"The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks." – Jeff Hammerbacher, fmr. Manager of Facebook Data Team, founder of Cloudera
What's critical to understand is that he's not just talking about the minority that is directly working on ad technology. He's talking about everyone who works on an ad-supported website that depends on page views, which is nearly all of them. Since revenue is proportional to page views, the driving concern is to increase page views rather than maximizing end user satisfaction, which only has secondary importance as one factor in page views, and often not the largest factor.
As to the free market, advertising distorts it very badly. The free market is based on consumers voting with their wallets. What happens when the wallets are held by advertisers?
And for what do we accept the above state of affairs? So that we can get content and services for free? Then we are all suckers! It's an absolute lie that ads give us anything for free. It actually makes the web much more expensive: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7485773]
What's critical to understand is that he's not just talking about the minority that is directly working on ad technology. He's talking about everyone who works on an ad-supported website that depends on page views, which is nearly all of them. Since revenue is proportional to page views, the driving concern is to increase page views rather than maximizing end user satisfaction, which only has secondary importance as one factor in page views, and often not the largest factor.
As to the free market, advertising distorts it very badly. The free market is based on consumers voting with their wallets. What happens when the wallets are held by advertisers?
And for what do we accept the above state of affairs? So that we can get content and services for free? Then we are all suckers! It's an absolute lie that ads give us anything for free. It actually makes the web much more expensive: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7485773]