Ads/marketing budgets create employment that would otherwise not be there.
Ads provide monetization for apps you use on your phone. Without monetization you wouldn't have the proliferation of the ads, and not everyone is willing to pay directly.
It creates jobs, supports businesses, helps otherwise unsustainable content. It helps the small businesses grow their market. It supports economy.
You are also sort of missing the point. We are trying to make ads relavant for everyone, but even if it's relavant, you don't click on everything you see. This is true because of how you as a person do things. You don't buy the first car you see on the street, you do research, you spend days etc. Just think of that, and you'll see why why 1% ctr is actually not a terrible thing as you made it sound like. if you clicked on everything you see, you wouldn't be able to do _anything_.
Disclaimer: Current FB and ex-Google employee working on ads for 8 years. And no, my pay doesn't depend on me saying these, i could just work _anywhere_ i wanted, literally.
Actual money.
In the absence of ads, we'd have people paying money to honest app makers for the utility of the app. And along with that, the accountability, honesty, and incentive alignment that comes from a straightforward exchange. Instead, we have app makers selling users, their data, and their attention to the various companies/intermediaries/entities involved -- without ever telling the user how the bread is buttered.
Yeah, when I'm buying a toaster, I do research. But that has nothing to do with modern ad-tech and its various tentacles whatsoever. Actually, nowadays, I find this whole ecosystem actively prevents me from being proactive about my consumer choice, because every single thing I see when I google "best toaster 2020" is some type of eldritch symbiosis of Fb Goog Az (choose any; none are good), a 1 cent-paid-per-letter 3rd world content farmer, instant click bidding based on my browser, age, gender, location, prior 2 week consumption pattern, political view.
It's really tough to compete with free, and I understand that there are significant barriers to paying directly for content/utility/etc. I know, the system we have set up is ambiguous and complicated and subtle. But maybe those ads/marketing budget dollars could be used to actually like, I don't know: improve people's lives? fix these systems? reverse course? Convince people to consume less so that we don't collapse the biosphere?
It's so tiring to see the most intelligent people alive say, well, this is quite clearly a massive problem that might literally destabilize the order of our entire society on one hand, but on the other, people just have to know how bad they want the Newest Garbage On Sale This Upcoming Black Friday...
Yes, it is a lie and a scam. One of the most epic of recent years.
How do you think you'd get to know your neighborhood burger joint without some form of advertising (either word of mouth, or through real paid advertising). how would you know the burger joint somewhere else?
Short of a micropayment solution that pays out proportional to the value you get (flattr? maybe), ads is the only viable option. But that only solves the content creator pov. It doesn't help the advertiser - the business that need your money to survive.
What I'm getting at is that some things are better for giant tech companies and corporations and worse for regular people and some things are better for regular people but worse for giant corporations and tech companies.
I'm not even saying that I hate that this is the case, I understand our reality. The lack of creativity, the lack of imagination on this from anyone at all, but especially our best and brightest -- that is the worst part about all of this.
The absolute depth of monoculture on these issues is "oh for sure, it's messed up, but like, fixing it is too hard because of how messed up it is. Better double down before this whole thing implodes!"
Here's the difference: If I am paying for a thing, I have a choice. I am never presented with the choice over whether I want to get tracked online. Or between apps. Usually tracking is invisible and completely obfuscated in such a way that even if you want to know who is tracking me and what is getting tracked you can't.
> How do you think you'd get to know your neighborhood burger joint without some form of advertising
It's in my neighborhood, I see it when I drive by, friends recommend it. Sometimes I do a web search. I don't think I've ever found a restaurant (grocery store, pub, etc etc) due to an advertisement. About the closest I get is when the local paper runs their people's choice awards for local businesses. (and I know, the local paper gets revenue from advertising)
The only choice you have is to stop paying for the thing. In reality it's more likely that you'd end up paying with money and with the data that's being collected. Businesses always want to grow revenue so at some point collecting data again or serving you ads in a paid product constitutes low hanging fruit.
Look at Samsung and the ads they force on you after you paid thousands on their TVs, look at Amazon who crams some ads in movies and shows you already pay for with Prime, look at Google who still collects info on you even if you pay for YouTube Premium.
This isn't about paying with money or your data. You may get something for your money at first, until you don't anymore.
The area is ripe for disruption. But sadly, that's the world we have to live in. I am pretty sure google would have prefered if you paid for the services you get (i suggest you sign up for google one, if you use gmail/drive/etc). But until that's ubiquitous ads is what we have.
re: neighborhood burger joint - web search implies someone is providing you this for free. or through ads. or you pay.
I certainly would and have. I highly suspect that's the majority (or at least a significant percentage) of money made in the gaming industry.
I don’t think so; and the counter example is gaming. We would see free to download products with upsells catered to whales. I’m not sure if that would be a better product but I don’t think that business model is honest either
[Replying to parent because I can't reply directly to poster]
It looks like you have no idea that there are games worth paying for. Not on mobile phones though. And definitely not free to play games. They are designed to take your money, not entertain you.
That, and the seemingly utter stupidity of ad engines. Like, yes I bought that new power tool last week. Stop showing me the ad for the tool from the same store I already bought it from.
I'm pretty much convinced that apart from the people working in the ad business, nobody actually profits off ads. Certainly it's close to impossible to prove that ads are effective, and people who sell ads to companies are good at cherry picking and suggestive correlations. Then in the end everyone tries to buy the same eyeballs by paying the same ad companies, and it all averages out to nothing except you spent a bunch of money.
Yes. I hate this too, but think of it as a bug, not the actual intention. We would love to know when you wouldn't buy a product as much as we would love to know when you actually would. But we don't, always, and end up having to make approximations. We don't always know what you actually bought, we just know you bought something. Advertisers don't even always tell the value of stuff you bought, something tht'd have benefited them to share from ROI pov etc.
Clearly, nobody is interested in fixing it then?
"It's a developing area" is a pretty old adage by now, and is worn out. Modern tech exists for 25+ years now. Do something. Most of the people I've spoken to hate ads.
Not fixing ancient bugs isn't helping the situation.
Whether something creates jobs or not doesn't make it a net good. Would you suggest Ransomware is good? Because it also creates jobs. As do Nigerian email scams and Ponzi schemes. "Creating Jobs" doesn't mean something is good for society.
> You are also sort of missing the point. We are trying to make ads relavant for everyone, but even if it's relavant, you don't click on everything you see.
Apparently you are missing the point here. Whether you see it or not, Facebook and google's marketplaces by nature serve advertisers, not me. Advertisers don't give a damn what advertising is "most relevant" to me. What they care about is which demographics are most profitable to their brands.
> We are trying to make ads relavant for everyone
So long as Google and Facebook put the advertisers in control of who sees their advertising, any assertion that the system is designed to serve us is bullshit. People don't see advertising that is relevant, they see advertisements from the people who pay google/ Facebook to see their message. Those two things are not equivalent and never will be.
But think of it this way. You are getting a service, you are paying either directly or indirectly through ads.
Facebook wouldn't be a thing if it were a paid product from get go. It'd probably even lose a major part of its user base if it became a paid product overnight.
Like i said, i would love if i can pay for a product i am benefiting from, but it's not always possible.
But they don't put advertisers in control of who sees their ads.
If you look at audience sizes on FB, and then run some direct response ads on that audience, you'll notice that you only ever reach maybe 10% of that audience.
This is because what FB/Goog are good at is figuring out which ads are likely to get someone to click and/or convert, and show only those ads.
The dirty secret is that those people might have converted anyway.
One can measure this with an attribution model, but the trouble is that the two biggest players Google and Facebook have very little incentive to co-operate, so all attribution models are extremely biased.
tl;dr the advertisers set boundaries on who should see the ad, but they don't control who the ads get served to.
