Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Anyone who is truly honest with themselves will admit that 90 to 99% of ads deceive and manipulate people into consuming a product

My most effective ad incoming, prepare for the perfidy.

  Make Bingo Cards Quickly
  Create word bingo to fit any theme.
  Try now, no download required!
  www.BingoCardCreator.com

It is for a SaaS application which makes word bingo cards.

Can you suggest how the ad is deceptive and/or manipulative? If it helps, I'll supply context: it is almost guaranteed to show on pages which talk about making bingo games in an elementary school (or similar) setting.

I spent about $8k last year showing this to ~4 million teachers, homemakers, event planners, and other people interested in topics like Halloween bingo. (A particular thing that it does.) This resulted roughly 80,000 of them visiting a landing page which offered them free bingo cards for their email address. Roughly 20,000 of them took me up on that. Somewhere around 500 of those 20k decided they liked their free bingo cards so much they wanted to pay for the product which I sell.

I have a pretty good idea of where that $8k ended up. Approximately $3k of it subsidizes operations at Google, a company which you may have heard of. The other $5k subsidizes content creation at a few thousand sites across the Internet. Some of them are honestly not net value providers. Many of them are.

One of my most successful ad placements, for example, is on a hobbyist site created by a teacher and her husband. It offers many free printable activities and is ad supported. It's been lovingly maintained since the late 90s or so. My rough approximation of their annual ad revenue is "it would make for a pretty nice teacher's pension in any state."

It is very not obvious for me that anyone would be better off if that team decided to take down their site to avoid the moral impurity of advertising. Their users would lose access to many useful, free printable activities. I'd lose access to a large group of great prospects for my product. Many teachers would fail at their goal of playing classroom bingo with their students tomorrow. Their kids would be sad.

But your ads, and in particular the careful placement you describe are not at all representative of the majority of ads most people see around the Internet.

And your example about the hobbyist-site-gone-nice-pension is not a startup. It's also just an appeal to emotion, when the argument is just that we could do with less advertising in general, and that it would be nice if startups could find or have a different way to monetize.

A lot of ads are is deceptive (though IMO, 90% is a bit high estimate), but more importantly it takes a very real mental cost of constantly having to task-switch: when I'm merely looking for information (which is 99% of the time I'm on the Internet), there is an army of specifically crafted boxes of information strewn in sidebars across the web, doing their utmost best to get me out of that mindset and into the mindset of deciding-to-purchase.

If I actually were to have to suffer that I'd never get anything done. That may sound extreme, but there's more people like me that need their focus and it's fragile. Thankfully there's AdBlock and similar tools.

I don't see anything wrong with this type of advertising and I appreciate where you're coming from.

But, ignoring the issue whether most ads are like this or hyper-tuned to psychologically trick you into consuming goods you can't afford, there seems to be another issue here, separate from the parent.

The advertising industry seems to be the biggest pushers of big-data collect-all-you-can-because-you-may-need-it-someday. This automatically erodes privacy for everyone.

For you to have reached that many teachers on such a budget, I assume all this collected data helped immensely, but at what cost?

I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on this.

Please identify the specific mechanism by which you think that an ad for Bingo Card Creator appearing on a page about bingo cards erodes the privacy of Ethyl Smith, a hypothetical schoolteacher in Kansas who is currently viewing the page about bingo cards. It is not obvious to me that this is "automatic" or that there are various poorly specified data being collected which helped immensely other than "It looks like she wants bingo cards. Maybe we show her an ad about bingo cards?"

I think showing an ad for a bingo card creator when Ethyl Smith searches for one is the perfect (and original) mechanism for targeted ads.

What I worry about is Ethyl Smith's emails / chats / SMSs (via hangout) / location and map searches &c. all being collected for the sole purpose of showing her the perfect targeted ad.

In my personal opinion, I don't mind Google using their algorithms and that to extract data from all those sources to display to me relevant things that I'd actually buy, then show me stuff I don't care about. It's not like Google employes thousands of people who pour through your email, chats, hangouts and other stuff to be like "yup, this ad would be perfect for them."

I agree. I use gmail, so I can't in all honesty say that I have an objection to less privacy in return for targeted ads.

But I do get pissed off that the NSA can tell Google to give them that data without my permission and with no benefit to me (I don't live in the US so there's no security benefit to me even if the NSA was increasing US security).

There does not need to be a specific mechanism:

Advertising industry erodes the privacy of Ethyl Smith.

Bingo Card Creator supports and is supported by the advertising industry (and, in particular, corporations which encourage the erosion of privacy).

Every individual can easily excuse themselves from this process by saying there is no direct link between their own commercial effort and privacy erosion, and it's very easy to ethically justify what you individually are doing. After all, no single person or entity is literally saying or thinking "let's screw Ethyl Smith".

Personally speaking, I no longer find this a very good excuse.

If you are against advertising, how do you cease the intrinsic and instinctive self-advertising of human beings?

The study, published in the Journal of Basic and Applied Psychology, found that 60 percent of people had lied at least once during the 10-minute conversation, saying an average of 2.92 inaccurate things.

I assume you do not find yourself very excusable.

Read what you wrote: are you talking about advertising, or are you talking about lying?

Whenever advertising is lying, there is no question I am against advertising.

OP >> 90 to 99% of ads deceive and manipulate people into consuming a product

This thread has been characterised with the opinion from people like yourself that advertising is immoral, akin to lying, manipulative, deceiving etc etc <insert descriptor>.

My point stands - advertising is just an extension of social interaction. If you hate advertising, you essentially hate yourself since you advertise continually.

Ah, I see that you are ignoring and misrepresenting the point that I made. Good for you.

Anyway, to respond to your point:

I do not welcome advertising as an extension of social interaction, no more than I welcome someone shouting at me in the street as an extension of social interaction.

Not misrepresenting anything. You are just incapable of accepting that advertising has a place in a market economy and that across society human beings are hard-wired to advertise, even if just using body language.

You have somehow compared this to shouting at you. Whether you welcome advertising or not you do do it. Arguing against advertising is like arguing against breathing.

Carry on downvoting me; I care a little above 0 about my karma score. It just shows me that advertising detractors cannot form a coherent justification for their views.

Saved to my ad copy swipe file :)

Seriously, that is a truly excellent PPC ad. I'm assuming it's the result of considerable split-testing.

Thanks. I spent quite a bit of time in 2007 through 2009 on that, and a bit until 2011. I'd be surprised if it has changed since then.

You don't negate my point because:

- I did not say 100% of ads are lies

- You don't prove that you could have done better through product reviews and word of mouth (which is now web-scale via social media), especially in a world where you didn't have to compete with other products that make false claims through advertising.

- You didn't refute my claim (via the footnote link) that if people paid up front for Google, the other content creation sites you mention, as well as the hobbyist site, that it would actually be cheaper for everyone, both on a monetary and social cost-basis.

And wow, over 50% of the cost of your product went to advertising! In a world where people discover things via web-scale word-of-mouth (e.g. social networks, product review sites, recommendations from field- or topic-specific authoritative websites), your product would be 50% cheaper, and even cheaper than that considering people would not waste money buying products due to dishonest ads.

Yes, we are in a sort of catch-22. Because people are so used to getting their web for free (even though as I point out that is an illusion), a huge majority of us would have to boycott ads to change the system to where non-ad-supported business models could thrive. But those of us who dare to do it first, before that critical mass is achieved, are likely not to survive.

But a seemingly insurmountable catch-22 doesn't mean it isn't messed up and not worthy of critique. Remember, history is replete with such situations. When we all lived under totalitarianism, a small number of people could rule over a vast majority only because to unite people into a rebellion, you have to speak up, but if you speak up, you're head gets cut off.

Change is hard.

>>web-scale word-of-mouth(social networks, product review sites, recommendations from field- or topic-specific authoritative websites)

All of which are ad-supported and if they were fee-based they wouldn't be that massive, which agian brings back to ads.

>> Relying on ad revenue is a moral failing.

If relying on ad revenue is a moral failing, so is using such a product/service. Have never used a such product/service?

He doesn't negate your points because there were none to negate. Well, except for that clearly accurate "90-99%" figure you quoted. Your personal crusade is not a rebellion, and no one is trying to cut off "you're" head.

Sure, we all agree that deceptive advertising is deceptive. That's wrong, but not all advertising is bad. I think you'll be surprised to find out that 95% of people (yay, making up numbers is fun!) actually don't mind that google tracks their activity so they can show more relevant ads. I typically don't click on them, but hey, more relevant ads still makes my overall experience better and I really don't care if we get there because some of my search history was (relatively anonymously) logged on some of google's servers.

Also yes, word of mouth leads a lot of people to discover new products, and may be cheaper than traditional advertising in dollar amounts, but it's likely a much greater time investment that may not even pay off in the end. Likewise, patio11 could pay the hobbyist site, and google, and any other "legitimate" advertising platform directly but I think the time commitment to find those valuable platforms, enter into an agreement with them, and deal with all the associated details may not be worth it for him.

In the end, it's about finding a cost-effective way to get your products in front of its audience. That may be "word of mouth" (and I don't want to get into that debate, but product review sites tend to be more misleading, biased and corrupt than a lot of ads), or it may be ads. To each his own, but you don't need to condemn everyone who doesn't share your overly idealistic views.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com