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Comment by forgotmyoldname | Hacker News Reader

I really don’t get why big companies buying ads are apparently morally trapped in 1950.

Nobody who was actually going to buy your product is going to care if it appears alongside someone saying “oh shit! Cool!” But we consistently get policies that punish people just for saying simple words, like YouTube apparently demonetizing anything with “foul language” in the titles/first minute or so of the video.

Most people also won’t care if a portion of the website has boobs or something. 99.999% of people won’t decide to never again purchase your soda because it advertised on a site that had a bare nipple on a certain subsection of that site. But policies are enforced like this is true, and it ends up killing platforms once they reach a size mainstream enough to sell fast food and soda ads.

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I used to buy millions of dollars of ads for major brands including Verizon and NBC Universal. You’re right and wrong at the same time. If Clorox accidentally bought $1MM of ads on Pornhub would it hurt their bottom line? No. It might be help it with clever creative.

It’s all about Christmas bonuses or quarterly bonuses. High level executives are notoriously conservative and DO NOT rock the boat. All it takes is enough moralizing hypocrites seeing an ad in the wrong place or emailing the company or whipping up a Twitter cancellation and suddenly their career aspirations are at risk. And they are incredibly replaceable.

It's about appealing to the largest demographic possible. The company might not care about such antiquated morals, but a large percentage of the population does.

An example is the YouTube "adpocalypse" from a few years ago. When major national brands have ads showing up to Nazi videos and conspiracies, it's not a good look for the company and journalists ripped them a new one. People don't care that the ads are "algorithmically" placed.

There’s a huge difference between “shows up beside” and “shows up on the same website” though. I don’t think GP was talking about showing ads next to porn, but rather whether unmonetized porn on a NSFW sub poisons the well for advertiser friendly subs.

My understanding is that advertisers had an issue with Nazi videos being monetized with their ads, not Nazi videos being on the platform at all. Obviously nobody wants to pay money to have their brand associated with that.

I said “fuck” like, twice in a 3 hour hangout with a group of “friends”, all something around their mid-20s.

At the end of the night, I was pulled aside by one of them and was told “we like having you hang with us, but you can’t be swearing like that around us.”

These people exist. In much larger numbers than you think. And they are much more demographically spread out than you’d think.

Edit: I don’t really hang with them anymore.

It’s very rare that I’d curse in a business or formal setting. Take me to meet your parents and I can be the picture of civility. If we’re out having casual drinks, well, I’m a Navy veteran and the language may get a bit more colorful. I’m not going to turn the air blue, but if we’re out for 3 hours, you’re likely to hear an f-bomb or two. If that bothers someone, we’re probably not going to hang out together for a number of other reasons.

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