Comment by eevilspock | Hacker News Reader

Comment by eevilspock | Hacker News Reader

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I agree, but it's an absolute fallacy that consumption is free. In fact, it is more much more expensive with ads:

1. The advertisers who pay for it all still get their money from us, but baked into prices of the things we buy from them. There is no free lunch.

2. The overhead cost of advertising is huge and we pay for that too. Ad systems and data collection systems, ad engineers and people like the author. Ad agencies. Creative agencies. Ad tracking. Marketing departments.

3. We pay the opportunity cost of a product that cannot put users first because they live or die by giving advertisers what they want (what we want only indirectly and secondarily, if at all). This includes both the cost of lost privacy as well as well as design that optimizes advertising revenue. As has been said, we are more Google's products than we are their customers.

4. We pay the social costs. Democracy and the free market assume people make voting and purchasing decisions based on facts and reason. Advertising is predominantly about manipulation and deceit. To me this is the most expensive cost of all.

Added together, we are paying a lot more for "free" web content and services than if we could just straight up pay web sites for straight-up ad-free versions. A system to make that convenient is possible, but we're too hooked on ads to even try.

[This is a condensed version of a more detailed case with reference links that I made here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7485773]

"Everyone gets that advertising is what powers the internet, and that our favorite sites wouldn’t exist without it."

The author nails the two sources of the problem, that advertising drives the internet, and that everyone believes we have no choice.

Absolutely! I agree with pretty much everything you said. I meant 'free' in a superficial way, but it's clear that ultimately, there are costs.

I recently wrote a post drawing parallels between the ad-driven economy to the debt-driven economy, and how both damage our lives and economies in similar ways. You might find it interesting:

http://livefreeortry.com/2014/04/30/silicon-valley-data-is-t...

I found it very interesting. As I replied to snide's comment herein, I would love to collaborate with others who see this clearly to help other see this clearly.

After writing that post, I was all fired up to work on a micro-payment solution of the type you mentioned in one of your other posts...but then I lost motivation. Cheeky landing page:

http://stevejain.com/penthouse/

How can I contact you?

EDIT: just sent you an email.

This is a fantastic post, and nails down one of the most frustrating contradictions I encounter online: People whose salaries are ultimately paid by advertisers complaining about low income people making self-sabotaging decisions.

Either advertising works or it doesn't. Insofar it works, it's basically coercion. If it pays for things we love it's because we're indirectly paying for them + the advertising industry.

Either advertising works or it doesn't. Insofar it works, it's basically coercion

Not even close. An ad can make a decent amount of money if it does one of three things: show me a new place where I can get a need that I have solved, or show me a solution to a problem or need that I know I have that didn't know had a solution or, and this is the most tangential and the one that is most difficult to do - shows me a need or a problem I didn't know I had and a solution to that (this is what people often complain about as superficial, but if I see a sign saying "most people pay more tax than they have to, lets us do your taxes and save" that might get me thinking).

There is no coercion there, the information itself is valuable to me and the advertiser.

The trouble with most ads, and the reason people think they suck in general, is that most of them are for crappy products because crappy products, in general, need more advertising. Great products need advertising too but not so much.

You're right in principle but not in practice, as you yourself point out in your final paragraph.

How are users supposed to know which ads are honest, and which ads are crappy products spun as great? And if crappy products far outnumber quality ones (case in point, how much of the content on the web do you think is garbage?), how does advertising achieve what you claim in your second paragraph?

And even for those non-crappy products, how much incentive is there for sellers to tell half-truths to increase sales? "Here is my great product (but I won't tell you about this other better or cheaper product that I know about, and in fact, I'm buying this ad to make sure that that upstart competitor never even has a chance! It's so nice that my established market dominance pays for my wide and deep advertising mote!)"

See this thread for more on this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7733941

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." -- Upton Sinclair

And thanks for the +1. I usually get downvoted on HN whenever I raise this issue, because many HN'ers do get their salaries ultimately from advertisers.

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