Comment by shkkmo
12 days ago
> I'm somewhat unsurprised that my off the cuff hypothesis has been tested, and is indeed likely accurate.
That study is a correlation with self reported satisfaction. The effect size is that a doubling of ad spend results in a 3% change in satisfaction. I struggled to find good numbers but it appears as if ad spending in the USA has been a more or less constant percentage of GDP growth.
Thus the only real conclusion you can draw from your argument is that any increase in unhappiness caused by the internet was caused by its associated GDP growth increasing ad spend per capita.
Personally, I do think advertising has become more damaging precisely due to the internet but good luck proving it.
> And a practical point on this topic is that the benefits of the internet are, in practice, fringe, even if freely available to everyone
Ok, nevermind. I can't take anything else you say seriously when you call the ways the the internet has improved people's lives "fringe". I take it you never tried to take a bus pre-internet? Drive a car across the cohntry? Or lookup any information? The internet's effects on people is so far from fringe that it has seeped into almost everything we do at a fundamental level. Perhaps because of that you can't see it.
As the article mentions a 3% drop in life satisfaction is "about half the drop in life satisfaction you’d see in a person who had gotten divorced or about one-third the drop you’d see in someone who’d become unemployed." And advertising spending is increasingly exponentially. Good numbers on ad spend are available here [1], as that's the source they used (the exact date).
Ad spending was estimated at growing around 14% per year. In current times it's settled around 5-10% per year, but of course keep in mind that that's a compounding value. So a doubling isn't every 10-20 years but every ~7-14. And furthermore in their study they were able to demonstrate that shifts in happiness followed even local shifts in advertising. So when advertisers scaled back for various reasons, life satisfaction increased, and then began diminishing as the advertising returned.
Mass advertising will likely be the tobacco of our time once you consider the knock-on effects of societies full of individuals being made intentionally discontented.
[1] - https://www.zenithmedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/Adspe...
> And advertising spending is increasingly exponentially. Good numbers on ad spend are available here [1]
I don't see a single place in that PDF that lists historical ad spend data. You do realize that is a "forecast" not a mearement?
And even that forecast contradicts the point you are trying to argue. It projects that ad spend will grow exponentially...at a rate lower than GDP.
So again, the only evidence here that the Internet increased advertising spending is by arguing that the Internet increased GDP.
> Ad spending was estimated at growing around 14% per year
This is false. The only place that numer was used in your cited text was here:
>> We forecast paid search to grow at an average rate of 14% a year to 2016
So that isn't a measurement, it is a forecast. It is also not for all ad spending growth, but for "paid search".
I too dislike mass advertising, but if you wanna argue against it you need to do MUCH better.
You have yet to offer a single coherent counter-argument or explanation. Rather you are wildly flailing with seemingly endless weak claims that mean nothing. Like here if I look it up and the ad spend was indeed growing at somewhere in the ballpark of their numbers (since their predictions are obviously going to align with trends), are you going to change your opinion? Obviously not, no more than you're going to change your opinion after realizing that a 3% decline in satisfaction was indeed a lot, or that the study did indeed make some significant effort to demonstrate causality.
Or now if you learn that economies, especially European, grow dramatically slower [1] than you seem to think, are you going to change your opinion? No, because once again you're not making a logical or rationale argument whatsoever, but behaving like somebody on the defensive desperately trying to argue against something but having no foundation beyond the dislike of a seemingly inescapable conclusion.
[1] - https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/euu/eur...
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