Comment by mattlondon
6 hours ago
I typically block ads as well, but more recently I changed some setting in the default Android newsfeed thing and some ads started to show through amongst the news items.
The ads there are usually fairly innocuous (i.e. not disruptive, not flashing auto play vids etc, they just look like another news item and you can just scroll past them like other news articles you're not interested in), but I have actually found them useful. I am wearing a T-shirt right now in fact that was advertised to me a week or two ago as "on sale" for £8 (eight) and which I clicked through and purchased. There have been one or two other examples of things there that actually have been useful or at least interesting to me right now. So they actually have been useful/helpful in that regard.
So I am a bit conflicted here. It is no cost to me to click on the ad, and I bought some things that I use but would probably have not got otherwise. Am I being manipulated to part with my money? I dunno. Would I have bought a £8 t-shirt anyway if I was just in a shop and saw it? Maybe. Was the ad actually quite well targeted and appropriate? In this case yes.
I think on balance I would say those news feed ads are acceptable to me. I have problems where it is totally irrelevant and disruptive. Hopefully the AI mode ones will be similar to the news feed ones. I would be pretty upset if the ad content was directly worded into the response.
I love the idea of targeting advertising. But the current implementations I hate.
The ASR voice recorder app gets this right. It lets me use the full featured version for three days, after which I need to watch a few ads to get another three days. I choose when to watch the ads, and if I'm late there is nothing worse than a small nag at the bottom of the app. I actually now start every day with the ads, while I cook breakfast, and it is a positive experience. I could also just pay for the app and be done with them.
I think the very old Google was better in this: They analysed current intent by looking at current search and contents of the current page one looks at. There an ad may solve a specific current need. As soon as past profile overrides this the relevance goes down: It's great that two weeks ago I spent a lot of time on travel sites, but now my summer vacation is booked and all related ads are irrelevant.
The problem with the idealism of targeted advertising is that it assumes that there is always an ad that fits your desires. In reality, some people have very niche interests and preferences, and not every business advertises through the same channels or with the same budget. Ads will pretty much always cater to the lowest common denominator even if you account for the individual.
Search ads do seem like the one ad type that kind of flips that though. Where it's not based on some general set of interests, but literally the thing you're searching for at that moment.
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> I am wearing a T-shirt right now in fact that was advertised to me a week or two ago as "on sale" for £8 (eight) and which I clicked through and purchased.
This means the ad was effective. But was it useful to you? Did it save you from having to look for it yourself?
If you were not thinking something like "I need a certain T-shirt" before this came up, it's likely the ad created a desire in your mind which you didn't have. You got manipulated successfully by the advertiser.
I think what was left out of the blog post was "helpful to the advertiser".
The meta point is that advertising has become so ingrained into society it really is difficult to differentiate if a need or desire originated intrinsic or externally. It's really great for companies selling stuff.
We live in a world where ads are the primary way information about products enters the information sphere. That seems like something we should fix to me, but it's where we are, and it means if ads are well enough targeted it can be rational for an individual to want to consume them.
Also I think people pay much of the price of ads even if they don't view them, via increased prices. The trillion dollar advertising industry money ultimately is paid by consumers. It is a necessary cost to try to launch a new product because we are reliant on it for information and because all your competitors are advertising.
I sort of wish there was a google "ad" search, where its like google search but only for ads, for the rare cases you want to buy something, and are looking through for a compatible product. Make advertisers differentiate by providing more information about their product to help me make a choice rather than shoving the product everywhere else hoping that I'll buy the thing out of fatigue
The super concise version of my typical rant is that we aren’t just being simply served up ads. They are mining us for data every step of the process and then using it in invasive ways or selling it to their friends who will use it for God knows what. We don’t know what they’re doing, when they’re doing it, what they’re using it for, and we have no way of not participating once we’ve walked through the door. There’s no warning sign that actually tells you what is happening and no realistic way to opt out except for never opening that URL in the first place. You literally can’t be an informed consumer if you want to be on the Internet