What if we made advertising illegal?
924 comments
·April 5, 2025gcp123
Ferret7446
> imagine a world without advertising
I can't because a world with magic and world peace is more realistic and believable.
It's impossible. How do you even define advertising? If you define it conservatively, then advertising will skirt through the loopholes. If you define it liberally, then you have an unfair, authoritarian system that will definitely be selectively enforced against political enemies.
And in all cases, you are self-imposing a restriction that will give other nations an economic advantage and jeopardizing long-term sovereignty.
camgunz
I see this dynamic in tech all the time:
"We'd like to pay/invest in you tremendous amounts of money to make X more efficient": yes, absolutely we know what X is and we understand scaling it is immensely valuable and fundamentally changes everything.
"We'd like to regulate X, making it safer, and therefore harder or even impossible to do": that's ridiculous, you could always do X, what even is X anyway, don't tread on me, yadda yadda.
It's so transparent to me now, and I've passed this curse onto you.
Nothing else in law works this way. No definition is ironclad. This is what legislators, agencies, and courts are for. We all know this.
bravetraveler
Hyperbole is the word
PaulDavisThe1st
What you can do relatively easily is to control the physical format of advertising. For example, consider how rare "billboards" are outside of the USA. Or towns in various places that prohibit signage that is not in the same plane as the edge of the building (i.e. no sticky-outy signs).
Or for that matter, consider Berlin, which has banned all non-cultural advertising on public transportation. Yes, there's some edge cases that are tricky, but overall the situation doesn't seem too fraught.
idle_zealot
You start conservatively, and set up a watchdog to investigate loopholes and punish those abusing them. Fund an astroturfing campaign? Congrats, that's 10 years and a hefty fine to fund the continued operation of the watchdog. You can make promotional material and publish it, but it has to be clearly labeled and opt-in, not bundled with access to something else. The problem isn't small-time promotion that's difficult or impossible to crack down on, it's that we've built a whole attention economy. So long as we make it a bad value proposition for big players we'll have succeeded.
cavisne
Billboards being rare outside of the US seems quite incorrect. The developing world is full of billboards, and places in Europe like Milan have some wild Samsung billboards.
roenxi
That is requiring advertisers to set the HTTP evil bit. If advertising is fine, they're happy to make it obvious that something is an ad. If you ban that, suddenly it'll all be astroturf campaigns and product placement. I'd be surprised if banning billboards caused advertising budgets to drop.
theamk
Agree, that'd totally work - things like "billboards" or "ads on public transport" are possible to define and regulate. Advertising on the web would be much harder, I'd like to hear a good proposed rule on that.
Sadly, a post titled "A proposal to restrict certain forms of advertizing", and full of boring rules will be much less likely to get 800+ points on HN.
caseyy
That’s exactly right. Even if ad banning isn’t 100% doable, we’d be better off with it done 80%.
All-or-nothing thinking is so common in HN that it’s seriously over-complicating simple problems by trying to find a perfect solution. Such an ideal solution is rarely necessary.
gamblor956
I saw plenty of billboards in London and Paris last summer. Where is this magical place in the world that has lots of people but no billboards?
markdown
Billboards are banned in the state of Hawaii.
naasking
> you are self-imposing a restriction that will give other nations an economic advantage and jeopardizing long-term sovereignty.
I don't see how you reached this conclusion, unless you think advertising/propaganda yields bet positive outcomes more than net negative, which seems contentious.
Here's one way it could be false: the wisdom of the crowds only really works when groups of people independently reach their own conclusions, because people who don't understand an issue are randomly distributed around the correct answer and so they all cancel each other out, leaving only the people who do understand an issue to cluster around the correct decision.
Propaganda/advertising works directly against this, thus undercutting the usefulness of the wisdom of crowds.
margalabargala
> If you define it conservatively, then advertising will skirt through the loopholes.
This would result in a better world still, without the authoritarian system you describe. No need to get it perfect the first try, just start small.
For an example of this in action, drive through any of the US states that do not allow billboards.
flakeoil
But how do you define advertising. What about social media influencers? How to prevent someone from paying people to promote stuff? What if it is forbidden and then only a bad government can promote their agenda, but anyone else cannot.
abracadaniel
Many complex problems can become easier if we can accept that the solutions can be malleable and designed to adapt. We just don’t really apply that to laws for the most part.
jononor
One would never reach zero. And it would be challenging both to define and police laws against advertising. But to get to a world with drastically less advertisements than today seems doable.
scarface_74
So we want the government to decide what is advertising and propaganda? Is telling people about the wrongs of government propaganda? Is going door to door about have you made Jesus the head of your life propaganda?
rglullis
> How do you even define advertising?
You don't define "advertising". You look for things that advertisers do and see if they can be made illegal or unprofitable.
Formula 1 cars used to have displays for tobacco products. At one point, the law in Europe started saying "you can not do that", so tobacco advertisements disappeared.
Aeolun
I think the article mentions banning “sold advertising”, which seems like a fair way to go about it. You can still advertise your own stuff, but you cannot pay a marketplace to do it for you any more. Advertising would by necessity become a lot more local.
cyberax
How would I advertise my app? Or my TV brand?
caseyy
> How do you even define advertising?
Almost everyone can tell when they’re being advertised to. And almost everyone can tell when they advertise. Effectiveness of such bans would depend on enforcement, the definition is clear enough.
halgir
> the definition is clear enough.
It really isn't though. There's so many different forms that we can't reduce it to "I know it when I see it" territory and depend on case-by-case enforcement.
Do we ban outdoor billboards? Product placement? Content marketing? Public relations? Sponsor logos on sports uniforms? Brand logos on retail clothing? Mailing lists?
I do love the idea, but doubt its feasibility. Implementation would have to be meticulous, and I expect the advertising industry would always be one step ahead in an endless race of interpretation. We can still try to curtail the most disruptive forms though, we don't have to destroy all advertising at once to make a positive difference.
kragen
It's not a well-enough-thought-out proposal to call "radical"; it assumes that making advertising illegal would make advertising go away and that there would be no drawbacks to this. Even if we all agree that it's bad for people to say things they're paid to say instead of what they really believe, there are many possible approaches to writing specific laws to diminish that practice. Those approaches represent different tradeoffs. You can't say anything nontrivial about the whole broad set of possible policy proposals.
To me it sounds a lot like "What if we made drugs illegal?"
cogman10
> it assumes that making advertising illegal would make advertising go away
It would? I don't understand why you and others see this as a hard law to craft or enforce (probably not constitutional in the US).
The very nature of advertising is it's meant to be seen by as many people as possible. That makes enforcement fairly easy. We already have laws on the books where paid advertising/sponsorship must be clear to the viewer. That's why google search results and others are peppered with "this is an ad".
> To me it sounds a lot like "What if we made drugs illegal?"
Except drugs/alcohol can be consumed in secret and are highly sought after. The dynamic is completely different. Nobody really wants to see ads and there's enough "that's illegal" people that'd really nerf the ability of ads to get away with it.
There's not going to be ad speakeasies.
kragen
Well, I agree that for the most part consumers try to minimize their exposure to advertising, but not always. Some extreme examples of commercial advertising that was or is highly sought after by its target audience include eBay listings, Craigslist posts, the Yellow Pages, classified ads, the Sears catalog, job offer postings, the McMaster–Carr catalog, Computer Shopper before the internet was widely accessible, and "product reviews" by reviewers who got the product for free. So it seems likely that there would, in fact, be "ad speakeasies".
But let's consider the other side of this:
> I don't understand why you and others see this as a hard law to [...] enforce
Suppose we consider the narrowest sort of thing we'd get the most benefit out of prohibiting, like memecoin pump-and-dump scams, which are wildly profitable for the promoters but provide no benefit at all to the buyers, so nobody goes looking for. We can get a preview of what that prohibition would look like by looking at the current state of affairs, because those are already illegal.
And what we see are fake Elon Musk live streams with deepfaked mouth movements, fake Elon Musk Twitter accounts that reply to his followers, prominent influencers like Javier Milei for no apparent reason touting memecoins they claim to have no stake in themselves, prominent influencers like Donald Trump touting memecoins they openly have stakes in, etc. I haven't heard about any memecoins making ostensibly unpaid product placement appearances in novels or Hollywood movies (probably crime thrillers) but it wouldn't surprise me.
How about sports stars? Today it's assumed that if a sportsball player is wearing a corporate logo, it's because the company is paying him to wear it. Suppose this were prohibited; players would have to remove or cover up the Nike logos on their shoes. Probably fans would still want to know which brand of shoes they were wearing, wouldn't they? Sports journalists would publish investigative journalism showing that one or another player wore Nike Airs, drank Gatorade, or used Titleist golf balls, and the fans would lap it up. How could you prove Titleist didn't give the players any consideration in return?
A lot of YouTubers now accept donations of arbitrary size from pseudonymous donors, often via Patreon. In this brave new world they would obviously be prohibited from listing the donors' pseudonyms, but what if Apple were to pseudonymously donate large amounts to YouTubers who reviewed Apple products favorably? The donees wouldn't know their income stream depended on Apple, but viewers would still prefer to watch the better-funded channels who used better cameras, paid professional video editors, used more informative test equipment, and had professional audio dubs into their native language. Which would, apparently quite organically, be the ones that most strongly favored Apple. Would you prohibit pseudonymous donations to influencers?
Commercial advertising is in fact prohibited at Burning Man, which is more or less viable because commerce is prohibited there. You have to cover up the logos on your rental trucks, though nobody is imprisoned or fined for violating this, and it isn't enforced to the extent of concealing hood ornaments and sneaker logos. But one year there was a huge advertising scandal, where one of the biggest art projects that year, Uchronia ("the Belgian Waffle") was revealed after the fact to be a promotional construction for a Belgian company that builds such structures commercially. (I'm sure there have been many such controversies more recently, but I haven't been able to attend for several years, so I don't know about them.)
Let's consider a negative-space case as well: Yelp notoriously removed negative reviews from businesses' listings if they signed up for its service. We can imagine arbitrarily subtle ways of achieving such effects, such as YouTube suggesting less often that users watch a certain video if it criticizes Google or a YouTube supporter (such as the US government) or if it speaks favorably of a competing service. How do you prohibit that kind of advertising in an enforceable way? Do you prohibit Yelp from removing reviews from the site?
Hopefully this clarifies some of the potential difficulties with enforcing a ban on advertising, even to people who don't want to be advertised to.
34679
I thought drug laws were a fine example, but let's look at another. It's illegal to bribe politicians. Does that mean there is no grift in Washington?
amelius
Current administration already made a bunch of radical decisions. What's another one?
noir_lord
That parallel between propaganda and advertising is why I have a pathological hatred of advertising, I block it in all forms possible, to the extent that if I can’t block it I won’t use the product.
I simply hate been manipulated.
So much so that I forget what the modern tech landscape is like for the average user til I use one of their devices.
We’ve (collectively we for techies) helped create a dystopia.
barnabee
100% agree.
I am happy to pay for an ad-free version of a product I want but I will never use your product if I cannot block or remove the ads.
ruszki
Isn't Hacker News for advertising for Y Combinator and topics which are important to Y Combinator?
kilroy123
I am the same exact way.
When I visit my parents it's eye opening how much advertising they're bombarded with daily.
lordnacho
> Try this thought experiment from the article - imagine a world without advertising. Products would still exist. Commerce would still happen. Information would still flow. We'd just be freed from the increasingly sophisticated machinery designed to override our decision-making.
We would no longer be tricked into buying a bunch of crap that doesn't make us happy.
But because GDP is what it is, we will have a recession. Quite a big one, because a lot of the economy is reliant on selling people stuff they could do without. Perhaps people would be happier once things settle down, but we have locked ourselves into measuring things that are easy to measure, and so we're all going to think it was a failed experiment.
grues-dinner
> Try this thought experiment from the article - imagine a world without advertising.
While we're at radical thought experiments combine that with "what if any entity worth over 100 million (insert arbitrary limit here, perhaps what if it was based on an multiple of average employee salary) was disallowed".
And, in fact, if the maximum company size were limited, and thus the marketplace wasn't a swimming pool full of whales, but instead full of a much larger number of a broader mix of smaller fish, what would advertising look like then?
For example, large categories of industry would have to change hugely into cooperative non-owning groups of smaller companies. Would they still have the same advertising dominance, or would the churn within the groups break things up?
barnabee
I like the direction but some things are difficult to imagine happening at all without extremely large companies.
I have wondered before about restricting a company’s diversity. Effectively giving a time limit after a company over a certain size develops a new line of business by which it must be spun off into a new company. Say 12 or 18 months.
For example, Apple would have been allowed to develop and launch Apple Music but it would have been forced to spin it off.
The rule would need to be carefully crafted, and would need regulators to be active in enforcement as it would require interpretation to be applied (similar to how anti-trust works today, perhaps).
johnnyanmac
I'd rather cap salaries than company sizes. The logistics of certain industries may naturally require more manpower than others and put them at a disadvantage.
But someone earning $10m a year while their workers are on food stamps is unacceptable. Having a dynamic limit of total comp would mean they either take less money and put it into the company, or raise the wages of those employees.
grues-dinner
Sure it's just a thought experiment.
But even in the strict context of the experiment for very heavy industry, like a steel mill or chip fab, they could be co-operatively owned in whole or by parts.
You could also extend the experiment to allow capital assets to be discounted, or allow worker-owned shares to be discounted. So you can get big, but only by building or by sharing, respectively.
Obviously the big industries today would not be possible as they are structured. But what would we get instead? Would the co-operative overhead kill efficiency dead, or would the dynamism in the system produce higher overall efficiency and better worker outcomes than behemoths hoarding resources and hoovering up competition? And if no one can be worth over 100 million (say), what would that do to the lobbying and deal-making system at the higher levels? One 10-billionaire would have be be replaced by 100 people.
cscurmudgeon
[dead]
Terr_
It is a tricky and uncomfortable truth that human minds are hackable.
On the flip side, we've had many thousands of years of adversarial training, so it's not as if protections don't exist—at least for a very classical modes of attack.
hliyan
This his how I look at it. If a lesser computing device's vulnerabilities were exploited to alter its intended behaviour, especially for financial gain, it would be considered hacking and criminal penalties would apply. Why that applies to a mobile phone, and not to a far more critical computing device (the human brain) is the question.
autoexec
There are manipulation techniques we really can't protect ourselves against. It's like the optical illusions where even when you're fully aware what the trick is, you know the horizontal lines on the café wall are actually straight, you still see it incorrectly. Awareness of our weaknesses isn't enough to correct them.
Even when we can use that awareness to notice the times that we're being manipulated and try to remind ourselves to reject the idea that was forced into our brain surveillance capitalism means that advertisers can use the data they have to hit us when they know we're most susceptible and our defenses will be less effective. They can engineer our experiences and environments to make us more susceptible and our defenses are less effective. They're spending massive amounts of time and money year after year on refining their techniques to be more and more effective in general, and more effective against you individually. I wouldn't put much faith in our ability to immunize ourselves against advertising.
amelius
Read up on psychological warfare techniques. And these have been embraced by adtech companies and are being applied to children ...
ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7
The reality of "mind control" of those perpetually exposed to media has been a popular topic throughout the last half century at least.
Humans don't have those protections. Although, ego deludes oneself to believe they do. Ask anyone if they are susceptible to advertising. Maybe 1 in 5 have the humility and awareness to state the truth.
barnabee
This is precisely why I try to see as close to zero advertising as possible, and also why I will always actively avoid buying something when I do see an ad for it (if I realise this).
I do not trust my in-built protections, so I’d rather not be exposed in the first place.
relaxing
Thousands of years of adversarial training is what made us controllable — stick with the group, and we’ll defend ourselves against the enemy.
timewizard
It's a pattern recognition machine dominated by reward feedback mechanisms.
It's not hackable so much as it lacks resistance to environmental noise.
LunaSea
> Try this thought experiment from the article - imagine a world without advertising. Products would still exist. Commerce would still happen.
But newspapers, TV and Youtube would die out.
cauch
Advertisement get the source money from the viewers, it does not create any money in itself. So, if advertisement is banned, people will have more money, and this money can be used to finance what they want to consume.
This is something that I still struggle to wrap my head around: if a company is paying X$ for advertisement, it means that people subjected to this advertisement will give Y$ to this company that they would not have paid otherwise, Y higher than X, otherwise there is no reason for this company to pay for advertisement. Yet everyone is saying "yeah, advertisement, I don't care, I just ignore it". Surely it cannot be true.
parkaboy
Even if it seems like everyone is saying this, it's just statistically not true / in the aggregate, at least in the context of direct online ads. Otherwise the direct ad industry would be totally dead (ad performance is measured to death by companies).
Conversion (getting someone to purchase) at scale with ads is not so simple as person sees ad, clicks, and buys. There are many steps along the funnel and sometimes ads can be used in concert with other channels (influencer content, sponsored news articles, etc). Within direct ads you typically have multiple steps depending on how cold or warm (e.g. have they seen or interacted with your content previously) the lead is when viewing the ad and you tailor the ad content accordingly to try to keep pushing the person down the funnel.
Generally if you know your customer persona well and have good so-called product-market-fit, then (1) you will be able to build a funnel that works at scale. So then (2) the question is does the cost to convert a customer / CAC fit within the profit margin, which is much more difficult to unpack.
However, it's worth keeping in mind that digital ad costs are essentially invented by the ad platform. There is a market-type of force. If digital ads become less effective and the CAC goes too high across an industry/sector, the platform may be forced to reduce the cost to deliver ads if the channel just doesn't make enough financial sense for enough businesses.
All this is to say, the system does/can work. Tends to work better for large established companies or startups with lots of funding. In general, not a suggested approach as a first channel for a small startup/small business. Building up effective funnels is incredibly expensive and takes a lot of time in my depressing personal experience.
jzb
"This is something that I still struggle to wrap my head around: if a company is paying X$ for advertisement, it means that people subjected to this advertisement will give Y$ to this company that they would not have paid otherwise"
You seem to be assuming that, in the absence of advertising, the company will sell as much as it did before -- just with lower overhead costs -- rather than advertising driving more sales and possibly lowering costs because the company has more customers. For some items / things this may be true-ish. I'm going to buy paper towels because I need paper towels, and advertising has little influence on that -- except, maybe, which brand I buy. But I'm going to spill things, and my cats are going to keep barfing on the floor from time to time, so I'm going to need paper towels regardless. And I'm not going to buy a bunch of extra ones just because the ads are so good.
Don't get me started on soda advertising and such because the amount of money those companies spend on ads is mind-boggling and I don't think it moves the needle very much when it comes to Coke vs. Pepsi...
But, would I go see a movie without ads to promote it? Would I buy that t-shirt with a funny design if I didn't see it on a web site? Sign up for a SaaS offering if I don't see an ad for it somewhere?
If a SaaS lands 20% more customers because ads (and other forms of marketing) that's not necessarily going to mean I pay more for the SaaS because ads. It may very well mean that the prices stay lower because many of their costs are fixed and if they have 20% more paying customers, they can charge less to be competitive. If a publication has more subscribers because it advertises, it may not have to raise rates to stay / be profitable.
In some cases you may be correct -- landing customers via ads equals X% of my costs, so my prices reflect that. But it's not necessarily true.
makeitdouble
Parent's point about ad being close to propaganda is key: people getting advertised at are often not the ones with the money.
For newspapers for instance, Exxon or Shell could be paying a lot more to have their brand painted in favorable light than the amount the newspaper readership could afford to pay in aggregate.
The same way Coca Cola's budget for advertising greenness is not matched by how many more sales they're expecting to make from these ads in any specific medium, but how much the company's bottling policy has to lose if public opinion changed too much. That's basically lobbying money.
chronogram
News would still exist and would not be competing with engagement driven news because there's no engagement=ad views. I wager it would be very helpful to news.
TV would absolutely still exist, given that people pay for it and there is a big industry around ad-free streaming services already.
LunaSea
Almost no online newspaper survives from subscriptions.
Non public broadcasters are rarely if ever and free. Meaning that their business model requires this as revenue to survive.
makeitdouble
For news, I feel it's another can of worm altogether.
Right now we've already having oligarchs owning news groups and very few independent publications. But getting rid of other revenue sources won't help that situation, we'd get more Washington Post or New York Times than Buffalo's Fire.
It's a lot easier IMHO to have an independent newsroom if the business side can advertise for toilet paper and dating sites than if it needs to convince Jeff Bezos of its value to him.
And investigation journalism costs a lot while not getting valued by many, there's no way we get a set of paid-only-by-viewers papers from all relevant spectrums covering most of the news happening every day.
jzb
"But newspapers, TV and Youtube would die out."
The missing part of this sentence is "as they exist now". There are other models that exist that could support broadcast and publications. There are other models yet to be explored or that have floundered because they've been snuffed out or avoided because the easiest (for certain values of "easy") path to dollars, right now, is advertising.
It is a pipe dream, of course -- and the author of the piece doesn't really do the hard work of following through on not just how difficult it would be to make advertising illegal, but the ramificaitons. While an ad-free world would be wonderful, that's a lot of people out of a job real quick-like. Deciding what constitutes an "ad" versus content marketing or just "hey, this thing exists" would be harder than it might seem at first thought.
theamk
Which models are there? The only other ones I know is patreon-like, which totally destroy the long tail.
And long-tail ones are the best. There are some great videos on youtube which are 10+ years old and do not have millions of views. I am sure many of their uploaders already forgot about them. I cannot see them existing without being supported by "something", and if that's not advertisement, than what?
appreciatorBus
* “the newspapers, tv channels and YouTube content that had so little value to society that no one was willing to pay for will die out.”
Yes.
Enginerrrd
I don't know. I would GLADLY pay for ad-free youtube if the price were set at what they'd otherwise make on ads for me. In which case, that'd be about $3.50/month.
Instead they want to price-gouge me for 5x that so... no thanks. I'll just use my ad blocker.
wintermutestwin
I would gladly pay for ad-free youtube if they weren’t double dipping by tracking me (which is now more valuable because you have my cc#)
pseufaux
TV and YouTube would definitely suffer. Not sure if that's an issue or benefit. But I'm not sure newspapers or journalism would be so bad. My expectation would be that people would still need/want information from somewhere might begin paying to get it.
LunaSea
They already have this choice and don't pick it.
Henchman21
Very little of value would be lost.
TeMPOraL
> But newspapers, TV and Youtube would die out.
Good. They're but shells of themselves, eaten through and bloated up by cancer of advertising. Even if they were to die out, the demand for the value they used to provide will remain strong, so these services would reappear in a better form.
I thought people in tech/enterpreneurship circles were generally fans of "creative disruption"? Well, there's nothing more creatively disruptive than rebuilding the digital markets around scummy business models.
(Think of all business models - many of them more honest - that are suppressed by advertising, because they can't compete with "free + ads". Want business innovation? Ban "free + ads" and see it happen.)
nofalsescotsman
Treating the symptoms is easier and cheaper. And let's be real, the money would rather treat symptoms than the cause. Convincing monied interests to stop advertising is not a realistic thing. This would have to be done through legislation and force. And I agree it should be done.
gigatree
Neither convincing them nor compelling them through law would work. I’m surprised the author can’t see that as an ad person himself. The incentives are too strong; if you outlaw them, they’ll just be circumnavigated in more nefarious ways.
johnnyanmac
Law can be very strong but our "representatives" as of now aren't very good at representing the will of the people.
The system can work but we vote in horrible people to execute it.
dash2
This idea isn't uncommon because it's beyond the Overton window, it's uncommon because it is silly and unworkable.
* Total fantasy to think you wouldn't fall afoul of free speech, both legally (in the US) and morally.
In fact, the author touts as a benefit that you'd stop populists being able to talk to their audience. This is destroying the village of liberal democracy in order to save it!
* Absolutely zero thought has been given to how to police the boundaries. Giving a paid speech? Free gifts for influencers? Rewards for signing up a friend?
* Products need marketing. You don't just magically know what to buy. Advertising fulfils an important social role. Yes, I know it can be annoying/intrusive/creepy. "In our information-saturated world, ads manipulate, but they don't inform" is an evidence-free assertion.
* Banning billboards or other public advertising? Fine. Not new. Done all over the place for commonsensical reasons.
* Any article that talks about "blurry, “out-of-focus fascism”—that sense of discomfort that you feel but can't quite point out" is itself blurry and out-of focus, not to say absurd and hyperbolic. Calling a mild sense of psychological discomfort "fascism" is just embarrassing.
ozornin
> how to police the boundaries
Any existing policy inevitably has a gray area, no matter how elaborate it is. That's okay if the author didn't cover corner cases in a short essay.
> You don't just magically know what to buy.
Knowing what you need is not magic. I don't remember much advertising lately that would tell me how a good can satisfy my existing needs. Mostly, they are trying to make me feel I need something I didn't need before
dash2
Hardly a corner case. It's such an obvious question that the failure to cover it means the author isn't serious.
Knowing what you need is not magic, but knowing which products might satisfy it is not automatic. Advertising targeting, which people quite reasonably find intrusive, exists because advertisers desperately want to find people who may potentially want to buy their product.
Hendrikto
I agree with almost all your points, but this is just false:
> Products need marketing. You don't just magically know what to buy.
We don’t need marketing, we need information. Objective information, that would be easier to come by in the absence of manipulative marketing.
dash2
You are defining marketing as manipulative. In fact, marketing is just "bringing a product to market". For example, it includes having booths at a trade show. The line between objective information and "puff" is impossible to draw. I googled "strollers" and got:
Joolz strollers with ergonomic design, manoeuvrability, compactness, and storage space. compare and choose your favourite Joolz pushchair model.
Is this manipulation or information?
toomim
This begs the question: how could you reliably distinguish advertising from other forms of free speech?
The courts already distinguish "commercial speech" as a class of speech. Would we prevent all forms of commercial speech? What about a waiter asking you "would you like to try a rosé with that dish? It pairs very well together." Is that "advertising" that would need to be outlawed?
What about giving out free samples? Is that advertising, and thus should be illegal?
What about putting a sign up on your business that says the business name? Is that advertising?
I hate advertising and propaganda. But the hard part IMO is drawing the line. Where's the line?
imiric
We don't need to go into absurd discussions in order to prevent 99% of the harm that comes from modern advertising.
The line is clear: is money being exchanged in order to promote a product? That's advertising.
Someone I know mentioning a product because they want to recommend it to me? Not advertising.
Giving out "free" samples? Presumably someone is being paid to do that, so advertising.
We can later quibble about edge cases and how to handle someone putting up a sign for their business. Many countries have regulations about visual noise, so that should be considered as well.
But it's pretty easy to distinguish advertising that seeks to manipulate, and putting a stop to that. Hell, we could start by surfacing the dark data broker market and banning it altogether. That alone should remove the most egregious cases of privacy abuse.
OmarShehata
> The line is clear: is money being exchanged in order to promote a product? That's advertising.
this is obviously not a clear line. No money is exchanged when I promote my own product through my own channels, nor when I promote my friends products, whether I disclose it as promotion, or disguise it as my genuine unaffiliated opinion. Sometimes it really is a genuine opinion! Even worse: sometimes a genuine opinion becomes an incentivized one later on as someone's audience grows
the good news is there is a solution that doesn't require playing these cat & mouse games and top down authority deciding what is allowed speech: you want better ways to reach the people who want your product.
Ads are a bad solution to a genuine problem in society. They will persist as long as the problem exists. People who sell things need ways to find buyers. Solve the root problem of discernment rather than punishing everyone indiscriminately
imiric
> People who sell things need ways to find buyers.
No, you've got that backwards. People who sell things should have a way of announcing their product to the world. Buyers who are interested in that type of product should be the ones seeking out the companies, not the other way around.
The current approach of companies pushing their products to everyone is how we got to the mess we are in today. Companies will cheat, lie, and break every law in existence in order to make more money. Laws need to be made in order for companies to stop abusing people.
You know what worked well? Product catalogs. Companies buy ad space in specific print or digital media. Consumers can consult that media whenever they want to purchase a specific product. This is what ecommerce sites should be. Give the consumer the tools to search for specific product types, brands, specifications, etc.; get rid of fake reviews and only show honest reviews from verified purchases and vetted reviewers, and there you go. Consumers can discover products, and companies can advertise.
This, of course, is only wishful thinking, since companies would rather continue to lie, cheat, and steal, as that's how the big bucks are made.
I honestly find it disturbing that with all of humanity's progress and all the brilliant technology we've invented, all of our communication channels are corrupted by companies who want to make us buy stuff, and by propaganda from agencies that want to make us think or act a certain way. Like holy shit, people, is this really the best we can do? It's exhausting having to constantly fight against being manipulated or exploited.
addicted
> No money is exchanged when I promote my own product through my own channels
This is not really advertising, but it’s not really a problem either. People expect you to promote your own products and take it with the grain of salt they should. Besides, there are only so many channels you can possibly control.
> nor when I promote my friends products, whether I disclose it as promotion, or disguise it as my genuine unaffiliated opinion. Sometimes it really is a genuine opinion!
Sure. Maybe this is advertising that slips through. If all were down to is people advertising their friends’s products for no money then we would have eliminated 99.99% of the problem.
Further, if you have a highly influential channel, the cost of promoting a non genuine opinion about a friend’s product would almost certainly hurt your reputation, providing a strong disincentive to do such a thing.
irrational
> No money is exchanged when I promote my own product through my own channels
Isn’t it? You receive money when people buy your product because of your advertising.
pishpash
Yellow books used to do that. Because you're right it's a matchmatching problem.
crazygringo
> The line is clear: is money being exchanged in order to promote a product? That's advertising.
The line is absolutely not clear.
Is ABC allowed to run commercials for its own shows?
ABC is owned by Disney. Is ABC allowed to run commercials for Disney shows? Is it allowed to run commericals for Disney toys?
Can ABC run commercials for Bounty paper towels, in exchange for Bounty putting ads for ABC shows on its paper towel packaging?
Literally no money is being exchanged so far.
I'm familiar with a lot of gray areas that courts regularly have to decide on. But trying to distinguish advertising from free speech sounds like the most difficult free speech question I've ever come across. People are allowed to express positive opinions about products, and even try to convince their friends, that's free speech. Trying to come up with a global definition of advertising that doesn't veer into censorship... I can't even imagine. Are you suddenly prevented from blogging about a water bottle you like, because you received a coupon for a future water bottle? Because if you use that coupon, it's effectively money exchanged. What if your blog says you wouldn't have bothered writing about the bottle, but you were so impressed with the coupon on top of everything else it got you to write?
You can argue over any of these examples, but that's the point: you're arguing, because the line isn't clear.
dmoy
I agree with the general thought - doing something like this would give giant mega corporations a huge leg up from verticals.
> Can ABC run commercials for Bounty paper towels, in exchange for Bounty putting ads for ABC shows on its paper towel packaging?
I was with you until this one
Under both IRS and GAAP rules, that's equivalent to money changing hands. So in a hypothetical "no money for advertising" world, that would be over the line.
Gunax
I think you articulated the vagueness very well.
One other example I was thinking was product placement. Are these characters eating pizza? Or is it Pizza Hut®™ pizza?
kragen
> Is ABC allowed to run commercials for its own shows?
Well, not if they pay employees to do it. Except that shows aren't products, they're services, so they'd be exempt from this proposal.
tiborsaas
What if I "win" a BMW and I can't stop talking about it on social media?
econ40432
Does CNN, Fox News, ABC, New York Times and CBS use money to endorse candidates on air? Is that advertising?
ericjmorey
Who would think it's not advertising?
tptacek
Candidate endorsements (and political advertising in general) are core political speech. You can't outlaw it in the US.
numpad0
I'm wondering if it's possible that the reality might be working the other way around than perceived. Could there be steaming can of worms that modern rampant commercial advertising is venting and holding down?
Studio Ghibli made ~$220m on Spirited Away. What if they made $2.2T, is the quality going to go up, or down? And, would there be less ads, if no one made even $2.2 on them?
card_zero
You're presenting an idea here by means of a lot of implicit leaps, and I don't even know where I'm supposed to leap to at each stage. It's like a logic game that I'm failing at.
What's the connection between adverts and the amount of money Ghibli made on their best-loved movie?
Hmm, maybe none, maybe you're using Ghibli as a metaphor for products that make money through adverts. And maybe the implied answer to the next question is that their next movie, The Cat Returns, would have been higher quality if they had made even more money on Spirited Away. So what you could be saying is that crippling the ad industry would lead to lower quality products, without even much reducing the number of (less effective) adverts that get made.
That's one way to read what you said, but I feel like I got it wrong.
akoboldfrying
> is money being exchanged in order to promote a product?
So if I paint my store front's sign myself, I'm good, but if I pay a signwriter to paint it, it's illegal?
I guess I better become "friends" with a signwriter, so that they don't mind making a sign or two for me "for free". And so that I don't mind giving them a widget or two from my store sometime in the future.
thayne
> The line is clear: is money being exchanged in order to promote a product? That's advertising.
So that would exclude:
- listing your house, or car in the classifieds
- buying a sign for your business (ad discussed in other posts)
- buying a garage sale sign
- buying a for sale sign, or flyers for your house for sale
- paying a realtor to sell your house
- paying a reporter or professional reviewer to write a review. Even if they are paid by a newspaper/magazine/consumer report site, money exchanged hands for something that promotes a product.
- distributing a catalog
- paying a cloud provider or VPS provider or website hosting service to host a website that promotes your product
Also, what exactly constitutes a "product"? Does a service count? If not, that is a pretty big loophole. What about a job position? Or someone looking for employment?
And finally, advertisement in some form is kind of important for making customers aware your product exists. Word of mouth isn't very effective if you don't have any customers to begin with. I would expect removing all advertising to have a chilling effect on innovation and new businesses.
To be clear, I think the current advertising environment is terrible, and unhealthy, and needs to be fixed. But I think that removing all advertisement would have some negative ramifications, especially if the definition of an ad is too simplistic.
barnabee
Publishing factual information in a place people expect to find it is not advertising.
Listing a house for sale on an agent’s website: not advertising.
Promoting that listing or the agent on the home page of a local news site: advertising
etc…
Some cases will be harder, all are decidable. We are talking about law not code, so there’s no need for a perfect algorithm, the legal system is designed precisely to deal with these sorts of question.
imiric
It's remarkable that you put all that thought into coming up with holes in my one-line argument, and no thought into steelmanning it.
Since we're coming up with hypothetical laws and loopholes, here is a simple addendum to my original argument:
- Only applies for companies, and only to those with more than $100,000 ARR.
There. That avoids penalizing most of the personal advertising scenarios you mentioned. Since laws are never a couple of sentences long, I'm sure with more thought we'd be able to find a good balance that prevents abuse, but not legitimate use cases for informing people about a product or service.
Again, the goal is not to get into philosophical discussions about what constitutes advertising, and banning commercial speech, or whatever constitutional right exists. The goal is to prevent companies from abusing people's personal data, profiling them, selling their profiles on dark markets, allowing mass psychological manipulation that is threating our democratic processes, and in general, from corrupting every communication channel in existence. Surely there are ways of accomplishing this without endless discussions about semantics and free speech.
But, as I've said in other threads, this is all wishful thinking. There is zero chance that the people in power who achieved it by these means will suddenly decide to regulate themselves and kill their golden goose. Nothing short of an actual revolution will bring this system down.
> And finally, advertisement in some form is kind of important for making customers aware your product exists.
Agreed. In the olden days before digital ads, product catalogs worked well. Companies would buy ad space in specific print media, and consumers interested in buying a product would consult the catalog for the type of product they're looking for. Making ads pull rather than push solves this awareness problem proponents of advertising deem so important. The reason they prefer the push approach is because it's many times more profitable for all involved parties. The only victims in this system are the people outside of it. The current system is making a consumer of everyone every time they interact with any content, when the reality is that people are only consumers when they're actively looking to buy something. Most of the time we just want to consume the content we're interested in, without being sold anything. It's the wrong approach, with harmful results, and the only reason we stuck with it is because it's making someone else very rich. It's absolute insanity.
kodt
Well money must be exchanged to put up a sign outside of your business. Therefore it would be illegal.
theamk
exchanged with whom? If it's a small business, it's likely the owner puts the sign out themselves.
Or is it money exchange with sign manufacturer? In this case are outdoor signs OK if owner personally made them?
arrosenberg
It’s not speech that needs to be regulated, it’s broadcast (which should not have 1A protections at nearly the same level). Even if a waiter is giving recommendations, those are limited to the people at the table and there is clearly a mutual exchange of value. Broadcast (aka Industrial) advertising is something we accept, but not because it particularly benefits the viewer. It benefits the broadcaster and advertiser and makes the viewer into a product.
ambicapter
I think this is the best insight on this thread. Laws of this kind would be like banning billboards in cities, which has been done.
throwanem
And we already regulate actual broadcast on this basis.
For example, it violates no rule to include valid Emergency Broadcast System/Emergency Alert System tones (the electronic, machine-interpretable "chirps") in a movie or TV show, or to publish that via streaming, DVD etc. But no one does this, because broadcasting spurious tones (and triggering spurious automated broadcast interruptions) carries serious first-instance fines to which FCC licensees (ie distributors via broadcast) agree as a condition of licensure. They know they aren't allowed to do this and, very occasional and expensive mishaps excepted, they won't take the risk. (1) So program material that wants to include those tones has to make sure they're excluded from the TV edit, or decide whether the verisimilitude is worth the limit on audience access.
While the specifics of course vary among cases, the basic theory of broadcast (ie distribution) as distinct from and less protected than speech, with the consequential distinction drawn specifically along the scale at which speech is distributed, seems clear.
(1) Some may note instances such as one of the Purge films (iirc) that seem to contradict this claim. Compare the tones in those examples with the ones in test samples or generated by a compliant encoder [1] for the "Specific Area Message Encoding" protocol. Even without a decoder, the FSK frequencies and timings have to be resilient to low-bandwidth channels designed to carry human voice, so it's all well within audible ranges and you can hear the difference between real tones and what a movie or show can safely use. Typically either the pitch is dropped below compliant ranges, or the encoding is intentionally corrupted, or both. But almost always, the problem is just sidestepped entirely, since it's the attention tone that everyone really notices anyway.
[1] https://cryptodude3.github.io/same/ is no more certified than mine but has, unlike my own implementation, been tested against a real EAS ENDEC. At some point I want to test mine against that one and find out how badly I screwed up reading the spec ten years ago...
JuettnerDistrib
How would this work for a personal blog? Would I need to be careful not to endorse or even talk about companies and products? And if I didn't have to, wouldn't that open the door for advertising masquerading as news or opinion? Genuinely interested in this.
arrosenberg
Were you paid to talk about the product? If not, then it’s constitutionally protected speech. If there is any kind of payment, it’s advertising. If it’s advertising, follow the law.
thayne
Does a website count as broadcast, since anyone with an internet connection can access it (sans the Great Firewall and similar)?
Henchman21
Put this way I almost think we should ban anything that makes “people into the product”
kelseyfrog
The ambiguity of these questions is a feature rather than a bug.
Being unable to tell when something is "advertising" forces everyone to think twice before hawking their wares, which is exactly what we want if we intend to kill ads. The chilling effect is precisely the intention.
It’s the engineer’s curse to believe that airtight laws are automatically better, or that justice springs from mechanistic certainty. The world is fundamentally messy, and the sooner we accept its arbitrariness, the sooner we can get to an advertising-free world.
Brian_K_White
No. This is called selective enforcement and is the worst thing in the world. It gives the enforcers the option to pick on whoever they want and give a pass to whever they want, as if there were no law at all. There is effectively no law at all, because literally anyone doing anything can be called either guilty or innocent at the whim of the person doing the enforcing, or whoever controls them.
TuringTest
You've just described how laws actually work - but we have created modern judiciary system so that it will tend to produce outcomes considered fair by the majority. Algorithmic enforcement of justice without human deliberation of case-by-case specifics would be worse that the worst horror stories about soulless bureaucracies.
That's why we have judges and lawyers, so that the outcome can be decided as a communal process instead of just one person deciding what is punishable - even if the person is the developer building the automated justice dispenser and they'll be not around when the decision is taken, it would still be made by the whims of a single enforcer.
throwaway173738
No, what it does is require the courts to interpret the meaning of the word and create precedent. That’s not the same as selective enforcement.
econ40432
There would be a chilling effect on speech. People would be afraid to speak or be imprisoned for saying the wrong things. North Korea is the only country that bans advertising.
mschuster91
> North Korea is the only country that bans advertising.
Outright banning, yes maybe. But many countries or local governments severely regulate advertising in one form or another, and no one is crying foul either.
tener
So we end up in a system in which those with money to litigate will do what they want? I'd rather have airtight laws instead.
kelseyfrog
Can you point to an airtight law regarding speech that exists today - both as written and enforced? I can't.
This is a worse is better[1] situation. Specifically, I'm arguing against the MIT approach to lawmaking.
The MIT approach:
> The design must be consistent. A design is allowed to be slightly less simple and less complete to avoid inconsistency. Consistency is as important as correctness.
Thinking about laws like software terminates thought.
_def
That's where we are right now. Airtight laws are impossible in complex systems.
01HNNWZ0MV43FF
Many lines are hard to draw but we benefit from trying to draw them. Worrying too much would be bikeshedding
The biggest example that comes to mind is gambling. Japan says it's not gambling if the pachinko place gives you balls and then you have to walk next door to a "different" company to cash out the balls. I say it sounds like their laws are captured by the pachinko industry.
Video game loot boxes are technically legal but most of us don't want children gambling. Even if the game company doesn't pay you for weapon skins, there's such a big secondary market that it constitutes gambling anyway. Just like the pachinko machines.
autoexec
> I say it sounds like their laws are captured by the pachinko industry.
It wasn't just the pachinko industry that tied the hands of Japanese government. It was the people too. It's a lot harder to ban something and keep it banned when everybody wants it. Thankfully, not many people want ads, but pachinko was popular enough that it makes sense to continue to let people do it. You're right about still getting a benefit. Even after carving out exceptions, banning gambling broadly otherwise is effective enough to solve a lot of the problems that unregulated gambling can cause.
I do think video game loot boxes are something that needs regulation. Not just because it is gambling, but because the games can be unfair and even adversarial. Casinos exploit and encourage adult gambling addicts but at least those games are required to be "fair" (no outright cheating) and they have to be honest about how unfair the odds against you are. A supposedly impartial third party goes around making sure casinos are following the rules. Video games don't have any of that and they're targeting children on top of it.
uniq7
Any laws with blurred lines will be used by the people in power against their political adversaries to keep them in power.
tppiotrowski
I agree with this. Any law that's not universally enforced: speeding, jaywalking, tax audit, etc is a tool for political persecution.
IshKebab
All laws have blurred lines. I guess you could say some are a lot more blurred than others.
what
>video game loot boxes
Is buying packages of random baseball/pokemon/etc cards gambling then?
djoldman
In the communications industry there are SOME fairly bright definitions:
- Advertising and marketing are when an entity pays some other entity to transmit content
- Public relations is when an entity, without paying, causes another entity to transmit content
- Public affairs is when an entity causes a governmental entity to consume specific content at minimum, up to possibly influencing decisions. It should go without saying that this is without paying as well, otherwise it's corruption/bribery
kodt
>- Advertising and marketing are when an entity pays some other entity to transmit content
So all usage of the internet would apply?
djoldman
I guess I could have been more specific.
...an entity A pays some other entity B to transmit some specific content to a third party to induce the third party to take action that benefits the paying entity A.
OJFord
I would propose 'unsolicited salesmanship'.
If I enter your restaurant, car dealership, etc. then you can pitch & try to up-sell your goods and services to me.
If I drive down a motorway or use your website, third-parties can't advertise their goods and services at me from spots you've sold them. (But you can tell me it will be faster to exit onto your toll road or that I should buy or upgrade my membership plan on the site.)
pishpash
So no third-party advertising. But that would then create bundling schemes where the restaurant sells you a bundle of their goods and some third-party goods together, for a kickback on the backend, or they make referrals.
OJFord
No, that's why I said 'unsolicited' rather than 'third-party', so take the motorway billboard toll road example - if you also happen to own the car dealership or the webapp, you can't advertise that, because that's not what I've come to your motorway for.
And what's solicited or 'relevant' doesn't need to be rigidly defined in statutes (assuming common law) - the ASA or OfCom whoever it would be (UK examples) slaps fines on the rulebreakers and if they think they've interpreted the law correctly in good faith then it goes to court and we find out (and the growing body of case law helps future would-be-advertisers interpret it).
The existing advertisement disclosure rules for social media for example don't allow the loophole you propose: a 'sponsored' segment shilling a product in a YouTube video isn't considered different from directly selling video time to the third-party in which to run their own ad reel.
lukan
I would start with obvious things, like banning distracting blinking advertisement next to roads and go further from there.
Rule of thumb, all aggressive unwanted information.
Clear? For sure not, like you said. But I am considering (rather dreaming) moving to La Palma, a vulcano island that banned all light advertisement (they did so, because of the observatories on top, but they are cool).
Still, a city without aggressive lights would be nice. Some lights are probably unavaidable in big cities, but light that is purposeful distracting, should be just banned.
And online is kind of a different beast, as we voluntarily go to the sites offering us information (but thank god and gorhill for adblockers)
graemep
I think it is a good question, but there are some answers. For one thing, it is paid for, though a system set up for the purpose of putting commercial speech on someone else's profit making media.
Many laws do draw lines in areas that are equally difficult. Its a problem, but far from a fatal one.
defanor
> It's such a wild idea that I've never heard it in the public discourse.
IIRC there is a Dilbert comic strip about that.
> Clickbait [...] would become worthless overnight
Advertisement is not the only incentive. E.g., the Veritasium YouTube channel's host explicitly switched to clickbait, explaining it by his intent to reach a wider audience. Another example is clickbait submission titles on HN, not all of which are for the sake of advertisement (unless you count HN submissions in general as advertisements themselves, of course).
> When I say advertising, I also mean propaganda. Propaganda is advertising for the state
Not necessarily for the state, the usual definition includes furthering of ideas in general. In places like Russia, propaganda of an increasing number of ideas is actually banned, as it used to be in many other places ("heresy" and suchlike). Combined with selective enforcement, it is as good as banning all propaganda. It may be a particularly bad example of such a ban, but still an illustration of the dangers around it.
I think a better path towards the world without (or almost without) commercial advertising is not via coercion, but as kaponkotrok mentioned in another comment, via education and public discussion (which may also be called "propaganda"), shifting social norms to make such advertisement less acceptable. People can make advertisements unprofitable if they will choose to: not just by ignoring them (including setting ad blockers), but also by intentionally preferring products not connected to unpleasant and shady tactics, including those beyond advertisement: slave labor and other human rights violations, unsustainable energy sources, global warming, animal cruelty, monopolies, proprietary or bloated software and hardware are some of the common examples. Social norms and such enforcement seem to be less brittle than laws are, and harder to turn into an oppression mechanism.
hansmayer
Fantastic article, I particularly like the point about humanity being more or less ad-free for much of it existence. I was just thinking about absurdity of advertising yesterday. As a life-long football fan (not soccer ;)), I was always bothered by the slow creep-in of those silly, mindless pre- and post-game interviews they do with players and managers nowadays. In the two decades since this has been happening it never occurred to me why these were a thing, until yesterday. In a lead up to a minor game, of course there was an interview with one of the players. In front of one of those panels with repetitive ads for various businesses. As it happens to be the case every time for the last 20ish years. Of course! The interviewees are just providing the mindless content, while my mind absorbs the background ads! So obvious, but it never occurred to me even once. Ad industry is really a cancer on society.
stego-tech
Just from the headline alone: oh please dear god yes.
The internet became usable after implementing the Pi-Hole. So much noise, so much wasted bandwidth, so many unnecessary lookups, gone with a Raspberry Pi and a few packages.
While other commenters are getting into the technical weeds of things, the reality is that the OP is right. Ads don’t inform, they manipulate. They’re an abusive forced-marriage that we cannot withdraw from even with ad and script blockers, because so much of society is built upon the advertising sector that it’s impossible to fully escape them. People like the OP and us are mocked for moves to block billboards in space as being “alarmist” or out of touch, yet driving along any highway in the USA will bombard you with ads on billboards, on busses, on rideshares, on overly-large signs with glowing placards, in radio and television, on streaming providers who raise our rates on what used to be ad-free packages.
Advertising is cancer, and I’m tired of pretending it’s not. Let’s get rid of it.
snailmailman
Youtube so badly wants me to pay for premium. But the ads they show me are almost entirely scams and questionably legal content. Ads for guns. Ads for viagra knockoffs. Ads for “stock market tips” that use AI generated celebrity impersonations. Ads for “free money the government isn’t telling you about”.
It’s constant and ever-increasing. I stopped watching a 30 minute video recently after the 5th ad break just over 10 minutes in.
On desktop uBlock still works in Firefox at least. But I’ve basically given up YouTube on iOS.
BLKNSLVR
I feel naive saying this, but a certain percentage of the ads on YouTube seem to contravene what would be legal of they were shown on television - in Australia at least.
It feels like standover tactics, showing the worst of the worst unless you pay up.
I should also at least admit that recently,Like the last 12 months, those greasy-type ads are less common, having been replaced with more television-style ads, although they last longer. Still an improvement overall though.
mbirth
The trick with YouTube on iOS is to delete the app and use the website in Safari instead. There, you can use Wipr 2 or other ad blockers.
tsycho
Serious question: Why don't you pay for YouTube premium?
Isn't it hypocritical to want YouTube to offer you its content for free? If the content is valuable to you, you should be willing to pay for it. If not, just stop watching YouTube.
Toorkit
I can still remember ads on TV from when I was a kid. Mind worms, embedded deep. And it makes me angry.
null
mixmastamyk
Inflamed hemorrhoidal tissue
junga
> Advertising is cancer, and I’m tired of pretending it’s not.
That's the most "hacker" newsy thing to me. Whenever advertising critical articles come up, there's a large percentage of people commenting pro advertising. Yeah, I get it, you don't bite the hand that feeds you but come on. Does working in ad tech somehow influence your brains like the ones you are targeting?
stego-tech
I don't think it's exclusive to advertising. Humans in general desire stability (myself being no exception), and anything that disrupts a system they've become accustomed to can very quickly become perceived as a threat.
My theory is that the people who fight against changing the status quo are just fundamentally opposed to change itself, not necessarily supporting the system as it currently stands. They know the ins and outs of the current system, and changing it means they have to dump knowledge and re-learn things - which they're fiercely opposed to doing. The enemy you know, over the enemy you don't, in a manner of speaking.
Those of us who can visualize futures starkly different than a continuance of the present day are a threat to those people who demand indefinite complacency and an unchanging world. Unfortunately for them, the universe is chaos and change is inevitable - so finding your own stability amidst the chaos is a skill more people need, such that necessary change might be embraced.
globular-toast
I've been using browser ad block for more than twenty years now. Back then it was to block flashing banners etc. I use Firefox everywhere so have it on my phone too. Due to this I haven't realised how bad it's become. I didn't even realise YouTube had ads until recently and how ridiculous they are.
I run DNS blocking at home which helps somewhat with shitty devices like Apple that don't give users any control. But my partner was looking at a local news site on her phone on the train the other day and I couldn't believe it. Literally an ad between every single paragraph plus one sticky ad at the bottom. It was like twice as much ad as content. Sickening.
Animats
Sao Paulo, Brazil, made outdoor advertising illegal. That worked out quite well.
The US used to forbid prescription drug advertising. That seemed to work.
Ads for liquor, marijuana, and gambling are prohibited in many jurisdictions.
The FCC once limited the number of minutes of ads per hour on the public airwaves. That limit was below 10% of air time in the 1960s.
The SEC used to limit ads for financial products to dull "tombstone" ads, which appeared mostly in the Wall Street Journal.
A useful restriction might be to make advertising non tax deductible as a business expense. That encourages putting value into cost of goods sold rather than marketing.
jen729w
It's illegal here in Canberra, Australia. There's not total compliance -- people still stick an A-frame on the street, and of course real estate agents will always put something in a front lawn -- but there aren't giant billboards that you see everywhere else. It's really refreshing.
barbazoo
That idea about taxation is interesting, I’ve never considered that angle.
It would be very unpopular with the people I’d imagine.
Animats
Historically, marketing cost was a small fraction of manufacturing cost. Gradually, marketing cost took over in many sectors. STP Oil Treatment was noted in the 1960s for being mostly marketing cost.[1] Marketing cost began to dominate in long-distance telephony, in the era when you could pick your long distance company. Retail Internet access is dominated by marketing cost.
The total amount of consumer products that can be sold is bounded by consumer income. Advertising mostly moves demand around; it doesn't create more demand, at least not in the US where most consumers are spent out.
Think of taxing advertising as multilateral disarmament. Advertising is an overhead cost imposed on consumers. If everybody spends less on advertising, products get cheaper. Tax policy should thus disfavor zero-sum activity.
NoahZuniga
Making advertising non tax deductible has the effect of making it marketing ~20% more expensive, which would lead to about 20% less marketing. But not really. It doesn't really cost YouTube anything to play an add, so YouTube ads get 20% cheaper, and you see the same amount of ads.
Also this would be hard to implement. Tax law has a hard time discriminating costs. What if all the marketing is done by an Irish subsidiary?
1oooqooq
> Sao Paulo, Brazil, made outdoor advertising illegal. That worked out quite well.
it was just a gimmick in the end. yeah the city is cleaner, but i doubt there's even the slightest difference in sports betting in sao paulo vs places with outdoors, for example.
...and did the us forbid prescription drugs ads? thats literally all i see on daytime tv.
drekipus
> I doubt there's even the slightest difference in sports betting.
> Yeah the city is cleaner..
Cool. So it has positive effects on the city, without any negative effects on economic outcomes.
Cool. I'm in. Let's implement it everywhere
1oooqooq
the article discussion is about having impact on addiction and behavior... I'm pointing that while there's profit to be made, trying to ban advertising in one way is futile for that end.
yeah you can make the city pretier or get less banners on your sites, whatever. advertising will still happen.
iambateman
To go halfway to the extreme of this article, I think banning large-scale billboards in my city would make a big difference.
It feels like having a calmer public space is more in the public interest than reminding them to drink Miller Lite.
mikestew
Redmond, WA has a ban on billboards. Locals can see this demonstrated by driving 124th St. and crossing Willows Rd into Kirkland. First thing you’ll see are billboards.
Just got back from a trip to Florida. Billboards along every freeway, and 75% of them are personal injury lawyers. If you’re a resident of Redmond, it is an obnoxious contrast.
gentoo
I love this article because I think this is the conversation we should be having. Lots of advertising is harmful, some of it is useful on balance, and some of it is too hard to ban without infringing on other desirable speech. But I do think we should be critically thinking about all advertising and outlawing certain flavors of it.
Billboards let landlords skim extra money by making the public space significantly more hostile to everyone else. Fuck em.
barbazoo
There’s a ban here in BC except on indigenous land. Which is scattered throughout where I live. So you have these primitive, ugly things sticking out in clusters wherever people are allowed to put them. I wish people didn’t need the money to allow those on their land.
adgjlsfhk1
Vermont bans billboards and it is amazing.
el_memorioso
São Paulo implemented "Cidade Limpa" which banned posted ads. It was said to renew the city.
uneekname
My hometown did this, and I was surprised how bad billboards can be when I moved away
johntitorjr
Some cities have exterior walls of buildings covered in ads. Other cities have them covered in murals. The latter are much more pleasant to be in.
nullbio
The issue is that if you ban advertising, we still get advertising, but it'll be done in a way that hides that it is an advertisement. Aka, the internet will be full of bot posts that are thinly veiled ads posing as legitimate inquiry or discussion. That's a worse off scenario. Better the enemy you know.
RedNifre
Currently, we have both, so banning ads would reduce ads.
gameman144
This feels very similar in my mind to blanket concepts like "let's ban lobbying". There are certainly specific modes or practices in lobbying that are damaging to society, but lobbying itself (specifically, informing lawmakers about your specific perspective and desires) is a valid and desirable function.
Likewise, advertising on its own at its core is useful: there might be something that adds value to your life that someone else is trying to provide and the only missing link is that you don't know about it.
In both cases, it seems totally fine to have strict guardrails about what kinds of practices we deem not okay (e.g. banning advertising to children, or banning physical ads larger than some size or in some locations), but the extreme take of the article felt like it intentionally left no room for nuance.
BriggyDwiggs42
>is a valid and desirable function
No I don’t think so. I would genuinely guess that 97% of the ads I see are irrelevant garbage or, more commonly, bids by products I know to raise awareness to increase the probability of their sale. I discover the vast majority of what I care about through word of mouth and I suspect I’d be fine without ads. There are so many negative externalities that it’s actually ridiculous.
yunohn
And pray tell how the chain of word of mouth started for that product?
barnabee
People who work there.
People who come across the product in a shop or in/on a market.
Reading (unpaid) reviews.
There are vastly many ways that unbiased, factual information about a new product can be disseminated to those who are looking for it that are not advertising.
Henchman21
Why should we be open to nuance when we’re being actively manipulated? Cease manipulating me and I will hear them out on the nuances, provided the advertisers can articulate it.
gameman144
Someone telling you about a product is not manipulating you. Tracking or certain ad practices might be manipulative, and it's fine to push back against or ban that manipulation, but that is not at all inherent to advertising.
Henchman21
Feeding people lines about what “they need” or what their neighbors might be doing is manipulative. All advertising attempts to be manipulative, IMO.
But, I’ll play along for a moment: If trying to convince people they need something that oftentimes they simply don’t isn’t manipulation, then what is it? It isn’t simply informative because it’s attempting to change one’s mind.
null
SebastianKra
> Likewise, advertising on its own at its core is useful: there might be something that adds value to your life that someone else is trying to provide and the only missing link is that you don't know about it.
Journalists exist.
The best way to learn about new products is through influencers/reviewers/experts in their field. I'd even say its superior, which is why advertising companies ~sponsor~ bribe influencers to promote their products. Companies can also promote a product by sending it to reviewers.
So ads are not the only way to inform consumers, and the benefits IMO don't outweigh the cost.
aucisson_masque
> The best way to learn about new products is through influencers/reviewers/experts in their field. I'd even say its superior, which is why advertising companies ~sponsor~ bribe influencers to promote their products.
In the same sentence, you give a possible solution and the reason why it wouldn't work.
Ban ads and companies are going to pay more and more for sponsored content to the point you can't differentiate what is legit from what is not.
barnabee
Sponsored content should be considered an ad too and banned in this scenario.
Many “influencers” would have to go back to being amateurs. That’s ok. Some would accept backhanders, but they risk prosecution, which is actually possible [0].
[0] https://www.nzherald.co.nz/kahu/government-orders-maori-infl...
milesrout
There are a very few areas where there are good reviewers. Sadly most "reviewers" just repeat marketing materials, read stats from the box, and talk about themselves.
wat10000
Anyone who has found out about a useful product through advertising that you wouldn’t have know about otherwise, purchased it, and been pleased with your purchase, raise your hand.
Anyone?
This whole “advertising is useful” thing sounds like the spherical cow of marketing to me. It might make sense in abstract but it doesn’t reflect reality.
anigbrowl
It is useful in specialist domains. If you love fashion then fashion magazine ads are worth studying, because you read them with a critical eye. If you're into any sort of nerd hobby (model trains, synthesizers, board games...) then the specialist magazines/video channels/forums for that hobby are interesting, again because you have a critical eye. Sure, there are ads that target the newbie with 'the first and last ______ you'll ever need!' but as you get more experienced in the hobby you quickly learn to distinguish which manufacturers are selling the dream vs offering their product. This remains true even on forums for particular vendors that have a cult following. Likewise for many professional trade news outlets.
But it only works where you have specialized focus and experienced/informed consumers that are able to separate the sizzle from the steak. For example, doctors and other medical professionals are generally well qualified to assess the claims of pharmaceutical advertising, consumers are not - even though I am comfortable reading the fine print in such ads and even reading papers about clinical trials, I still rate my evaluative ability as mediocre compared to a professional.
Mass market advertising for general consumers is generally cancer, imho.
gameman144
I'd be happy to give an example I gave below: rake hands.
I hate the step after raking where you have to use the rake and one hand to carry the leaves to the bin. There was an ad for "rake hands" where you just hold a small hand-formed rake in each hand and scoop them both.
Twenty bucks, vastly improved yardwork experience, and I would have literally never thought to look for something like that.
mindwok
Many people, otherwise advertising wouldn’t work at all and the industry wouldn’t exist. Even if you hear it via some other source, they may have heard of it via some form of advertising.
wat10000
That doesn’t follow. Most advertising exists to make you more likely to buy the product, not merely to inform you that it exists.
milesrout
Yes, happens often. Plus all the products that have been recommended by (a friend that became aware of them through)+ advertising. And all the products that only exist because of advertising.
Also: sales. I have bought things in sales that I would not have bought otherwise (because its value to me is higher than the sale price but lower than the normal price) where I was only aware of the sales from ads.
charcircuit
There's several games I've enjoyed from seeing ads for them. I would have never seemed them out on my own.
walleeee
> lobbying itself (specifically, informing lawmakers about your specific perspective and desires) is a valid and desirable function.
If it were a truly demotic activity you would have a point. But as it is, lobbying (in the US at least) is almost exclusively by/for large/moneyed interests, and the part of it which isn't is considerably less effective than that which is.
milesrout
Every time you communicate something to a politician, submit a submission on a Bill, or write a letter to the editor criticising a political policy, you are lobbying.
That you don't bother engaging and others do doesn't give them an unfair advantage.
That being said, the US system sounds like a shitshow of bribery and corruption.
boramalper
For so many comments in this thread saying that it’s impossible to make all advertising illegal, we can certainly start with making personalised advertising illegal with all its invasive practices.
lordnacho
The thing that really irks me is celebrity endorsements.
Tell me, do you think Roger Federer really appreciates that watch he's selling you? Does he really use that coffee machine that he sells, and thinks it's the best one?
We know what his motivation is, he is not your friend who bought a watch and a coffee machine, used them, and recommended them to you. He gets paid by the producers of the stuff he endorses.
Plainly, advertisers have discovered a loophole in the human psyche, and are exploiting it. We evolved to take in recommendations from people we know, and billboards/TV/etc are close enough to the real thing to trigger _something_ in us that doesn't just work when it's a non-celebrity whose face we don't know. The effect is big enough that celebrities get paid a gigantic amount of money to pretend they are someone you trust and recommend some product they never even thought about until they got given the deal.
I think we should tax that kind of thing. I'm not restricting his free speech. Roger is free to stand in front of the opera in Zürich and tell random strangers that they should buy the coffee machine. But if you put it in mass media, there should be a gigantic tax.
I can’t stop thinking about this article. I spent a long time in ad tech before switching to broader systems engineering. The author captures something I've struggled to articulate to friends and family about why I left the industry.
The part that really struck me was framing advertising and propaganda as essentially the same mechanism - just with different masters. Having built targeting systems myself, this rings painfully true. The mechanical difference between getting someone to buy sneakers versus vote for a candidate is surprisingly small.
What's frustrating is how the tech community keeps treating the symptoms while ignoring the disease. We debate content moderation policies and algorithmic transparency, but rarely question the underlying attention marketplace that makes manipulation profitable in the first place.
The uncomfortable truth: most of us in tech understand that today's advertising systems are fundamentally parasitic. We've built something that converts human attention into money with increasingly terrifying efficiency, but we're all trapped in a prisoner's dilemma where nobody can unilaterally disarm.
Try this thought experiment from the article - imagine a world without advertising. Products would still exist. Commerce would still happen. Information would still flow. We'd just be freed from the increasingly sophisticated machinery designed to override our decision-making.
Is this proposal radical? Absolutely. But sometimes the Overton window needs a sledgehammer.
P.S. If you are curious about the relationship between Sigmund Freud, propaganda, and the origins of the ad industry, check out the documentary “Century of the Self”.