The Law of Shitty Clickthroughs (2012)
andrewchen.com
andrewchen.com
There were times when checking my mailbox (I mean physical one) was either important - taxes, administration, bills or fun - postcards from family and friends. Now it’s 99% spam. It’s not worth checking.
Email - the same. Mostly spam and shitty newsletters that will 'Teach you to Be Rich...'.
Professional press - instead of interesting and novel ideas and research we get sponsored junk just to sell services. Instead of honest reviews we get paid test winners. All mixed with just plain old full page commercials.
TV shows - instead of good story we get some unbelievable plots that are built only to excuse showing a sponsor car, cooking pots or some other junk.
Phone - few years ago a call from unknown number meant your kid was sick or you have missed something in your taxes. Now it's always spam, many times per day. I've already disabled all notifications from numbers out of my contact list.
Blogs - they used to be interesting or personal, now it's either commercial spam, worthless review/comparisons or a personal brand spam. Mostly written by cheap contractors with no experience in the field. I hope it get's replaced by GPT-3 soon.
The list is pretty long: - city full of ugly banners - loading screens in cash machines so you can see a commercial - commercials in movie theaters before and after the film - worthless books just to build personal brand or promote products - sidewalks full of flyers - free games for kids on mobile - web pages with popups - addictive social media practices - spam comments underneath articles and in forums - reddit communities full of spam
The list goes on.
If we give them more time they will find a way to destroy everything that's worth while for us. Well paid psychologists, instead of helping people will find a way to get to your brain with next junk you don't need while data scientists prepare more reports from our personal data. After that engineers will work hard to circumvent your ad blocker instead of adding new features, fixing performance or improving user experience.
Sorry, for the long rant, but sometimes I simply think their mission in life is to make our lives worse.
In the end I'm just happy that clickthroughs are shitty. And that they stay this way.
The profile on you in various advertising scumbags databases will eventually be so inaccurate it will be worth the cost to store in a rust platter
Over indulge the scummy advertisers. Cost them as much money as possible for worthless clicks. They crossed so many lines over the last couple of decades people should be embarrassed to work in that industry. Honestly if i did I would lie and say I do animal experimentation. It's basically the same thing after all
Or at least that's the "Optimism set to 11" plan.
I suspect there is no solution, but it's interesting to consider some. What would a society look like if you somehow forcibly limited the number of people you could contact?
You just need to look back into history and see. We've basically been increasing the reach of contact, being the end game: globalization.
So you'd have:
- several monopolies spread across many countries instead of Google for example;
- less massive companies like Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Apple;
- less access to services and goods;
- less emigration and brain power leakage;
- less economic growth;
- and the list goes on
Like this board wouldn't exist if you forced that limit.
Is this bad? I don't think it has to be bad necessarily, it's a choice that wasn't made in the past and some countries/organizations have benefited from it more then others.
Cuts out billboards, ads on the screen you're looking at, Nike swooshes on people's shoes.
The first killer app of AR glasses will be ads in places where we couldn't have ads before. Your neighbor's lawn ? Ad space. The sky ? Ad space. Whirlpool in a toilet ? Ad space.
Imagine waking up, putting on your glasses and looking into the autumn morning sun, dawn. The rays break into golden lines of light. As the sun rises further, a capri sun ad. You sigh and fall back into you bed and stare at the ceiling, another ad taking advantage of the plainess. Be less Boring- Virgin Galactic.
Its sounds like dystopia but future generations will be collecting banner ads as a quaint little hobby like we do stamp collecting.
1) v 1.0 - blanks out ads, the public rejoices
2) v 1.5 - allow ads from 'trusted partners'
3) v 2.0 - introduce a monthly subscription to blank out all ads
In the 1990s, I used to watch TV and there were lots of ads. Now I have Netflix and the ad blocker takes care of YouTube. There were magazines and newspapers you had to buy but were full of ads. Now it’s free and the adblocker takes care of the ads. Radio ads. Now podcast where you can fastforward, sometimes before you even hear the name of the company.
Computer magazines (and computer/video game magazines) had pretty good ads. They're still fun to read today.
I still miss the Fry's Electronics ad sections in newspapers.
A few years ago at least, print magazines still seemed to be alive in the UK, perhaps in part because they were often sold by newsagents.
There's also the question of qualitative change, such as personally targeted advertising and the infrastructure and methods (massive pervasive surveillance) required to support that.
Given global ad spending trends and the consequences of targeted manipulation and mass surveillance, I'd strongly suggest your life is not nearly so free of advertising's influence as you testify, and perhaps even believe.
Oh boy... It's that time of the week again...
I agree that nearly everything has become a marketing channel but it is possible to avoid most of it.
Pessimistic, cynical, backwards-looking to a golden age that never existed, anti-marketing and sales, etc.
If this is such a huge problem, and you seem to have a lot of passion for it, why not try to create tools to solve it for people?
And if you think business is evil, it doesn’t even have to be a product or service! You could simply create a political organization to try to lobby government to right these wrongs you see in the world.
Your comment is the most upvoted one on this thread so a lot of people must feel the same way.
There’s only one problem.
People are irrationally resistant to change and new things. Even changes that might make their lives better.
To affect this change, you’ll need to get a lot of people’s attention and buy-in via this process…
…called marketing.
Awww crap. This means becoming the thing you hate.
Maybe this is just how the world has always worked and will always work?
And maybe it’s not so bad?
It's a false claim often made by marketing people that marketing is synonymous with persuasion and the propagation of ideas. That without marketing everything is doomed to obscurity and irrelevance. Well, that may be true for an increasing number of areas of life in the world that marketing has built but it isn't generally. You've heard of Quantum Mechanics, right? Do you think it says something valid about the world? Did anyone ever market it to you?
Marketing is a fundamentally shallow form of communication. It's the forcing of awareness of something onto people without their choosing to be aware of it. The payload is necessarily low in information content, the interaction is brief and the message is dressed up to be maximally attention-grabbing. These things have negative results, and those negative results become worse the more pervasive marketing gets. The fact that people have always done it doesn't make it good, or make it desirable to allow an unlimited amount of it into our society.
It's worse in modern times for a couple of reasons. One is that our society consumes more information than ever before, and we've made a Faustian bargain with marketing to fund the generation of that information. Another is that marketing drags everything down to its level - the presence of these shallow, maximally distracting signals forces others to do the same in order to be heard. The transformation of politics into marketing (marketed as "inevitable" or "the way it's always been" by marketers) is a case in point. It's cancerous, and I'm glad people are finally waking up to it.
I don't think anything I can say will change your mind. Often, a belief that things were better in the past is more of a personality trait or an emotional disposition motivated by external events rather than something rational.
If you're so inclined though, I highly recommend using the Library of Congress website or Newspapers.com to read what mass communication was like 50-200 years ago.
You'll be amazed at how little has changed:
Yet.
Any argument you make that students should spend an hour learning about quantum mechanics instead of something else on the market of ideas (eg. finance, literature, history, etc.) is by definition an act of positioning.
The curriculum of today is the result of marketing in the past. You just don't see it that way because you weren't around when those decisions were being made.
But I agree, it sounds like we’re just arguing semantics at this point and have reached the logical end point of all internet debate
Otherwise people might think Andrew Chen is advocating for mobile notifications and Open Graph in 2021...
Here is the 2012 discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3804055
The dated URL is: http://andrewchen.co/2012/04/05/the-law-of-shitty-clickthrou...
As a not-a-marketing/ad-person, if more ads contained useful information and less emotional pandering to whatever/whoever they think I am, I'd be more likely to look at and click on them. That, and not actively surveilling me...
But clickthrough rates are so bad that they are effectively useless for even for so-called useful ads that nobody with any sophistication cares about that metric. Pretty much the only thing that adtech talks about is CPI now.
Compared to the median person we have a much more engineering focused mindset, we have incomparably deeper technical knowledge and skill in computer programming and are far more willing to read.
That means that things that work well to target us may not work well for the average person. I finally understood this after thinking way to many times "why would anybody be stupid enough to do X" when it turns out the answer is lots of people.
I suspect there are only few companies that manage the contact lists and they are now careful not to overstep the law.
On the other hand, scam calls from abroad started to appear (sir-your-computer-has-a-virus type).
I've been using fake names and emails for some accounts online and somehow I recently received physical spam mail with one of those names without ever sharing my address.
Might or might not be relevant that we sell products for a niche, technical industry.
It's really sad too, because these sites know that you clicked on them from a sea of similar looking results, and this signup form is the only way you're likely to even remember their existence.
Most complaints are about intrusive advertising. Product management, customer analysis, demand and financial modeling, and all similar aspects of market making is what marketing traditionally is.
Advertising and promotions is a small component that tars the broader industry.
Consumer profiling is a large component that tars the entire industry.
The 10X solution to solving the Law of Shitty Clickthroughs, even momentarily, is to discover the next untapped marketing channel. In addition to doubling down on traditional forms of online advertising like banners, search, and email, it’s important to work hard to get to the next marketing channel while it’s uncontested.
Sometimes I get asked “have you ever seen someone do XYZ to acquire customers?” Turns out, the highest vote of confidence I can give is, “No I haven’t, and that’s good – that means there’s a higher chance of it working. You should try it.”
There is no such thing as an uncontested marketing channel. It's why browsing the Internet feels like a chore on most days. Any interesting UGC site with an audience will be deluged with marketers.
Think about Medium and Quora. Great when they began, back when contributors understood the intent of the site, and wrote accordingly. Today, they are nothing more than an appendage of one's personal brand and SEO strategy.