, it doesn't mean they like them.

ars technica is an extremely tech orientated website. It's going to have more than general websites.

adblock usage overall is probably 0.5% - 1% if that.

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