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Comment by maivjj | Hacker News Reader

Both the creatives in media (all forms - ads, news, sports, movies, radio, tv, games etc) and the ad tech crowd don't talk about barely growing global disposable income. Meanwhile they are furiously producing more and more content (ie real estate for ads).

What happens when production outpaces consumption or supply over shoots demand? Naturally hiring will slow, mergers and consolidation, cost cutting via relying on tech and more automation.

We have sort of peaked in how much people's Attention can be milked. In both time and cash. They just don't like talking about it.

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> We have sort of peaked in how much people's Attention can be milked. In both time and cash. They just don't like talking about it.

This is why the conglomerates consolidation is mentioned, particularly in consumer targeting and data access. In order to ensure efficient targeting to avoid over-indexing on generic, world-wide/national attention, marketers are increasingly turning to consumer data brokers to fine-tune their messaging to niche groups so they can gain more traction with less dollars. By buying these aggregators up, they end up saving money in the long-term and lock out competitors from gaining any competitive advantage of using those data brokers or charging more heavily for the pleasure, thus getting paid on the way in and out.

Regardless of the feelings of those here on HN or those who use adblockers, the rest of the public seems to be largely accepting of marketing and its annoyances. By continued consolidation and aggregation of consumer data, marketing agencies are continuing to find ways to stay relevant and efficient--all until someone fixes the root issue: data collection, sharing, and coalescing of organizations collating these data used for targeting.

There’s a reason Meta is pouring so much into VR/AR…

It’s the future for sure.

It's certainly another frontier of exploitation, but we have yet to see any signals of significant demand. Well, maybe Roblox is sort of that signal. But meta's vision seems pretty disconnected from any signal that people want to interact this way.

Besides, haven't we already been through this with second life?

> about barely growing global disposable income.

Perhaps in the developed world, but with china and now southeast asia, india, africa, etc developing, I don't see how global disposable income is barely growing. If anything, there will be hundreds of millions ( perhaps billions ) of people with substantially growing disposable income in the next few decades.

> What happens when production outpaces consumption or supply over shoots demand? Naturally hiring will slow, mergers and consolidation, cost cutting via relying on tech and more automation.

That's one possibility. The other is to grow consumption/demand to meet the supply.

> We have sort of peaked in how much people's Attention can be milked.

Nowhere close to it.

>barely growing global disposable income.

It feels like global disposable income isn’t growing but that’s not true because the list of necessities increase the more income increases, if you lived like a person in the 90’s did you could save a huge amount of money,

How do you propose someone live like they did in the '90s when '90s things like food, healthcare, rent and gas aren't priced like they were back then?

Simply go back to the 90s and pay 90s prices for rent.

Hava…sorry New Orleans would like a word, where half the houses were falling apart before the hurricane anyway.

Most people could never afford to live like a person in the 90's. Do you think affording a smart phone makes up for not affording a home? A middle income employed person working full time today has the same work output as 5 workers together had in the 90s. And each of them could afford houses, families, vehicles and more. The middle income worker today cannot afford that.

youre not going to make up the difference in things like housing or healthcare by not having a phone

Advertisement has rarely not been a zero sum game. Disposable income will be disposed of and ads exist to influence the direction the money moves.

> What happens when production outpaces consumption or supply over shoots demand?

Isn't that already happening? No human in our lifetime would be able to consume it all. Or do you mean that the total production would be higher than the total consumption? I'd wager a guess that we're already beyond that as well as one human can easily create content longer than they spent creating it.

To me it is pretty clear the comment you are replying to is using "consumption" to mean "demand."

Attention is the real estate for ads. The hope is always to steal more attention (time) from your audience that they are giving to things that don't contain ads (sleeping, walking in nature, talking to friends) or your competitors content.

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