I built a game and naively added ads to it as it seemed a good way to monetize. The game started to be really liked, and had 300k+ downloads overall. Many kids started playing it also.
Luckily I realized quickly that kids play on the devices of parents and so the ads they might see are at times super inappropriate!
Then I removed all ads, I'd rather make less money but have people play and have a good time. Its not always about money. At times I get contacted by players, how they love the game and how it has been part of their childhood etc. Some very moving messages, worth more then a few additional bucks from ads and I feel much better because players aren't exposed to random ads, pictures and messages.
The learning for me was that I will never work on anything that uses ads as source of income, this includes turning down jobs at Google and Facebook.
Do you morally disagree with advertising/tracking monetization as a whole or just those particularly geared towards vulnerable populations? (children in your instance)
I have my professional job developing software solutions for clients on a contractual base, but for a period after I graduated university I dabbled in mobile development and made the decision during that time that I'd never bloat my crappy apps with ads or tracking. I can't particularly articulate why I'm against that business method as a whole, but something always felt wrong in subjecting people to tracking/advertisements for my own monetary gain... if I'm not producing something worth paying outright for then I'm not going to skim pennies off the privacy of my users.
I'm not in the app market, but I run a few user-content-oriented websites which get millions of monthly hits. They're funded only by community donations. I decided to never add any ads to any of them.
I'm not sure I morally disagree with advertising or tracking. (In my case, my websites are aimed at adults and there are no concerns about children seeing inappropriate content.) It's not about the morality or even the tracking for me. I personally don't even mind tracking all that much (though I know I'm in a tiny minority on HN).
I just, simply, really fucking hate looking at ads. They're annoying and distracting and ugly and will make any decent-looking website look tacky and dumb. And I thought, if I would never want to browse my own website and see ads, why should I subject other users to them? Sure, I use an ad blocker, and most of my users probably do, too, but I'm sure there are many who don't. And there're also the practical concerns about ads affecting page load performance and bandwidth consumption, but that's a more minor consideration.
I also try to avoid commercials and video pre-roll ads (even those HBO ones advertising other HBO shows), and I skip past all ad/sponsor parts of podcasts and YouTube videos. I can only think of a single time in my life that an ad led to a purchase, and that was from a YouTuber I liked doing an absurd segment that unexpectedly turned the entire 10 minute video into an over-the-top ad for the sponsor, and it was funny and well-written and well-executed and was something I was already planning to get and seemed to be a good deal and a good product, so I actually did buy it a week or so later. That's one exception out of hundreds of thousands or millions, though.
I admit I do feel what might be a kind of revulsion at the thought of huge companies like Google and Facebook making advertising their primary revenue source, or the thought of some of our world's top minds being paid amazing salaries to figure out how to get more people to look at and click ads. But I think it just comes down to me not wanting to see or hear them. They waste my time and/or much of my visual field, and are an eye/ear-sore, and I'd like to do unto others as I would want them to do unto me.
> I'm not sure I morally disagree with advertising or tracking.
This seems to me like one of those spots where one's approach to ethics can play a big part in the conclusions you draw.
From a sort of Kant-style, deontological perspective, where you have to be able to say with confidence that something is morally wrong in order to make much of a judgment at all about it, yeah, it seems hard to mount a strong case against ads.
From a more Bentham-style utilitarian approach, it's easier: Are ads and tracking a net benefit or detriment to people in general? AFAICT, the only people who try to mount a case that the answer is yes are people whose livelihoods depend on everyone being OK with ads.
Then there's the "do unto others" approach you get from virtue ethics. The GP's take of, "I'm not going to monetize with ads because ads annoy me" reminds me of that.
It's interesting, because, if you could paint those three approaches to ethics with a broad brush, the latter two would be, "Let's try and make things as nice for everyone as possible," while the first would be more like, "As long as it's not actually evil, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯"
> the only people who try to mount a case that the answer is yes are people whose livelihoods depend on everyone being OK with ads.
Playing devil's advocate... Advertising helps the world in the case where a person has a need and they see an ad that informs them of a way they hadn't considered to address that need, and that solution proves to be better than available alternatives.
... I'm sure that happens ever. I am skeptical that it's enough to net positive.
I wish I saw more ads for local entertainment options. Preferably diverse. I don't need 100 ads all telling me to do the same thing at different venues. But an ad informing me that hey, this weekend there will be a model train convention or if you'd rather there is a big chess boxing game you could go see. That'd be cool.
Another argument would be that advertising allowed the internet to develop as it is, to the scale it is. It's impossible to separate the accessibility, progress, UX, and information available from the core business model that enabled so much of it.
If ads had never been allowed, would search be more like AOl's keywords? Would we still be limited to 10MB in email storage? Think what you will, but Google has developed a ton of impressive technology and open sourced quite a bit of it; they have been much more open stewards than I would expect if AOL and IBM and Microsoft built out the internet.
(They have also given everyone a ton of value without asking for money from users -- it's important to not underestimate how far we've come on the backs of the ad dollar).
It might be a faustian bargain, or it might not be.
IBM and Microsoft both contribute more to open source than Google. In fact, the explosion of the internet occured during their primes moreso than Google.
What Google really pushed forward was SaaS and the free price tag was a trick to make it seem as good as open source.
But when it comes down to it, Gmail is worse than Windows 7 when it comes to user power. At least you can use windows 7 without a constant connection to Microsoft.
Microsoft is in the open source game to domimate it. They want to be in a position where you can't realistically run an open source project without their involvement. Their recent moves around github all point in that direction.
IBM has more of a consultancy perspective: they want rheur business customers to pay for services provided on top of existing solutions. And open source platforms make it easier to sell custom extensions.
These are valid counter-arguments; my intention wasn't to litigate the merits of each claim, just to mention that as the parent had trouble conceiving of other options than 1.
I will say, however, that your claims would be challenging to verify or refute -- quantity of contributions may not be a good metric, and it appears your Gmail/Win7 comparison is based on a single dimension (user power) which is further limited to one dimension of that dimension (whether it requires a constant connection).
You may be correct, but your comment didn't provide much of an argument to get me to think more of the problem. It just seemed like you needed to negate my (also unsubstantiated but admittedly devil's advocate position) out of some sense of anti-google sentiment.
I think you really had a good piece of feedback going until you made it personal in the last paragraph. It does not endear you to the reader and from an intellectual perspective I don't understand why you'd finish an otherwise well-structured response like that. If it was out of anger, I would expect it in the front. Can you explain what made you write it like this?
> If ads had never been allowed, would search be more like AOl's keywords?
Not sure how that's related to ads. I've been online since 1996, and AOL wasn't available in my country, although did get those AOL trial diskettes with my copy of C&C: Red Alert.
Xcite, Yahoo, Altavista, Askjeeves and others simply had a search box and an alphabetical directory of sites. I didn't hear about Google until 1999 when I came across a Time Magazine article about it, and there were ads on the internet well before then.
> Would we still be limited to 10MB in email storage?
Are you sure ads are related?
If you calculate the cost of 10MB of hard drive space in the good old days of Yahoo mail, adjust for inflation, calculate how much hard drives you can buy now for that money, you’ll get at least 100GB. I don’t think average gmail mailbox approaches that size.
Originally, in the days of doubleclick, before Google cornered the internet ad marktet, I absolutely hated online ads. They were annoying, distracting and intrusive.
Then Google conquered the market with very low-key unobtrusive ads, and I was fine with them. I had no problem with tracking, because it lead to more relevant and less annoying ads.
But in the past couple of years, tracking and ads are touching on absolutely everything I do online. Google for an accountant, and for the next month all videos on Youtube have ads for accountants. Read an article on something, and suddenly all ads are about that.
And with these ad companies also controlling our social media and our online search results, suddenly my entire view of the internet, and therefore my view of the world, becomes controlled by people who want to show me ads to sell me stuff.
It's too controlling and too intrusive, and I have no control over it. Maybe if they make it more transparent and gave me more control over what they show me, I'd be fine with it, but at the moment it's too much.
Only seeing informative ads about things I'm interested in is good. Having my entire experience controlled by people who want to monetize my information is not.
The problem I have with the anti-advertising crowd is that none of them take their philosophy to the required ethical conclusion: Stop using free ad-supported resources. Google and Facebook are easy examples of this. The position would be far more ethically aligned if they unplugged from all ad-supported products and services.
Just because someone, either by choice or necessity (have you tried to stop using all ad-supported resources? You've practically gotta be a hermit) participates in something they find morally wrong, doesn't cease to make it morally wrong.
The morality, or lack thereof is your perspective and yours only, it is not an absolute fact.
What is a fact is that some are perfectly content having others pay for services they use while, at the sane time, trying to weave a fake moral framework with which to justify their actions.
Nobody is forcing anyone to use these sites, and you don’t have to.
Advertising is a pollution on social space. A deliberately attention-grabbing advertisement represents a very real theft from people, and a public space covered in it, even more so. Advertising is designed to exploit inherent human weaknesses and biases, to manipulate behaviour. It's abusive. Seen from this position, Google is an abuser.
The required ethical conclusion is not "inconvenience yourself so you can be more respectable", it's far more extreme than that. What about saving other people from it, or activism to ban it completely, like we restrict noise pollution and physical manipulation of strangers?
Using ad-supported services and an ad-blocker might be unethical theft, but the anti-advertising position is against-adverts not how to treat Google fairly; it's not about being "ethically aligned".
If, when clicking on a hyperlink, I were presented with a landing page where I'd be presented a diagram of what the page would look like, in order to inform me that 70% of the initial data mass of the page would be chumbox, and that there'd be a video that expands out of the middle of the article and starts playing automatically as I scroll past, etc etc, then I'd happily rely on that instead of an adblocker. But that's not what happens - instead, I click the link, and the page immediately starts eating up my data budget (which costs me money, yo) and attempting to track me. My best defense here is to use some sort of adblocker.
At which point, the equilibrium point seems to be, some sites I don't even necessarily know they're trying to serve ads to me. Other sites give me a little popup saying, "Disable adblock or GTFO," so I politely GTFO.
It's less possible to do anything on that front with outdoor advertising; annoying as a lot of it is, I can't very well stop consuming the world itself.
TV, radio, stuff like that, that's at least getting easy nowadays.
That's not how I think about it, though. It's not about the principles of a website using ads or issues with advertising companies. I just personally don't want to see them. If I'm using a Google service, I generally see no or almost no ads because I use uBlock Origin, so I'm not bothered at all. And I actually do subscribe to YouTube Premium because there's no decent way to block ads in the mobile apps, as far as I know.
I do like Google's services, and I do understand they couldn't exist without ads, so I know there's a little bit of cognitive dissonance there. But for me, if I can block the ads, then I'm not going to complain. The only time I boycott a site is if they lock you out of the site if they detect you're using an ad blocker. (I'm okay with small messages politely suggesting you turn it off if they don't otherwise restrict access to the site. I always ignore them, though.)
It isn’t cognitive dissonance. You are using something others are paying for and don’t wat to be bothered. If you don’t like the add, don’t use the service.
The alternative ethical conclusion is to pay for the services. I would if I could, but a lot of these guys don't offer this because they want a nice broad stroke of people in their data pie.
And that's just where these services are being up front. There's a lot of sneaky underhand tracking that goes on without even being aware of it.
I run a user-content website, and hate advertising too. But, the website costs $15,000 a year in expenses to run, and community donations bring in $3,000. Advertising generates $50,000.
I stay with safe ad categories (no drugs, alcohol, gambling, adult content, etc), and use standard display sizes. No audio ads, background ads, popups, etc. I'm sure the site could generate twice the revenue with background advertisements.
Anyway, I just wanted to give a slightly different perspective. Although I hate advertising as much as you, my site doesn't work with community donations. So, I use advertising to keep it alive, and try to draw a line somewhere I think is appropriate.
Never ran something like this, but always wondered: why not have a visible counter saying "this is what it costs to run, please donate!" and let people donate to keep it up? Some kinda big progress bar somewhere or whatever.
How do you know it "doesn't work with community donations" when you have no measures to help deal with the tragedy of the commons?
I ran a content forum and blog that needed $6k at cost back in pre vps days and raised it several years in a row off community donations.
I refused to show ads because they were all ticket brokers / scalpers.
It is actually kind of a pain and takes work to raise money this way. For me, I had to do a personal appeal, email drips, and I even added membership status indicators to usernames and gave access to “exclusive” content.
It did work though with the thermometer thingy and some pluck.
Yeah I suspect it could work with some savvy and pluck. I have some ideas that will probably lead me to face off with this issue myself, I'm kinda looking forward to it.
Or with that, a visible running revenue counter with a probability that ads will show. If the site generates $3k/year and costs $15k/year 20% of the page loads would be ad free.
I don't blame GP for wanting to make some money - they're certainly putting in some otherwise unpaid hours. But a "Target 0" system could work well for some communities.
Have you ever worked at a nonprofit? I have, my whole career, lots of them. Don't say this. Nonprofits use strategy after strategy, tested and untested and rational and intuitive, to increase donations in every way they can. They know what they're doing. Do they get it 100% right? No. Do they do it all day, every day, and know a ton about it? Yes.
I can't tell you how many times someone has said to me "why do you guys send out those letters? Everyone just throws them out." Do you know why? Because we see how much they cost, and how much they make, and it's worth it.
This guy is actually running a community site that's paying for itself. Do not question him, especially by proposing one tiny little strategy among the thousands that might work.
I don't think this advice of "if you haven't done it you can't criticize or ask questions about it" is very good. It would bar me from commenting on and criticizing Michael Bay movies, so no thank you.
I'd also like to know if the guy shuts off the ads when he makes more than is needed for maintenance costs.
1. That's my bill for hosting and bandwidth expenses. I obviously need to consider the cost of my time which is not included in that figure. The more money the site generates, the more time I invest in it. So, if it were to generate $150,000 from advertising, I wouldn't shut it off, but I'd start pulling my time out of other projects, and moving it into this community site to add more of the requested features.
2. I want to save for a rainy day. Online communities don't last forever. It would be short sighted to shut off advertising simply because this years expenses are met, and then two years from now I need to close up the site because advertising is falling short. When the site hits a rough patch, I want the savings to either push it through or pivot. Coasting on maintenance costs would be a dangerous road with an abrupt end.
I've heard that line from people raking in several hundred thousand a year, while they still callously heap ads on their audiences.
If you have no target, neither for your site nor for your personal ambition, it seems like the veneer of "I tried to avoid them but couldn't" is really quite thin.
Do you serve the ads yourself or do you defer to third party ad networks? I have no problem with the former, but with the latter I think it's very hard to control what gets displayed, and you're also opening your users up to various attack vectors.
There has got to be a niche available for somebody to do plain old non-evil advertising???
EDIT $15,000 a year sounds like a tremendous amount of money to run a web site in 2019 ...
He said user content so that might be users uploading images, audio, or video with the associated storage and bandwidth costs not to mention workers for generating thumbnails.
I'm the grand-parent poster and not the parent, but yeah, my user-content sites don't cost anywhere near that much. Storage is probably the biggest cost, and that still doesn't cost much. I'm not really sure how a site like that could cost that much unless you're getting absurd amounts of traffic, or are using some poorly optimized software; though I also don't know the nature of the site or the content.
If my costs were anywhere close to that I think I'd have no choice but to suck it up and place some ads as well. As it is, community donations cover our costs just fine, but pretty much 100% of that revenue - which is all of our revenue - goes to infrastructure cost. We don't make any profit, but that was never the intention when creating the sites.
I can give you my feelings towards this topic.
Personally, I don't mind ads that inform me of the existence of a product that I may be interested in, where it tells me how it can solve my problems.
What I don't like is ads that use psychological devices to try to get me to buy their product. I also don't like ads that are a distraction of the content I'm trying to consume. So when playing a game, if the ad scroll at the bottom of the screen is flashy, I can't easily play that game so I give up. Now an ad that shows on a loading screen may be more acceptable, as long as the contents of the ad aren't something that would get me fired if someone at work sees it.
I also hate that ads have to have their own javascript in it. The ad networks should provide a safe canned set of functions that they control, and not serve up anything that an ad customer submits.
Finally, if I'm already doing research for something (such as browsing through the Bose headphones site), I don't want to see ads for those same headphones that I already researched, following me around on all the web pages I visit. It just really feels like someone is stalking me. Or look through a site like rvtrader, then when you look up the weather the next day you see a bunch of camper ads. Again, stalking. It's gotten to the point where I constantly browse in a private browsing tab (yes, there are ways they can still track me, but they aren't as obvious about it).
The distraction aspect is what really gets to me; cancelled my NYTimes subscription after these bright red / orange advertisements loaded all over the page, where the content I was interested in was the bland black text over white background. Couldn't even read the headlines without naturally focusing on the bright red advertisements.
I had this experience with my Irish Times subscription too ... it wasn't the main reason I unsubscribed but was a contributor ... actually IIRC it was what prompted me to install an ad blocker in the first place!
Personally it depends on the product. I find advertising specific prescription drugs abhorrent to anyone.
However, I think it’s completely reasonable to say talk to your doctor about ED or whatever. If there is only one treatment they seem similar, but when several options exist people should not be pushing for a specific drug based on an ad campaign.
- We've decided (in the US at least, but most everywhere short of a few communist or communist-adjacent countries) that the way we incentivize and reward drug researchers is by having them work for pharmaceutical companies that profit on the free market—and in particular that drugs are valuable to society and worth researching in proportion to how much profit they bring.
- If you don't know that a certain medical condition is a medical condition, you might not seek treatment for it, or you might not recognize it at all. In particular, rare diseases by their nature are those that many doctors don't know how to diagnose, and new treatments by their nature won't have been part of those doctors' curriculum.
- There are few means of reliably pushing information to the general public outside of advertising.
Therefore advertising "talk to your doctor about this condition" (and perhaps "whether certain drugs might be right for you") is both a rational / logical response within this framework and exactly what the framework wants you to do.
If we want to get rid of it, let's redesign the framework: reward drug researchers in some way other than profits, or find out how to inform either doctors or patients about new treatments in some other way.
Drug advertising on TV in the US is one of the more in your face dystopian aspects of visiting. It’s very strange to push specific treatments onto lay people who don’t have the background to clinically diagnose or choose treatments for themselves.
Maybe it’s a symptom of lacking a national healthcare system but we manage fine without drug advertising in the UK and elsewhere in Europe. In our case advertising and sales are aimed towards Doctors.
And even the pressure on medics has been greatly reduced by regulation.
My friend who is an independent prescribing nurse in the NHS [which means she can go off-piste like a regular doctor writing arbitrary prescriptions, she's not just limited to a handful of standard recipes to solve well understood problems] says after she qualified her blow-out birthday party was entirely paid for by drug reps out of their marketing budgets. These days that would get them fired, and the best you can hope for is stress toys, stationery, that sort of thing.
When visiting the USA I turned on the TV just to watch an ad segment (didn't have to wait long) and I agree with the dystopian feel. Medical ads and also the attack ads (political or otherwise). It just made me want to say "piss off ads! promote a product or service but stay the hell away from my personal business". Big vibe of none-of-your-business, but like you say they just get in your face. It feels a little like being at a tourist market.
But I wasn't there to watch TV so I filed it as the next weird cultural artifact where the USA is in fact exactly as advertised worldwide on TV and film instead of made-up by a crazy screenwriter :)
Norway also ban: Alcohol, smoke, gaming, all ads to children, all gun related, not allowed to count points in games before children are 13, credit card loans, all health related than can’t show scientific benefit..
Scandinavian translation difficulty: the word for a gambling game here is ‘spel’ or game (at least in Swedish), a video game is a ‘datorspel’ or computer game.
My typo - Should be gambling and all games involved money. The only one allowed is governmental and all the profit from that game go back to sports for kids, and “they” are closely monitoring that you don’t get gambling addicted to that game by forcing you to only play with a personal ID.
I think both of these types are not allowed where I live (the Netherlands) because, you know, people shouldn't be getting their medical advice from advertising, for what I hope are obvious reasons.
Not OP but I've had some thoughts on ads for a while that I've never shared:
1. Ads ruins user experience. This is pretty much an objective fact. People can and do adapt, but it's moving away from the ideal.
2. Ads often manipulates the user (emotionally, psychologically) to get clicks, which is just downright unethical.
3. Often unethical things are advertised, things that shouldn't even be on the market. These are usually rolled into an ad network, and ad embedders don't get a say in what's shown or not.
3. If we removed 99.99% (or maybe 100%) of all ads, I can't imagine that people will have a harder time purchasing what they need, when they need it.
Considering only points #1 and #4, there seems to be no harm in supporting ads in any way.
But #2 and #3 make it seem, to me at least, unethical to even work for a company whose business relies on ads.
I know a man who turned down a job opportunity discussion from Facebook this week for this exact reason, and I think that's noble, especially considering he's very poor and could use the raise.
Couldn't agree more on 2 and 3. What is even more unacceptable to me is that these ad networks track everything I do on the web. It is one thing that I see an ad for a laptop when I search for Chromebook (I'll call it contextual for ease) but totally different thing that I see ads for say Professional training when searching for Chromebook because I happened to click on a post on LinkedIn long ago. Other words, I don't like companies having a profile on me which they can use however the way they want at a later date.
Just as context, the vast majority of ad budgets are not tied to click through metrics. Ford & Coca Cola do not care a whit if you click on their ads.
The vast majority of advertising dollars are around a) brand recognition and b) spending to make sure that it’s the people they want to have brand recognition (for coke everyone, for Ford F-150 a particular demographic).
They believe this is important. They have years of evidence to prove it is & that you don’t think it works on you doesn’t matter to them.
Not a solution for everything, but focused websites/blogs (on guitar, camping, kayaking... Or even painting) can afford "ads" with no tracking (link to amazon products), or even invest some time to call specialized stores about single image ads without using any advertising network.
> Do you morally disagree with advertising/tracking monetization as a whole or just those particularly geared towards vulnerable populations?
Irrespective of one's views on this, it's a controversial topic. Given children are minors, this decision shouldn't be forced on them by app developers.
I used not to, but after having been in a few research programs exploring the future of add-tech, I now think we should treat advertising as we do environmental pollutants, and the collection and monetization of personal data as a harmful substance business in need of extremely strict regulation.
I don’t know, but the only kind of advertisement I consider morally sound is a properly indexed, well described parts catalog with good resolution photos.
>Luckily I realized quickly that kids play on the devices of parents and so the ads they might see are at times super inappropriate!
That was exactly what happen to my kids yesterday. I don't mind ads, but when they are inappropriate for the 5 years old I get really pissed off. And I wish Apple Arcade could come sooner so they don't get distracted with Ads.
It is the same reason I don't really allow them to watch Youtube unattended anymore. I wish there is some curated Kid Channel I can safely let them browse. ( Kid these days are extremely good with technologies )
I let my kids try out YouTube kids and I thought all the content was total garbage. Mostly toy unboxing videos, video game walkthroughs, and creepy knockoffs of cartoons they liked. Deleted it very quickly. We stick to DVDs and Netflix now.
Yes Guided Access is great. I default it to a 20min timeout. So if I let my 8 year old play Minecraft on it, and he runs off to some corner of the house to binge, I don't have to worry about hunting him down. He'll get a nice warning around 3min out, and then the phone will essentially brick itself. It's great knowing that he will absolutely be coming back to me with the phone in 20min.
I am not familiar with the ad space, but isn't there a provider/method/framework that would allow people embedding ads on their apps/websites/platforms to select the types or categories of ads they'd be comfortable with?
I completely agree with your position. I have turned down solicitations from both organizations you listed for exactly the same reasons. Working for any entity that engages in any sort of behavior that involves compromising user experience or privacy simply for sake of profit is not something I can consider at this time. I understand situations arise that are not profit-motivated which can't be avoided (federal investigations, service outages), but it is clear in the case of Facebook and Google what is going on. Compromising user privacy and interactions is their principal means of doing business.
It could be that they interviewed with Google/Facebook and then afterward, but before accepting an offer, decided that they couldn’t abide by the moral situation.
We had several children’s apps on iOS back when ads were allowed. We chose to only have a single ad in the parent accessible settings screen and nowhere else. Showing ads to kids simply did not align with our philosophy.
That a choice about advertising, not about third party advertising. Even if you had decided to have ads, as long as they were first party adds, the policy would have allowed you to continue to deluge kids with ads.
I built a game and naively added ads to it as it seemed a good way to monetize. The game started to be really liked, and had 300k+ downloads overall. Many kids started playing it also.
Luckily I realized quickly that kids play on the devices of parents and so the ads they might see are at times super inappropriate!
Then I removed all ads, I'd rather make less money but have people play and have a good time. Its not always about money. At times I get contacted by players, how they love the game and how it has been part of their childhood etc. Some very moving messages, worth more then a few additional bucks from ads and I feel much better because players aren't exposed to random ads, pictures and messages.
The learning for me was that I will never work on anything that uses ads as source of income, this includes turning down jobs at Google and Facebook.