As I replied on the techcrunch post, here's a quote from the recent film Ratatouille, that I believe sums up my opinion on the numerous haters out there (uncov, jay (living in first life) and the rest)

"In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face is that, in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is more meaningful than our criticism designating it so."

"Pay no attention to what critics say. A statue has never been erected in honor of a critic."

-- Jean Sibelius, Finnish composer (1865-1957)

What about those MS haters?

Basic premise holds - creating > criticism.

It's obviously a huge, huge market, but I just have to greet this with some skepticism: "Adpinion's solution is to empower users to choose their advertisers.". I think...people who are cognizant of ads in any way other than background noise usually "choose" to get rid of them. But then, maybe there is a good PsyOps way around ad blockers. There are other companies doing similar things, like adkrakr. I tried that today out of curiosity...it brings up a tag cloud, and I clicked on (among other things) "bird seed". What do you know...I got some bird seed ads. Wow.

But hey, if you can increase CTRs by 0.01 percent, you'll be billionaires.

Ads are here to stay and if you have to encounter them, why not let them be ones for things you might actually like? I think the voting thing is pretty ingeneous, though i feel there will be some problems:

People don't like extra effort, they are more likely to ignore an ad they don't like than click or move a slider. On the other side of the same coin, they will be more likely to just click on an ad they do like than muck with some sort of rating system.

People don't always know what they like, just because one day they find something attractive doesn't mean a week later or even hours later they will like the same thing.

Not sure how they can do this - but seems like there are a few things that would really help this work.

a - encourage the advertisers to make better ads. Ads are inherently useful - when they're relevant. Cool ads are entertainment in themselves. Anyone remember adcritic.com? Welcome to my Friday nights in college...

b - pass voting data back to the advertisers in some meaningful way. Haven't thought this through yet...

> encourage the advertisers to make better ads.

That's what I wish to happen. I do sometimes enjoy ads themselves. If advertisers find it's more effective to make nicer ads than to put crappy ads everywhere...

Good article, nasty comments :( TC has become a very negative place.

Looks cool! I'm eager to give it a try. Maybe we'll get the YC alumni discount (or maybe just priority on the invites).

are you guys planning on letting people actually input their ad preferences? or are you just going to determine them based on what they vote on?

i wrote this in another thread, but i would gladly spend a few minutes telling an ad-server what i'm interested in so that the ads are relevant.

If it's reddit for ads, then I'd think it's based on what you vote on. The process seems to work well enough that you shouldn't get too many ads for Ron Paul's site.

I got a chuckle out of that one.

an online survey and user account would make sense for this. I'm not sure how many people would use it.

I had thought of this exact same system last week, but obviously a little too late. :) Good luck guys!

I voted up the ad with desktop to S3 storage :)