Wait, why wouldn't that be important? It seems like the most important question since it asks whether advertising has any significant impact at all.
But it's also critically important for both adtech companies and data scientists who work in the space to direct people's attention away from those sorts of metrics. You generally don't want to call the attention of the person who signs your paycheck toward the fact that it's all but impossible to really know for sure if your service has delivered them any net benefit.
But advertising has had a fair amount of safe-harbor carve-outs for over a 100 years or so that are not available to other industries. So it is no surprise it continues today.
edit: I hate to say it but the auto-downvoters here on HN are approaching reddit levels. Everything I said above is true.
It's not that you're wrong, it's that you're boring.
"I knew this years ago, look how my cynicism is superior to your naievite" is a boring comment to read. You could explain why you think this is any closer to fraud compared to selling anything else and claiming it's the best in its class, or what safe-harbor carve outs by whom, or why they matter more than other effects, or what you think should be done to change them, or anything more substantial than "I'm not surprised". Oh aren't you? Great, cool story bro. Except it's not /even/ a cool story.
It's old man "get off my lawn". It's every tech forum's old-man status grabbing which is now approaching Reddit /r/SysAdmin levels on HN. The only question is whether aggressive downvoting can curb its growth here before it gets a choke-hold.
It would appear jodrellblank is perfectly demonstrating how to misuse the feature, by calling you boring. Not exactly the kind of attitude that we want to have around here.
I hope not. Some of the most informative, useful comments I've seen on Hacker News have taken the form of wild tangents.
I do see where you're going, though, that if "I agree" is sufficient cause for an upvote, then it's only reasonable that a vote in the opposite direction should be allowed to carry the opposite semantics.
It's just that, from a purely social standpoint, that's not actually how human beings typically think, feel, and react. Perhaps it could be that simple on the Vulcan version of Hacker News.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
I don't have an opinion on what "correct" downvoting culture would be, one way or the other, but - if you say "contributions that don't add much to a discussion" should be downvoted, then isn't a "boring" comment precisely one that _should_ be downvoted?
Downvoting for disagreement has always been ok on HN.[1]
I don't really like it, but it has always been the case on HN. The question is if the community voting behavior has actually changed.
Thanks.
> I think people have the wrong idea about HN downvotes because they think Reddit rules apply to HN.
That one gets me, because I had previously assumed that downvoting for disagreement would be a standard Reddit thing, but that HN's community is supposed to strive toward a more "we're all mature adults here" kind of community standard.
I realize people have strong feelings about it, but that's because of the psychological intensity of the mechanism. There's no way HN would survive without downvotes, despite the fact that not all downvotes are fair. It's a critical part of the immune system.
What safe-harbor carve-out existed 30 years ago for advertising that another industry might have wanted something similar on?
The "reasoning" allowing advertising/advertisers to lie is that it is assumed consumers do not believe it.
Therefore ad companies are not going to try to prove that their product doesn't work.
All of the elements listed below must be proven. However, some of the comments here describe behavior that comes pretty close.
(1) a representation of fact; (2) its falsity; (3) its materiality; (4) the representer’s knowledge of its falsity or ignorance of its truth; (5) the representer’s intent that it should be acted upon by the person in the manner reasonably contemplated; (6) the injured party’s ignorance of its falsity; (7) the injured party’s reliance on its truth; (8) the injured party’s right to rely thereon; and (9) the injured party’s consequent and proximate injury.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Apart from taking threads badly off topic, such complaints usually end up as uncollected garbage, since often the most unfairly downvoted comments end up getting corrective upvotes from users.
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=corrective%20upvote&dateRange=...
Moreover, most companies started small at some point so advertising and maintaining advertising made sense up to a point.
And if we look at those companies where maybe advertising actually doesn't help, companies that have reached a level of success where organic referrals and public awareness drive most of their business. And they're ongoing businesses that probably reached that level through advertising and have money now to use for that.
But not only are they already advertising but they don't if their word-of-mouth/public-knowledge presence will last indefinitely, they don't know if just word-of-mouth would let them control their image, would stand-up against future competitors ads and so-forth. So, even supposing you could show advertising didn't offer any immediate increase in customers, continuing to spend on it doesn't seem to me as irrational as it sounds.
Uber shows up in the news and in conversation every day. Most people have heard about it by now. Very few people are going to install it because they saw an ad.
Not the case for your neighborhood "Bob's Burgers" or "Uber Competitor" or some other new company. Or for specific marketing actions of known companies (promotions, new services, etc)
Our industry is shot-through with idealists who believe meritocracy should be the former, when in reality it's always been the latter (and always will be, unless someone can invent omniscient humans).
Could it be that people simply don't like being interrupted and having their time wasted, whether it's by ads, marketing or PR? Just because you have a business to grow shouldn't give you the right to waste my time.
The real problem is that for large companies with brand awareness they're starting to find a lot of their spend may not be generating revenue. Ebay in the Freakonomics podcast turned of about $100M in ad spend with no loss of revenue. But smaller, companies usually don't have the staff/knowledge necessary to know how and where to use their ad dollars.
I don't think I ever saw a Whatsapp or Telegram advertisement in the first few years of their existence. There's a lot of software in particular that gets around by word of mouth alone.
Necessity for advertisement seems correlated to how unclear it is what advantage your product has for the consumer. If you make something that's like X but twice as fast or twice as cheap you don't need advertisement.
But if they want to exploit a more organic growth curve, and are in a financial position to do so, then advertising isn't so useful.
Ardour is a cross-platform DAW that has been around for 21 years. Every 2 minutes somewhere in the world, someone starts a version they got from us. We've never advertised.
Having worked with a decent number of small teams without a lot of brand recognition, ads bring in a lot of customers: it was pretty obvious in our metrics when we ran ad campaigns vs when we didn't. Sure, eventually a few of those people may have found their way to us somehow anyway, but there was a step change in volume from ads. At least in my experience, the idea that ads have no significant impact is not really supported by the evidence. I assume that's what the OP meant by it not seeming important: they're working under the assumption that "do any ads do anything" is clear and you don't need to prove the worth there — instead you need to prove which ads work better than others, and cull the ones that don't perform well (which will also help save you from scammers).
One could argue that advertising for large brands with name recognition could be less valuable. I don't really have data or experience to know that one way or another, but in a competitive market that seems a little hard to believe. Tesla is an interesting counterexample, but I think it may be in part due to the EV market in the US not being particularly competitive; no one makes attractive, mid-priced cars with long range other than Tesla, let alone having an established charging network for road trips. And Elon's antics are, tbh, a form of marketing in and of themselves; "all press is good press."
Edit: I wrote the above paragraph badly. I can definitely believe ads are less valuable if you're a big brand vs a small one. But I'd be surprised if they're useless, at least in a competitive market. People don't have infinite money, so if they're looking to buy X and an ad for X from your competitor pops up, it seems reasonable to me that some percentage of the time your competitor would make the sale and thus you wouldn't, even if organically that sale might've gone to your company instead.
Also, I wouldn't argue that even small companies need ads — just that they do seem to be effective at increasing the volume of people interested in using your product at a given time. That may or may not be necessary/useful depending on your situation. I have been on teams where we intentionally turned off ad campaigns because we learned what we needed to learn from the cohort of new users, and now wanted to improve the product based on their feedback before spending money on more ads.
It is without a doubt, and this is what the Freakonomics advertising episodes are mostly about.
But yes, the question still is: does it raise intent or did the user already want the thing, googled it, and clicked on the first result (which is your ad, above the organic results that also lead to your online store)?
There is a role for advertising because Google polluted their organic search results with Ads making it harder for you to find what you want and forcing you to compete for the top Ad spot. I realize that I can only speak for myself, but I have never seen any evidence that advertising works and I've worked in ad tech.