What annoys me are ads for products I've already purchased (amazon is terrible about this), or the same ad plastered 20 times across multiple sites.

Instagram handles ads pretty well IMO. They are non-intrusive, easy to digest, and highly relevant.

Facebook OTOH, has become one giant scrolling, auto-playing, clickbait/video ad. There is essentially 90% junk to 10% information (posts/photos/etc). IG has the same ratio but in reverse.

People love to bemoan the horrors of internet advertising, but tbh I find it way less intrusive than other forms of ad placements (TV, radio, billboards).

Except autoplay vids w/ audio. Those should be banned flat out.

Talk about damming with faint praise. Ads are the top reason why I no longer listen to radio, and the TV is only bearable because I have a DVR.

That said, those are just annoying. Online ads are much more dangerous.

(I'm fine with ad-supported products, but I see it as a necessary evil of the transaction, not as a win).

You also have the option to fully block ads using extensions/plugins - nothing like that really exist for cable tv/radio/public spaces.

Among the biggest problems with ads are that when they are the primary economic model for these services, they will tweak everything to favor paid ads as much as they can get away with. That means everything from conflicts-of-interest around serving the needs of the biggest advertisers to undermining organic (non-paid-ads) discovery of products and services…

Can you expand on this? I also can't really parse what your second paragraph is trying to say. How do businesses that rely on ads undermine organic product discovery, and what conflict of interests could they have?

1. Given capital being so unequally distributed, paid ads amount to amplification of the messages from those who happen to have money. In another framing: you see ads about mediocre products with a big marketing budget; you don't see ads about wonderful products that have little marketing budget.

2. The conflict of interest is where Facebook has an incentive not to highlight too much the non-paid posts from people that mention products that don't pay for advertising. If you were to consistently see non-paid posts that gave you all the info you need to get products and services you appreciate, then the advertisers wouldn't be seeing their ads pay off and might cut back on paying Facebook for ads.

Overall, attention is somewhat zero-sum. Your attention to one thing is not attention to something else. You never really know what you're missing. But in an ad-driven system, attention is biased toward (but not exclusively) whatever serves those things connected with ad money.

1. Products reliant on advertising for revenue are incentivized to increase the amount of ads shown (per user and in total). This leads to product strategy which prioritizes growth and engagement above all. The line between "highly engaging" and "addictive" products becomes very thin, arguably disappearing entirely.

2. In order to provide highly targeted ads, companies must necessarily collect, store and organize a tremendous amount of data on their users. We have seen over and over again that this data can then be requested, stolen or tapped by governments, hostile actors and other powerful organizations for nefarious purposes without the consent of the user.

2. Source? Outside of a few edge cases (china) I don't think this is a real concern. The same can happen with financial (or any) data, but I don't see people saying the data is the problem. Rather its the processes around that data that need fixing.

Advertising revenue is ad CPM (how valuable the ad is and how well it's targeted) multiplied by ad impressions (which is why people measure page views, time on site, minutes watched, etc.) Both matter in the model.

2. Beyond China and other authoritarian governments, the Cambridge Analytica affair is perhaps the defining example of this. It showcased nonconsensual data harvesting with malicious use of the data against those users to impact politics both domestically and internationally: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/04/us/politics/cambridge-ana...

Here another example from just a week ago: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/19/climate/koch-brothers-pub...

> "Central to the work of Americans for Prosperity is i360, the Kochs’ data operation, which profiles Americans based on their voter registration information, consumer data and social media activities."

In other words, the topic is the advertising where you give your attention to one party and that party participates (gets paid) to show you something else different from what you went there to see.

So, concretely: this is about paid ads on Facebook. This is NOT about products listed on Amazon that show up with compelling descriptions when you search for that type of product and clink on a link that wasn't higher in the list because someone paid for that.

When you go to Amazon and search, you are specifically choosing to put your attention toward products of a certain sort and asking for information. Amazon is delivering that information. There's marketing in how the products present themselves, but it's still something you are actively looking for, given to you second-party by the company from whom you are considering buying the thing.

When you go to Facebook to see how your friends are doing and your attention there gets sold to advertisers to show you unrelated products that may happen to fit your interests, that is the topic of discussion here.

Lots of poor advertising methods have tainted the industry unfortunately but marketing is directly responsible for the success of every single corporation and the immense amount of content and information we all get to enjoy.