Nearly everyone has bought into the utter bullshit that advertising makes the web free. This delusion buries not only the fact that we have made a deal with the devil, but also that the deal really sucks. What we traded our souls for we don’t even get. The web would be both cheaper and better if we just paid for what we use straight up. And more importantly, society would be better. I'll explain all of these.
IT'S NOT FREE
We’re not Facebook’s customers, advertisers are (more on this below). But we are the advertiser’s customers, and the cost of the "free lunch" is simply shifted to the price of the things we buy from them. In other words we still end up paying for the full cost of Facebook (and even more, as I'll get to next). Costs may even shift regressively, to advertised products predominately consumed by those with lower incomes, in which case the poor are subsidizing the better off.
IT'S MORE EXPENSIVE...
Not only are you still paying for the full cost of the Facebook product you use, you are paying for all the advertising overhead: the costs of its advertising technology and infrastructure (huge, btw), the agency and creative costs (Don Draper and company have to pay for the hookers and scotch somehow, not to mention what’s-his-name who basically just lounges in his office barefoot thinking Japanese), and the advertiser's big marketing departments (that often outnumber and outspend the people making the product!).
The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks. – Jeff Hammerbacher, fmr. Manager of Facebook Data Team, founder of Cloudera
So in addition to the original product cost and the ad overhead costs, you are also paying the opportunity cost of an inferior product (as Dennis Curtis points out in the OP) as well as the engineering costs of figuring out how to optimize ad revenue, because that’s what happens when websites have to design to please advertisers over pleasing us, the users. Dalton Caldwell makes this point comparing Sourceforge to Github[1]. As ergo says in a comment[2], “If the new news feed is making their advertisers happy (and bringing revenue into Facebook), then that's what they optimize for.” As jfoster says in a comment[3], “Ad-supported models untie the relationship between UX and revenue.”
Furthermore, our identities and privacy are bought and sold to the highest bidders. And where do the bidders get their money? From us of course! A double whammy! We're trading our privacy for free product? Bullshit. We get personalization? Bullshit. Personalization means optimizing something for me, not optimizing for the advertiser. Again, we're not the real customer. We’re certainly not Google’s[4][5].
WAIT. IT'S EVEN WORSE...
Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need. – Tyler Durden, Fight Club
Think of the social costs of advertising. The web is infested with misinformation and manipulation. Beside the lying ads themselves, relying on a revenue stream entirely dependent on how many ads are seen severely affects the moral choices of those who decide what gets produced and how its presented. What are the costs of a misinformed and variously manipulated citizenry, of distortions to the free-market?
Knowledge and discourse are the lifeblood of both democracy, free markets, progress. The web, from the little scammy websites to the big brand ones that so many blindly trust, has a huge influence on who we vote for, what we buy, and most importantly, what we believe.
There is no free lunch, and there is no free web. This "free" ad-"supported" web we have is much too expensive.
[4] Lloyd made his pitch, proposing a quantum version of Google’s search engine whereby users could make queries and receive results without Google knowing which questions were asked. The men were intrigued. But after conferring with their business manager the next day, Brin and Page informed Lloyd that his scheme went against their business plan. "They want to know everything about everybody who uses their products and services," he joked. - Wired, http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/10/computers-big-data...
There was no way for me to buy anything online until I turned eighteen (no longer true now that Canada got with the program and started issuing visa debit cards). I'm very grateful for the opportunity I had to use the Internet to learn and communicate for free.
And it's not just children. How would people in poor countries afford to pay the same amount as a Westerner for access to StackOverflow or a motorcycle repair forum or whatever?
I don't think it's such a clear win to make the Internet for-pay.
I don't think you got what I was saying. Try a closer read. The internet is for-pay; we are paying for it, and there's no way around it. The question is how we pay for it.
In your pre-eighteen-year-old case:
* Most likely you (or your parents) bought stuff from a company that advertises on the web. So you (or your parents) were paying, just not directly. And as I point out, you were paying extra.
* If you didn't buy enough of the advertised products, your internet was subsidized by other users who did. Same for people in poor countries. But these subsidies are wasteful, as the advertising overhead takes a huge cut.
* You still paid for the opportunity costs of an inferior product.
* Most importantly, you still paid for and will continue to pay for the damage to society that advertising and an ad-supported web inflicts. Ads are dishonest and manipulative. An ad-supported web is driven by click-rates, not user satisfaction, so we get the proliferation of link-baiting empty (if not manipulative) content that we all see today.
But you are right in that if we ditch advertising, we need some way of distributing the costs progressively, and make sure that people who have little still have plenty of internet and internet content access.
Advertising is not the worst. In-App purchasing is. It turns the whole thing into endless ad stream. Every purchase confirms the success of previous efforts as ad, then what to do next? hit the f*cking user harder!
Yesterday I was sitting with a friend's young boy who was showing me some math games on a tablet. These are games designed to teach simple addition, subtraction, etc to young children.
What amazed me was how intense the push for in-app purchasing was! Every one of the several games had a popup after each level or activity that would offered some in-game "power-up" for just $0.99 or various amounts. It wasn't just that you could make an in-app purchase, but that the app was very aggressively pushing it. He told me, "my mom says I can't do that", but the "no" button was much smaller and harder to press than the yes button, visually.
His mom indicated that he had made such purchases before, and so far she hadn't found a way (on this particular tablet) to disable in-app purchases.
This is a plague of a problem. Developers who put IAP into their games frequently, in no uncertain terms, try to trick young kids into pressing the "buy $100 worth of database bits with your parents' credit card!" button. It's despicable.
AppLock on Android solved this issue for me and my kids (since any intent that goes to the Play store will get intercepted and challenged for authentication), but it's very frustrating to them to have to try to navigate these screens that have 12 big, bright "goes to the lock screen" buttons and 1 small, uninteresting button that does what they actually want.
I would think you could defund the account...? I am not familiar with iDevices, but with Google I could just remove payment information from my account, and that would pretty much put a stop to accidental purchases.
This is why I donate to PBS. Their content is unrivaled and unimpeachable. What is the name of the app your friend's son was using, they deserve a special place in hell.
The sad truth is if the developer had priced the game at say five dollars they most likely never would have been discovered or if they had the user's conditioning would have kicked in: "Must find free alternative! Dumb greedy developers trying to rip me off, entertain and teach my child for free. FREE I SAY!"
We (as app users) brought this on ourselves, or at the very least we're half culpable.
The day the app store stops being the primary marketing channel for apps the better off we will be.
I stand by my original comment. Yes, developers deserve to make money, that doesn't mean you have to be an asshole, especially when they probably go around claiming to be "educators".
Macroeconomically, it is true that the resource, human, and energy costs of the internet sum to the integrated time discounted expectation of future returns for communication sources (advertisers).
This does not preclude the possibility of mutual growth, though. A system interested in long-term stability will optimize minimally for short-term advertiser revenue, and primarily for long-term attention provider satisfaction.
One counterfactual of the current model that can be instructive is the following. Assume a system whereby all communication is happenstance -- there is no advertising or selective filtration (which is what advanced advertising becomes). Such a system degrades in much the way twitter does -- manual (attentive) classification and differentiation are not used universally enough, people don't sufficiently filter their own attention sinks, and the attention eventually dries up in the vacuum of entropy.
It would certainly be possible to move to such a manually filtered system, but it would require a massive reconstruction of social norms. The best system would be one that could passively or subconsciously negotiate filtration strategies in a decentralized runtime environment. It will need to be spatially collocated with the conscious being, eventually, or the latency will be unacceptable.
Eventually, then, we'll find that such filtration will actively seek out opportunities for novelty or for the satisfaction of latent (either unrecognized or frustrated) desires, and surface them to attention. This is precisely what advertising becomes.
Finally, you are right that we're approaching the equilibrium from an oblique angle, but it is a direction from which we can make progress at every step of the way, and the endpoint is ultimately a fairly ideal state.
Comments
Nearly everyone has bought into the utter bullshit that advertising makes the web free. This delusion buries not only the fact that we have made a deal with the devil, but also that the deal really sucks. What we traded our souls for we don’t even get. The web would be both cheaper and better if we just paid for what we use straight up. And more importantly, society would be better. I'll explain all of these.
IT'S NOT FREE
We’re not Facebook’s customers, advertisers are (more on this below). But we are the advertiser’s customers, and the cost of the "free lunch" is simply shifted to the price of the things we buy from them. In other words we still end up paying for the full cost of Facebook (and even more, as I'll get to next). Costs may even shift regressively, to advertised products predominately consumed by those with lower incomes, in which case the poor are subsidizing the better off.
IT'S MORE EXPENSIVE...
Not only are you still paying for the full cost of the Facebook product you use, you are paying for all the advertising overhead: the costs of its advertising technology and infrastructure (huge, btw), the agency and creative costs (Don Draper and company have to pay for the hookers and scotch somehow, not to mention what’s-his-name who basically just lounges in his office barefoot thinking Japanese), and the advertiser's big marketing departments (that often outnumber and outspend the people making the product!).
The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks. – Jeff Hammerbacher, fmr. Manager of Facebook Data Team, founder of Cloudera
So in addition to the original product cost and the ad overhead costs, you are also paying the opportunity cost of an inferior product (as Dennis Curtis points out in the OP) as well as the engineering costs of figuring out how to optimize ad revenue, because that’s what happens when websites have to design to please advertisers over pleasing us, the users. Dalton Caldwell makes this point comparing Sourceforge to Github[1]. As ergo says in a comment[2], “If the new news feed is making their advertisers happy (and bringing revenue into Facebook), then that's what they optimize for.” As jfoster says in a comment[3], “Ad-supported models untie the relationship between UX and revenue.”
Furthermore, our identities and privacy are bought and sold to the highest bidders. And where do the bidders get their money? From us of course! A double whammy! We're trading our privacy for free product? Bullshit. We get personalization? Bullshit. Personalization means optimizing something for me, not optimizing for the advertiser. Again, we're not the real customer. We’re certainly not Google’s[4][5].
WAIT. IT'S EVEN WORSE...
Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need. – Tyler Durden, Fight Club
Think of the social costs of advertising. The web is infested with misinformation and manipulation. Beside the lying ads themselves, relying on a revenue stream entirely dependent on how many ads are seen severely affects the moral choices of those who decide what gets produced and how its presented. What are the costs of a misinformed and variously manipulated citizenry, of distortions to the free-market?
Knowledge and discourse are the lifeblood of both democracy, free markets, progress. The web, from the little scammy websites to the big brand ones that so many blindly trust, has a huge influence on who we vote for, what we buy, and most importantly, what we believe.
There is no free lunch, and there is no free web. This "free" ad-"supported" web we have is much too expensive.
—
[1] http://daltoncaldwell.com/an-audacious-proposal
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7484075
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7484442
[4] Lloyd made his pitch, proposing a quantum version of Google’s search engine whereby users could make queries and receive results without Google knowing which questions were asked. The men were intrigued. But after conferring with their business manager the next day, Brin and Page informed Lloyd that his scheme went against their business plan. "They want to know everything about everybody who uses their products and services," he joked. - Wired, http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/10/computers-big-data...
[5] Google's once famous clean and neutral search results are now cluttered and biased (http://arstechnica.com/business/2013/10/new-banner-ads-push-...).
There was no way for me to buy anything online until I turned eighteen (no longer true now that Canada got with the program and started issuing visa debit cards). I'm very grateful for the opportunity I had to use the Internet to learn and communicate for free.
And it's not just children. How would people in poor countries afford to pay the same amount as a Westerner for access to StackOverflow or a motorcycle repair forum or whatever?
I don't think it's such a clear win to make the Internet for-pay.
Ads already paying less for users from poorer countries, so a pay-for system should be priced also by country.
I don't think you got what I was saying. Try a closer read. The internet is for-pay; we are paying for it, and there's no way around it. The question is how we pay for it.
In your pre-eighteen-year-old case:
* Most likely you (or your parents) bought stuff from a company that advertises on the web. So you (or your parents) were paying, just not directly. And as I point out, you were paying extra.
* If you didn't buy enough of the advertised products, your internet was subsidized by other users who did. Same for people in poor countries. But these subsidies are wasteful, as the advertising overhead takes a huge cut.
* You still paid for the opportunity costs of an inferior product.
* Most importantly, you still paid for and will continue to pay for the damage to society that advertising and an ad-supported web inflicts. Ads are dishonest and manipulative. An ad-supported web is driven by click-rates, not user satisfaction, so we get the proliferation of link-baiting empty (if not manipulative) content that we all see today.
But you are right in that if we ditch advertising, we need some way of distributing the costs progressively, and make sure that people who have little still have plenty of internet and internet content access.
Advertising is not the worst. In-App purchasing is. It turns the whole thing into endless ad stream. Every purchase confirms the success of previous efforts as ad, then what to do next? hit the f*cking user harder!
Yesterday I was sitting with a friend's young boy who was showing me some math games on a tablet. These are games designed to teach simple addition, subtraction, etc to young children.
What amazed me was how intense the push for in-app purchasing was! Every one of the several games had a popup after each level or activity that would offered some in-game "power-up" for just $0.99 or various amounts. It wasn't just that you could make an in-app purchase, but that the app was very aggressively pushing it. He told me, "my mom says I can't do that", but the "no" button was much smaller and harder to press than the yes button, visually.
His mom indicated that he had made such purchases before, and so far she hadn't found a way (on this particular tablet) to disable in-app purchases.
This is a plague of a problem. Developers who put IAP into their games frequently, in no uncertain terms, try to trick young kids into pressing the "buy $100 worth of database bits with your parents' credit card!" button. It's despicable.
AppLock on Android solved this issue for me and my kids (since any intent that goes to the Play store will get intercepted and challenged for authentication), but it's very frustrating to them to have to try to navigate these screens that have 12 big, bright "goes to the lock screen" buttons and 1 small, uninteresting button that does what they actually want.
IAP/microtransactions are a plague.
I would think you could defund the account...? I am not familiar with iDevices, but with Google I could just remove payment information from my account, and that would pretty much put a stop to accidental purchases.
This is why I donate to PBS. Their content is unrivaled and unimpeachable. What is the name of the app your friend's son was using, they deserve a special place in hell.
The sad truth is if the developer had priced the game at say five dollars they most likely never would have been discovered or if they had the user's conditioning would have kicked in: "Must find free alternative! Dumb greedy developers trying to rip me off, entertain and teach my child for free. FREE I SAY!"
We (as app users) brought this on ourselves, or at the very least we're half culpable.
The day the app store stops being the primary marketing channel for apps the better off we will be.
I stand by my original comment. Yes, developers deserve to make money, that doesn't mean you have to be an asshole, especially when they probably go around claiming to be "educators".
Yea. PBS's content is truly unrivalled and unimpeachable. Its a wonder they've maintained it for so long now.
It is maintained by contributions from U.R. Lissners. ;-)
Macroeconomically, it is true that the resource, human, and energy costs of the internet sum to the integrated time discounted expectation of future returns for communication sources (advertisers).
This does not preclude the possibility of mutual growth, though. A system interested in long-term stability will optimize minimally for short-term advertiser revenue, and primarily for long-term attention provider satisfaction.
One counterfactual of the current model that can be instructive is the following. Assume a system whereby all communication is happenstance -- there is no advertising or selective filtration (which is what advanced advertising becomes). Such a system degrades in much the way twitter does -- manual (attentive) classification and differentiation are not used universally enough, people don't sufficiently filter their own attention sinks, and the attention eventually dries up in the vacuum of entropy.
It would certainly be possible to move to such a manually filtered system, but it would require a massive reconstruction of social norms. The best system would be one that could passively or subconsciously negotiate filtration strategies in a decentralized runtime environment. It will need to be spatially collocated with the conscious being, eventually, or the latency will be unacceptable.
Eventually, then, we'll find that such filtration will actively seek out opportunities for novelty or for the satisfaction of latent (either unrecognized or frustrated) desires, and surface them to attention. This is precisely what advertising becomes.
Finally, you are right that we're approaching the equilibrium from an oblique angle, but it is a direction from which we can make progress at every step of the way, and the endpoint is ultimately a fairly ideal state.
This is the most insightful comment that I have ever read in HackerNews.
thanks eevilspock for your great comment. It's a perfect plea for app.net.