Thank god for advertising

[Surlethe]

I was just musing on this. Media like television and, more recently, the internet, cost to distribute. In TV, you have to pay the actors, announcers, graphics people, etc. Then you have to pay for the complex systems that get the video from the studio to the consumers' set. With the internet, you have to pay for the hardware and for the cost of storing and accessing information (i.e., bandwidth).

The problem? It's hard to make the end-users pay for it. That's where advertising comes in: if advertisers want to ride along with their product, the producers of the media can get their revenue from them, and we consumers get a practically free ride (especially on the internet). So thank god for advertising: without it, there would be a whole lot more "Subscribe for access!" websites.

[Serafina]

Advertising:
Making companies pay for your entertainment.

[Sarevok]

Its pretty easy to bypass advertising these days though with the help of modern information technology. I have adblock plus installed into firefox browser which eliminates most internet ads automatically. With a little tweaking I can block the ads not in the filter database myself. So it is possible that if more users started blocking ads sites could be losing revenue. The internets chief source of money right now is ads. And most ads are very easy to block. Most people just dont bother adding adblocking software. But what if ad blockers became commonplace ?

[Mr Bean]

Its pretty easy to bypass advertising these days though with the help of modern information technology. I have adblock plus installed into firefox browser which eliminates most internet ads automatically. With a little tweaking I can block the ads not in the filter database myself. So it is possible that if more users started blocking ads sites could be losing revenue. The internets chief source of money right now is ads. And most ads are very easy to block. Most people just dont bother adding adblocking software. But what if ad blockers became commonplace ?

They are common place in any business because most malware comes via popup's not links on the page. The "Your an idiot" kind of popup's which when clicked on will install viruses or trojan's or the worse "Yeah your fucked" kind which you have to ctr-alt-delete to kill because every button on it is coded to install the malware. So yes because of viruses popup blocks are becoming more common. I sure as hell have them installed for any client I work with an explain how things go.

[Starglider]

Its pretty easy to bypass advertising these days though with the help of modern information technology. I have adblock plus installed into firefox browser which eliminates most internet ads automatically. With a little tweaking I can block the ads not in the filter database myself. So it is possible that if more users started blocking ads sites could be losing revenue. The internets chief source of money right now is ads. And most ads are very easy to block. Most people just dont bother adding adblocking software. But what if ad blockers became commonplace ?

Web sites would simply switch to harder to block technologies. For example, having the entire site presented in Flash. Text ads can be merged into the main text as a scrambled stream, with the content reconstructed by Javascript in the browser; this is already done (mostly by dubious sites) to get around keyword based web filtering, and it will defeat simple ad blockers. If it came to it, content would come as big PNGs containing the text and burned-in ads, and Microsoft would offer some horrible secure-path based version of IE that is incompatible with adblock plug-ins and the only way to view some sites. To filter that you'd have to postprocess and use machine vision algorithms to blank out any part of the screen that looked like an ad; it would be impractical to descramble and filter the content stream prior to display. This would be a tremendous waste of time, money and bandwidth of course, similar to the time and money spent (futilely) trying to prevent software from being pirated. So in all it's for the best that most users don't know how to or don't bother blocking ads.

Long term, well, Greg Egan had a good take on this in Permutation City; the arms race between the advertisers trying to create personally-targeting advertising and developers of filtering software had gotten to the point where both sides were using near-sentient AI. Not all that infeasible; there's already lots of money in targeted advertising (we've been paid to make lead-generation systems), and the amount of money spent on spam filtering keeps rising too.

[Darth Wong]

I was just musing on this. Media like television and, more recently, the internet, cost to distribute. In TV, you have to pay the actors, announcers, graphics people, etc. Then you have to pay for the complex systems that get the video from the studio to the consumers' set. With the internet, you have to pay for the hardware and for the cost of storing and accessing information (i.e., bandwidth).

The problem? It's hard to make the end-users pay for it. That's where advertising comes in: if advertisers want to ride along with their product, the producers of the media can get their revenue from them, and we consumers get a practically free ride (especially on the internet). So thank god for advertising: without it, there would be a whole lot more "Subscribe for access!" websites.

Without advertising, people would also do a lot more thinking for themselves. Advertisers tell us to associate certain products with certain activities by programming us like Pavlov's dogs: through massive repetition of associated images and sounds. Political advertising is the worst.

The entire film industry of Hollywood was built primarily through end-user payment, and it functions quite well. TV, on the other hand, is a goddamned wasteland that causes more social problems than it solves (if it solves any). Despite American assumptions to the contrary, government-run TV networks could easily do the job of informing the public without becoming totalitarian propaganda machines. Look at the CBC in Canada and the BBC in Britain.

[Rogue 9]

I was just musing on this. Media like television and, more recently, the internet, cost to distribute. In TV, you have to pay the actors, announcers, graphics people, etc. Then you have to pay for the complex systems that get the video from the studio to the consumers' set. With the internet, you have to pay for the hardware and for the cost of storing and accessing information (i.e., bandwidth).

The problem? It's hard to make the end-users pay for it. That's where advertising comes in: if advertisers want to ride along with their product, the producers of the media can get their revenue from them, and we consumers get a practically free ride (especially on the internet). So thank god for advertising: without it, there would be a whole lot more "Subscribe for access!" websites.

Without advertising, people would also do a lot more thinking for themselves. Advertisers tell us to associate certain products with certain activities by programming us like Pavlov's dogs: through massive repetition of associated images and sounds. Political advertising is the worst.

The entire film industry of Hollywood was built primarily through end-user payment, and it functions quite well. TV, on the other hand, is a goddamned wasteland that causes more social problems than it solves (if it solves any). Despite American assumptions to the contrary, government-run TV networks could easily do the job of informing the public without becoming totalitarian propaganda machines. Look at the CBC in Canada and the BBC in Britain.

And NPR and PBS in the United States, for that matter.

[KroLazuxy_87]

I was under the impression that they(well, NPR, I don't have as much exposure to PBS) may be mildly subsidized, but were mostly funded through member support and by donations from foundations or organizations.

Speaking of which, NPR just switched to a twice a year membership drive, instead of three. They drives will last for longer though. Their last one was reportedly pretty successful.

[K. A. Pital]

Doesn't the overall economy still pay for that though? Goods advertised become more expensive, and the consumer still pays for that advertising.

He pays nothing when he uses the Internet, but when he goes to the store and buys an advertised product, he spends money to cover the corporations' ad budget, and, by proxy, still support the Internet.

Personally I'm no big fan of advertising, though considering it's probably a necessary evil to keep the free-access information and knowledge space that is the Internet afloat... I can't say what my stance is. I loathe the culture of consumerism and I personally buy generics just for every "brand" product out there just to keep my money away from the products that blast my ears and eyes from TV, internet ads and billboards every day (seriously the over-advertising makes me hate those products, not get interested in buying them).

I use adblocks. I have also found that most content that interests me is academic, and hosted on servers maintained by state or supranational organizations (Universities, governments, libraries, ministries, statistic bodies of governments and supranational orgs (UN, World Bank, OECD, et cetera), police organizations, and such), which already have that in their budget and I support that anyway by paying taxes. I wouldn't be lamenting a demise of a huge portion of commercial and entertainment websites held afloat by ads, actually. Would make the Internet more like a library and/or a social club, and less like a huge online shop. Though large shutdowns of server facilities could have bad consequences for the overall network, I guess.

[General Zod]

Advertising is why I almost never watch TV anymore, and if I do watch it I get it off the internet so I can get my shows ad-free. I figure if I really need a product I'll be able to look it up on my own and figure out whether I can use it; I don't need some obnoxious commercial that makes me want to go postal to tell me I must buy something.

[Molyneux]

Billboards.
My stance on advertising can be summed up in that one word. They target an effectively trapped audience, spoil the view, and actively distract from driving.

Advertising is an evil that cannot be defended - it exists primarily to coerce people into buying things that they do not need, and presumably do not already want. It is manipulative and very often outright untrue, and it attempts to hijack anything popular for its own benefit - you've all seen car commercials attempting to link good songs with their product in the viewer's mind, or popular songs with the lyrics rewritten to sell some piece of crap.

I would gladly pay for my entertainment through subscription or other means if it meant that I wouldn't need to actively avoid advertising.