- display a static ad, have the "x" to close appear soon (3-10 seconds)
- display an animated ad, have the "x" to close appear soon (3-10 seconds)
- display a static ad, have the "x" to close appear after 20-30 seconds
- display an animated ad, have the "x" to close appear after 20-30 seconds
- display several ads in succession, each short, but it automatically proceeds to the next; the net time after which the "x" to close appears after 20-30 seconds
- display several ads in succession, each lasts for 3-10 seconds but you have to click on an "x" to close each one before the next one appears
I live in the USA. The well-established consumer product brands (Clorox, McDonalds, etc.) almost all had short ads that were done in 3-5 seconds. The longest ads were for obscure games or websites, or for Temu, and they appeared over and over again, making me hate them with a flaming passion. The several-ads-in-succession were usually British newspaper websites (WHY???? I don't live there) or celebrity-interest websites (I have no interest in these).
It seems like the monkey's-paw curse for this kind of legislation is to show several ads in a row, each allowing you to skip them after 5 seconds.
- I brewed my own kombucha (I have GI issues and I am so lactose intolerant that even kefir and yoghurt would give me a reaction)
- I ride a bicycle everywhere (I exercise daily and like to stay active, bicycle is often the fastest way around London)
- I buy expensive locally farmed produce (the quality is usually night and day vs other sources)
There were plenty of other signals by which I superficially seem like a hipster but my wife would attest I'm the opposite of an actual one.
In the words of my ever wise mother "keep the good bits, leave the rest"
What he’s creating is fame and money for himself, the fact that it’s by doing videos is incidental. That’s why he also got into ghost kitchens, a game show full of corner cutting, and a theme park in Saudi Arabia open for under two months.
at least 50 cent, who got into rap strictly for the money, made something fairly entertaining
I take your point, but I am still baffled why people find this appealing.
You’re subject to it every bit as much as me or anybody else, but for whatever reason, we have different triggers than the Mr. Beast crowd. People that think they’re immune to it after having it pointed out to them are likely just less aware than most how their emotions are being manipulated by things they don’t even consciously perceive. Sales guys love people like that.
> Sales guys love people like that.
You can also easily never speak to them. I know they exist, but as a consumer I can't think of anytime I've had a sales interaction with a salesperson. I understand that some people do, and might even actively seek a salesperson - but if I go to a physical store I already know what I want to buy before I get there and the only interaction I might have is to ask how to find the thing I want.
I know it's a common argument/appeal to authority that advertising must work, because companies are still doing it - but there are economists who think that it might not[0].
[0]: https://freakonomics.com/podcast/does-advertising-actually-w...
This is not specific to YouTube. It’s billboards, product placement, etc etc etc.
> You can also easily never speak to them. I know they exist, but as a consumer I can't think of anytime I've had a sales interaction with a salesperson
Ok, so you make every major purchase online, probably don’t own a car, never purchased a home or lived in a city where its extremely difficult to rent without a realtor, never go out to restaurants or bars in the US where the service staff essentially works on commission in the form of gratuity… sure thing.
Thinking Sony would sell just as many products entirely based on word of mouth is absolutely absurd.
Car crashes are not appealing, and yet it is something most people are tempted to look at. Many people think of dopamine as the pleasure hormone, not really, it is the motivation hormone, pleasure is one way to achieve that, but so is horror.
It makes evolutionary sense, if something horrible happens, you better pay attention, to get prepared so that it doesn't happen to you.
I don't know the details of the psychological response to Mr Beast thumbnails, and I think neither does My Beast himself, the analytics say it works and that the only thing that matters to him.
Fashion swaps styles fast enough most people can’t afford full wardrobes before it changes, which by default keeps each style looking fresh.
He also changes the thumbnails and titles of videos once published, sometimes up to dozen times in the first day.
He also has dozens of channels for different languages, so can test thumbnails and other tweaks with those.
https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/393332200/you-can-...
So like a month ago. How did Beast A/B test before then?
My first thought is that the person has a strong grasp of their profession and they love money. A hack like that has to have a really high value/effort ratio.
I loved making custom progress bars really fun so people didn't mind watching the huge sites download.
I HATED when they had me mess with the time so that it got to 90% really fast and then spent AGES finishing the last 10%.
Yet another data point on why nobody should be wasting a second watching Mr Beast content. Complete algorithmically optimized garbage.
I recall Mr Beast showing up in a Colin Furze video for a few minutes and Mr Beast was very clearly incapable of being a normal person. He was obviously out of place, being in full makeup and styled, and couldn't seem to be bothered to actually engage or express real interest in the subject. I think the guy has replaced his real persona with some manifestation of the YouTube algorithm. If he's not actively making money, he's just a shell.
It's scary imagining people getting sucked into that :/
nah turns out it sucks for everyone.
When you click over to subscriptions, you see only the stuff that you subscribed to, and nothing else.
Recommendations on a video are based on you subscriptions and the current video, and nothing else.
I could never go back.
The day youtube disables the "turn watch history off," is the day I'll stop using youtube.
I, too, could never go back.
Huh? Opening the front page of youtube in a private view (with no existing youtube history) shows you a completely blank page.
You can still get a glimpse of what is out there by watching a specific video in a private window and looking at the recommendations.
[0]: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/c8/84/8e/c8848e81afa88a42bd4d...
That guy is so over the top that I cannot bear watching his videos, despite them theoretically being exactly up my alley. I like tinkering videos, I like his ideas, and the high-quality results, but I hate his mannerisms.
For instance: when reading/writing/both many files of differing sizes on traditional drives there is an amount of latency per file which is significant and not always predictable. Whether you base progress on total size or number of files or some more complicated calc based on both, it will be inaccurate in most cases, sometimes badly so. Even when copying a single large file on a shared drive, or just on a dedicated system with multiple tasks running, the progress is inherently a bit random, the same for any network transfer. Worse are many database requests: you don't get any progress often because there is no progress output until the query processing is complete, and the last byte of the result might arrive in the same fraction of a second the first does¹. The same for network requests, though IE (at least as early as v3) and early versions of Edge did outright lie² there to try make themselves look faster than the competition.
The progress bars in videos are a different beast (ahem): the total time is absolutely known, any inaccuracy is either a deliberate lie or gross incompetence.
--------
[1] I once worked on a system that kept logs of certain types of query so it could display a guess of how long things were going to take and a progress bar to go with it, but this was actually more irritating to the users than no progress display as it would sometime jump from a few % directly to done or sit at 99% for ages (in the end the overly complicated guessing method was replaced by a simple spinner).
[2] It would creep up, getting as far as 80%, before the first byte of response is received. This also confused users who thought that something was actually happening when the action was in fact stalled and just going to time-out.
In the Tiger era, the OS X start-up progress bar worked this way—it kept track of how long boot-ups would take, and then displayed its best guess based on that.
It was a compromise that let us focus our limited attention on the things our project could uniquely do, without needing to refactor or do fast-and-slow-passes to provide subtask-count estimates to the UI. I'd make those same choices again, in that context. But in an ad context, it's inexcusable.
(Yes, I know it's mostly the ad's fault, but there's no practical way to punish them directly. So force apps to pick better-behaving networks.)
“Hey you bought socks that one time! Want more socks??” -> Unsubscribe.
“Hey it’s your weekly sock news! What’s new in socks!” -> But I unsubscribed! Haha no, you only unsubscribed from the “product releases” list. Not the “weekly news” list or our 10 other fabulous mailing lists!
-> Report all emails from this domain as spam. May god have mercy on your soul, cute socks.
Interacting with a company/organization immediately turns into a lifelong "legitimate relationship" that supposedly entitles them to contact you forever and ever.
Meanwhile, near immediately, they would love a review! They want Participation in OUR new oven.
It's overwhelming, and most frustrating is it seems 'communication' is rapidly become a one way st.
They did work with a bad ad network though so it's a valid enough reason to complain imo.
You got served an ad from "one of our partners". That's all you'll get to know, and there's no mechanism to even report the app's shitty behavior to Google or Apple (and they don't care when the app becomes too large, either).
(If you're using a mouse, forget what I said. But I haven't run into an ad where the close button didn't close it... if you were able to click the close button.)
——
[0]: https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...
They're very very clearly click-fraud tricks, and most platforms will ban them if they're caught. But by clicking on the ad, it closes the ad, and there's no way to go back and report them, nor incentive for ad-viewers to do so. By design, IMO.
The whole industry runs on scams like this, there's no incentive for large platforms to proactively block any of them because they lead to money moving through them, where they can extract their rent. They only move against the most egregious, to keep fraud at the same barely-acceptable level as all the others.
Wasn’t there an article here a few days ago about Facebook specialising in hiding such malicious ads from testers and law enforcement to maximise gains?
if(testdetected == 1)
ecm.lowemissions
else
lmao.fuckyouregulatorspetrol goes in, toxic gas comes out, so make toxic gas less.
most of them have 0% understanding as to how data mining works or how online ads (and scams) function
Another trick that I’ve noticed on the Reddit app is that the tappable area is much larger for ads than normal posts. If you tap even near the ad it will visit the ad
Everything is trying to scam you nowadays jfc
The fact you are getting irrelevant ads is a good thing that indicates that is probably working.
It'll probably be a win for them.
The web ad company was hampered by poor engineering and management that had big glory projects that were poorly conceived or too ambitious; they no longer exist.
The first mobile ad company was constrained by ethics and prioritized a better experience over earning that last fraction of a percent (though most people on the outside would disagree on principle).
The second mobile ad company had a decent API designer early, and managed to capture a specific role in advertising. That role gave them access to data that ended up being wildly useful for purposes other than it's original intention, and they've done well based on that. But they are completely mired in in-fighting, executives who only bother to come in and be seen for quarterly results, and they don't do *anything* unless someone else does it first. They don't have a functional legal department and engineers are afraid that their head will be on the block if something goes wrong, and everyone is afraid of killing the golden goose.
So no, I suspect it hasn't happened because almost nobody thought of it, and the people that did are too afraid to be a trailblazer.
And we've already seen the precursors for it. Chaining multiple short ads together to add enough value to be worth it for an in-game reward is the beginning of it. It's not a very far leap.
I'm sure in their mind, they don't care about me leaving. Apparently more than enough people put up with it to keep the site viable.
We should just ban all online ads then. I honestly think we would be better off. Yes, some things that used to be completely free would start costing a little bit, but I don't think we would lose much of value, really. And there would still be lots of different ways that consumers could discover goods and services if we didn't have online ads, it would just be via directories where consumers could go and search for products instead of consumers being bombarded with information noise all the time.
The freemium ad-revenue model is a local maximum which results in a whole lot of shittiness.
The only way I've found to do it so far is to manually exclude yourself from every individual app category. IIRC there are over a hundred categories and you need to manually go through and select every category to exclude your ads from mobile apps.
My second favorite was for some pirate game, but the ads were basically the setup for an adult movie, with tons of hammy overacting. I thought they were so funny, I was really sad when they stopped.
I wonder how much risk there is to brands due to this sort of thing? I tend to feel the same way; are we just uncommon?
The only place I see ads is Amazon Prime Video (b/c I'm still irked they changed the deal and added ads). I've come to hate those companies whose ads I see over and over and over again and I've resolved to never buy anything from them. I even used one of their products regularly and switched to a competitor due to their ads.
The latest was "I Love Hue". It let me play 10 levels (nice) and then put ads in. If they had just asked for $1 before showing the first ad I might have paid but as soon as I saw the ads I just uninstalled.
Note: IMO "I Love Hue" is a $1 game. I'm happy to pay $$ for bigger games and often do though on Switch/Steam, less on mobile.
While the game indeed was ad-free after that, there was no progress possible anymore as everything suddenly cost 3x the virtual coins than before. Basically forcing you to shell out even more money to buy their stupid coins.
We’ve refunded the IAP and that was that.
I would not be surprised if the incentives are in place for ad networks to push for longer ads and for advertisers to create longer ads.
My wife is a sucker for these horribly generic flashy F2P puzzle-ish games. There are these ads that pop up every N action or something; some of these look like a mini-game and are actually an ad for another of those F2P games, and you have to play the mini-game that showcases some dumb simple mechanic of the game it advertises for a little bit before you can dismiss the ad.
Some come complete with two trivially easy levels ONLY 20% OF PLAYERS CAN PASS SOLVE THIS that glorify you OMG YOU HAVE SUCH HIGH IQ then one impossible that taunts you into installing the game.
The predatory dark patterns are so obvious they should be trialed to oblivion but no apparently this kind of abuse is legal.
Maybe I didn't notice the X in some part of the display or whatever, but even if by making a concerted effort to not do it, you still "convert", their click though stats must be crazy.
I understand the reason for these (they often have an IAP that will remove ads, so the more annoying the ads the more likely folks will be tempted to buy it). But doesn't make it ok. I usually just leave a one star review and uninstall.
Then can use the game without annoyance of ads
As it happens, the data collection, surveillance and ad serving strategies of the mobile OS vendors and their unpaid "app developer" independent contractors are still subservient to application firewalls and/or user-controlled DNS
This could change one day, it's within the control of the mobile OS vendors, but I have been waiting over 15 years and it still hasn't
But it's also why this administration is dismantling those agencies as fast as it can -- without them the legislature will always be hopelessly behind on proper regulation.
As is often the case I think that means the restrictions should just get even more strict, e.g., "no ad may ever be longer than X seconds and no app may ever show more than Y seconds of total ads within any 24-hour period". Then add some extra clause like "any attempt to circumvent or subvert these rules is punishable by fines up to 10x the company's gross annual revenue, plus asset forfeiture and prison for executives". People at companies should be deathly afraid of ever accidentally crossing the line into abusive behavior.
Interesting new opportunity for YouTube here. Detect your usage patterns and near bed time show you increasingly boring content until you fall asleep, then fill your head with subliminal messages in these long ads.
It’s very smart about that stuff!
I have a (unsupported, unsubstantiated) theory that YT detects phones of "sleepers" and pushes more profitable content with the understanding it won't be skipped.
I've got a few spare phones, maybe I'll run an experiment.
You can have multiple YT accounts on a single gmail acct, but I don't think that'll fool them. They know where you initially logged in from. So you will likely need multiple gmail accounts to do this kind of experiment.
They don't have SIMs, they'll be connected to a VPN router, and I'll create new Gmail accounts for each device, from each device.
It could just as well be something super valuable -- like an unattended kiosk device playing youtube to a crowd of people.
Someone who falls asleep watching YouTube will skip ads, unless they're asleep.
The idea is that if YT can infer that someone is asleep (location, no movement, no sound, low light, night) that they can show the longest, most skip-inducing ads that they've got since they know they won't be skipped.
The difference between the kiosk and the sleeper is that if the sleeper gets a 20 minute ad at 2pm while they're eating lunch, they'll skip it. YT is incentivized to show the most profitable ad that someone won't skip.
The value in identifying sleepers isnt showing a long ad, it's showing a long ad with the certainty that it won't be skipped.
Because YouTube has a functional monopoly on online video advertising in a huge number of markets.
Enshitification is not just for YouTube's viewers and creators.
Now I just pay for Youtube. I'm a lot happier that way.
while depriving google of revenue AND costing them money
win, win, win and WIN
but this isn't the case, I'm completely cost neutral to them
but it does directly cost Google money... and I'm perfectly fine with that
Don't get me wrong, I'm well aware this is impractical. But it's fun to think about sometimes.
There are products that do solve legitimate problems people have. Maybe there is less of that now, but in this past this was very true, and advertising helped make people aware that solutions to their problems have been developed. The first washing machine, for example.
The problem comes when the advertisement manufacturers problems that didn’t previously exist.
I see this pro-ads argument all the time and it’s so obviously-stupid that I’m truly baffled. Is this the kind of lie ad folks tell themselves so they can sleep at night?
Also, I'm not sure we want a world where only the largest corporations get to sell things. That's what would happen if people could only find things through stores and catalogs, especially pre-internet.
I definitely don’t want that directory to be skewed with ads in favor of those with the most money, or who have decided to burn the most of their limited resources on ads instead of improving their services, lowering their prices, or hell, just taking more profit. The ads were the biggest problem with the good ol’ yellow pages.
Paying for placement is what makes an ad. And that’s what would have to be prohibited.
You see the contradiction.
You’re essentially saying no bad ads, only good ads, without defunding the difference. (Anyone can afford a Google or Meta ad in the way they could a White Pages listing.)
1. No non-invited display of paid messaging, period. If you go to a directory and ask for a list of people who paid to be part of that directory, it can show it. If you play a game, watch a movie, take the bus, or search a non-paid directory of sites they simply cannot show you things they were paid to show you. I think I'd call this making attention-theft a crime.
2. No payment for priority placement in paid directories. A paid directory has to charge the same (small, nominal) fee to everyone involved.
How would you distinguish someone asking for the directory versus asking for something else with said directory (which are totally not ads, pinky promise) displayed alongside?
> I'd call this making attention-theft a crime
Someone standing up to make a political speech in a public square is now a criminal?
> A paid directory has to charge the same (small, nominal) fee to everyone involved
This is just ads with a uniform, "small, nominal" fee. Uniformity is objectively measurable. Smallness and nominalness is not. Presumably you mean these directories have to be published at cost?
You making sending the directory with something else unconditionally illegal, you either get the directory or the something else, not both at once. This is also necessary for the second part where you require everything in the directory paid the same amount.
> Someone standing up to make a political speech in a public square is now a criminal?
Only if they were paid to do so.
> This is just ads with a uniform, "small, nominal" fee. Uniformity is objectively measurable. Smallness and nominalness is not. Presumably you mean these directories have to be published at cost?
Personally I think uniform is more important than either small or nominal. It means that the person creating the directory can't be bribed to direct your attention to certain parts of the directory - i.e. steal it. Rather it's your choice to get the directory in the first place and pay attention to it, and everything inside it is at an equal playing level. I don't really care if it's at cost or if making directories is a profit making venture.
I'm not entirely sure what the original proposers intent was with the "small and nominal" part though. They might have wanted something more like "at cost".
The purpose being that because every item in any paid directory has paid the directory the same, the directory has no (monetary, at least) incentive to direct your attention towards sub-optimal listings. As an attempt at forcing the directory to sell itself as a useful directory of services, rather than as an object which sells its users attention to the highest bidder.
Rather than coverage being spend based, it’s a low, static price to be listed in the directory, with near zero extra differentiation other than what you choose to put in your little square/rectangle.
If I go buy a Google or Meta ad with the same negligible budget, I can get my product shown to 50 people and then the money runs out.
That's completely different from getting onto a phonebook-like list where everyone that visits can see my company's offer.
What a sad comment.
Ever notice that there used to be a lot of businesses with names like "A+ Heating and Cooling" or "AAA Chimney Sweeps"? That was because being at the top of the phone book's alphabetical listing was more likely to get you business since a lot of people would open to a section, start at the top and start calling.
There's only so much shelf space to go around, eventually decisions will be made about who can put their products on a given shelf.
Any large business with the ability to produce multiple different products will inherently have the advantage of getting more shelf space assuming you want to display all products.
But even assuming you just wanted your shelf space to be a bunch of "per company" catalogs, businesses with more money to spend on glossier catalogs, or brighter inks, or more variations so thicker catalogs will have an advantage.
Then there's names and numbers. Hooked on Phonics gets a leg up on every other competing reading program because they got the phone number that is 1-800-ABC-DEFG, no one else can have that number. The lawyer who gets 1-800-555-5555 (or other similarly easy to remember number) has a leg up on anyone with a random number out of the phone company's inventory.
But I'm curious, what would this perfectly level field you envision look like? How would these sorts of problems be solved?
It's not society's problem to ensure corporations are able to take prime real estate by abusing their customers.
They can meet with every shop owner and argue why their products should be sold, although if you ask me I bet the shop owner knows exactly what their customers want so once again where is the benefit for society here? That some greedy people aren't able to make a buck abusing human psychology?
Once again, what is the benefit for society here?
If people are using their advertising budget unethically, you should expect them to find new unethical ways to use their advertising budget once you've eliminated the existing ones. Rather than playing whack-a-mole, take a step back, and see if you can fundamentally change the rules of the game. Why is advertising bad? What do you want to happen? Fixing the "how" too firmly, too soon, is an effective way to produce bad policy, no matter how good your intentions.
Word of mouth also requires a high degree of trust in the person spreading the word. Otherwise you get things like youtube "review" channels that are just paid reviews. Or the reddit bot farms where suddenly everyone in a given part of the web is suddenly dropping references to their new Bachelor Chow™ recipes. You can't even trust the news. We all know about submarine ads, but even without that, you can't ever be sure if you're hearing about some new thing on the news because it's really the best/popular, or because they just happen to know a lot of the reporters.
Weren't those better before ads got involved?
> Web rings were a thing
Aren't those literally word of mouth?
> Otherwise you get things like youtube "review" channels that are just paid reviews.
That would be illegal under the laws we are discussing, presumably.
The directories? Ads were part of those pretty early given that they were modeled on real world directories like the Yellow Pages in the first place. Here's a webarchive of yahoo from 1996[1]. Note the big broken banner at the top with the link text "Click here for the Net Radio Promotion". AOL was pretty much always full of ads, and don't forget the old AOL "keyword" searches which were ads by another name.
> Aren't those literally word of mouth?
Sure, and they were pretty lousy at helping you find information, which is why people stopped using them in preference to search engines, even though search engines had ads. Heck one of the selling points of Google originally was that their ads would actually be relevant to you and the things you were searching for.
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/19961022175643/http://www10.yaho...
And if you're going to charge on a per-query basis, I note that Kagi isn't nearly as well funded or well known as Google, and that's with them offering an "unlimited" tier. And a per-query model disincentivizes me from using the service in the first place. The more digging I do, the more it costs me, so the more likely I am to take the first result I get back.
Even the most classic "direct to the people who are most interested" advertising model where the consumer pays money for the ads (magazine ads) still is almost entirely subsidized by the advertisers, not the consumer.
Retail stores are basically rooms full of ads. Those end isle displays? How much shelf space allotted? Eye level shelf or bottom shelf? Distributors pay for that. The whole damn store is advertising!
You mentioned catalogs above... catalogs are almost pure advertising.
Looking for a directory of [service, in my area] ... you mean like the yellow pages? That were a literal giant book of advertising that companies paid for?
Spend some time in retail technology. The world does not work the way you think.
Banning advertising could actually make it easier for new entrants.
It's the big players who have the most money for ads, buy up all billboards, internet and TV ads, etc. A small shop can't afford to do that. If ads were completely banned (in all forms including the bulletin boards) then everyone would have to rely on the word of mouth not just small businesses.
I also think that fields like photography are just highly competitive regardless of ads so it's then mostly a networking game.
If you're truly baffled by a view that many people share, you're probably missing something.
How do you solve discoverability, especially of a new type of product or category? I invented this new gadget call "luminexel". People don't know what it is yet, because it's new. How do people find it in a catalog?
Or the thing I sell is fairly technical and needs more space for descriptions / photos to communicate what it is. Do I get more space in the catalog?
You make a post on Hacker News titled “Show HN: I made this cool thing called Luminexel, check it out!” Some people will think it’s really cool and tell their friends about it. Eventually it will end up on some “curated list of awesome things” website.
Many posts on HN are ads. We’ve just collectively decided that some of them are OK
So, place an ad in other words.
So your question seems like pure fantasy to me — like asking how we’ll slay dragons without ads. I don’t know, but I don’t think that’s a thing which actually needs doing, either.
New products within an existing category show up in catalogs, review articles, etc just fine without ads. As does your highly technical product, for which people in the relevant industry already know the information and/or are already used to narrowing their search to a few products and then requesting additional information.
Your pro-ad arguments seem to be solving problems that don’t actually exist.
You say “that is what a store is for”… well, how would you even know a store exists to go check it out? In the physical world, you would walk by and see the store and be curious to check it out… well, what is a store front other than an ad for the store? Putting your name, product, and reasons you will want their product on the store front IS AN AD. You wouldn’t walk into a store front that was completely blank, with no information about what they are selling.
And even that simple advertising is impossible online. If I create a new online store, how will people ever know it exists? There is simply no answer that doesn’t in some way act as an ad. I would love to hear how you would let people know your store exists in a way that isn’t just an ad in another form.
Ads are a necessary evil for effective market discovery. They should be heavily regulated but you can't effectively operate a market economy without one.
There are no successful economies without information exchange. Discovery can happen without advertising -- if you consider that the main feature of ads is that it's unwanted information distribution.
Even thousands of years ago in illiterate societies people would advertise their goods/services via verbal campaigns, drawn pictures, songs, etc.
And even if they're necessary at some level, what if the US had 90% less ads, etc.
I don't think that is true. The oldest known mass printed advertising is about 2000 years older than the oldest known blue pigment.
> As far as I'm aware, there hasn't been enough testing to say much about the importance of ads.
I think if you look at some early advertising (e.g. BCE), you'll see that most have a painfully obvious functional form of just simply announcing the existence of a product/service for the world to observe.
> I think if you look at some early advertising (e.g. BCE), you'll see that most have a painfully obvious functional form of just simply announcing the existence of a product/service for the world to observe.
That doesn't tell us how important it is to have advertising.
And it doesn't tell us how important it is to have advertising anywhere near current levels.
There is this capitalist lie that money is a stand-in for "value provided to society". So, when you provide value, society gives you money, and you can use this money to ask society for value back.
Which sounds great. And truly, I do believe that people should have to contribute to society if they expect society to support them, but the problem with this lie is that, despite how capitalists make it sound, the market was not designed with this ideal in mind, instead we have imposed it onto the market after-the-fact in order to justify why the market is good and worth keeping around.
But the real truth is that money does not reward the person who contributes the most value, it simply rewards the person who makes the most money. Money is not "value", money is power. And the system rewards profit no matter how it's acquired.
This means that you can provide a good service that people want, but you still need to advertise and compete in order to be rewarded for your contribution.
It also means that you can do something valuable, like cleaning up all the trash off of a beach, but that doesn't mean that the market will reward you for your contribution.
And it also means that if you have a thing and you want to make profit selling it, you can run a manipulative ad campaign that convinces people that they truly need it, and the market will reward you.
Not sure about that, markets existed since forever and are still useful even without ads.
I recently got a catalog where everything was on pretty even footing. There was the occasional photo with someone wearing stuff, but it was a smattering of random brands, big and small. Nothing in it looked paid for. It was a catalog of stuff made in the US. The meat of the catalog was text that listed 1 item in a category per brand, when the brand may have had hundreds. A brand with literally one product was indistinguishable from a major brand. I actually found this quite frustrating as a potential buyer. If I was interested in a category I had to manually go to every single website to see what they actually had and if it was something I was interested in. There was no way to cut through the noise, other than my own past experience with companies that had some brand recognition (from advertising elsewhere).
I grew up 1,000 km+ from any significant stores and shopping - everything we wanted we got via browsing catalogs, building order lists, and either ordering in via road train or taking a few days off to travel > 2,000 km with car and double axle multi tonne capacity trailer.
The issue is that anti-ad zealots won’t acknowledge that advertising is a spectrum. You can go full blown horrendous dystopia or enter into a commerce-free hermit kingdom where private property is banned and resources aren’t traded efficiently, with the end result being that everyone is poor because nobody trades anything with anyone.
A sign for your store that identifies you is technically an ad. A brand logo printed on your product is technically an ad. A positive review is basically an ad. What lengths are we going to go to ban ads?
Be honest: you’ve never bought a single useful thing that you found out about via an ad and ended up glad you saw an ad for?
That is important because the wealth of nations is often predicated on the populace being able to trade their labor.
For example, in recent years North Korea has developed their own Amazon-like delivery website for food and goods and has expanded intranet smartphone service because, obviously, fast communication and ease of transmitting a desire to buy or sell is helpful for growing an economy and keeping the nation from starving. Otherwise, why would they adopt an imperial capitalist concept like that?
It's important to strike a healthy balance, even if it inconveniences some honest people (although we're talking about people who work in advertising...). I don't think you can claim we have a healthy balance currently.
ETA: catalogs are not ads in this context; people seek out catalogs when they want to find something, which already makes a huge difference
Making all ads only legal in bazar-like environments, banning all other forms of "forced" ad viewing, and also banning personalized ads completely, would go a very long way to fixing the issues. Hell, we can start with simply banning personalized ads, that alone would effectively destroy the surveillance economy by making it illegal to use that data for anything other than providing the service the customer purchases.
Also, ad bazaars sound great until you realize that every locality needs to have their own bazaar. Seeing ads for New York barbers is kind of useless when you're in Los Angeles. Now you have a million ad bazaars and that's the only advertisement allowed. A little bit of corruption and your ads outshine all your competitors in that locality and they go out of business, since signs are an ad too.
Also also non-personalized ads mean that the only things that can be advertised online are digital goods or things that are available globally. Basically, it will work for Amazon and AliExpress but that's about it. And adsls in Russian or Japanese or Korean or German or French or Swedish or Portuguese aren't going to be that useful for you, are they? Ads in English but for a product in another country might be even worse.
Turns out that products that work well tend to get remembered, and ones that don't get forgotten.
You say products that work tend to get remembered, and sure, for existing products with a market you might be right… people would continue buying those things even with no advertising.
But how did the FIRST person who bought the product find out about it? Someone has to try it once before you can even know the product works. How would a new product enter the market?
Maps exist. Search engines exist. Have you been stuck in a cave the last 50 years?
Yellow pages (phone books) were essentially entirely advertising. They didn't just list businesses out of the goodness of their heart, they took listing fees. This is a form of advertising!
Sometimes the ad lets me know about an entire type of product that I didn't know existed but found very useful, and I probably didn't even by the actual brand that was advertised.
If you consider the general concept of "letting people know what products are available for purchase", I think it's hard to disagree that it's a reasonable thing to do. That doesn't excuse the manner in which it is done today, of course, but that core functionality is not fundamentally evil.
I do have some very high quality products that were recommended to me through friends. Like one local lady that makes really quality outfits. She doesn't advertise at all because she's already overwhelmed with orders as she's so good.
I'd boil it down to: if you added a "don't show this" option, would anyone use it?
A catalog that comes in the mail because you requested it is not advertising, since you requested it. Products mentioned on the front page of this site aren't advertising, because they're organic, and it's part of what I'm here for. Classified ads, despite the name, don't really qualify since they're in a separate section that nobody reads unless they're specifically seeking out those ads.
A useful product doesn't have "don't show this" buttons because it would be completely pointless. I seek it out because I want it. I don't get upset at the company that made my office chair foisting it on me, because they didn't. I ordered the chair and got what I wanted.
But ad companies don't resist "skip" buttons because they think they're pointless because everyone loves their products. They resist "skip" buttons because they know people don't want to see their shit. Their entire business model is based around forcing people to see things they don't want to see, but might accept as part of a package deal for seeing the stuff they do want to see.
That is the stuff that should be completely destroyed.
So, do superbowl ads not count as ads because a non-negligible portion of the viewership wants to see them? Or are you saying that there needs to be a non-negligible fraction of the viewers who don’t want to see it for it to be an ad?
(Though, that doesn’t imply that the best available definition won’t have any edge cases like this.)
I think it works better to define whether or not something is advertising based on, rather than whether the viewer wants to see it, instead by whether those putting the media where it is intend for viewing it to be (as far as they can make it) a requirement for something else.
Though, I’m not sure that even that should be considered a requirement. It seems to me like the things businesses paid money to get put on the million dollar website, should count as “ads”. I don’t see why we should define “ads” to refer exclusively to objectionable ads.
There are probably a decent number of football fans who would use a "skip ads" button if they had one for the Super Bowl, so they're still some way toward the "ads" end of the spectrum. But they're certainly less objectionable than most TV ads.
It is extremely common in the science/technology sector that buyers aren't looking for a solution to a problem they have because they are under the impression that a solution doesn't exist.
The archetypal business-school case study for this is the story of Viagra. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2025/03/27/viagra...
But it applies to most new technology in a less dramatic sense.
The entire point of the ad industry is to muddy the waters and psychologically manipulate consumers. It's not even remotely interested in informing, it's interested in propagandizing.
There are also many reasons that the ad industry needs to be tightly regulated, of which your point is one.
This is solved by 5 minute of searches on the web in 99% of cases really. I never in my life bought something because I've seen an ad about it, meanwhile I solved countless of my problems by thinking about the issue and looking for a solution online or talking to people about it
I occasionally get the hiccups. When it happens, it’s a problem. There are many home remedies that exist, but nothing has ever actually worked. I was watching Shark Tank one day, which is basically a bunch of ads, and there was a guy selling the Hiccaway. Several years after seeing this, I decided to give it a shot. I’ve used it 2 or 3 times now and it’s instantly stopped my hiccups. I feel a little weird for a while afterward, but at least the hiccups stop.
This was a legitimate problem and I waited for an ad to solve my problem, because nothing else I tried worked, and I didn’t know this thing existed until I saw the ad. I’ve also never heard anyone talk about it outside of Shark Tank, so word of mouth clearly isn’t doing much either (at least in my circles). The topic of hiccups doesn’t come up that often. Everyone gets hiccups, but they aren’t out there actively looking for solutions. It’s just something that happens, and it sucks.
btw you can also try looking for solutions on your own, like going to a doctor, searching online ? type "hiccups solution" online and hiccaway is on the front page.
It has been this finding and solving of problems that led to our standards for what solves a problem increasing as well, for better or worse again.
I think everyone has looked for hiccups solutions at some point in their life, found them not to work, and gave up. That’s why I think this is a decent example. Adults aren’t actively searching for hiccup solutions. They gave up long ago, and most of the time, it isn’t something they think about. But when they happen, they kind of suck. Depending on when they happen, like before a big presentation, they can also be a major problem. People tend to overlook it, because they know there isn’t a real cure.
I’m not arguing for more advertisements or hiccup commercials 24x7. But there is value to some way of creating awareness of new things that are actually useful. Most advertising is trying to manufacture problems or just keep a product you already know about in the front of your mind. This is probably 95% of advertising. My argument is for a way to surface that 5%.
Look I'm not saying you can't live a low ad lifestyle. I don't have cable or network TV and run ad-blockers on every device I own. And yet I can look around my home and see numerous products purchased at least in part due to an ad. The Retroid Pocket sitting on my table, the M series laptop sitting in front of me. The Sony TV across the room, the game consoles under it. Heck the dog at my feet was the one I adopted because I went to an adoption event being sponsored at a local business. Even when I'm seeking a specific product out and then seeking out information, I'm looking for reviews and a lot of those reviews are given sample/free product for the purposes of making their review. That's an ad. I might be able to place more trust in that review if the reviewer doesn't give the product manufacturer editorial control they way they'd have in a sponsorship, but you can be damn sure if sending free product to independent reviewers wasn't paying off in terms of higher sales, the manufacturer wouldn't be doing it.
I've definitely investigated and eventually purchased things I first learned about through an advertisement.
Mind, usually that was from print ads in things like magazines/newspapers, the occasional direct mail ad like the old Fry's electronics mailer or movie trailers. Online ads are overwhelmingly ugly attention grabbers for things I have zero interest in or no time for when displayed.
I myself usually choose to watch trailers for movies, look at job ads and housing ads when I actually want to watch a movie, change job or move house. What pisses me off is the 99% of ads in my life that are just blasted in front of me online and in public.
It's probably silly and the answer is just that they are, but they at least meet two different types of advert to me, personally.
I would partially agree with OP in that I can't believe any adverts I've ever seen have influence a purchase from me. I actually quite often blacklist brands and products for aggressively marketing to me.
There simply isn't enough ads for soft drinks, supermarkets or cars to reasonably fund the tech industry as it currently exists. Ad funded Facebook, perfectly fine, but that's not a $200B company, not without questionable ads for gambling, scams and shitty China plastic products.
Platforms should have higher standards, accept lower profit margins and charge users if needed, rather than resort to running ads for stuff we all now is garbage.
I interned at an ad agency once, and I really enjoy creative advertising, but frankly there's just way too much advertising in this world.
I'm curious how does this account for "town criers" and the like? And there seems to be quite a few examples of less "information dense textual statement" in some of the articles on Wikipedia about advertising [1] [2].
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_advertising [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_card
The closest experience I have had was with ads for new restaurants, of which two turned out good and one - not good. Also, twice last year, I saw trailers of new movies I wasn't aware of at the moment. However, I am sure I would later discover it via reviews or word of mouth.
And mind that it was not problem solving, just an entertainment suggestion. I can live comfortably without new restaurants, or I will eventually discover them via other channels.
Now sure, it probably happens about once a quarter, and for that I watched probably hundreds if not thousands of ads, so was it worth it, I don’t know, probably not.
Less intrusive ads? Less frequent ads? Sure I can get behind that (though, I can turn off a TV, can't turn off the town crier). But ads have been a part of us since the first person with something to sell wanted to sell it.
[1]: https://bailiffgatecollections.co.uk/gallery-category/victor...
I would happily take a deal that gets rid of all tv and video ads and replaces them with as many independent criers as companies are willing to pay.
You could probably hire a lot of “town criers” on fiver for the cost of a 30 second TV spot.
This has very little value to me. I'm buying my wife a new car next year and I won't be perusing adverts to find what to buy. If I did I would be thoroughly mislead as the adverts are full of aspirational bullshit.
Adverts encourage people to eat unhealthy food, take unneeded drugs, drink, smoke, buy more house than they need and replace perfectly functional consumer goods. They make everybody's life worse (apart from the advertisers).
Commerce won't stop without them. I've mostly eliminated them from my life but that hasn't stopped me from spending my money.
I don't think we need ads for discovery, I see it more as a nefarious way to occupy space in people's conscious.
How exactly does that work for virtual products?
Who here never browsed a product or company catalog they found, just because they were curious?
But as sibling comment said, if it's really good, people will find it eventually.
The problem again is greed. The organic way is too inefficient so advertising needs to come in and make people rich instead of letting the product do the convincing naturally, word of mouth and so on.
Frankly, they should be illegal. If a physical store did that in Canada, it certainly would be. I'm surprised Canada hasn't reacted to these overabundant fake-product ads.
I want to agree with you, but you only think you're not seeing ads. Obviously, the SEO corruption has made everything you search for distorted by irresistible economic incentives of tilting the search results and search engine in favor of promoters.
Ads solve the discovery problem. Without ads, people still try to solve the discovery problem and try to get your attention. Are those methods still ads?
examples?
- SEO optimization to get to the top of the search result page
- Paying influencers to use their product
- Paying people to post on forums about the product
- Sending / sponsoring reviewers
There are plenty of legitimately well-intentioned ads that can connect someone who needs a good/service with someone that supplies it and everyone wins.
The problem is that we use a nearly totally free unregulated market where anyone can advertise anything anywhere.
edit: I'm not saying we should necessarily try to optimize for good ads over bad ads or even assuming that is possible. I would settle for just somehow reducing the total volume of ads to help make email, snail main, voice mail, and other methods of communication more usable.
Or I'll go to rightmove if I want to look at adverts for houses. I'm happy to spend both time and even money on seeking out new products.
But it seems that people have a parasitical relationship with adverts, they can't imagine a world where there aren't wall to wall adverts on TV and radio. And in magazines and movies and at ball games and on buses and milk cartons and T-shirts and bananas and written in the sky.
Adverts should be for my benefit, i.e. I can turn them on or off.
We allow every space to be overrun with these things, wasting our time and infecting our brains and in the end its zero-sum for the companies and negative-sum for us. No value anywhere is created.
Why YT and Google in general would want to be associated with such scammery, I do not know.
They want the numbers to always go up. Scam ads pay just like non-scam ads.
Hence why companies have to be forced not to be assholes with legislation.
Yeah but the lethal dose is pretty high. 1 ad won’t kill you.
Unfortunately there can never be just 1 ad without regulation.
I would normally get those at the store I normally buy that kind of thing when I'm there to get other things. E.g., most groceries come from the big Walmart Supercenter near my house. If I get a flyer in the mail from the Safeway that is on the other side of town, and see they have a good sale price on one of those things, I might stop by that Safeway when I'm in that part of town on other business and get it.
Also, the existence of crippleware, where companies actually invest resources into removing features from a product is interesting. It would be interesting if we were to live in a world were both advertisement and crippleware are forbidden. It's already forbidden in many jurisdictions for various public function professions such as medical services or legal services so it's not as though it couldn't be implemented.
This is a silly and short-sighted blanket statement. People used to love getting catalogs, which are just big books full of ads. In the right context, people appreciate being informed of products that can help improve their lives.
Lots of businesses sustain themselves on ad revenue - would the world be a better place if we had no ads, but
- TV was twice the cost
- Google, YouTube, etc. (insert your favorite ad-supported website here) didn't exist or cost a monthly subscription
- All news was paywalled
- Any ad-supported website providing basic information (e.g. the weather) was paywalled or didn't exist
- etc etc
When we used to pay for newspapers, the informational value of the news was a lot higher, news and news-like social media posts were not the primary tool to spread stupidity.
Some newspapers were 50% advertising. You still had to pay for them.
Not even because of the first order consequences of the ads, but because since there are ads, we have an entire media ecosystem based on grabbing your attention.
So that TV displays series and movies meant for people with the attention span of a goldfish. This applies to Netflix and Hollywood by the way. All of it. Even music changes for radio, meaning more ads.
Google, Youtube, etc, along with news, along with social networks, depend on ragebait, being the first to spout whatever factoid, true or false, polarization of thought and basically a good chunk of what is very evidently wrong in today's society.
I trust we could support a weather app with donations. For the rest? If I could remove either ads or cancer from this world I would sit a long time thinking about the decision, but gut feeling? Ads. The actual cost of the ad industry is enormous and incalculable, not even mentioning the actual purposes ads serve.
As for the rest, I'm very much a fan of the Bill Hicks standup bit regarding the subject.
At the very very very least, every ad-supported service should be required to offer an option to pay and see no ads. I do pay for services I use regularly when they offer it as an option to avoid ads.
I don't have the proof but I'm guessing that this is provably wrong. Without advertising in some existance it would be nearly impossible to start a business which means everyone would be peasants farming for subsistence living. I think the problem is that the propose of ads has become divorced from product. The issue is poor regulation not the existence of ads.
Think about it, how as a small or competitive business owner would you get people to buy your soda vs coke/pepsi without advertising in some way? The issue is that coke/pepsi know they have a simple product so they blast ads not to sell their product but to adversarially drown out competitors before they can exist. Tons of advertising has counter agenda purposes like this rather than selling a product, its propaganda not advertisement. There are probably tons of unenforced laws already about this but IANAL.
However ads should be limited only to communication channels that are optional to engage in. As for example, an ad on YouTube, a private video platform, should be perfectly fine. That’s part of the product. On the other hand, ads on a highway, on the street, should not be allowed. I have not given permission for them to enter my personal mental space. I’m fine with shops advertising their presence, but not full fledged advertising on roads, streets, etc.
You guys did not read past the first sentence?
Also most of the demand of goods is artificially created by ads, so there would be less production of crap and thus less resources wasted.
It would also mean a whole industry of people would do something else that is potentially not as detrimental to society.
The money spend on the digital marketing industry was estimated at 650 billion USD 2025. For comparison that is equivalent to the whole GDP of countries like Sweden or Israel.
The main issue is how you discover a new product. The main benefit to society is/could be faster progress. The main downside to society could be unhappy people that consume crap.
I think smart people should think about alternative solutions, not just think "ads are the problem".
I personally have the exactly same issues as above when I look for example for open source libraries/programs for a task. There are popular ones, there are obscure ones, they are stable ones, etc. The search space is so big and complex that it is never easy.
My personal preference would be a network recommendation system. I would like to know what people I know (and in my extended network) are using and like - being it restaurants, clothes or open source software. I have 90% of friends (or friends of friends) satisfied with something - maybe I should try. Of course it is not a perfect system, but seems much better than what we currently have...
I can think of a hacky solution where your friends can share their (trustpilot?) or alternative accounts username and then you can review what they are reviewing/what they are using etc.
The problem to me feels like nobody I know writes a trustpilot review unless its really bad or really good (I dont know too much about reviewing business)
I feel like someone must have built this though
Another part is how would you get your friends list? If its an open protocol like fediverse, this might have genuine value but you would still need to bootstrap your friends connecting you in fediverse and the whole process.
And oh, insta and other large big tech where your friends already are wont do this because they precisely make money from selling you to ads. It would be harmful to their literal core.
Random question: do you have a personal site where you write about things you recommend? Because that's the solution IMO. And that's the network you're talking about: it's the web. You find enough people you trust and you see what they recommend. The issue is that in modern society 99% of the people consume and 1% are fucking influencers getting paid to promote crap.
For example I have for example a list of restaurants that I share with people that visit my city (plenty of tourist traps around), but it is cumbersome to manage/share. Does not feel like a solution.
Buying magazines for trusted 3rd party reviews used to be way more common, far better experience than trying to sift through SEO slop these days.
And adverts don't help determine what the best tool for your problem is. They determine which product spent the most on adverts.
So yes, adverts do not help you with decision making at all.
We live in the information age.
How did you learn about your programming languages? Ads?
Programming languages are easier to discover because they are a reasonable number (tens) you can asses, they are very important (if you are in the field), so you can invest a lot of time in choosing and following the trends.
I will not spend the same amount of time deciding about everything...
One thing that I prefer something like ads/reviews (and in fact works well enough in my case): cultural events in the city I live.
The question of "how do people spontaneously discover products" is invalid. It's just not something people want in their lives.
To be really honest, even if things were publicly broadcasted, The amount of choices of products we make in each day would be huge.
So no random stranger would go and look for your product choices. What would matter are the close friends and family or perhaps when one becomes really famous?
Would the fundamental idea of anonymity go away from all internet? Like if someone posts a youtube video or even a yt comment, would I get to know what they ate for dinner?
Can ads still be blocked? If my product choice is an LLM lets say, would my prompts be choices as well that will get leaked with the conversation to everyone?
To be really honest, Govt.'s (snowden showed us) already can know about your product choices pretty good enough and the internet/infrastructure behind it is pretty centralized nowadays as well
Sure there are alternatives but how many people do you see using beyond the tri-fecta of cloud and how those choices come downstream to us consumers if services run there
I feel like this is gonna be a classic example of Hawthorne effect (Had to look the term for that) meaning that people will behave differently now that they are being observed.
Also do you know that its not any technical limitation which limits it but financial incentives.
There is no incentive to having your product choices be publicly broadcasted but for the services, there is an incentive of money if they show you ads and which they end up showing to ya.
If there was an financial incentive for the servers to create this choice itself of opting out / public broadcasts option, they probably would be reality.
How would people learn about various choices?
By going to a website where they can learn about various choices.
It could be similar to ads, but with higher truth value to it.
AND most importantly, the user would view the information when THEY want to see the information, not when the marketeer wants to shove it in their face.
Who pays for the website? In the end, a world without ads gets very pricey very quickly.
What needs to be regulated is ads that you can't avoid. You can avoid online ads by paying ad free versions or not browsing certain sites(eg: instagram, FB). Billboards need to go away, and some cities have outlawed them.
I dont think there is a practical way to prevent this case.
Youtube is the one site worth paying for not to see ads and sponsorblock extension skips the live reads.
At some point, yes. But by that point they switch to the next service with ads and the cycle repeats.
Its also important to note that many can't pay for such services. I.e. minors. So they don't get a choice unless their parents sympathize. That helps indoctrinate the next gen into accepting ads. I think that late Millenial/early Gen Z was a unique group that grew up with minimal ads (or easy ways to block ads) before smartphone hoisted most control from them.
And it's not that impractical : just make a consumer-run search engine for products and services.
Have you thought deeply about why micropayments have not been embraced?
Enthusiasm for micropayments is very similar to enthusiasm for cutting the price of something from $5.001 to $5.00000001. It's a 0.02% decrease in the price! They make about as much sense as saying "hey, if I can buy 80,000 plastic ninjas for $500, I should also be able to buy one ninja for $0.007".
The other autoplay, where it starts playing stuff while browsing. I’ve tuned this off many times too.
The massive thumbnails so I can only see 2 thumbnails on the screen, I’m not sure what the advantage is here other than better tracking what you linger on. They also get bigger on the active row, so if I see a video I might want on the 2nd cut off row, then make it my active row, the thumbnails get bigger and I can’t see it anymore. I lose context due to this all the time and it drives me nuts.
Shorts, yes, but not just Shorts in the Recommendations, but Shorts dominating search results, where it almost doesn’t show traditional videos anymore. In the browser you can filter search results for videos vs shorts, but not on the AppleTV.
It keeps showing big banners with a demo video next to it for features Premium users can get… it’s an ad for something I’ve already signed up for. I report these as spam.
The games. I’ve never once played one, yet they are prominently displayed in my recommendations.
I think as a Premium user I should be able to choose what screen the app opens into, or what is on my home page. I’d like my watch later list, for example. Instead, it just randomly mixes some of those into the recommendations and it may or may not make it clear which ones those are.
I know there is more, and some big ones I’m missing, but those are some of the things they come to mind.
You’d probably have to compromise on free speech, since the line between ads and public persuasion is ambiguous to the point of non-existence.
Better middle steps: ban on public advertising (e.g. no billboards, first-party-only signage). Ban on targeted digital advertising. Ban on bulk unsolicited mail or e-mail.
You can self promote, but you can’t pay third parties to do it for you and you can’t sell it as a service.
How would you define ad space?
> You can self promote, but you can’t pay third parties to do it for you and you can’t sell it as a service
An acid test I've found surprisingly powerful is that of the founders promoting the Constitution through pamphleteering. They wrote the pamphlets themselves. The historical record is silent on whether they paid for their printing or distribution. (The papers could publish due to subscribers and paid advertising.)
If your rule would let them pamphleteer, it should be fine. If it would not, it probably needs work. I have not yet seen a definition of advertising that satisfactorily isolates this.
Everyone could self promote, they just couldn’t contract someone to do it for them. Employees could promote for their employer, but it couldn’t be subcontracted out. And you can’t pay a company to put up your ad on their billboard or their website, etc.
Ignoring how this might be enforced, would it be enough to let people express themselves while cutting out the impact of negative externalities of advertising?
I think it's doable. But I haven't seen the scalpel yet.
In the meantime, we have clean lines we can run up towards. Banning ads (basically, commercial speech) in public space. Banning commercial bulk mail. And banning targeted commercial advertising (beyond the content it sits).
They don't. Follow the money: why do ads power free services? The advertiser needs to expect to make more money in the scenario where they run the ad as compared to where they don't. The viewer must be spending more money in response to having seen it
If the viewer doesn't have the money to pay the first party fair and straight (say, a video website), they also don't have money to splurge on that fancy vacuum cleaner in addition to the website and advertisement broker getting paid, no matter how many ads you throw at them
Ads are useful for honest products, like if I were to start a company and believe that I've made a vacuum cleaner that's genuinely better (more or better cleaning at a lower or equal cost) but nobody knows about it yet. However, I don't see the point in money redirection schemes where affluent people inefficiently pay for public services (if they're indistinguishable and the company shows ads to both, thereby funding the poor people's usage). Let's do that through taxes please
The first part is true, the second part pretty obviously isn't. Advertizers expect to net $ from ad buys, but most advertising isn't trying to increase a consumers total spending, its trying to drive that spending towards the companies products.
To give the most obvious example, the largest category of advertising is for food and beverage products. But no one thinks that if those ads all suddenly disappeared, people would stop buying food.
They don’t necessarily make more money from every user though.
Advertisers/brokers will also do everything to optimise to whom the ad is being shown to not waste they money. Poor people can't turn it into arbitrary cash, they can just waste time on video sites and freemium games while they barely (or don't) have enough money to make ends meet
I guess I am very much in the "let's pay fair and square" corner, both for websites/services and for taxes/subsidies where needed. I don't see it working reliably or efficiently any other way in the long run
It could have been great but the implementation lacked encryption and had wild security issues. So nobody used it and it was shut down
Well, no, not even close. You'd get an email address from your ISP. You still do; nothing about that has changed.
Among the things that haven't changed is that you were more likely to use a free online email service, most notably Hotmail or Yahoo.
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DQh50UKkt10/?igsh=MWx6ZW41ZHV...
My annoyance is that regardless of how I lock ads out of my own home and devices, I will still always see ads for McSlop and Coca Cola everywhere I walk in my city.
I watch quite a lot of content on YouTube and really should sign up for Premium but I feel that the shockingly irrelevant ads I get presented with on YouTube are trying to drive me to sign for it - they're certainly not going to get me to buy anything!
Comes with YouTube Music for 15$.
I probably use YouTube more than any other website, for about 10 minutes my premium subscription had expired and u rushed to throw money at Google to turn it back on.
Musicians complain about low streaming payouts, but 30 years ago I'd pay $40 ( inflation adjusted) for 15 songs and only like 3 of them.
Now I can listen to 500 or 600 unique songs a month + music that would of had to be imported for that 15$.
If I actually like an artist I'll buy an album as a keepsake.
And with 'Native ads' it's nearly impossible to have ad-free experience nowadays.
Because YT doesn't pay shit to content creators, hence being part of creating this.
The people making the content need to make a living too, as much as ads suck.
If anything the big businesses use advertising as a protection moat. As a small business, I would def prefer to be in a world that allows me to advertise, even if I have to compete for things like my own name
If I search for Salesforce and something that isn't Salesforce shows up above Salesforce, the tool I'm using is wrong and I will assume that the promoted product is a scam.
This happened to me yesterday when installing the mobile version of Brotato. Some other game appeared above Brotato in the Google Play store. I already hate Android but this only makes me hate it more. Google already gets an unjustified cut of the money I'm paying for the game, yet on top of that they serve me the wrong result at the top.
Brotato is free to distribute their game outside the Play Store as well, Android isn't locked down. If the cut was unjustified why would they give money away to Google for free? The reasons are actually extremely similar to the reasons ads benefit society.
Also "sideloaded" apps cannot be automatically updated, although personally I think it would be better if nothing could automatically update lol
I'm also not the biggest fan of Steam. But at least on Steam if I search for Brotato it's the top result, Steam is not tied to the OS so if gamers and game makers decided they hate Steam they could jump to some other market (as opposed to, say, the built-in Microsoft store in Windows that thankfully seems to be failing), and Steam has helped drag Linux into the 21st century in a good way.
These two sentences are contradictory. Big business uses it as a defensive measure, yet you think a small business can use it as an offensive measure. It's an absurd outcome of the SEO of the last two decades that people think it's fine to pay for get traffic using your own keywords. Stockholm syndrome.
Large brands continue to run ads to enforce brand loyalty and keep their image fresh. For a lot of companies, dropping advertising will lead to reduced sales.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/cmo/2024/12/18/why-cutting-adve...
However, as a new entrant to a consumer facing market, how is one supposed to drive new customers to try their product? Just being a bit better or a little cheaper isn't necessarily going to win over a lot of people if they never bother trying it due to existing brand loyalties. So you've got to do some amount of advertising to build some kind of awareness to the product and get people to try it.
That doesn't necessarily mean unskippable video advertisements or whatever, but one should try and do some kind of marketing push to get awareness of your product up other than hoping presence on some store shelves will result in enough sales fast enough to keep your company alive.
"Just being a bit better or a little cheaper isn't necessarily going to win over a lot of people if they never bother trying it due to existing brand loyalties"
This is a feature, not a bug. Brand loyalties are built when products are reliable and good. Your product should be enough of an improvement to make people move of their own accord.
If your new product solves frustrations present in an incumbent, on a long enough timescale, your product will come out on top.
If both products are presented equally in a marketplace, the better one will win. If your company does not survive because you can't shove it in people's faces, this is a good thing.
I've got numerous examples where this didn't happen because of other brand awareness. Neato had a very competitive and better bot vacuum to iRobot for years and yet they failed to gain traction. A large part of that would be because everyone knew about iRobot's offerings and yet ask any random person if they've ever heard of Neato Botvac and you'll get crickets. You're imagining an ideal world where clear better performers always win. This doesn't often happen in practice.
What if in the stores, botvacs and irobots were presented right next to each other with the same amount of real estate?
Imagine you're a normal random consumer and not an electronics nerd. You've heard people on the morning TV news show talk about these robot vacuums and showed a Roomba. You have a friend that got one last Christmas and said their Roomba was pretty cool. You go to the store, and you see a few Roombas and some other brands you've never heard of. You're probably only going to spend a few minutes looking at the shelf. Which one are you likely to get?
And in the end iRobot managed to coast on that brand connection of "robot vacuum" == "roomba" for a lot of people for nearly 20 years. It really only took until competitors were way cheaper and way better that got people to really start to switch. Their products have not been competitive for over a decade and yet they've only finally died. That power of linking a brand to a specific item or service is powerful, and its not purely push advertising and forced video ads that build it.
Its somewhat the same thing for Google. Sure, they do some amount of advertising especially at top of line events, but overall it seems their direct outbound marketing is kind of low overall. They spend a bunch of defaults and continue to build the connection that to search the internet is to Google, even as they continue to inject more paid results and the quality declines. Other competitors are out there which are comparable or better, but even with them heavily advertising they fail to unseat that brand connection.
Why would you assume I'm providing a better product? Ads are predominantly needed by those providing worse products, because spending money on marketing has much better ROI than actually creating a good product.
[0]: https://matthewsinclair.com/blog/0177-what-if-we-taxed-adver...
This also not only for advertising but also normal signs like the logo of the business on buildings. You'll see most people circumvent the more expensive multilingual rate by adding small Thai text at the top of the sign.
Unrelated, but another interesting fact is that some bus stops in Bangkok are completely funded by an advertising company. Of course, they'll get the ads space for free as a result, and they only offer it in viable locations. The current governor doesn't like this idea and settle for a less fancy bus stop paid by public money.
But, something I haven’t fully worked out but have vague suspicions about: are ads actually a tax-favorable business model under the current system? We watch ads in exchange for some service, if it wasn’t an ad-supported service we’d have to pay money for it, and that transaction would be taxed.
Of course, the transaction between the ad network and the company placing the ad is taxed. But it seems like they could have a lot of play, as far as picking where that transaction takes place…
Ads should at least be taxed as heavily as if we had paid for the thing with money, IMO.
Not really that much harder, and would immediately cover the worst offenders. I mean we already have disclosure laws on product placements and ads.
And don't whine about "how will new companies find customers?" They'll figure it out. Capitalism always finds a way. Business interests should always be secondary to the needs and safety of real people.
It's only a matter of time before our ad-driven tech economy pops when they realise how much fraud is committed by the adtech companies, how little return these ads really give, and peoples susceptibility to ads further declines, causing them to exhaust even the most invasive and penetrative advertising techniques.
A nice idea I saw was a service where you can get a free/discounted public transport ticket for doing some squats or other exercise in front of a machine. Something like that would shift a lot of money from handling healthcare for the inactive over to providing free public transport.
Of course. Ads make us buy more things. Things we don't need most of the time.
Think of the environmental win if we banned ads tomorrow!
For every "innocent" and well intentioned ad out there, there are quite literally a billion cancerous ones that rely on pure deception to make the biggest buck out of you. Ads are the driving force behind the cancerous entity that is Meta and all the ills that they've brought upon the world such as actual fucking genocides. The "people" I've had the displeasure of meeting that come from advertising backgrounds have all been soulless psychopaths who would sell their own family for a bit of cash.
I mean just look at the type of shit they come up with in this very thread. It's all just games on how they can circumvent these kinda rules. "Oh you'll force me to let people skip my brainwashing? I'll just put up 20x more ads to make up for it!" Who even talks and thinks like this other than ghouls?
Fix that and then I'll pay.
Until then I just block the ads and the sponsors.
Tubular is a clone of Newpipe by the way, newpipe's devs didn't want to allow the sponsorblock plugin so it had to be forked.
Well or not show the sponsors to premium users. They could simply upload a separate premium version. Don't forget, these content creators are already getting a lot more money from YT when a premium user views their vids. So they're not entitled.
They can walk away but where would they go?? Besides, more and more people are using sponsorblock since it's become totally insane with these.
And no I don't tend to watch many with sponsor crap in them because they aren't actually very good (think the low-quality crap from LTT etc). The best channels (EEVBlog is one notable one) don't have sponsors at all because they're made for love.
What I am not doing is watching the sponsorship segments anyway. So yeah I use sponsorblock. And I use Ublock origin or revanced to remove the ads too because there's way too many now.
It's just that as it stands it makes no sense to do so. I still get ads so there's nothing in it for me. And if I use sponsorblock I might as well go the full way.
It's really on YouTube that they have let this situation be created. They should have stopped sponsor segments the moment they arrived.
Subscription services are like hungry hungry hippos, you give them $10 a month and next year they want $100.
I honestly think if everyone starts paying, it will only make them remove the free tier quicker. I think society is better with youtube free, even if ads are annoying.
Enabling on site money transfers (as YouTube does) and taking a small cut from each transfer (far less than YouTube's lol level 30% cut) would probably be getting close to enough to cover your costs, especially if you made it a more ingrained/gamey aspect of the system - e.g. give big tippers some sort of swag in comments or whatever, stuff like that. It's not going to be enough to buy too many [more] islands for Sergey and Larry, but such is the price we must all pay.
[1] - https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/valves-reported-prof...
they wouldn't. For two reasons. Without the capital (that to a large extent comes from ads) nobody could run the herculean infrastructure and software behemoth that is Youtube. Maintaining that infrastructure costs money, a lot. Youtube is responsible for 15% of global internet traffic, it's hard to overstate how much capital and human expertise is required to run that operation. It's like saying we'll replace Walmart with my mom&pop shop, we'll figure the supply chain details out later
Secondly content creation has two sides, there aren't just users but also producers and it's the latter who comes first. Youtube is successful because it actually pays its creators, again in large part through ads.
Any potential competitor would have to charge significantly higher fees than most users are willing to pay to run both the business and fund content creators. No Youtube competitor has any economic model at all on how to fund the people who are supposed to entertain the audience.
However, you brought up the distinction between consumers and producers, but I'd argue that such a thing doesn't inherently exist. YouTube was thriving before Google when it mostly just a site for people to share videos on. Here [1] is one of e.g. Veritasium's oldest videos. What it lacks in flare and production quality, it makes up for in content and authenticity.
You don't need 'creators', you simply need people. And I think a general theme among many of the most successful 'creators', is that they weren't really in it for the money. They simply enjoyed sharing videos with people. Like do you think Veritasium in that video could even begin to imagine what his 'channel' would become?
What if we made advertising illegal? (simone.org)
1975 points by smnrg 9 months ago | 1409 comments
For example, when was the last time you saw a TV or YouTube ad for a motorcycle from any of the big Japanese brands? The products are so mature and the value proposition is so good that they don't need to. And that's a 70 billion dollar annual market.
I also think providing a service for free is fundamentally anti-competitive. It’s like the ultimate form of dumping. And there are many studies showing that people are irrational about zero-cost goods, so it’s even harder to compete against than might be expected.
There are endless studies, such as this [1] demonstrating a significant inverse relationship between ads and happiness. The more ads, the less happy people are. And I think it's very easy to see the causal relationship there. And this would apply even if the ad industry wasn't so scummy.
- Improved incentive for the IT and medias industry. Users and viewers are the customers again.
- Removal of the culture of normalized lying that infects everyone to the point people don't see it anymore.
- Natural selection of product by actually asking people for money. Can't pay 2 euros / month for facebook? It deserves to die.
- Redirection of resources from marketing to useful things. Billions going back to R&D, quality control, etc.
- Brand forced to rely on quality and word of mouth again. No more temporary product trick. No more "one month brand lifetime" hack. No more "PR will save this disaster".
- Improved skin in the game. And you will see less reputation-damaging behavior because of this. Think twice about doing A/B testing, fake sales, use too many notifications. You need those saavy power users to spread the word now.
- Disappearance of old and new artificial social norms solely created by marketing firms to sell stuff that parasites our reality. No need for everybody to look the same, no need for diamonds for engagement rings, no "whole white family having breakfirst in a big house and everything is clean and they are all happy and hot" to sell coffee, no "big red guy with a beard" created by coca cola.
- Getting back on specs. You can't sell perfume and cars on an vague idea anymore.
- Children won't get conditioned from a young age to want stuff they don't need, think ideas they don't really have, and adopt behaviors that are harmful for them just so that a marketer can get 3% more engagement.
- Creating massive volume of bad content will not be a successful strategies anymore, since it's not about displaying ads. So content quality go up.
- Streets get nicer, with no more ads display. Clothes as well, with no more big logo making you look like a billboard.
- No more ads in your mail box! And you can redirect the money from the gov marketing budget to actually find email spammers as well.
- Removal of a huge means of accumulation and centralization of power. Right now, it's pay to win, and the more money you have, the more you can run ads, the more you can sell. Which means a small local shop cannot easily compete with a big one. But without ads, it's actually close to its own clients, and has an advantage to get their attention organically.
- People get back some part of their attention span.
The benefits are not superficial; they are immense!
Ads are a plague on our societies.
Evolving as humans requires us to find a way to ban them.
I doubt I will see it in my lifestyle, but we need to get rid of this parasite if we want to go to the next level.
> Don't get me wrong, I'm well aware this is impractical. But it's fun to think about sometimes.
Yeah, sure. Get them to convince you how impractical it is. How the economy relies on it. How things “wouldn’t work” without it. Then you/they have just argued themselves into the position that society relies on this shitty practice to sustain itself. Then in turn: why ought we live like this?
- Ads. Lower quality products/services perform better with more/better ads.
- Venture Capital. Services out-compete others by using free money early on, killing the free market.
> But I really wish ad companies would implement this rule across the board.
I genuinely don’t know how you could get your wish without regulation. You can’t expect all players in the ad game to follow self enforced rules if there’s any possibility that not following a self-imposed rule (“all ads must have a skip button”) will bring a competitive advantage. As soon as one player decides to take that advantage, all will. Back to square one.
In what world would that ever be a possibility? It's like asking a dictator nicely that they relinquish some of their power!
Competitive markets do innovate. I watch YouTube live instead of Twitch (many streamers double stream) precisely because the former has skippable ads.
I’m guessing you haven’t taken even one semester of the relevant economics. Isn’t it great to be an internet commenter?
For youtube, different people are going to have different reactions to their business model.
"Economics" as we talk about it is basically a farce. It's more vulnerable to confirmation bias than any other social science.
Why?
Especially in a developing country where consumers ability to pay for such things is going to be limited, that will presumably deprive some margin of the population of media/services that are currently ad supported.
If they do have a dollar to spend then why wouldn’t they spend it on what they wanted to watch in the first place rather than spend it with me, the advertiser.
Many advertisers may avoid advertising or lower their ad budgets. This means the tech platform makes less revenue. This means the platform and the video creator both make less revenue. This means less videos get created.
All of these happen at the population level.
I hate ads, but regulations that are for things that aren't public health (including mental health), anti-monopolization, etc. are probably bad for innovation and growth.
You have to balance regulation and over-regulation.
I say this as a proponent of antitrust regulation against tech giants and a privacy advocate against tracking, storing, and correlating user activity.
Everything needs to be kept in balance. Regulation is a blunt instrument and is better used to punish active rule breaking rather than trying to predict how markets should work.
Break up Google. Don't tell content marketplaces how to run ads. They know their customers far better than old politicians do.
If ads become onerous, alternatives emerge. Different channels, platforms, ad blocking. It's a healthier ecosystem that doesn't grow ossified with decades old legalese. Regulations that actively stymie the creation of new competition.
Now every new video and social startup in Vietnam has to check a bunch of boxes.
IMO regulation never was or is going to force this shift: it's already happening in unregulated ad markets, and is going to keep evolving in that direction because it's simply more effective/lucrative than ads done other ways.
> Break up Google. Don't tell content marketplaces how to run ads.
I'm all for breaking up megacorps, but there's no way a government like Vietnam can effectively accomplish that. The entire regulatory weight of the EU (90% of the non-US first-world consumer base) can't break up Google, so inflicting a series of wristslaps that hurt Google more than any small startup is the best way.
I'm no expert on the region, but I can't imagine a small video/social startup in Vietnam will be hurt more than Google by being forced to show a skip button after 5s on their ads — and generally speaking ads as a business model generally doesn't work all that well or mean much for small startups (<1M MAU), their survival and scalability hinges more on VC money and product-market fit than ad arbitrage.
If you, like me and most people I know, hate ads, why would it be a bad thing to limit it?
What are we expecting to actually accomplish with all this platform growth thing?
I derive incredible value from YouTube. It wasn't always great, but it is recently full of extremely good educational content, tech talks, independent journalism, how-tos, independent film and animation, and so much more.
I'd wager that you use and benefit from a lot of services that are paid for via advertising. Even public transit is subsidized by advertising.
The regulation was about unskippable ads, not ads in general.
I agree with the op and I don't agree that we are better off without YouTube. It's not hard at all to understand the op, so I'm not sure why you misread them and jumped to conclusions that all ads are parasitic and asked if we're better off without YouTube. Was that rage bate or did you really think the op was talking about all ads?
There was a fight back at Euston station recently
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cm2987kvp3no
I never get a taxi in New York thanks to the adverts. Sadly the general population thinks their time and attention is worthless and accept adverts. People actually watch commercial tv, which steals 20 minutes of your time every hour to brainwash you.
At best, it's as you said, the platform and creator make less money (Youtube gives 55% of ad revenue to the creator). This would naturally lead to less content eventually.
At worst, video content becomes unsustainable without a subscription.
I, personally, am drowning in "content".
Until the content is utterly captivating and speaks to your soul in a way even your closest friends and partners can't, we haven't hit peak content.
You know that one movie you see every decade or so that you can't get out of your head? The one that left you flabbergasted, that you've watched at least half a dozen times, and that you frequently and fondly remember? It touched your mind and soul and fit your tastes like a glove.
THAT is peak content, and until we are swimming in it, we're not there yet. Most of what we have today is utterly disposable and ephemeral - transient dopamine activation instead of philosophically world shattering indelible experiences.
We have a long way to go.
Great. Once that happens, we can work on regulation to kill even more advertising.
this all sounds great. ideal, even.
I am unsure what you are trying to say here. But if you mean to refer to "market distortion", I cannot see how that can be happening.
The reason is that these rules are supposed to be applicable universally to every company in the same way. And as such, they do not create any market distortion in one way or the other. Because everyone has to play by the same rules. Those are as fair market conditions as one can get, in my opinion.
> some might not bother
Why should that be a problem? If someone does not like the regulation in a particular jurisdiction, it is fine. No one is forcing them to operate there.
The main point is the following: If they want to operate, they have to play by the local rules. Just like everyone else.
Mobile ads in the US are heinous. Each one has a different mechanism for skipping, the skip buttons are micro sized and impossible to tap, some of them don't even work.
Standardization should have been up to the platforms selling ads, but they haven't done it. It's past time for local authorities to step in and protect consumers from predatory behavior.
So what if it is?
> makes global advertisers have to customize for the local audience
My understanding of advertising is that there is already substantial customization for local audiences.
To make it harder for people who dont care about Vietnam to do business.
Ive heard this garbage excuse since Reagan took a wrecking ball to regulations. Not making effective regulations is ALSO a market distorting thing, that encourages the absolute worst behaviors. And now with Citizens United, its $1 = 1 vote.
But no, "marrrrrkeeeeetttttt"
But assuming that they did, the situation seems like one where there could be any number or ways of following the letter or the law, while flouting the spirit of it. I don't dare imagine the creative ways these people will come up with to make entertainment even worse than it already is. So for areas that seem to require miles and miles of caveats and very specific rule-making, my gut reaction is that the regulatory path isn't the right one until we can break down the scope into something that simple regulations can accommodate without loophole. Put more simply: if it seems like people will just find ways around the problem, my assumption is just that we're not targeting the right problem yet and we need to break it down further, if regulation is the right solution at all.
But that is pretty assumptive, so - again - it's just a first feeling. Doesn't pass my vibe check.
Instead of prescribing exactly what you should do, describe the outcomes you want, and let case law fill in the rest of the owl. That's the only way to prevent violations like this.
To be fair, the main disadvantage of this approach is that law is much harder to understand. You can't just read the law as it is written, you also have to familiarize yourself with all the rulings that tell you how that law should actually be interpreted.
and here shows just how bad the rot is. I would assume that buying that much "air time" to have your longer content played would come a quite a premium. I would also not be surprised if selling those premiums come with a bonus. There's a reason those paid-programming shows run with no commercials. The cost of airing it paid for all of the ad pods during that block of air time, plus extra for being special snowflake.
If these long content "ads" are flukes, then that also shows the rot of the ad market that this isn't handled as an exception.
When it comes up the 10th time though there’s no way I’ll be watching the film it advertises, no matter how much I might have done after the first time.
You don't see how these are conflicting viewpoints? What do you think would compel a company to act in some way that is not in line with its short term financial interests? Sheer luck?
If an advertiser does not like those terms and is willing to forgo my users for that position, more power to them. I have every confidence that I will still find advertisers and, in my experience, they will be higher quality advertisers for the demographics of my users. Artists tend to advertise in cheap space that they know other artists will be viewing. You get the idea.
What has me curious is why you see those two as conflicting viewpoints? I didn't need a government to regulate me. Just common sense and care for my users. I'm not going to subject them to noisy or obnoxious ads, nor am I going to subject them to content that may not be suitable for everyone, and so I'm also not going to subject them to overly long ads. It seems, to me, that you have a profound lack of faith in the platforms you use. Which I can understand as a practical realization about the current apex platforms. But I don't know why it would blind you to the possibility of reasonable people acting reasonably.
> Long term financial interests, mostly.
It's great that you as an individual feel otherwise (I do too), but there are larger macro forces at work which compel firms to act the way they do: pursue short term growth at all costs. The counter-balance to this is either a strong regulatory environment, or a hope and prayer that a majority of companies suddenly gain a strong CEO who feels otherwise and is not obligated to satisfy shareholders who don't. Only a few such CEOs come to mind, and they're looking increasingly short for this world.
I think there are so many issues with this type of regulation that circumvention will be inevitable and, like with so many other things, lead to a worse outcome overall. I think good regulation will look different altogether, but it's hard for me to imagine what it will look like. My best guess is that it will target different choke points, or target them in different ways. Maybe like... subsidies for content creators that enforce a 5-second limit on ads? It's not something many have control over now, but a platform would instantly become more attractive to content creators if they were allowed to dictate that.
Seems like that would have some sour ramifications as well, but it's just off the top of my head. The point is, I'm not against regulating the hell out of these giant industries, or these industry giants. I'm all for it. I just want it to actually work/make things better.
When talking about how ads "don't work on you"; it's very important to remember that just like every single other human you're not immune to propaganda.
> the main purpose of the ad
I recognize that showing me the name of the product is the most valuable part of an ad, by far. It's entirely about repetition which breeds enough familiarity for trial, and enough personal affirmation if the trial is a positive one.
But, that aside, if I'm looking for a skip button before the 5 seconds is up, I either do not purchase the product (I'm not sold: I don't buy), or I'm already a purchaser of the product and I'm either a fan (Your ad didn't sell me: I was sold, beforehand) or I'm not (I'm not sold: I don't buy it anymore). It wasn't a statement about ads not working on me, it's a statement about a personal, practical response to ads that I am conciously aware of because I'm already looking for a skip button.
But even if everything I said was incorrect, and you actually are immune, just like you describe... everyone else isn't, and they're being targeted as much as you are.
The games in AA are either made for Apple Arcade (some great indie type games) or, very commonly, they are basically 'de-fanged' ones from the regular App Store, with all the IAPs and ads ripped out. Where there is an in-game currency that normally is scarce without paying, they'll either just give you a bunch of it to start with, or you will earn it naturally while playing.
I agree with you that the number of ads and purchase-pushing mechanics in all regular App Store/Play Store games is insane. It's all because a few whales who do buy these purchases are what pays for the whole thing.
I'm leaning towards letting the kid play games only on an XBox and never on the phone. Even if I get rid of the ads, I don't want the games to be accessible wherever they are. Whereas with a TV, they need to situate themselves in a dedicated place to play games.
I couldn't agree more that a carry-anywhere gaming (or worse, social-media) device is too corrosive to childhood.[1] My eldest is only 7, so unsurprisingly he doesn't have a phone, and uses an iPad. The size of it has a nice side-effect that it's impractical to carry around, so it's only used at home and in the car.
When he's older, I plan to give him a phone that can only text and call.
[1] Sure, some of us had things like Game Boy, but consider how long those batteries even lasted, how bulky and limited the devices were, how expensive games were, how there were zero ads... It's really far from the same thing. I'd be fine with him having a thing like a Game Boy.
Stardew Valley cost me $15 on iPhone a few years ago, which is a lot for an iPhone game, but I don't regret it at all. It's a direct port of the PC version, meaning it's a complete experience, but also not a single ad. No attempts to get me to spam my friends, no prompts for me to buy gems to make my crops grow faster, no need to watch an ad to unlock fighting in the mines. It's a game that I paid some money for and then I got to play. What a concept!
I have a borderline-irrational hatred for ads and will very actively go out of the way to avoid them. I understand the whole "no free lunch" economic theory, so you could argue that they're a necessity in some cases, but at this point I'm in a stable enough position to justify paying a few bucks to play games uninterrupted.
Outside of Stardew Valley, I play Binding of Isaac and Organ Trail. Both of them cost a few bucks but both also give you a complete, ad-free experience.
Unbelievable, when you consider the sheer volume of betting ads they have.
This is also why taxes on vices should always, always, always be revenue neutral. Lawmakers should never have to choose between reducing demand for a vice and revenue.
The sad part is that day we broke all previous daily revenue records.
No hunting for tiny X's. No shifting DOM to dodge clicks. Hit Esc and it stops. For iOS and Android force it as part of the UI, like the volume buttons, back/home buttons.
It seems that quite a few mobile gaming companies make this mistake. Or they "accidentally" set the click area of the button offset from the graphic, or very very small.
Online advertisements only. I was curious how they were going to implement that on TV!
It doesn't mention how much time must be in between ads
The law also prohibits advertisements that harm "national security" or "negatively affects the dignity of the Party Flag, leaders, national heroes [etc.]". Wonder if that's the real purpose here
I don't think so. Vietnam has been making great progress with privacy and digital rights laws, at least in paper. I haven't been following how well they actually enforce them though.
More likely there's a split in the government between a progressive faction who created this law and the old school side, and they probably had to add that text to get it into law.
I can't stop thinking about this rental apartment building in my city that's on indigenous land so regulation around advertising doesn't apply (BC) and they have a huge electronic billboard right in front facing probably couple dozen windows.
I feel bad for the people living there, negatively about anyone advertising there and negatively about otherwise very environmentally conscious land owners for allowing this.
I expect it will make the experience worse rather than better because the publishers will try to maintain their inventory (how many seconds of ads they show per minute watched)
I understand there's money involved, but surely those who offer products must see that it's increasingly counterproductive?
> Typically, six consecutive small signs would be posted along the edge of highways, spaced for sequential reading by passing motorists. The last sign was almost always the name of the product.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burma-Shave#Roadside_billboard...
I'm of the opinion that if you're seeing ads on your hardware, which you paid for, your computer is broken. That advertisements are always evil, always wrong, and never morally just. And everything possible should be done to avoid, remove, or deface them.
To that end:
Andriod:
- Root your damn phone! And install AdAway (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AdAway)
- Firefox + uBlock
- Don't install malware/spyware (Arguably, Android is spyware, but custom ROMs fix it.)
- AdGuard (free, works well, but not perfect, enable the "extra" filters)
- Don't install malware/spyware (Arguably, iOS is spyware, but Apple thinks you're a simp, so Good Luck.)
- Seriously, you probably shouldn't be using Windows, but I "get it" sometimes you have to.
- Don't install malware/spyware
- https://christitus.com/windows-tool/
- https://old.reddit.com/r/WindowsLTSC/wiki/index
- https://windhawk.net/
- https://github.com/Open-Shell/Open-Shell-Menu
- https://wpd.app/
- https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10
- Firefox + uBlock and done.
- OpenSnitch if you run random executables from the Internet.
- https://github.com/arkenfoxI did for many years, and finally gave up. With recent Androids, life in the rooted world is much more difficult:
Netflix automatically drops to a lower quality tier.
Many apps now just refuse to work on a rooted phone.
But the worst thing: If I want to update the ROM to get the latest security benefits, I have to wipe my data.
Surprised you didn't mention something like PiHole.
- It's local network only, and while I can VPN home, I don't always want to
- It has a high maintenance overhead, at least for me. It would block too much, then my wife would complain, and I'd have to spend time figuring out the magic rule that was breaking.
- It's DNS-level blocking only, which is helpful but doesn't cover nearly as much ground as just uBlock can.
- The DNS server has annoying preconfigured caching rules, that, while I can work around, it was just more effort for something I don't want to put more effort into.
I want to block ads from most apps.
Buttttt, this goes back to my original post. DO NOT INSTALL MALWARE.
Because that's my first rule, I don't use apps with ads.
Generally, if I can't do a thing from a standard website, I probably don't need to be doing it. Otherwise, I have nothing against paying for a good app. For example, I LOVE AutoSleep.
But how is the internet economy supposed to function without these micro transactions, in the form of ads. A lot of the abundance in software and technology we've seen in the past decade is possible only through this mechanism.
If the existence of a given industry requires the annihilation of individual privacy and the elimination of free thought, then that industry does not deserve to exist. Kill the ad industry.
Medicine being better delivered, all the research that has been accelerated because of reducing compute and storage costs, the list is infinite.
Streaming services and E-commerce are the classic examples for A. Wikipedia is the quintessential example for B. C includes pretty much all the social outlets: Web forums, a Matrix server, private game servers (public game servers fall under A), blogs, etc.
There is an argument to be made that advertisements are so detrimental to the user experience and mental health of the recipient that they are morally justified in blocking them. However, that is debatable when you consider the alternative, which is that the medium you are consuming may not exist at all if not for the advertisements published along with it.
That's a logical leap. The artist can want both things.
There are two payments involved:
1. The user pays with his time/attention
2. The ad company pays the site
In most cases, the author doesn't mind getting the payments from number 2 even if you skip 1. Many, many sites explicitly point out they don't find a it a problem if you install an ad blocker.
I don't have ads on my site. I'm OK with you consuming it for free. If I put ads one day, I'll still be OK with it, because I know I'll get some money regardless. It's practically free money.
I will not miss the vast majority of sites I go to that serve ads if they all decided to shut down and/or go paid only. I should be spending a lot less time on the Internet/phone to begin with!
> medium you are consuming may not exist at all
I've realized that's not my problem. It's not like most of the internet is healthy anyway. It's psychologically manipulative and designed to keep you fearful, angry, spiteful, jealous, and above all, depressed.
Fuck Google. Fuck Meta. And fuck every single last person working for them.
A good blocker should block many of those scripts too, but there's no stopping server-side analytics at scale.
Market Cap by Year
Year 0 1 2 3 4
2025 Nvidia (4.6T) Apple (3.9T) Google (3.8T) Microsoft (3.5T) Amazon (2.6T)
2020 Apple (2.3T) Microsoft (1.7T) Amazon (1.6T) Google (1.2T) Meta (777M)
2015 Apple (598M) Google (534M) Microsoft (440M) Berkshire (324M) Exxon (325M)
2010 Exxon (369M) PetroChina (303M) Apple (296M) BHP (244M) Microsoft (239M)
Some Billionaires...
Year Musk Page Bezos Ellison Zuck Buffett
Current 714B 257B 251B 244B 227B 148B
2024 195B 114B 194B 141B 177B 133B
2023 180B 79B 114B 107B 64B 106B
2022 219B 111B 171B 106B 67B 118B
2021 151B 92B 177B 93B 97B 96B
2020 25B 51B 113B 59B 55B 68B
2016 11B 35B 45B 44B 45B 61B
- There are currently 19 people worth more than $100bn!
- 4 of them are not American (Arnault, Ortega, Ambani, Helu)
- 27 of the top 50 richest are non-Americans
- 57 of the top 100 are non-Americans
- Bill Gates was first worth $100bn in 1999, becoming the first centibillionaire
> A lot of the abundance in software and technology we've seen in the past decade is possible only through this mechanism.
If times were good for the rest of us I honestly couldn't care less if Musk became a trillionaire. Good for him ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. But while wages are stagnant, while the job market is very competitive, we have major layoffs, while inflation is hitting average people hard, and while they keep pretending they can replace us all with AI; then hell fucking yeah I do care.
It ends up being a question about what is more right, than what is right. I'd feel more conflicted if we all, or the majority of us, were benefiting from the advancements. But sympathy is difficult when we look at those numbers.
https://companiesmarketcap.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_public_corporations_by...
https://www.forbes.com/real-time-billionaires/
P.S. here's a fun game for understanding how much a billion dollars is. It's difficult because that level of money generates so much interest.
Imagine you have a billion dollars. You put it in an investment account that earns 10% yearly interest, compounded daily. On day 1 you need funds, so sit on your ass and do nothing. After than, on each weekday you hire a new employee at the cost of $250k/yr and is also paid daily.
How many employees can you hire before you have less than a billion dollars?
There's a lot of variants you can run on this kind of thought experiment and I think they're helpful for understanding that level of wealth.
In my own petty way. I consider this my pushback against a system that is pushing oppressive systems onto me. But really, I'm partially glad this system works and partially annoyed that this is the cost.
If not, how do you think they should make money?
(I don't like ads myself).
Figure it out or go bankrupt, for all I care. They're the ones who chose a business model directly adversarial to their users.
Plenty of games, mail and other services work without ads already, I'm sure if we're one day lucky enough to see Google go belly up someone will fill that hole as well.
> iOS:
- uBlock Origin now exists
- Settings > Apps > Safari > (General) Extensions > uBlock Origin Lite
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ublock-origin-lite/id6745342698
- Alternatively, use Orion Browser (Kagi)
- Pros: a bit better ad blocking
- Cons: more buggy
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/orion-browser-by-kagi/id1484498200
> Firefox as a whole:
Also check out BetterFox
- https://github.com/yokoffing/BetterFox
Phones are also general computer systems. Fuck this bullshit of pretending they're anything less. If you don't have control over your computer, your computer is broken. You don't have to be forced to adhere to Big Tech's short comings.
> Andriod:
- Install Termux (from F-droid, not Playstore)
- It is trivial to write scripts to handle a lot of things that work through third parties. Less than 100 lines. I find these scripts *better* than many app alternatives and infinitely more trustworthy. We're on HN, everyone here should be able to write basic scripts. Hell, the AI could probably do these things easily (make it use functions! Bash needs functions!)
Some ideas to show scope of what you can do:
- Automated backups: just a fucking rsync to your folders (god fuck Apple, why can't I rsync my pictures on an iPhone!!!!)
- I have my script check for WiFi. If on my SSID I rsync locally. If not, I go through Tailscale. If not on WiFi I don't backup, minimizing my data usage. I'm lazy and just set the cron job to run once a day, making each backup usually pretty small but can cause larger backups when traveling
- rsync can also remove files from your phone if you're concerned about storage.
- You can backup to multiple locations! Even if you use google drive or whatever you should still rsync to your local machine. Remember, Google photos doesn't save full resolution.
- Loss Prevention: Your phone hasn't accessed a set of predetermined WIFI SSIDs in a set time period? Send a file to a known computer (Tailscale), email yourself, or something else with the device's coordinates. Add an easing function, check battery health, and whatever info you want. Hell, even take pictures. You can also make it play music or whatever to help find it.
- Replicate Apple's Check In:
- You can read GPS coordinates, SSIDs, and send SMS messages. This is a lot easier than you think
- Enforce the actual WIFI SSID you want!
- Phone sometimes jumping on the wrong SSID? Have no fear a few lines of code can tell it to fuck off!
- I had this issue living in graduate housing where a university AP was near my unit. My phone would randomly decide to join the uni's connection despite sitting a few feet from my router and having better signal strength...
- Install Tailscale and get access to your local machines remotely
- Setup a raspberry pi at home and make an exit node that uses pihole (suggestion: check out systemd-nspawn)Does they get killed if you're low on memory?
Perhaps you could share these scripts somewhere? I'm sure other people would find inspiration from them.
Personally I use Nextcloud for all my phone and computer backups, it's working well for me.
> How reliable are cronjobs in termux?
> Does they get killed if you're low on memory?
> Perhaps you could share these scripts somewhere?
> Personally I use Nextcloud
That's what I mean. How can you make sure of that?
> Is there something you're specifically interested in?
No, I already have a setup that's working for me.
> Would you recommend this over my setup?
Well, it depends. Nextcloud is a full Google Workspace replacement basically, including files sharing, office, notes, kanban, calendar, emails, chat, video calls, photo management. I use it for my business (and it's great) so I just use some spare storage for my own backups.
Probably overkill unless you want the other features.
> How can you make sure of that?
I'm beginning to wonder if many people are not comfortable with simply being content. They actually want someone to come and tell them why they aren't happy. Ads do that for them.
I don't get it. Could you please elaborate? Thanks in advance!
Unskippable ads are almost always brand ads focusing on total view time.
Source: I used to live there.
So far I have experimented with NetShield from ProtonVPN and https://nextdns.io/ with varying results. There are also features baked into certain browsers like the cookie blocker with DuckDuckGo which works extremely well, and UnTrap for Safari on iOS which allows for heavy Youtube web customisation.
Also, shout out to Playlet on Roku. A privacy focused YouTube proxy for the TV which blocks ads and even can identify sponsors, filler and credit segments and allow you to skip these.
I am not involved in any of these projects, I just think they're cool.
Blokada 5 is free. It blocks ads and trackers system wide. It works in all games and apps I checked for the last 4-5 years.
Used to work with YouTube as well, but not any more. I use New Pipe for that.
You're experience may vary depending on block lists you subscribe to, but vanilla set up is already quite good.
> Online platforms must add visible symbols and guidelines to help users report ads that violate the law and allow them to turn off, deny, or stop seeing inappropriate ads.
The fact that this even needs to be written into law to force companies into taking more responsibility with their advertisments is incredible.
I still would never buy an X10 camera or any other of their products given how they abused pop-over/under ads. Same for Sony for other reasons... I can carry a product grudge for decades.
I have a mental view that gets disrupted by ads and sometimes even angry. In the rare moments which I use a computer or phone of a friend or family without those, I really can't tolerate the suffering they go through. My single best advice to people about using ublock origin and Firefox resonated with everyone of them. I use it on my parents devices as the best security measure that could be used.
Am I overreacting, maybe but I find my level of tolerance for ads is zero no matter how much I agree that some of them are good or not. Maybe this is the result of decades of self imposing dark patterns and intrusive ads do to some people. I really feel sorry for majority of internet users that do not use adblockers.
I am not under any obligation to let my client serve their ads which is usually the number one malware vector.
> Picture this: an advertiser pays premium rates for space on your site, but their carefully crafted creative sits unseen at the bottom of a page your readers never scroll to. Despite technically delivering the impression you promised, you've essentially sold empty air. This disconnect between ads served and ads seen is why viewability has emerged as the cornerstone metric in digital advertising's maturity.
> Video ads require at least two seconds of continuous play while 50% visible ... These seemingly arbitrary thresholds represent extensive research into human attention patterns.
I get the obvious answer: "they work"
But do they? Do big companies have a real data-driven model to demonstrate annoying ads leading to sales?
While anecdotal, I can think of a number of specific times ads slipped through my ad blocker and I went out of my way to avoid buying anything from those companies.
I got a taste of this from an EU MEP that I proposed something to, and they replied "it can't be done because of the law". I then replied "but you make the law, it's literally your job!" - and they looked at me, blank faced. Imagine large rooms filled with people who mindlessly act within a framework they dislike, whilst being the only people who could actually change it, and not having the will to do so. It sounds like some special type of hell.
I shudder to think how many people sitting in positions of power just mindlessly continue doing a thing because of some form of complacency. Madness.
It might also lead to more intrusive ads, as each user now has at most 5 second to see.
The regulation will be enforce on domestic companies only.
Apparently Google knows how to circumvent adblockers, and they're testing these tools in certain markets.
Feels appropriate: What if we made advertising illegal?
You can rearrange the deck chairs, sure, but more ads might be more annoying than fewer longer ones.
Without a t, it may as well be a streaming service.
Actually, there should not be ads to begin with. They always waste my time. Thankfully there is ublock origin - which Google killed while lying about why they did so. Everyone knows why Google killed ublock origin (it still works on Firefox, but how many people still use Firefox?).
For the rest: adguard phone/pihole home, frosty instead of twitch, newpipe instead of youtube(I hate the interface), infinity instead of reddit and a lot more alternatives for social media. Also using xmanager for some apps ;). I have zero ads on my phone or my pc. I disabled the ads once for my wife, she instantly yelled at me to enable it again :).
Advertising standards agencies in most Western countries are scum.
But is it the government's job to regulate good user experience? Are unskippable ads a social problem that must be regulated away? I am the polar opposite of a libertarian, but to me ads are the alternative to other means of monetisation. They support things that are free to use but not free to operate. The transaction is consensual and not unavoidable.
This is so obviously a free-market problem. The reason these ads exist is because there's a significant percentage of people who are happy to put up with them and those people mean that products can be better funded without requiring subscriptions.
If people want to use products with unskippable ads, then who cares? This "I want X without Y" regulation is so stupid. You can't have X without Y. Just go buy Z product and stop asking regulators to find ways to keep you coming back to products of consumer-hostile corporations.
> Vienam Bans Unskippable Ads, Requires Skip Button to Appear After 5 Seconds
If we need to edit titles, could we at least take the opportunity to correct obvious typos? (Missing the t in Vietnam)
Also submission titles can be edited in the first 5 minutes of posting or so.
- Vietnam get 50 % tariffs
- Change the ban
- Easy peasy for Tech bros.
[1] if you want to dispute this, is it just because you're thinking the store is run by a big company you don't like and that you feel rips people off? Does it change though if your mom baked those cookies to give out to try to get people to shop in her little boutique that barely makes enough money to cover rent? The point is just that it's not universally justifiable. I don't care if you block ads (I block them too) or take free samples from stores.
All a giant waste. Just propaganda blasted at our eyes and ears all day, a drum beat of distraction attacks on our attention. Almost all forms of advertising should be banned or regulated till they are as quiet and unobtrusive as possible.
Live TV had unskippable ads for like the last 80 years, and somehow YouTube is different? Why?
I hate ads, I block ads, and even I think this is stupid. Idk what Vietnam's constitution is like, but I think it's absurd from a free country perspective. If I'm paying to serve you videos, why don't I get to set the terms of that deal? Nobody is forcing you to go to a specific website. If you think they're crap because of all the ads, I likely would agree with you. I think blocking them can't be criminalized, because after all it is your device you're using to remove the ads. But how can you fine or punish a company for not explicitly letting you take the content without complying with their terms?
i'm just wondering what you want the "market" to do and how.