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Comment by adriand | Hacker News Reader

The author writes that you can either pay with money or you can “pay with your attention”. What’s left unsaid is the cost of that attention. I believe that cost is very high and it isn’t just ads, it’s the design of countless products including social media sites, games and even the site you’re reading this on right now. It’s all designed to extract as much attention as possible, and the cost is people’s ability to concentrate, learn and get shit done. The cost is, in other words, staggeringly high.

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The thing is, Google's customers generally do not simply want attention, they want people to pay them for something.

Thus, there is a monetary cost if the advertiser succeeds. Google is just a middleman, taking a cut of those prospective sales.

The sad part of online ads is that the internet allows an advertiser, with Google's help, to potentially annoy hundreds of millions of people in order to make some small number of sales. The "solution" to this inefficiency is "targeting" and "stickiness", and that is where the whole business becomes far too intrusive and counterproductive.

In the earlier days of the internet people knew ads were not what they wanted to see on the network. I remember the first ad someone posted to Usenet. IIRC it was an immigration lawyer. Brin and Page originally said when they announced Google in 1998 that they wanted to offer an alternative to a black box web search engine that is funded by advertising.

The only thing that has changed since then is that new users are less critical, they have no idea what the internet is like without the advertising. Imagine if every household had to participate in an AC Nielson study just to watch TV. There are generations of users now that have no idea what those times were like, when people expected privacy and there were boundaries. They cannot fully appreciate what has been lost because they never experienced it to begin with. It is not too late to reclaim what is being stolen.

> The sad part of online ads is that the internet allows an advertiser, with Google's help, to potentially annoy hundreds of millions of people in order to make some small number of sales.

This sentence suddenly made me see all online ads as essentially modern, “intelligent” robocalls at scale.

@canadianfella: same as TV but worse, and we're just getting started

With ads you're not just paying with your "attention" (waste of time and focus), you're also paying with changes in your behaviour, perceptions, and attitudes.

As much as we like to imagine our minds to be impenetrable bastions of rationality, they are not. We can easily be enticed and manipulated to do things we wouldn't otherwise do, to see things differently than we otherwise would, to consider things we wouldn't consider, and all of that is exactly what the advertisers are paying for.

> not just paying with your "attention"

And maybe abolishing democracy

Political manipulation ads, helping an authoritarian rise to power.

But ads for buying what I just searched for: "buy new running shoes", aren't like that -- they can be helpful instead :-). It's mainly social network ads like on Facebook that are dangerous for society?

From the article:

> I think advertising is positive

It's both? Ads are different from ads, just like different things one can eat are different, like potatoes (running shoe ads) versus poisonous mushrooms (nation states abolishing democracy in the US via political manipulation on Facebook)

If I search for “buy new running shoes” I’d rather get the best search results, not the highest paid for.

I’m pretty sure there are better criteria for those results than the amount of money paid to end up in that list.

But alas, that’s not what modern search engines use, because they are advertisers first and foremost. Not reputable search providers anymore.

I tried starting a website a while back that would give reliable, unbiased information on a certain class of goods and services.

I looked at my competitors and saw that most of them were obviously shilling for the company that was paying them the most, which was never the best. I figured by being the most honest I could be the most trusted and win out.

The trouble is, the best companies would rely upon word of mouth. Promoting them wouldn't get me paid a dime. Honesty would benefit them, but not me.

Getting traffic, meanwhile, I realized would cost me money.

That's when I realized that the only way to get a non negative margin in that industry was to sacrifice your objectivity (which is what everyone did).

Theoretically you could charge users for this I guess, like Which? magazine does but I couldn't see a straightforward route to that point that wouldn't involve burning a lot of capital I didn't have. The chicken/egg problem rose its ugly head again.

I gave up soon after.

What if there was something like GPG's network of trust, but for buying stuff

Figure out which brand you prefer, contact them and negotiate a commission. If you're open to your readers about it, it should be fine.

Nice idea :-) hmm at the same time, from the perspective of the readers, how can they know that Pydry (GP) didn't behind the scenes contact 20 brands, and are now promoting those who paid the most?

Sure, they won't know that, but I don't actually think honesty is an important selling point in most sectors. If the review seems coherent and plausible, that's enough for most people. So in a way, honesty is mostly for his own benefit.

Besides, how could he prove his honesty either way?

I guess he could arrange commission with all companies, hope that his favourite brand isn't also the one paying the most, and then disclose all the commissions.

> If the review seems coherent and plausible, that's enough for most people

I think so too

> hope that his favourite brand isn't also the one paying the most, and then disclose all the commissions.

I'm thinking that if the site visitors have a way to see that usually the site promotes other brands than the highest paying, then that'd be good enough. At the same time, why would they trust the disclosure info :-)

Another thought: if his/her favorite brand didn't pay enough, s/he could just disclose the commissions, but not write any review. (To encourage that brand to pay more)

Cutting out the commission was partly how the better companies tried to provide a good service at a reasonable price. Some even had FAQs that stated that they wouldn't pay commission. A couple paid pretty meager commissions.

The competing sites would tend to either pretend that these companies don't exist, or if that wasn't possible coz the brand was strong would subtly try to indicate that they weren't all that hot compared to [site that pays a LOT for new customers].

I don't mean to suggest that the challenge was insurmountable, but I couldn't figure out a way to make honesty pay, particularly given the high cost of acquiring traffic.

Moreover, if you acquired some sort of trust (which many parties did) or a high spot in google through an aged domain or something, the incentive to exploit it for profit would inevitably take over.

It was clearly something users cared about coz they complained about it, but there was something akin to a tragedy of the commons going on.

Aha ok. Without knowing the product it’s hard to advise, perhaps you can start a youtube channel around it, become the go to expert in the field? Sell consulting? Sell follow on products or services?

Yeah, I tried content creation but I quickly realized that it was more expensive than advertising, it's fiercely competitive, there are people out there way better at than me, there's major incumbency advantage that I didn't have and it pays off slower. It fundamentally didn't change the economics of what I was trying to do at all. The people taking the highest commissions had a lot more to blow on content creation than I did, with my refusal to play the same tricks.

These market dynamics are fairly common across many industries. I don't think the one I chose was particularly special.

Consulting or something might have been possible but at that point it's basically giving up and joining an entirely different industry - which is what I ultimately did.

I really really tried to make honesty pay but I couldn't.

Just googled that to see if the ads are helpful. They weren't. Not surprising, because Google ads are ranked by profitability, not helpfulness, and those metrics don't correlate as much as Google would like you to think. The ads just took my attention away from organic results, which are the ones that are supposed to be ranked by helpfulness.

Those sneaker ads probably aren't destroying our democracy[1], they're just costing the society things that are hard to quantify. They induce me to buy what's most profitable to the sellers, not what's best for me. They take away business from actually helpful resources, and from those who don't advertise on Google.

[1] They are enabling the existence of a search monopoly (along with other factors), so you know, "probably" is the strongest word I'd go with here.

No, Google Ads are not ranked for highest bidder. There's Quality Score that affects the decision a lot. If I have a website about running shoes and want to bid on the keyword "second hand cars" two things happen: first my bid gets astronomically high, because it's not matching the user's intent. secondly from all those people who click and leave google search but come back after a few seconds, google figures out that the quality score of the website is so bad (wrong intent) that the bid for that advertiser even gets more astronomically high and at one point even gets stopped.

The whole system incentivises ads that match the intent of the user, any deviation from this is extremely difficult and not profitable for the advertiser in most cases.

I know. I didn't say the ads were ranked for highest bidder. I said they were ranked to maximize profitability. If the user does not click an ad, it's not profitable to Google. If the user comes back to the search page after visiting the ad, the ad is not profitable to the advertiser.

But if the user buys from the ad, that doesn't say anything about whether the ad was useful (or counter-productive) to the user, it only means that this transaction was profitable to Google and the advertiser.

Ads not matching the search query are not the issue. They are neither profitable nor helpful, so you can't use that criterion to distinguish the two goals.

>As much as we like to imagine our minds to be impenetrable bastions of rationality, they are not. We can easily be enticed and manipulated to do things we wouldn't otherwise do

I don't think advertising does work well on everybody nor does it have to. Maybe not even half of us need to be susceptible for it to be as profitable as it is.

I have noticed some people are much more susceptible to suggestion than others. These people are probably responsible for a disproportionate amount of commercial profits and probably more likely to be taken in by paid political campaigning.

Furthermore, I reckon if we could hold a mirror up to many of these people they might reconsider their behavior (it probably would work better than shouting at them at thanksgiving or over Facebook).

IF advertising didn't work, on average, it would probably have gone away by now, don't you think?

I didn't say it didn't work.

Yes, completely agree. Advertising is essentially mind hacking. Companies pay advertisers to introduce their brands into the minds of consumers. It's inherently hostile.

My ability to concentrate, learn, or get shit done has only ever been hindered by an ad to the extent that it's annoying waiting for the ad to finish. I can't imagine most people don't just tune ads out most of the time. Still better than having to pay every website a subscription. It's nice having the option though, for example I personally find YouTube Premium worth the money.

There's a very important piece you're missing here and once you get it, it's hard to see the world in the same way. A product you pay for doesn't care how often you use it. The tennis racket sits there. It doesn't matter how much you use it, that's your choice.

A product you pay for with your attention has a voracious appetite for your attention. The more you use it, the more valuable it is to the company that made it. It would be best if you were using it All The Time. It would be best if it was incredibly addictive so you would never get tired of it and move on to something else. It would be best if the maker of this product could measure how much of your time they were capturing so they could make sure to capture even more in the future.

And in fact, if you look at time use studies, we pretty much spend all of our waking lives using a phone, tv or computer. There is literally no time left, so an advertising company is trying to invent a self driving car so you can keep using your phone during your commute, the last sliver of waking life left unconquered. Our dreams will surely be next.

This is still ultimately true with things you subscribe to though. Netflix vies for your attention even though you pay directly with $$, because if another streaming service takes more of your attention, you'll pay for it (potentially instead).

With Netflix they have to strike a balance, though. Someone who watches Netflix 8 hours a day is going to cost them more in royalties than someone who watches 8 hours a week.

The sweet spot is likely a little different for everyone, and is whatever amount of attention keeps them subscribed, but no more.

Additionally, I have a customer-vendor relationship with Netflix. With a random ad-supported website or something like Facebook, I'm the product, not the customer. I would much much much rather be a customer than a product.

>With Netflix they have to strike a balance, though. Someone who watches Netflix 8 hours a day is going to cost them more in royalties than someone who watches 8 hours a week.

Does Netflix license content on a per play basis? All the info over the years I’ve read, although not official, indicate they were paying the content owners a flat amount for a certain time period.

For example

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/04/business/media/netflix-fr...

"The sweet spot...is whatever amount of attention keeps them subscribed, but no more."

I used to believe that. Nope, they want all your attention all the time. If they lose it, another streaming service might gain some market share, and the stock price will lose billions.

That's not how Netflix thinks about it internally. The north star metric for Netflix is how many people choose to renew every month and the biggest correlation to this is number of minutes watched per month.

All else being equal, given a choice between a change that makes people watch more minutes per month or less, Netflix will always choose more.

Not really, Netflix definitely wants to have you use their platform frequently so you value it enough to keep paying for it. But this is balanced against the cost of making sure you don't run out of content and cancel anyway. They also pay a bit more for bandwidth and servers if you watch a lot.

So while Netflix wants all your TV time, they derive no extra benefits if all your time us TV time. This is absolutely not true of advertising supported services that make more from you the more time you spend.

> I can't imagine most people don't just tune ads out most of the time.

"Most" means "not all".

That's not a feature of advertising as a business model, it's just a feature of growth-focused businesses. The same forces apply to products that you pay for with money. For a very obvious example, just look at Candy Crush.

It is not even remotely a feature of all growth-focused businesses.

For example, Slack is a growth focused company that uses a subscription model for revenue and has no incentive to maximize time spent in their App.

You are correct that advertising, microtransactions and gambling lead to very similar business model incentives.

It's not just the cost in attention--those ads are produced with the price of our privacy included in the cost.

I feel like there are other costs beyond attention and privacy, too. Costs of malware and fraud are also common, but for the sake of argument we can just focus on somewhat more "legitimate" / "non-malicious" ads. (Emphasis on the scare quotes.)

There's the aesthetic cost. If I see an ad on or near a nicely designed or produced website or video, it immediately detracts from the visual appeal.

There's the annoyance cost. I'm personally immediately irritated and annoyed when I see or hear an ad. It affects my mood and my impression of whatever I'm trying to look at or listen to. (I despise it when I'm away from my computer and have a podcast on which ends and instantly transitions to some loud peppy ad for a fast food restaurant and I have to interrupt whatever I'm doing to walk over and shut the thing off.)

For some, there's the cost of paying for a product or service that an ad misled them about. They may pay more than they should have or get something which is portrayed a certain way in an ad which doesn't hold up in reality.

There's the psychological and sociological cost. Ads (especially in video or audio form) present a certain clinical and biased world frame. People usually talk and act in unnatural or "perfect" ways. A young person exposed to, say, hundreds of ads per week and thousands of ads per year may eventually start to subconsciously find that frame normal and expected. Even though they know they're ads rather than non-fiction, I think those things can potentially seep in in some cases.

There are the conflicts of interest and the effects caused by suspicion of conflicts of interest. If I see a "sponsored search result" or "sponsored article", I expect that the source will be less likely to show things which might propose a competing narrative or say anything negative about the sponsor. "Okay, I can't trust this source for anything related to [X], now."

As a corollary to the annoyance cost, there's the fakeness/sincerity dissonance cost. If I'm reading an article or listening to a podcast that's presented as, or may very well be, sincere and truthful, it's a little bit jarring for it to be interrupted with some fake, artificial, marketer-crafted bullshit with superlatives about how [X] will change your life and is the best thing ever. A little hard to take the rest seriously at that point.

I feel like I could list at least ten more. From a purely subjective and personal perspective, I don't even mind the egregious privacy implications as much as all these other things. I just fucking hate seeing and hearing ads.

> For some, there's the cost of paying for a product or service that an ad misled them about. They may pay more than they should have or get something which is portrayed a certain way in an ad which doesn't hold up in reality.

This is a big one. Something being free with advertisements doesn't mean that we're not paying for it, just that the way we're paying for it is hidden. Companies don't pay Google money for altruistic reasons, they're paying because they can earn more.

If you think about it, we're actually likely to pay more when we pay through ads. Google wants X dollars. In a subscription model, we pay X. In an ad model, a company gives Google X, because they think they can make X + P (profits). So they get us to buy a product we don't need, and in order to recoup their loss we need to be paying the manufacturing cost M (we'll pretend other costs like transportation and retail markups are included in here as well), plus X, plus P. Otherwise the advertising isn't worth it. Instead of us paying X to Google to us their products, now we're paying X+P+M for their products in a very roundabout way, and then calling it free.

Usability costs. Ads are by definition content users didn't want but are receiving anyway. They use up the bandwidth of users. They take up space on the interface and distract the user, taking attention away from more important things. They make sites uglier and harder to use. They lower the signal to noise ratio.

Banner blindness. It's been proven that people have become used to ignoring banner ads. Their eyes jump over them as soon as they're recognized. Since there may be false positives, this habit has implications for user interface design: an actual user interface element that looks like a banner ad will be ignored by most people. On the other hand, sites have also begun to style their ads exactly like their main content in order to make it harder for users to distinguish them.

Oh yeah, I can't believe I didn't even mention some obvious ones like bandwidth usage, slower page performance due to loading and rendering and JavaScript-based trackers, etc. There are so many different things to enumerate.

The arrogance of appropriation is a pathology common to developers.

For example: “we’re rolling out a new tool. It takes only fifteen minutes to learn!” when 100,000 people have to learn it.

Developers working in advertising aren’t just exhibiting this disorder; they are consumed by it.

Can you elaborate

I can tell you this is an unpopular observation to put before developers, who are not often great at considering the human price of their choices, and advertising executives will continue to roundly & loudly defend their value proposition until there is no more toothpaste to sell, or we finally convince them to board the Golgafrincham B Ark. The combination of the two is a potent toxin that can turn an unassuming everyday programmer into a vassal of malignant narcissism.

Time is the most valuable commodity anyone possesses. Stealing it is diabolical.

The problem with ads is that they destroy value, which I think is what you are getting at. If you are an ad-dependent website, you are incentivized to fill your site with so many ads until it becomes just barely tolerable for the marginal reader. E.g. if your site as V viewers, and N ads, with L(N) being the number of viewers who turn off in disgust at seeing the N-th ad, then the equilibrium condition is L(N) = V/(N+1). A website with 10 ads displayed would suffer a 10% drop in readership if it added an 11th ad. That's the only condition whereby they don't ad that 11th ad. And you only added 10 ads because the number of readers you lost with the 10th was less than 1/10 of your total.

That is, you are incentivized to significantly reduce the pleasure obtained from your product, as the attention demanded by ads competes with the attention of your readers/viewers.

But if you are selling a good for money, while you are also incentivized to keep raising prices until the marginal cost of the product is equal to the marginal benefit, the money you charge doesn't reduce the quality of the product. A beautiful car may be painful to buy, but it's still a beautiful car. There is no such thing as a beautiful website with ads, the product is intentionally made awful.

And that situation of destroying value creates really weird long and short-run equilibria. For example, ads incentivize the kind of products for which attention is more easily shared: you wont find a lot of deep-think pieces that are ad-supported because the ads are too distracting. Instead, you find a lot of short-attention span pieces as these work better with ads. Thus the staccatto assaults of 9 weird tricks to do X, where you read a weird trick and then look at a couple of ads and go to the next weird trick. You can feel the presence of the ads in the work itself. In the Old TV era, episodes would encounter these cliff-hangers when the detective walks into a room, points a gun, you hear the sound of a woman screaming, and then it cuts to a commercial. They needed to create this peak of interest so you'd stick around to see what was in the room. But that peak also artificially disrupted the story. Online, all that is compressed into a few seconds of recognition, it is constant disruption.

In terms of long-run equilibria, there is this ratchet effect: As people flee the ad-sponsored world the ones who remain are more insentitive to ads and so the number of ads increases. In other words, the quality of the writing gets worse over time, in an ad-supported eco-system.

So no, ads are not just an alternate way of paying for content, they are a way of shaping content, and for the worse.

products subject to direct market forces are incentivized by this as well. you don't pay for crack with popups.

At least you're getting something out of it when it isn't ads, though. If it's a game (like Candy Crush, mentioned in another comment), at least you're getting some tiny dopamine hit, no matter how repetitive and empty. For social media, at least you're getting that slight bit of humor or outrage bait.

I don't like these things at all, but they're something. With an ad, you're solely siphoning off a portion of my infinitesimally fleeting existence. It's like getting stuck in traffic, except deliberate and with malice aforethought.

I despise ads, but I think paying for a stimulating, informative article (for example) with an ad view is inherently less destructive than paying for a meaningless, empty dopamine hit, or manufactured outrage.

In that case I'd rather subscribe to/pay the author directly. (Who's to say an ad impression on some company's website will even help the author in any way? Maybe there's a chance it could indirectly, or maybe there's a layoff or pay cut planned soon anyway.)

For that and several other reasons, I strongly prefer independent solo journalists (or very small independent self-operating teams) rather than ones that work for publications. I think Substack and Patreon are far better solutions here than advertising is, for example.

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