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A comment on Ads on paulgraham.com -- Check the bottom of any PG essay.

Re:Ads on paulgraham.com -- Check the bottom of any PG essay by rokhayakebe on Monday July 23, 2007 @06:01PM (#36205)
I wonder when people are going to get it. We have been talking about "IN-vertising" for ever but NO, NO, NO. We still want to guess what the user wants. No software can tell what a user wants better than the user him/herself. I believe we should spend more time and resources providing users with services that let the user initially decide the ads they want. For me send anything that rhymes with coffee, mobility, startups and thick women. Block the other ads. If I feel like buying a car in the next few weeks, then let me pull the firefox or IE plugin and tell it to serve me a few VW Golf ads and listings. Would it be hard to build such a plugin?
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Re:Ads on paulgraham.com -- Check the bottom of any PG essay by randallsquared on Monday July 23, 2007 @07:57PM (#36226)
If you already know you want a VW Golf, the ad isn't very useful for the advertiser.
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Re:Ads on paulgraham.com -- Check the bottom of any PG essay by rokhayakebe on Monday July 23, 2007 @08:05PM (#36227)
Yes it is. If there are 4 cars dealers in my state who have what I am looking for, they can all serve ads to me, then I compare and buy the best car with the best payment option.
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Re:Ads on paulgraham.com -- Check the bottom of any PG essay by vegashacker on Monday July 23, 2007 @11:07PM (#36265)
I may be a minority, but that's not how I buy stuff if I know what I want to buy. If I know what I want to buy, then I research the item using Google.

I don't click on ads often, but when I do, it's usually because something caught my attention that I wasn't directly searching for.

The one exception is that I occasionally try to "trigger" ads that give me a discount once I know exactly what I want.

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Re:Ads on paulgraham.com -- Check the bottom of any PG essay by randallsquared on Monday July 23, 2007 @08:21PM (#36232)
I see. I assumed the advertiser was VW, but as you point out, there are others who'd still be interested.
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Re:Ads on paulgraham.com -- Check the bottom of any PG essay by farmer on Thursday July 26, 2007 @09:20AM (#36832)
That's probably when the ad is the most useful, because they can get you to buy it sooner. It's a pretty good deal for VW if a few cents' worth of internet ads can cause you to make a $20k purchase a month sooner.
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