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Comment by endisneigh | Hacker News Reader

I see nothing wrong with this. In fact, I’d love for a company to give me a free car with ads on and/or in it for me to use during road trips.

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At scale, though, it just pushes poorer people into accepting it, since it frees up cash for other uses. So it turns into a propaganda and monitoring device that mostly targets a pretty specific group.

And those poorer people aren't very valuable to advertisers, since they have far less money to spend on frivolous extras, so it's hard to run 'free stuff' services like this.

This is the real issue with it - the people who opt in are almost certainly the least valuable from an advertisers' perspective. I would definitely wonder what kind of assumptions they built into their model about how much ad revenue folks would generate when deciding whether this was a viable business model. I wouldn't be shocked if they just used an average, ignoring the fact that this group is likely to be below average, and that renders the whole business infeasible.

I don't see this as an issue.

Sure, there are expensive stuff that get advertised which poor people are shy to spend money on.

But there are lots of stuff that poor people do buy. Like toothpaste, mobile phones, shoes, clothes, dishwashers, deodrant, soft drinks.

Although these stuff are cheap, they are billion dollar industries.

And manikng a lot of people switch from one toothpaste to another will make a company a lot of money.

The thing about low income earners is that they spend pretty much 100% of the money they make, and there are a lot of them

Yes but you are thinking that the ads would lead to increased spend instead of redirecting spend to the advertised alternatives.

There's lots of bottom feeders who love separating poorer people from their money. Gambling companies, payday loans, pyramid schemes, etc...

True, but those advertisers still don't expect to pay much per ad impression. The ballpark of what I've heard is that type of ad impression is worth only between 1% and 10% of what a typical ad impression is worth.

This is the reason that companies like twitter don't allow their paying members to see stuff ad-free.

If they did, then ad revenue from the non-paying members would drop a lot, since now advertisers know that they are no longer targeting the general public, but instead the general public who refuse to pay $8 for a better experience.

> And those poorer people aren't very valuable to advertisers

Their vote is still valuable, just feed them propaganda towards your candidates

I'd probably take free ad-sponsored taxis but I'd definitely not want to let a company pay me to put a camera in my home.

the thing wrong with this is that there's already too much shit in this world, and advertisers paying you to put shit in your living room is just going to result in a bunch of extra shit going in landfills.

> I see nothing wrong with this.

Aside from all the data collection, anyway.

If you're willing to put that aside, it's great.

Hopefully this is the death knell for TVs that cost over a grand yet come with bloated adware and other bullshit that you can't uninstall. If I want ads on my TV, you'd best be sure I'd like to be paid for viewing those ads.

Fuck paying for the privileged of be advertised to.

> Fuck paying for the privileged of be advertised to.

You've described TV in a nutshell.

TV previously generally didn't watch you.

"If you stare into the void, the void stares back."

Sure, if you're willing to ignore the downside of anything, then that thing is great.

Personally, this is no more attractive than any other "smart" TV -- which is to say it's a nonstarter -- but I have no doubt that there are enough people who don't mind it that they might be able to make a business catering to them.

Data collection is not inherently wrong. As long as there is consent I will willing take the benefits in my hypothetical situation.

Consider the alternative - we are literally discussing an ad now, and received nothing. Anyone who clicked the link has likely had some data taken about them.

> As long as there is consent

True, yes, as long as it's actually informed consent (which is incredibly rare in surveillance marketing). I was just expressing that it rates extremely high on my creepiness scale, not that there was an ethical problem with it.

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