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Comment by fluidcruft | Hacker News Reader

In a logical world it would mean that you see fewer ads. If your matches increase, your price per ad goes up so the service needs to show you fewer ads to hit their ad revenue target for you.

But if you think that will happen I have an East River transportation startup in New York that is seeking an angel investor.

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Revenue targets are certainly dynamic but avoiding user churn is important too.

So you want to keep cost per impression up. You would not want to saturate and devalue.

Better to play 10 ads at 10c each vs 20 ads at 4 or 5c, as high ad load impacts users propensity to return to the service.

> the service needs to show you fewer ads to hit their ad revenue target for you.

In a logical world, yes.

In a capitalist world, that revenue target goes up every year. Apple became the richest company on earth selling hardware, yet here they are now drowning their software with ads.

We really should just cut out the middle man here and ban ads entirely. If an ad broker wants to pay me to watch an ad, pay me directly.

I've come to the conclusion that we should just ban all advertising, completely. Any possible positives to allowing advertising are entirely dwarfed by the negatives.

I would love it if there were no ads. Seems like a dream though. Has any government tried it? If so, what kind of sneaky ads posing as content emerged? "Native ads" posing as content already exist. At least it's easy to tell the difference when the ad is out in the open and marked clearly.

I think this new sort of AI-powered language model assistant search will be interesting once it trickles into end user control. Injecting ads requires the model output to be under central control where the they can inject ads. But when we get to the point that we can just automate our browsers to fetch 1000 pages and generate summaries locally, ads will be toast. There is a massive battle for control over generalized computing brewing because the ad networks need to force us to not build.

> I would love it if there were no ads.

So would I; they're disfiguring ugly.

So would you ban shop signs? What about a shop-sign that simply said "Cafe"? Or "Meals"? That would be the end of chain stores (which I would not regret).

I don't mind shop signs; I do mind posters all over the street-scene.

The Post Office delivers about 4X as much unaddressed junk advertising pizzas and estate agents than real mail, and I object to that. In this country (UK), anyone can stuff whatever junk they like in your mailbox; in the US, I believe only USPS can put anything in your mailbox. Are USPS allowed to deliver unaddressed pizza fliers?

The best argument in favour of advertising is that it makes it possible for a new entrant to a market to make an impression; without it, markets would always be dominated by incumbents, give or take the occasional surprise. I don't know how to capture that benefit, without ending up with the whole world covered in billboards.

We already regulate shop signs - compare e.g. streets in Asia vs. Europe. Completely different what is tolerated. Tolerating informative signage (e.g. non flashy signs telling you what shop you are looking at) is not incompatible with banning advertisements.

> The best argument in favour of advertising is that it makes it possible for a new entrant to a market to make an impression; without it, markets would always be dominated by incumbents, give or take the occasional surprise. I don't know how to capture that benefit, without ending up with the whole world covered in billboards.

I don't think that argument holds much water as ads require a big capital investment. The main reason new entrants need to advertise is because the incumbents are already advertising so you neeed to compete there just to get back the base level of engagement.

> drowning their software with ads

Where? I use Apple hardware basically exclusively. Are they that good in hiding the ads, or are you exaggerating a bit?

Open the AppStore app and look how much ads are stuffed there.

While that's true, the questions was specifically about the claim they are "drowning their software with ads". Providing a single example doesn't really support that claim.

You can get ads for their services (mostly Music an Arcade) in iOS settings (and IIRC System Settings on MacOS), unsolicited push notifications from App Store etc.

GP is exaggerating, but they definitely do seem to be increasing the number of ads in apps. Apple News (even the paid News+) has tons of ads, often after a single sentence in an article. In AppleTV+ (a service I love!) they’ve removed the image cards of shows in your up next queue on the “What to Watch” page and replaced them with a big auto-playing audio and video preview of one of their shows that’s not in your list. There’s no way to get the old functionality back. I’ve stopped using the app other than from the Home Screen where I have it set to show my “Up Next” queue. It’s really disgusting that they’re making these changes and it’s really turning me off of their services which I loved until recently.

off the top of my head:

- App Store (biggest offender)

- Apple News

- Stocks

This year they'll be rolling them out into Apple Maps as well.

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