Why Are Ads So Hated?

Ash sent me a link to his theoretical valuation of Wikipedia and I forwarded it to Jason who then wrote this post suggesting that Wikipedia run one leaderboard per page and give all the money it generates to charity.

I run ads on this blog so I can give the money to charity. It will be about $30,000 this year. That's money that would not otherwise go to charity. I think its a good thing and I hate leaving money on the table that could otherwise go to a good cause.

Jason is suggesting the exact same thing for Wikipedia. He thinks one leaderboard could generate $100mm annually. That is a lot of money to be leaving on the table. I like the idea.

But if you read the comments to Jason's post, the disgust is literally dripping off the page. It seems that there are a lot of people who hate ads (or hate Jason or both).

I just don't get that. Ads are content just like everything else. Good ones that are relevant (and wikipedia being a search/keyword driven site could target the ads so easily) and attractive are additive in my opinion. But clearly not everyone feels that way.

Comments

[Emre Sokullu]

I was thinking the same - but the problem is different:

Wikipedia doesn't want spammers to manipulate entries to trigger their ads. It's a wiki, editable content and very very popular.. Not the best place to use Google Ads..

Maybe context-insensitive ads can be used though.

[Skeptic]

I think a lot of this is Calacanis-hatred, not so much ad-hatred.

[Rik]

Fred,

I think most of the dislike for ads in general comes from the fact that they're not all that targeted as one would wish them to be. For instance, under your post in my reader was an ad for a kyocera printer, and right now there's one up on your site for a discover card and one for HP printers. I really don't need another printer at this point. I live in Holland and thus do not qualify for a Discover Card. a) your site does not have anything to do with printers, so why are those particular ads there, and b) from my IP your ad supplier could have known that I wouldn't be the most lucky target for a discover card, right?

That's what I think is a major problem for online ads: the're about 85% percent as annoying and untargeted as they were when just invented.

Apart from that, big applause for you raising 30K for charity with this blog.

[Simon]

ok - but how is sale of a HP colour printer and the promotion of a discover card additive to venture related information you offer?

We live in a society driven by consumer spending. Your donation to charity is indexed by your site's popularity and related advertising consumption. If charities relied on donations derived from one's popularity, where would we be? If you become less popular, will you now donate less? Does USV have a philanthropic element where a given % of deals secured go to charity, or is it easy pickings from advertising?

Its a double edged sword, as $30k donated is still doing someone, somewhere some good. But the mechanism, the basis of where that money comes from - consumerism - winds the world tighter and tighter. Should there be adds on a book inner cover? On a wall next to the Mona Lisa in the Louvre? Hell, if the money gos to charity, its surely a good cause.

Donations to charity are a wonderful thing, but giving away money just doesn't automatically make the world a better place. Its the choices and judgements we make every day. The actions we take, the governments we elect, the corporate giants we support, the food we eat. Amongst this, advertising is more of a hinderance than a help IMO.

[Richard Tibbetts]

I'll echo Rik's point, that the ads on your blog are not very effectively targetted.

The other problem with image or flash ads is that they often detract from the content of the page. They are often structured to be attention getting, and thus distracting. I find the graphical ads in your rss feed much more annoying than the textual ads used by some other bloggers. Of coures, your ads are more valuable, because they claim more of my attention.

Graphical ads push on the boundaries of permission based marketing, by using various techniques to draw my attention away from what I really want to be reading. This makes them impolite, if not fundamenally bad.

[Peter Cranstone]

Fred,

The real problem here is relevance. I looked at your ads. There is nothing there that interests me. Why not, because you (aka the web ad engine) knows absolutely nothing about me. It doesn't know where I live, it doesn't know what device I'm on, and has no idea of my interests. Consequently I never click on your ads. I'm absolutely willing to share essentially what is already public information in the yellow pages with the ad engine. Then I would expect to see an ad on your page which knew that I lived in CO, liked cycling and then offered me a promotional ad which pointed me to a local bike store (less than 5 miles away) with a time sensitive offer. Now that's relevance. Our company has a technology which is capable of doing that now on a mobile device. AND the kicker is the user is in control of every piece of his personal data and opt-in or out as he/she desires.

Cheers,

Peter

[Allan]

Ads disrupt us in what we are doing. I came to your site for the comments, not for the Discover card it offered me. If I wanted a Discover card I would have gone to Google and search for something related. When I go to Wikipedia I want just the facts, no more, no less. Ads waste my time. That is annoying; really annoying.

[Adam]

Fred,

You say “I hate leaving money on the table that could otherwise go to a good cause”. It’s sounds like the wealth from ads was free, that it otherwise would be wasted. Of course that is not the case. The wealth comes from people who visit your site. Ads are a tax on their time (attention) and cognitive capacity (memory). That much is obvious. What is less obvious is that it is a very progressive tax in a sense that everyone pays the same “rate” but for some people time and memory are orders of magnitude more valuable than average (ads are priced to average). Because your readers are clearly above average, you de facto destroy economic value by displaying the ads, the same way that any progressive tax destroy economic value. You may increase “social justice” by redistributing from valuable members of society to those at the bottom, but you destroy economic value.

Regards,
Adam

[Jason Preston]

I think people are against ads because ads haven't caught up with new media yet. People resent the idea of companies forcing their brand and their message (controlled by the corporation) down their throats. That's old world-advertising, and that's the bulk of what's up online still.

I think it was John Battelle who, during his speech at the BBS, showed us a DICE ad that basically consists of a little java chatbox where IT people can vent about how crappy their life is. It's really cool. And that's new world advertising - once that kind of advertising becomes more prevalent, I think more and more people will have less and less of a problem with ads.

[ZF]

Look at this from the point of users to understand that their reaction to ads is not site-specific. Users have to plough through many pages each day which carry more than enough ads to be annoying, so they react negatively to the idea of one more ad, whether that ad appears on Wikipedia or anywhere else.

Further, Wikipedia currently offers a welcome respite from ads, a place to look for information where one can be sure of not being assaulted by them, an attraction which would be gone in an instant if Wales were to cave in. I don't think Wales is likely to be a saint, instead he may understand very well that giving up this distinctive advantage while Wikipedia's traffic is still exploding would be a bad trade.

To take another example, if Craig Newmark were to sell out tomorrow for the full commercial value of Craigslist, would anyone suggest that at an earlier stage he should have taken banner ads? I don't think so. Even the income stream which might have been derived and channeled to a charity up to that point would be tiny in relation to the philanthropy he could then afford. And even a relatively small amount clipped off Craigslist's growth rate by the presence of ads would have made the their net economic impact large and negative. I would have expected a VC, of all people, to be more likely to understand the implied value of hyper-growth.

[Vijay]

Sad to say. Pages are very dirty now a days. Google adsense makes it worst. Its hard to see any pages or content with out any add. :(

[ashkan karbasfrooshan]

Fred,

Thanks for linking to my analysis, though I was not necessarily suggesting that Wikipedia should run ads...

Why Wikipedia Should Avoid Ads (For Now)

http://www.watchmojo.com/web/blog/?p=637

[Jenny]

Yeah, the ads on your blog have nothing to do with the conversation. Feedburner and federated media do not help your content in any way. I have also noticed when people use these two lousy services the pages load a lot slower than most ad services.

[sourabh niyogi]

Here is the Wikipedia experiment: have wikipedia.com be exactly like wikipedia.org except with Adsense on it. People who really cared about an ad free environment would go to wikipedia.org, and people who really saw the ads as informative would go to wikipedia.com. This would turn a useless communist/capitalist debate into a "give the people what they want" solution.

Obviously, Google et al would point to .org for a while, but after a few months it would change. My guess is that in the steady state, .org traffic would have most of the "communist" Wikipedians, the kind of people who stopped watching PBS just because it accepted a few sponsors, and the kind of people who switched to the ad free version of this blog.

[tomo]

These perpetual complainers are a bunch of ignoramus'. Seriously, the have no logic behind their rationale.

Do they think that you, Fred, are going to pay your hosting provider, your isp and whatever other services you would need in order to keep this blog online? These people kill me with their purest mentality that may work well for their group of companions but the internet isn't an educational or govt entity any more, it is a commercial delivery network that almost from the first commercialization of it in the early 90s has been the spring board to a series of new industries or more evolved and efficient industries from the past. Advertising is the biggest part of it and it is what allows google to give away free wifi, to give away everything for that matter...every single one of googles services is subsidized by advertising.

How many of those people that complained had gmail accounts? Actually, it would surprise me to learn they were all on shell accounts :) not the point though. Muzak is advertising or branding or marketing and that type of sneaky below the radar stuff is , at least to me, par for the course and expected. How much money has been invested in everything internet? Who knows, but surely the $15B/year online advertising market has funded some of it.

Grin and bear it or start your own news site or blog site or whatever site that doesn't sell advertising. After all, it is a free market and if its wrong will surely be corrected via market driven demand.

This whole notion of their argument kills me. It is like what is happening in SF as two companies tried to rollout free connectivity to the citizens. For lack of a better term/phrase, these people are clueless.

[Rob Deichert]

It's interesting to see people write, "I think most of the dislike for ads in general comes from the fact that they're not all that targeted as one would wish them to be." Advertising companies are capable of delivering targeted ads but there is a general concern about being "too targeted."

There are companies who can deliver ads that list the name of the user in the banner. They are double opt-in when you sign-up at various merchants. What was interesting was we actually received complaints from surfers at my old company on receiving these ads. It was considered by them an invasion of privacy, the very privacy they gave up when they were on these various merchant sites.

We can get much more targeted, it's balancing whether it will cause a significant amount of backlash. What people wish for and what they really want are two different things.

My concern is whether the same people who complain about poorly targeted ads are the same people who are hyper concerned about privacy and data collection. Unfortunately we can't read minds yet, we need your data (anonymously) to increase the relevancy of your advertising experience.

[Anonymous]

Ads are excellent on YouTube. I go there for entertainment. I watch an ad here or there. Ads are terrible where I'm trying to read important/useful content.

[aaron wall]

The issue is not targeting or relevancy... the issue is that some will feel it is bait and switch. That something they thought was pure and easy to believe in now suddenly is part of the real world.

[michael]

This is a somewhat pedestrian discussion (beginning with the simplistic post itself) for a very complex topic on a site that usually offers some nifty insight. For example, tomo you chide we ignoramuses who may have negative feedback regarding the net's commercial evolution but then highlight your own ignorance by describing google's behavior as 'giving things away'. How clueless is that?

As for whoever opined that Fred would never pay to maintain this blog without ad dollars, I beg to differ. Fred gets exposure and education and relevancy for his primary professional pursuits as a VC for which I imagine he is able to scrape together a living. He also clearly enjoys expressing himself and I am sure could name many other benefits of his time spent blogging. As a result, he is perhaps not the typical example, and is generous donations indicate he would be a pointless target for influence, but what about the net as a whole? Might the behavior of advertisers in the more evolved medium of television provide some answers as to why people get passionate over how the net evolves commercially? I am reminded of the closing line from Quiz Show: "We were gonna get television...the truth is, television is gonna get us". Childhood obesity to pick a single example is more than enough evidence for me that television did indeed 'get us'.

Now I realize a few pesky ads in the infancy of the internet is not the collusion of NBC and Geritol behind a rigged game show, but for those reading who are not as clueless as tomo thinks we are, blind faith in the wisdom of the "free market" might fall short of our ideal for steering the commercial evolution of the net. As for why some folks hate it is probably folks like me, who agree in principal with free markets, but know that abuses abound and the Internet is a far easier place to abuse privacy and embed influential content and abuses will grow as the dollars grow. In this culture if you are a rainmaker ethics don't mean shit. Not the standard I want my son consuming en mass on the net as he ggrows up.

As for this site, I don't personally mind the ads because I am able to ignore them to an extent and Fred is in hardly in danger of being compromised or muted by and advertiser. But I respect that there are those who don't agree despite Fred's commendable generosity. So, those who know that eventually, advertisers will influence content decisions don't like them. Those who know that ads are often a synonym for lies don't like them. People who hate the overconsumption fueled by too much advertising don't like them. I can think of lots of folks who would take issue with them. Let's get Neil Young's opinion. In a world where Coca Cola's ad dollars enable a highly acidic caffeinated sugar water to be associated with things like freedom and prosperity while they can sell pesticides to Indian's with barely any need to fear consequences, I think we could use far more cynicism towards advertising of all kinds. Caveat emptor.

[tomo]

Michael sums it up with: Caveat emptor.

For every negative there is a postive and vice versa. If you are fortunate enough to remember that each time you roll out of bed you will build that 'beware' attitude into your expectations, it should come a surprise when advertisements appear in your kids schoolbooks, in their classrooms, on their webpages or blogs, in movies, television shows, etc. because as our tools evolve so does the way in which buinesses will market and nothing is sacred. I'm stating that as an outsider, not that I believe it is defendable on moral grounds, just it all boils down to $$. Is it right or wrong? Depends who you ask but the fact is that in a free market economy there is nothing stopping the next guy from taking it to a whole new level if there is money to be made. What GOOG is doing by 'giving stuff away'{aka using as a loss leader) is REALLY blurring the lines of who is the marketor, maketeer and marketie and all the stuff they give away, as I put it, is them betting that the giveway costs are a drop in the bucket when compared to the money they will drive by being the defacto world wide network medium for print, video and audio and embedding marketing or ads into every single miniscule aspect and element of your daily life. I am a cynicist and believe in all sorts of conspiracies but it all really, IMHO, is a function of capitalism and efficiency in markets. Not recognizing and understanding that is being ignorant and naieve.

[Charlie Crystle]

ads are the ramorra fish of genuine content

[Bernard]

This is in response to Peter and the relevant, direct, time sensitive advertising in support of local community advertising efforts...gone mobile!

If you tack on the consumerism from above then you have hit the holy grail. Every numbnut in town will be racing to their local bike shop or walmart to purchase the latest 15 minute offer. Talk about winding the world up even tighter.

Although we are building an embeddable app with advertising running through the chrome we have taken the opposite approach. If the person installing the app doesn't want their clients to see kyocera, hp, nike, or anyone for that matter, they can simply uncheck the advertisers we gathered onto the system by company, service, product area etc. There is not an algorithm deciding it knows me best based off click stream, profile, or what location I am at during the 1,500 minute of the day, but rather a trusted source I am visitng who has filtered out the rubbish they think is unnecessary for my visit. P2P advertising filtering if you will. If that person does a bad job at filtering, maybe I begin to get annoyed with the lack of sensitivity and cease to visit the site. The future is empowered consumers which will be much more difficult to target, if they even want to be targeted at all!!!

Point being, the less auto generated advertising nonesense out there the better off we all are. If an ad happens to pop up on this VC site recommending a entreprenuerial book filtered by Fred then it's probably worth a look and advertising money well spent.

Until then I am sure there will be loads more companies launched trying to hit the holy granular level of understanding the consumer base only to find out people did not act accordingly!

Bernard

[Jason Calacanis]

Given the feedback I just came up with a more modest, third version of my proposal... interested in hearing your thoughts on it.

http://www.calacanis.com/2006/10/31/wikipeda-advertising-proposal-version-three-the-6m-a-year-sear/

basically add a "Search the web" box to Wikipedia, keep the ads off the site, and bring in ~$6M a year to pay for servers, core staff, and bandwidth.

[Rational]

Ads are evil because they are an attempt to make take an action (buy a specific item) which is most likely not to the best of your interest. It is highly unlikely that the ad you are just seeing is for the cheapest, highest quality item; but ads tend to give you enough info to rationalize your buying decision but not enough to be rational about it.

In other words, ads are an attempt to push you to take actions which aren't in your best interests. And mind you - they work. People buy Coke. And Pepsi. I Do.

Ads also squander your attention and time (much like spam does). I do not want to spend the next 10 seconds considering whether to switch to Sprint - I want to finish reading the Wiki article about cellphone. When I am done, I can, if I so wish, look for the information I want (e.g. cell plans).

[everysandwich]

I have to nod to Rob in suggesting the pinpoint targetting will either be or seem to be a scary invasion of privacy, and yet many here resent advertising that's not relevant or in context, suggesting it might be counterproductive. Jason's one-time opt-in solution makes sense to me. In fact, it makes sense in other media. I would appreciate being able to be able to tell my TV to choose at least the categories of advertising I see. The advertisers might appreciate it, too.