It's strange to have some moral objection to advertising because advertising is, ultimately, a form of discovery, a way of connecting people who want or need something with those that supply it. Ad revenue on the Internet, almost by definition, means someone found something they wanted.
How exactly is it bad to connect people with things they want and need?
The problem with advertising is when it gets too obtrusive, like on TV when, near the end of a movie, you'll see an ad break every 6 minutes (at least in Australia).
I generally like the way Google does advertising (disclaimer: I work for Google). It doesn't get in your way (except in some cases on Youtube). It pays for a lot of great services that are free to the end user (search, GMail) and Google clearly separates organic search results from paid promotion.
How anyone can have a moral objection to that baffles me.
Treating advertising a way to connect suppliers with those with a need is a common, benign interpretation of what it is, but that view rests on assumptions of trust or informational parity between buyers and sellers. i.e. the sellers have to be meeting genuine needs, or the buyers have to have the information necessary to make good determinations. I don't see why we should assume that's generally true. There are plenty of counterexamples (e.g. Drug companies advertising drugs for conditions for which there is not good evidence of efficacy, and consumers being unable to evaluate the statements for themselves).
Google makes its revenue by auctioning qualified snippets of human attention. By qualified, I mean that it makes algorithmic inferences about the users demographics and intentions and uses these to bucket these snippets of attention so that they can be priced differentially. This is why Google's advertising is so much more profitable than most other forms.
At best, I think you can say that Google's advertising is neutral. The value it provides to society is determined by the qualities of the buyers and sellers.
A more skeptical view would be to point out that buyers are better informed than sellers when they enter these transactions. For example, google's search users don't get to see the price that google is charging for their attention, nor are the mechanisms by which google intends to use, say the Google+ network to improve classification transparent to us.
You can reasonably claim that it would be preposterous (or uncompetitive) for Google to reveal these mechanisms, or that Google couldn't survive such a climate of openness. Certainly their competitors are probably worse. That doesn't mean we should be any less critical.
I think that the more informed we are about how we use our attention, the better, and it's not clear that Google, or any other advertising company is automatically aligned with society in this regard.
"genuine demand" is a true scotsman fallacy waiting to happen. Purchases are revealed preferences. That people have incoherent preferences doesn't mean you get to pontificate about what they should have.
Where is anyone pontificating about what people should have?
I also don't see any mention of whether people's preferences are coherent or not.
I didn't use the words 'genuine demand', but I did talk about genuine need. This isn't a true Scotsman fallacy because I am talking about the buyers ability to get their needs met, and not debating what qualifies as a genuine need - which is as you say, a revealed preference.
What is the difference between need and want? Economically, there is no difference - there are simply goods that have less elastic demand curves and goods that have more elastic demand curves. The elasticity value that distinguishes "need" from "want" is totally arbitrary.
Fair point, but it doesn't really affect the sense of what I said in my original comment.
Also, just because economists haven't found a bright line between concepts doesn't mean they aren't distinct. I think there's a distinct difference between needing food, and wanting an xbox.
If you start with that assumption, you immediately confront the issue that you may 'need' food, but you don't need tasty food, or much food, or even "easily digested" food. One does not even 'need' "clean" food, as humans are easily able to tolerate being ill most of the time; and, unfortunately, many people worldwide operate with this constraint their entire lives.
In fact, we didn't even really 'need' food at all: what we needed were a few nutrients, maybe in the form of a pill. Food is a luxury, and if our stomachs disagree we can always get stomach-ectomies.
Until, of course, you find that one guy who defines the point of his existence to be the very first guy to get a billion points in Halo: a person might be in a hospital, dying anyway, and while eating may prolong his life another month, he will consider his whole existence to be a waste if you take away his Xbox; at this point the concept of objective needs totally disappears, and you end up back in the land of "differently elastic demand curves".
Ok: I think one easily gets the other impression from your want/need distinction. Regardless: the first two paragraphs do not even touch on that: that person might 'need' an Xbox, but not one that has a working blue video composite. The point is that there is an elasticity to the demand curve for everything that the person might 'want', but there is no obvious breaking point where you suddenly end up with a 'need': and a great example is that you do not really 'need' food, you just want it very very badly.
That's fair enough. I think this explains the reactions of others in this thread. The distinction between want and need isn't important to my original point, and I certainly wasn't intending to claim them as objective. It was a careless choice of words.
> I am talking about the buyers ability to get their needs met
so a 'genuine need' being met is a conversion, right? isn't that what google's algorithms and advertisers optimize for?
i think in your framework of evaluation, that makes better advertisement inherently more moral, and thus, working for a company that's trying to increase conversions an inherently moral task.
I don't see how I've equated a conversion to a genuine need being met. That would imply that nobody ever buys anything that isn't suited to their needs.
preferences are subjective. If someone is buying something you claim they don't need you need to, at the very least, get them to agree with you before you have a plausible case.
you aren't being trolled, get an introductory microecon text.
If the way that Google shows ads was entirely driven by the needs/wants of the ad viewers, then it's easy to make a case that the ad viewers are being served. But Google doesn't only have the ad viewers in mind; the interests of advertisers are also being served.
And where the interests of advertisers and those of the ad viewers conflict, who wins? To the extent that advertisers ever win in those conflicts, then the interests of the ad viewers are not being served. And in that case, it's perfectly reasonable to question the social utility of Google's ad-serving.
But it's hard to define exactly how and when the interests of the ad viewers aren't being served. And that's where this thread gets bogged down a bit, on the question of what the ad viewers' "genuine" wants/needs are.
But I don't think we need to nail that down before we can question the social utility of the ads, because the system accommodates a set of interests (those of the advertisers) that often conflict with the interests of the ad viewers. Now, if you can reduce those conflicts, that's great, but is it really controversial that they exist?
Plausible case for what? What case do you think I'm making that you are somehow contradicting? Nothing I've said is in conflict with the idea of preferences being subjective.
QUOTE: "the sellers have to be meeting genuine needs, or the buyers have to have the information necessary to make good determinations."
both of your assertions are false. markets tend toward equilibria you disagree with. that you disagree with them doesn't make the needs "non-genuine", nor does it mean information asymmetry is a barrier to efficient markets. correcting information asymmetry is itself subject to market forces.
I haven't denied my parent post. You are quoting me out of context - it doesn't make sense if you don't include the full sentence, and you aren't explaining why you think I'm claiming needs are not subjective.
Where have I said anything about me agreeing or disagreeing with people's needs? Certainly not in that quote. My position is simply that Google's advertising doesn't necessarily serve the function of matching people with suppliers of what they want or need because it's an attention auction which is agnostic to the idea of need or want.
You also haven't addressed what part of what I've said is 'pontificating' or why I don't have the right to express my views.
Normally I think your posts are very thoughful, but this time you are attacking a straw man. The OP clearly indicates near the bottom of the post that it's not about working for the betterment of humanity, but about work he personally finds fulfilling. Serving ads is not fulfilling work for him. Morals don't come into it.
The OP was attacking a strawman. The assertion that Google and Twitter and Facebook are not working for the betterment of humanity (or are not doing fulfilling work) because they sell ads is ridiculous. Those companies may not be working for the betterment of humanity, but the ad angle is irrelevant.
Take the following:
> Google+ isn’t about sharing cat pictures, it’s about serving ads. Twitter’s massive network of 140-character bits of information isn’t about connecting people across the globe or to view current trends in worldwide thinking, it’s about serving ads. Facebook isn’t about entertaining yourself with games or sharing interesting links, it’s about serving ads.
Replace every instance of "serving ads" with "making money", and the meaning is unchanged, but the naivete is more obvious. You can do that to the entire article.
Every business is about making money. Whether they make that money by selling ads, or selling a product, or selling a subscription, or whatever else is irrelevant. Making money doesn't mean that a business can't also be connecting people, or organizing the world's information, or curing cancer, or any other fulfilling goal.
> Whether they make that money by selling ads, or selling a product, or selling a subscription, or whatever else is irrelevant
The OP is making the point that, for him, the method of making money is entirely relevant to his sense of fulfillment when working for a company. He does not make the claim that a business cannot be doing lots of other cool things alongside making money - in fact, he points out that Google and Twitter and Facebook are indeed achieving fulfilling goals, but he objects to the income stream and therefore would not feel fulfilled by working for those companies. That's completely fair.
Substituting the claim of the OP about "serving ads" with "making money" distorts the entire message, and of course makes it sound ridiculous.
Then he should just say "I am unwilling to work for a company that sells ads", rather than trying to say that none of Google's work is meaningful simply because they sell ads.
I don't believe substituting "serving ads" with "making money" distorts the message at all. I think it merely highlights how immature his stance is. He stated quite plainly that Twitter isn't about connecting people, that Facebook isn't about sharing links, because they are about "serving ads". The implication here is that a company which sells ads cannot do anything, which is ridiculous. He set up a strawman.
If your interpretation is correct--which it may well be--then the OP fundamentally doesn't understand the business of any of these companies. Relatively few engineers work directly on serving ads. The vast majority work on other things. At Google this includes, but is not limited to, Android, Chrome, search, Google+, Maps and self-driving cars.
Except all those projects are about serving ads. Android is about serving ads on cellphones. Chrome about making browsers better, so consumers will use more Google products, and see more ads. G+ is about harvesting social graph data to serve ads. Self driving cars is so people will check their mail on the way into work, and see more ads.
None of that nullifies the direct value those products provide. If self driving cars mean I check my mail on the way to work and see more ads, it's still a self-driving car. I don't see the problem in staring at a couple of electronic billboards if I can live in the future (and not have to stare at real billboards whizzing past me, for that matter).
The ads are the means to an end, not the other way around. You do what you can to change the world and make a difference, you work on something amazing that you care about, the ads are (often times) your way to fund your ideas while helping other businesses thrive (by bringing in users through buying advertising).
First this: "advertising is, ultimately, a form of discovery, a way of connecting people who want or need something with those that supply it."
Then this: "How exactly is it bad to connect people with things they want and need?"
And this: "How anyone can have a moral objection to that baffles me."
This is misleading. There may be people who object to advertising in principle, but even if you don't, if you are seriously trying to think about "moral objections", you need to at least consider what is being advertised and how it is being advertised. Instead, your comment is an example of how advertising advertises itself.
For almost any nonessential item, no one knows what they want until they see it. That might be seeing it when you are walking around a store, seeing your friend who had it, or seeing an ad for it on google but no one would ever think "I need an XBox360" if they have literally never heard of it.
There are rare exceptions, eg someone is hiking and their toes are too cold and they think "I wish I had boots that would keep my toes warmer", then they go find an item that matches that, but I think that is a tiny percentage of the purchases.
That's a weird way to read the OP comment, and I think you're way overreacting to it. You seem to be drawing some insidious connection between those two statements that simply isn't there.
OP didn't claim all advertisements were morally acceptable, but that there was nothing inherently wrong with the enterprise.
It's not always a moral objection to advertising per se, but to the methods that enable targeted advertising. I wrote a short piece about the scope of modeling and mining algorithms if you're interested: http://blog.twodeg.net/when-your-data-sings
(there's a TL;DR in the form of a figure at the link)
> How exactly is it bad to connect people with things they want and need?
Ads aren't always about giving people what they want or need, because there is that clever hack of creating the need in the first place. Besides, even if ads were really about satisfying existing desires, there is also the problem that people don't necessarily want or need the things that are right for them or for society.
There's a big difference between a moral objection and just not liking ads. I don't have any moral objection to ads, but I share this guy's dislike for them. I never click them and would, for various reasons, generally prefer to pay for a service rather than use it for free and have it monetize via advertising.
Someone smarter than me put it thus: [Advertising] cannot be reconciled with the notion of independently determined desires, for [its] central function is to create desires – to bring into being wants that previously did not exist.
It's one thing to not like advertising in general; I think we all prefer to avoid them. A lot of times, ads are crap. Its another thing to entirely dismiss adverting and the people that are involved in advertisement. It's just down right shitty to be condescending about it.
you missed the step where they build profiles of users who haven't opted into having their information and details discovered in order to serve them advertising
tv advertisers don't have my email, don't know which websites I am visiting, don't know what I am searching for etc. etc.
> I generally like the way Google does advertising (disclaimer: I work for Google). It doesn't get in your way (except in some cases on Youtube).
> It pays for a lot of great services that are free to the end user (search, GMail) and Google clearly separates organic search results from paid promotion.
Got any links/reports to back that up? Which ads pay for what parts of what great services?
Cause it's a wonderful assumption, except the "great services" you quote hardly have any ads on them, but they are everywhere else, where they do (sort of, sometimes), get in your way.
I'm just saying. Google's advertising profits are quite mysterious. And possibly rightly so, they are a company, after all, and it's probably in their best interest not to share that data.
Except it refers statements about what great services their advertising crap exactly pays for to the realm of pure speculation.
It is strange to have some moral objection to being shot because being shot is, ultimately, a chemical reaction, and isn't our existence based on all sorts of chemical reactions.
How exactly is one chemical reaction bad, but so many other reactions good? It makes no sense.
PPC ads in Google SERPs are a great thing because they're keyword-based, highly relevant and targeted.
The problem with ads starts to happen when we get into behavioral targeting, remarketing/retargeting, data exchanges, etc. This is where things get a little creepy. People don't want profiles built up on them with all of their likes and dislikes so that display ads can be better served to them.
What's worse is that Google has been testing out banner ads on some of their other properties like Google Image Search, and Facebook-style ads are showing up in Gmail (see the Groupon ones?).
I'm worried that some day the Google we know and love will end up looking like Yahoo around the late 90's, littered with banner ads.
I remember people making a switch back then to Google when it was banner ad-free and had great search results.
In the case of Google ... that purpose is to serve ads.
It's like saying that human's purpose is to consume food.
Food is our way to get energy we need to do something - anything, actually. We would die without food, but are we limited to that? (Okay, some people actually are, but these are few).
Google did A LOT - probably more than any other company - to organize and structure data, make it more accessible - THAT is their purpose (and I believe Brin or Page actually told that).
Google's mission statement is: "Google’s mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."
Nothing in that statement necessarily presumes the use of ads to pay for it. If users said "we'd rather pay 1c per search than see ads" (and the math added up) Google would change to that instead.
I'm currently an intern at Google. Everyone knows where the money comes from, but day-to-day, engineers talk about what's best for the users, not about what's going to help connect ads. That's what the ads division is for, and that's only one of 7 product groups.
Everyone else is trying to make products to help people, and even ads feels like its helping too by finding you the products you want more quickly.
Exxon Mobil Corporation is committed to being the world's premier petroleum and petrochemical company. To that end, we must continuously achieve superior financial and operating results while adhering to the highest standards of business conduct.
There are generally three kinds of mission statement.
The plain mission statement which comes out and tells you what the company does, as if you'd never heard of them before. This is best typified by the Five Guys fast food chain's mission statement: "We are in the business of selling burgers." However, most companies will at least throw an adjective in there. I honestly like Blizzard's: "Dedicated to creating the most epic entertainment experiences... ever."
Then there's the framing mission statement, like Google's, which tries to put a context around the plain work they do. Another example is Starbucks, who claims a mission to "inspire and nurture the human spirit – one person, one cup and one neighborhood at a time." These are the ones that try to be aspirational.
Finally, there are the ones that seem to have been written by lawyers or legislators. These drone on endlessly are so awful they demean the dignity of the companies that have them, so I won't finger anyone to protect the guilty. However, you know for sure you're reading one about the time you halfway through and find the word "stakeholder."
I'm not a practicing Buddhist but one of the principles of the Noble Eightfold path is the idea of 'right livelihood'. Which essentially means that you should avoid making a living doing something which does harm to other living things. One of the listed livelihoods to avoid is being in the business of making weapons. This really struck home when I was working for a company doing a lot of DARPA work. I had previously worked in Universities and in a small community organization. I have to say going home at the end of the day at the previous positions made me feel good about myself in a way that cannot be replaced with increased income. It was disheartening to know that if I worked my hardest at the DARPA company, all I did was essentially help the US military kill people better. I eventually left that position to go work for a state university.
So I do strongly think that no matter how interesting the problems, and no matter how good the pay one should avoid working in areas that do cause harm to others.
Unfortunately the world we live in is a bit more complicated that than one the Buddha lived in, so answering the question "Does what I do cause harm to others?" is a bit trickier to answer. I personally don't know if selling ads meets that qualification, I certainly don't think that merely making a profit does, and I don't know enough about the field to know about HFT and the like. But I do think the important thing to do is ask yourself that question, and if you aren't happy with your answer then it may be time to look elsewhere.
I used to work for a university supercomputer center, which (surprise, surprise) ran weapon simulations. I agree with you, though some DARPA research to "kill people better" does good by reducing collateral damage.
Well DARPA also does defensive work which is meant to deter and protect lives. Also the Internet was a defensive project by DARPA to enable better communication across the country in case of a emergency. Just reading a book on DARPA, what about projects like creating better artificial limbs for wounded soldiers?
Not saying DARPA is all saint like and all but a lot of their project are meant at protecting and saving lives (heck they are funding energy research to avoid wars based on oil etc)
Just going to say without military spending we wouldn't have a lot of great things. A non military way of funding these things would be even better.
and they really have gotten a heck of a lot better at reducing collateral damage - compare ww2 carpet bombing to the Iraq "Shock and Awe" campaign - the civilian population were pretty much fine.
So I agree with you that "killing people better" does "save lives" in a sense (although no war would be the preferable option of course).
I happen to work for Facebook, and a large fraction of my friends and family are expatriates. A place to easily keep in touch, share photos of kids, chat with abuelita, all that boring stuff, directly improves our quality of life.
When I recommend Linux for my friends, the top two "programs" they care about are Skype and Facebook. After that, maybe Youtube.
As for the ads, yes, that's a source of revenue. If that is a dealbreaker for author, well, I had that opinion once myself. Then I graduated high school and worked for a very interesting advertising startup, learned about the origins and practice of it and how it grew up alongside print, took advantage of and sped up the development of new technologies, etc. I don't expect to convince anyone but advertising is itself a worthwhile problem.
I was going to comment that Google, Facebook and Twitter are platforms for search, connections and communicating respectively. Ads are simply a revenue model. If Facebook charged $20 per month, would you work for them then?
However, after seeing comments like:
I work for facebook - "advertising is itself a worthwhile problem."
and...
I work for google - "People in non-advertising teams hardly ever ask 'how will this effect click-through rates?'."
Hardly ever? :-) Maybe it is more about advertising then I realize.
If "more about" means "non-zero", sure. I don't work in ads now, but I appreciate the extremely tricky and fractal problem they are trying to solve, in the same way I appreciate the work people do in security, design, features, reliability, etc.
The OP has a point: most advertising is a waste of time for both the advertiser and the recipient. There are many perverse incentives that skew outcomes, even leaving aside spam and scams. It's totally fine to hate bad ads.
But condemning advertising per se because most ads don't work is like condemning programming because most strings of characters don't compile.
> Hardly ever? :-) Maybe it is more about advertising then I realize.
That's a broad interpretation of "hardly"... Clearly some people in some non-advertising projects are at some point going to care about some ad metric in some way, so "never" would be inaccurate. That still doesn't mean that there's any significant amount of effort spent on non-ads people on ads performance.
Does Facebook have standards on what kind of ads are served? Does Facebook try to connect people with ads that are relevant? Somehow even if you are trying to _do the right thing_, the author still can't fathom why you'd sink so low as to work for Facebook.
I think that's the point of disagreement. Advertising is often inane and wasteful, but in my opinion it's not fundamentally evil.
If we serve more relevant ads resulting in clicks/sales/etc, we get more revenue. We get happier advertisers, and give users access to things they demonstrably want. There is a clear alignment of incentives to have good standards and to try to square that circle. There are other "crosswinds" which make this task hard, but also (to me) a very interesting optimization problem.
People can (and should) complain when we fail to do it right. But to assume the worst, or to write off the entire industry because we make money from advertising, leaves no room for a meaningful discussion.
I find that most anti-ads people change their tune when they try selling something on the internet.
You get your service/product built. You make a page for it. You wait for people to come check it out. Your friends drop by. Maybe you sell a few subscriptions. Then nothing.
So you start looking at ways you can spend money to get people to check out your service. You're buying ads now. And you're grateful that there are platforms like Google, Facebook, and eventually Twitter out there to help you sell your stuff and build your business.
Yep thats right. I actually really like ads from google because it isnt obstructive and they actually help look for what your after. I am well aware of how they get this information so they can target things to you and whether or not you agree with this is i guess a different issue which i have some thoughts on but in the regards to just the adverts discussion alone and their "intrusiveness or helpfulness" i like them and think they are useful. Interms of ad quality tho, i cant say the same for facebook ads.
Many years ago when google first started doing targeted ads on their search i didn't even know they were paid for ads. I thought it was just a new design and didn't think much more of it. Then i realised "sponsored ads" meant they where ads people paid for and thought it was a much better way of doing it then how some search engines where doing it (which at the time) was artificially putting paid ads higher in the results which obviously skewed your search result and turned any good search engine into total crap.
Also currently im in aus and just launching a product and the traction has been pretty good and we have done so by using direct marketing but trying to get to a more global audience we cant do it the same way as we are when we do it locally.
We cant hand out flyers, we can do newspaper ads, hell we cant even talk to the target people, the best we can do is use facebook twitter and tools like adwords and admob and if you use these tools right people take notice and it helps build your business. Im happy these things exist cause otherwise how the hell do we get the audience on the other side of the world if we dont have presence there.
I wonder how many people who say this are the same people who'd pay for every one of the free services offered by these companies. I for one would rather have ads.
When my likeness is used in conjunction with a random product, there is an implicit assumption that I somehow support it. And other people may see it and distance themselves from me, refuse to do business, or refuse to hire me.
As an extreme example, how would you like it if an unscrupulous porn site featured your face on an advertisement? Even worse, suppose a prospective client or employer saw your face on an advertisement for some banned substance. In most cases, its irreparable damage.
"suppose a prospective client or employer saw your face on an advertisement for some banned substance"
But this is not what Google does, or am I missing something? AFAIK, what they actually do is more akin to shopping basket analysis supermarket chains do. So my question remains: How exactly does it harm you? Has Google ever linked you in a publicly identifiable way to some product? Moreover, if you feel bothered by the way they handle things, why don't you just stop using them?
"But this is not what Google does, or am I missing something" <-- Google in specific doesnt do anything like that now, but Google and the other sites can change their terms of service from under us (I dont think people knew five years ago that Facebook ads would use our likeness or would change their terms to allow them to do so by default). For all the talk of Google "does no evil", they are still a company and, push come to shove, could change their terms.
"Moreover, if you feel bothered by the way they handle things, why don't you just stop using them?" <-- as explained in my example, I can't stop prospective clients or employers using google. I certainly can stop myself, but the damage happens when others see it
It sounds like he's railing against the motivations of the business as a whole that allow Google, Twitter, and Facebook to live at the scale that they do.
As for why someone would have hostility, I can relate with him. I think it's a general opposition to consumerism needing to be in your face everywhere and the deceptive nature of it (tracking users across the web for example). Just feels "dirty."
If you happen to take a wider view, almost our entire society is frivolous. Banks, politicians, salesmen, lawyers... very few people actually do anything that improves peoples lives in meaningful ways. Farmers, scientists, teachers, and construction workers are maybe the exception.
Many farmers, scientists, teachers, and construction workers lead meaningful careers.
But think about McDonalds. The food is grown by "farmers", the buildings were built by construction workers, the people who work there were taught by teachers, and the food was created by scientists.
Some, but not all, of those people are doing meaningful work.
Now consider the banker that renegotiates mortgages with long time customers to help them stay solvent, the politicians who stand up for constituents, the salespeople who help people find a car that will really serve them well, the lawyer that takes a pay cut to defend the accused...
Meaning is not found in what you do, but how you do it.
You've misconstrued "improving someone's life" to being "meaningful work". Maybe a banker thinks his career is meaningful, but bankers do not improve people's lives. The people who built the house you're buying are the ones who improve your life. The banker is an unnecessary middleman. Middlemen in almost every scenario are redundant and merely add drag to our society. If we could eliminate the bankers job, automate it somehow, maybe we can get them to pick cherries or something useful.
What rot. The banker is a middleman, it's true, but a very necessary one. The bank connects people who have money (old people) to people who want to borrow money (young people), allowing house-sized quantities of money to be borrowed and paid back over a period of decades in a way that lowers risk and maximises accessibility for the depositors. If it weren't for banks, then most young people would be (essentially) unable to afford to buy houses.
Heck, if it weren't for banks we'd probably live in some kind of Jane Austen world where the vast majority of the land is owned by a few super-rich families and the folks who don't inherit money have no way of getting ahead.
You do realize that half of all wealth in the US is in the hands of 400 super-rich families, and that this concentration is increasing, not decreasing?
Maybe you were being ironic and I just took you too literally!
Likewise there's a big difference between forcefully inserting yourself as a necessary catalyst (aka, a middleman), and meaningfully improving someone's life.
It's the difference between someone who INVENTS a medication, and someone who collects 5% fee any time you PURCHASE the medicine. Sure, the pharmacists might go on and on about how they are helping people, but really it's the chemists that are doing the hard work that ultimately are the ones improving your life.
While the dude who invents the drug that saves my life is doing far greater work than the dude who makes it possible for me to buy that drug at the pharmacy two blocks away, they're both doing good work, and both a net gain to the world. Why disrespect either?
There are genuinely useless, parasitic, and net-negative people out there, but none of the proposed examples (bankers, pharmacists, Google) falls into this category.
No it isn't, both are equally necessary for your life to be improved. You may consider inventing more prestigious and you could argue that it improves more peoples lives but some hypothetical scientist who simply invented a bunch of stuff in his basement that was never distributed would have as little impact on the world as anyone.
Well, a lot of early banking was developed for and by farmers who wanted to lock in a fixed price for their crops before the harvest.
And science and teaching are only possible because of the economic surpluses generated by trade, which is again, facilitated by banking. Teachers don't work for free! If anyone threatens their final salary pensions they go on strike!
I work on Google Search. I don't see my job as ultimately selling ads.
If you look at things that way, you might as well take the argument to it's extreme. Adwords doesn't actually make Google money, the payment processing system does. Are the ads just a way to get folks to use our payment processing system? Is search just a way to get folks to use our payment processing system? I don't see it that way.
Instead, I see my job as creating a search engine. I create a tool that helps people learn more about the world around them, more quickly and efficiently than they would have otherwise. For most queries, ads aren't even displayed. Making money is one way to bring more resources to that problem. So ads are a way to drive improvements in search rather than search being a way to drive eyeballs to ads. Often, the ads are a useful service in their own right which is an amazingly lucky opportunity.
Isn't it possible for a company to have more than one purpose? The people who run these companies aren't necessarily just greedy corporate bastards. Many of them want to change the world in positive ways. Ads are the funding mechanism. The article's viewpoint is one-dimensional IMO.
People in your team may not ask this question, but people who are in charge of them do. All the time.
Let me ask you a specific question. Google navigation. It's web-based only, right? It requires Internet. It does not work in a rural area where your phone has no Internet. Why not make this application a standalone, to enhance user experience? To make user "happier"? So that it works even without Internet? Don't tell me it's not possible: many companies have done this, well before Google, so Google can do this too. The answer: Google intends to serve ads, and for this Internet is the key. You don't have an Internet connected phone? Google does not care about you: you will not see ads.
Also why he'll never be a journalist, magazine columnist, or work on a TV show.
Advertising is just a "bug" in the system that a lot of companies are exploiting: it turns out you can make a lot of money by doing nearly nothing. Eventually the advertising revenue will dry up because people will become immune to it (or just smarter), and everyone will figure out some new way to monetize their services, perhaps by charging money to use them.
If you want advertising to go away, support these companies. The more ads people see, the less they'll click. And then the whole system blows up.
I think a lot of geeky people have the same issue as me with internet advertising. I dont click on ads. I do not buy any advertised products. The entire market is targetted at some average consumer, like tv ads, not at the niche markets like me. Google has apparently worked out that I might be interested in buying cameras, but I do not buy them based on adverts.
The brands that I respect have characteristics that advertising does not convey as well as informational marketing. I dont believe that wearing your prouct makes girls sexy, but I might believe that your German engineering is very good based on data.
I also like some adverts as cultural items, but the web has not been good at those yet.
So advertising annoys me because it is dumbed down and a waste for me, and I think that is a common geek view.
You buy advertised products, and you likely "remember" advertised products that you've seen alongside content, on TV, etc. Advertising doesn't require conscious recognition to be effective, and it's very, very difficult to avoid exposure to things that might qualify as advertisement.
There's actually a great deal of advertising related research out there, which might make sense when you consider just how much money is floating around. Here are a few random articles from my notes, they're interesting reads (one of them might even explain why you even consider using the phrase "german engineering"):
No I dont buy advertised products. Except razorblades. I really do not buy mass market consumer products in general. Oh I bought an iphone, not because of the adverts though.
I have read a lot on advertising, it is very interesting. I simply do not buy the types of product that are advertised, and I am geeky about the stuff I do buy. If advertising was aimed at me it might work, but it is not, that was the point I was making, and why I think many geeky people are averse to advertising.
My views on German engineering are from time spent in Germany, and reading.
I'm not sure you can make this assertion. If you still shop in stores, then yes, you probably buy advertised products. But if you just buy everything off Amazon or niche stores like Whole Foods, it's very easy to buy without having been exposed to advertising.
Also, I don't watch TV commercials and I use AdBlock, so even if I'm buying advertised products, it's not because of subconscious conditioning. It's random chance.
If you leave your house, you're exposed to advertising. How do you even know about Whole Foods?
Amazon's entire site can be broadly categorized as advertising, some bits of it more easily than others. Companies pay for placement at retailers like Whole Foods and labels are generally exercises in advertising. Sometimes they're hilariously named, like the "No Ads" sunscreen I remember seeing a long time ago.
Redefining everything as advertising does not work. I heard of Whole Foods through word of mouth which is not advertising in general. Sure placement can be.
I could very well be wrong, but I doubt you heard enough through word of mouth to get you in to the store. You need quite a bit of information at a pretty specific time to go to a grocery store you haven't been to before, everything from location to a serendipitous follow up thought for "I need groceries today".
Assuming you did end up there without seeing/hearing any advertising, you went in and bought products with "advertising" stamped on the front of them, right? Even store brand products have labels that feature a message the store would like you to consider. Otherwise we'd just buy things in brown cardboard boxes and stamped burlap sacks like the good ol' days.
As far as I know I have never seen a Whole Foods advert. Not sure they advertise here (uk). I spend a fair amount of time finding new grocery shops in the area.
Considering all labelling to be advertising is, as above, overextension of a reasonable definition. Although I do buy stuff out of cardboard boxes and sacks too.
Advertising is a bug in the human brain. It turns out dropping names, unfounded associations, and weak arguments is enough to get people to buy things. As long as we're easily swayed to spend money like that, advertising will stick around.
Advertising works. It works amazingly well. And I guarantee that you are successfully advertised to all the time. Advertising doesn't just occur within little pre-defined boxes on the internet. Hell, even here on HN, advertising happens all the time.
Every "Show HN" post is targeted advertising. Every blog post about some interesting set of figures a start up discovered is advertising. Those interviews start ups do? Advertising. Hell, even job posts are advertisements.
Yea but on Facebook I'm being blindly targeted with ads where system thinks it knows what i want. but it doesn't know.
If this is the same thing than facebook and goolge have very crapy advertising that don't work for me if i am targeted (I know because I'm not being "connected" to what I want), maybe only if i try to advertise something to someone But in that case it is very hard to use.
> on Facebook I'm being blindly targeted with adds where system thinks it knows what i want.
Actually, you aren't. I mean, you can be, but Facebook allows for highly targeted advertising. You can fine tune your ad to go out to a rather specific group of people. That you fall into that category means you might see those ads. Of course, some ads go out to as many people as possible.
As for how to put those ads on Facebook? It's easy. Go to to the bottom of the page on Facebook, and click on the Advertising link (https://www.facebook.com/ads/).
> If Advertisment works why I'm not being "connected" to what i want already.
That's a rather vague question. Advertising isn't just about connecting you with what you want. It's also about creating brand awareness. Advertising works. Just look at the world around you. Everytime a company reaches out with it's brand to the outside world, it's advertising. It's making to make it's message heard. How it's paying might be different, but it's looking to attract attention.
> And another thing; There is no need for Man in the Middle in advertising . All this can be automated by software and end peers.
I'm really not sure what you mean by man in the middle?
I'm not talking only about the people that put their advertisments. I am talking about both sides. why is it not working for all at the same time? People that see advertisments should see what they want to see . and not see crap.
Maybe in theory this is how advertising is envisioned but it is not working in practice. Proof: I'm always seeing garbage in ads on facebook and google. therfore it is not working for all.
there can exist advewrtising as today but. there will also be this other thing that works for all, we don't have to call it advertising.
I find this blog post utterly stupid. It's a pseudo-idealistic view of the world. Google created a programming language as their vision of how language should be. They did not create Google Wave for ads. That's how Google works, they experiment, and if it's accepted they work out a business model for it. I cannot speak for Twitter or Facebook, but Google, I am pretty sure, that's the case. Sorry Mr. Dave Copeland, I differ.
This is was really "interesting". To summarize it: I will never work for Google, Facebook or Twitter, because they want to make profit. Jeez...these are not ONG's or some sort of humanitarian enterprises! How does he think that these companies pay developer salaries? And saying that all of those companies are focused in platforms for advertisement is clearly an understatement. I never cared too much for the add's that Facebook has and neither was offended by them. It's all business at the end of the day and a legit way of making money.
Every time I click on a title like "Why I'd never work for Google, Twitter, or Facebook" I keep expecting it to be a great big 96 point for page saying "Because they wouldn't fucking hire me"
So far, I've only been disappointed by these troll posts.
Oh my god. What's even funnier is like the last panel of that comic, I actually sent cupcakes in with my resume to the local google sattelite office.
I thought it was really clever. I bought a domain "google____.com", wrote a custom resume specifically for google, had the cupcakes delivered with the name of the website written on top (on a tiny printed chocolate coin so as to be legible)
On the day they arrived, I had about 50 hits from mountain view california, a bunch from atlanta (roughly the number that worked in this sattelite office) (screen http://i.imgur.com/ucsXO.jpg)
Then nothing but silence. I thought it was the cleverest little trick ever. Apparently XKCD had thought of it first.
I don't get the objection. A company providing an online service has to be paid somehow. It's either going to be paid by subscriptions, or by advertisers. The people have spoken: the ad-supported model is nearly universal, the paywall model is rare and unpopular.
I don't see how Google and Twitter are guilty for giving people what they want. I am sure Google and Facebook would have gladly avoided the whole advertising rigmarole if they had been able to charge for their services; but the fact is, Facebook would have about 150 users now if they did that. I personally may or may not like this situation, but this is how it works.
Speaking of moral imperatives, I will say one thing for the ad-supported model: it opens up the internet to developing world markets in which people would not be able to use paid services.
As with most folks here I was struck by the wholesale adoption of the 'brilliance applied to clicks' meme. For those who aren't aware of it, its the 'pay the best and the brightest minds to figure out ways to get me to click on ads.'
It makes for a great sound bite, but it is completely and utterly wrong. To a first approximation, these internet services don't write ad copy or design ad banners, and that is where all the effort goes into figuring out how to get you to click. So don't work for an ad agency :-).
Now what the folks at Google do (I have no direct experience working at either Facebook or Twitter) is make it so that the system they have can reliably and efficiently serve advertisements into designated spots on the pages. This problem is a combination of bin packing and economic theory and systems design. Trust me when I say that the engineers working in ads (and they are a small fraction of the company) probably don't care at all whether or not you 'click' they care that they can see the query/page, do the auction, and provide an ordered set of results in under a few hundred milleseconds. But lets talk about clicking for a moment.
Ads are a 'tax'. They are a way to subsidize something so that it costs the consumers less. They do that by selling access to the consumer's eyeballs. Taxes, like prices, influence consumer behavior (just ask any town in California (8.75% sales tax) borders Oregon (0% sales tax)). So the upper limit on ads (as a tax) is when they start driving consumers away.
Like many people I find that some advertising levels are intolerable. I used to regularly read some gaming web sites until the tax of dealing with all the advertising became too high. (even with Adblock for web sites, or arriving at the theatre 10 - 15 minutes post start time so that you can just see the movie, avoiding ads has a cost too). I wrote a local radio station and explained to them that a particular ad they played caused me literally to change the station when they played it, generally leaving me on their competitor's station. You can't tax your way into a successful business model, and if you can't afford to offer the service with a combination of upfront cost and tax then you just quit while you are ahead.
The original post reminded me of John Cuzack's line in "Say Anything" - 'I don't want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career. I don't want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed. You know, as a career, I don't want to do that.'
I don't understand why providing a relevant set of ads in the shortest possible time is unrelated to encouraging people to click on ads. It seems clearly to be quite closely related to me -- provide a better ad experience, and people are more likely to make use of the ads. Whether the engineers optimising the system realise this or not is somewhat irrelevant.
Ok, I agree that providing a better ad experience makes it more likely that people will use those ads. Would you agree that that might be expressed by saying, "If the probability of someone clicking on an advertisement is X then increasing the number of people who see/visit the page proportionally increases ad clicks by factor X ?"
If you agree that this restatement adequately captures your claim then I'd like you to consider the difference between "creating a desirable web site", versus "getting someone to click on an ad."
Using examples, someone who designs an advertisement to 'appear' underneath my mouse as my mouse traverses a trigger point is "trying to get me to click", whereas someone who designs a web page on widgets which includes an advertisement for something associated with widgets off to the side, they are not working on 'trying to get me to click.'
My claim is that engineers at Google (and presumably Facebook and Twitter) are working on making your experience with their products the best it can be. This increases the number of people who use their products, and if the probability of someone clicking an advertisement is fixed, the higher traffic rates will result in more clicks. And yet, unlike the original author's posting, they worked not on 'getting people to click' rather they were working on 'being more useful to more people.'
Its important to remember that advertisements are not 'evil', not even a little bit evil. I used to subscribe to BYTE magazine and Computer Shopper in part to get access to the advertisements. These represented companies who had things I would likely want to purchase and knowing about them was a service, not a burden. The consumer 'cost' of advertising relates to how much the consumer cares that its 'part of what they are looking for' or not.
Abusive use of advertising decreases your readership which reduces the rate your desirability as an advertising platform. Its a negative value coefficient in the feedback loop so it self corrects.
This is why I work for Kiva. There are lots of new projects with fun technologies, but at the end of the day, it's all about "saving the world". Plus, I end up meeting a lot of Google, Twitter, and Facebook folk anyways.
Saying that Google's primary purpose is to serve ads is like saying that a government's primary purpose is to collect taxes. It's a means to an end; not an end in and of itself.
I sympathize to some extend, but I think it is unfair to characterize "Google, Twitter and Facebook" as only advertising companies. A lot of the engineering effort at these companies goes into improving their core services, too.
If you are working on Google's search engine, you are actually making the world's body of knowledge more easily accessible. This is a huge boon to the millions (or billions?) of people who use Google's free search engine every day. Arguably, many engineers can have a bigger positive impact on the world working at Google than they could have on their own.
Similarly, Facebook allows millions of people to connect and communicate. Remember the revolution in Egypt? It started on Facebook.
So yes, I agree that it is sad that so many smart people are working on how to serve ads more effectively. But the reason these internet companies serve ads is because they need to pay for the engineers and server farms that provide a service, which "nobody" is willing to pay for in cash. If you think you can do better (provide the service without covering the costs with advertising) please do, but until you demonstrate that this is possible, I think we'll have to take the bad with the good.
I work at Google. I can't say I ever worry about advertising. I worry about creating a kick-ass product that people want to use.
The number one 'core value' at Google is "Focus on the user and all else will follow". From what I've seen that holds pretty true across the company.
If it isn't a product that people love to use there won't be anybody to show ads to.
If it's a product people do love to use, the people who work directly on the ads system will figure out how to serve up effective ads.
From my perspective, it's not functionally different from when I worked at companies with a more traditional sales model. In either case my job is to create a product that is compelling to users. Whether the users pay with cash or 'pay' by clicking on ads my job and my focus are the same.
Imo its worth working at any big shop for a year to see how things work at scale, and understand the problems bigger companies face. Consider it part of your training.
Dont hand over a significant chunk of your productive career. Just use them to sharpen your own saw.
There is a common sentiment in this thread that advertising is something we should accept willingly for the privilege of enjoying a free or discounted service. while that may reflect the current reality of the situation, indifference towards the current model doesnt promote innovation and change. Am i doomed to see banner ads and interstitials for the rest of my life? I rather like the idea of being ad-averse if it means there is an increased incentive to find an alternative way to monetize on the web
First, this guy has a right to his opinion, and that's OK (I work at Google). But Google does not exist to serve ads. It exists to control the internet, to suck money out of it, and to keep other companies from encroaching on its territory. This is why it is attracting attention from Washington.
Back to the matter at hand---finding work...hard work...that is fulfilling is not easy, but I think it is worth it. Many people find this outside of what they do for a living, so the only criticism of this piece I have is that it suggests that it is ONLY possible to find fulfillment through the thing you do to pay the rent and put food on the table.
I've seen OPower's website. I like it. This is a great idea, and I'm happy to see it take off, so I can see this being very fulfilling work - perhaps the most important work of a lifetime, way more unique and special than one of Google's foot soldiers. But not everyone has that chance, that opportunity, a role like that, and yet everyone has the chance, the opportunity to orient themselves to seek out what is fulfilling to them, to lead a meaningful life, which often involves changing jobs! And I don't think the author understands that this is a universal drive, something which transcends the place of employment.
I've had similar feelings about working for financial services industries - all of their main revenue sources don't actually make anyone's life any better, other than in some tangential way that is secondary to the enrichment of the company.
That said, most internet companies do deliver some modicum of usefulness to their users, as a byproduct of selling their eyeballs to advertisers (which is the actual product).
Except that they do. Ever wondered, for example, how Google, Apple, Microsoft or any other public company that makes products you are likely using got their main funding? (Hint: IPO.)
I'm personally a little annoyed with the "the user is not the customer" meme.
I used to work on a product search engine. I had four, count them four distinct groups I had to please with my shopping search engine.
The first group was the user. If the users didn't like our site, find the item they were looking for, and buy it, we didn't make money and I got fired.
The second group were the merchants. The merchants wanted our fire hose of traffic to always be pointed at each of them individually, all the time, always increasing. If the merchants didn't like the traffic we were sending them and ended our relationship, we didn't make money and I got fired.
Also up there was the Googlebot, a customer of its own. If the Googlebot didn't like our site, it wouldn't send any traffic to us, we wouldn't send any traffic to our merchants, we wouldn't make any money and I would get fired.
Finally was the sysadmin. The sysadmin was the only guy who actually had to run the software I wrote. If he wasn't happy with it, our site would go down in the middle of the night, he wouldn't be able to get it back up without waking me up in the middle of the night, and I would feel really bad, and maybe even get fired.
The world isn't black and white. You can serve many masters. Some days what's better for the user takes priority, some days what's better for the sysadmin takes priority. Some days you smack a giant ass banner ad on the top of the site, other days you take down the giant ass banner ad because it's slowing down your site and driving users away and costing you more money than it brings in. There are gradations between the white-gloved consummate servant to the user and packing your users into the chute to get sheared, chopped, battered and fried.
The "users are products" meme is just so goddamn emo-sophomoric-simplistic-annoying. Blarghch.
Let's look at tools and apps that typically do not have ads: public data tools on government websites. Even at the federal level, there is nothing that comes close to the usability of what Google and FB provide. For example, the most advanced delivery system used by the U.S. to inform their customers, the public, of Treasury expenditures is monthly excel spreadsheets.
Try using a local crime mapping tool, like California's Megan's Law offender database.
because there are no systematic metrics to tell how much and in what fashion these data apps are being used, the government has no ability to tell if their apps are actually effective. Furthermore, there's no near-term incentive to improve these tools because no profit margin depends on these apps actually being used.
The author here should be commended for his idealism, but that doesn't warrant the viewpoint that money-making mechanisms serve no beneficial purpose besides a company's bottom line.
I think this is a bit of a pessamistic view of the companies in questions. I mean sure we can all agree that their revenue model at the end of the day is ALL about advertising, and sure companies only care about making money right? So I can see where you care coming from and why, but there are a lot of engineers at those places who could care less about serving up a single ad.
Google, Facebokk, Twitter, and anyone else who wants to make a dime off of advertising has 1 goal that should always be higher on their priority list than serving up ads...getting more users and keeping them happy. Without the massive scale of users that these companies have, who would care how many ads they are serving.
I know what I am saying is all very obvious, but I think there are far more people inside those companies that are aiming to solve and inovate on problems within the user space rather than just the ad space.... just IMHO.
a) There is a long tradition of advertising supporting other enterprises without corrupting it. Did the Watergate investigation only occur to sell advertising? Few would argue that was the case, but many would argue that revenue from advertising made it possible.
b) Advertising can (and should) get much better than it is. In the ideal form you would never see an ad until the moment you needed what it was selling and at that point the advertised product would be exactly what you needed. Working towards that goal is interesting, and teaches us at least as much about human intelligence as all the research in AI labs over the last 25 years.
I think the problem for engineers working for certain companies such as Google, Twitter, or Facebook is not that your customer are advertising companies.
The real challenge (and problem) for some engineers is that your user is not your customer.
The joy of interacting with customers which are actually paying for things you made for them is sometimes priceless.
Also when working for Google, Twitter, or Facebook you might never learn how to envision and build the product (and company from it) which is sold directly to the customer.
So don't expect the next Oracle, Informatica, or Apple coming from ex-Googlers (even they have a lot of engineering knowledge in that space).
Yeah, I liked google, twitter, and facebook back in their early days, before they sold out and went mainstream. I use a different search engine and social network now, they're pretty small, you probably haven't heard of them.
Cue Lloyd Dobler: "I don't want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career. I don't want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed. You know, as a career, I don't want to do that."
I've always thought of advertisers and advertising as "it's immoral to let a sucker keep his money".
If advertisers are freely willing to pay for the web services I use eventhough I don't bother with ads myself, it's more than ok.
If there are enough suckers who actually buy that stuff to keep the advertisers' budgets on black so that they can keep paying for the web services I use, it's more than ok, too.
In neither case, I'm not the sucker and I still benefit from the scheme despite the fact that I don't even do anything, except run adblock.
From engineering point of view, the sad thing (and danger) about Google, Twitter, or Facebook is they will get in trouble as soon as some other company figure outs more efficient advertising model (and starts eating their revenue).
In other words, regardless of all these great things Google is doing and great technology, if somebody invents better ad market than AdSense, all this great technology will not help them at all. That is the problem.
One might argue all our activities are geared for one thing: existence. But then it is not mere existence that counts, but what the existence results in, that makes any one useful to the world. Same goes with Google. They have to exist to do cool things (like android, remote controlled cars, street view etc).. and their existence depends on serving ads.
I've wondered a lot whether ads don't actually add value. Seeing as the ads get more and more directed to you personally, knowing about something might actually be good for you.
For example: let's say I'm looking for "Animal Farm" online. An ad for the book "1984" might actually create value in this case.
Ads don't annoy people, people annoy people. Would it be hypocritical if his company advertised to get customers? Where does the author think we'd be without advertising in terms of the internet? Very odd logic for not wanting to work at said companies.
I needed new tires for my car, got a google ad for a new set of tires from a local place with a $100 rebate, got the tires, got my rebate the other day in the mail. Advertising just saved me $100, it's not ALL evil.
You might not work for the big three for "these reasons", but i doubt that anyone else would even think about reconsidering their wish to work/job there.
this guy must be young, as he doesn't seem to remember how fucking awful the internet was before google (google search that is. he seems to take it for granted, as anything invented before i was born.. like running water... or electricity).
I’m not saying that my code needs to save the world or support
humanitarian causes, but it should at least be something that I like,
or I would use, or that I care about.
and i am not just talking about how awful search was. remember punch-the-monkey ads? i feel like google adwords is the second greatest internet invention.
so i have to look at a couple of (non-intrusive, often related to my interest) ads, in order to pay for my access to any bit on information from anywhere in the world, in single-digit milliseconds?
and btw, google's self-driving cars? toootally about freeing-up more of your time to be able to watch even more ads -- because today, i don't look at ads (billboards) while i am driving..
(ask me why advertising is the only way to pay for a service like search at a scale like the internet -- with transaction costs and all that)
I don't think it's strange to think that there are many devs that could work for Google, Facebook, or Twitter but choose not to. All the companies I've applied to consist mostly of such people.
It's true, but quite reductive, that that these smart people are working on these interesting projects in the service of advertising. If you think in these terms, Walter Cronkite worked for ads, too.
Also, consider that to the extent that these projects are open-sourced or otherwise widely available, they create external value. Go will not be solely used by Google, though it may have been created to serve Google's aims. Likewise for whatever messaging system Twitter built this week.
Everything is not so simple; we use their (amazing) products, we pay by clicking ads. And it is useful for society as a whole (Google, Twitter and Facebook).
I am 100% sure that not even half of the programmers who work at Google are working in the "deliver ads" area. Many of them are working in a little piece of something that does something that someone else is going to find really useful... just like millions of people in earth!
Applications like those provided by Google, Twitter and Facebook only achieve their popularity based on their widespread use, thus the need to keep them free and supported by advertising. Just like television, radio, the heavily-subsidized news industry and many, many more programs that rely on sponsorships in lieu of publicly-funded grants. These programs create jobs and in many cases promote education and health awareness through outreach, not to mention life-saving services and charities who without the use of advertising would not be able to sustain themselves. Advertising is a fact of life and has been socially pervasive since times immemorial. Advertising is communication and vice versa. Without it we would not be able to function as a society.
From over here in the United States, it looks like it's not such a terrible thing. The BBC manages to produce great programming and content, and the license is much less than what the typical US consumer pays for cable.
The issue is choice. The same people who'd scream if Murdoch had the power to force everyone to subscribe to the Wall Street Journal don't think it's a big deal that everyone is forced to subscribe to the BBC.
Assuming the government is still going to fund a TV station, not having a license for BBC would just mean it was funded out of general taxation revenue. Having a license system or not is irrelevant, it's still being funded by taxation either ay.
If I actually had a cable subscription, I would totally agree with you, too. I have a TV hooked up to my computer that I use for Netflix/Hulu/Amazon Prime Instant rather than deal with Comcast. Unfortunately, if I were setup like this in the UK I'd still have to pay the BBC licence.
Actually, I say "unfortunately", but I would actually be okay with it. The Beeb has some amazing content. But there are definitely more than a couple people with TVs who have no interest in cable (or BBC) subscriptions.
You wouldn't have to pay the BBC license with your setup if you detuned your TV from the usual channels and used it in the way you're describing.
You only have to pay the license if you're watching live TV. If you don't own a TV or if your TV isn't tuned to terrestrial channels, you don't have to pay. Even if you're not paying, you still get access to loads of great radio stations and a fantastic website AND on-demand catchup of all BBC programmes on iPlayer. The license is only for live TV.
IIRC, you only have to pay for a TV license if you watch BBC stuff as it's being broadcast.
You have the option of saying you don't need a license, in which case they send someone around to make sure you aren't lying. This is how it is currently at my place (althought they never got around to sending their van over..)
The "detector vans" are FUD, what they actually do is just assume that everyone has a TV and send them a letter. The TV licencing company (and it is a company, not a government organisation) is quite misleading in the way it practices, their inspectors cannot for example enter your property unless you let them in. And they can't force you to answer any questions. So there's no way for them to prove you're watching TV without a licence. All that said, personally I think the TV licence is awesome value for money, BBC TV and Radio programmes are generally of very high quality, and of course there are no adverts and there are very strict guidelines on impartiality etc
They also have to pay the license, which imo amounts to nothing more than a poll tax for mindless entertainment, every year. I've never paid one and I currently do not own a TV; I was just taking a swipe at what I view as an indirect tax that further imposes the will of a few in government over the people.
But the fact remains that whomever takes a stand one way or another on advertising is just deluding themselves. It's always been with us, it's how we communicate with each other.
Hipsterdom has thoroughly penetrated software engineering. The underlying theme is that some person thinks he's too cool/intelligent/noble for [something everyone else wants]. Rejecting something scarce and highly selective, employment at aforementioned companies, also suggests some level of sour grapes.
How exactly is it bad to connect people with things they want and need?
The problem with advertising is when it gets too obtrusive, like on TV when, near the end of a movie, you'll see an ad break every 6 minutes (at least in Australia).
I generally like the way Google does advertising (disclaimer: I work for Google). It doesn't get in your way (except in some cases on Youtube). It pays for a lot of great services that are free to the end user (search, GMail) and Google clearly separates organic search results from paid promotion.
How anyone can have a moral objection to that baffles me.