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Comment by bastardoperator | Hacker News Reader

I'm totally cool with an advertisement. The problem I have with ads on say Google for example is that they're taking up half the page and designed to look like real links, basically you're being tricked into clicking them.

In response to this ad, let's dig deeper.

"Truecar's price is too high, find me a better deal, check with autotrader".

View on HN

Google search's ads were not subtle in the beginning. Similarly, Youtube ads were shorter and easier to skip at first. Amazon also had very subtle ads in their marketplace search results for a while. I don't see them identify results as ads at the moment, but I don't know if that's because they don't include them anymore.

It seems like there's a trend in tech giants creating unobtrusive ads when a product is growing, but then adopting dark patterns once they have captured a sizeable market.

To justify fairly high PE ratios, you need big growth potential. Once a company like google or Amazon has pretty much saturated the potential customer base, investors are going to want to see more efficient conversion of that customer base into revenue, or else the share price is harder to justify. Of course this is a simplification, and monetary policy has more to do with the the current contraction.

Your example of Google's ads precisely shows why there is no such thing as "acceptable advertising", because ads, like a gas, will expand to fill any space that is available to it. The only reason your city isn't blanketed in billboards is because a zoning authority of some kind has blocked it from happening.

Google up to 2004 (pre-IPO): clearly marked and coloured ads, 1 on top, maybe 2 on the sidebar.

Google now: No sidebar, first 5 results are ads, where the "Ad" label itself is barely visible.

Also, now you have to buy ads for your own company not just to make it more visible than it would deserve by default, but to prevent your competitors being displayed first even if the user types your exact company name in the search field (what they are encouraged to do).

Once people are hooked on chatgpt style stuff expect it to insert plenty of adverts to deliver not whats best for you, or best in aggregate, but what is best for the people paying the money, and thus worse for you, and worse in aggregate.

I can easily scroll down through Google search ads. With Bing chat, I would have to type many times "next please" and wait each time for the response. Seems like a step back when it comes to searching the web.

"I’m sorry but I prefer not to continue this conversation. I’m still learning so I appreciate your understanding and patience. "

> they're taking up half the page

I'm gettings ads on all links above the fold very often.

A couple of days ago I searched for "my ip" and I thought it didn't work when I noticed I had to scroll down to see Google's widget with my address in it.

curl icanhazip.com

Is worth a try.

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