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Comment by nolok | Hacker News Reader

Advertising is one of those area where energy costs and needs don't seem to be a problem. It we could replace all "active" advertising display by e-ink, we would save an insane amount of energy. It feels like every bus stops now has one of those lcd ad screen, because good old recycled paper is not good enough anymore.

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I guess that changing the paper displays cost a lot more than people imagine when you include all the backend jobs for distribution.

Being able to change the sign quickly/often for new advertisers might also bring in more money. E.g. you can now sell different advertisements on Friday versus other weekdays, and more specialized Christmas advertisement.

With eInk, an advertiser can also change the ads based upon who is walking/driving down the street.

I guess they definitely are a problem; but one that the advertisers don't have an incentive to solve maybe.

Will lack of backlighting cause difficulties tho?

That's a solved problem.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5jBQKZ_mGg

How about not putting advertisements on public utilities though

I'm all for this philosophy but you'd need to raise taxes to compensate. It's always a trade-off

For BART in the Bay Area, it’s a shockingly small amount of money - $1.7M in revenue out of $255M total. I’d happily pay half a percent more to not have that crap put in my face. Hell, I’ll pay your half percent too.

Advertising is a negative-sum game. If we replace all "active" advertising displays with e-ink, we won't be saving energy - that energy will be immediately put to use in making even more of even more obnoxious ads.

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