Why people think Ads are bad:
— The cached thought¹ that ads are bad.
1.Two things:
(i) The regular use of words within certain contexts biases their meanings e.g 'impregnating' a girl.
(ii) Deliberate framing: death tax vs inheritance tax, pro choice vs pro life, undocumented immigrants vs illegal aliens.
— They may hinder ideal UI/UX.
— Often bear a weak relevance.
What Ads are:
— Ads are tools that aid problem-solving by matching people to tools that solve their problems. People are notoriously bad at solving their own problems, or even realizing they have solvable problems.
Ads should be a net positive for consumers since they (consumers):
(i) are getting a product for free.
(ii) have an opportunity to passively discover solutions to some of their problems.
The only way they might not be is if ads are either poorly designed, or bear a weak relevance to a user. The solution to which isn't castigating ads as being bad; the solution is making better ads by:
— Destroying the cached thought that ads are bad.
— Designing ads that do not disrupt UI or UX, but instead align with the default context within which they exist. Cc: Reddit and Quora's native ads.
— Better data collection to improve relevance.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
This is about as useful as saying "the solution for crime is not telling the criminals theft and murder is bad, and putting them in jail. The solution is to make people just realize they shouldn't steal and murder". Good luck with that, please tell me when you find out how to do that. So far all the ad industry is running - no, flying on super-sonic jets - in the opposite direction. I am lazy, so I tried to get by without installing ad blockers a couple of times when getting new phones/tablets. Nope. It's not possible. Ads eat so much CPU/memory/bandwidth that it is just intolerable to me. I'd rather stop using the device altogether then use it with ads. And the targeting of the most ads remains to be horrific. I'm pretty sure by now ad networks know about me more than I bother to remember about myself. But they still show me crap that is so dull, repetitive and annoying that it threatens my mental health if left unblocked. I get the role that the ad industry played in the spread of the free services on the internet and supporting independent creators. But this once useful function turned malignant, and now it grew entirely out of proportion and became evil. And I see no way to make it go back to benign forms.
More options
Context Copy link