Are You Ready for the Nanoinfluencers?
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Second thought: At the risk of falling down a slippery slope, what is the end result of the advertisification of everything? If everyone with any sort of social presence is now a billboard that's going to erode what little "trust" there is in social networks even further. At some point this is going to take down the "review economy" - the Yelps, Foursquare, etc of the world because you won't know who's leaving a review and who's a local nano-influencer posting to get their monthly free meal.
Reminds me of the "ad buddies" from the Netflix show Maniac except instead of seeking them out they seek you out.
The NY Times in particular has tried to portray themselves as independent and unbiased, when they’ve been anything but for essentially their entire history.
There is a fundamental difference between journalism and advertising.
When you see people advancing this point of view it's always worth pausing to notice and reflect on who benefits from efforts to erode this distinction.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_York_Times_controver...
> When you see people advancing this point of view...
This is an ad hominem and not an argument.
It's undeniable that there are biases and preferences in journalism, and that there's no such thing as a truly objective point of view. Journalism is made by humans.
But that's a fundamentally different argument than equating advertising with journalism. They aren't the same. Fact-checked reported journalism that attempts to be objective is fundamentally a different thing.
And it's also a factual statement to say that there is an organized effort to obscure this difference, and that this effort benefits specific groups.
If a media organization is fully user supported then they are separate. The problem, at least in US media, our media is almost completely advertising supported. The editors of the organization always have to be mindful of upsetting the people that actually pay for the service. This can put a deep and hidden bias in the reporting structure.
Journalism and advertising are both products (distinct as they are) being sold thru the same media, e.g. a newspaper or a 30-minute cable TV timeslot.
I think it is fair to say the clarion call of "Fake News" has been around longer than some people think and spans across the political spectrum. In fact, when I hear people insist that CNN or some other mass-media outlets are the cure for alt-right and/or Donald Trump, I wonder if they remember the time not so long ago where they were considered the prime enemies of the left.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death
However, over time, news agencies realized the potential of injecting opinions into NEWS as real news. "Hey, here's what we think of what happened at this place at this time. Here's what you should be thinking too" Suddenly, they can do things they couldn't do before:
1. Change the direction of what you should be thinking about.
2. Change the tone of the opinion to reflect positivity or negativity.
3. Masquerade wrongful events as right ones by parallel justifications and unneeded context.
4. Masquerade advertisements as opinions.
5. Derive strong reactions from readers thus increasing engagement.
And this gives them enormous power over us. THIS is their business model - the ability to control (us) a given set of people.
For eg., that's why Facebook is powerful. The value they add to their investors and advertisers isn't being able to connect with everyone and anyone. Instead, they can use their newsfeed to tune what you should be thinking about, how and when exactly. All those reactions they collect, is to fine tune exactly these parameters.
Imagine being able to change your mind or distract you around election time. How valuable is it to governments? I'm not saying they do these things, but then this is the weapon the media (Facebook, Yahoo, etc.) possesses and they could/could have been doing these things to control us.
So, this is what the newspapers are selling.
So, when Yahoo writes "Hey Apple suxxx here's why you should be buying an Android phone instead", you know it's a slow day for them and they just want to increase their engagement and ad revenue. That and probably they took money from some Android maker behind the scenes (this happens all the time).
/endrant
Anytime you hear that a word is derived from an unusual contraction or acronym, please check it against a real etymology source.
Huh? News is just the plural form of the word new.
All individual actors have agendas and flaws. Maybe a harsher review is produced on a bad day, but that doesn't inherently mean the reviewer is on the take.
Don't confuse media, the obvious medium, with journalism, the content, that is how propaganda is mislabeled and spread.
Examples 1 and 2 could be raw opinion rooted in fact that the reader disagrees with or could be propaganda. Heavily dependent on the context and source.
Examples 3 and 5 are stated in the negative and perceived as propaganda, but where does rightful reporting end and 'unneeded context' start? When the reader begins to disagree? Again heavily dependent on the context and source.
Example 4 is a paid endorsement, exactly what should be expected in a capitalist system.
Also news isn't based on an acronym for cardinal directions. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/news-etymology/
TV news used to be a loss leader until the past 20 years or so. You could see essentially the same news regardless of what channel you preferred. Now the world looks completely different depending on what source you consume.
It's a relatively recent phenomenon that news has been corrupted by advertising, clickbait and catering to specific audiences as they fight for smaller and smaller pieces of the pie.
I recently cancelled my sub to the NYT after nearly 20 years; now they are trying to tempt me back with the slogan “debate, not division”. But they still employ guys like Charlie Blow who just vomit bile across the page to drive more clicks so that’s a no from me. In retrospect they have been on the decline for years, and paying customers like me saw no fewer ads and were subjected to no less tracking than free readers.
On the back of Carryrou’s work on Theranos I have a sub to WSJ now. I am totally willing to pay for content, but I won’t tolerate piss-taking.
Laid out just how much everything is manipulated. So yes, I believe that if you are reading an NYT about this and the target happens to be advertisers on NYT, that’s not an accident, nor is it speaking highly of NYT’s journalism standards.
(we used to jokingly refer to the article body as "seo ballast")
It's wild.
https://www.stuffyoushouldknow.com/podcasts/live-in-chicago-...
This part is explored really well in The Century of Self documentary. It describes how Madison Avenue used new psychology concepts and Baby Boomer individualism to invent modern advertising.
Children will go online looking for toy or game reviews not knowing even their friends have sold them out for a couple bucks.
Still, strength is probably more important as a child.
There has to be a point of saturation where the culture as a whole turns back to some version of authenticity. Clearly it's not going to be the millennials, perhaps the next generation will figure it out.
There will be no point at which society as a whole flips against it - the sad truth is that advertising works, really well, and most people happily sign up to this lifestyle. The war for your headspace is a hell of a lot better than the wars that came before it.
The 'woke' (or whatever term you'd prefer) generation is never coming - but there will be people within every generation that turn their back on advertising and the promises it makes.
1: As in advertising that targets our desire to be happy/powerful etc. rather than merely describing the product. Watch Century of the Self documentary for more information on how this form of advertising came to be.
Devil's advocate / on the other hand: there's so much potential lost with all the effort going into producing products that make the world better, but which fall flat due to a lack of or poor advertising.
We can keep flipping this as long as we want. At the end of the day, it sucks that companies get a bigger (short-term) reward by dumping more into advertising and marketing than into the product itself.
I’m curious about all these world changing wonder products that just aren’t popular because a marketing agency wasn’t involved in manipulating... I mean educating the public.
Edit: This regards all forms of product promotion, not just paid ads.
It's like how advertisers often claim "the internet wouldn't exist without advertising".
What they really mean is all the sites (composing the majority of the internet now it seems) which have such little or negative instrinsic value that they must rely on click baiting, psychological manipulation, and selling out to advertisers would die out -- leaving only those sites which provide enough value that people care to pay for themselves, like it used to be in the "good old days"
It's probably best not to discuss crypto-coinage in this context.
They are working very hard on building up the infrastructure and technology needed for total population control. The needs of an advertising company and an authoritarian government are very similar.
And if the targeted advertising isn’t detected? Isn’t the whole topic here to advertise in a way that doesn’t seem like a website banner ad?
It's definitely a nuisance, and left unchecked can become a Black Mirror or Maniac-esque nightmare. But in it's current format it still feels like a worthwhile exchange.
The internet services themselves are almost completely nonsense that we could do without. It's difficult for me to think of a single ad-based website or application that serves a purpose outside of its' own self propagation.
The knock-on effects of circulating money for development work into new languages/libraries/frameworks might well be.
I'm rather glad I could skype my brother in Japan even when I couldn't afford international call rates.
And so on...
In my experience the sites which you pay a small monthly fee ($5-10) to are far superior
If you have literally zero money, even to spend on activities with high expected future return, your value to an advertiser is zero, and eventually they'll figure out how to not waste resources on you.
The correct answer to poverty is not 'make the world a bit shittier for everyone and hope it balances out'.
(As an aside, I also used to have ~no money, and can't really say I required ad-based sites to learn. I just pirated it all, used sites without advertising, used IRC, etc. I think this idea that everything has to be ad-supported is quite a modern phenomenon.)
A lot of the best content on the Internet is hosted by its own creators, paid out of their own pocket, out of willingness to share the knowledge.
I run a collaborative writing forum for mostly a pre-teen and teen demographic. It's the ilk of what got me into writing as a young one. They don't have money to spend, but ads keep the forum alive.
It would be extreme to say my forum has nothing to offer these youngsters, or that my lone banner-ad eclipses any good my forum may be doing.
As ads die, we're just going to continue witnessing the centralization of the internet which surely isn't all that great, either.
It's hard for me to get a sense of scale here, I wouldn't have thought that this sort of thing would require more than a token level of resources.
Everyone's charity has a limit. I consider shutting it down all the time but it becomes hard when I browse my own forum watching people connecting and writing. And losing money on this forum over the years is one of the sacrifices I've made which accelerated my return from the beaches of Thailand. Sometimes I look at that with regret. The forum cost more than my rent.
Using off-the-shelf software like vBulletin/Xenforo is expensive. You end up throwing money at scaling issues because it's essentially a black box.
I ended up migrating to my own software to wrestle control over costs. But it was an incredible amount of work to rebuild a popular forum from scratch. I could do it because I was in my mid-20s living off savings in Thailand. But I'm not, anymore, and I'm left throwing money at scaling issues again because it's hard to commit serious engineering work to something that isn't a profitable venture. The opportunity cost is huge.
I wish you the best of luck.
Such as? I can’t seem to think of any examples.
I think most of us expect that on the "Most Admired/Least Admired Scale" marketers clump towards the bottom, not the top.
There are plenty of failed KickStarters/GoFundMe's to peruse, but this is endemic among non-profits. While many do NOT offer services that could be self-supporting, many others could be, but there is insufficient business or advertising understanding to pursue being successfully self-supporting.
Among inventors, many pursue licensing or finding large partners (a reasonable idea, as far as it goes), but I've seen some pretty ridiculous advertising attempts.
But the real gold mine is from the files of marketing consultants working with teachers/service providers. Only some clients are in the "trying to make the world a better place" category, but many overlap that. Here's where you really find the greatest numbers of admirable folks very out of their depth at marketing.
From what I've observed, working to make the world better isn't mutually exclusive with understanding advertising, but is strongly anticorrelated with wanting to do it. People who think about making the world better tend to understand that advertising is a cancer on society.
It came along when we were all high school/college or so, and this big platform to refind old contacts was a surprising new experience.
Then all of collectively went into the workforce and suddenly had public images to manage and so the whole thing very quickly became yet another advertising channel via tragedy of the commons.
Reconnecting with old acquaintances is just one (outdated, as you mention) use case of social media. They have become much more subversive (and profitable) as media/advertising engines.
They'll survive as long as companies are willing to put money into advertising and enough people are influenced by (not even "suckered by") the ads. So basically forever.
Reminds me a type of sponsorship in sports and hobbies. The brands or shops select some individuals and give them access to their collection at advantageous price (say -30% of retail price, but not free), in exchange of simply wearing or using the stuff. Similar idea of "influencers" as advertisement platforms.
Next step: startup providing an API for influencers as a service.
The much maligned "Klout" was an early form of this but cratered for dumb reasons.
I can see shady fly-by-night operations using these “influencers” to shill their dangerous & non-compliant shit and possibly get people hurt. Sure, they can also be buying conventional ads but (I hope) most people are wise enough not to fall for them or at least carry out due diligence where as it being posted by a “friend” (I’d say anyone that sells out their followers isn’t really a friend) inherently gives it legitimacy.
We’ve already got this situation with multi-level marketing schemes using social media to shill their garbage (most is crap, and some is outright dangerous with multiple reports of nasty side-effects) and con new victims, I’d rather not see this expand even more.
Agreed, but the rest of my point still stands. I feel there’s a lot of potential for abuse here.
The meaningful difference is in the former case, the revealed preferences are swayed by the exchange of money and may not authentically reflect the person's true opinion, whereas in the latter case the revealed preferences are swayed solely by social convention (and may not authentically reflect the person's true opinion).
But they don't have to work too hard. "Influencers" can be created virtually out of thin air. Simply say "this is an influencer", and in the absence of contrary signals many people will treat them as such.
(We've all heard of a NOT famous person hiring friends to pretend to be paparazzi when they go out somewhere, fooling people who see them, being introduced to someone "famous" that we've never heard of, etc., etc.)
It's kinda sad to see people promoting stuff in exchange for some free samples, just so they can call themselves "influencers". I'm wondering if people are not getting tired of all of this fakeness.
https://medium.com/acm-cscw/was-this-an-ad-an-investigation-...