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Comment by chii | Hacker News Reader

It's stupid, because in the era of television, people understood that the advertising commercial breaks in programmes were distinct from the actual content of the programme, and that the advertisers are _not_ endorsing the contents of the programme at all!

How this somehow translated, in the era of online youtube videos, to the exact opposite is still a mystery to me. So what if your ad appeared next to something radical on youtube? So what if your ads appeared next to some weird sex segment of youtube? People who see it aren't going to confuse the ads with the video, just the same as people watching television isn't confusing the ads with the programme.

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>It's stupid, because in the era of television, people understood that the advertising commercial breaks in programmes were distinct from the actual content of the programme, and that the advertisers are _not_ endorsing the contents of the programme at all!

This is simply not true. If you go back long enough shows were often sponsored by specific advertisers making the link even stronger than traditional preroll YouTube ads (this practice goes back to radio, so it is even older than TV). It also ended up with bizarre pairings like "'The Flinstones' brought to you by Winston Cigarettes."[1]

Eventually cable TV came along and it didn't have the type of FCC oversight that broadcast TV does. However you generally only see swearing and nudity on premium cable and not basic cable despite no official rules preventing it. The primary reason for this is that basic cable still relies and advertisers while premium cable does not. Basic cable channels still fear advertisers dropping out if their ads are paired with objectionable content. And that is really all that is happening on YouTube. GM doesn't doesn't want their latest car ad to appear in front of a racist manifesto. I don't think that is a particularly unreasonable desire for an advertiser.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVRO6GAfvzA&t=69

Another example of this is Transformers, which is/was beloved by kids and was easy advertising for Hasbro.

> was easy advertising for Hasbro

Transformers was only advertising for Hasbro. They licensed the toys then made a show around them to sell them.

And as a big Transformers fan as a kid I along with many others fell right for it!

So this may look like I am arguing against you, but I actually have a very similar stance.

Look at it like this:

Nowadays, the ads (and the videos) are targeted. Additionally, the algorithms are - no other way to put it - really fucking dumb and are constantly "overcommitting". E.g., I watched a few episodes of a podcast months ago and my YouTube recommendation has been 98% episodes of the same show since then, because the algo registered I spent a disproportionate amount of watch time for those (who knew, podcast episodes are long). Or look at Amazon grouping every single book I read the untranslated English version of in "International Books" because it determined that English ain't my mother tongue. Now I am constantly getting cultural, cosmopolitan and language learning stuff; because I read Ian Banks and software philosophy books.

I am aggressively ad-blocking, but I imagine ads are quite the same and I am sure you can recite similar experiences. Now based on this shitty, bizarro reality I would say that the fear of an ad bubble heavily overlapping with a content bubble (for absurd reasons) is not irrational. It is weird, it is dumb, and we could probably overcome it, but products would be associated with weird/illegal/controversial niches by...association.

This whole situation is a shit cocktail of misguided KPI's, straight up scams, questionable assumptions (we still don't know whether targeted ads do anything), cancel culture, bad software and US censorship (we can show you two passenger planes colliding and 700 people incinerating but we can't show you the pilot going "motherfucker"). But this specific choice, to aggressively ban to avoid bad association, is actually somewhat rational.

>, because in the era of television, people understood that the advertising commercial breaks in programmes were distinct from the actual content of the programme, and that the advertisers are _not_ endorsing the contents of the programme at all!

This isn't true. In the past, some viewers have always followed the money trail of a tv show which inevitably leads to the sponsors/advertisers that help fund it. Example of tv advertisers pulling out of controversial topics:

https://www.nytimes.com/1997/04/30/business/main-character-e...

As I've mentioned many times before, there is no media institution on the planet (whether private corporate or public government funded) -- that is immune from censorship because every piece of the chain (creation, distribution, broadcasting, advertising, etc) all require money and money is the ultimate lever to apply pressure via government decrees, consumer boycotts, advertiser boycotts, employee revolts, journalists shaming, etc.

Nobody has invented an implementation that can withstand any pressure to filter content but also be available to the mainstream masses. Google even with its billions has to tame Youtube to placate advertisers. Apple, even with its billions has to placate China. Niche/obscure "censorship-proof" tech like Freenet/IPFS is not for the masses and the desirable content creators can't monetize their effort there.

On the contrary, television advertisements have (rightly) always been viewed as inextricably linked to the content they appear between. As such, advertiser boycotts have been a favoured tactic of conservative organisations throughout the past few decades. For example, from 1982:

> For the second time within a year, the Coalition for Better Television is threatening a boycott of one or more companies that advertise on prime-time television, but this time without the support of its most prominent member, the Moral Majority.

https://www.nytimes.com/1982/01/28/arts/a-boycott-of-tv-adve...

Maybe it‘s because television boards held up a certain level of acceptable truth and decency in the „good old times“?

When theories about child-eating democrats are freely stated as facts and picked up ans spun further in the recommendations so that a conspiracy theorist ends up in Congress (and a significant minority of the population is fine with that), then yes, I as a consumer want to execute on my free speech to hold advertisers responsible for sponsoring that.

Not sure if this is true about the past era.

I don't know much about TV, but in newspapers print and online, where to put ads has at least for a long time included considerations beyond of just what space is available.

At the news site I worked, the CMS had an per article option to white/blacklist ads from categories or disable them entirely. E.g. so to not show an car advertisement boasting their reliability under an article of an car accident where a child has died.

Or in print news papers (especially weekly ones) you often see that it is structured in a way that the realities about the harsh world and negative stories in general are in the first parts and the paper becomes more and more fluffy and feel-good as you turn the pages. It is in those later sections where most big brands want their ads to be placed.

Also, a lot of things that are pretty normal these days would have caused outrage and protests against the publishers not too long ago.

In my view, people were always easily offended/outraged. Just what causes it, and which views have significant followings and voice changes over time.

It changed with political correct investments. Some 15 years ago people became aware of companies investing in weapon industry, specifically cluster munition and landmines. A signal was sent by publicly shaming companies that shrugged their shoulders. That set a general trend to avoid negative publications and backfire by explicitly distancing from politically or humanitarian questionable practices. It has now escalated to fear-management and rewriting history.

Not in the early days. The Soap in Soap Operas was because you never knew when the ad for the soap company sponsoring the show would show up. There wasn't a break, it was ", and then I used my XYZ soap to"... until you got to the "and" the audience didn't know the ad was coming.

The ad breaks came later as TV realized that the ad was forever part of the show and so they didn't get more money when the did a rerun.

It's because ads online are targeted.

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