I cant upvote you enough. This single comment contains many of the contrarian view against HN. It is nice we have these real world stories on HN to balance the ideological fight against ads, where All Ads are evil.
The problem was never about the ads.
It was about the fact that ads were forced, privacy-invasive (due to customization) and generally were terrible overall (think malware/crypto mining risks, terrible UX - think annoyingly flashy gifs, or those gigantic banners in the middle of a scenic drive), not to mention poorly regulated, leading to lots of "double your money/phallus in 3 days!" type of scams.
There are a few "fair" advertising companies (the name slips me) that I am perfectly happy with. A static, discreet ad need not be bad. Several ads are absolute works of art and passion. The vast majority are not.
What we have is (techy) folks wanting to not have a shitty experience, and the average privacy-conscious user not wanting tracking. Companies do not respect (or care enough) for these which is why you have an anti-ad point of view. (I should probably write about this.)
Today, the ad industry tracks the user, and ads are attached to matching user interest, which gives an incentive to produce arbitrary, but addictive content, with most of the benefit accruing to the ad oligopolies instead of the content producers.
Today's statistically-driven advertising does not relate to the context and thus has no bridge for engagement. We are all desensitized to them, so they just have to block content, flash more incessantly, and make the dismiss click box smaller (or just start putting fake dismiss boxes to trick people into more engagement).
I think the scammy/dark side of advertising is driven by the cost of impressions being so low. This is because of the pricing disparities allowed by the advertising broker tracking attributions rather than the business themselves. Legitimate products suffer as a result, similar to the effect of spam on email.
I dont think we disagree.
Like I wrote in another post, most on HN couldn't understand the difference between placement ad on Google Search Engine and Google Ads Network. And suggested we should ban all "tracking ads". And later all ads. I explicitly ask them and suggest what you just wrote. That there could be good ads, and they, by majority disagree. This isn't just on HN, it is pretty much across the whole tech industry. Benedict Evans wrote a lot about this [1] and on Twitter. We even went to ask people offline to make sure we are not in an online bubble. But so far the results suggest otherwise. Especially with Tracking [2].
[1] https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2021/5/13/apples-ads...
[2] https://twitter.com/benedictevans/status/1387414650443141120...
I still don't understand your point. The only reason Facebook's ability to properly attribute went down drastically is specifically because of the iOS privacy changes that require user opt in to track across different sites.
Fine, I don't doubt there were other HN commenters who were arguing different meanings of "tracking", but that's all a moot point. In this instance, we know exactly why Facebook's ad effectiveness went down - it went down because they could no longer track all your interactions across the majority of the web. Tough shit.
IIUC, you can do attribution with a very basic ad: <a href="website.com/ad-34" ping="fb.com/my-product/ad-34/ping"><img src="fb.com/my-product/ad-34/img.jpeg" /> Come buy my product, you'll love it!</a>
Then you sum up all the "/ad-34" hits, and figure out how many of those user sessions (which are now on your own site -- single domain, but perhaps leveraging a script supplied by the ad network) went and actually bought something. The ad network can correlate those sessions with the "ping" it receives to determine clicks vs. conversions.
Facebook (and other ad networks) want credit if someone clicks on your ad, spends time on your site, but then doesn't actually buy anything until a couple days when they enter the URL directly (i.e. not clicking on an ad). This is the problem generally referred to as attribution. Facebook (and others) do this by tracking everyone all around the web. They track the ad click and then they track you going back to the website the next day, and they know it's the same person.
Ad attribution directly depends on pervasive tracking.
For example, I bought a product the other day after seeing a Facebook ad, but I didn't click on the ad itself and rather went searching for it on DuckDuckGo, then after reading a bit about it online, bought the product.
I'm curious as to whether that got attributed to the ad impression or not.
Allow some facebook supplied javascript to set a first party cookie when the user hits website.com/ad-34, and then reference that 1st party cookie the next day when the user returns. Phone home when they buy something. Facebook can now correlate (1) the ping they received to begin with, (2) the user session cookie they initiated on the first visit, and (3) the user session they observed when a purchase was made.
I'm sure things get easier with 3rd party tracking, but fundamentally you can do it without cross-site tracking.
I'm sure that's what inspired my hard line against ads. I block ads and tracking where I can. And I've become so used to an ad-free web that I don't think I'll go back anymore.
If they'd only listened to us this before things got totally out of hand this could have been avoided.
zero traction in the real world for this. people will click on whatever you show them.
A) Advertising was considered so extremely gauche that no one did it B) No revenue from advertising existed C) Ad-supported services went away
I would be a very happy man.
It’s like the old adage: this job would be great it weren’t for those pesky customers.
The implementation of ads is also wildly invasive, creepy, and propagandistic. However, focusing on implementation allows ad salesmen to lessen the sharpness of the criticism by supposing there is some "nice" way this could be done.
I don't think there is anything inherently wrong with expending money for things that are valuable. That kinda seems like the whole point of money.
I think in many cases we should be aiming to do that for social fundamentals that would make all of us live richer and happier lives like healthcare and education, but it has a lot of negative consequences in consumer products which are more individualistic, competitive, and status oriented.
Because even at the most extreme, where there are no ads, even the most minimal difference like location or appearance has value. Consider the simple example of a grocery store - what products do they place at eye level? What products do they place closer to the entrance? What color does P&G make their detergent bottle? What do they call it?
It's all "advertising", and there's no practical way to prevent it.
The alternative is that everything is packaged in the same sized gray box and described in perfectly utilitarian terms.
So advertising will always exist. We just need to know where to draw the line.
Second, how is this a "balanced ideological fight" counterargumnet. Let's say I oppose Facebook ads as invasion of privacy (and I do). A person on the internet used Facebook ads to make money. Those are contrary why? It's not like I'm sitting here and was like "oh, now that someone made money on the ads, I'm totally in favor of them."
I pay for YouTube Premium to avoid ads because I hate ads. But I also like robust economic activity. So, I’m happy to pay a fee instead of seeing ads.
Yep, and I drastically limited watching YouTube on-site because their advertising became untenably invasive. The last straw was when they tried to get me to pay money to back-track how much they made their product suck, rather than actually providing me value over the out-of-box experience a few years prior.
There’s some good content on there, but it’s not good enough to subject myself to that, or to reward such behavior with money.
That reasoning can be used to justify any shitty practice.
Concerned about global warming? If you have an income it’s because of economic activity, most likely derived from emitting carbon.
Concerned about human rights in China? If you have an income it’s because of economic activity, most likely derived from trade with China.
Concerned about American workers getting fired for unionizing? If you have an income it’s because of economic activity, most likely derived from interacting with sales behemoths like Walmart and Amazon.
Therefore, I suggest you come up with a better rational for bad things. Or frankly stop trying to justify them. That also works.
We have a family friend, retired now, who had a successful career in marketing and strategy in multi-billion dollar transnational companies. I once asked (probably naively) why [maker of extremely popular product at the time] ran so little advertising. The friend told me "they have a good product. They don't need to spend money haranguing people into buying it or spreading the word about because it's actually good. Word of mouth is free".
At least half of your polemic needs citations.
It’s creepy for one thing. It reminds me of why we sometimes have to let go of a certain kind of relationship: they know too much, and are too effective at getting you to buy into action that is not ultimately in your best interest.
Oh they sure were. All ads are useless. Targeted ads are evil. And Ads should not be targeted were the HN's view, which later became there shouldn't even be any ads, it should all be subscription. That is 2018/19. By 20/21 HN were even targeting those who were working inside the online Ad industry. And this is seen across the tens of thousands of comments. ( Say 50 Thread of 200 comments )
It became such a problem that people working inside Ad industry were even afraid to post their views on HN. And they have to be upvoted to make sure there are still sanity inside the HN community.
I don't think I've ever seen someone say this. People hate that they make the internet impossible to use. I have a family friend that runs a small business and all of the revenue comes from ads on the websites they run. I hate using their website because of the ads.
Pop-up that takes up the whole screen asking to subscribe, auto-play video ad, content moving as ads get loaded slowly. It's all just awful to use. The ads are absolutely effective though.
Edit: it would likely just cause a shift to self hosted ads, which is a dramatic improvement imo.
My guess is it'll result in backend web modules that make it easy to automatically dynamically re-host the same virus- and tracker-infested malware ads we all hate
This is a side-effect of media selling advertising through brokers rather than direct, that these brokers then built tools to track impressions, clicks and sales attributions, and then created a disparity between each level of several orders of magnitude.
When advertisers were paying an order of magnitude more for ad impressions, we needed far fewer ads and those ads tended both to be of higher quality and more topically relevant.
At the current CPM, I routinely get ads which aren't spelling or grammar-checked.
Now, I get 90% ads for car parts and car accessories. I don't have a car, I don't drive, I don't have a license, and I don't even like to be in a car, but for whatever reason Amazon (or Instagram?) ads are assuming that what I really want are car parts and car accessories that I don't recognize, can't use, or don't understand.
It feels very stupid to me that those are the "default" ads I'm getting, even though I never tap on them for obvious reasons, but it's reassuring to know that they went from knowing exactly who I am and specifically what I had been looking at to having no clue whatsoever anything about me, or who I am or what I like.
The problem is the tracking itself, whether you notice it or not. At least that's my opinion.
Just like I doubt that people mind that Netflix gives you recommendations based on what you watched on Netflix.