I already decided my Ad participation. I block ads, and want the advertising industry to die. This does not seem like a value add to me.
I'm a firm believer that FOSS and (Internet) Content needs funding. Yet, I loathe ads. They promote (but are not solely to blame for) behavior that is a brain drain on society. Ads always seem to boil down to 90s style child cereal commercials. Loud noises and flashy attention grabbing tactics to pull you towards it within a tiny, limited window of bought attention.
I'm not convinced society is better because of ads. The dystopian movies with neons signs everywhere seem shockingly accurate (and I believe are already like that in many eastern cities).
I like some of Brave's attempt. At least their doing something. But Ads still seem wrong to me.
> Eg, I pay $5/m or $15/m, whatever, and that gets split up by the number of pages I view and content I consume.
That's 100% possible to do with Brave's system.
Can you explain what exactly in this conversation you don't care about? Follow-up question, can you explain why you felt the need to air that don't-care-about-it without moving the conversation anywhere?
Do you wish the "free" content was of higher quality?
Do you think a insightful blog post, youtube video, or similar content is worth rewarding the person who made said content?
Seems like the main evil of advertising is that it doesn't directly reward the maker of the content. Most of it is sucked up by the middle men who siphon off most of the money and force the content providers to work ever harder for their ever smaller fraction of the proceeds.
Using brave seems much like using Patreon to sponsor your favorite content providers. But instead of trying to manually set a $ per month per provider you can just use your eyeball time to control each content providers share.
Seems like the internet where brave (or similar) was popular would be a much nicer place than the current advertising.
Wouldn't you be willing to pay $20 or similar a month if that meant zero ads for you and your favorite sites got more money than they get through advertising today?
It's odd to me though. I could pay for content I care about at an amount far smaller than $200/m, and the content creators would make more from me I imagine.
Why the extreme overhead? There's no way some blogger is making $200/m off of a handful of clicks from me. I'd be shocked if they made $5/m directly from me.
So where is the disconnect?
(sidenote, i understand the $200/m figure was not for a single blogger. But, lets pretend that blogger was all of my traffic for the month. I still can't imagine it's even remotely close to $200/m)
So my comment was talking about paying content creators. I can't imagine they come anywhere close to $200/m from me, as you put it it's all the middlemen. So why would I be concerned about $200/m?
To say though that Google has to get a piece of the $200/m that some blogger makes assumes of course that Google is the ad provider. Not sure, but it seems like a weak argument.
I wish I could start seeing the real no-ads costs here.
Google's revenue from ads could be useful, though.
For anyone who is a user of multiple brands, you need to add these numbers.
When you grab a bottle of dish soap off the shelf, do you select the same one each time because you prefer it for reasons you can't quite articulate or do you grab whatever's cheapest because they're basically all the same?
Their purpose isn't to randomly convince someone to spend $20-30k on a brand new vehicle.
The purpose is to convince people who've already bought the car that they made the right decision and to feel good about it - and to rave about their new exciting, big purchase to their friends/family.
But you’re right, I probably buy Coca Cola (and like it better) instead of Pepsi because of life long branding. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen an online advertisement for Coca Cola though.
That's why I believe a lot of value all these trackers provide to various companies is not so much the typical 'buy this product now' pop-up that you're thinking, but instead more nefarious value-adds.
Maybe that mortgage or car loan rate you applied for came back a little higher than others would have received on the same day. Perhaps that collection agency decided they wouldn't discount the medical bills because they know 'you can afford it'. I've seen several sites give me one price when I was logged in without an ad blocker, and then a lower price after clearing my cookies.
There is no way insurance companies aren't paying huge amounts of data to calculate rates offered to individuals based on thousands of data points. I imagine the government itself would be able to take advantage of user data in all sorts of clever ways - everything from solving crimes to catching tax cheats to provide better and cheaper background investigations for the millions who require it.
Companies interviewing candidates could save thousands on each potential hire if they could quickly have an algorithm avoid the 75% of candidates they wouldn't consider hiring anyway.
There are just so many ways companies can statistically make a few extra percent here or avoid an expensive loss there, it will be used until the government disallows it, which apparently isn't going to happen anytime soon in most countries.
The numbers coupled with lack of factual evidence of effect is staggering. I have a lot of distrust in the business. It’s about as accurate as Nielsen.
[1] https://mondaynote.com/the-arpus-of-the-big-four-dwarf-every...
[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/325645/usa-number-of-int...
I do click on the occasional Kickstarter boardgame advertisements, but I never end up backing because we always end up playing bloodbowl anyway.
On the other hand I do subscribe to the internet part of a Danish news paper that along giving you access to articles also removes all adds for paying users. I guess that’s sort of what brave wants to do, but who wants the hassle of buying alt-coins and reporting the taxes on it?
If you save your money, then financial companies are going to want to advertise to you to use their services. If you invest, investment opportunities will want to advertise to you. If you travel, vacation destination will want you.
Assuming you don't just put your money in a box, SOMEONE is going to want you to use your money in a way that gives some of it to them.
The reward distributed to them is paid by you. Your balance accumulates either through opting into ads (advertisers pay you to intrude), or you can buy Basic Attention Token yourself (like via Coinbase) and top up your wallet.
Brave is doing exactly what it sounds like you want.
For me the best way is either a Netflix style network (like safari books), or something like [1].
[0]: https://unhashed.com/cryptocurrency-news/are-fake-websites-a...
The audacity of so many people who feel entitled to get paid makes me so sad. I adblock, strip affiliate links, etc.
Ad revenue drives censorship. Dumbs people down, etc. The whole biz should burn down to the ground.
On the other hand that same carrot brings a lot of baggage like: ads, and lots of crap (content farms and idiotic buzzfeed listicles and cat videos) some idiocy is okay, but we get flooded ...
Your eyeballs only have value if they’re willing to look at things that other people are willing to pay to have you see. Thus ads.
I'm sure you're not just expecting content creators to make stuff for you full-time entirely for free.
Ads should die, but it requires consumers to realize that they need to pay for content one way or another.
But people don't need to realize anything for ads to die. All they need to realize is that they should all be using ad blockers and never ever turning it off again.
Being able to make people look in your direction long enough to show them something else they might spend money on is not valuable. It doesn't need to exist.
That isn't true at all. What about when I play a youtube video on my chromecast and it shows an ad on my TV? What happens when websites draw all their content using the canvas instead of the DOM, and adblockers don't work anymore, or websites like Hulu which already make it difficult to enjoy the content while avoiding the ads.
Are these websites the only websites you visit? Otherwise, you're very short on paying for the content you consume.
Without ads, you have to pay the creator of every YouTube video you watch, the journalist behind every news article you read, etc. Unless the content creator is actively choosing to give it to you for free (i.e. never had any ads in the first place), then you need to pay them somehow for every bit of content you consume.
With how we consume content, this will have to be pay-per-view as a day of browsing would otherwise need possibly hundreds of subscriptions.
A mediator in form of Brave's "BAT" or similar is a good way to do fair pay-per-view.
> But people don't need to realize anything for ads to die. All they need to realize is that they should all be using ad blockers and never ever turning it off again.
No, everyone should not use ad blockers, there should be no ads. Ad blockers are a defective symptom of the decease that is ads, not a solution to the problem.
> Being able to make people look in your direction long enough to show them something else they might spend money on is not valuable. It doesn't need to exist.
It's important to remember that we're only fighting random ads plastered everywhere as brute-force marketing.
Other forms of marketing will always exist. Having a big logo on your physical store is marketing, done to attract attention of possible customers. Showcasing their products within the store is marketing to try to make you buy them. Nothing wrong with that.
The only way you would find new products or services is by 20th century word of mouth or search. And search is built on a mountain of ad dollars.
Are you claiming that you don't need Google?
Funding the site with Brave and BAT would at least offer a practical alternative to reliance on advertising. Unless, perhaps, your goal is not to destroy advertising, but rather to destroy all sites which depend on external funding and yet aren't a big enough draw to justify a dedicated subscription?
That's a misunderstanding. It's not a guilty by association thing. It's that there is already a thing more in line with accomplishing my goals, since uBlock Origin has no provisions for ad companies to still make money.
Furthermore, ads have driven most major media from newspapers to radio to tv... and what has made them so financially accessible to most people. Maybe you can afford to pay money to every single patreon out there, but not everyone can. And imagining a world where everyone uses an ad-blocker and advertising dies means that every content creator is just going to put up a paywall, which means information will be exclusively restricted to people with money. That sounds like a fantastic future.
Frankly the notion that advertising is objectively bad, or good, for that matter is reductive. You might say certain practices are good or bad, and certainly the ones we are seeing online right now are not good, but that seems to me the problem Brave is trying to solve - building an ad model for the web that actually works.
>They distort the product market as they favour those players with the highest marketing budget, rather than with the best product. Presumably the companies with the bigger budgets have that money to spend because they have a better product. When people buy your product, you have money to spend, and then you go and spend it on marketing and advertising (which are two separate disciplines, I won't get hung up on that but just know that using those two interchangeably betrays a lack of critical understanding). I can think of very few companies that became market leaders solely because of advertising while selling an inferior product. Beer/alcohol springs to mind, but even there I could argue that taste is subjective and that image is a huge part of what people are drinking regardless so much like fashion, customers are buying the label as much as the utility.
> They distort the media market as getting people to look in your direction is the only thing that has value. Clickbait and fake-news are a direct result of advertising, and wouldn't exist without it. This is also wrong-ish. People didn't tune into a TV show because of the advertisements that aired between commercials, they tuned in because of good TV. The better the TV show, the more money they could command from advertisers because of the audience size. They wouldn't invest that money into more advertisements, they would invest it into making better TV. Now, with clickbait you have a bit of a point - but that's more of a systemic issue. When people started giving content away for free, newspapers crashed as content moved online. Desperate for an audience, advertisers used yesterday's model (look for the place with the most eyeballs) and started migrating over there. There was a period of time where buzzfeed and clickbait reigned supreme for that reason, but that's starting to change as advertisers get wiser about where they are positioning their company. Respectable products tend to dominate respectable sites and clickbaity sites get filled with less respectable companies. It's far from perfect, but again - this is about the method, not really advertising as a practice. I don't see the connection with fake-news at all. Fake news happened because people were glued to their newsfeeds. If anything advertisers are terrified of fake news because it hurts their credibility to show up next to it.
> They are an attempt at manipulation. People have to constantly expend the energy to counteract that manipulation. I also believe this to be a big factor in the decrease in trust in media. Since the stuff that is meant to inform you is always surrounded by stuff trying to manipulate you, how could you ever build trust to it? Are reviews an attempt at manipulation? Maybe you think they are better because they are a third party... but at the end of the day they are just trying to tell you one product is better than another. If "attempts at manipulation" are bad, then we should get rid of all review sites. If your issue is that the company is saying their thing is best, when maybe it isn't, what company in their right mind would say "hey, our product sucks". Do you have an issue with sales or selling in general? Is the very act of getting someone to try and buy your thing a cause for societal ill? As for people constantly expending energy to counteract this manipulation, this is my least favorite line of argument around advertising. It disrespects people and treats them as weak minded simpletons who have no thoughts other than what they are told to think. At a certain point you have to respect people and their ability to make decisions for themselves.
Laughably wrong. Like, parallel universe wrong. Don't even know where to start on that one.
With response number two, there is so much wrong, I don't even know which part to quote:
-Who said people turned in because of advertising? I have literally no idea where you got that from?
-Fake news is a cheap way to produce content that gets a lot of attention. You make something up that riles people up, and then people share it. Without advertising, there would be no direct financial advertising to do so.
-Who cares that advertising companies would prefer not appear next to fake news. Their actions still directly encourage fake news.
And so much more. A real Gish-Gallop you got there.
> Are reviews an attempt at manipulation?
This is the mark of the ultimate dishonest argument or lazy thinking. Do you honestly not see the inherent difference (of kind, not degree) between a review you seek out from a trusted independent source, and an ad that someone paid for to put in front of you against your will, and who's only incentive is to get you to buy the product it is about? If you don't, I genuinely can't help you.
>It disrespects people and treats them as weak minded simpletons who have no thoughts other than what they are told to think. At a certain point you have to respect people and their ability to make decisions for themselves.
I don't like having to constantly spend that energy. I don't like constantly having to be on alert and defend myself from the manipulation attempts.
And this is such a bad argument in general. You could use the same argument against anything designed to make people's life easier and less stressful. Why does advertising get a past.
In conclusion, your entire comment is a collection of the very worst, lazy and dishonest arguments and excuses for advertising.
And yet you couldn't address any of them without dodging the material part of the argument in favor of faux outrage, generalities, and personal preference topped off with a belittling logically unsound conclusion.
Cool.
And let me assure you that there is nothing "faux" about my outrage.
I've heard advertisers try and justify their work and it doesn't sound very convincing. The simple fact is they are paying to make you do something you wouldn't have ordinarily done.
As we have become more resistant to their activities they have become more underhand. Adverts will try and convince you that you can't be a good father unless you own an SUV, that your partner will become slim and attractive if you buy a specific perfume for her, that you will have a happy family Christmas if you just bought this oak table. This sort of manipulation is a scourge on society.
If I'm looking to buy a washing machine I either go to the electrical store or by a copy of Which (I guess consumer reports would be the same thing in the US).
* the global advertising industry is upwards of a $500 billion market [1]
* that industry employs close to 200k people in the U.S. alone [2]
I think it is safe to say that people who earn their living via the advertising industry and thus positively contribute to the economy would be a benefit to society. Of course one could still make the argument that the net impact is harmful, but I don’t think it is controversial to say that is a bold claim with many complicating factors.
1. https://www.statista.com/topics/990/global-advertising-marke...
2. https://www.statista.com/statistics/186066/employment-in-us-...
I’d rather they work with the likes of DuckDuckGo and share context based ads. Context does NOT include my personal details :)
It's fine if only some of us do it (and I do as well) but it just leads to the death of free internet, and subscription models for all news sites.
That might be fine for you, but don't think for a second that's not a privileged position, and if the internet moves behind a paywall that is a significant detriment to a massive class of people.
Sure, your system works for you, but don't pretend like your solution scales.
And even if you decide to never see an ad, you’ll still receive grants in BAT from time to time, which you can use to tip content creators.