I’ll describe the problems I have with online advertising, both for me and in general:
a) For me personally:
I’m a philosopher by formation, and I work in a very technical area, so I have as my focus of interest two things: truth, and data. Modern ads have neither.
If a manufacturer wants to get me interested in anything, at all, I want specs front and first. No fluff, no emotional appeal, no aesthetic considerations. Hard data. If an ad has any of these, and none of the form, I not only ignore it, but I develop a very strong negative bias towards the brand, to the point the more ads I see for anything lacking factual rigor, the more opposed I become to ever buying it, or from it, if it’s an ad to develop brand awareness. These, in particular, made me quite aware of brands not to purchase from.
They very, very, very rarely have anything to do with my interests.
In the past they used to be a tiny little bit more relevant, back when ads were based on the contents of the page itself, since if I was interested in reading that topic I was interested in that topic. Then it’s changed to my former topics of interest, meaning not on what I’m actually interested right now, and thus became even more irrelevant than they already were.
I think that, over a period of maybe 3 years, I’ve seen one ad that was relevant to my interests. It was for a classic music streaming service. It got me to the point of actually opening their website. Alas, it was too expensive and I didn’t subscribe. But that was it.
When they hit close, they’re for things I already purchased.
When I decide to purchase something, my procedure is systematic. I seek reviews of things in that category, I visit technical sites with specs for the top 5 to 10 items I found that roughly match my interest to see which ones fit, I narrow down my choices to 3 items, then I compare their prices at price searching sites, and buy the one that provides the best return per dollar. Ad tracking machine learning is very dumb and, not understanding I already purchased the item (usually the same day I began searching), causes ads to start offering me the very same item, for days on end, which is useless both for me as well as for everyone else involved.
b) In general:
Ads exploit cognitive biases.
As a philosopher first, and a rationalist second, I strive to get rid of cognitive biases in myself, and try to elevate others out of them. Hence, ads that aren’t strictly data-driven and factual exist in the opposite side to mine in this moral axis.
Sites showing ads exploit dark patterns.
The same thing, except from the side of those showing ads.
All of that said, there was a time I didn’t mind ads. It was that narrow period of a few years in which Google distributed only textual ads, and had rules about sensible places to put them at. When they changed direction I began using ad blockers, and whenever I stop using them the end result is so obnoxious I promptly go back to using them.
Now, in regards to:
c) Alternatives:
Paywalls and micropayments.
Values for paywalls are, simply put, nonsensical. There’s no way the ads I would have seen in a site over a period of one month would have generated $20 for the site, so trying to charge me $20/month is a no start. I could see paying $1 for the right to read a number of articles from that site, let’s say, 100 articles at a $0.01 per article, which would be more than enough for several months (provided it was tied into my upvoting the article after having read it precisely so as to discourage clickbaity content-free nonsense that tried to waste my time), but that’s about it.
How that would be implemented in practice is a matter for browser manufacturers to solve. I imagine they will do so eventually as adblocking becomes more and more pervasive, as this doesn’t seem to be a particularly difficult problem to fix.
Curated ads.
There’s one category of ads I don’t mind: curated ads by site owners, in which they themselves evaluate every ad show in their site for truthfulness, adequacy, and taste, and they themselves host and provide them.
These are rare nowadays, but it’s the one kind of ad I don’t block. It’s basically the kind of ad one would find in printed magazines and printed newspapers, except that online.
There’s no way the ads I would have seen in a site over a period of one month would have generated $20 for the site, so trying to charge me $20/month is a no start.
When you switch to a paywall model, you have to accept that you’re going to lose a large portion of your readers, which means you need to charge the remaining ones a lot more, no?
When you switch to a paywall model, you have to accept that you’re going to lose a large portion of your readers, which means you need to charge the remaining ones a lot more, no?
Yes, but no.
Technically there’s no direct derivation from costs to price charged. The costs involved in you providing a good or service let’s call it Vmin, determine a lower boundary, so that if you cannot charge below that you’re operating at a loss and won’t provide that service, instead opting to do something else. On the other extreme, your potentials customers’ maximum ability to pay (in aggregate), let’s call it Vmax, which in turn is bounded by their income, determine how much you can charge them. The price, V, that you’re effectively going to charge, is between Vmin and Vmax.
Customers will do what they can to push V towards Vmin. You, on the contrary, will do what you can to push V towards Vmax. In the end, V ends up somewhere in the middle, so that Vmin < V < Vmax. Therefore, my prior is that a charge of $20/month for such a service is much closer to Vmax than it is to Vmin, for the sole reason this is the incentive playing on the provider’s side.
Be as it may, I neither accept lying, biased, and dark-pattern exploiting ads, nor do I have a high enough income to justify paying more than a few dollars per month, in aggregate, for the sites I read. Solving this equation is something site owners, together, should work into. If there’s no solution and the end result is less of those specific contents, well, I derive marginal utility from having access to that content, so if it goes missing, shrugs.
I’ll describe the problems I have with online advertising, both for me and in general:
a) For me personally:
I’m a philosopher by formation, and I work in a very technical area, so I have as my focus of interest two things: truth, and data. Modern ads have neither.
If a manufacturer wants to get me interested in anything, at all, I want specs front and first. No fluff, no emotional appeal, no aesthetic considerations. Hard data. If an ad has any of these, and none of the form, I not only ignore it, but I develop a very strong negative bias towards the brand, to the point the more ads I see for anything lacking factual rigor, the more opposed I become to ever buying it, or from it, if it’s an ad to develop brand awareness. These, in particular, made me quite aware of brands not to purchase from.
They very, very, very rarely have anything to do with my interests.
In the past they used to be a tiny little bit more relevant, back when ads were based on the contents of the page itself, since if I was interested in reading that topic I was interested in that topic. Then it’s changed to my former topics of interest, meaning not on what I’m actually interested right now, and thus became even more irrelevant than they already were.
I think that, over a period of maybe 3 years, I’ve seen one ad that was relevant to my interests. It was for a classic music streaming service. It got me to the point of actually opening their website. Alas, it was too expensive and I didn’t subscribe. But that was it.
When they hit close, they’re for things I already purchased.
When I decide to purchase something, my procedure is systematic. I seek reviews of things in that category, I visit technical sites with specs for the top 5 to 10 items I found that roughly match my interest to see which ones fit, I narrow down my choices to 3 items, then I compare their prices at price searching sites, and buy the one that provides the best return per dollar. Ad tracking machine learning is very dumb and, not understanding I already purchased the item (usually the same day I began searching), causes ads to start offering me the very same item, for days on end, which is useless both for me as well as for everyone else involved.
b) In general:
Ads exploit cognitive biases.
As a philosopher first, and a rationalist second, I strive to get rid of cognitive biases in myself, and try to elevate others out of them. Hence, ads that aren’t strictly data-driven and factual exist in the opposite side to mine in this moral axis.
Sites showing ads exploit dark patterns.
The same thing, except from the side of those showing ads.
All of that said, there was a time I didn’t mind ads. It was that narrow period of a few years in which Google distributed only textual ads, and had rules about sensible places to put them at. When they changed direction I began using ad blockers, and whenever I stop using them the end result is so obnoxious I promptly go back to using them.
Now, in regards to:
c) Alternatives:
Paywalls and micropayments.
Values for paywalls are, simply put, nonsensical. There’s no way the ads I would have seen in a site over a period of one month would have generated $20 for the site, so trying to charge me $20/month is a no start. I could see paying $1 for the right to read a number of articles from that site, let’s say, 100 articles at a $0.01 per article, which would be more than enough for several months (provided it was tied into my upvoting the article after having read it precisely so as to discourage clickbaity content-free nonsense that tried to waste my time), but that’s about it.
How that would be implemented in practice is a matter for browser manufacturers to solve. I imagine they will do so eventually as adblocking becomes more and more pervasive, as this doesn’t seem to be a particularly difficult problem to fix.
Curated ads.
There’s one category of ads I don’t mind: curated ads by site owners, in which they themselves evaluate every ad show in their site for truthfulness, adequacy, and taste, and they themselves host and provide them.
These are rare nowadays, but it’s the one kind of ad I don’t block. It’s basically the kind of ad one would find in printed magazines and printed newspapers, except that online.
These are my 2 cents on the subject.
When you switch to a paywall model, you have to accept that you’re going to lose a large portion of your readers, which means you need to charge the remaining ones a lot more, no?
Yes, but no.
Technically there’s no direct derivation from costs to price charged. The costs involved in you providing a good or service let’s call it Vmin, determine a lower boundary, so that if you cannot charge below that you’re operating at a loss and won’t provide that service, instead opting to do something else. On the other extreme, your potentials customers’ maximum ability to pay (in aggregate), let’s call it Vmax, which in turn is bounded by their income, determine how much you can charge them. The price, V, that you’re effectively going to charge, is between Vmin and Vmax.
Customers will do what they can to push V towards Vmin. You, on the contrary, will do what you can to push V towards Vmax. In the end, V ends up somewhere in the middle, so that Vmin < V < Vmax. Therefore, my prior is that a charge of $20/month for such a service is much closer to Vmax than it is to Vmin, for the sole reason this is the incentive playing on the provider’s side.
Be as it may, I neither accept lying, biased, and dark-pattern exploiting ads, nor do I have a high enough income to justify paying more than a few dollars per month, in aggregate, for the sites I read. Solving this equation is something site owners, together, should work into. If there’s no solution and the end result is less of those specific contents, well, I derive marginal utility from having access to that content, so if it goes missing, shrugs.