Google Will Pay Publishers for ‘The Night of the Yellow Ad’
adexchanger.com
adexchanger.com
https://www.fontblog.de/fontblog-archiv/C1716572149/E9454162... http://dativ.at/fotos/panoramas/neubaugasse.html
All in all that's how the exact addresses were mapped in Google Maps.
I get that some people don't like seeing ads but there's all sorts of public infrastructure that people would rather not look at.
Edit: I wish there was some sort of go-to essay on how and why advertising is bad, backed by academic sources. It would make arguing against ubiquitous ads just a bit easier.
Taxes make me unhappy and yes, all sorts of things the government does, many of them related to infrastructure are designed to manipulate people at scale. Often it's manipulation for "the greater good". Sometimes it's not.
Having my infrastructure subsidized slightly more by ads and less by taxes makes me less unhappy.
Advertising on public space is highly unobtrusive, like a banner ad compared to some JS advert that covers the whole canvas and tries to trick you into clicking it.
The overwhelming majority of of advertisement is irrelevant to any given person. I'm not in the market for ED pills, high end vodka or student loan refinancing. When it's irrelevant like that it's just white noise. If I do see something relevant them maybe I'll look into it and maybe exchange my money for whatever is being sold and it's a win for both parties.
Paying for infrastructure is a necessary evil. That money has to come from somewhere. Ads are a fundamentally less evil way of satisfying that necessity than taxes.
Also, the ads on the subway have never tried to run malicious code on me and don't report my metadata to Google/FB/the NSA/etc.
Strongly disagree. Advertising is obtrusive, distracting, ugly. It defaces our public infrastructure and crowds our minds. It lets companies into our brains nearly everywhere, companies who generally are working hard to make the world a worse place by overharvesting the earths' natural resources in order to make junk to sell to us, or to enrich a select few by selling an experience to the rest of us.
I don't watch television partly to avoid sitting through ads. Raise my taxes to pay for ad-free streets, subways, and everything else that isn't so optional for me.
Ads that are trying to psychologically manipulate you are doing worse than running malicious code on your machines, they are trying to run malicious code on your brain.
Research has shown time and again that there are exploits to trick human minds, and you cant really just update your brain to shut those down. You can try to be mindful of them and avoid them, but if they are plastered literally everywhere when you go out into public, that becomes a much harder task
The ability for an static ad to screw with your mind is orders of magnitude less than the ability of code running in your browser to engage in nefarious behavior with the aim of stealing your PII for the purpose of financial crime or just intrusive tracking.
Subway ads are like boring old banner ads on websites that are only targeted based on the content of the websites they are on.
>Research has shown time and again that there are exploits to trick human minds, and you cant really just update your brain to shut those down.
It's very hard to run those exploits when your level of access is "2x2 square of glossed folder paper on the wall"
Static print advertisement like found on subways is orders of magnitude less bad than TV, online and arguably radio ads. I don't see why there is some perceived moral argument against using them to help pay for the upkeep of society.
As for the "perceived moral argument". I don't see why everyone in society should be subjected to psychological attacks constantly to keep taxes lower.
These are value judgements so people are going to have different opinions that aren't based on immutable laws of nature. If you're going to assume that the other side is ridiculous because you don't hold the same opinion, why even engage in a debate in the first place?
There's a BBC documentary series called "The Century of the Self" about the invention of modern PR/propaganda by an Austrian gentleman named Edward Bernays.[1] He basically perfected the art of propagating fake news. (If you've read "The Fish That Ate The Whale" you'll recognize the name - he's the one who helped the CIA overthrow the Guatemalan government.)
The series is three or four parts and the first episode is a bit heavy on how Freud's pop-psychology was the catalyst that started it all (Bernays is related to him, though I don't recall exactly how) but oh man was my mind blown when I got to the part about "manufacturing consent." It's incredible the master manipulation machine this guy was running in the 1950's. It's even more incredible when you realize that our brains still work the exact same way. We still fall for these tricks time and again but now, thanks to the internet, they're harder to resist and we can fall for them faster and more efficiently.
Could there be a reason there isn't one?
The footnotes are full of peer-reviewed articles like: "Impact of exposure to idealised male images on adolescent boys’ body image"[1]. I spent about 2 minutes on this and this only covers a small sliver of the impact advertising can have on mental health.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S17401...
I had the misfortune of hearing a few minutes of commercial radio in a taxi when I'd forgotton my earphones the other day. The assault on the senses that advertising brings is unbelievable.
Incidentally, we have archive evidence of print adverts and they tell as much about how we used to live as what old newspapers do. With digital adverts there is no trace or evidence that the adverts ever existed.
Different times, different attitudes. The rash of crypto-currency adverts from last year promising untold wealth would look utterly crazy at any other time than then. Someone needs to save the adverts - including yellow squares - for posterity.
Compared to the average display ad the bright yellow grabs attention and "The night of the yellow ad" makes you curious
Many auctions only have a single bidder, and in this case, the price is a 'reserve' price set by the publisher (website). That is common in ad slots which have strict targeting criteria banning nearly everyone else from being eligible.
In those cases, often the advertiser sets a super high bid, just to make sure they win the auction. Assuming the eligibility criteria keep all other bidders out, that's not an issue.
It looks like what happened here is the 'Yellow Ad' found a way to be eligible for far more auctions than normal, and had a very high bid. That meant it was now a 2nd bidder in lots of auctions where the price was normally set by the 'reserve' price, and the final hammer price was much higher.
Anyways, I found the article very informative because we weren’t sure what happened, it was such an anomaly we thought all our data was bad for the day, but it turned out to be an early Christmas present I guess.
Postmortems of things that affect a ton of businessses and people seem newsworthy to me. And while this isn’t a very detailed one, it’s more information than I could find anywhere else - we assumed it was a costly fat finger mistake.
seems like an elaborated scam within google to bump q4 revenue. someone really wanted their bonus I guess.
Sorry, this was obviously an accident that cost them ten million dollars. They are not going to orchestrate a stunt that makes them look incompetent.
Speaking of the other Google story on the main page as we speak...
https://www.blog.google/products/messages/latest-messages-al...