The primary thing that makes advertisements disagreeable is their irrelevance. That’s not to say whether or not the advertisement is for a product or service for which the viewer is interested in purchasing but how it relates to the context in which it is viewed.
People complain about billboards next to a countryside highway because it is entirely irrelevant to driving through the countryside. Actual complaints may be about how the billboards block a scenic view but that also seems like another way of complaining about the irrelevance. Similarly, if I am watching a Youtube video, I am never thinking that a disruptive message from a commercial business is relevant to my current activities (uh, passivities?). No advertisement is relevant, not even in-video direct sponsorships, hence SponsorBlock.
If I go to Costco and see an advertisement for tires... well, I’m at Costco, where I buy stuff. Things are sold at Costco and people go there to have things sold to them. I might need tires and realize I can get that taken care of while I’m at Costco. Nearly every advertisement I see at Costco is relevant because it’s selling something I can buy in the same building, indeed usually something juxtaposed close to the advertisement.
I don’t complain about advertisements at Costco because that would be insane. I complain about the advertisements on Youtube because they’re irrelevant and weird but somehow normalized.
> The primary thing that makes advertisements disagreeable is their irrelevance.
That's not true. We don't hate billboards because of their irrelevancy. We hate billboards because they're giant ugly attention grabbers that make the world look worse for everybody in exchange for making someone money. If the billboards were all about driving-related products, they'd still suck.
The YouTube ads are hated because that's the whole point. YouTube has something we want (the video), and they're keeping it from us until they we do something we don't want to do (watch an ad). We dislike these ads almost by definition. If we liked them, we'd seek them out, and we'd call them something else, like "movie trailers" or "Super Bowl ads."
Steel-manning the argument, near where I live, it's not that uncommon to see small to moderately sized advertisements along the road, such as a sign outside/near the entrance of a farm that's selling eggs, meat, etc. I am wholly unopposed to this. In fact, I'm very supportive of this, and used them to find a farm to buy local honey from. Whereas the stereotypical massive slabs whose advertisements get wallpapered on, I think those are distracting menaces, particularly if the primary way you see them is by driving.
And where I live it's an ever growing hell of political signs, dominos pizza, and anyone else who realizes there is no enforcement against this wide scale littering. The signs are never removed and continue piling up. Abandoned / unmonitored lots are also a frequent target.
And it's rapidly getting worse
Glad you're cool with it though, I guess? Cuz I've considered running for office on the sole platform of having them perpetually removed and perpetrators prosecuted.
There are literally signs advertising to hire people to place more signs.
You'd get my vote! These boulevard signs are totally out of control. They are technically against bylaws in my town, but nobody enforces it. Two anecdotes about how insane these are:
1. I saw one last week advertising a halloween party, so it's been in the ground for over 6 months. It is on a sidewalk near the university and is passed by about 1000 people per day, and in 6+ months not ONE SINGLE PERSON said "Oh, I should talk this down".
2. I once saw a city employee get off their riding lawn mower to move one of these signs out of their way, cut the grass, then get off the mower again to put the sign back!
And echoing the GPs comment, what really gets me about these is that we all have our lives diminished so that one person or company can earn a little extra...maybe. Or in other words, 1000's of people are subjected to this and perhaps 1 person might bite?
I'll close with my favorite interpretation of advertising: Advertisers essentially steal your sense of self-satisfaction so they can sell it back to you.
> It is on a sidewalk near the university and is passed by about 1000 people per day, and in 6+ months not ONE SINGLE PERSON said "Oh, I should talk this down".
Weren't you one of those people? Why didn't you do it?
In Portland, it's against the city code to staple signs to telephone poles.
This is, of course, completely ignored.
There are also signs stuck on wire next to freeway exits or other prime traffic areas. Typically they're on public land because a property owner would want permission or would just remove it.
There are people who angry enough about the sign proliferation that they cut the sign in half so you can't read the phone number or address or whatever.
You should be able to go online and pay a small fee (like $1 or even $.25) per sign that you put up for your garage sale or business. The money could be divided among the city, the pole owner, and people who are paid by the city to remove signs that don't have a QR code or has one that expired.
The fee could be adjusted so that garage sale signs cost much less than business signs. Business signs could only be allowed for businesses who started less than X days ago. Etc.
Where I live, there are sign regulations (total 30 sqft of road signs per lot, or less for smaller lots, 6ft maximum height, minimum 200 ft spacing, up to 2 temporary signs/lot for a maximum 60 days/year, regulations around needing to look nice, etc.). There are signs, but they are much less noticable and more function as a navigation aid rather than a call for attention.
Driving through the south is always fun.
> Go to church or the devil will get you!
In Washington state, the law is that signs along the highway have to be things you can actually purchase in the same property.
I think that rule helps strike a decent compromise: Adjacent local businesses can draw attention to themselves, but it blocks the business-plan of erecting a forest of billboards to auction off, flogging cell-phone providers or prescription drugs etc.
https://app.leg.wa.gov/rcw/default.aspx?cite=47.42.040
Have other states adopted this? Definitely would change things in NJ.
Similarly, I’ve found numerous small businesses/attractions thanks to highway billboards while traveling. Yes, I find billboards tedious and a nuisance, but I’m happy with the tradeoff.
Except digital billboards, especially those that can switch to blinding white backgrounds at night. Those can rot in hell.
On a few nice towns here there's no regular advertisements, but shops are allowed to have nice wooden signs matching the aesthetics of the town signs.
You can still find your way around, and discover things, but looking around feels like you are finding things instead of looking at things yelling at you to find them.
> If the billboards were all about driving-related products, they'd still suck.
To be clear, this is my primary point because I’m driving, not shopping. Something that gets close to maybe agreeable (I would still dislike it) would be an advertisement for a gas/charging station on a long highway. But even then we already have official roadsigns that only show logos and are otherwise relatively unobtrusive. Similar ones for fast food, actually.
Such signs seem agreeable given there is some relevance (I legitimately might be low on gas/battery charge/food satiation levels in a context which I am actually likely to have a specific product need from one or more of the advertised businesses) and they are small enough to be ignorable when they are not actually relevant. The biggest issue I think about with that is how a business gets themselves on the sign but it’s probably not that hard once they are operating next to a highway exit.
(I loathe advertisements, so when I say “agreeable” I mean something like “not wholly disagreeable”.)
If you saw a giant, attention grabbing billboard for something you are looking for, you wouldn't hate it. In the context of roads, these are businesses putting their signs on the side of the road. For example I usually find billboards/signs pointing to the nearest supermarket, restaurant or gas station to be useful, because that's the kind of thing I may want do do when I am driving, and I am getting useful information out of them.
Driving-related products like tires are annoying on a billboard on the side of the road because I am obviously not going to look at my tires while I am driving, and it is usually not something you have an urgent need for. They are however relevant (and therefore less annoying) in a gas station, where you can check your tires as you are filling up your tank. It may even give you the idea of checking tire pressure, which is a good thing. One of the most clever driving-related ad was a letter I received from the garage I did car maintenance with, reminding me a couple of weeks before the next scheduled maintenance that it was to be done (with, of course, an offer on their part). It was useful, yet 100% an ad.
And yeah, we usually call things "ads" when they are annoying and by some other word when they are not, and advertisers tend to avoid the word for this reason. Calling it "sponsored" for instance. But it doesn't change that fact.
Of course I would hate it.
Ads are just mental warfare against you. Its someone trying to manipulate you for profit.
If I drive somewhere I know where I want to go. If I need supplies I can pull over and check on the map where the nearest store is.
In such case I don't care what store it's, just it's proximity.
> If you saw a giant, attention grabbing billboard for something you are looking for, you wouldn't hate it.
Yes, I would. When I'm looking for something, I search for it until I find it, and then after that I'm not looking for it anymore. I don't go for a drive through the countryside in the hopes that system76 have put up a billboard which blocks the view of the countryside but shows me the specs for their latest laptop model.
This is the problem. Ads may not work as well for some people (who hate them) but they work great on others. Unfortunately, because the ones it does work on spend money, the rest of us are stuck in advertising hell.
I don’t want AR glasses for productivity or the social media bs they want to push; I want them to blight out every f’n ad that is everywhere. When they can do it in-device with no internet connection and I’ll fork over 1k for glasses immediately.
Given that so far the nearest things to successful AR glasses have been produced by Google and Meta, I think the relationship between wearing AR glasses and seeing ads is unlikely to go the way you are hoping.
(I too would love there to be AR glasses that you can put arbitrary software on, only under your control, rather than that of some rapidly-enshittifying company that has the device locked down. I suppose it's not strictly impossible that that might happen, but it doesn't seem like it's the way to bet.)
The thing is that you are not looking for a new laptop while you are driving, but you may be looking for a gas station because your "low fuel" light just turned on. And how are you going to find that gas station (which may not be exactly on the road you are driving on) if there is no sign advertising for it?
You can tell me you can pull over and look at a map, or program it on your navigation app. Not only it is not the most convenient, maybe even unsafe, but how do you think that gas station ended up on that map? Most likely the business paid for that, making it an ad.
That's the idea, we dislike that laptop ad because we usually don't buy laptops while we are on the road, it is an irrelevant attention grab, especially when that billboard is disproportionately large. But a gas station, restaurant or convenience store is relevant to a significant fraction of the people on the road, and when the sign is reasonable, we don't usually call it a billboard, even though it is an ad and not a sign like a speed limit.
„For next gas station take exit 31“ is not an ad in the sense most people understand ads, just as a „toilet“ sign on a door is not an ad for that toilet. I feel like you are constructing a case of ads that doesn’t really fit the common definition, but maybe I misunderstand.
> And how are you going to find that gas station (which may not be exactly on the road you are driving on) if there is no sign advertising for it?
Well, actually, in all serious travel I do, I tend to know exactly where I'm going to stop for fuel before I ever set off. It's programmed into my gps as part of my route. And I'm going to find it using my gps software.
If I'm doing a less-serious trip somewhere and I don't pre-plan my stops, the way I find places to stop for fuel is I drive along on my route, and if I need fuel, when I see a "gas" station, I stop there. Again, no billboards needed.
> You can tell me you can (snip) program it on your navigation app. Not only it is not the most convenient,
I find it super convenient. Much much more convenient than running out of fuel or not knowing if I have enough to make it to a particular place.
> how do you think that gas station ended up on that map? Most likely the business paid for that, making it an ad.
Well, that's debatable. It's a listing for an amenity of a certain type (fuel station) on openstreetmap. To be in the "Fuel" category that shows up on my gps software, you'll need to sell fuel (or your entry will get edited and you'll show up in a different category). In much the same way as a sign saying "public toilet, this way" isn't an ad.
But the debate about the blurry lines of "what is an ad?" is beside the point: have you noticed how that pattern of: "I want a thing, I search for it, I find it, and then I'm not looking for it anymore" holds true here? And also how no obnoxious billboards were involved?
Even if it is an "ad", it's in an appropriate place - on openstreetmap, in the "fuel" category, and searchable by gps coordinates. I can toggle whether I want things in the 'fuel' category to be visible in my gps software very easily - I can turn that "ad" off with exactly 2 button presses if it bugs me. It's not a huge obnoxious billboard blocking my view of the countryside, lit up with 10000W of lights at night time.
When's the last time you stopped for food or gas on a road trip and used billboards rather than a maps app to help you choose a place to stop?
Nearly every time I go on a road trip and find myself low on gas or hungry.
Mucking with apps while driving isn't particularly safe.
12 days ago, driving thru North Carolina. Several times.
Gas and another restrooms.
If you're looking for restrooms, did you use billboards or the road signs that advertise rest stops or gas?
You sound like an ad exec. I never want ads ever, they are by their nature intrusive. I have never bought anything from a targeted ad on social media. If one plays and I can't turn down the volume quick enough I will make noise to avoid hearing it.
If an ad is placed in a way that forces you to look at it you have every right to want to remove it. If it's in my personal power, I do.
If it didn’t work on people companies wouldn’t spend hundreds of billions of dollars on ads. Everyone says the same thing that ads don’t work on them but the data says otherwise.
Have you read those comments about how people who says ads don't work on them fail to realize it works on them subconsciously when they go shopping?
I actively avoid products I see mass market advertising for. It’s a useful heuristic, if you see a YouTube advertising campaign you can basically guarantee the product is poor value for the money. That extends to basically all name brand products like soap.
Cheap signs along the road don’t trip that heuristic because they cost so little it doesn’t change the underlying economics.
I too use the metric of seeing a YouTube sponsor or ad usually means it's bad.
I was actually interested in some of those privacy/info removal services but after doing research found those to - as you said - lack value for the money.
How does an ad being on YouTube mean it's a bad product?
It’s an economic argument. The product could be fit for purpose, ie Nord VPN could work just fine.
However when you’re advertising a VPN on a cooking channel the cost per customer is quite high so they need to recuperate that high cost by charging extra. This is more true the longer the advertising campaign runs and the less a channel is related to the product, each of which drive up new customer acquisitions costs.
Obviously it’s not a perfect predictor, but it doesn’t need to be.
Ok, this makes sense. But then how would people market their product then?
Marketing overall doesn’t need to be effective marketing to me. It really depends on the product and strategy, YouTube can sell anything other options need to be product specific.
Being the value option is enabled by lower advertising spend but it also needs less advertising spend because it doesn’t look overpriced in comparison. PR firms for example may be able to get a few articles written quietly pushing your product. https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html However spending 100x as much doesn’t get you 100x as many articles. Diminishing returns hit hard and YouTube or other mass market advertisers is low on that list.
Companies can employ multiple strategies, Lexis and Toyota are car brands under the same entity targeting essentially completely different customers bases with two completely independent advertising budgets.
If a product needs to pay people to talk about it, it must not have organic buzz and popularity. Think VPNs sponsoring YouTubers, or those cheap wireless earbuds from a small brand. I wouldn't trust their quality.
Exactly why I do not own any Apple or Google products or have any subscription services. Advertise to me products I can not actually own or control for myself and I hate you.
Personally my guess for VPN, earbuds, food delivery is that the quality is fine but it costs an extra 50% to pay for the ads.
Such a claim needs evidence; by its nature, it insulates itself from counter-arguments based on experience.
If person X says "ads don't work on me", the state "I experience no influence from ads because they don't work" is indistinguishable from "I experience no influence from ads because they're so sneaky that they only affect me subconsciously".
Unfortunately, it's very hard to get individual-level evidence. You can get population-level evidence, but sometimes that evidence shows that the ads don't actually work (for instance, The Correspondent's 2019 articles about the subject).
Which is borderline nonsense nowadays. If this were another website, I'd convey it thru the meme of SpongeBob showing Patrick all the diapers* with captions of "sports betting" "pokemon speculation" "monetization in games" with maybe the last panel being "diamonds are valuable"
They have always had powerful psychological tools but they are next level nowadays. Best to just avoid.
* https://i.imgflip.com/2yg87r.png
(I don't think pokemon intentionally wants such a toxic secondary market tbf)
I think you are complaining about the signs that happen inside cities particularly on roads where traffic gets backed up and slow. Beyond that it's gas/food/hotels/motels/tourist attractions... and religious speech. But in urban areas where it's AC repair, plumbers, injury lawyers or whatever lets be real: you're not missing much of a view.
> We don't hate billboards because of their irrelevancy. We hate billboards because they're giant ugly attention grabbers that make the world look worse for everybody in exchange for making someone money. If the billboards were all about driving-related products, they'd still suck.
I like billboards when I'm driving down an interstate and I want to decide if I should get off at the next stop and I want to know what food options there are. (example: Driving down I5 from SF to LA). I like billboards when they tell me about an attraction coming up. (Winchester House has a billboard) I like billboards when they advertize concerts/entertainers. (Driving down the I15 from Ontario to Oceanside there are ads for who's playing at Yaamava (https://www.yaamava.com/yaamava-theater), Pala (https://www.palacasino.com/entertainment/upcoming-concerts/), etc...
> We don't hate billboards because of their irrelevancy. We hate billboards because they're giant ugly attention grabbers
If you read the rest of the paragraph it becomes clear that this is what was meant by irrelevant.
It’s probably stretching the meaning of the word, I think obtrusive would fit better.
No it’s using the common usage of the word irrelevant rather than the ad industry term of art. In common usage, almost all ads are irrelevant unless they simply help you find what you were already looking for (like a search ad leading to the exact website you were searching for).
The ad that convinces you to buy something you hadn’t thought of before (while watching a video related to that topic) would be considered relevant by the ad industry. But that’s still irrelevant in common usage because you were watching a video, not shopping.
> If we liked them, we'd seek them out, and we'd call them something else, like "movie trailers" or "Super Bowl ads."
I like these things but I do not seek them out.
Many people do, though. I've heard people say proudly that they "only watch the Super Bowl for the ads".
> keeping it from us until they we do something we don't want to do (pay for the service).
Fixed that for you.
I pay for youtube with generous monthly donations to ad-block devs and list maintainers... Also how about all the ads on paid services now?
Oh and I pay for plenty of services just not from vampires like youtube who rip off the actual talent and hold their audience captive.
Arrr Matey, the sails may have been luffin but they be full again!
[flagged]
> That’s not how the economy works.
Kind of seems like how the economy works quite a lot of the time
How do those people end up making money if nobody wants what they are selling.
In the case of advertising that is the million dollar question. Determining the relationship between ad spend and revenue is next to impossible, whatever bullshit ad companies feed you to get you to spend more on ads.
> If the billboards were all about driving-related products
Well, I don't complain about road signs.
The road signs are also unwelcome eye sores. However, they provide a lot of value by achieving safer road traffic so we tolerate them.
That value still needs to be compared and evaluated for delivering information vs delivering annoyance. If information were delivered by giant, flashing, multicolored road signs every 50 meters the answer would be different. My 2c.
Precisely. Thank you.
Road signs are relevant so we dont complain about them despite being an ugly eyesore.
We don’t complain not because road signs, in addition to being an eye sore, are relevant to our current activity, but because they provide significant value.
While relevance has some correlation to value, that correlation is pretty weak; it is easy to find examples of high relevance and very negative value. We should not conflate those.
Your opponent (with whom I agree) argued that the problem with most YT ads and billboards is negative value. Which will stay even if google makes them relevant. My 2c.
It seems we have a slightly different definition of 'relevant'.
Regardless, we all agree: roadsigns are ugly but ok, billboards are just plain bad.
Good point. I assumed relevance was approximately similar to the correlation, without a strong assumption on the signs. Which is just my interpretation, not a universal definition.
Here in the UK we have several campaigns for reducing 'street clutter', which includes excessive use of road signs.
>> that make the world look worse for everybody in exchange for making someone money.
There are places where billboards act as rather effective sound barriers, shielding quiet neighborhoods from road noise.
Trees, dissipating sound instead of reflecting it, are even more effective.
How can dissipating be more effective than reflecting? Wouldn't you need multiple dense rows of trees to reach the efficacy of a single pane of sound-reflecting material?
Impedance matching (dissipation) converts more energy into heat while also reflecting and transmitting energy as sound waves.
I highly doubt a billboard is thick or dense enough to effectively block freeway sound. It’s not like you have a seamless wall of billboards “protecting” a neighborhood
It'll block some. It's not generally big enough to be effective.
A solid, tall, wall of wood ... Like maybe a fence? Many small towns put up fences to keep highway noise out. The residents don't see the billboards, not from their side. Only the drivers ripping by notice them.
Found marketing director of an ad agency.
> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.[1]
> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email [email protected] and we'll look at the data.[1]
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
It's a joke, calm your knickers.
Then build a sound barrier , no need for an advertisement on them. Or decorate it with art if you want to make them less ugly.
Do you know what's better on those surfaces than ads? Art. Or nothing.
This is some weird shilling for capitalism or weird devil's advocate tbh. Don't feel like you have to find solutions or positive sides to everything you see on the internet. Billboards are visual noise, road noise is audible noise, neither is desireable.
And I'm sure the rural landowners dont care a jot about the opinions of drivers flying past on the highway. Nobody is going to pay them to not put up ads.
Nothing is wrong with billboards, I can look the other way. When the billboards show up on my dashboard and I have to stare at it before I can turn off my exit then we have problems
I don’t mind watching a video with an ad. My child and I can preoccupy ourself. When it’s a 90 second ad we are forced to watch just to watch a 45 second video I’m gonna make certain we don’t watch that ad
Why should I have to look the other way? It's the billboard that's an imposition, an intrusion, and a nuisance. (Especially when there are multiple)
https://www.amusingplanet.com/2013/07/sao-paulo-city-with-no...
> Nothing is wrong with billboards.
Elaborate.
Benefit of the doubt that perhaps that was the entirety of the comment at the time you posted this reply, but they did elaborate if you could take the time to read the whole thing:
> Nothing is wrong with billboards, I can look the other way. When the billboards show up on my dashboard and I have to stare at it before I can turn off my exit then we have problems
> I don’t mind watching a video with an ad. My child and I can preoccupy ourself. When it’s a 90 second ad we are forced to watch just to watch a 45 second video I’m gonna make certain we don’t watch that ad
As spoken by thousands of tech companies over and over - if only the ads were more relevant, users would like them! No, they never will. That's because an advert is effectively an unasked-for imposition on my attention intended to benefit somebody else more than it benefits me (should it be considered to benefit me at all). There's a name for behaviour like that: rude.
I am not blind to commercial imperatives, but expecting people to ever feel anything more positive than low-level irritation with advertising is unrealistic. People do not like feeling that others matter more than them, particularly where money is involved. Spaces without adverts in them, whether physical or virtual, are simply more mentally enjoyable to people than those with them. Imagine one of the worlds wonders, natural or otherwise. Imagine the Acropolis, the Coliseum, the Buddha of Leshan - or Lake Annecy, or the Great Barrier Reef, or the Amazon. Now try and imagine a single advert which is so wonderful that it would improve any of them, contextual or otherwise. You can't, and you won't. They're pollution that we tolerate.
> That's because an advert is effectively an unasked-for imposition on my attention intended to benefit somebody else more than it benefits me
"Adverts" are a pretty incoherent category here. There are a lot of things that are technically advertising — placement of a product, or informational content about that product, paid for by some company's marketing department — that most people would never think to call "an ad."
For example, the end-caps in a grocery store? Ad space, auctioned off by the retailer each month!
But you're already shopping, looking for things you need, comparing brands; and these end-caps are effectively just putting things you might have been looking for anyway, where you'll find them sooner. So people don't tend to think of these as ads.
(They are ads, insofar as they succeed in getting many people to never go to the regular place in the store where that thing is, and therefore never doing a fair compare-and-contrast of the product to its alternatives, being swayed by alternatives that might be running sales, etc.)
But do they steal your time? No, in fact the opposite; if you pay attention to products on store end-caps at all, and ever buy anything from them, then they mostly will end up saving you a tiny bit of time. So consumers don't tend to perceive these as ads.
---
Now take this one little bit further: sponsored search results. These sometimes feel like ads and sometimes don't.
If you think about it, sponsored search results are a lot like store end-caps... except that their existence makes the regular "store shelves" of the SERP page take longer to get to.
If they end up showing you the thing you were actually looking for (as they might if you're searching for a specific brand, and that brand has paid-for placement for their own name — perhaps to defend against others placing for their name; or perhaps they're bad at SEO and their website ranks badly in the organic SERPs for their own name) then these sponsored SERPs feel like they performed a genuine service for you.
Likewise, if they end up showing you something better than what you were looking for (as they might if the organic listings, ranked by SEO-ness, end up ordered askew to actual product value or popularity; while the sponsored listings, ranked by auction, end up ordered by, essentially, the paying company's stock price, and thereby by how much consumers already interact with them), then you also might come away pleased with the existence of these "ads."
But the other maybe 90% of the time, they look and feel and act like ads — things less-relevant than the organic SERPs, that you want to just get out of the way of the search — and so are perceived as ads.
---
And now, consider, say, the catalog of other products available for purchase, that used to come in-box with products from some manufacturers. You'd buy e.g. a LEGO set, or a couch from Sears, and end up with a glorified flyer telling you about all their other products — often in much greater detail than you'd get by viewing the products in a retail store. (This has been mostly superseded by the existence of online stores and product unboxing+review videos — but it's still a good object lesson.)
Were these catalogs, ads? Maybe. Probably the majority of people who received such a catalog never ordered anything from it, and had their time wasted having to dispose of it. But because these catalogs were being sent to people who the manufacturer knew already had shown willingness to purchase from them, it's likely that a much larger percentage of people were "called to action" by these catalogs than by what you'd normally think of as an advertisement.
And, in fact people sometimes would just read this type of "ad" for fun: fantasizing about things they might one day own! (I recall doing this myself, as a child, with certain toy-brand catalogs)
---
One more turn of the screw: is a movie or TV show that stands on its own as a work of entertainment, but which was made at least in part with the motivation of getting people interested in purchasing things from the franchise licensor's universe of branded products... an ad?
Certainly, back in the 80s, when advertising laws were more lax, and there were kids' cartoons running untrammeled with "integrated" advertising: embedding ads for the merchandise itself; showing the equivalent merch in the show; etc — there was every reason to call those shows "ads."
But is Hello Kitty and Friends (2020) an ad?
Now, if you said yes to that, try again with: is a Marvel movie an ad?
If you said yes + no: what's the difference? Prestige?
Yeah, you're right, "adverts" as a catch-all term is doing a lot of heavy lifting there, and it's not focused enough. And thank you for a clearly, deeply considered reply!
You raise some interesting points, and I'm probably pretty unusual in finding most of those things even low-grade annoying (I am genuinely slightly irked by producers having influence over store merchandising because I'd rather be free to try and choose products which genuinely suit my needs rather than having my attention nudged by certain products being shoved into my eye line).
Movies are about the only one of those areas where I'd be hesitant, but that's mainly because I'd say yes, Hello Kitty is basically an ad, and Marvel Movies... I'm not sure. I'd say the movies themselves would be worth making financially without the merchandising spinoffs, and so they can be considered a product in themselves (and perhaps also because I've never bought a single item of Marvel merch despite having seen many of the films). But you're right to point out that in many cases the line is blurry. That said, for things like YouTube - it isn't blurry in the slightest, in most cases!
I totally disagree. There have once or twice been adverts that I've seen where I've thought "yes! I do want one of those!". Obviously I like those adverts.
If there really was a way to magically make all adverts relevant then yes - users would like them!
But that's a totally impossible ask. Not only do websites mostly have no idea what's relevant to me (even with all the tracking) but they obviously have huge financial pressure to show me crap that I wouldn't ever want.
So, yes. Relevant advertising is good, but also basically impossible.
I'm not sure we're actually disagreeing that much, but I will say: even if you show me something I love, in a way that I appreciate, but you do it in a time or place where I don't want that thing? That's still an imposition. So in a way we agree because time + place + content + style is something that is not possible to get right. There will never be an advert brilliant or relevant enough to make me happy that you showed it to me while skiing in the Norwegian mountains, or while watching my child enjoy their birthday party. Most cases are less extreme, but then most adverts are much worse - the scale will never be tipped the right way.
Even if it is something I would like if a friend told me about it, if I am bombarded by ads I hate it and often will find or make an alternative.
The primary thing that makes advertisements disagreeable is their irrelevance.
Bane: For you
I dislike them because they're loud, flashy, annoying, and (most of all) because YT saturates them. It even tries to put them in the middle of songs when it detects a transitional pause. And they are served so often. It's literally worse than broadcast TV, which is an incredibly low bar to step over.
Platforms should not allow advertisers free speech. They should limit the content to static imagery/shots, dissolves, and spoken narration, ie the form rather than the content. Don't tell it can't work, this was how adwords worked on Google Search for years and everyone made handsome profits. Advertising is cancer if allowed to go full spectrum. The people who work at Youtube should be deeply ashamed of what they have allowed it to become and the trash monetization incentives they've established.
They’re disagreeable because you’re having your attention robbed unsolicited for the purpose of someone else trying to get your money. The whole concept is an insult. At best they drive materialism.
You're trading your attention for entertainment you don't otherwise have to pay for.
Not true, cable TV runs ads and costs money. Many sports channels cost money in a cable package and still have ads. The *paid* Netflix plans have ads now.
It’s pretty clear that companies can’t stop salivating over how lucrative ads are, and will continue to shove ads down our throats inside of paid products as long as we live.
OK, but we're very specifically discussing YouTube here, which as discussed, you don't have to pay for; but if you do, you don't see ads.
Except, you do.
https://www.howtogeek.com/more-ads-are-coming-to-youtube-pre...
Clearly they are referring to the ad-free plan, not the cheaper ad-subsidized plan.
If you do, you don’t see pre-roll and mid-roll ads. You still see embedded ads, sponsor mentions, “all the tools we used are linked below”, etc.
That's on the video creator, not YouTube. Just tell them to stop or you won't watch their videos anymore.
...for now. But I do wonder how well this statement will age.
All of the people commenting on this thread will be dead and buried one day. That's how well all of this will age.
Society used to have the wisdom to plant trees for its children to sit under. On the whole I think I like that attitude a lot better than this "apres moi, le deluge" thinking we see so much of now.
Ad subsidized is not the same as ad free.
Many hybrid products/services exist to lower costs by taking on some ads. The low tier Netflix plans and $200 smart TVs are examples of this.
Sports TV is just a monopolist scam though.
You do in the end because you're buying the products that are funding the ads.
I completely agree, though with a twist. Google knows everything about me and yet I get ADs for things that I would never purchase. Just because I'm a middle aged male I see trucks, and beer, and football advertisements all day long. Those are irrelevant to me. If Google would only use their immense knowledge of me and what I like, I might be more amenable to watching their ADs. Where are the ADs for geeky movies that I might enjoy (is there a new Superman movie coming out)? Or books by my favorite authors? Or video games or computer equipment or electric cars? Hell, I have grandkids so stuff for them might work on me.
To be clear, it's not only Google, all the big providers have so much information on all of us, but they don't seem to take advantage of it at all. I've turned the AD "customization" on/off for all kinds of things and it doesn't seem to matter in the slightest. Nearly everything I see is irrelevant to me.
Their incentive is to make money, not serve you relevant ads.
If a geeky movie studio pays X to show an ad to people of your profile, while a car manufacturer pays X*2, Google is better off showing you the car, even if they are internally 100% sure you'd buy the movie instead.
The next Superman movie might correctly conclude that you’re going to go see it anyway, so advertising it to the hypothetical you isn’t very valuable.
I could be wrong but I was under the impression that ads paid primarily per click, in which case surely the relevancy is important too?
Even if they pay per impression, pricing is ultimately driven by clicks.
Even if you pay-per-view of an ad, a company selling tampons will not pay as much for 1 thousand views of their ads on a youtube channel for construction workers, as on a youtube channel for girl's fashion. Because the former drives no clicks/revenue, and the latter does.
So yes relevance is extremely relevant to make money.
In many cases the buyer pays per impression.
> Just because I'm a middle aged male I see trucks, and beer, and football advertisements all day long
Well, yeah. Those companies will pay to send their ad to all middle aged men. Those companies could slice and dice more to get better demographics, but they don't think it's worth it.
Google's business isn't to slice and dice the demographics to show you better ads. It's to slice and dice the demographics in any way that the advertisers will pay for.
Because the people who are willing to pay money are, ultimately, the customers.
The ads probably get to you subconsciously anyway, IIRC there are studies done by psychology experts (some of them also work for the ad industry) that explains the presence of random ads.
For one thing, if you're suddenly in the market for a truck, you'll see the brand that was in an ad a long time ago and you think "Oh yeah I've heard of Ford, never heard of Isuzu, let's look at the Ford much closer.". Even a tiny nudge that the ad did helps, when selling to millions. Obviously a truck is a big purchase, and you individually probably would do more research, but the nudge applied to millions might move the needle in the heads of a few dozen people.
It's an established strategy to serve you irrelevant ads. When the targeting gets too specific, the people start to notice and panic.
Target is a fun example - they had cases where they revealed pregnancies through targeted ads. Now, they'll put an ad of a lawnmower (untargeted) next to the bassinet (targeted) and customers are less creeped out
Idk of it is a strategy, would be interested for any background reading.
My XP at an ad-tech is that there is only so many targeted ads, and the advertisers cap how many times they want to show you an ad. When it comes time to bid to show you an ad, all of the targeted ads might have exhausted their campaigns (shown you the ad X times already, or the campaign ran out of spend). In this case, all the advertisers that would bid a _lot_ in auction are sitting out. There are still other bidders, but these are less targeted and are bidding less money. Because the highly targetted ads are exhausted, these lower targeted ads might look random. Their targeting might be instead of based on gender, city, income, the targeting might be based on just geography. The fewer targeting parameters, the lower the bid.
In effect, once all the highpy targeted campaigns are done with you, they stop bidding, and the ads with less targeting which have cheaper bids are now the auction winners. If those are exhausted too, then there is a very large pool of low rent ads which have even less targetting.
Here's a skeptical write-up about the mailers I was referencing. I like this view because it acknowledges human fallacies. For example, that an untargeted ad could feel targeted or that we may exaggerate the amount of ads that feel targeted.
https://medium.com/@colin.fraser/target-didnt-figure-out-a-t...
It’s better they don’t. Hyper-targeting of ads to achieve political aims has been happening for the past decade with Meta leading the way.
There is zero situation where this technology doesn’t get co-opted by adverse interests to make your life measurably worse.
Better to keep them dumb and then grow a regulatory spine to put a stop to the endless proliferation of ads. It was done for advertising on other media.
> Google knows everything about me
No it doesn't. Google is highly restrained when it comes to using what it knows about you to serve you ads. Way more restrained than for example Meta or the newer Chinese apps like TikTok.
I agree with your point, but you're also making a different argument than the point you're replying to. Google knows way more about you than they're legally able to apply to advertising. Just because they can't use it for that specific purpose doesn't mean they lack the information.
Is there a reason? Is it a matter of principle or?
I would like to see a advertisement for “The C Programming Language - ANSI edition”. Yes I have a copy but would like to see it advertised on YouTube. Wish my copy was signed :/
You don't get it. You are not the target
Most advertising is seeking the less intelligent consumer. Or the young and still naive consumer.
They outnumber you 1 million to 1.
It's why female musicians make more money putting their name to a makeup brand then their music.
It's why Elon will make some promise that is unrealistic.
It's why Apple put low paid everyday tech support staff in their stores and called them Geniuses.
You have to put yourself in the shoes of the mainstream buyer. They see a headline and believe it.
Couldn’t youtube easily discern those who are young and naive from those who aren’t so that the latter don’t get ads? It would be a win-win for everyone: youtube spends less (no need to spend bandwidth), companies dont get hated that much, non-naive-young consumers are not bombarded with ads.
People are known to buy stuff on eBay when they are drunk. So they don't want to miss out on opportunism!!
But lots of companies are now allowing people to pay to not see ads.
Anecdotally, YouTube will show to boomer home owners scam solar product ads which they'd never show their younger, more scam-resistant counterparts. So they at least make some adjustment.
Also wouldn't we farm & sell our ad-free accounts
PS: maybe they could just show us Coke ads, whichever ubiquitous brands necessarily advertise to stay in our consciousness etc.
> It would be a win-win for everyone
Not the naive young ones. Who are also the prime target for radicalisation.
Spot on. As technically apt people, we grossly overestimate the technical ability of the average user.
Well said.
> I don't complain about advertisements at Costco because that would be insane. I complain about the advertisements on Youtube because they're irrelevant and weird but somehow normalized.
They're normalized because we've been conditioned over many decades to accept them.
We were psychologically manipulated to associate brands with specific feelings engineered by advertising firms. Cigarettes were "torches of freedom". The Marlboro Man was a symbol of masculinity and confidence. Coca-Cola was the happy Christmas drink. Ads with catchphrases became cultural phenomena: "Just do it", "Whasssuuuuup", and so on.
We watched ads on cable TV even though we were paid subscribers. We watched 30 minutes of ads before a movie in the cinema. We read ads in newspapers and magazines even though we paid for them, and then when we could get them for "free", we liked even more paying with our attention than our money. We consumed TV and radio shows where "brought to you by" was just part of the content. We accepted ~20 minutes of ads for every hour of TV we watched.
So it was natural for advertising to also take over the internet. With the technology built for advertisers by very smart people who got rich in the process, they're able to create campaigns that target potential buyers much more accurately. They can build profiles of people in various invasive, shady and inventive ways, and their profits have never been higher because of it.
Never mind the fact that the same technology is used to manipulate people into thinking and acting in certain ways unrelated to their purchasing behavior, and that this is largely responsible for corrupting democratic processes, toppling governments, and the sociopolitical instability of the past decade. Several birds, one stone.
You can also pay for YouTube. I do. It’s nice, not crazy expensive. No ads. Creators get paid. Everyone wins.
You lose on long run. In few years, you will pay more and still watch ads while YT will no longer be free. (let me remind you of video streaming services)
Managers want their rewards that are tied to earnings and stockholders want to earn more.
And once they both get their money, the next year reward will be tied to even more earnings. And stockholders will want to earn more.
I’ve paid for YouTube Premium from the beginning (remember YouTube Red?) and it has been a mostly great service for 10+ years. The value I get is vastly greater than Netflix or any other streaming service. But if they ever start putting ads in the paid subscriptions (like many streaming services now with their basic tier) I’ll jump ship.
Yep, you were a test project. Will people pay for free content or punish them by leaving the platform. And will they start to pay if you increase number of ads. Now they moved to next stage.
Anyway, not there yet. Frog is boiled slowly, slow enough that people dont notice until it is to late.
First they need to kill ad blockers tier. Then you increase number of ads to unbearable (they are already doing that) and get as much people as possible to paid content. Also market must be ripe enough, so there will be no more ships to jump. Then you will get ads, different tiers to pay, segmentation of content etc.
I hear you, but I can only live in the now and not whatifs. I refuse to watch ads and will pay to avoid them. If a service I use makes that impossible, then I’ll no longer use the service.
And there is more content in the world right now than any single person will ever be able to consume. I have zero concerns about dropping a service.
But you don't need to drop a service. You can keep it as good as it is. You just don't reward google predatory tactics by paying, as you are literally making YT worse.
YouTube sucks because it works for advertisers, not users.
If everyone just paid like you pay for anything else in life, YouTube would work for users, and be dramatically better.
Unsurprisingly, the people who consume resources while giving nothing back are the ones making it suck the most.
In theory, yes. In practice, Google's core business is selling ads, not selling access to movies.
But that is exactly the business they are trying to morph YouTube into. If we agree that being exposed to persuasion always has negative value, then ads are bad. Watching ads is the only behavior that causes them to persist. If everyone blocked them, YouTube would go out of business or switch entirely a paid model. If everyone paid, then they switched to a paid model already. The only choice the causes ads to persist and increase is to both refuse to pay, refuse to block, and still watch. So don't do that.
> But that is exactly the business they are trying to morph YouTube into.
They had so much time to do that, yet TFA is about ads getting more aggressive, not less.
> Noone goes there anymore, it's too crowded.
So if I don't pay and I don't want to watch ads then what? I'm not going to jump through mental gymnastics to not pay creators and Google for offering the service. If you truly don't want to reward Google, then don't use anything from Google.
How did it work until now? Anyway, we both know that care for "creators" is "think of the children" thing, but I will play along: pay them using patreon (or, I have bought this: https://theduranshop.com/the-duran-gold-eagle-premium-t-shir..., triple time overpriced but they deserve it).
For Google, don't worry. You have payed them, with your data, thousand times over. And if you stop providing today, your existing data will be exploitable for years to come.
On top of it, by paying, you create a direct trail from watched video (data) to your account, from there to your credit card and from credit card to physical person. So you are giving them even more data.
Anyway, if Google goes bankrupt, because of you, you can consider yourself a saint.
Someone who has really done something very good for the whole planet and human society.
I will lit a candle each day into your honor.
So what's your alternative if I don't want ads (content is not free to make), want the creators to be paid, and paying for premium is tempting YouTube to abuse pricing? (or so you say)
Block the adverts, and pay the creators via Patreon. And join Nebula to build other alternatives.
Are they paid now? What are you fixing by paying, if nothing is broken (yet)?
Not sure what you mean. I was a test subject? The test still seems to be ongoing after 10 years. I fail to understand how any of these alleged experiments involve me.
Exactly, it's the enshittification trajectory as explained by Cory Doctorow. Without laws and regulations that stop companies from doing that, it's inevitable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification#Examples
If he had used YouTube premium for a hundred years you would still say the same? Ten years is longer than world war two lasted.
> I’ve paid for YouTube Premium from the beginning (remember YouTube Red?) and it has been a mostly great service for 10+ years.
I struggle to see the difference between Youtube Premium and regular Youtube with the exception of ads.
It's the same shitty recommendation algorithm. It's the same "you will watch shorts or else". It's the same nerfed unusable search. It's the same "we randomly decided that your bandwidth isn't enough, here's a 480p version of the video you're currently watching".
Yes, it’s mostly just the ads. There are some nice-to-haves like video downloads and background audio on the iOS app. I almost never use search, recommendations, or shorts, but I’m sure you’re right to criticize those features.
Can you download the videos to mp4 or is it some proprietary DRM thing that only plays on YouTube? If not that just sounds like a worse version of yt-dlp
https://github.com/TeamNewPipe/NewPipe
I've stopped recommending this (except for in-person to friends) because it's so valuable, and I'm seriously worried about it getting stomped by YouTube.
By this logic you lose in long term no matter what you do.
If you pay premium: they'll add ads to premium too.
If you watch ads: they'll add more ads.
If you use ad-blocker: they'll embed ads into the video.
If you use another platform: the said platform will need to monetize and you are back to square one.
You just described the evolution of every streaming platform out there
> If you use ad-blocker: they'll embed ads into the video.
Someone will eventually make an AI adblocker that will dynamically update the video with all ads removed or replaced. For example, let's say that I specify to my AI streaming video editor that "detect all bottles and glasses with alcohol and replace their contents with water and their labels with Liquid Death"
Similar technology will be/is already used to e.g. display a Coke can for some markets and a Beer can for other markets, depending on who paid for that market.
I’ll switch to Nebula if that ever happens.
Content creators have no loyalty to YouTube and will share their content elsewhere when YouTube annoys their paying fans.
There is no if. This is how corporate greed works.
What will happen is, that content creators will spread to different providers, that also have managers and stockholders/owners.
Look what Netflix was like and how many various payable video streaming providers you have now. More than you are prepared to pay for content.
In few years, you will be torrenting content that today you watch for free.
And only because people decided to pay, showing the world that there is money to be made in YT model.
Yes, businesses want money. The point is that YouTube has no leverage on creators. they have to play nice because the barrier to entry is nil as competitors already exist in Twitch, Dailymotion, Nebula, Vimeo, Dropout, etc.
None of that helps you if you want it to be free, but for those of us willing to pay, we can happily ally with creators if YouTube gets shitty.
That’s how it’s supposed to work. It’s a good deal now and I’m happy to take it. None of that matters if you are comparing it to piracy… obviously.
We will see how prepared you will be to pay, where each of creators you watch will be on different network and you will have to pay for each network $10/month, while you watch 20 creators.
Again, this is nothing new. It already happened with video streaming, where Youtube now is Netflix then.
This already happened with Dropout.tv when college humor left YouTube.
Yes, it ain’t perfect. The alternative is the creator literally stop making videos. YouTube is already not serving ads for demonetized videos. People doing it for the love of filmmaking can already do it for free.
No, the alternative is that you DONT pay. That you deliberately not do what is the easiest move(1) and on top of that even feel special for doing it. That you suffer a short time for better next. That you fight them with technical means. That you vote with your wallet, squeeze your teeth hard and show them you just wont pay and they will lose ad watcher if they show more ads.
And now you will tell, that people are not disciplined enough for that, that majority wont pass the marshmallow(2) experiment? That some Mike Judge movie was actually documentary?
Yes, I know.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Booby_trap , A common trick is to provide victims with a simple solution to a problem, for example, leaving only one door open in an otherwise secure building, luring them straight toward the firing mechanism
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_marshmallow_experimen...
How do creators get paid under your rubric?
They already get 55% of revenues at YouTube which is basically the highest percentage in any creator industry. How do we pay creators under your rubric and allow them to be discovered?
Looks like it worked and it works, without any changes, while the number of views is keeping their earnings to small group that will not increase as there is not infinite number of time to watch the movies. And dont "creators" me. It is about google earning more money for their stockholders and managment collecting their rewards, not about "think of the children".
>And dont "creators" me. It is about google earning more money for their stockholders and managment collecting their rewards, not about "think of the children".
Classic consumer-only socialist. You have no model for production except business is bad. If you care about labor then you care about labor getting paid. So far you've demonstrated that you have no model of paying content creators. You would rather they go away then actually pay for their services. You pretend you should be able to get it for free. If you have no model of production, then you have no model.
No, it is much simpler. Success of a company is not limited on constant growth of profit but rather of providing to workers and owners a normal life.
And in our case, it is paid in current model (actually even in model with less ads). It doesn't need any growth of profit.
Everything else is pure greed. Now the question opens, are you paying for videos or greed?
What's a "normal life"? And who gets to decide that?
> And in our case, it is paid in current model (actually even in model with less ads). It doesn't need any growth of profit.
Who are you to decide that?
Looks like the planet will. It has already started to sanitize flee infestation called humanity. And, contrary to what it was told to you, planet is fine. Nothing wrong with it. Scratching. And will joyfully survive for millions years to come. We wont.
You have no model for how labor gets paid.
Sure I do, by suckers watching ads, like it always was.
The whole thing about Google is that they are not software company (as people like to falsely believe), they are advertising company, financing everything else from ads. Including search, youtube, android, gmail and all other side projects.
And those side projects brings them data, to advertise more efficiently.
Now, seeing a trend to monetize their side toys is just pure greed, they don't really need that.
This is also the reason, why no one can compete with them. As competing with free products is impossible unless you have side financing.
By the way, did you (and everyone else) maybe read this study? https://insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu/article/leave_my_br... It is very eye opening.
Your model for paying labor is "Other people should pay, but I shouldn't have to pay." That fails the basic categorical imperative.
It worked until now for, what, 20 years? And it worked very well, check Google stock.
Don't be afraid, they have calculated people not paying into the strategy.
And it wont stop working because you wont pay Google extra money. But it will become worse for most of people, including you, if you set yourself into position of slave and pay, confirming their theory that they can exploit you so much more.
Btw, did you check the link? You should really learn from it.
"vote with your wallet" is like trickle down economics, it's like if only everyone used paper straws we could prevent climate catastrophy. Split up FANGM should be the bare minimum.
It is not, but discipline is needed instead consumerism. And every half intelligent marketing guy will make it harder than to just pay. Paper straws you mentioned are just paper straws.
Splitting should happen 10 years ago. I doubt it will have any special impact now.
> Paper straws you mentioned are just paper straws
No they are the decipline you are talking about, the delusion is, if everyone used paper straws we would save the ecological destruction of the oceans. The structural problems of endless profit maximization machines can not be addressed by appealing to individual action.
> Splitting should happen 10 years ago. I doubt it will have any special impact now.
That depends on the amount of pieces, don't you think?
Ok, I wanted to avoid it, but since you didnt understand, paper straws are just straw men. They have absolutely nothing with voting with wallet, it is just some lame scenario, comparable at nothing and kicked instead of the real thing.
Or said differently: plastic straws are only a minor part in ocean pollution, while people not voting with their wallet is the main reason for all corporate shenanigans we are experiencing.
And yes, I agree it depends on number of pieces, but I don't put any trust into USA as state, even without Trump, being able to persecute billion $ corporation.
> while people not voting with their wallet is the main reason for all corporate shenanigans we are experiencing
That's what I'm getting at is wrong. The paper straws are an analogy, if everyone stopped driving cars and lived in the woods we could reduce carbon emissions significantly, therefore the reason we can't stop climate change is people not voting with their wallets. Everything is people not voting with their wallets, it applies to everything, that's why it applies to nothing.
If you are having troubles understanding, you can read more about it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man
Most of your suggestions are fiction but tiktok and insta are real competitors to YouTube shorts.
I’m glad there’s competition for the one part of YouTube that I dislike even more than the ads.
Content creators have loyalty to the magic money tree on the internet, they will shake as many of the trees they can, right down to begging for $1 from every 'fan' to add to the $50,000 they make a month.
Number of video streaming services who have removed their ad free tiers: zero.
I think paying for Youtube will increase the chances of my Google account getting banned. I've never heard of Google banning somebody for rejecting adverts. But if I pay them money, there's a chance there will be a problem with the payments, and that risks triggering false positives on automatic fraud detection. If that happens I assume I would be banned with no recourse and no human intervention. The safest thing to do is never change how you interact with Google in any way unless you absolutely have to.
I don't like depending on Google in this way but I've had a Gmail account for a very long time and changing to a different email address would be a major inconvenience.
> I think paying for Youtube will increase the chances of my Google account getting banned. [...] The safest thing to do is never change how you interact with Google in any way unless you absolutely have to. I don't like depending on Google in this way but I've had a Gmail account for a very long time and changing to a different email address would be a major inconvenience.
I recall that even logging into Youtube with your Google account could have that danger: if for some reason Google decided that your name isn't your real name, under its "real names" policy your whole account could get banned, even from other services like Gmail and Google Talk. It's for that reason that I've been very careful to never log into Youtube with my Gmail account, even though that account always used my real name, and even though Google+'s deep integration with YouTube is AFAIK no longer relevant.
The value I get for paying YouTube doesn't match the price.
Ad blocking is already free and was free for two decades, why would I want to start paying for it now? It's not like I am breaking ToS (despite their pop-ups stating otherwise) and even if I did it is my computer and it is entirely up to me what kind of content it is and isn't going to display.
Personally I don't care if creators get paid or not, I have enough financial problems as it is and I have no capacity to add the problems of complete strangers on the internet to the pile.
Everyone wins aside from me, the end user. I am paying for something that is already free to do, I get nothing out of it (I still have to run stuff like Sponsorblock to get the content I actually want) and I participate in the upkeep of a business model that not only doesn't have my interests in mind but also has no issues with tricking me (there is no content moderation for YouTube ads and there are plenty of cases in which users are served scam ads).
> Personally I don't care if creators get paid or not, I have enough financial problems as it is and I have no capacity to add the problems of complete strangers on the internet to the pile.
Then stop watching youtube. You're just free-riding on the backs of whatever mechanisms exist to motivate the people who make videos to keep doing so. Plenty of other things to do in life other than watch videos you think are worth precisely zero <currency-units>.
Agreed. This isn’t a situation where you can’t pay. YT has a clear, reasonably priced solution for no ads. It also comes with YT music.
If people don’t think there’s enough value in YT, then don’t pay and don’t use it.
Reminds me of the early justification of Napster where people would complain the latest B. Spears song was garbage and not worth paying for, yet it was the most downloaded song.
> If people don’t think there’s enough value in YT, then don’t pay and don’t use it.
The most common throughline of all pro-piracy discourse is that there's a lot of people who feel completely entitled to free entertainment, and they will come up with all sorts of bizarre mental gymnastics to justify that as something other than "I want free entertainment and don't want to see ads."
I don't think anyone could articulate a coherent logical argument as to why they feel they should get YouTube's services, and the entertainment produced by the creators who are on YouTube, while not paying either of them through any means, other than pure selfishness.
You'll notice that it's always YouTube that is the target, though. People feel entitled to free YouTube as though by birthright. If someone doesn't like Netflix, they cancel and move on, they don't usually claim they deserve it free.
Maybe because it was not monetized originally, and so those who were around back then argue it must remain that way?
Even worse, it's come to the point where it is actively destroying the internet. Everything from every news site being paywalled to click bait mania to brain rot content focused on the bottom suckers who can't ad block.
Why would you pay though its really simple to block ads and youtube is already rich enough. Why bow down to consumerism and enrichment of the already rich?
> youtube is already rich enough
maybe, hard to say. but the people who make videos, and get 55% of the revenue (give or take a bit), frequently are not (unless you insist on watching mega channels only).
Well it should be a hobby to be a youtuber not a job. Monetizing it destroyed the whole platform.
While I think there is certainly a lot of questionable content because of monetization, some of my favorite YT channels exist because of it.
For example, there's a guy who rebuilt a early-1900's sailing boat from scratch, funded almost entirely by revenue from his channel. The videos are crazy high quality hand-construction porn and would never exist without the monetization aspect. Oh, and I had no prior and no current interest in boat building.
Most of the channels I follow (via RSS, rather than YT itself) are like this, and YT generally does an excellent job at putting new channels in front of me from time to time that marry my interests (even one's I didn't know I had) with phenomenally great story telling via video.
I know that it creates opportunities for people. The question is, could that guy have done it without the monetization part? Certainly, would've just taken a lot longer...
He would have given up the project. It was a full time thing for him, not a side project.
Why pay for clothes? Nordstrom's is already rich enough, just walk in and take something.
Because they provide a great service that delivers more value than the subscription is worth.
The people provide the value, the platform just happens to have a monopoly standing in that domain...
This is still hacker news not well behaved consumer news. A friend once said to me „if you have some self respect as a techie you don’t pay for streaming“ ;)
I currently pay for Apple Music though ha
Except for some reason I have to watch ads installed by the creators themselves despite paying 26 EUR.
I find that annoying too. In case you haven't seen, there's the sponsor block extension for that, which is not limited by anti-adblock measures.
Not on tvs.
On the rare occasion I watch YouTube via my Roku stick, ads cause me to mute the tv and skip when I can. I guess I could put a mini pc behind the TV and get all the browser extensions but this compromise is good enough for my lazy self.
Smarttube Next...
https://github.com/yuliskov/smarttube
Specifically it's about $14 a month in the US, from what I see.
I say this number so people know how to think economically about this. Anyone who is complaining about this is annoyed, but not $14/month level annoyed on net. Otherwise they'd just get the subscription, or stop watching YouTube.
I have paid for Youtube Premium for a long time. Now it’s pushing shorts (you tried to hide the section and it told you “ok, we won’t show you shorts for 30 days.” I don’t want to see them ever, respect my goddamn choices. Now you can’t hide shorts any more), telling I’m not interested is like yelling into the void, search is useless to the point of being insulting and full of clickbait. Youtube Music is so smart it keeps putting non-music videos in my playlists. Creators are deplatformed, demonetised and paid even less.
Youtube can take a hike, I’m not giving that company a dime and hope it fails. After some changes in my personal life as well, it’s good that I am not spending too much time on that awful website
At least it respects it for 30 days, the Facebook app (which I use to keep in touch with family) is a desolate place where literally every time you open the app your feed is filled with shorts and posts from people you aren’t friends with. And those aren’t event the ads!
Doesn't respect it on any of my tvs.
Then I’d have to use the official YouTube app, whose UX is utter garbage compared to Tubular.
I pay for youtube too and it still completely sucks. I hate when people try this bs.
* I don't want to have to have an account and be logged in to it.
* I pay for youtube but I don't always get to use my account. Other people's houses and devices exist. Other people's accounts exist even on my own device.
* I pay for youtube and still have to get all the baked in ads.
* I pay for youtube and have a wonderful black screen with no suggestions or discoverability because I have history turned off. (the feature does not depend on the history data, because for years this was never a problem, only a few years ago they suddenly decided to essentially penalize people who don't play ball like good little data cows). This even after I partially gave in and subscribed to a bunch of channels, which previously I never did.
* I pay for youtube and still have no control to disable shorts. (don't tell me about browser plugins. The world is far more varied than one browser on one pc. There is no youtube browser plugins for roku or the 100 other platforms that have youtube players. And even on a pc, you're not always on your own pc where you are free to hack on the browser.)
Here is the value you get from paying for youtube:
It's having only 8 of your fingernails pulled out instead of all 10.
>...only a few years ago they suddenly decided to essentially penalize people who don't play ball like good little data cows...
I'm extremely skeptical that the company that makes most of it's money on the collection of data isn't still collecting data on your viewing habits (and other assorted account-related activities) just because you clicked a checkbox. I don't have a lot of great evidence to back this up but I would still see videos related to my viewing history in the after-video suggestion grid as recently as a few months ago ( before I realized I could zap it with Ublock)
Absolutely there is no reason to believe they aren't still collecting data.
But the checkbox claims that they aren't logging, and so by clicking it they know your intention is not to cooperate in their fundamental business model.
It's just yet another little deniable dark pattern pressure, making the service suck a little when you don't do what they want.
And my outrage point is you get this dark pattern pressure even while you are actually paying money at the same time.
They make more money from the free users and ads than they do from subscriptions. They actually don't want paying users, they just kind of hsve to offer the option to keep those users pacified.
> * I don't want to have to have an account and be logged in to it.
The whole point of YouTube is watching your subscriptions or recommendations based on your previous history. What is your use case if you don't even want to be logged into it?
That's only partially true for me. Recommendations? Not at all.
Subscriptions less and less. I can think of two that I regularly watch, and even those I'll just binge their most recent 2-3 every couple of months.
For me it's Ctrl/CMD+L "y [thing I'm searching for]" Enter.
I've dabbled with tools like PinchFlat to archive/stream via Jellyfin but there's niggles I haven't tackled.
Sure. All you said is completely true. I have a good solution: don't use YouTube then.
My comment was in response to : "You can also pay for YouTube. I do. It’s nice, not crazy expensive. No ads. Creators get paid. Everyone wins."
"then don't use youtube" is a non-sequitur to that.
You can have zero finger nails pulled out if you don't watch YouTube...
Still a non sequitur. Irrelevant. The comment claimed that paying for youtube makes it good. Not using youtube does not address the claim thst paying for it makes it good.
What does "disable shorts" even mean?
I think the gp meant YouTube Shorts [1], Google's answer to TikTok and Instagram Reels.
1: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/
presumably "not being shown or suggested Shorts"?
Yes. If I'm paying money, why can't I have what I want instead of what they want to shove at me? I thought paying for it made it nice? It's not like it would be either a technical or ui challenge.
Answer is paying does not make it nice. Paying does one thing, which is significant, but the experience ovarall still sucks, including even that one thing, ads, because you still get ads.
Agreed, this is one of the times I'm fully behind a Google business model. I'd happily pay for products rather than have them datamine me senseless.
You have to have an account and log in to it!
I would gladly pay for YouTube as well, but I’m sure they’ll mine the shit out of me either way.
Yes, I also appreciate the skip ahead feature that lets you fast forward over the sponsorship ads that a lot of creators have started insetting into their videos.
It doesn't get rid of the ads. Most medium to big youtubers will have one or more sponsored segments inside the video.
But that's their choice, not youtube's.
I don’t get how YouTube advertises. Because we use VPN in China, YouTube simply pushes ads in whatever local language my proxy server happens to be. Which baffles me quite a lot since even the most basic tracking and use history (I have two decades in Google) would tell them at least the language I can understand.
The parasitic nature of ad tech attracts the laziest get rich quickest tech workers who go on to management where they hire the griftiest of grifters into their ranks.
Ads have been on TV since the beginning of TV. And before that, that were — and still are — on radio.
Where they’re also “irrelevant”.
But the relevancy to our current activities isn’t tied to their effectiveness.
I know that they’re effective, because I had impressionable teens tell me they wanted me to pick up Prime drinks at the store, all because they were convinced drinking Prime was cool.
But let me be clear — I hate ads, too. I hate them on TV, radio, YouTube, billboards, in my mailbox, in my email inbox, and when they cover up 50% of real estate on websites. Pretty much everywhere they show up.
But the purpose of ads aren’t for me to like them, or to be tied to where I’m at a place I can purchase something.
The purpose is to leave a lasting impression.
And, like it or not, they’re effective enough, for some people and for some products, that they’re going to keep doing them, regardless of the fact that nearly everyone hates them.
> But let me be clear — I hate ads, too. I hate them on TV, radio, YouTube, billboards, in my mailbox, in my email inbox, and when they cover up 50% of real estate on websites. Pretty much everywhere they show up.
The mailbox ads can actually be quite useful. Since I started looking at them instead of just tossing them straight into the recycling bin I've discovered they often contain coupons for good deals at restaurants that I semi-regularly already go to. Those coupons have saved me noticeable amount of money on those visits.
Similarly on groceries. In the grocery case it is not coupons but advertisements of sales. 97% of the time I shop at the large supermarket nearest my home, which usually has the best prices. But occasionally there is a very good deal on something expensive like meat somewhere else and it is their mailbox flyers that let me know about it.
Sometimes people use the internet for non-commercial reasons. Originally those were the _only_ reasons that people used it. However the Silicon Valley ethos of online advertising faciltated by so-called "tech" coompany intermediaries assumes _all_ internet use is commercial in nature.
Consuming content online has always been about agency. You choose the content. Previous media landscapes were largely passive endeavors. Broadcast media choices were limited. You either muted the ads, turned off the TV/radio or endured the advertisements. I often find myself closing YT when ads are played.
Not only are they largely irrelevant, but they are frequently in the wrong language. If I want to immerse myself in the local language, I will go outside and interact in that language. If I am listening to a podcast in English, typically around Anglophone cultural or political topics, why would they invade my space with non-English content?
I don't want to hear local music or K-Pop when I am listening to classical music.
In many cases, the language isn't even local to the country which I reside in. If I cannot have an English-only space on my own computer, I won't be using the site. There's a time and a place for immersion into other cultures. My personal computer in my home office isn't the place.
The way I've come to think about this is that the relevance of the ad to you (as a YouTube viewer), is irrelevant. It matters not whether they are relevant to the content/topic of the video, or whether they are of the kind that SponsorBlock blocks, or those shown by YT algos. The ads serve one purpose, and one purpose alone - to bolster revenue for Google. What may have started out as a 'well-intentioned' (using the term loosely) means to recreate Costco-like ads for the digital realm in the early days of the web, was quickly consumed, like most everything else, by Corporate greed and morphed into a source of user frustration over time.
> The primary thing that makes advertisements disagreeable is their irrelevance.
Disagreeable to whom, exactly?
Personally, I would rather the adverts were irrelevant if it meant I didn't have my every move tracked on the web.
The main problems I have with ads are, in order from most problematic to least:
* the lengths that ad networks go to to track me, * the very real possibility of getting malware, * the lengths advertisers go to to ensure their ads are seen. (We have popup blockers in pretty much every browser nowadays for a reason.)
Take away those, and you could convince me to disable my ad blocker. Until then? Not a chance in hell.
It's not irrelevance, it's lack of trust.
I could see an ad for the exact thing I need and I still wouldn't click it. Either it's a scam, or it's technically not a scam because offering 90% off in the first month of a 12 month contract is legal, or it's the worst product on the market and the only way it can get users is blowing VC cash on ads, or there's something else that will surely disappoint me.
I think the theme you and other posters are stating in various ways, is that being expised to persuasion always has negative value. The motivation for some actors can be good, but it will never be universal. When seeking out information to make a purchase, one of the primary taks is to identify and filter out persuasion in the process, in the form of sponsored listings, or reddit shills. I have seen calls to ban paid persuasion, or even all paid speech. I don't know if that is compatible with the notion of free speech, or if I agree it is a good idea, but it certainly would have some good effects in addition to any bad ones.
I feel like it's happened to me multiple times that I've seen an ad for something I actually want, but if I click through or look up the company advertised, then do a little research on that company, I discover that it's a scam or a super crappy version, then I actually purchase the thing from a more reputable company with higher quality. So I guess they succeeded in getting me to buy something, from their competitors.
I hate the ad-centered nature of modern web anyway, but I don't understand why ads are not based on the content of a webpage/video. I am much less disturbed by ads eg on a podcast where the podcaster gives a sponsored message about a service relevant to the topic of the podcast. And prob if I watch the podcast I am already most probably part of the target audience. There is no need to profile me over the websites I visit or apps I am using and invade my privacy, and still fail to target me correctly. And even if you can correctly infer that fishing is my big hobby and now you should bombard me with ads about fishing, maybe this is not what I want to see or hear about when I am watching a lecture on a computer science subject, and I will definitely not want to buy anything then? Maybe it would make for a less distracting and annoying experience when I watch some videos about fishing?
How old are you? I wonder if you were exposed to the world before advertising took over every aspect of our lives. Before the most valueable companies in the world were based on media and advertising sales.
If you were alive before ad tech ate the world, you'd have a very different take on this whole thing.
To me the annoyance primarily depends on how shady or high-risk the industry being advertised is. I cannot stand getting ads that have AI puppets of people like Ilia Calderón (a journalist and TV news anchor) to sell supplements or convince people to join investment chat groups.
This is not true. The primary thing is that they are a tax on attention and a threat to the user's sovereignty over their focus.
The more relevant ads are, the worse they are. Relevant ads are more distracting and more likely to hijack the user's attention and focus against their will.
> People complain about billboards next to a countryside highway because it is entirely irrelevant to driving through the countryside.
They also are a distraction, which seems pretty ironic when billvoarda are used to remind drivers to not drive distracted.
> The primary thing that makes advertisements disagreeable is their irrelevance.
We hate advertisements because they unsolicited manipulations to get our money.
> I don’t complain about advertisements at Costco because that would be insane. I complain about the advertisements on Youtube because they’re irrelevant and weird but somehow normalized.
Calling it like it is.
> If I go to Costco and see an advertisement for tires... well, I’m at Costco, where I buy stuff. Things are sold at Costco and people go there to have things sold to them
If you visit content on the internet that the Google Ad network thinks suggest you might be interested in purchasing new tyres, then showing you ads for companies that sells tyres is, unfortunately, relevant no matter what your doing now, because you're more likely to click them, or remember the company/brand when choosing a purchase.
Also a large proportion of ads aren't designed to affect immediate purchase - cars, movies, coca-cola, and other brands are hoping to get into your (sub) consciousness so you'll remember when you buy days, weeks or months later.
When Google started ads they were praised for being relevant. But, as long as advertisers are willing to pay more, they can buy off the relevancy, not really caring about directly measurable conversion rates.
10000x NO!
I absolutely hate advertisements in stores specifically because of their releavance. If I go there to buy cereal, I expect to go to the cereal shelf, look at the options, evaluate them and pick the optimal one for my set of criteria.
What I absolutely do not want is for one cereal brand to be placed right as I come in, exploiting my psychological quirks to get me to either buy it on the spot without going to evaluate other options or just occupy a slightly larger part of my attention to skew my evaluation process when I get to the shelf.
Advertising is just another money multiplier. If you have a ton of money to throw at ads, you'll make more money than those that don't. And to make up the ad investment, you'll necessarily have to be a worse deal for consumers.
When you are next in the cereal aisle take a close look at how they are arranged. What you see is advertising. Shelf space is at a high premium and companies tussle for your attention.
The product which is easiest to reach - for an adult on cereal shelves and a child in the toy section - pays a premium to be there. The smaller unknown brands are pushed to the bottom and on top where you have to stretch.
It's no different to a large Kellogg's cereal advert in your face as you walk in the shop.
Yes, advertising is bad because it works. At its core it's manipulative and well targeted adverts are the most manipulative.
The most disagreeable thing is they are psychologically insidious.
I really hope ads to stay as irrelevant as possible, for as long as possible.
However it seems impossible to last for our society with all the tracking, product placement and astroturfing.
The worse the experience, the more likely people are to pay to remove ads entirely. So we end up with this weird situation where the ad experience degrades on purpose, rather than improving relevance or fitting the context, because annoyance drives subscriptions.
No, we just hate ads because they're trying to tell us what to buy. It's the definition of illiberal.
For videos media, you also have to factor in tone and pacing . Totally kill the flow of watching a video essay when a loud talking ads jump out for 5 second. That's why I have a kinder view for Youtube sponsors, since it's read by the literally same person making this video, and have total control when to place it. Even if it's NordVPN ads in a middle of a history channel.
they aren't failing at relevance they're succeeding at something else entirely. they're not designed to match context, they're designed to create friction. disruption was not just side effect, it's the mechanism. you don't skip because the ad's irrelevant. you skip because you're reminded this space isn't yours. that skip button is intentional friction it trains you. not to buy, but to tolerate. and over time, less skip, more forced watch, more normalisation. so maybe the endgame isnt better ads, it's users who've stopped expecting control
Even if they were relevant, they'd still be holding global internet video culture behind a paywall.
First pay with your identity (carrier phone number required for a Google account). Then double pay through Premium in the illusion you won't end up seeing ads anyway.
You're right to point out the "relevance factor" is not what people commonly take it to be. The context is (as always) crucial. Of course, the degree to which an individual tolerates advertising varies for a multitude of reasons.
> billboards [...] countryside
I think people simply find this to be an ugly thing. They object to the ugliness of it. They're in the countryside -- i.e. not the town/city -- and they find themselves unable to escape (even here!) from this seedy miasma. Putting disgust into words is not a simple thing, perhaps this is the reason for the inconsistent reasoning you've noticed.
All advertising is ugly, it's an ugly business -- money grubbing manipulation. It's inherently weird to be subjected to the endless torrent of uncanny twisted art that is advertising every day for your entire life. The ads on Youtube are normalised by the same force that normalises all the other advertising -- the ads in one context normalise the ads in another. The ads on the side of the bus, on the LCD panels on the train, on the same screen that shows the timetable at the station, before the movie starts, by the seemingly sensible ads in Costco. One hand washes the other.
We're all living in Truman's world. About the only thing that might make it better is maybe some of this nice Ovaltine recommended by 9 out of 10 doctors.
Imagine if the tire advertisement at Costco stood in front of you for 30 seconds and wouldn’t let you pass or turn around until a minimum amount of time passed.
What would Costco offer you in exchange, like a rebate on the tire itself or on anything bought at Costco maybe? Then surely a lot of people would stay.
Youtube is offering access to entertainment in exchange for 30s ads, that's a valuable proposition to many.
>The primary thing that makes advertisements disagreeable is their irrelevance.
The primary thing that makes advertisements disagreeable is the system that disputes my indisputable right to ignore them. If I paid someone to cut the adverts out of my newspaper before I read it, would I be stealing from the publisher?
Silicon valley has spent the last 30 years getting the internet to run on lies, and depends upon the charity of people willing to be lied to. Now that trillions of dollars depend upon this system, they can no longer afford to leave it up to charity, and believe that they must go to war. This is a war that they will lose.
Ban advertising, formally enshrine the right of adblockers to operate, and use the new regulation to work out a new business model, or perish in the arms race that you are absolutely destined to lose.
it's shocking how bad youtube ads are compared to say instagram or google search. maybe i'm just not targeted well.
> The primary thing that makes advertisements disagreeable is their irrelevance.
The primary thing that makes advertisements disagreeable is the whole thing. There is nothing good about ads, ever. If I want information about a product, I'll go looking for it, and I won't go to an advertiser. If I'm looking to watch a YouTube video, there is absolutely no condition under which I want to hear about a product unless that's explicitly what I went to that video to hear about.
All ads are lies. There is never an ad that tells you about the flaws in a product or compares it honestly to competing product. I'm simply not interested in being lied to.
I don't like ads but keep in mind the only 100% "relevant" ad is disguised as content. Is that what you want? Sponsored or generated stuff that feeds you some agenda while you think you watch something different...
Lol you sweet summer child, they don't care if the ad is relevant to you, you're not the customer. https://medium.com/@Glenames/programmatic-advertising-101-c9...
Your eyes are the supply. The demand (customer) is people wanting your eyes. Relevance in ads is if your eyes are a candidate to at some point buy their product.
What your taking about at costco is essentially house ads or really signage.
Remember unless you are a brand you are not the customer for ads.
This is correct.
But the real customer, the brand, cares if the ad is relevant to you because they are either paying for impressions or traffic. Either way, if the ad is not relevant the analytics tools will show that campaigns in Google perform worse than campaigns bought in, say, Meta or TikTok.
On relevance: I've never seen an ad on YT that would make me buy a product. I guess, this is now a matter of principle.
Moreover, it's now also a matter of fending off GenAI content (AKA slop) for the sake of sanity.
So, I'm clearly not the audience. Which raises the question, what is YT in the business of selling, they are trying to enforce? Lifetime?
This pretty much applies to all ads everywhere. I mean Im a guy and I get ads for tampons on TV or a million odds for all sorts of diseases I dont have.
Shit I rather willingly give info about myself so irrelevant ads can be filtered out and I dont have to waste time on them and the advertiser doesnt waste money on me
It makes sense
> The primary thing that makes advertisements disagreeable is their irrelevance.
Well, obviously. If the message was relevant or a good offer for the customer, they wouldn't need to pay to advertise it. Advertisement is for products which have low enough cost/benefit for the customer to not sell themselves.
Lol you sweet summer child, they don't care if the ad is relevant to you, you're not the customer. https://medium.com/@Glenames/programmatic-advertising-101-c9...
Your eyes are the supply. The demand (customer) is people wanting your eyes. Relevance in ads is if your eyes are a candidate to at some point buy their orid8.
What your taking about at costco is essentially house ads or really signage.
Remember unless you are a brand you are not the customer for ads.
The primary thing is that they're there, that they make the world a worse with their nash equilibrium of "everyone is doing it so everyone must continue doing it", and that they're basically rich people begging you to give them more money. Outside of a context where you have made a conscious choice to spend money, at that.
I'd argue that even in a supermarket they're mostly useless and manipulative. I came in to buy bananas, you don't need to tell me doritos are buy 9, get 3 free.
Fuck ads.
The most successful marketing campaign of all time was the marketing department convincing companies that they need marketing.
If you’re Coca Cola and you spend £1,000,000,000 on a Christmas TV ad of a bear drinking cola, does that increase your sales? No. It does nothing. But every year they’ll do it.
The only marketing that works is at the point of sale, and free samples. Anything which is just random and in public will not result in anything.
But the genius of the scam is, it’s not measurable. You bill £1,000,000,000 a year for marketing, and they can’t measure if it worked. How do you know if a TV ad worked? But they can’t withdraw the funding, because you’ll tell them their competitors will win. So the scam keeps going.
I don't drink cola myself, but it seems logical to me. The point of the expensive advert is showing everybody how rich Coca Cola is. That increases the trust people have in their products being safe and reliable because they know Coca Cola has something to lose. If they didn't advertise they'd be like those Chinese sellers named as random strings of uppercase letters. I definitely wouldn't buy cola from one of those.
Think about all the ways you a smarter than the average person.
Well this is one of them too, unfortunately.
Ads work extremely well. Often they are the single most important aspect of product. Google and Meta are two of the largest corporations on Earth entirely because thin brains click their ads all day. Your hate for ads isn't misguided, but you are hitting the wrong mark.