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Comment by cutemonster | Hacker News Reader

> 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)

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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.

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.

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