While I think that ads can be (and, at least in my personal case, are) positive-sum, I don’t think this article expresses the reason why. I would phrase it as follows:
There are many things I would buy if I knew of their existence. Certain kinds of music, games, etc.
Unfortunately, I don’t know of their existence. In a world with billions of people, figuring out what products I might want takes time and effort.
You could let anyone who wanted to tell me ‘you should buy my product’. Unfortunately, lots of people will waste lots of my time.
Instead, we set up an ecosystem where:
A website (let’s say Youtube) shows me content I want to see.
Rather than charging me $20/month or whatever, they make me watch brief ads.
Companies that think they have a product I want to buy pay Youtube to advertise on it.
If the companies are right:
I buy the product.
I am very happy! I got to see content I wanted to see anyway, without having to pay for it, and I also got alerted to the existence of a product I’m interested in! Yay!
Youtube is happy. They got paid for providing content to me (albeit indirectly) and I’m happy and likely to keep coming back.
The company is happy. They paid a bit for advertising, successfully reached the target market for their product, and made more money.
This is a large win-win where a lot of value/money/information/amusement is effectively materialized from thin air with no costs.
If the companies are wrong:
I don’t buy the product.
I am mildly happy. I got to see content I wanted to see, without having to pay for it, but I had to watch a silly ad for an economically illiterate insurance agency. Meh.
Youtube is mildly happy. They got paid for providing content to me (albeit indirectly) but I’m less happy and might look for other websites (EDIT: and the company is less happy and might do the same).
The company is unhappy. They paid a bit for advertising, failed to reach the target market, and wasted it.
This isn’t an amazing win-win like the scenario before. Nevertheless, the only person who’s really unhappy with this is the company...who is effectively paying for their poorly targeted ads.
This...seems...obviously good to me? A couple representative things I’ve run into from ads:
The band Mono Inc. took out a Youtube ad that was just the music video for one of their songs. I liked it, and have bought several of their songs as a direct result.
The game Hades got advertised to me back while it was in early access. I bought it very early, and liked it a lot.
When I’m upset about advertising, it’s usually because it’s not targeted enough. For example, Buffalo Wild Wings has started showing me lots of ads for their new delivery service...which does not deliver to my zipcode. This seems like a foolish waste of effort that could be avoided if only advertisers took my zipcode into account. I assume this is the result of some sort of silly privacy law that forbids them from using that information in a moral panic over Big Data?
I acknowledge that my experience with ads may not be the typical one. Nevertheless, I think that:
Ads can be, and frequently are, heavily positive-sum.
In some cases, people may harm themselves with ads by being foolish around them.
I still don’t want positive-sum advertising banned or heavily restricted because some people are foolish about it.
while I agree with most of what you said and in an ideal world ad should work in a win-win manner as you described, I have cut out as many ads from my life as possible since they are significantly net harmful in my experience.
the problem that I found, and you don’t seem to address, is that ads are not just a simple showing of “I have the stuff you may want”. It is usually an attempt of manipulation using primarily superstimulus or social engineer to maximize profit for the advertisers. e.g. for a car ad they show happy people living exciting lives which have no relation to the car but make you associate the buying of the car with non-existence social fulfillment.
It would be ok if advertisers’ incentives are aligned with ours. But usually, they are not perfectly aligned if not horribly misaligned. And I assume that companies that use “honest” ads would fail to compete against “superstimulus” ads. So the majority of ads would be the equivalence of attempted mind control which rational agent should avoid even at the price of not knowing that there are things you may want to buy.
e.g. for a car ad they show happy people living exciting lives which have no relation to the car but make you associate the buying of the car with non-existence social fulfillment.
It’s actually worse than that—the way the manipulation works is to induce you to compare the people in the ad with your own life, causing you to feel ugly, unlovable, like you’re missing out on life, etc. and then to propose the product as a relief from this deliberately induced misery.
So, this viewpoint is very harsh and I don’t know how fully I endorse it, but my gut reaction is something like this:
If you can’t benefit from positive-sum informative advertising because you are incapable of watching a 15-second ad without succumbing to mind control, this is a problem with you rather than a problem with ads. The correct response is for you to avoid ads personally (and in fact many websites that use internet advertisements give you the option to pay instead, e.g. Youtube Premium), just as a child who cannot prepare food without cutting themselves should not be given a set of steak knives. It sounds like you are doing that already, so good for you!
The correct response is not for you to try to prevent a positive-sum thing from existing for others, just as the correct response to a child getting their hands on a steak knife and cutting themselves should not be to try to ban steak knives for everyone else.
Attempts to restrict advertisements on those grounds seem isomorphic to e.g. New York Mayor Bloomberg’s infamous attempted ban on large sodas. The justification there appeared to be ‘I am incapable of existing in a world with large sodas without drinking too much soda and getting fat, therefore other people should be banned from positive-sum trade to protect me from my weakness without me needing to exert any effort.’ The argument against soda seems to me a substantially stronger argument than the equivalent argument against ads: first, I think the harms of obesity are substantially larger than the harms of advertisements; and second, I think it is easier to personally avoid exposure to internet advertisements than it is to personally avoid exposure to large sodas.
In defense of the position df fd took, you’re playing a very asymmetric game here. Advertisers are investing very large sums of money and lots of person-hours of work to figure out how to change people’s preferences with those 15-second ads. There’s not a comparable degree of investment in developing techniques for making sure your desires aren’t manipulated. I think it’s hard to be totally sure that ads aren’t subtly creating new associations or preferences that are intended to benefit the advertiser (potentially at the reader’s expense).
Taking a bigger look, I think most people would agree that the average person in the United States makes at least a few irrational consumption decisions (such as buying a large expensive car, eating an unhealthy diet, or spending money on mobile games). There are lots of things one could point to in order to try and explain why that is, but I think it’s potentially good evidence that people overall are susceptible to having their desires changed by advertising.
this is a problem with you rather than a problem with ads
Oh, I absolutely agree that this is a problem with me rather than with ads. But the problem with me is that my brain is human. I can’t totally fix the exploits in the human brain that ads target.
Given that this is a society of humans, ads seem contraindicated. I do try to avoid them, but ads are going out of my way to expose themselves to me in a way sodas mostly do not (except insofar as they are advertised).
again, I mostly agree with you. however a few thing I want to submit for consideration:
-unrelated but I am mildly miffed at the comparison of me to a child with the seeming implication of lack of knowledge, power and agency [also did you just called me weak will lol?]. Although this may not be the intended effect.
-If I make take my point to the extreme, say on one side of the spectrum we have what you describe “win-win” situation on the other imagine a chip in your brain that stimulates your pleasure centre when you think of buying the product. I am sure we agree that there is no need to regulate the good end of the spectrum and there is an urgent need to fight against the bad end. now obviously we need to draw the line somewhere, and everyone would be affected differently and predisposed to draw the line differently. And I found the current state of advertising in general way over my line, I am glad to hear your experience is different. But to quote banksy:
People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.
[...]
Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.
You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.
this beg the question: am I entitled to live my life free of ads if I wanted to? I am not talking about space where I consent to see ads to walking into like youtube. I am asking: am I entitled to walk outside and see no banner ads, watch movies with no product placement.
Anyway, my crux is that ads have at least 2 parts to them, “good” information and “bad” social manipulation. and we may disagree on whether the current ratio of them in ads is worthy of banning or not [inherently subjective I believe]. But surely we agree that if we can turbocharge the good part and minimize the bad part we should try to do that. we may disagree on how to do that though. I am partial to some kind of tax for preference.
They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.
I’m very suspicious of this line of reasoning, since I could also say: “those men kissing in public didn’t ask for my permission to put themselves in front of me”.
This isn’t a knock-down rebuttal or anything, I just wanted to note this.
Fair enough (and apologies for the rudeness). I do think I’d draw a pretty sharp distinction between ‘ads dropped in public spaces where you cannot avoid seeing them’ vs. ‘ads on webpages that you watch in lieu of paying for things’ - the latter seems much easier to avoid and much less likely to be harmful.
(And as I understand things OP seems to be mostly working on the latter?)
You have not produced evidence that billboards are generally ‘criminal mind control’, only that they violate norms for shared spaces for people like Banksy. Ultimately this boils down to local political disagreement, rather than some clever ploy by The Advertisers to get into your brain.
You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you.
This is strictly true in the sense that advertisement is negative cost and negative value, but that is exactly why it is used as a tool for producing otherwise difficult to coordinate public goods.
To quote David Friedman:
Consider one example of the public good problem: radio and television broadcasts. By producing and broadcasting an entertaining program, I provide a benefit to everyone who listens to it. Since I cannot control who listens to it I cannot, as in the case of ordinary production, collect my share of that benefit by charging for it. The public in question is a large and disorganized one so it is clear, on theoretical grounds, that programs cannot be privately produced.
Yet they are. Some clever person thought up the idea of combining a public good with positive production cost and positive value with a public good of negative cost and negative value and giving away the package: program plus advertisements. As long as the net value is greater than zero and the net cost less than zero, people listen to the program and the broadcaster covers his costs.
I think you’re somewhat underselling the bad by saying the thing that usually annoys you is insufficiently targeted advertisements, because it’s downplaying the bad, like auto-play video/audio ads, or ads that expand or move around the screen.
I’m also noticing a trend—Youtube, I’m looking at you—of making advertisements less about actually selling advertisement, and more as a punishment for using the free version of a service as an incentive to push people onto the paid version.
These two things may not be entirely unrelated.
Also, while I think you’re correct, I don’t think your experiences are universal; in particular, targeted advertising just doesn’t work for me.
Years ago, I tried to sign up for Match, and was rejected because they wouldn’t be able to match me to anybody. I feel that the same kind of thing happens with targeted advertisements; I feel like they’re trying really hard, but the targeted advertisements just don’t … connect with me. I think I’ve seen two advertisements in all of twenty five-ish years on the Internet that actually gave me information on a new product I was actually interested in getting.
Nonetheless, now that I’ve basically disagreed with everything you’ve written here—I basically agree with everything you’ve written here. But I think a lot of the objections to advertisements are fundamentally ideological, and the actual good or bad of advertisements tends to be, in a sense, irrelevant to conversations about the good or bad of them, as these conversations are dominated by the bad of the concept of advertising itself.
This is very idealistic description of advertising. The type of ad that merely informs you of an existence of a product is possible in theory, and maybe existed in 19th century, but I was born too late for that.
This model fails to explain e.g. why many ads are annoyingly loud, or what is the purpose of showing you the same ad hundred times. Also, why the ads show you attractive people, contain exaggerated claims about the product, etc.
The type of ad that merely informs you of an existence of a product is possible in theory, and maybe existed in 19th century, but I was born too late for that.
I have purchased clothes, plush animals, books, and games because of online advertisements that told me about their existence; I would have been unaware of the products in question if not for the ads. (I have also generally been happy with the products that I got; one of the clothes that I ordered is probably my favorite piece of clothing.)
I agree with you that the best case scenario for ads is very positive sum, but I take issue with...
I am mildly happy. I got to see content I wanted to see, without having to pay for it, but I had to watch a silly ad for an economically illiterate insurance agency. Meh.
I would frame this as “I paid with time and attention”, rather than “I didn’t pay for it”. There are definitely times when trading time or attention for money is an excellent trade, but it’s not guaranteed and it’s not the same as not paying for something. I’m curious if you take advantage of the “get paid to watch ads” programs, and why or why not, since it’s essentially the same trade but with a different default.
This is largely discounting the third scenario, advertiser or viewer is actively hostile. Top comment above goes into the first of those two, but ads are frequently a gateway to all manner of scams, cons, and fraud. A cost largely born by those far less clever and more vulnerable than those participating in this discussion. On the other side, you’ve got things like click fraud. While not huge relative to ad volume, the costs and externalities are also huge compared to the money changing hands in these transactions normally and probably tips the scale significantly.
While I think that ads can be (and, at least in my personal case, are) positive-sum, I don’t think this article expresses the reason why. I would phrase it as follows:
There are many things I would buy if I knew of their existence. Certain kinds of music, games, etc.
Unfortunately, I don’t know of their existence. In a world with billions of people, figuring out what products I might want takes time and effort.
You could let anyone who wanted to tell me ‘you should buy my product’. Unfortunately, lots of people will waste lots of my time.
Instead, we set up an ecosystem where:
A website (let’s say Youtube) shows me content I want to see.
Rather than charging me $20/month or whatever, they make me watch brief ads.
Companies that think they have a product I want to buy pay Youtube to advertise on it.
If the companies are right:
I buy the product.
I am very happy! I got to see content I wanted to see anyway, without having to pay for it, and I also got alerted to the existence of a product I’m interested in! Yay!
Youtube is happy. They got paid for providing content to me (albeit indirectly) and I’m happy and likely to keep coming back.
The company is happy. They paid a bit for advertising, successfully reached the target market for their product, and made more money.
This is a large win-win where a lot of value/money/information/amusement is effectively materialized from thin air with no costs.
If the companies are wrong:
I don’t buy the product.
I am mildly happy. I got to see content I wanted to see, without having to pay for it, but I had to watch a silly ad for an economically illiterate insurance agency. Meh.
Youtube is mildly happy. They got paid for providing content to me (albeit indirectly) but I’m less happy and might look for other websites (EDIT: and the company is less happy and might do the same).
The company is unhappy. They paid a bit for advertising, failed to reach the target market, and wasted it.
This isn’t an amazing win-win like the scenario before. Nevertheless, the only person who’s really unhappy with this is the company...who is effectively paying for their poorly targeted ads.
This...seems...obviously good to me? A couple representative things I’ve run into from ads:
The band Mono Inc. took out a Youtube ad that was just the music video for one of their songs. I liked it, and have bought several of their songs as a direct result.
The game Hades got advertised to me back while it was in early access. I bought it very early, and liked it a lot.
When I’m upset about advertising, it’s usually because it’s not targeted enough. For example, Buffalo Wild Wings has started showing me lots of ads for their new delivery service...which does not deliver to my zipcode. This seems like a foolish waste of effort that could be avoided if only advertisers took my zipcode into account. I assume this is the result of some sort of silly privacy law that forbids them from using that information in a moral panic over Big Data?
I acknowledge that my experience with ads may not be the typical one. Nevertheless, I think that:
Ads can be, and frequently are, heavily positive-sum.
In some cases, people may harm themselves with ads by being foolish around them.
I still don’t want positive-sum advertising banned or heavily restricted because some people are foolish about it.
while I agree with most of what you said and in an ideal world ad should work in a win-win manner as you described, I have cut out as many ads from my life as possible since they are significantly net harmful in my experience.
the problem that I found, and you don’t seem to address, is that ads are not just a simple showing of “I have the stuff you may want”. It is usually an attempt of manipulation using primarily superstimulus or social engineer to maximize profit for the advertisers. e.g. for a car ad they show happy people living exciting lives which have no relation to the car but make you associate the buying of the car with non-existence social fulfillment.
It would be ok if advertisers’ incentives are aligned with ours. But usually, they are not perfectly aligned if not horribly misaligned. And I assume that companies that use “honest” ads would fail to compete against “superstimulus” ads. So the majority of ads would be the equivalence of attempted mind control which rational agent should avoid even at the price of not knowing that there are things you may want to buy.
It’s actually worse than that—the way the manipulation works is to induce you to compare the people in the ad with your own life, causing you to feel ugly, unlovable, like you’re missing out on life, etc. and then to propose the product as a relief from this deliberately induced misery.
So, this viewpoint is very harsh and I don’t know how fully I endorse it, but my gut reaction is something like this:
If you can’t benefit from positive-sum informative advertising because you are incapable of watching a 15-second ad without succumbing to mind control, this is a problem with you rather than a problem with ads. The correct response is for you to avoid ads personally (and in fact many websites that use internet advertisements give you the option to pay instead, e.g. Youtube Premium), just as a child who cannot prepare food without cutting themselves should not be given a set of steak knives. It sounds like you are doing that already, so good for you!
The correct response is not for you to try to prevent a positive-sum thing from existing for others, just as the correct response to a child getting their hands on a steak knife and cutting themselves should not be to try to ban steak knives for everyone else.
Attempts to restrict advertisements on those grounds seem isomorphic to e.g. New York Mayor Bloomberg’s infamous attempted ban on large sodas. The justification there appeared to be ‘I am incapable of existing in a world with large sodas without drinking too much soda and getting fat, therefore other people should be banned from positive-sum trade to protect me from my weakness without me needing to exert any effort.’ The argument against soda seems to me a substantially stronger argument than the equivalent argument against ads: first, I think the harms of obesity are substantially larger than the harms of advertisements; and second, I think it is easier to personally avoid exposure to internet advertisements than it is to personally avoid exposure to large sodas.
In defense of the position df fd took, you’re playing a very asymmetric game here. Advertisers are investing very large sums of money and lots of person-hours of work to figure out how to change people’s preferences with those 15-second ads. There’s not a comparable degree of investment in developing techniques for making sure your desires aren’t manipulated. I think it’s hard to be totally sure that ads aren’t subtly creating new associations or preferences that are intended to benefit the advertiser (potentially at the reader’s expense).
Taking a bigger look, I think most people would agree that the average person in the United States makes at least a few irrational consumption decisions (such as buying a large expensive car, eating an unhealthy diet, or spending money on mobile games). There are lots of things one could point to in order to try and explain why that is, but I think it’s potentially good evidence that people overall are susceptible to having their desires changed by advertising.
Oh, I absolutely agree that this is a problem with me rather than with ads. But the problem with me is that my brain is human. I can’t totally fix the exploits in the human brain that ads target.
Given that this is a society of humans, ads seem contraindicated. I do try to avoid them, but ads are going out of my way to expose themselves to me in a way sodas mostly do not (except insofar as they are advertised).
again, I mostly agree with you. however a few thing I want to submit for consideration:
-unrelated but I am mildly miffed at the comparison of me to a child with the seeming implication of lack of knowledge, power and agency [also did you just called me weak will lol?]. Although this may not be the intended effect.
-If I make take my point to the extreme, say on one side of the spectrum we have what you describe “win-win” situation on the other imagine a chip in your brain that stimulates your pleasure centre when you think of buying the product. I am sure we agree that there is no need to regulate the good end of the spectrum and there is an urgent need to fight against the bad end. now obviously we need to draw the line somewhere, and everyone would be affected differently and predisposed to draw the line differently. And I found the current state of advertising in general way over my line, I am glad to hear your experience is different. But to quote banksy:
this beg the question: am I entitled to live my life free of ads if I wanted to? I am not talking about space where I consent to see ads to walking into like youtube. I am asking: am I entitled to walk outside and see no banner ads, watch movies with no product placement.
Anyway, my crux is that ads have at least 2 parts to them, “good” information and “bad” social manipulation. and we may disagree on whether the current ratio of them in ads is worthy of banning or not [inherently subjective I believe]. But surely we agree that if we can turbocharge the good part and minimize the bad part we should try to do that. we may disagree on how to do that though. I am partial to some kind of tax for preference.
I’m very suspicious of this line of reasoning, since I could also say: “those men kissing in public didn’t ask for my permission to put themselves in front of me”.
This isn’t a knock-down rebuttal or anything, I just wanted to note this.
Fair enough (and apologies for the rudeness). I do think I’d draw a pretty sharp distinction between ‘ads dropped in public spaces where you cannot avoid seeing them’ vs. ‘ads on webpages that you watch in lieu of paying for things’ - the latter seems much easier to avoid and much less likely to be harmful.
(And as I understand things OP seems to be mostly working on the latter?)
You have not produced evidence that billboards are generally ‘criminal mind control’, only that they violate norms for shared spaces for people like Banksy. Ultimately this boils down to local political disagreement, rather than some clever ploy by The Advertisers to get into your brain.
This is strictly true in the sense that advertisement is negative cost and negative value, but that is exactly why it is used as a tool for producing otherwise difficult to coordinate public goods.
To quote David Friedman:
Relevant: the non-adversarial principle of AI alignment
I think you’re somewhat underselling the bad by saying the thing that usually annoys you is insufficiently targeted advertisements, because it’s downplaying the bad, like auto-play video/audio ads, or ads that expand or move around the screen.
I’m also noticing a trend—Youtube, I’m looking at you—of making advertisements less about actually selling advertisement, and more as a punishment for using the free version of a service as an incentive to push people onto the paid version.
These two things may not be entirely unrelated.
Also, while I think you’re correct, I don’t think your experiences are universal; in particular, targeted advertising just doesn’t work for me.
Years ago, I tried to sign up for Match, and was rejected because they wouldn’t be able to match me to anybody. I feel that the same kind of thing happens with targeted advertisements; I feel like they’re trying really hard, but the targeted advertisements just don’t … connect with me. I think I’ve seen two advertisements in all of twenty five-ish years on the Internet that actually gave me information on a new product I was actually interested in getting.
Nonetheless, now that I’ve basically disagreed with everything you’ve written here—I basically agree with everything you’ve written here. But I think a lot of the objections to advertisements are fundamentally ideological, and the actual good or bad of advertisements tends to be, in a sense, irrelevant to conversations about the good or bad of them, as these conversations are dominated by the bad of the concept of advertising itself.
This is very idealistic description of advertising. The type of ad that merely informs you of an existence of a product is possible in theory, and maybe existed in 19th century, but I was born too late for that.
This model fails to explain e.g. why many ads are annoyingly loud, or what is the purpose of showing you the same ad hundred times. Also, why the ads show you attractive people, contain exaggerated claims about the product, etc.
I have purchased clothes, plush animals, books, and games because of online advertisements that told me about their existence; I would have been unaware of the products in question if not for the ads. (I have also generally been happy with the products that I got; one of the clothes that I ordered is probably my favorite piece of clothing.)
I agree with you that the best case scenario for ads is very positive sum, but I take issue with...
I would frame this as “I paid with time and attention”, rather than “I didn’t pay for it”. There are definitely times when trading time or attention for money is an excellent trade, but it’s not guaranteed and it’s not the same as not paying for something. I’m curious if you take advantage of the “get paid to watch ads” programs, and why or why not, since it’s essentially the same trade but with a different default.
This is largely discounting the third scenario, advertiser or viewer is actively hostile. Top comment above goes into the first of those two, but ads are frequently a gateway to all manner of scams, cons, and fraud. A cost largely born by those far less clever and more vulnerable than those participating in this discussion. On the other side, you’ve got things like click fraud. While not huge relative to ad volume, the costs and externalities are also huge compared to the money changing hands in these transactions normally and probably tips the scale significantly.