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Comment by speckledjim | Hacker News Reader

I think for a community devoted to startups, having a particular dislike of online advertising, and a strange "That's not real income" mentality is unfortunate.

If you rule out advertising income because you don't like adverts, or because you don't have the skills necessary, then you're missing out on a slice of a gigantic pie. The vast majority of the general population are receptive to advertising and find it useful.

I think it's worth remembering that most people in the tech world are absolute outliers. In the real world, most people own and watch a TV. Most people buy newspapers. Most people view and click on adverts. Most people don't own ipads. etc etc

edit: You can downmod this all you like. You're the one missing out on the money.

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>The vast majority of the general population are receptive to advertising

That's terrible justification to do something I consider sleazy just to make a buck. I am a proponent of the idea of voting with my wallet, unfortunately for some reason that concept seems to get whitewashed by people who justify ignoring it by saying its "just business". That mindset is even stronger by people who are not end consumers.

>You're the one missing out on the money.

I used to be OK running enough ads for my web properties to cover hosting. Then I discovered I had scruples.

This is the sort of uneducated attitude I'm talking about.

Advertising is not 'sleazy'. It works, and it provides a service to both advertiser, publisher, and consumer.

Do you also consider online dating to be sleazy, or job posting sites? Because that's essentially what advertising is - matching a consumer interested in something, to an advertiser who provides something.

Without advertising, most consumers would not have a clue what products and services exist. Most manufacturers would have no way to tell people about the service/product they provide.

I'm literally amazed at the naivety.

Calling it an "uneducated attitude" is a bit of an ad hominem, and could just as easily be flung in the other direction, at the attitude that takes some sort of naive Economics 101 justification completely uncritically, without being familiar with the history, practice, and theory of marketing/advertising.

I agree that at its best advertising is matching, basically filling in an information gap. But it often does the opposite, exploiting an information gap / ignorance; in fact it's often explicitly and completely unapologetically aimed at doing that, looking to create and exploit information asymmetries. You make more money by selling people an expensive version of something they can get equivalent cheaper, or by luring people into a contract whose full cost they don't realize up front. There's a reason advertisers tend to read up on behaviorist psychology, because exploiting weaknesses in human decision-making, to encourage people to allocate their resources in a way that they wouldn't do with perfect information, is a big part of the game.

I may just know the wrong people, but I don't actually know anybody in marketing who doesn't have a sort of cynical "tricking suckers into buying our clients' stuff" view, at least some of the time. That's the game; you don't last long in the business if you have a purely idealistic view of only matching people to quality products that are a good match for them, especially since at larger firms you often have no choice about which products you're supposed to be selling.

>Advertising is not 'sleazy'. It works

The two are not mutually exclusive.

>it provides a service to both advertiser, publisher, and consumer

Given the number of advertizing channels, and the pool of products and services offered, the cost (in time) to the consumer, is rather high just to learn that X exists.

>Do you also consider online dating to be sleazy, or job posting sites? Because that's essentially what advertising is - matching a consumer interested in something, to an advertiser who provides something.

I'd agree that they are essentially the same if I had to go to "fast food" section of craigslist to find out what fast food joints out there, or the "auto insurance" section to find out that Progressive is a thing.

>I'm literally amazed at the naivety.

Say I accept your premise, that still doesn't negate the fact that there is enough advertizement in other mediums that all the virtues of it are already sufficiently met that adding advertizement to my websites don't create any value for the visitor.

I don't believe in the eradication of advertizement, just that it has reached a level of permeation that subjecting my visitors to even more of it is something I do not believe in.

> I don't believe in the eradication of advertizement, just that it has reached a level of permeation that subjecting my visitors to even more of it is something I do not believe in.

Most people can tune out things they're not interested in.

Just as you walk down a street, you are bombarded with shop signage, and you filter out the ones that interest you, and the ones that don't. You read a magazine, and when faced with an advert that's not relevant or interesting, you turn the page.

There are certainly people who do not have the ability to cope well with adverts on the internet, and for them, adblock exists.

Most people can tune out things they're not interested in.

Vermont is a tourist trap and as such doesn't allow billboards. Should they allow them and just tell the leaf-peepers to enjoy the scenery around the billboards? Or is the presence of advertizement, willfully ignored or not, still intrusive?

We don't allow advertizement in schools (well, thats eroding, but anyway..), I'm willing to bet your workplace isn't covered in advertizement posters and have an intercom and/or tvs constantly blaring ads all day unless you work a particularity shitty, most likely retail, job. Why not? If you could just decide to tune out the ads once and never worry about it again, why not?

Advertizing is a necessary evil. You can just say that. You don't have to justify it as a practice you (or others) engage in beyond that. No, I don't think its _evil_ evil, I'm just using the phase, but what I don't understand is that you seem to be arguing for it beyond its role as a necessary evil. Why do you? Are you defending it as a practice you have diluted yourself into beveling is good for everyone so that you don't have to feel conflicted about engaging in it? Are you just talking the talk to make a practice you engage in (and yourself as a user) look better in the court of public opinion? Have you just swallowed the "if its profitable, it is therefore good in every metric" ideology hook, line and sinker? I really don't get where you're coming from.

"Vermont is a tourist trap and as such doesn't allow billboards. Should they allow them and just tell the leaf-peepers to enjoy the scenery around the billboards? Or is the presence of advertizement, willfully ignored or not, still intrusive?"

Sounds like it would conflict with Vermont's branding. In other words, for Vermont beautiful foliage is a far better inducement to get people to come and spend money than a bunch of signs with words on them.

> I'm willing to bet your workplace isn't covered in advertizement posters and have an intercom and/or tvs constantly blaring ads all day unless you work a particularity shitty, most likely retail, job. Why not? If you could just decide to tune out the ads once and never worry about it again, why not?

I work from home, and generally have the TV on all the time, showing me amongst other things, adverts. It doesn't bother me. In fact I find it very useful and interesting.

It's no more a necessary evil than "shops" are.

Shops are pretty much advertising. They connect a consumer to several manufacturers. They stock things you might want to buy. You go in, get bombarded with branding advertising products. You filter out the ones you want, and buy them. The shop gets a cut of revenue, just like a website gets a cut of any sale after a user clicks on an advert (Either directly, or averaged out to a per click/impression price).

Some people do hate shops as well. I've gone to the mall with people who find the whole experience absolutely horrible and uncomfortable. Personally, I love browsing round shops, seeing what you can find.

Shops are pretty much advertising by their very nature. A shop without a stock of goods for you to buy wouldn't be a very useful shop.

Ignoring that weird anology, you seem to be arguing that since you personally enjoy advertising, then everyone else in the world should just deal with advertising all the time, because, well, speckledjim on HN doesn't really mind it all that much.

It's just not a very convincing argument.

No. I'm in no way basing this on my own preferences.

I'm basing it on data and numbers. If advertising didn't work, it wouldn't be a $multibillion industry.

The most successful advertisements, i.e. the ones that work best are not simply broadcasting useful information to consumers. Instead, they typically rely on known cognitive exploits.

If advertising is just about educating consumers, why don't advertisers run ads that are critical of their own products? A half-truth can be worse than an outright lie, because it is more confusing.

I run ads on my sites and I think I have some scruples, thank you very much. They sort of cover hosting costs.

If people don't want to see the ads, well they can go find some other site to see: it's that simple. They get to use my site(s) for free, so I think it's a pretty good deal for them.

People who don't want to see ads will probably have them blocked anyway.

Others have already stated the points I wanted to make but I'd like to add another one to the discussion. There is a double standard on graffiti in the real world. Why can a company put it's logo in huge print for everyone to see but every time a kid spray paints his comparatively small logo, he becomes a criminal? The reasons appear to be that one is paying the government money and making a profit while the other is not.

While I can see the point you're trying to make, the companies concerned have obtained permission to display their logo in that way from the owner of the medium in which they have chosen to display their logo; the kid hasn't.

There's an arguable point from an anarchist, I suppose, viewpoint about the tyrrany of property laws and concentration of resources, but that's not I'd suggest what most graffiti artists are trying to bring to the forefront with their work.

I think that it helps to look at the issue objectively rather than considering it from the perspective of the status quo. My point isn't so much that the kids don't have permission as much as it is that they won't get permission if they ask, or they are too afraid to ask out of fear of persecution. Looking at the planet from the eyes of an alien, it's clear that a small subset of the population have a monopoly on the visual appearance of our hives. It's also pretty obvious that the tribes in power consider production to be far more important than anything else, where even self-expression and art are turned into commodities. Which brings me to the point I was trying to make - that in your house you decorate it in a way that makes you feel good. In the shared public spaces, only those who have enough resources get to decorate the place, and almost always for the purpose of acquiring more resources. It never looks good, so the joy of the many is sacrificed for the profit of the few. We often forget that even though the building belongs to someone, the space surrounding it is still public, yet the fact is not respected.

Because it's my property, and I don't want some young kid tagging my property. However, if that same young kid sought permission, I might give it to him if the message of the resulting art would be something I'd support.

Well then the public space belongs to both of us, which means that you can't display certain things. For example, try hanging up a huge image of a naked woman on one of the sides of your house. It's your property but because of the effect it has on those who see it, the local council would take issue with your decoration. Why should we be subjected to psychological manipulation on a near constant basis?

Are you seriously trying to argue that I should be allowed to spray paint your car because it's visible from a public space?

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