I always chuckle when ad companies say that. I have never seen a helpful ad in google search, but well I have been using adblockers forever so I would not know.I am honestly curious though, for those who don't use adblockers - what percentage of ads that you see are actually helpful?
Their purpose isn’t to be helpful. They're there to sell you something, and nothing more. Any semblance of helpfulness is misinterpretation and merely coincidental.
They are helpful to the people who buy the ads, not those of us who have them injected into our experiences.
I have genuinely met people who claim that ads are helpful and interesting and used this as a justification for adware companies to stalk you every step you take on the web.
My guy take is that they are mindrotted by ads into thinking they are good for them. Digital Stockholm Syndrome. Or maybe a Myth of Sisyphus type situation.
TikTok effectively became a shopping mall because of this behavior, and long before technology there has always been a large demographic that treated shopping as a hobby and form of entertainment.
If ads were universally repulsing to the entire population, we wouldn't have seen the development of current adtech. The uncomfortable reality is that most people either are apathetic toward ads, or actively want to be served ads. 60 to 70% of the global internet population still browse without any ad-block. Think back to how many people willingly and purposefully watched infomercial shopping channels like QVC?
The ads are a symptom of a society that largely enjoys consumerism.
Nonetheless, mostly before the appearance of the Internet, when I was reading various technical journals, especially during the seventies and the eighties of the past century, e.g. magazines or journals of electronics or of computers, I was considering most ads as helpful, as they were making me aware of various things that I might have wanted to buy.
Unlike the ads that bother me today, those ads in magazines or journals intended for more competent buyers contained enough technical details and prices to make possible comparisons between products, and they were also easy to skip when not interested, instead of covering important content on a Web page and making efforts to provide a visual distraction that makes difficult to focus on the useful content of that Web page.
The Internet ads are completely unhelpful because they are never about something that I intend to buy in the near future. The most stupid thing is the fact that after I have searched for something to buy, I am bombarded for a long time with related ads, but that is exactly when with certainty I am no longer interested in that kind of ads, because I have already bought whatever I had been searching for.
And even the second is on shaky ground because by design it won’t tell you really where it stacks up.
I suppose you could argue that making you aware of sales/deals is “helpful” but that’s closer to what I’d classify most advertising as - zero-sum.
(Advertising of a different kind has a use, allowing companies to “sponsor” activities they like in a way the shareholders won’t revolt over. The more you consider companies to be feudal lordships the more it all starts to make sense.)
Please see this comment exchange from 3 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37218627
> "the correlation between $just_bought_thing and $will_buy_another is very, very high ... Showing someone ads for products in a category they recently purchased from is one of the most effective things a store can do ... the data is exceedingly clear."
This looks like an argument against advertising the same thing. Why would you advertise something, they were already going to buy?
But showing an ad before their next purchase definitely would improve the numbers on the "our conversion rate chart" _advertised_ to ad buyers. A con played by ad companies to sell more ads.
Depends. Ads a low-effort large-reach pathways for lead generation, mostly useful for B2C penetration.
I also did sales when I ran my own company, and I can absolutely guarantee that ads can be helpful. When talking to leads you're talking to someone who a) never saw what you offered but is listening to you anyway, or b) saw what you offered and decided to contact you.
The very first thing I'd do in sales is try to determine if the person I was talking to had a) A need my product could satisfy, plus b) Authority to make the purchase, and c) The budget to actually follow through.
The last thing I wanted to do is spend a bunch of my limited time talking to people who never had any intention of pulling the trigger on a contract; those are much harder to convert to paying customers (not impossible, just harder) and were almost never worth the effort.
My best-case scenario was "Someone reached out to me". Ads are a way to make that happen.
Now, if you're talking about internet ads, then you're talking about a different beast altogether (B2C), and those ads can be helpful to purchasers if they were already in the market for $FOO.
The problem is that internet ads are almost never worth the money - a significant number of clicks are from bots, another significant number are from accidental clicks and only a tiny tiny number of them are from people with the intention to buy $FOO from somebody, and they are just checking our your $FOO offering to compare.
If nothing else, an ad cannot impartially compare a product with the competition (and sometimes the "competition" is buying nothing at all), therefore every ad lies.
If I already needed or knew about it, I didn't need the ad.
If I was happy with my life without the product advertised, I didn't need the ad.
Furthermore, ads are fueling our capitalist, consumerist economy that is destroying the planet. Ads are a literal existential threat to humans.
Now, after a doctor’s involvement, my friend is on the new med and it treats their condition better and the quality of their life is improved.
The ad triggered a series of events that helped my friend.
The doctor, for whatever reason, was not the primary motivation.
just to be clear i don't know your friend or their life or their medical condition or if the drug you saw an ad for treats their condition or if you saw an ad for a drug or if your friend has a medical conditon or if you have a friend at all... and i don't know if every event in a chain of events is necessary to the eventual outcome of that chain of events... and i can't see into the alternate reality wherein you didn't see that ad for a drug, to know your friend would've been fine in the end... and so on.
i'm speaking more generally, saying advertising is superfluous to medicine.
The first gets blasted all over the internet to be shoved in the faces of all and sundry.
The second goes quietly and efficiently to the professionals tasked with helping the individuals in society with problems that may directly benefit from new thing.
The distinction, to me, is obvious.
If I wanted that level of care, I expect to pay for a personal physician who only has one patient. Me.
The reality is most of the time my Dr knows more technical info than the patient. But sometimes I know something they don’t. The information asymmetry lasts about 60 seconds before my doctor validates the info against his professional sources.
My doctor is providing a value commiserate with what I pay him.
The role of search
I'm sorry, a single anecdote does not invalidate the above.
Ads are evil. They make us desire things we don't need, undermine our self-esteem, and in the large part just sell scams. I'd be happy to ban most forms of advertising. It's a plague.
If so, I'm not so sure it is advertising, as being discussed here, that you're referring to.
If not, funny coincidence.
I am partly named after the doctor in the song Comfortably Numb.
Promotion and discovery are important. Advertising is the spread of information. Of course some can be bad or misleading, and that is bad.
I've tried to match the absurdity of your example.
Well, how do you know that your life couldn't be better with the product? /s
> You argue that ads can be helpful... by saying all the ways ads are helpful to the business.
Are you sure that's all I said.
Are you sure your derision is warranted?
> You are a true advertiser. Congratulations.
I have never purchased any online ads. This is how far off the mark you are.
Might be useful for a B that wants to penetrate some C, but is it really useful from a penetrated C perspective?
Ads are useful, but to whom? Not often the consumer!
The benefits ads have to the consumer can be obtained other ways, like a well functioning search engine.
Imagine if Google used AI to improve search results rather than maximize the revenue from, and irritation by, ads
That makes it make sense.
Google fucking suck.
Their purpose isn’t to be helpful. They're there to sell you something, and nothing more. Any semblance of helpfulness is misinterpretation and merely coincidental.
Pithy, dismissive, reductionist, and wrong.
Yes, most of the bottom-feeding ads you see these days are along the lines of your description. But those are not the only ads, not the only method of advertising.
Good advertising is informative. iPod ads let people know that iPods exist. An ad for a new album lets you know that a band you like, but don't follow closely, has something you might want to try. An ad letting you know that "Chainsaw Y is on sale this week" is helpful for people thinking about buying a chainsaw. An ad demonstrating "Chainsaw A is as good as Chainsaw B, but costs less" is helpful for people considering an alternative.
The problem is the race-to-the-bottom mentality that has consumed the advertising industry since 2008. This is largely fueled by the ad tech industry which prioritizes things like "engagement" that can be presented in a pretty chart to middle managers, but don't actually mean anything. That's how you end up with all the obnoxious pop-ups and videos.
Ads for chainsaws on a chainsaw enthusiast web site is fine. Ads for a refrigerator I already bought two weeks ago is just a waste in a dozen ways.
Or what Google is doing for years: a wall of ads for "Black & Decker" chainsaws when you specifically search "Husqvarna" or "Stihl", sending the results you want to the sixth or seventh place in the page.
No, it's not.
I completely unplugged from broadcast TV simply because I can no longer stand to be bombarded with FUD, manufactured lifestyles, propaganda, etc., that provides absolutely no useful information about a product, or really anything other than reminding me that X company's Y product exists.
The results of above mentioned advertising have been great. I get inbound enquiries, parents get their curiosity about the usefulness of what I offer whetted. I don’t understand how the ad was unhelpful to the parent and me.
At some point Google ads where genuinely good and helpful to me. If you needed to buy something, and you didn't know who sold it or what it was called, the Google ad engine would yield better results than their search.
Now Google also broke that part. All ads I get are for Temu, Fruugo and other weird sites that I guess does drop shipping, maybe some marketplace stuff. It's the same sketchy sites that's return for almost all searches. It's rarely the "brand sites" that you trust who shows up first in the "Sponsored products" section.
They are not. The utility of companies advertising their products can be trivially served with dedicated 'advertising' channels without enabling stealth surveillance by big co. and their paying clients, various goverments.
Maybe it isn't quite as black & white as that?
What about an ad run by a non-profit that doesn't have any marketing professionals at all? Said non-profit attempting to connect to consumers?
What about listings on craiglist? or facebook marketplace? or personal ads in the local newspaper?
Do you have a proposal/alternative to help with market discovery, customer discovery? Search has in the past served that function, but is likely to be soon dead.
You opt in to looking at these, often for something specific. It doesn't lower your general quality of life like ads do.
> Do you have a proposal/alternative to help with market discovery, customer discovery?
Yea: we should stop building our society around encouraging people to buy crap they never asked for
The ads there are usually fairly innocuous (i.e. not disruptive, not flashing auto play vids etc, they just look like another news item and you can just scroll past them like other news articles you're not interested in), but I have actually found them useful. I am wearing a T-shirt right now in fact that was advertised to me a week or two ago as "on sale" for £8 (eight) and which I clicked through and purchased. There have been one or two other examples of things there that actually have been useful or at least interesting to me right now. So they actually have been useful/helpful in that regard.
So I am a bit conflicted here. It is no cost to me to click on the ad, and I bought some things that I use but would probably have not got otherwise. Am I being manipulated to part with my money? I dunno. Would I have bought a £8 t-shirt anyway if I was just in a shop and saw it? Maybe. Was the ad actually quite well targeted and appropriate? In this case yes.
I think on balance I would say those news feed ads are acceptable to me. I have problems where it is totally irrelevant and disruptive. Hopefully the AI mode ones will be similar to the news feed ones. I would be pretty upset if the ad content was directly worded into the response.
The ASR voice recorder app gets this right. It lets me use the full featured version for three days, after which I need to watch a few ads to get another three days. I choose when to watch the ads, and if I'm late there is nothing worse than a small nag at the bottom of the app. I actually now start every day with the ads, while I cook breakfast, and it is a positive experience. I could also just pay for the app and be done with them.
I still get ads that I'm interested in in that niche; I just choose not to click them because I think my wife will kill me if I collect any more board games :)
Also I think people pay much of the price of ads even if they don't view them, via increased prices. The trillion dollar advertising industry money ultimately is paid by consumers. It is a necessary cost to try to launch a new product because we are reliant on it for information and because all your competitors are advertising.
This means the ad was effective. But was it useful to you? Did it save you from having to look for it yourself?
If you were not thinking something like "I need a certain T-shirt" before this came up, it's likely the ad created a desire in your mind which you didn't have. You got manipulated successfully by the advertiser.
The meta point is that advertising has become so ingrained into society it really is difficult to differentiate if a need or desire originated intrinsic or externally. It's really great for companies selling stuff.
But Instagram, despite me only using it to keep in touch with friends via DMs, seems to know me very well. I get a lot of ads for puzzles and board games and video games, which are right up my alley. I've purchased a nontrivial amount of stuff from Instagram ads. Very few were life changing, except maybe an electric nail clipper which is the only way I can clip my infant daughter's nails. But the rest are all fun stuff that I've gotten value from.
And FTR I do use an ad blocker both on my browser and my modem came with one. I guess the modems one isn't great though because I still see Instagram ads.
I used to do this. I used to pay for adverts -- computer shopper was a magazine I traded real money for to get the adverts.
If ads aren't opt in, they aren't useful.
At the moment search ads aren't very helpful because you have neither of those things. You always get them for any type of query, and when you do get them you don't know if the thing being shown will exactly solve your problem, or only approximately, and the work is much more on you to find that out by reading the product's marketing pages further.
If all that could be done for you up front, reasonably honestly, then I could see it being useful. I mean to be sure, in some small percentage of searches I really am looking to buy something and really do want to be usefully, honestly pitched on available options.
When searching for sonarqube, I received an ad for a competing product I'd never heard of and I'll check them today to see if it fits my need.
I have never seen a helpful ad, anywhere, in my life.
"Ads help people discover new products" is a lie that people who work for companies supported by advertising revenue tell themselves. If $deity exists, and they were to delete all ads from the world tomorrow, never to return, everything would be just fine.
Truly great products sell themselves by word of mouth.
You could maybe argue that ad revenue could subsidize the costs of information delivery but information delivery costs are basically non existent today - it's all about attention delivery and thats an entirely different thing.
I bought once through facebook ads, and now I actively try to avoid any ads
Coca Cola advertising is mainly brand awareness - remind you they exist but not really directing you to buy one “right now”.
Product awareness is how you learn about new product - usually trying to convince new customers, but sometimes just trying to swap existing customers. These can be “offensive” (a new product aimed at taking a competitors market share) or “defensive” (keeping existing customers from switching away). Of course this overlaps with above.
Sale awareness is how you “scoop” up customers who have been exposed to the above but haven’t bought - you’re offering a “deal” so they’re more likely to buy. Most online search-targeted advertising is this kind, and is the most immediate (click and buy) - the other two are just to make it so when you want product, you want their product.
If your ads inventory is big enough, ads can actually be a better answer to your intent than organic content, because the companies behind the ads have a much stronger incentive to satisfy your need.
If AdWords or search consider both relevance and the fee collected, the end user will never be shown the most useful results consistently. If the goal was usefulness they would only pick results by relevance and take no fee at all, or take a flat fee that isn't based on a bidding system.
The ability to think often is ultimately a capability that only a minority of humans possess. Therefore, for the vast majority of people, ad is very useful.
For example, my retired parents enjoy buying little gadgets from ads.
The organic search results didn't offer what I needed at all, but the ad took me straight to an e-commerce site that sold what I wanted. I had it in my hands at a reasonable price about 5 days.
It was for a Nintendo Wii component video cable, back in 2007.
Truly an exception though. I think generally the only people for whom ads are helpful are advertisers.
More directly: Someone paid to have them surface that result for me, instead of having me find them for being the best. I can understand the need to bypass the SEO arms race of yesteryear, but it still rubs me the wrong way.
the part that crosses the line for me is when the platforms are peddling malware and scams through ads. google search would have a ton of this suprisingly..so i hope in AI mode they can improve things
Suddenly, you could search for something obscure and get ads about that exact topic. This enabled a huge number of small niche businesses to exist and prosper.
We now live in the world Google Ads created, and we take for granted the there will be someone selling Bulgarian accordion cleaning kits out there that I can easily find. But targeted ads made this world possible!
That's a good thing.
I don't mind ads, as I understand that without money, web sites go away. But I'm very careful about being tracked. That, I don't think is cool.
It's not unusual for me to see ads for companies hundreds or even thousands of miles away, and often selling things for which I do not possess the correct body parts.
I consider that affirmation that I am mostly successful at staying off the ad-tech radar.
I mind ads because they crowd out less profitable margins and result in worse products. Imagine how nice and useful Google could be if they optimized for search instead of ads.
I have, fairly often in fact. That's why Google makes such a bucket load of money from their ads - they're actually vaguely relevant.
I've don't think I've ever seen a relevant ad outside of Google though, and I still wouldn't say "yeay, helpful ads!". Nobody is going to want them even though I occasionally get relevant ones and click on them.
I should know, I block tracking and see annoying and unhelpful ads.
And I browse social media with their algorithmic feeds, where the content is hyper personalized, helpful and mostly ads too.
Those "naive" ads from 15+yr ago are far more relevant than anything I've ever seen since.
There, I fixed it!
That was a helpful advert.
I also sought out the Supergirl trailer and decided I wouldn't bother seeing it. Again a helpful advert.
In both cases I chose the advert.
> I have never seen an ad in google, because I use adblockers
But yeah that's literally the only platform where I've ever had useful ads. Even other meta products only have absolute garbage ads.
And I'm a to-the-bone hater of ads. Ad-blockers up to my eyeballs. Except for that one niche of local gigs on insta.
That this self-awarely-self-contradicting quip is the top comment on the page is about as essential a summation of HN's collective thought as I can think of.
I remain amazed at the pathology that results in the truth that, even in the world as it exists today, the one enemy that truly unites the supposedly-elite techno-leaders of our increasingly advanced society is...
...horror about seeing advertisements for products we're probably buying anyway.
But seriously. What are we paying advertisers for? Converse pays Google so that they don't show Vans when I search for Converse? Sounds like extortion or protection money.
I have never purchased anything [just] because of an ad, nor do I know anyone who has.
But I have been turned off from EVER buying some things because of their obnoxious ads.
The whole ads racket is a case of the emperor with no clothes, an ugly self-justifying cancer infesting human civilization.
And to those perpetuating the racket who'll say "but how will people find out about products??" the answer is fucking better search and filtering systems.