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Comment by paytonjjones | Hacker News Reader

> They know the best-reviewed, least-returned, best-priced model. The only purpose of the ads is to get you to pick an air fryer that isn’t that one

Thoughtless take. Say you've just invented a better looking, better functioning, cheaper air fryer. How do you expect to reach your first customers if not through ads? Sell it to your friends? That's even more invasive and annoying.

People's urge to rid the world of ads is similar to our urge to rid the world of "middlemen".

It's natural, and I get it (ads are annoying), but this is a forum where I expect people to think a little more deeply about the economics and second order effects of things.

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You're completely ignoring the fact that the majority of people do not expect a search result ranking to be influenced by bidding. Yes it happens, but unless the item is labeled as an ad, most people will infer value that does not exist. And this is wrong. The only reason they appear in the search is so that they do not look like ads. There's plenty of places to advertise and the best for the consumer is for transparency to exist in the first place.

The problem TFA is complaining about isn't ads in general, but specifically ads in Amazon search results for products sold on Amazon.

Amazon is a two-sided marketplace. Why should their obligation in search be 100% to one side?

Even for the buyer, there are second order consequences if you remove the ability for sellers to effectively sell. If sellers can't effectively ramp, they're going to turn to other platforms. If new sellers can't compete on Amazon, prices will increase and diversity of options will go down.

I'm not saying ads in search are a hard necessity in every platform. I'm just asking people to think through the whole issue before making snap judgments because ads are annoying to them.

You take the money you would've spent on ads and instead offer a lower price than the current leader to make up for the buyer's uncertainty toward your product. This lets a search algorithm organically decide that you are among the top (risk-neutral) value contenders. Once that uncertainty disappears, you will have a higher value product and can therefore command a higher price.

Put another way, the buyer uncertainty about your product actually, concretely makes your product worse. They don't know whether your thing will fail. The don't know whether you will go out of business if they need support. All else equal, either your product is not the best product, or you need to offer a lower price. Ads are a way to instead just pay someone to straight up lie (i.e. defraud) and say it's recommended when it's not.

It's a nice idea and I can see it working in some cases.

I'll be the first to admit I don't know the specifics, but I imagine in some cases, it's economically prohibitive to lower the price by such an amount that it makes up for the uncertainty in a typical search algorithm.

Then your product is actually worse for the customer. It's nice that you want it to be better, but it's not in a meaningful way that you can't just handwave away. Risk carries a cost.

Another possibility would be for the marketplace to be better able to load information about your product so you could provide some more information and reduce that uncertainty. E.g. that you use different (better) materials in your construction. Or you could work with the marketplace to purchase or demonstrate some kind of insurance policy to mitigate support concerns. Basically allow those unknown pieces of information to be discoverable by search engines and the customer. If the market has more knowledge, then if you have a better product, it should organically rank better. Either way, ads do literally nothing to benefit the buyer since they provide zero information (actually they provide a negative piece of information: someone paid for you to see something, so you can assume it's not in your interest to see it).

The article isn't an attack on advertising to bring awareness of your product to an unaware market; it's an attack on being made to pay for a customer who has specifically asked for your product to be shown your product.

Unless your _ads_ are going to compete with your competitors' then that's not going to be effective. Ironically middlemen are probably solution here, you'd be better off going to trade shows and working with department stores that sell air fryers, they'll want to turn your lower cost into their higher margin.

The problem is we aren’t in a world of more “reasonable” advertising. What we see deployed now are basically weapons-grade manipulation systems, and upstarts do not have equal access to the arsenal. So yeah, they need to get the word out, but they can’t even do that! The big dogs get better, more privileged access.

> People's urge to rid the world of ads is similar to our urge to rid the world of "middlemen".

This is a lazy strawman and not what the author of the post argued for.

> It's natural, and I get it (ads are annoying), but this is a forum where I expect people to think a little more deeply about the economics and second order effects of things.

Then maybe contribute to the dialog on that front. The article did so more than your comment setting up a strawman.

I don't think you put much thought into the article before you carelessly bandied about the phrase "Thoughtless take."

You certainly didn't read it in much depth. The author is talking about search ads explicitly and narrowly within a category where Amazon has plenty of signals it could use to steer customers towards the highest satisfaction product.

If you make a new better product, advertise everywhere you want. And if Amazon took seriously its customer obsession, it would start driving people towards your product if it was better. Not because you paid them to.

> advertise everywhere you want

Except, apparently, the surface that's actually closest to the purchasing decision? Why must that surface be forbidden?

The case is laid out pretty clearly in the article. Spend some time thinking about it.

I have to agree with OP, this phrase specifically reveals it isn't a good take:

> sales [the best product] were entitled to in the first place

Unfortunately, this is not, and has never been, how it works. The best product is never entitled to sales. Marketing, which very much includes advertising, is a massive, massive factor in sales.

So advertising entitles you to sales?

Of course not. A terrible product may not sell well even if it has great ads, for instance.

right, you've spent most of your capital on product, and now you're competing with everyone else on $/ad.

Amazon, the store, has an incentive to show trending products, rather than items that sold well 10 years ago... if you already own the old standard, and you do a search and find it's still the highest in search results, you'll be unlikely to buy.

Can't you just use it at home like a normal person?

Say you invent a crap product, and shove ads under my nose to bug me while I want to buy a decent product. Why should I accept that?

Just get your products reviewed by trusted reviewers, if you can budge them maybe you deserve a bit of attention from us. Someone who has a stake in being trusted for their fair reviews.

Ads are a scourge.

you sound like the kind of person who believes the best air fryer is the one that is advertised the most.

No, but I'd say it's slightly more likely than by chance (after all, success begets capital).

I actually prefer Dr. Pepper, but a lot of people think Coke makes the best cola, Apple makes the best laptops, etc.

Should Dr Pepper have to spend a dollar per purchase to be the top result when you search for "Dr Pepper"? Is it good for the customer that when they search Dr Pepper and they stopped paying for the placement ads the first page is no longer Dr Pepper but instead "UUBUOI SODA 100% SODA COLA POP PEPPER 7 UP〖1L〗〖2L〗〖12OZ〗〖500ML〗" AND "FUUOYAY YUM YUM SPARKLE FIZZ 致癌神水"

While this isn't necessarily the reality for sodas, this is the reality for darn near every thing I look to buy off Amazon.

Soda is actually not a bad example to disprove your hypothesis. It's just one example of where your own health and finances will be better off if you ignore advertisers entirely.

and exclusively paying attention to what doctors say:

https://www.health.com/what-happens-when-you-stop-drinking-s...

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