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Comment by esotericn | Hacker News Reader

I agree.

I think that advertising is on dubious grounds when it exists as a substitute for payment (dubious because of the extremely low payout compared to the inconvenience / damage caused).

In public spaces, on transport systems and so on, things that can't be avoided and are either already paid for or aren't even being used (e.g. walking past an ad on the pavement which pays for nothing other than the land it sits on) it's completely inexcusable.

We're trying to encourage people to use public transport.

We need to do _everything we can_ to make it a better environment, more comfortable, more homely, etc.

Knocking out advertising would be an easy win. (Killing off the OTT announcements would be another one... but I digress...)

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"on transport systems"

I was going to refute your claim about these things just paying for the space they use, by stating figures that show advertising provides a significant subsidy for Transport for London (which operates the tubes and buses in London).

But I was wrong: annual advertising revenue is just 142MM GBP, or about 16 GBP per London resident. This seems low given how much time people spend looking at ads on the tube.

Yep. I actually discussed this in a similar thread on HN a few days ago.

Fare revenue is approximately 3bn GBP. A 1:20 ratio.

In the worst case assuming no-one additional travels due to it being more pleasant, fares would have to increase ~5%.

My bus fare would go from 1.50 to 1.57.

This is a distraction, though. It's not relevant, because we shouldn't allow damaging activity to occur regardless of whether it might look marginally better economically if we zoom in far enough.

If the tube system funded itself by stealing wallets from random passengers, it would still be right to stop that program, even if fares went up, because it wouldn't be right or good.

A related concern I hear often is that if something becomes n% more expensive, then some people will be priced out.

The correct answer to 'poor people can't afford the bus' is not 'perform strange indirect forms of abuse on slightly less poor people'. The answer is 'fix the fact that people are poor'.

Public services should be funded via taxation, not by private advertising partnerships.

> Public services should be funded via taxation, not by private advertising partnerships.

25% of TFL funding comes from government grants anyway, increasing that to 27% from local property taxation in London seems the most sensible thing, but in the age where people only care about the bottom line and don't factor in externalities I can't see that as an option. The Met are now selling themselves because people won't pay taxes to fund them (London's police budget is 20% lower today than it was in 2012/2013)

That's maybe the ultimate economic argument about ads: They may produce value, but probably not enough to be worthwhile if you ignore external costs.

My standard example is, I strongly suspect that the added bandwidth consumption of ads translates into a greater cost to me (via increased hope and cellular Internet service prices to cover the extra bandwidth consumed) than what people are actually making off of the ads.

It's almost like a version of the tragedy of the commons, where, in this case, the "commons" is everyone's personal space.

I think you're looking at this number and coming to very poor conclusions.

TFL says daily ridership is 5MM people, and based on your figures, daily advertising revenue is 390k GBP. That means that for every 1000 users, they're earning 78 GBP in ads revenue.

From my experience on the tube, I see maybe 10 unique ads in a given day (sometimes less, sometimes more), which means that CPMs on the tube, for an untargeted audience, are about 7.80 GBP. That's a huge number!

Sure, but:

- TfL gets ad revenue from buses, bus stops etc., so almost all ~9MM Londoners see their ads every day

- you might see 10 ads in a day, but they're much more eye catching than online ads, due to position and size, and the fact that an average tube journey is about 50x the time we spend on an average web page

- ever sat in traffic behind a bus? those ads are targeted at people who own a car, live in London, and speak English

I'm not sure why this "CPM" figure is relevant. That might be interesting to someone working in advertising, I don't care whether the advertisers think they got a good deal or not.

(As an aside it's trivially explainable by the fact that on the Tube you are basically forced to look at it, likely for 10-20 minutes. You either stare at the person opposite, or you look up, where oh, there's a convenient hair loss advert).

What matters is whether the person being forced to look at the shit gets a good deal or not.

They don't. I get _nothing_ from an advert on the street, and from an advert on the tube I get a discount of pence, which could _easily_ be made up for in improved mental health outcomes.

You've even quoted it.

> That means that for every 1000 users, they're earning 78 GBP in ads revenue.

So 7.8p per person. It would disrupt my day less to pick that up off the street. That's not a joke, it's serious.

You think it's a lot, because you're mentally multiplying (it's already in this bloody euphemistic "CPM" term) by loads of people and imagining how much you can make from mass abuse.

> What matters is whether the person being forced to look at the shit gets a good deal or not.

Funny, and true.

While reading the parent post, I found myself imagining Mr. Burns from the Simpsons rubbing his hands together as he considered what an awesome 'CPM' he was getting.

Like you, I also think some concepts are bullshit and totally deserving of willful ignorance.

I don't know what CPM is either, aside from an OS I used 30 years ago, but if it makes advertising seem reasonable or desirable, I'm sure I don't want to know.

The way I see it: in an industry whose main goal is to trick people into buying things they don't need, why should anyone expect it won't use its own methods on itself?

> TFL says daily ridership is 5MM people, and based on your figures, daily advertising revenue is 390k GBP. That means that for every 1000 users, they're earning 78 GBP in ads revenue.

I suspect that's 5 million journeys, not people, and it's tube only, not all TFL as a whole.

£390k a day of advertising income, and £13m a day of farebox revenue, means that every £2.60 ticket would be £2.68 without the barrage of adverts.

The major reason I don't subscribe to sky TV is the adverts. It's only about 15% of their revenue, so clearly not everyone thinks like me, but life is too short for adverts.

I don't understand people that listen to non-premium spotify either.

> life is too short for adverts

Agree 100%. In north america you typically pay your cable bill and still get adverts.

Better off just ignoring the whole thing, or stick to public stations.

My leisure time is worth on the order of £1/minute pre tax (given that's what I charge for overtime or consultancy jobs)

Call it 50p a minute after tax.

A typical hour long TV program will have 18 minutes of adverts, or £9. The cost of watching the 40 minute program about £20.

The question then is is this TV program worth £20 to me

If no, I won't watch it.

  is this TV program worth more than £20 but less than £30 to me

If yes, I'll watch, but not with adverts. If it's worth £25, I'll pay upto £5 for the episode.

  is this TV program worth more than £30

If yes, I'll watch with adverts, but only if it costs more than £9 to buy the episode.

Typically the cost of buying a TV episode is very small - on the order of £2, so it rarely makes sense to watch with adverts. Back in the 90s I paid the equivalent of £10 an episode for tapes of DS9 season 6 and 7

> I don't understand people that listen to non-premium spotify either.

When I listen to Spotify (non-premium), I usually only listen to albums and music in my lists, and not anything random. I am not sure if that plays into things.

But what I have on my browser is uBlock Origin, which seems to block the majority of "interstitial" adverts they stick sometimes in-between tracks. Occasionally one or two sneak thru; many times they are ads for Spotify Premium (kinda hard to block those).

I just don't listen to enough music or anything to justify spending money on the premium offering; the $10.00 a month isn't an issue for me, but I've maybe have listened to the music I have on Spotify a total of 1-2 hours for the entire month of October, and that was kinda random for me - prior to that I hadn't listened to it for months.

I have the majority of the music anyhow as MP3s on my phone; I don't really like non-premium Spotify on my phone because I haven't found any easy way to block the adverts, plus the player in non-premium mode doesn't support "play the album in track order" - it's stuck on "random", which isn't something I like for all of my music (I prefer to listen to albums, rather than songs).

Spotify's ads work. When I first started to use their service, ~2011, they had maybe 5 ads localized for UK (where I was working at the time). That meant every 3 songs I would get the same ad. The ad sometimes would change the next day. After couple of days of this seriously fucking up my brain, I decided to pay them money just to shut them up.

I don't understand how people cope with free Spotify either, but maybe with large enough collection of ads, it just isn't that annoying.

> Spotify's ads work

In services where you can avoid adverts by paying, yes. Pay the protection money and you're sorted. It works.

Whether it should be legal to give free sandwiches which has a 1% chance of poisoning you, while charging $5 for a sandwich that's poison free is another argument.

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