‘Going where the customer is’: Marketers are coming for messaging apps
digiday.com
digiday.com
I think Facebook has truly pioneered the worst form of advertising. Compare it to YouTube. YT puts ads at the beginning of videos, and tries to make the ad as relevant to the video's audience as possible. They're still ads, they're still annoying, but at least they are clearly and obviously ads. It also incentivizes good content. Both the audience, the content creator, YT, and the advertiser benefit from the videos being as high quality and engaging as possible.
Facebook does the opposite. The vast majority of the advertising spend on Facebook is to "boost" a post, which just means that Facebook biases the algorithm to cause the post to be more visible to more people than it otherwise would be. This means that 1) that post pays money to displace other content. Content that the viewer would have enjoyed more. Generally it's organic content from actual friends. 2) that post is in no way marked as an advertisement. The viewer does not know that someone is paying money to influence them. Something as simple as "<friend> likes <company>" can be shown in your news feed just because that company is paying money to show you that.
It's as if someone paid your friends to say things like "wow, I love McDonalds" when they're around you. Except that both you and your friend don't know they only said that because McDonalds paid for it. It's deeply manipulative. And there's really no line between advertising for some company selling a product and advertising for a political candidate or platform. The fact that they want to expand into private conversations is genuinely scary.
Compare that to Facebook, where I can just keep scrolling. I’ve also found a few hobbies through Facebook ads, I think their targeting is pretty good.
No advertising company wants you to see ads you don’t care about. It just wastes the advertisers money. Ads that are boosted are still trying to target audiences that will actually click on the ad.
Can't wait for good ambient AR so we can wear IRL ad blockers.
It's not simply a matter of raw percentage, it's also a matter of advertising value (eyeballs) which is a different question. A significant amount of the most valuable space is publicly regulated, such as along highways. So for example in the US four states ban billboards entirely (Alaska, Hawaii, Maine and Vermont), and it's really nice even just driving through them. For Maine and Vermont (since they share land borders with the rest of the contiguous 48) it actually makes for quite the state border transition in some cases, where leaving you suddenly cross and instantly face a pile of advertising. It doesn't have to be that way though, and as a quality of life goal it wouldn't be wrong for people in other states to give it some thought. Constant ads IRL may somewhat fade into the background just as in other contexts, but that doesn't mean it has no impact.
There was a move in the 1960s led by the wife of President Johnson to get rid of them. One success was, I believe, a freeze on erecting new ones on interstate highways. I don't know how well that worked, but they don't seem to be the worst offenders.
Still it's a good cause.