Ask HN: What will it take to destroy the ads market?
The more I live the more it seems like we're living in a soulless dystopia:
- My local state TV channels feature 20 minutes of commercials for about 5 minutes of actual content - YouTube shows more and more ads as time goes by - Can't go in the street without being bombarded by ads wherever you look - Whenever you Google something, the top results are SEO spam websites with jumping ads and auto-playing videos that quite literally feel like some form of digital cancer - Services are starting to display ads even if you're a paying costumer -- e.g Samsung TVs
At which point enough is enough? They've stripped humanity out of these daily tasks so much that I can't imagine this is sustainable. What will be the last straw in this market?
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People should be taught when they're still kids how to become resistant to advertising and exercise more critical thinking; I knew so many people who completely ignored some products they saw every day used by others until the day they were shown on TV; that can't be good.
Yoi don't get ads if you pay for YouTube, or if you pay enough for most streaming services. Most papers and such offer an ad free subscription tier too. Cancel TV and use YouTube TV if you must.
For Google, there are ad free competitors, or just use ad block.
They'll be around as long as the financial incentives are there. Micropayments failed so many content providers are moving back to pay walls again, whether it's Patreon or adult videos or Steam or whatever. Gotta put food on the table somehow. If you don't want to see ads, just pay for the producers' time some other way.
I recently cancelled my Toronto Star digital newspaper subscription - some $17/mo or some bullshit like that - because I was horrified to find after paying that frankly ridiculous subscription fee, I was still being fed ads within their iPhone app.
This obviously isn't the only - even recent - case of this.
In no way does a subscription payment mean you will not have advertisements or tracking.
It's infuriating to see time and time again how companies care just so little about the customer and so much about taking advantage of the very people who are paying them. :(
A perverse incentive is an incentive that has an unintended and undesirable result that is contrary to the intentions of its designers.
Just because your target market is hard to reach doesn't mean it is perverse incentive or strategy failure.
More adds may drive some targets to alternatives, but as long as you make up the difference with the remaining eyeballs, it is a net win and not perverse.
To be perverse, you would have to show that you can make more sales with fewer ads
We'll move from ads to micropayments for content, when you can pay with your bank account, fractions of a penny in real time for seconds and minutes of content.
There will be big technology providers that supply the technology for the studios and content creators and will include many in one package. You will be paying seamlessly with your gpay on your browser or gaming console or whatever.
(or you can see it as a way for DIS to raise their current subscription prices like netflix did)
People love it. It works. No one wants to go back except for a few 'rare ones'. Somehow, people still manage to spend their money and start businesses - amazing.
I see no reason why the same couldn't be done online, were the political will to suddenly start reflecting the will of the people somehow.
There are many possible implementations, and many rather easy to implement solutions. The virtuous cycles could be incredible.
The best we can hope for is that they’re labeled and you can pay to remove them. If you get rid of labeled ad markets you end up with a bunch of sponsored content without your knowledge that will destroy your trust in any information you find online or otherwise.
I think we might have to observe Netflix and HBOMax to see if the economics of a paid subscription for content can be scaled to completely eliminate ads in the long run. So far it has not happened for written content outside of a few pockets.
Personally, ads help discovery to some extent and provide some baseline education to find some product if you ever need to, especially when you have a lot of choices. I came from a different country to the US, I don’t have TV here and only watch Netflix, prime and HBO.
I really struggle when I have to buy something to do stuff which is new to me (how do I clean LVP floors without ruining it ?, how do I maintain a lawn? (learnt about lawn care companies) Who do I call to fix a rotten board in my kitchen (learnt about handyman).
It’s really tiring to have to Google and Reddit every single thing and learn this from scratch on top of filtering out conflicting information and not knowing what is an ad.
An unappealing grey background, a representative, unedited, in-situ photograph of the product along with a text describing the name and specifications of the product, maybe along with some state-appointed announcer who neutrally reads the text.
I really hate the world as is, polluted with meaningless, over-optimized advertisement, but at the same time I also think that "no advertisement" is definitely not the answer.
As with most things, I think we have to find a good balance. Maybe a good way to start would be for governments to set (harsher) limits to advertisement. Allowing less seconds of ads per each hour of content, forbidding print ads in certain areas, etc etc.
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24480572
"ABSTRACT. The vast amount of product information available to consumers through online search renders most advertising obsolete as a tool for conveying product information. Advertising remains useful to firms only as a tool for persuading consumers to purchase advertised products. In the mid-twentieth century, courts applying the antitrust laws held that such persuasive advertising is anticompetitive and harmful to consumers, but the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) was unable to pursue an antitrust campaign against persuasive advertising for fear of depriving consumers of advertising's information value. Now that the information function of most advertising is obsolete, the FTC should renew its campaign against persuasive advertising by treating all advertising beyond the minimum required to ensure that product information is available to online searchers as monopolization in violation of section 2 of the Sherman Act."
It sounds like you have the problem letting go of the ad subsidized media, apparently many people are fine with it.
If you can't afford to pay for the ad free content, fair enough, but maybe be grateful you at least have a means of getting it without paying.
It’s already happening, a while back I got a subscription to the Discovery streaming platform and occasionally it would interrupt the show with an ad. I refuse to pay for that, so I unsubscribed. But sooner or later I will have no choice anymore.
History is repeating itself and yet you still have people in this very thread carting out the tired old bromide: "the market will take care of it, vote with your wallet". Well, it clearly won't in this case.
1. https://www.nytimes.com/1981/07/26/arts/will-cable-tv-be-inv...
One negative change though is Public Broadcasting Services are being encouraged to be self funding, which may reduce the options for free and ad-free content!
This doesn't really work. Paid Cable/Satellite TV has ads all over the place. Even the extra premium channels will put cross promotion between the shows to fill the time slots. Paid streaming has cross promotion on almost all services, and some services have actual ads even when you paid (sometimes there's a higher tier you can pay for which has fewer ads). Of course, paying for content on disc, when available, doesn't prevent ads either.
Currently the signup and payment flows are so long that they greatly reduce impulse buying. I really wouldn't mind paying 50 cents for an interesting article if there just was a simple button to click, but I'm not going through that annoying flow for an article.
He argues that the internet ad market could crash soon because it isn't really delivering value anymore, or rather it delivers far less value than advertisers currently believe (and pay for).
If true, it could be pretty devastating to the current internet given how many major players like Google, Meta etc. depend on ad revenue to provide free services like Facebook, YouTube, GMail etc.
Of course, there's the fantasy that events like IDFA deprecation will make the ad market crash. Spoiler: IDFA deprecation has been more of a blip than a bomb. Advertisers rapidly found ways around it (whether those ways are in TOS compliance or not). Then there are the brands coming into the space just looking for impressions -- think of your old school giants like Coca Cola. They're already comfortable with fuzzy, somewhat unknowable returns.
Haven't read the book but I have close contact with multiple people in the industry. And as I said, their results are right there in dollar signs. (For the record: I'd love to believe the ad market actually is threatened, I'm not arguing for it and personally I block ads.)
In fact, I'd argue that the internet ad market continues to boom because it has continually delivered highly measurable value for years.
It also seems very naive to me to say that large advertisers don't understand what they're doing. In many cases we're talking about large public companies whose expenses are scrutinized by major shareholders. If they were throwing money away on useless ads that didn't deliver value, there would be activists in there pushing for change.
My understanding of the field is quite the opposite. The only way to measure the true value of online advertising is to measure how much sales have been generated with ads enabled minus the sales that would have been generated without the ads.
To the best of my knowledge, this is unsolved, even by the giants who have plenty of talent and data to throw at the problem. And for a reason, this is a very hard causal problem to solve, with many (many) confounding variables.
Ideally, you could support this informed opinion with some studies? Preferably not just general anti-ads clickbait.
Sure, you can’t ever /really/ know if your “inception” in the case of branding campaigns worked, but product/seasonal campaigns are super easy to measure and prove.
And so, "to the best of my knowledge, this is unsolved" is not an opinion but a fact.
I am happy to be proven wrong with the relevant material.
And by material, I mean scientific papers, not assertions such as "product/seasonal campaigns are super easy to measure and prove."
And so, if you google-scholar (not google) for "online advertising incrementality", you are left with (granted, excellent) work that shows that nothing has been proven yet and that it is a very hard problem [1].
And when customers of Google, Facebook and other ad tech companies ask them about incrementality, their answer is surprisingly quiet.
[1] https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3447548.3470819
PS: I don't make any hyped claim that ads don't work. I question this fact in a constructive way.
Proving specific incrementality is rarely a concern from actual customers, unless they wanted to tighten their purse strings. Nobody questioned if actual incremental gains could be made - only whether there are diminishing returns for their increased spend.
I have almost no ads in my life - they're not that hard to avoid. Most days I see/hear 0 of any kind. Getting rid of a TV years ago was one of the best things I ever did. Now I just watch the movies, series, documentaries I want to watch, ad-free.
> YouTube shows more and more ads as time goes by
I never see any, with uBlock Origin. I never see ads on Google, not sure why.
> Can't go in the street without being bombarded by ads wherever you look
You may need to move somewhere where this isn't true.
Billboards are fairly unavoidable in some city suburbs/city centres though, and I really hate super-obtrusive ones. Make take creative action yourself. I'm in Australia, where BUGA-UP famously used to creatively deface billboards, changing their message into something true/funny. I saw one defaced, well, improved, in their style just the other day, maybe they're still around. Very inspiring stuff. People have to say NO to billboards.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billboard_Utilising_Graffitist...
1. Don't click on ads.
2. Run an ad blocker or, even better, turn off JavaScript[1] when a page displays excessive ads.
3. Build a new type of Open Source-based search engine which utilizes an alternate revenue model.
4. If you can't do #3, like I am, then pay for one which utilizes an alternate revenue model.
5. Encourage the sites you use to explore using Lightning for payments. Lightning can be connected to requests to the site's content using Aperture[2].
[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/disable-javascript... [2] https://github.com/lightninglabs/aperture
To me, the problem is the tastelessness of the advertising experience:
> There's too many ads displayed too frequently.
> Because there's too many ads, most ads have to be gimicky, flashing, attention seeking junk encourages people to install ad blockers. It's a race to the bottom.
> This criticism is an aside, but most corporate advertising is nonsensical focus-group designed garbage. You have ads that try and show families with a Black male and a White female and maybe an Asian kid. Like, who the hell is this artificial nonsense even pandering to?
> There's real frustration with the context of most advertising: watching a 30 second ad to see a 10 second sport highlight is not a pleasant tradeoff.
> Because companies want to gather lots of data, their ad networks load up lots of trackers and bullshit JS that slows down websites and compromise privacy.
> Despite being able to track people around the web, their machine learning is garbage. Everybody has probably experienced buying something random like coat hangers, buying them, and then seeing nothing but coat hanger ads for a long time.
For some reason it didn't work, but the idea of advertising working like the now defunct The Deck appeals to me: very strict rules on placement of ads and I think other good policies that made me want to support those sites and not block those ads.
Internet culture is trending towards being fed content algorithmically rather than seeking content deliberately. I see no end to the ad market in this context, for as long as you are not the one deciding what you are looking at - there will be value in paying whoever does control it to show you an ad.
People need to start vehemently rejecting content forced upon us without request with the same intensity as someone shoving food in your mouth. The recent rise of the "for you page" indicates social trending in the opposite direction though, so ads arent going anywhere.
We'll be matrix-style inside an AR pod, unable to move or do anything but watch unskippable ads.
The only thing the matrix got wrong was the plot device of humans as a power source. It's far more realistic for us to be an advertising sink, to maximize how the results of increasing productivity can accrew to as few people at the top as possible.
It ends when the uber eats and amazon drivers, the only people who will be still allowed outside, stage a rebellion.
While I understand you completely, I think a lot of these issues would be reduced if regulators played an active role on controlling what is being advertised/how it's being advertised and where... because at the moment it seems to be delegated to the platforms to police their own ad network.
With that said, you also need to realize that with the advent of digital advertising many small businesses found ways to reach old and new customers at a small cost (now increasingly expensive, and therefore more prohibitive).
Because you have to remember that prior to this, advertising was a luxury, and many of our childhood brands were so successful because companies like Proctor & Gamble, Unilever, Coca Cola, Mars, Mattel, Hasbro, etc had the control of the share of voice with their brands, and they controlled big chunks of share of shelves, with access budgets of millions.
Imagine returning to a days where only an handful of brands were controlling the majority of media inventories and distribution/sales channels... I don't think that's a good thing.
I don't have a solution for this to be honest, yet I think that reaching audiences shouldn't be limited to behemoths that have access to hundreds of millions in advertising budgets.
For entertainment I haven't watched TV for ages and cannot stomach the modern movie industry anymore, so I'll play some old school games, or better, creation as entertainment.
Sadly, it's looking like "WWIII, or Asteroid Dino-Doom v2.0".
As a bonus you could have slightly better privacy with proper blocklist.
clearly people behind those ads know better seo optimization, gaming google search
kindly ask google to change to new search algorithm and we'll get rid of ads ... until those ads people master new seo otimization tactics
rinse repeat
So how do you get a cert? A friend (who is already a member) gives you a one-time access URL to a page that lets you download a new client cert. Install that in your browser and now you can access the site, and you can generate your own "new cert" URLs like the one your friend gave you to give to your friends for them to join.
So that's how the network grows: word-of-mouth direct personal connections. And all these connections are public: recorded in a public DB (Sqlite file) and published regularly (say, every four hours or so) so the membership graph is known to all.
How do you use it? Well, the other thing you can do with the site (besides minting new "join URLs") is to propagate information (not to be coy, URLs to some article or whatever, like the submissions here on HN) through the network. You go to the site (auth w/ client cert), enter the URL of the thing you want to propagate, and you get back what I call a "bump URL" that has a code that identifies the subject and the sender (you). You send this "bump URL" to your contacts (via email, Twitter, whatever) who can click on it to see a page that has the original subject URL and a new "bump" URL customized for that contact, for them to send to their contacts. There are two buttons: "Engage" and "Reject". "Engage" redirects you to the subject site after recording the "engage event" in the public DB; "Reject" likewise enters a "reject event" in the public DB. Both are optional, you don't have to click on either (it probably doesn't make sense to click on both.)
And that's pretty much it: you have a public graph of members, and a public sub-graph for each subject URL with public "engage"/"reject" events, and all the data are published in a public DB that anyone can download and analyze. (Have I mentioned that it's all done in public enough yet?)
- - - -
So how does it work? Why would you use it? And how does it kill the ads market?
Simple (and as yet theoretical): Let's say I'm a small business with some widgets to sell. I create a sales page and make a "bump" URL for it and send it to my contacts, who forward it to theirs, who forward it to theirs, and so on. When someone "engages" with that URL/page and actually buys a widget, I can check the public DB to find out the "chain" of word-of-mouth links that led to that sale and reward each of those folks somehow.
- - - -
I am not spelling it all out here, there are additional details, but the above is the crux of the idea. There are also some pretty obvious problems (e.g. how many "bump URLs" are going to be flying around? Billions!?) but I think most of the potential problems are solved by the direct interpersonal nature of the thing:
Spam? No, why would you forward spam to your friends? If a friend sends you spam you can talk to them and tell them to stop, or just stop clicking on their "bump" URls. As far as I can anticipate, most problems would be solved by the open feedback between members in light of the public DB.
Moderation? Everyone is a moderator, and then some: people who don't participate can still read the DB, so the moderation "team" is larger than the userbase!
Censorship? No, because no information (other than the URLs themselves) goes through the network, so there's nothing to censor. (Of course someone could use an offensive URL, but again, if you get a link to something that offends you (for whatever reason, in whatever way) you can "reject" it, or just not propagate it.)
Anyhow, I can go on but I want to know what y'all think? I've been sitting on the demo for months now because I just don't know if I really want to do this or not, but I really DO think it's "got something", that there's potential in this idea. What do you think?
A movement of programmers hell bent on ridding the digital world of advertising.