Comment by jleyank | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jleyank | Hacker News Reader

If my behavior is anything typical, advertisers are going to be a world of hurt. When I read a newspaper, I tend to be open for advertising. I usually am looking for movie reviews, concert information and the like. Ads for concert series, festivals, ... are welcome in this environment. To me, these ads can often make me willing to deal with the advertiser.

However, when I am using a mobile I tend to be doing something with that mobile. Looking at mail, getting map information, watching a video or browsing my cycle of blogs and RSS feeds. While I am doing this I tend to find advertisements rather annoying. They suck down bandwidth I'm sometimes paying for. They get strangled when there's not enough bandwidth to go around. Contrary to print ads, these tend to make me unwilling to deal with the advertiser. Particularly if they're intrusive, animated or noisy.

As many others have said, if you show me pertinent(!) ads when I'm interested in ads I'm happy. If you ram stuff in my face, spend my time and money and keep me from doing what I want to do I'm unhappy. Here's a clue: unhappy people don't make good customers.

Also, if you're of a certain age you remember things like computer shopper magazine. Which, while it had articles, I don't think I ever found one. It was basically a one and half inch thick catalogue.

People paid money to buy a thick catalogue, to see what was shiny and new.

What was it about ads in magazines that made us actually want to see them. I used to buy guitar magazines and even though I never bought any of it I liked seeing new gear that was coming out. Online I would never bother to check things like that and actually get annoyed by those ads on guitar websites.

I think it's just because of the pushy nature of so many ads on the web or mobile apps.

An example of it done well would probably be The Verge's mobile app for Android when their primary benefactor was Starbucks - when you'd launch it after a while, you'd get a quick ~2 second splash screen that showed the Starbucks logo while the news data was being loaded.

True. I wonder how advertisers could get the kind of engagement online that they got in magazines where people would voluntarily read your entire ad, maybe spending as much as a few minutes on it.

There are better ways to learn about new products on the web, so ads suck more.

I remember Computer Shopper. I used to have a subscription at work. I would keep the issues in a bookcase. Back in the mid nineties, each perfect-bound issue was the size of a major city telephone book and consisted of perhaps a 100 pages of editorial content on decent paper spread out in a sea of advertising on cheaper paper (the kind that gets ink on your fingers). Then, as the internet ramped up, the magazine got slimmer and slimmer. Looking at my bookcase, it was easy to see the trend. I see from their Wikipedia entry† that they finally ceased print in 2009. The started in 1979. I lost track of them in about 2002.

†http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Shopper_%28US_magazine...

Advertisers figured out how to use the newspaper, the radio, the televison, and we've watched them figure out how to use the internet. It isn't like mobile is tainted somehow, they'll figure it out as well. From the 2012 to the 2013 charts, in no case did the spending allocation trend against the consumption allocation.

An RSS reader paid for by local announcements actually kind of makes sense, but I don't see anyone with the market share to make it work.

EDIT: and if someone doesn't think spending tracks allocation I'm open to other theories of why the bars line up.

Television advertisements would like to have a word with you. These are the most annoying, strategically placed to interrupt in tense moments, yet they make up the bulk of ad spending?

I find that I've gotten to a point too where my mind subconsciously blocks out ads, even the ones at the top of Google searches. I also don't believe I've ever clicked on a banner or display ad (purposely) since I've been on the internet. They just always feel scammy or not targeted well enough in my opinion. But that's also just the nature of the internet...

I actually do keep score on advertisers whose uninvited popups or navigational hijack tricks waste my time. Their brands accrue negative associations.

I can't fathom why so many advertisers are so eager to demolish their brand equity by annoying the shit out of users.

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