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How can you possibly say this when google is making billions purely from advertising? One of the biggest companies in the world, whose biggest revenue stream, by an absolutely massive margin, and still growing, is ads.

I think you forget that we live in a bubble here and we do not generalise out to the rest of the population.

How many of those dollars come from mis-taps trying to back out of the growing volume of SEO hell garbage pages to get back to Google? Most people use the web on mobile, and most of them do not use ad blockers, so they experience the full power of this real phenomenon.

>How many people here see any ads? And if you watch someone without adblock or money to spend on ad-free versions of stuff, they just ignore them entirely because their attention span has already been destroyed.

All the time on mobile. In instagram every third post is an ad. I have actually purchased some stuff on there as well. (Turns out what I bought was just drop-shipped garbage so I am less inclined to purchase in the future but the ad was compelling enough for me to pay).

Ad-free experience is the best. Desktop browsing is wonderful. (although even though I use uBlock Origin, my search terms somehow result in tailored ads on instagram anyway)

I work with Gen-Z developers. They don't even use a desktop at home, only mobile. Therefore, unless they are doing some sort of convoluted setup with things like AdGuard, they are experiencing the full ad ecosystem in their daily computing usage.

I have adguard on mobile but this stuff does not seem to work on Instagram and other apps.

My dream setup are custom mobile apps that are open source wrappers around popular apps with all the ads, tracking stripped out. After all, most apps are just some simple text/graphics that pull data from some hardcoded endpoint. Most of the binary is external libs that you don't really need such as analytics/tracking/QA)

Unfortunately this dream is a major ask that will probably not happen.

You can use adguard DNS and it'll block ads even in apps.

The only place I see overt ads now is sponsors on youtube channels. So far I've managed to avoid buying anything through those.

In my experience it is hit or miss. Seems to crash apps that use Certificate pinning for some reason. Its a pain to have to go back and forth to disable and re-enable it depending on the app you use, hence my dream setup that I talked about.

Sponsorblock is pretty good for avoiding those, too.

> How many people here see any ads?

HN puts hiring ads for YCombinator startups in the news feed. Look for the posts that don't allow comments. I'm not say this to complain about HN (they're un-obtrusive, relevant without tracking, and a really clever way to use their forum), but there's even ads on here, even though you might not notice them.

Do you think that's what the article is really talking about though?

I know that HN is actually a big advertisement for a VC fund. But at some level, the GNU Coreutils documentation (as a random example) is a big ad for GNU coreutils (plus maybe some free software stuff). Those kind of "ads" that are more like "entailed promotion" are actually what a good searchable communication network looks like, and I dont believe are what the article is talking about. Discoverability is advertising, and good discoverability is good advertising. But that kind of advertising is not what we normally think of when we talk about "punch the monkey" style internet advertising, which is what the article is about.

"You're a horrible person. You are stupid, and you smell. People stay away from you. You're the most disgusting human in the area.....

But amazing wonderful intelligent people use this product. And it makes them smarter, and the women adore and just want you. And you'll go to bed knowing you accomplished everything you could ever want by possessing and using product."

Is very different from

"GNU coreutils does these things and has X license."

One uses a whole slew of psychological games to mentally invade the viewer, and to make them devalue themselves until they buy your product and become 'whole again'. (Adverts targeting women use this consistently - telling them they are stupid or stink and product fixes it.)

The other is just matter-of-factly 'thing does stuff'

It's hard to watch something that doesn't have a quiet (or loud) product placement. If you really haven't been seeing ads I guess you must live in the woods and wrote this post by mailing a letter to dang, and also didn't have him mail you the front page of the day or comments for these posts because that would also contain ads. Realize they are everywhere in culture. If you see something, chances are others see it too, and therefore there's opportunity to monetize that thing.

Advertising has been proven to work, over and over. Any good ad campaign includes metrics to see how effective they are, and they are in fact effective.

You too probably have been influenced by ads far more than you think. They're in all kinds of things you consume like videos and podcasts, blogs... even many frontpage HN posts are blatantly advertising a service or platform. You might think you're not falling prey because you don't see an ad for Wendys and go immediately there for dinner that night. But tons of companies are slowly exposing you to their preferred platform, building goodwill towards their brands, or otherwise subtly influencing your behavior.

Marketers are using a combination of paid ads along with HN posts and other social media posts to drive a variety of traffic to their page, and they have the data to show where everyone is coming from, what they're looking at, and how often they're converting to paid customers. I know this first hand from working with enterprise level marketing experts.

HN itself is basically a y combinator ad. You are for sure aware of y combinator by now, and if you needed startup funding you might consider applying there.

> How many people here see any ads?

Every third FB post is an advert (mostly irrelevant, somehow as often for suspect "mushrooms" as for power packs or hotels).

Every YouTube video on the app, un-skippable for at least 5 seconds and possibly 20. (I put the phone aside for a bit for those).

Most podcasts also have them, though at least I can skip past those.

Glad I’m not the only one being targeted by obnoxious “health” mushroom drinks and such

It seems more likely that you are in a bubble. Most people aren't like Hacker News commenters.

A data point: Google gets most of its revenue from selling ads and they're doing ok. Presumably, if advertising stopped working then their revenue would be going down a lot? There's an entire industry that would notice.

Most people do not know about, much less use ad blockers. An old colleague of mine started a local pizza restaurant. The first week after she set up Facebook and Google ads her average daily customers jumped 40%. After dialing it in and perfecting the ad campaign it's up to 90%.

Ads unfortunately do work.

Targeted ads work. If I search Google for a pizza joint near me, a pizza ad is indistinguishable from the correct functioning of the search (except that it put itself at the top of the list).

Non-targeted ads? Most people have mental filters that weed them out. They're just background noise now. (But oh, the bliss when the noise stops...)

How are you avoiding paid product placement, submarine advertising, sponsorships, Etc?

But that was also true 20 years ago and yet, ads are still around. I'm not sure much has changed since then. Ad blockers have become more widespread but so did mobile web browsing.

>How many people here see any ads?

Almost everybody, day-in, day-out, Adblock or not.

Not to mention HN being an ad for YC, and featuring posts-as-ads for YC companies...

Anecdotally, I know several people (outside the tech field) who have told me that they get value specifically out of product-based FB/Instagram targeted ads, to the point that they don't _want_ to install ad-blockers for those sites. I don't think the experience of the HN crowd resembles the experience of the average user in any way.

Stockholm Syndrome

https://www.globaldata.com/data-insights/internet-services-t...

I just finished up a job in marketing. We sold primarily to developers and we did this primarily using online ads. The percentage of people using ad blockers (that actually work) is less than you’d think.

What is the true percentage from your experience?

That’s impossible for me to know; however it’s low enough that the company just raised $5m on a $50m Val and is growing significantly in a downturn.

I see tons of ads, sadly. They are everywhere in the public space, stealing attention and pretending to have something valuable to offer.

> Just realized: advertising is over, and has been for a few years.

> How many people here see any ads?

You're not the target audience. Advertising definitely works, though not on everyone.

Never take HN commenters as a representative sample of the general population.

Advertising and marketing absolutely work on most HN commenters. And HN commenters are 100% the target audience for ads. They are (generally) rich and they spend money. Who wouldn’t want to target them?

I'd argue that we're already being targeted by very carefully placed comments positively supporting products/services, and responses on negative articles by "leaders" at aggrieved companies when users come to social media for last ditch customer support.

Just because it's not flashy banners or near-naked women doesn't mean it's not advertising.

fixed: wrong word

Of course, both on HN and every single popular website out there. Think of how many people use reddit for "human" opinions. Marketing aren't idiots, they know people type "myquery site:reddit.com" for a lot of things these days. As a marketer, you can go to some niche subreddit, ask "I need product for y what can I do" or something along those lines, then take your string of 20 bot accounts to say "Use X" and upvote those posts. It wouldn't be too long before you've snowballed this into THE product anyone on the subreddit recommends for anyone. Maybe you've even paid a mod to put it in the sidebar. Maybe you are the mod! You end up capturing the people who think qvc is for idiots just as well as the qvc watchers.

And even if you’re not directly, maybe a database provider has been bombarding your friend or coworker with ads for weeks and now they suddenly recommend that platform to you because it’s been seared into their memory

> Advertising definitely works, though not on everyone.

It works on everyone. In fact, the people who swear "ads don't work on me" are the easiest people to advertise to, because they are hyper aware of advertisements, and even saying to yourself "I won't use X product because Y" is simply enforcing a brand choice based on... advertising.

The number of HN commenters who insist they never see ads and aren’t impacted by the ones they do see is laughably high as well.

Whenever I see that I wonder, are we reading the same HN? There's probably hundreds of accounts used by marketing that posts various stories on here, not to mention in the comments. At least they label some of these posts as Show HN.