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Please Stop Working on Ads

83 points by nachopg 14y ago

potatolicious 14y ago
Please stop writing articles telling people not to work on ads. I don't disagree with the point, but we've seen a deluge of these recently and not a single one has had something fresh to say. Pissing all over people working on ads, is the new working on ads.
- diego 14y ago
  Have you read it?
  - potatolicious 14y ago
    Indeed. The point about user intent vs. value of advertising is neither new nor obscure - any semi-competent online marketer knows this (and this is also why Google continues to make the big bucks). The generic complaints re: "traffic first, fuck revenue!" is true, but like the above, is neither a new statement nor is it one that really needs popularizing - it's already being repeated ad nauseum in the community. There's also a whole side of marketing being discounted - which is that it is not always necessary for ads to convert directly to a sale. Coca-Cola, for example, invests a great deal of money in advertising without the expectation that each impression convert directly to a sale. Brand maintenance is a valid field, but that's besides the point. Your post is simply repeating a point that's been hammered home, repeatedly and enthusiastically, by various people over the last few weeks. It's getting pretty old. Which isn't to say the topic should be verboten, but can we refrain from writing another diatribe against the failure of ad-based business models unless we have something new to bring to the table? [edit] And another thing, and this isn't necessarily pointed at you - but these "screw ad-based business models!" posts seem to have come about mainly after the poor Facebook IPO. There are a lot of people cashing in on the schadenfreude, writing "I told you so!" posts. It all strikes me as self congratulatory and needlessly vindictive.
    - nachopg 14y ago
      People have complained about the lack of originality from the beginning of times. Please stop writing about it unless you have something new to say.
  - DannyBee 14y ago
    I did, and while i'm not going to be as aggressive as the poster above you, it really doesn't say anything new. It's rehash of arguments that occurred the very second facebook and twitter became popular.
  - raldi 14y ago
    Don't let him get you down. I enjoyed your article, as did all the other people who voted for it.
- ktizo 14y ago
  Please stop writing posts that tell people to stop writing articles that tell people to stop working on ads. Weeing all over kittens is the new old.
- mdonahoe 14y ago
  "we've seen a deluge of these recently and not a single one has had something fresh to say" Then stop reading them? Things get repeated, rehashed and re-posted all the time. Just be glad we arent talking about Bitcoin again :) Personally, I would love to see these articles on HN everyday, at the top, just to make sure every software engineer has seen at least one.
jemka 14y ago
>Facebook and Twitter are different. Not many people think: “I want to buy a Veeblefetzer. I’m going to Twitter / Facebook to start my research.” Likewise, I'm not sitting on the couch watching prime time television and thinking, "I need a new car, I'm going to start my research by watching car commercials." Nor is it my intent to "start my research" for any product that appears in magazines, or road side billboards, or any other similar form of advertising. Of course, that's not the purpose of those forms of advertising and OP seems to have a fundamental misunderstanding about the subject. I don't have a problem taking checks from advertisers as long as they're willing to write them and neither should anyone else.
- dpcan 14y ago
  That and..... people DO go right to Facebook and Twitter now to start their research on a product. Typing the name of a product into Twitter often times tells me exactly how people feel when they are using it. This is especially true of entertainment items like movies, games or apps. Facebook - I've been known to post "does anyone have/know/own/used a .... " and wait for my peers to tell me if it's worth it.
- diego 14y ago
  Oh, but I don't. What do you think is the valuation of TV networks these days? Brand reinforcement advertising is worth much less than intent-based ads that leads to instant conversion. "A stat like $3.5 million for 30 seconds of airtime may see a serious hit in the future as advertisers realize that the internet can yield just as big an audience as football without having to go through NBC." http://www.forbes.com/sites/davidthier/2012/01/30/the-end-of-the-superbowl-ad/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/davidthier/2012/01/30/the-end-of...
  - jemka 14y ago
    >"A stat like $3.5 million for 30 seconds of airtime may see a serious hit in the future" Ok, and until then the advertisers are still writing checks. You're not making a point that convinces people to stop using an advertising revenue model right now.
seanc722 14y ago
I would rather have people working on ads and them showing up on my Google searches then have to pay X amount per search to pay for the cost to develop/run/maintain.
dm8 14y ago
Somewhat agree with Diego. But unfortunately, people are not used to pay on the web. I've built an extremely useful service but only 1 in 100 was willing to pay, which is ridiculous to say. On a side note, what if you are building a startup to deliver ads? :) (Any thoughts on building a startup for ad-tech)
- ktizo 14y ago
  what if you are building a startup to deliver ads? Then you are starting in an overcrowded space. The only reason that the first internet empires have been ad-based is because it is the easiest and most obvious business model to try, given the existence of a large and rich existing advertising industry that is already used to supporting a lot of old media. It is not a particularly innovative business model however and is also probably not the biggest pile of money on the table.
- guga31bb 14y ago
  >I've built an extremely useful service but only 1 in 100 was willing to pay, which is ridiculous to say. To play devil's advocate, if only 1 in 100 people are willing to pay for your service, how useful can it really be? I'd think those 100 people are more qualified to judge how useful it is for them than the person who built the service.
  - dm8 14y ago
    Well, we were competing against "free" service offered by big co. Average user doesn't want to pay. They would say us, "ohh we will go to free service by big co". And I learnt big lesson that you can't compete against big co's especially their free products directly.
cletus 14y ago
This wasn't quite the diatribe I was expecting. I basically agree that what Amazon (and Google for that matter; disclaimer: I work for Google on display ads) is intent and intent is huge. Much as Facebook would like to become the de facto Internet, I don't see it ever capturing that intent (let alone Twitter). That being said, I think people discount what an inordinate amount of good advertising has done and just focus on the negatives (eg the "shit you don't need"). For example: 1. While you might be able to afford a few dollars a month to pay for the cost of GMail, as one example (note: I have no idea what the cost would be here; I'm just making up numbers), would you? People are highly reluctant to spend on this. But more to the point, what about people in Africa or Asia for whom a few dollars a month is a significant sum of money? Those people can enjoy the same service with an ad-supported model; and 2. Traditional advertising channels (print, radio, TV) weren't affordable to smaller businesses. Things like Adwords have allowed many businesses to exist that otherwise couldn't before the advent of online advertising. How many jobs do you think this has created and supports? But I do see the whole "eyeballs-then-advertising" SV model as peaking if it hasn't already. Facebook may well be the 800 pound gorilla that broke the camel's back on that one. And while the author notes that advertising space is growing faster than purchasing power not all advertising space is created equal. What you simply has is a diversity of distribution channels for your advertising. That's a good thing. But not everyone will succeed with an ad-supported model, that's true. To the author's problem of working on big problems, I agree. The fact that SpaceX spent less developing a launch system and reentry vehicle than was spent buying Instagram [1] with its 13 employees makes me sad that so many bright minds are working on the apocryphal social network for cats. [1]: I realize with the 50%+ drop in Facebook's IPO price, that sum is now significantly less.
- hapless 14y ago
  1. First item first: Gmail is free because the rich consumers using it are worth a few dollars a month in ads. Those free users in Africa who don't have the money can only exist due to cross-subsidy. The ad model helps them only by accident. Until they have money to spend, they can only detract from the value of Google's ad inventory. 2. To address the second question, the cost of traditional media: Adwords made new businesses more feasible because of the intent harvesting. It allowed people to pay to advertise to consumers who specifically wanted something, as opposed to a demographic block. Instead of advertising to every 25-55 man who might want a corvette, they could advertise to men who were thinking about a Corvette right now. Previously, it cost serious bucks to reach those men thinking "right now" because it was dumb luck -- advertise to enough men in the right demographic, hit a few guys who had the intent. To a significant extent, the additional data provided by Twitter and Facebook is no better or more useful than traditional demographic data made available by TV stations. Knowing you're a soccer mom with an SUV in Baltimore is only slightly more useful than inferring that from the market, income bracket, sex, and age group of viewers on a TV block. Worse, a lot of that broad-demographic advertising is branding. It will always be easier to make an impression with a 30 second full audio/video TV segment than with any kind of internet ad. Twitter/Facebook targeting information might be revolutionary in combination with TV ad inventory. Pairing that same data with internet ad inventory is (patently) not nearly as valuable, and it never will be.
paulsutter 14y ago
Making a blanket statement like "advertising is bad" is like saying that commerce is bad. We all agree that bad advertising is annoying. We all agree that most advertising today is bad advertising. But that's no reason to stop working on advertising. EDIT: Advertising is a $600B a year industry. It isn't going to disappear. Improving advertising seems like a good goal to me. Yes there are loftier goals, but this is a good one. EDIT: I'm fascinated by the downvotes. Could someone comment on how I've violated the guidelines here?
- hapless 14y ago
  You discussed none of the points in the article. This is likely to result in downvotes. (Did you even read it ?)
  - paulsutter 14y ago
    Specific points in the article that I'm responding to: "Please stop working on ads. Pick an unsolved problem instead. Not only it’s potentially better for the world, but also you’re more likely to raise funding and cash out. Oh, and if you’re an investor, don’t touch ad-based stuff. If you do, you’ll be very uncool"
diego 14y ago
For those who criticize the lack of "anything new" in my post: What motivated me to write it is that in the past few weeks I've met SEVERAL entrepreneurs who are starting businesses that would have no choice but to depend on ads. I'm almost at the point where I want to start a campaign to convince people that this is a bad idea, given how many other important problems are not receiving enough attention. I'm not saying that people should become missionaries. Many of those problems will create huge companies. Data suggest that starting a traffic-driven business today is like starting a new Hotmail.
- jaredsohn 14y ago
  >given how many other important problems are not receiving enough attention This would be a good place to mention some of them.
  - prodigal_erik 14y ago
    And some justification as to why they should be expected to be profitable, as opposed to all the problems society pays lip service to but doesn't care much about in practice.
holograham 14y ago
Part of advertising is brand impressions. You may not buy sometime at that time but your subconscious has been exposed to the brand enough (often with other feel-good emotional triggers) that when you do need to buy something you have a positive attraction to their particular brand. Online advertising is clearly a viable business model. The article correctly points out that aggregate purchasing power has grown slowly so their is more fighting for the same pool of dollars. The problem is not that advertising is a bad business, it's just a smaller business than some investors and founders expected. Facebook brings in hundreds of millions of advertising dollars per year. Not bad.
pearkes 14y ago
People should totally be working on ads. Ad's are horribly broken in many cases. Mobile advertising, for example, provides little, if any, value to the user in it's current form. That's why I'm proud I work[1] on ads. Let's take a step in the right direction (RESPECT THE USER!). [1] http://kiip.me http://kiip.me.
sriramk 14y ago
The funny thing is that the people I know who've worked on ads have some of the most in-demand skill sets around. It turns out that most successful consumer internet companies in the last decade have had to turn to some form of advertising (FB, Google, Yahoo, Twitter, Pandora, etc). And knowing how to build those systems makes you someone in high demand.
- unreal37 14y ago
  Perhaps the author works on ads for a living, and wants less competition...
- axian 14y ago
  Just because something is in high demand doesn't prove anything. There is high demand for homeopathic sugar pills and suburban shamans who charge $100/hr for consultation. All those companies you've mentioned have huge problems which points them directly at the revenue streams they've bet on. Facebook is taking a beating because they can't monetize the fastest growing mobile sector. Google is desperately working against the clock to beat the bubble by branching out in all kinds of industries unrelated to AdSense Yahoo has been bleeding money for a decade Twitter is in the same position as Facebook sans the stock market pressure ...and Pandora has been charging monthly fees for a service because they've seen the writing on the wall. No company on that list is doing anything exciting or disruptive that's tied to ads. It's a dead end. "The people you know". Yeah.
andrewla 14y ago
I think what this article is saying is more along the lines of "don't come to me with business ideas that rely on advertising as their revenue stream", or generalized to "there are many people who will not put money into business ideas that rely on advertising as their revenue stream". [1] While true, it's not useful -- there's lots of evidence that there are people who feel the other way. Ideas for companies that have no more of a business model than "attract eyeballs" seem to do just fine, and there are notable examples that do more than just fine (e.g. Google). The point has been made many a time that human attention is not easy to get, and there are people willing to pay money to get some fraction of that attention. My pet peeve is when sites that do not need to carry advertising carry large amounts of very annoying advertising -- I'm looking at you, Amazon, with your "Product Ads From External Websites", which you occasionally trick me into clicking because it looks like "Customers Who Looked At This Also Looked At". Or, far worse, is eBay, which is so inundated with ads that I find it almost unusable. [1] The exception, I guess, being companies that are in the business of serving or enhancing ads.
petercooper 14y ago
No thanks. While ads are less than ideal, I'd rather be enriching the lives of my 75,000 subscribers and run ads than have 500 people paying me $10 a month for the same publications (75k paying $10 would be even better but wouldn't have happened ;-)). Apps powered by ads are a different kettle of fish but advertising is still a big deal for media and publishing businesses.
- axian 14y ago
  Unless it's a company that cures cancer over the internet, your startup isn't enriching anyone's life. "Capture eyeballs, monetize later" mantra has failed in almost all cases, save for few select companies who are just breaking even on momentum alone. Media and publishing business are dying. What a strange example to illustrate a point.
  - eschutte2 14y ago
    As one of those 75,000 subscribers, I'm happy to say that's not correct. To state the obvious, if the product or service weren't enriching people's lives, why do you think they would choose to subscribe to it?
    - khyryk 14y ago
      I think there are various ways to approach this. One could argue that, for instance, watching TV for 6 hours per day does not enrich a particular person's life, no matter how convinced they may be that it does. Your second sentence is a type of an argument I've encountered numerous times, but I can't seem to recall what it's called. I may get back to this later.
  - theorique 14y ago
    Unless it's a company that cures cancer over the internet, your startup isn't enriching anyone's life. There's a lot of room to operate between "curing cancer" and "not enriching anyone's life".
  - petercooper 14y ago
unreal37 14y ago
The author doesn't seem to understand WHY companies want to advertise on platforms like Twitter and Facebook. (Facebook makes $4B a year on advertising, so we're not talking about an insignificant amount of money here.) That's really the most important part. These are the companies spending their money. Why do they want to "waste" their money on those sites if as the author states nobody goes there to buy things. Two reasons: 1) That's where people are. People spend 8 hours a month[1] on Facebook out of an average of 32 total hours a month[2] online - 25%. A company would be stupid not to want to be seen there. I'm sorry, but if your business is selling things to the average consumer, the average consumer is on Facebook. They go there to be social with their customers, friend, like, share, and follow. That leads me to my second point... 2) It's not about selling (right now). The OP makes a huge assumption that ads lead to clicks lead to sales. Ever seen a TV ad? Do you think TV viewers stop watching the program to run to the store to buy Tide? No. It's about branding, having a marketing message and making sure everyone sees it. The 30-second elevator pitch. Then when they ARE in the mood to buy, when they ARE in the store, they think about your product. "Hey, I need a new X soon, maybe I should check out product Y I've been hearing about." I can certainly see how people can think "there's no intent to buy" on Facebook and Twitter and maybe that's often true, but that's not even the point. And ad-supported businesses will always always exist although it might not be the best model for you. [1] http://mashable.com/2011/09/30/wasting-time-on-facebook/ http://mashable.com/2011/09/30/wasting-time-on-facebook/ [2] http://www.go-gulf.com/blog/online-time http://www.go-gulf.com/blog/online-time
thesash 14y ago
The consumer packaged goods industry generates two TRILLION dollars a year in the US, by selling us things we don't think we need, through branding and marketing. Bottled water is an entire industry that was built on selling us plastic bottles filled with an abundantly free resource by convincing us we needed it through, you guessed it: advertising. There are many, many industries that rely on brand awareness to sell there goods. There is an amazing quote which I unfortunately couldn't find that goes something like this: "In order to reach the small segment of the population that is interested in buying Mercedes, everyone in the world must know what our brand stands for." Ads with intent drive clear, immediate ROI, but they can only ever capture the segment of the market that know what they want. Display ads on the web may not be the future of advertising, but it isn't going to go away, even if cable TV died tomorrow. In fact, the very fact that this discussion keeps coming up makes it pretty clear that there is a huge opportunity to innovate in this market. Maybe the advice should be: don't build a business that runs on static display ads, do try to find an innovative ad model that engages users and works for brands. Ads, for example, like the interactive old spice ad on vimeo. Immediate ROI? No. Massive brand awareness? Absolutely. http://vimeo.com/47875656 http://vimeo.com/47875656
- adgar 14y ago
  > Bottled water is an entire industry that was built on selling us plastic bottles filled with an abundantly free resource by convincing us we needed it through, you guessed it: advertising. I drank the bottle of water on my nightstand when I woke up this morning in my hotel. I was a bit hungover and feeling lazy. Advertising had nothing to do with it. I wanted the bottle of water to make my morning a little easier. Yes, people buy things they want but don't need! It's almost like there's more to life than the raw inputs the human body requires.
  - stan_rogers 14y ago
    >> I wanted the bottle of water to make my morning a little easier. No, you merely wanted water. It could have as easily been a pitcher and glass and would have satisfied the want.
mattmaroon 14y ago
I think there's a false dichotomy here between solving a problem and building an ad-supported service. Facebook definitely solves a number of problems. How to keep in touch with people, communicate, share photos, etc. That's why people use it. Admittedly it doesn't do anything that couldn't be done (or wasn't done) another way before it existed, but it reduces the friction and wraps them up into a great package. If free social networks were banned, a lot of people would still pay $5 or $10/mo to use Facebook. But since a law like that seems unlikely in most countries, people will always gravitate to a free solution or some other method of monetization more creative than direct payment has to win.
- mark_l_watson 14y ago
  I don't know about $5 to $10/month for Facebook. I would like to see a HN vote/survey on how much people would pay per month for the most used web properties if paying was the only way to see them. For me, the maximum monthly costs would be: NYT. $15 Gmail $3 LinkedIn $2 Facebook $2 Not sure though about Facebook, HN, Reddit, etc. since they would be so much less valuable without large user bases.
aretiste 14y ago
Advertising is now an art form. But not the ads you see on the web. Leave ads to the print, radio and TV folks.
lazyjones 14y ago
I would like to agree, but have to point out that ads are the honest counterpart of the widespread guerilla marketing: fake reviews and forum posts, paid editorials and tv shows. As annoying (and technically backwards, i.e. still using document.write() and cache-busting headers etc.) it may be, the thriving online advertising industry prevents dishonest practices to a large extent - and it enables users to block ads!
badclient 14y ago
It’s 2 pm. Alice goes to Facebook. Bob goes to Amazon. Charlie goes to Twitter. If you have to bet on which site I'd most likely actually be on on a random afternoon at 2pm, it wouldn't be Amazon; it would almost certainly be facebook.
salman89 14y ago
So OP thinks that google should stop working on ads and should start charging for all its free services? There's nothing wrong with ads - just make them good and make sure it aligns with the product (Adsense).
AznHisoka 14y ago
I think the most compelling reason to not build a business around ads is that it has a poor ROI. Just do the math, and even with the most optimistic estimations, you'll still be disappointed. 1 million uniques a month => 10,000,000 PV/month => $5 CPM => $500,000/month => $50,000/month => $600K/year. Sounds great, but then you realize coming up with 1 million uniques by yourself is highly unlikely, and will probably depend on high costs as well. Side Rant: Those people saying 10 million users is the next 1 million users... most of them are investors who invested in Twitter or Instagram. They have NO clue how hard it is to get even 100K users, let alone 10 million or 1 million. Give me a break.
Lukeas14 14y ago
The internet still hasn't figured out a way to profitably produce a high quality service or content with ads as the primary revenue source. So far, the only profitable approach is to reach the scale of Facebook/Google which would enable you to create your own ad network large enough to attract individual ad buyers. But, this does not mean that it's impossible or that we won't come up with a solution in the near future. And the people who I would bet on to create such a solution are those who are currently "working on ads". It's a problem in desperate need of a solution simply because there are so many services (yelp, craigslist, pandora, etc.) that are free to users but expensive to build and maintain. It would be a shame to miss out on the next generation of ad supported content simply because we gave up on trying to make it profitable.
aretiste 14y ago
If search engines starting charging I'd teach people to scrape and if necessary to crawl, for free. Others would too. The web is about sharing knowledge. I dare any search engine to start charging. Go for it. They would end up like Twitter is going to end up (if they continue down the path they're on).
rdevnull 14y ago
This is not entirely accurate because: 1) True google ads can be more effective but are much more expensive vs. Facebook; 2) On facebook you can in fact target users by age and interests. You cannot target by age on google and with an higher CPC it doesn't always pay off. The model of facebook or twitter is not wrong. It is the same used by TV ads, newspapers etc. you try to target your potential consumers that might be perfectly good passive buyers. Not only people that search for an Hawaii vacation would buy one ....
brudgers 14y ago
I've been wondering how much of the total bandwidth and electrical energy consumed by the internet is the result of advertising infrastructure. I've also been wondering about how much time is lost waiting for pages to load because of it. I got interested when a vBulletin site I frequent added a Facebook "Like" button. I was amazed at how much crap went back and forth to Facebook every time I visited a page. I didn't have a Facebook account at the time, but it prompted me to switch to Firefox fulltime and install NoScript.
dev1n 14y ago
This goes back to the old adage by Tom Preston-Werner on making Gravatar (I think); paraphrasing, but if you don't design for revenue generating parts into a site, you're gonna have a bad time trying to make money off of advertisements.
mark_l_watson 14y ago
I recently saw a good comment, something like 'the best minds of today are working on Internet advertising instead of curing cancer, cleaner sustainable energy, etc.' Tough problem though. I don't want Google without ads. For other web properties like my favorite blogs to read, NYT, etc. I would be happy enough to make micro payments if doing so was really easy. (Actually, I do pay for the NYT, so why the ads?) Maybe the conversation should be about easy to use and secure micro payments.
IsaacL 14y ago
I can't understand this snobbishness about ads. Advertising has made a lot of web companies a lot of money. Yes, it's the uncreative default revenue stream. Unsure how to make money? Ads! But that's also a good thing - there's a default internet revenue model that works. If you can make money via freemium/premium/whatever, bully for you. But don't knock ads just because you think the smartest minds "should be curing cancer, not optimising CTRs". Ads have helped support many world-changing web services. It is not a coincidence that 8 of the top 10 websites are funded primarily by advertising.

83 points by nachopg 14y ago

Please stop writing articles telling people not to work on ads. I don't disagree with the point, but we've seen a deluge of these recently and not a single one has had something fresh to say. Pissing all over people working on ads, is the new working on ads.

diego 14y ago
Have you read it?
- potatolicious 14y ago
  Indeed. The point about user intent vs. value of advertising is neither new nor obscure - any semi-competent online marketer knows this (and this is also why Google continues to make the big bucks). The generic complaints re: "traffic first, fuck revenue!" is true, but like the above, is neither a new statement nor is it one that really needs popularizing - it's already being repeated ad nauseum in the community. There's also a whole side of marketing being discounted - which is that it is not always necessary for ads to convert directly to a sale. Coca-Cola, for example, invests a great deal of money in advertising without the expectation that each impression convert directly to a sale. Brand maintenance is a valid field, but that's besides the point. Your post is simply repeating a point that's been hammered home, repeatedly and enthusiastically, by various people over the last few weeks. It's getting pretty old. Which isn't to say the topic should be verboten, but can we refrain from writing another diatribe against the failure of ad-based business models unless we have something new to bring to the table? [edit] And another thing, and this isn't necessarily pointed at you - but these "screw ad-based business models!" posts seem to have come about mainly after the poor Facebook IPO. There are a lot of people cashing in on the schadenfreude, writing "I told you so!" posts. It all strikes me as self congratulatory and needlessly vindictive.
  - nachopg 14y ago
    People have complained about the lack of originality from the beginning of times. Please stop writing about it unless you have something new to say.
- DannyBee 14y ago
  I did, and while i'm not going to be as aggressive as the poster above you, it really doesn't say anything new. It's rehash of arguments that occurred the very second facebook and twitter became popular.
- raldi 14y ago
  Don't let him get you down. I enjoyed your article, as did all the other people who voted for it.
ktizo 14y ago
Please stop writing posts that tell people to stop writing articles that tell people to stop working on ads. Weeing all over kittens is the new old.
mdonahoe 14y ago
"we've seen a deluge of these recently and not a single one has had something fresh to say" Then stop reading them? Things get repeated, rehashed and re-posted all the time. Just be glad we arent talking about Bitcoin again :) Personally, I would love to see these articles on HN everyday, at the top, just to make sure every software engineer has seen at least one.

jemka 14y ago

>Facebook and Twitter are different. Not many people think: “I want to buy a Veeblefetzer. I’m going to Twitter / Facebook to start my research.” Likewise, I'm not sitting on the couch watching prime time television and thinking, "I need a new car, I'm going to start my research by watching car commercials." Nor is it my intent to "start my research" for any product that appears in magazines, or road side billboards, or any other similar form of advertising. Of course, that's not the purpose of those forms of advertising and OP seems to have a fundamental misunderstanding about the subject. I don't have a problem taking checks from advertisers as long as they're willing to write them and neither should anyone else.

dpcan 14y ago
That and..... people DO go right to Facebook and Twitter now to start their research on a product. Typing the name of a product into Twitter often times tells me exactly how people feel when they are using it. This is especially true of entertainment items like movies, games or apps. Facebook - I've been known to post "does anyone have/know/own/used a .... " and wait for my peers to tell me if it's worth it.
diego 14y ago
Oh, but I don't. What do you think is the valuation of TV networks these days? Brand reinforcement advertising is worth much less than intent-based ads that leads to instant conversion. "A stat like $3.5 million for 30 seconds of airtime may see a serious hit in the future as advertisers realize that the internet can yield just as big an audience as football without having to go through NBC." http://www.forbes.com/sites/davidthier/2012/01/30/the-end-of-the-superbowl-ad/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/davidthier/2012/01/30/the-end-of...
- jemka 14y ago
  >"A stat like $3.5 million for 30 seconds of airtime may see a serious hit in the future" Ok, and until then the advertisers are still writing checks. You're not making a point that convinces people to stop using an advertising revenue model right now.

seanc722 14y ago

I would rather have people working on ads and them showing up on my Google searches then have to pay X amount per search to pay for the cost to develop/run/maintain.

dm8 14y ago

Somewhat agree with Diego. But unfortunately, people are not used to pay on the web. I've built an extremely useful service but only 1 in 100 was willing to pay, which is ridiculous to say. On a side note, what if you are building a startup to deliver ads? :) (Any thoughts on building a startup for ad-tech)

ktizo 14y ago
what if you are building a startup to deliver ads? Then you are starting in an overcrowded space. The only reason that the first internet empires have been ad-based is because it is the easiest and most obvious business model to try, given the existence of a large and rich existing advertising industry that is already used to supporting a lot of old media. It is not a particularly innovative business model however and is also probably not the biggest pile of money on the table.
guga31bb 14y ago
>I've built an extremely useful service but only 1 in 100 was willing to pay, which is ridiculous to say. To play devil's advocate, if only 1 in 100 people are willing to pay for your service, how useful can it really be? I'd think those 100 people are more qualified to judge how useful it is for them than the person who built the service.
- dm8 14y ago
  Well, we were competing against "free" service offered by big co. Average user doesn't want to pay. They would say us, "ohh we will go to free service by big co". And I learnt big lesson that you can't compete against big co's especially their free products directly.

cletus 14y ago

This wasn't quite the diatribe I was expecting. I basically agree that what Amazon (and Google for that matter; disclaimer: I work for Google on display ads) is intent and intent is huge. Much as Facebook would like to become the de facto Internet, I don't see it ever capturing that intent (let alone Twitter). That being said, I think people discount what an inordinate amount of good advertising has done and just focus on the negatives (eg the "shit you don't need"). For example: 1. While you might be able to afford a few dollars a month to pay for the cost of GMail, as one example (note: I have no idea what the cost would be here; I'm just making up numbers), would you? People are highly reluctant to spend on this. But more to the point, what about people in Africa or Asia for whom a few dollars a month is a significant sum of money? Those people can enjoy the same service with an ad-supported model; and 2. Traditional advertising channels (print, radio, TV) weren't affordable to smaller businesses. Things like Adwords have allowed many businesses to exist that otherwise couldn't before the advent of online advertising. How many jobs do you think this has created and supports? But I do see the whole "eyeballs-then-advertising" SV model as peaking if it hasn't already. Facebook may well be the 800 pound gorilla that broke the camel's back on that one. And while the author notes that advertising space is growing faster than purchasing power not all advertising space is created equal. What you simply has is a diversity of distribution channels for your advertising. That's a good thing. But not everyone will succeed with an ad-supported model, that's true. To the author's problem of working on big problems, I agree. The fact that SpaceX spent less developing a launch system and reentry vehicle than was spent buying Instagram [1] with its 13 employees makes me sad that so many bright minds are working on the apocryphal social network for cats. [1]: I realize with the 50%+ drop in Facebook's IPO price, that sum is now significantly less.

hapless 14y ago
1. First item first: Gmail is free because the rich consumers using it are worth a few dollars a month in ads. Those free users in Africa who don't have the money can only exist due to cross-subsidy. The ad model helps them only by accident. Until they have money to spend, they can only detract from the value of Google's ad inventory. 2. To address the second question, the cost of traditional media: Adwords made new businesses more feasible because of the intent harvesting. It allowed people to pay to advertise to consumers who specifically wanted something, as opposed to a demographic block. Instead of advertising to every 25-55 man who might want a corvette, they could advertise to men who were thinking about a Corvette right now. Previously, it cost serious bucks to reach those men thinking "right now" because it was dumb luck -- advertise to enough men in the right demographic, hit a few guys who had the intent. To a significant extent, the additional data provided by Twitter and Facebook is no better or more useful than traditional demographic data made available by TV stations. Knowing you're a soccer mom with an SUV in Baltimore is only slightly more useful than inferring that from the market, income bracket, sex, and age group of viewers on a TV block. Worse, a lot of that broad-demographic advertising is branding. It will always be easier to make an impression with a 30 second full audio/video TV segment than with any kind of internet ad. Twitter/Facebook targeting information might be revolutionary in combination with TV ad inventory. Pairing that same data with internet ad inventory is (patently) not nearly as valuable, and it never will be.

paulsutter 14y ago

Making a blanket statement like "advertising is bad" is like saying that commerce is bad. We all agree that bad advertising is annoying. We all agree that most advertising today is bad advertising. But that's no reason to stop working on advertising. EDIT: Advertising is a $600B a year industry. It isn't going to disappear. Improving advertising seems like a good goal to me. Yes there are loftier goals, but this is a good one. EDIT: I'm fascinated by the downvotes. Could someone comment on how I've violated the guidelines here?

hapless 14y ago
You discussed none of the points in the article. This is likely to result in downvotes. (Did you even read it ?)
- paulsutter 14y ago
  Specific points in the article that I'm responding to: "Please stop working on ads. Pick an unsolved problem instead. Not only it’s potentially better for the world, but also you’re more likely to raise funding and cash out. Oh, and if you’re an investor, don’t touch ad-based stuff. If you do, you’ll be very uncool"

diego 14y ago

For those who criticize the lack of "anything new" in my post: What motivated me to write it is that in the past few weeks I've met SEVERAL entrepreneurs who are starting businesses that would have no choice but to depend on ads. I'm almost at the point where I want to start a campaign to convince people that this is a bad idea, given how many other important problems are not receiving enough attention. I'm not saying that people should become missionaries. Many of those problems will create huge companies. Data suggest that starting a traffic-driven business today is like starting a new Hotmail.

jaredsohn 14y ago
>given how many other important problems are not receiving enough attention This would be a good place to mention some of them.
- prodigal_erik 14y ago
  And some justification as to why they should be expected to be profitable, as opposed to all the problems society pays lip service to but doesn't care much about in practice.

holograham 14y ago

Part of advertising is brand impressions. You may not buy sometime at that time but your subconscious has been exposed to the brand enough (often with other feel-good emotional triggers) that when you do need to buy something you have a positive attraction to their particular brand. Online advertising is clearly a viable business model. The article correctly points out that aggregate purchasing power has grown slowly so their is more fighting for the same pool of dollars. The problem is not that advertising is a bad business, it's just a smaller business than some investors and founders expected. Facebook brings in hundreds of millions of advertising dollars per year. Not bad.

pearkes 14y ago

People should totally be working on ads. Ad's are horribly broken in many cases. Mobile advertising, for example, provides little, if any, value to the user in it's current form. That's why I'm proud I work[1] on ads. Let's take a step in the right direction (RESPECT THE USER!). [1] http://kiip.me http://kiip.me.

sriramk 14y ago

The funny thing is that the people I know who've worked on ads have some of the most in-demand skill sets around. It turns out that most successful consumer internet companies in the last decade have had to turn to some form of advertising (FB, Google, Yahoo, Twitter, Pandora, etc). And knowing how to build those systems makes you someone in high demand.

unreal37 14y ago
Perhaps the author works on ads for a living, and wants less competition...
axian 14y ago
Just because something is in high demand doesn't prove anything. There is high demand for homeopathic sugar pills and suburban shamans who charge $100/hr for consultation. All those companies you've mentioned have huge problems which points them directly at the revenue streams they've bet on. Facebook is taking a beating because they can't monetize the fastest growing mobile sector. Google is desperately working against the clock to beat the bubble by branching out in all kinds of industries unrelated to AdSense Yahoo has been bleeding money for a decade Twitter is in the same position as Facebook sans the stock market pressure ...and Pandora has been charging monthly fees for a service because they've seen the writing on the wall. No company on that list is doing anything exciting or disruptive that's tied to ads. It's a dead end. "The people you know". Yeah.

andrewla 14y ago

I think what this article is saying is more along the lines of "don't come to me with business ideas that rely on advertising as their revenue stream", or generalized to "there are many people who will not put money into business ideas that rely on advertising as their revenue stream". [1] While true, it's not useful -- there's lots of evidence that there are people who feel the other way. Ideas for companies that have no more of a business model than "attract eyeballs" seem to do just fine, and there are notable examples that do more than just fine (e.g. Google). The point has been made many a time that human attention is not easy to get, and there are people willing to pay money to get some fraction of that attention. My pet peeve is when sites that do not need to carry advertising carry large amounts of very annoying advertising -- I'm looking at you, Amazon, with your "Product Ads From External Websites", which you occasionally trick me into clicking because it looks like "Customers Who Looked At This Also Looked At". Or, far worse, is eBay, which is so inundated with ads that I find it almost unusable. [1] The exception, I guess, being companies that are in the business of serving or enhancing ads.

petercooper 14y ago

No thanks. While ads are less than ideal, I'd rather be enriching the lives of my 75,000 subscribers and run ads than have 500 people paying me $10 a month for the same publications (75k paying $10 would be even better but wouldn't have happened ;-)). Apps powered by ads are a different kettle of fish but advertising is still a big deal for media and publishing businesses.

axian 14y ago
Unless it's a company that cures cancer over the internet, your startup isn't enriching anyone's life. "Capture eyeballs, monetize later" mantra has failed in almost all cases, save for few select companies who are just breaking even on momentum alone. Media and publishing business are dying. What a strange example to illustrate a point.
- eschutte2 14y ago
  As one of those 75,000 subscribers, I'm happy to say that's not correct. To state the obvious, if the product or service weren't enriching people's lives, why do you think they would choose to subscribe to it?
  - khyryk 14y ago
    I think there are various ways to approach this. One could argue that, for instance, watching TV for 6 hours per day does not enrich a particular person's life, no matter how convinced they may be that it does. Your second sentence is a type of an argument I've encountered numerous times, but I can't seem to recall what it's called. I may get back to this later.
- theorique 14y ago
  Unless it's a company that cures cancer over the internet, your startup isn't enriching anyone's life. There's a lot of room to operate between "curing cancer" and "not enriching anyone's life".
- petercooper 14y ago

unreal37 14y ago

The author doesn't seem to understand WHY companies want to advertise on platforms like Twitter and Facebook. (Facebook makes $4B a year on advertising, so we're not talking about an insignificant amount of money here.) That's really the most important part. These are the companies spending their money. Why do they want to "waste" their money on those sites if as the author states nobody goes there to buy things. Two reasons: 1) That's where people are. People spend 8 hours a month[1] on Facebook out of an average of 32 total hours a month[2] online - 25%. A company would be stupid not to want to be seen there. I'm sorry, but if your business is selling things to the average consumer, the average consumer is on Facebook. They go there to be social with their customers, friend, like, share, and follow. That leads me to my second point... 2) It's not about selling (right now). The OP makes a huge assumption that ads lead to clicks lead to sales. Ever seen a TV ad? Do you think TV viewers stop watching the program to run to the store to buy Tide? No. It's about branding, having a marketing message and making sure everyone sees it. The 30-second elevator pitch. Then when they ARE in the mood to buy, when they ARE in the store, they think about your product. "Hey, I need a new X soon, maybe I should check out product Y I've been hearing about." I can certainly see how people can think "there's no intent to buy" on Facebook and Twitter and maybe that's often true, but that's not even the point. And ad-supported businesses will always always exist although it might not be the best model for you. [1] http://mashable.com/2011/09/30/wasting-time-on-facebook/ http://mashable.com/2011/09/30/wasting-time-on-facebook/ [2] http://www.go-gulf.com/blog/online-time http://www.go-gulf.com/blog/online-time

thesash 14y ago

The consumer packaged goods industry generates two TRILLION dollars a year in the US, by selling us things we don't think we need, through branding and marketing. Bottled water is an entire industry that was built on selling us plastic bottles filled with an abundantly free resource by convincing us we needed it through, you guessed it: advertising. There are many, many industries that rely on brand awareness to sell there goods. There is an amazing quote which I unfortunately couldn't find that goes something like this: "In order to reach the small segment of the population that is interested in buying Mercedes, everyone in the world must know what our brand stands for." Ads with intent drive clear, immediate ROI, but they can only ever capture the segment of the market that know what they want. Display ads on the web may not be the future of advertising, but it isn't going to go away, even if cable TV died tomorrow. In fact, the very fact that this discussion keeps coming up makes it pretty clear that there is a huge opportunity to innovate in this market. Maybe the advice should be: don't build a business that runs on static display ads, do try to find an innovative ad model that engages users and works for brands. Ads, for example, like the interactive old spice ad on vimeo. Immediate ROI? No. Massive brand awareness? Absolutely. http://vimeo.com/47875656 http://vimeo.com/47875656

adgar 14y ago
> Bottled water is an entire industry that was built on selling us plastic bottles filled with an abundantly free resource by convincing us we needed it through, you guessed it: advertising. I drank the bottle of water on my nightstand when I woke up this morning in my hotel. I was a bit hungover and feeling lazy. Advertising had nothing to do with it. I wanted the bottle of water to make my morning a little easier. Yes, people buy things they want but don't need! It's almost like there's more to life than the raw inputs the human body requires.
- stan_rogers 14y ago
  >> I wanted the bottle of water to make my morning a little easier. No, you merely wanted water. It could have as easily been a pitcher and glass and would have satisfied the want.

mattmaroon 14y ago

I think there's a false dichotomy here between solving a problem and building an ad-supported service. Facebook definitely solves a number of problems. How to keep in touch with people, communicate, share photos, etc. That's why people use it. Admittedly it doesn't do anything that couldn't be done (or wasn't done) another way before it existed, but it reduces the friction and wraps them up into a great package. If free social networks were banned, a lot of people would still pay $5 or $10/mo to use Facebook. But since a law like that seems unlikely in most countries, people will always gravitate to a free solution or some other method of monetization more creative than direct payment has to win.

mark_l_watson 14y ago
I don't know about $5 to $10/month for Facebook. I would like to see a HN vote/survey on how much people would pay per month for the most used web properties if paying was the only way to see them. For me, the maximum monthly costs would be: NYT. $15 Gmail $3 LinkedIn $2 Facebook $2 Not sure though about Facebook, HN, Reddit, etc. since they would be so much less valuable without large user bases.

aretiste 14y ago

Advertising is now an art form. But not the ads you see on the web. Leave ads to the print, radio and TV folks.

lazyjones 14y ago

I would like to agree, but have to point out that ads are the honest counterpart of the widespread guerilla marketing: fake reviews and forum posts, paid editorials and tv shows. As annoying (and technically backwards, i.e. still using document.write() and cache-busting headers etc.) it may be, the thriving online advertising industry prevents dishonest practices to a large extent - and it enables users to block ads!

badclient 14y ago

It’s 2 pm. Alice goes to Facebook. Bob goes to Amazon. Charlie goes to Twitter. If you have to bet on which site I'd most likely actually be on on a random afternoon at 2pm, it wouldn't be Amazon; it would almost certainly be facebook.

salman89 14y ago

So OP thinks that google should stop working on ads and should start charging for all its free services? There's nothing wrong with ads - just make them good and make sure it aligns with the product (Adsense).

AznHisoka 14y ago

I think the most compelling reason to not build a business around ads is that it has a poor ROI. Just do the math, and even with the most optimistic estimations, you'll still be disappointed. 1 million uniques a month => 10,000,000 PV/month => $5 CPM => $500,000/month => $50,000/month => $600K/year. Sounds great, but then you realize coming up with 1 million uniques by yourself is highly unlikely, and will probably depend on high costs as well. Side Rant: Those people saying 10 million users is the next 1 million users... most of them are investors who invested in Twitter or Instagram. They have NO clue how hard it is to get even 100K users, let alone 10 million or 1 million. Give me a break.

Lukeas14 14y ago

The internet still hasn't figured out a way to profitably produce a high quality service or content with ads as the primary revenue source. So far, the only profitable approach is to reach the scale of Facebook/Google which would enable you to create your own ad network large enough to attract individual ad buyers. But, this does not mean that it's impossible or that we won't come up with a solution in the near future. And the people who I would bet on to create such a solution are those who are currently "working on ads". It's a problem in desperate need of a solution simply because there are so many services (yelp, craigslist, pandora, etc.) that are free to users but expensive to build and maintain. It would be a shame to miss out on the next generation of ad supported content simply because we gave up on trying to make it profitable.

aretiste 14y ago

If search engines starting charging I'd teach people to scrape and if necessary to crawl, for free. Others would too. The web is about sharing knowledge. I dare any search engine to start charging. Go for it. They would end up like Twitter is going to end up (if they continue down the path they're on).

rdevnull 14y ago

This is not entirely accurate because: 1) True google ads can be more effective but are much more expensive vs. Facebook; 2) On facebook you can in fact target users by age and interests. You cannot target by age on google and with an higher CPC it doesn't always pay off. The model of facebook or twitter is not wrong. It is the same used by TV ads, newspapers etc. you try to target your potential consumers that might be perfectly good passive buyers. Not only people that search for an Hawaii vacation would buy one ....

brudgers 14y ago

I've been wondering how much of the total bandwidth and electrical energy consumed by the internet is the result of advertising infrastructure. I've also been wondering about how much time is lost waiting for pages to load because of it. I got interested when a vBulletin site I frequent added a Facebook "Like" button. I was amazed at how much crap went back and forth to Facebook every time I visited a page. I didn't have a Facebook account at the time, but it prompted me to switch to Firefox fulltime and install NoScript.

dev1n 14y ago

This goes back to the old adage by Tom Preston-Werner on making Gravatar (I think); paraphrasing, but if you don't design for revenue generating parts into a site, you're gonna have a bad time trying to make money off of advertisements.

mark_l_watson 14y ago

I recently saw a good comment, something like 'the best minds of today are working on Internet advertising instead of curing cancer, cleaner sustainable energy, etc.' Tough problem though. I don't want Google without ads. For other web properties like my favorite blogs to read, NYT, etc. I would be happy enough to make micro payments if doing so was really easy. (Actually, I do pay for the NYT, so why the ads?) Maybe the conversation should be about easy to use and secure micro payments.

IsaacL 14y ago

I can't understand this snobbishness about ads. Advertising has made a lot of web companies a lot of money. Yes, it's the uncreative default revenue stream. Unsure how to make money? Ads! But that's also a good thing - there's a default internet revenue model that works. If you can make money via freemium/premium/whatever, bully for you. But don't knock ads just because you think the smartest minds "should be curing cancer, not optimising CTRs". Ads have helped support many world-changing web services. It is not a coincidence that 8 of the top 10 websites are funded primarily by advertising.