Is Ad Avoidance a Problem? | Hacker News Reader

Is Ad Avoidance a Problem?

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I use ad-block.

Ads are polluting my brain. I'm thinking of something while traveling on the bus and suddenly I catch myself reading some silly slogan on a board. Now it's stored somewhere and I might think about it later again. I never wanted to read that thing and feel like it has been forced upon me. How many hours of collective thinking power have been lost to ads processing ?

Ads publishers treat us like a free resources that they can tap into. They hire psychologist and sociologists to know the best way to trigger emotional responses into us. They track our every move on the Internet. TV shows are especially created to dumb us down and make us more receptive to the ad-break. And ads are so omnipresent that they are virtually unavoidable. I don't remember the last time I got convinced to buy by an ad but it must work since they keep doing it.

So yes, I don't feel bad and ad-block the hell of everything and wish I could do it in the real life too.

EDIT: Actually my biggest grief is that the price of ads is not clearly exposed. I need to know upfront how much of purchasing influence I'm expected to spend on average otherwise how can I choose what is cheaper ?

I am torn how I feel about ads.

It seems that they work for web and app publishers, because it's a way to collect micropayments, while making people feel like they are not really paying anything. Instead of asking someone to micropay you $0.001, you ask them to waste brain cycles to tune out the ad + cause some increased chance that they'll overpay for a brand name later. This might end up being more expensive than the payment would have been.

I must admit I would behave the same way. If you gave me a way to pay $5 / month that would be split among the sites I visit based on the pageviews I generate, I probably would not do it. I wonder if there would a way for such a system to be set up, so that it could offer something more than just installing AdBlock would. I doubt it, but would be happy to be wrong.

It seems that ads are the only realistic way for this to work for publishers, while adding an unfortunate mental tax for everyone not savvy enough to install AdBlock. I hope one day we will come up with a solution.

You bring up good points.

But the reason I've always had an issue with ads is much different: the only people who can afford ads in the right places are the ones who are already big. In other words, it is extremely unfair. The people who could really use an ad on a TV don't have money to afford it. It's a perverse kind of system that somehow we just accepted without every questioning it.

I use ad-block, and this was only a recent development for me. At first, I didn't really mind ads since I mostly ignored them. I'm pretty sure there is a study somewhere about the long-term impact of web-based ads compared to billboards and TV ads, and I'm pretty sure that study would say that the long-term impact of web-ads would be much lower than TV ads, and basically forgotten in 5 minutes, and if not so soon, probably vaporized within a week.

The problem became too much when advertisers and webmasters decided to use other means to gain my attention. An ad in the corner of the page is no big deal. When the page starts to look like a Nascar event with no meaningful content, this is irritating. Since this apparently wasn't in-your-face enough, they added in pop-ups, scrolling ads, and most confoundedly, ads that talked. I listen to music when I am browsing, and I can't describe how disrespectful this is to me. I sometimes browse with my computer muted, but some of these ads have figured out how to turn my volume on! This is no longer an symbiotic relationship between buyer and seller, but a one-sided fuck you. This is in plain terms, abuse, and it is wrong and these assholes don't deserve a dime from my clicks or my views.

But the problem gets worse because showing me ads is no longer good enough. Now I have a few thousand companies tracking my every move. I dealt with slow-loading sites via iframes and gigs of cookies on my computer. So now, I turn on Disconnect or Ghostery.

I used to earn money from ad revenue on my sites, and I am going to put ads up on my current sites. It would be foolish for me to depend solely on ad revenue, and I certainly don't hold any ill-will toward people using ad-block, so I would have to think of other ways to monetize my content. Book review? Here's a link to Amazon with my affiliate code. It isn't as invasive and it offers my users choice without invading their privacy, their ability to see my content, and doesn't effect my site-speeds.

It is all a tough balance. Sure you want some analytics and you want some revenue, but depending solely on invasive ads and trackers doesn't serve your users. Once you lose sight of the users, you lose sight on usability, content quality, and many other aspects. I want to create a great product first and a revenue machine second.

I am happy to look at ads - if they are maintained and a hosted on the site serving them.

Far more than the intrusion into my awareness (and that's what I initially started resenting) I resent the cross-site tracking that is implicit with any hosted ad or third party ad provider.

If someone wants my attention, all they have to do is ask for it - themselves. Because while I'm willing to pay for my consumption with my attention to what is being sold, I am not willing to pay for it by sharing my browsing and viewing habits with third parties.

Talk about moving the measurement to create concession. Ads are a problem. Never have there been more advertisements. Not only do people have Billboards, TV ads, Radio Ads, and Newspaper ads like we've had in the 20th century (all of which are still pervasive and virtually unavoidable), But we're not talking about a problem in avoiding all of the new types of advertising only really initiated in this century.

Perhaps the problem isn't Ad Avoidance, but Ad Overload. People will either find a means to limit their exposure, or the Ad industry will see effectiveness drop to a level that isn't profitable to the cost.

I understand that jingles and subconscious inserting one liners are impossible to ignore and extremely valuable, but I think the question rests on how many of these virtually empty platitudes a human mind can carry.

I've always found it interesting that prior to us paying for services with our private data, we paid for it with our attention. All of these implicit value transmissions are harmful to audiences, but the effects tend to be distant in time or space.

> All of these implicit value transmissions are harmful to audiences, but the effects tend to be distant in time or space

Well I see harmful effects now. The word "consumers" for one. Children being manipulated for profits. Over-sexualization. Creating the idea that things will make you happy, and make this one of the most popular concepts in society. Dividing people through the message of "Individuality", even though that only really means buying things your neighbor wants.

> I've always found it interesting that prior to us paying for services with our private data, we paid for it with our attention.

And now we pay with both our private data, and our attention, as both are extremely related when you want to either control, convince, or confuse someone.

I agree that they're visible—I spoke too soon. I mean more psychologically that they have distance which means that we apply a lot of value discounting. Even if I know that funding all the things I enjoy via advertisement will eventually dehumanize me, I still get to enjoy them today.

Disincentivizing local consumer gain is, if I were to wage a wide bet, something society will need to figure out. Our current values are clearly aiming at it.

The concept that no ads leads to cultural wasteland is so ludicrously wrong it makes me angry. First ads are the wasteland. Second advertising is relatively new. Somehow culture was able to flourish without ads for thousands of years.

What is the point of advertisement?

Capitalism is an interesting trick. It is an artificial game, which exploits people's selfishness to benefit the world.

But selfishness doesn't usually work like that, so humans naturally try to find loopholes which would make them rich.

Instead of spending money on improving their services & products, corporations find it more profitable to spend huge amounts of resources on patent trolling, tax evasion and advertisement.

Sadly, ads will not go away any time soon, because they are much more difficult to get rid of then other loopholes I mentioned above.

What if you've built an amazing, revolutionary product but no one knows about it? You make it seem like the concept of advertising at it's core is inherently bad; it isn't.

If it were truly amazing, people would hear about it. Journalists would write about it, existing customers would tell all their friends, and you would notice more and more people using it.

With advertising, a revolutionary new product from a creator without an advertising budget can't compete with the established companies that have hundreds of millions to spend and drown out awareness of others. Think about political reality: It costs millions to hundreds of millions of advertising to run for office. What kind of politicians does that give us? And what chance does a fresh, clean and honest upstart have?

I use adblock, but I try to disable it on sites that

A) have solid content that keeps me coming back.

B) Do not have ads that open new windows or popups when I do disable adblock.

I actually appreciate ads when they particularly useful and focused. 99% of the time this happens when an ad network is not used and the ads are provided by the content provider intentionally (jobs in my area on StackOverflow) or banner ads on small blogs where the vendor has most likely personally contacted the writer because the market is dead on. Ad networks have a close to 0% success rate on showing me things I actually want, so I tend to disable those unless I am just trying to support the content creator with a few cents of impression money.

Ad avoidance is as much of a problem as periodicals that won't rely on their readers to make money. How come magazines are ad-sponsored but books aren't? What's the difference?

(I was glad to hear the Times makes money off of subscribers. I never feel bad about blocking ads, but I felt it was my civic duty after I started paying $13 a month or whatever it is to read it.)

And there's the Google stock (a company which, last time I checked, made most part of its revenue through ads) sky rocketing to prove once and for all that ads are a thing of the past...

I see this more as a crisis of the "old" media than a global ad avoidance phenomenon. Brand avoidance, consumer activism and anti-advertisement movements are real, but their size and impact on our culture (at least in Brazil) is not that big for the time being.

> But the funny thing is that advertising spending is actually increasing, both in the United States and globally. Moreover, it has grown three years in a row, reaching more than half a trillion dollars in 2012. This is true even of live-television ads, which are the most intrusive and the easiest to avoid, yet are nonetheless growing at a healthy pace—by eight per cent last year in the United States.

For every $1 one company spends on advertising, another has to spend $2 to steal your attention. Inevitably this means the industry will continue to grow infinitely as companies continue to try to buy your attention. Look at PPC, it's a perfect example of an openly efficient market to buy your attention.

My favorite quote that illustrates this is from Seth Godin:

Attention is a bit like real estate, in that they're not making any more of it. Unlike real estate, though, it keeps going up in value.

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2011/07/paying-atten...

"For every $1 one company spends on advertising, another has to spend $2 to steal your attention. Inevitably this means the industry will continue to grow infinitely as companies continue to try to buy your attention"

It sounds more like the industry will grow to the maximum that the economy can sustain, and no further. It may appear to be unlimited now but that probably means that the economy can sustain far more advertising than we are seeing today. Every time a new communications system is developed, the market will shift -- and we have so many systems now that the market is just catching up to all the ways we have to advertise.

I also suspect that there is another game occurring, which is the ads-versus-ad-blockers game, and that will also reach some equilibrium. As advertising becomes more aggressive, defenses against advertising will become stronger.

> It sounds more like the industry will grow to the maximum that the economy can sustain, and no further.

Fair point. I would argue that as long as (1) globalization exists (2) the population increases, it can sustain growth. In other words as long as the number of eyeballs increases so too will the people try to farm them up.

> Every time a new communications system is developed, the market will shift -- and we have so many systems now that the market is just catching up to all the ways we have to advertise.

Regardless of communication medium, in theory it doesn't mean the market spends any more or less on advertising. The goal is all the same, grab attention and convert to buyer. So I'm not sure what you mean by "the market will shift".

If you read far enough, the article actually suggests ad avoidance isn't so bad.

Another point to Bettridge: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines

Also, I really liked the linked article on gaze aversion, which argues that smartphones are a bigger threat than DVRs: http://adage.com/article/adagestat/smartphones-a-bigger-dist...

Or on the internet, it's not really ad block, it's the fact that I can't remember the last time I watched a show on one screen at home without easy access to a second screen to flip through cat pictures or whatever during (muted) commercials.

Guess I'm not the only one.

> Anyone who can reach the unreachable for even a moment has their hands on gold.

Is targeted door-to-door sales the next big thing?

Sometimes I wonder how the web looks like without a ad-blocker, for example if there are ads on HN. But I never was brave enough to surf the web without one after I got my first one back then.

Underlying the issue of attention and ethics is the fact that most ads are not benign static elements. They are accompanied by increasingly complex, increasingly opaque, increasingly ubiquitous, and increasingly intrusive forms of commercial (and therefore also government) surveillance.

Not to mention overt manipulation.

I use an ad blocker. I used to use it without a filter list and would manually block any ad I found intrusive (e.g. Flash ads, ads that pick words out of the page content and highlight them, animated image ads), but then it simply became too much work. The tipping point for switching to filter list was spending two hours trying to figure out how to block YouTube video ads.

I want to support the sites I browse, but ad networks that host intrusive ads give all ads a bad name. Even worse are the irresponsible ad networks that allow advertisers to execute JavaScript, embed PDFs, embed Java applets, or even embed an entire iframe with a URL of the advertiser's choosing.

"Back in the twentieth century, people were roughly equal in their power to avoid advertising. Only desert hermits and commune dwellers could truly live ad-free."

In the 20th Century it was certainly possible to avoid ads on TV. You could use the remote to mute them (or temporarily switch channels), leave the room to do other stuff while they were on, or tape your TV shows on a VCR and fast-forward over the ads.

Avoiding ads in print media was pretty easy too: just turn the page. Since print ads don't flash or make noise, they can be ignored pretty easily.

Well, but they were roughly equal in their power to do so and in how much they did it.

Currently, it's closer to "all-or-none" switch, where the majority see all ads, while many see nearly no ads at all - and it's a quite different situation.

I'm not quite sure what modern media you're comparing this to, since in pretty much every meaningful case, this is still true. You can turn off youtube, your tv, the internet (erm; your connection, but I like my original one better.).

Perhaps more meaningful would be to note that the media in which ads can be presented have become more and more necessary in some equivilent subset of daily and work functions between now and 20 years ago.

The argument is pretty simple: if you destroy the advertising revenue that content depends on, we’ll end up in a cultural wasteland, or, worse, a culture plagued by advertising that masquerades as content.

Isn't this true for things that are already paid for anyways? The car from Transformers seems to ring a bell.

The argument that advertising kills content doesn't really hold its salt for me, if people are not willing to pay for content is it that great anyways? The argument really only eliminates niche content.

Its not whether people are willing to pay for content, its can people really afford premium content? Ad-less content isn't very attractive when you have pay $99 per episode.

Essentially advertisers have been subsidizing content for years and the question is can people really afford premium TV content and in what capacity? I'm not sure what the exact numbers are but its something to consider when thinking about the " if people are not willing to pay for content is it that great anyways". People may like the content but might be priced out.

The next thing is consider is in the TV industry, you don't pay per content. Consider the film industry which is relatively ad-less, but they make most of their money from theaters. Imagine the backlash that would occur if comcast said it would remove ads, but you had to pay $13 for each show you watched.

Excuse my ignorance but where do the advertisers get the money to pay for the content? They get it from me if I buy their product. So instead giving my money to the advertiser who then gives it to the artist, why wouldn't I just give it to the artist myself (like with Netflix, etc.)?

I don't have the numbers but I am quite sure that movies at the theater woudldn't be that much more expensive either. The advertisers don't invest their own money, they invest the money they get from us the customers obviously. And they only can invest as much as we buy, not more.

Wouldn't cutting out the middleman save some bugs too?

I'm just speculating here but I could think of some reasons why advertising is a better revenue model than direct charging for a studio (also I think the theater model doesn't depend on ads. For ads I mean tv/cable/ota).

1.) Better price discrimination. Instead of 3 people paying $5.99, I could convince an advertiser to advertise 3 different products at different price points. If the advertisements were 100% effective and I got a 10% commission, it could result in one person buying a $500 Louis vuitton bag and another buying a Macy's store brand bag at ($50). That gets me a revenue of $55 compared to $18 if I sold direct. (I know that TV ads don't actually work this way, as you can't track whether a commercial led to a sale of a product)

2.) The advertiser may be willing to pay more for the ad spot than you are for the content. Again speculating here, but if an advertiser is willing to pay $20 per view and you will pay $10, then the studio is incentivised to go the ad route. (I think this is most likely, as people were livid when Netflix had to increase price of their streaming package meaning consumer could be more price sensitive).

All in all, I have to believe that advertisers haven't been pissing their money for decades, and that studios aren't so consumer hostile that they would bend infinitely for advertisers. If the charge-the-consumer-directly model actually worked I don't think studios would be so hostile to Netflix, and HBO would likely offer a streaming package that didn't depend on the cable package.

I think that perhaps excessive salaries of some actors/actresses might die out. Digital distribution should be making things cheaper. Entertainment is already very expensive because people are willing to pay for it. It is made more expensive because of cable companies forcing you to bundle and pay for content you will not watch. It is not necessarily just ads that are subsidizing the content, but also other people who are paying for this content they are not viewing. I don't think ads are going to disappear any time soon, but I think that a lot of shows in the TV industry wouldn't make it without ads (and probably shouldn't make it anyways with so few people watching them).

The author reflects how much we've all bought into the utter bullshit that advertising makes things free. There is no free lunch, and there is no free web. In truth ads actually make things much more expensive, as I'll explain below. In addition most ads are fundamentally manipulative if not dishonest, and thereby undermine democracy and rational free markets.

Advertising simply shifts the cost of the "fee lunch" to the price of the advertised products. In other words we still end up paying. It may even shift costs regressively, toward lower incomes and the less educated, in which case the poor are subsidizing the better off.

BUT IT'S WORSE...

We end up paying a lot more than if we just paid for our content and services straight up. Not only are you still paying for the costs of the "free website", you are paying for all that advertising overhead, the costs of advertising technology and infrastructure (huge, btw), the agency and creative costs (Don Draper and company have to pay for the hookers and scotch somehow, not to mention what’s-his-name who basically just lounges in his office barefoot thinking Japanese), and big marketing departments that often outnumber the people who actually write or make things.

You are also paying the opportunity cost of inferior product, because that’s what happens when websites have to design to please advertisers over pleasing us, the users. Dalton Caldwell makes this point comparing Sourceforge to Github: http://daltoncaldwell.com/an-audacious-proposal.

Our identities and privacy are bought and sold to the highest bidders. So we foot the bill for those bids AND we pay the cost of lost privacy. A double whammy! It's personalization? Bullshit. Personalization means optimizing something for me, not optimizing for the advertiser. Again, who's the real customer?

IT GETS EVEN WORSE...

Think of the social costs of advertising. The web is infested with misinformation and manipulation. Beside the lying ads themselves, relying on a revenue stream entirely dependent on how many ads are seen severely affects the moral choices of those who decide what gets produced and how its presented. What are the costs of a misinformed and variously manipulated citizenry, of distortions to the free-market?

Knowledge and discourse are the lifeblood of both democracy, free markets, progress. The web, from the little scammy websites to the big brand ones that so many blindly trust, has a huge influence on who we vote for, what we buy, and most importantly, what we believe.

You are correct in saying there's no free lunch. However, I disagree with a couple things.

1) We, as consumers, do not pay for the ad tech infrastructure - the publishers do. Their purpose is to make the inventory more valuable and allow publishers to get more money than they normally would. Better targeted ads mean less ads.

2) The Dalton Caldwell argument doesn't hold up. Do television programs design for advertisers? Yes, but they also need to design for consumers. A television show that has commercials all the time will get less views and so will an ad infested website with a terrible experience. That fear of alienation is why Facebook isn't a giant display ad.

3) Websites aren't necessarily backed by the purchase of products through ads. There are such things as "brand recognition" ads that do not rely on instant action. After all, most television ads are not informomercials or "buy now" ads. I think we'll see more brand recognition ads online in the next couple years and online ads will become more mainstream. You'll see less scummy ads as the internet continues to grow more influential and the social cost will diminish.

1) Where do you think publisher's get the money to pay for the infrastructure? Where do you think advertisers who pay publishers get that money?

2) Sure, they can't totally treat consumers as tools. But the product is less than what it would be if it were purely designed for users. Have you heard the argument that advertisers are Google's true customers, that we are the product? Google's once famous clean and neutral search results are now cluttered and biased (see [1]). From a Wired article [2]: "Lloyd made his pitch, proposing a quantum version of Google’s search engine whereby users could make queries and receive results without Google knowing which questions were asked. The men were intrigued. But after conferring with their business manager the next day, Brin and Page informed Lloyd that his scheme went against their business plan. “They want to know everything about everybody who uses their products and services,” he joked."

3) See #1 above. Why do brands spend money on brand recognition, and where does that money come from?

You say you agree that there is no free lunch but your disagreements contradict that claim.

---

[1] http://arstechnica.com/business/2013/10/new-banner-ads-push-... [2] http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/10/computers-big-data...

First, it's scaremongering to claim that ads may be regressive. Yes, maybe they are, or maybe the inverse is true, since plenty of advertising targets more affluent demographics while lowering the costs of the services displaying it. Without more data, we can't know.

As for being more expensive, that's based on the idea that higher costs necessarily lead to higher prices, which is far from a constant truth outside of the world of spherical cows and perfect competition. In some sectors, it could make it harder for startups to compete, raising the rent that an incumbent may be able to extract from consumers as profits.

Besides, removing advertising would remove a vehicle but not the motivation, so it's to be expected that firms would continue to invest in ways of capturing customers, which may or may not be cheaper that advertising.

Empirically, the results seem mixed, with the removal of advertising both lowering as well as raising prices in different sectors of the economy, so the conclusions aren't obvious.

I dislike advertising and I work for a company that charges for its products, by the way.

TV ads are still a growing business according to TFA. Mm...

In other news, people still go to the bathroom, fetch a snack, walk their dog, etc. during TV ads. And more recently, browse their tablet or smartphone.

Try this poll around you: You watch TV with:

[ ] No other screen on hand

[ ] One other screen (e.g. tablet, smartphone or laptop)

[ ] Two screens

[ ] Three or more screens

Then consider the price advertisers pay for "your attention" and have a good laugh.

Its hard to laugh unless you know the financials. If advertisers are paying 10 million dollars for super bowl ads and getting a 15 million dollar return then they are the ones laughing at your naivete.

Or not... Assuming your figure is even remotely correct, it's a pittance -- especially considering the budget to make that ad. And a dozen years ago they'd have gotten a lot more. Plus, it's not exactly easy to trace those $15M now, is it? It's not as if they were placing a cookie or a but on those TV viewers. They're spending it blindfolded.

Admittedly, there's more to ads than just selling. There's also a brand factor and a "you made the right decision to already buy this" factor.

Still, ever noticed those ads at bus stops, next to which virtually every bystander is busy using their smartphone? Methinks the returns in those, like on TV, are getting lower by the day.

"Still, ever noticed those ads at bus stops, next to which virtually every bystander is busy using their smartphone? Methinks the returns in those, like on TV, are getting lower by the day."

Maybe, but I think those ads tend towards the "effective if people see the logo many times per day" sort of ads. You are likely to see the ad for a moment before pulling out your phone, or while you exit the bus, etc. So maybe a major fast food chain will put its logo there, just to remind you that they exist and to increase the chance that you eat there for lunch.

I don't use an adblocker but I am real close to doing so. Why? Because of the jerks who think it is okay to run a bunch of animated graphics, moving images, or videos. I am also not happy about the pervasive tracking of users.

Someone should make an app that aggregates a list of companies that pay for advertisements which are especially disruptive or annoying, so I can be extra sure that I'm not supporting their behavior.

You could just surf the web and note the ones you see, but, oh.

I think the problem is that some ads are so heavy-weight. I kind of wish there were an ad-block tool that would only block ads that are too large (data-wise) or that take too long to load.

There is. Adblock Plus allows plain and unobtrusive advertising out of the box. For example, Reddit was recently whitelisted, which I'm sure helps their bottom line.

https://adblockplus.org/en/features#acceptable

I may just be paranoid, but I'm convinced that when wearable passive cameras (glass) are culturally acceptable the first thing Google et al will be pushing for is an option to "pop in", and analyze your environment.

Imagine you could see through the eyes of your customer interacting with your brand or a competitor's. Imagine being able to see how your customers shop, what they're eating today, and more importantly a view of their network from their eyes.

It doesn't have to be that creepy, merely an agreement to let Google collect information while you shop based on GPS data seems innocent enough.

Advertising will get more insidious, someone convince me I'm wrong please (I'm being sincere, I don't want to hate technology).

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