- My local state TV channels feature 20 minutes of commercials for about 5 minutes of actual content - YouTube shows more and more ads as time goes by - Can't go in the street without being bombarded by ads wherever you look - Whenever you Google something, the top results are SEO spam websites with jumping ads and auto-playing videos that quite literally feel like some form of digital cancer - Services are starting to display ads even if you're a paying costumer -- e.g Samsung TVs
At which point enough is enough? They've stripped humanity out of these daily tasks so much that I can't imagine this is sustainable. What will be the last straw in this market?
People should be taught when they're still kids how to become resistant to advertising and exercise more critical thinking; I knew so many people who completely ignored some products they saw every day used by others until the day they were shown on TV; that can't be good.
Yoi don't get ads if you pay for YouTube, or if you pay enough for most streaming services. Most papers and such offer an ad free subscription tier too. Cancel TV and use YouTube TV if you must.
For Google, there are ad free competitors, or just use ad block.
They'll be around as long as the financial incentives are there. Micropayments failed so many content providers are moving back to pay walls again, whether it's Patreon or adult videos or Steam or whatever. Gotta put food on the table somehow. If you don't want to see ads, just pay for the producers' time some other way.
People love it. It works. No one wants to go back except for a few 'rare ones'. Somehow, people still manage to spend their money and start businesses - amazing.
I see no reason why the same couldn't be done online, were the political will to suddenly start reflecting the will of the people somehow.
There are many possible implementations, and many rather easy to implement solutions. The virtuous cycles could be incredible.
The best we can hope for is that they’re labeled and you can pay to remove them. If you get rid of labeled ad markets you end up with a bunch of sponsored content without your knowledge that will destroy your trust in any information you find online or otherwise.
I think we might have to observe Netflix and HBOMax to see if the economics of a paid subscription for content can be scaled to completely eliminate ads in the long run. So far it has not happened for written content outside of a few pockets.
Personally, ads help discovery to some extent and provide some baseline education to find some product if you ever need to, especially when you have a lot of choices. I came from a different country to the US, I don’t have TV here and only watch Netflix, prime and HBO.
I really struggle when I have to buy something to do stuff which is new to me (how do I clean LVP floors without ruining it ?, how do I maintain a lawn? (learnt about lawn care companies) Who do I call to fix a rotten board in my kitchen (learnt about handyman).
It’s really tiring to have to Google and Reddit every single thing and learn this from scratch on top of filtering out conflicting information and not knowing what is an ad.
An unappealing grey background, a representative, unedited, in-situ photograph of the product along with a text describing the name and specifications of the product, maybe along with some state-appointed announcer who neutrally reads the text.
I really hate the world as is, polluted with meaningless, over-optimized advertisement, but at the same time I also think that "no advertisement" is definitely not the answer.
As with most things, I think we have to find a good balance. Maybe a good way to start would be for governments to set (harsher) limits to advertisement. Allowing less seconds of ads per each hour of content, forbidding print ads in certain areas, etc etc.
It sounds like you have the problem letting go of the ad subsidized media, apparently many people are fine with it.
If you can't afford to pay for the ad free content, fair enough, but maybe be grateful you at least have a means of getting it without paying.
Currently the signup and payment flows are so long that they greatly reduce impulse buying. I really wouldn't mind paying 50 cents for an interesting article if there just was a simple button to click, but I'm not going through that annoying flow for an article.
He argues that the internet ad market could crash soon because it isn't really delivering value anymore, or rather it delivers far less value than advertisers currently believe (and pay for).
If true, it could be pretty devastating to the current internet given how many major players like Google, Meta etc. depend on ad revenue to provide free services like Facebook, YouTube, GMail etc.
I have almost no ads in my life - they're not that hard to avoid. Most days I see/hear 0 of any kind. Getting rid of a TV years ago was one of the best things I ever did. Now I just watch the movies, series, documentaries I want to watch, ad-free.
> YouTube shows more and more ads as time goes by
I never see any, with uBlock Origin. I never see ads on Google, not sure why.
> Can't go in the street without being bombarded by ads wherever you look
You may need to move somewhere where this isn't true.
Billboards are fairly unavoidable in some city suburbs/city centres though, and I really hate super-obtrusive ones. Make take creative action yourself. I'm in Australia, where BUGA-UP famously used to creatively deface billboards, changing their message into something true/funny. I saw one defaced, well, improved, in their style just the other day, maybe they're still around. Very inspiring stuff. People have to say NO to billboards.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billboard_Utilising_Graffitist...
1. Don't click on ads.
2. Run an ad blocker or, even better, turn off JavaScript[1] when a page displays excessive ads.
3. Build a new type of Open Source-based search engine which utilizes an alternate revenue model.
4. If you can't do #3, like I am, then pay for one which utilizes an alternate revenue model.
5. Encourage the sites you use to explore using Lightning for payments. Lightning can be connected to requests to the site's content using Aperture[2].
[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/disable-javascript... [2] https://github.com/lightninglabs/aperture
To me, the problem is the tastelessness of the advertising experience:
> There's too many ads displayed too frequently.
> Because there's too many ads, most ads have to be gimicky, flashing, attention seeking junk encourages people to install ad blockers. It's a race to the bottom.
> This criticism is an aside, but most corporate advertising is nonsensical focus-group designed garbage. You have ads that try and show families with a Black male and a White female and maybe an Asian kid. Like, who the hell is this artificial nonsense even pandering to?
> There's real frustration with the context of most advertising: watching a 30 second ad to see a 10 second sport highlight is not a pleasant tradeoff.
> Because companies want to gather lots of data, their ad networks load up lots of trackers and bullshit JS that slows down websites and compromise privacy.
> Despite being able to track people around the web, their machine learning is garbage. Everybody has probably experienced buying something random like coat hangers, buying them, and then seeing nothing but coat hanger ads for a long time.
For some reason it didn't work, but the idea of advertising working like the now defunct The Deck appeals to me: very strict rules on placement of ads and I think other good policies that made me want to support those sites and not block those ads.
Internet culture is trending towards being fed content algorithmically rather than seeking content deliberately. I see no end to the ad market in this context, for as long as you are not the one deciding what you are looking at - there will be value in paying whoever does control it to show you an ad.
People need to start vehemently rejecting content forced upon us without request with the same intensity as someone shoving food in your mouth. The recent rise of the "for you page" indicates social trending in the opposite direction though, so ads arent going anywhere.
We'll be matrix-style inside an AR pod, unable to move or do anything but watch unskippable ads.
The only thing the matrix got wrong was the plot device of humans as a power source. It's far more realistic for us to be an advertising sink, to maximize how the results of increasing productivity can accrew to as few people at the top as possible.
It ends when the uber eats and amazon drivers, the only people who will be still allowed outside, stage a rebellion.
While I understand you completely, I think a lot of these issues would be reduced if regulators played an active role on controlling what is being advertised/how it's being advertised and where... because at the moment it seems to be delegated to the platforms to police their own ad network.
With that said, you also need to realize that with the advent of digital advertising many small businesses found ways to reach old and new customers at a small cost (now increasingly expensive, and therefore more prohibitive).
Because you have to remember that prior to this, advertising was a luxury, and many of our childhood brands were so successful because companies like Proctor & Gamble, Unilever, Coca Cola, Mars, Mattel, Hasbro, etc had the control of the share of voice with their brands, and they controlled big chunks of share of shelves, with access budgets of millions.
Imagine returning to a days where only an handful of brands were controlling the majority of media inventories and distribution/sales channels... I don't think that's a good thing.
I don't have a solution for this to be honest, yet I think that reaching audiences shouldn't be limited to behemoths that have access to hundreds of millions in advertising budgets.
For entertainment I haven't watched TV for ages and cannot stomach the modern movie industry anymore, so I'll play some old school games, or better, creation as entertainment.
Sadly, it's looking like "WWIII, or Asteroid Dino-Doom v2.0".
As a bonus you could have slightly better privacy with proper blocklist.
clearly people behind those ads know better seo optimization, gaming google search
kindly ask google to change to new search algorithm and we'll get rid of ads ... until those ads people master new seo otimization tactics
rinse repeat
So how do you get a cert? A friend (who is already a member) gives you a one-time access URL to a page that lets you download a new client cert. Install that in your browser and now you can access the site, and you can generate your own "new cert" URLs like the one your friend gave you to give to your friends for them to join.
So that's how the network grows: word-of-mouth direct personal connections. And all these connections are public: recorded in a public DB (Sqlite file) and published regularly (say, every four hours or so) so the membership graph is known to all.
How do you use it? Well, the other thing you can do with the site (besides minting new "join URLs") is to propagate information (not to be coy, URLs to some article or whatever, like the submissions here on HN) through the network. You go to the site (auth w/ client cert), enter the URL of the thing you want to propagate, and you get back what I call a "bump URL" that has a code that identifies the subject and the sender (you). You send this "bump URL" to your contacts (via email, Twitter, whatever) who can click on it to see a page that has the original subject URL and a new "bump" URL customized for that contact, for them to send to their contacts. There are two buttons: "Engage" and "Reject". "Engage" redirects you to the subject site after recording the "engage event" in the public DB; "Reject" likewise enters a "reject event" in the public DB. Both are optional, you don't have to click on either (it probably doesn't make sense to click on both.)
And that's pretty much it: you have a public graph of members, and a public sub-graph for each subject URL with public "engage"/"reject" events, and all the data are published in a public DB that anyone can download and analyze. (Have I mentioned that it's all done in public enough yet?)
- - - -
So how does it work? Why would you use it? And how does it kill the ads market?
Simple (and as yet theoretical): Let's say I'm a small business with some widgets to sell. I create a sales page and make a "bump" URL for it and send it to my contacts, who forward it to theirs, who forward it to theirs, and so on. When someone "engages" with that URL/page and actually buys a widget, I can check the public DB to find out the "chain" of word-of-mouth links that led to that sale and reward each of those folks somehow.
- - - -
I am not spelling it all out here, there are additional details, but the above is the crux of the idea. There are also some pretty obvious problems (e.g. how many "bump URLs" are going to be flying around? Billions!?) but I think most of the potential problems are solved by the direct interpersonal nature of the thing:
Spam? No, why would you forward spam to your friends? If a friend sends you spam you can talk to them and tell them to stop, or just stop clicking on their "bump" URls. As far as I can anticipate, most problems would be solved by the open feedback between members in light of the public DB.
Moderation? Everyone is a moderator, and then some: people who don't participate can still read the DB, so the moderation "team" is larger than the userbase!
Censorship? No, because no information (other than the URLs themselves) goes through the network, so there's nothing to censor. (Of course someone could use an offensive URL, but again, if you get a link to something that offends you (for whatever reason, in whatever way) you can "reject" it, or just not propagate it.)
Anyhow, I can go on but I want to know what y'all think? I've been sitting on the demo for months now because I just don't know if I really want to do this or not, but I really DO think it's "got something", that there's potential in this idea. What do you think?