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Comment by ChrisNorstrom | Hacker News Reader

Advertising ruins every communication medium it touches because it knows no limits.

✓ Email (spam). ✓ Telephones (telemarketing). ✓ Social Media Tools (farmville spam). ✓ Craigslist (spammers who collect emails). ✓ Websites (overlays, auto video, intrusive trackers, higher load times) . ✓ Video (30 second ad for 10 second video).

Anytime a page contains the word media player or tool, there are ads all over the place disguised as "Download Now" or "Play" buttons to try to deceive you. This is going too far. Out of fear that my parents might accidentally click an ad disguised as a play/download button (which are all over the place) and installing malware on the family laptop. I just installed ad blockers on every computer.

I had enough.

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> Advertising ruins every communication medium

Bull.

Without the revenue of advertising, you'd not have the live broadcast of the activities of Apollo 11 on the moon.

I could cite dozens (if not thousands) of important events of which the public was made aware because advertising sustained news papers, radio, TV, and the Internet.

Self-entitled madness.

Sorry, here's the politically correct version:

I Chris Norstrom have an opinion where I personally believe that there might be a chance that advertising negatively affects in some way the communication mediums that it uses to spread it's message in such a way that it might substantially or not discourage people from using or watching or engaging with that medium.

Except that, your opinion can't be substantiated.

How did advertising substantially discourage people from engaging with television? There were times when a major portion of the country was all watching I Love Lucy at the same time.

I just don't see how you can logically defend that opinion.

- People are fleeing TV and running towards netflix and bittorent, using DVRs to record their favorite shows and skip through commercials, and changing channels during commercials.

- Email is universally loathed and spam protection is standard, it's gotten so bad that the government had to make a law that forces all email solicitations to have an unsubscribe option and the name and address of the company sending the solicitation.

Hi Chris...

"Fleeing TV" -- indeed, a shift is being observed. However, the medium exists because of advertising. Also, the audience segment that time-shifts is not yet at a critical mass, though rising. And, live event TV (sports) is still doing exceptionally well because of advertising.

Email is another matter. Being a former advertising executive would you believe I never did an email campaign? (Probably not) Email spam (simultaneously posted advertising message) has always been more considered a path to malicious exploit than legitimate advertising.

I'm not denying that an increasing segment of users are becoming frustrated with ads, only stating advertising is the best method we have _now_ for monetizing content that costs some degree of expense to obtain and disseminate.

Ok I think there's been a miscommunication. I said advertising ruins things because it knows no limits, it doesn't know when to stop and overdoes itself. You are correct in saying that advertising is necessary to sustain free services. We wouldn't have radio, tv, content, free apps, search engines, etc... without it.

"Limits" in terms of advertising are relative and often moving targets. As a new product or service, it's hard to get noticed without testing where a certain limit may be. GoDaddy -- loathed by many, but not by most -- would not be the large firm it is now without having tested those limits. For better or worse, it worked, and some nice people have jobs (their campus is less than 2 miles from us).

I serve on the IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau) mobile committee. As a newish member, we don't have much influence... but I can confirm lots of "limit testing" is on the way. It's hard to monetize mobile, and ad delivery/targeting firms are in a panic.

>> your opinion can't be substantiated.

Opinions don't have to be substantiated. And when they are they're typically recategorized as facts.

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