This would SEEM obvious because as techies we hate ads. But you can't extrapolate this to the general population.
There was one time when I visited my mother. We started her instant messaging program, and we were presented with special offers. I recognized it as such within half a second, so I almost automatically checked the 'Do not show this again' checkbox.
My mother alarmed me: "No, do not make it go away! I want to see the offers, they're useful!"
I was mindblown.
Another example: I have snail mail advertisements. But my girlfriend, who's living with me now, asked me to sign up for advertisements such as supermarket special offers. Another mindblown.
I am mindblown too. I thought that it was pretty obvious by now to everyone that ads do not show you the offer that is best for you; they show you the offer that's best for the company, which means you spending more money on something subpar. I find ads anything but useful.
So how exactly do you expect people to find out about your product if you don't advertise it? Even word of mouth requires a first sale, which generally requires... advertising.
There's advertising, and then there's advertising. Maybe a hundred years ago ads were about product discovery, they are not about that anymore. For most of the needs we have there are already products so you can just discover the product categories via well... interaction with other people. A new class of product gets often gets its spread organically, or at least via product-discovery-ads.
So for example, you didn't learn about the existence of cameras via ads - you probably saw your parents or friends shooting photos when you were a child. And you know that the ads of cameras you see on the web are offering subpar products, and you're better off searching for a camera that fulfills your needs yourself.
Another example, of a relatively new category - iBeacons. You probably read about them on the Internet, or maybe in a magazine like The Economist. Sure, maybe you read an infomercial, but what you've learend is that there is this new category of products, and that they can help you make phones more context-aware. But if you're thinking about what beacons to buy, you are again better off researching yourself and consciously ignoring anything that looks like an ad.
I don't totally disagree, but it's worth noting that when I read about iBeacons "on the internet," that was likely just a sophisticated ad, disguised as a review or blog article.
It's definitely better than the ads that ghostery blocked, but ads aren't going away and they were still important to the discovery process.
Keyword there is "snail mail." You're saying you really want this stuff in your mailbox every week? I don't want any snail mail(of any kind), any week but it's something I still have to live with.
In contrast, I've been refusing to opt-in to my banks online statements for a long time now, simply because I want to have important stuff (e.g. my money) printed black-on-white. Email can be easily faked.
It is less likely that someone would send a falsified bank document through the mail, as mail fraud is a federal crime with harsher sentences than most online versions of spam/phishing.
Also records are kept for mail regarding where it was received by the post office (which likely has security cameras), when, who is on the return address and the recipient. There is physical evidence of who has touched a piece of mail such as fingerprints, hair, DNA etc.
This is part of why you don't get 50 letters from nigerian princes each day
Yes, is it really that hard to take 5 seconds out of your day and check snail mail? I get that people don't like it, but let's be real, it's not that big of an inconvenience.
Well, if this is opt-in mail, it's all cool. Where I live I, along with all my neighbours, have something like half a kilogram of spam mail weekly, all of it (except maybe first flyer from a newly-opened pizza place) goes straight to thrash. Scale this up to 1-million city or 30-million country and think of all this wasted paper, paint, electricity, fuel and labour.
Now are they? I sometimes wonder about leaflets (and some form of Internet marketing) that maybe it doesn't really work, but it's so hard to tell that they just keep throwing money at it because everyone else does.
Our kind of audience has learned to be more effective with less distraction, likely because we have encountered information overload routinely before and therefore changed our behavior and preferences to prevent or lessen the problem.
The flip side is that there are genuine discounts for many products that save you money with no strings attached. It's just differential pricing: they want to sell their products for more money to people who want to spend more money. Or it's part of an affiliate advertising program and the way to ensure affiliate codes get entered by buyers is to offer them a discount.
I hate many ads too but I'll seek out discounts when I think they might exist.
Grocery shops have another trick up their sleeve - they lower prices on some products, but raise prices of complementary goods. So you can have a genuine discount on bread, and at the same time heavily overpriced cheese. They're betting on you not caring enough to split your shopping between multiple venues.
My mother recently told me how she's tired of keeping track of prices (or price/quality tradeoff) in 5+ different shops - she can save a lot of money and buy good quality products at the same time as long as she knows what to buy where. But she's doing bulk shopping. I probably wouldn't bother walking around the hood to get one item cheaper.
The real problem is the wasted time. You may save $20 bucks a week shopping around, but if it costs you 45 minutes and you make $40/hour after taxes, you are spending 45 minutes to save 30 minutes.
Indeed. Well, my mother doesn't make anywhere near that amount so it's worth the savings for her - the shops are just counting that people earning more won't bother shopping around.
This makes me wonder if any of the people working at Superfish actually use their own products regularly, including this one, and like it. I wouldn't be surprised if they do.
If they make their money off of people legitimately interested, I wonder if there could be a way to convince the spammers that we're really not, so they can stop wasting their paper and bandwidth.
Ironically, I've been looking at Lenovo laptops recently, and now Lenovo ads follow me around the web (when they're not blocked). So they are currently showing me something of interest, and it's a handy reminder of how easy tracking is.
There was one time when I visited my mother. We started her instant messaging program, and we were presented with special offers. I recognized it as such within half a second, so I almost automatically checked the 'Do not show this again' checkbox.
My mother alarmed me: "No, do not make it go away! I want to see the offers, they're useful!"
I was mindblown.
Another example: I have snail mail advertisements. But my girlfriend, who's living with me now, asked me to sign up for advertisements such as supermarket special offers. Another mindblown.