It's a comment, not a debate. I'm not trying to crush raganwald's constructive and collect many finger snaps from the judges. I'm just trying to explain how Internet advertising works for a community which a) viscerally despises advertising, b) often dreams of working for an advertising company, and c) even if they don't work directly for the ad company will have their careers determined in large part by their ability to form an accurate mental model of how advertising actually works. To the limited extent that I disagree with raganwald about anything, I think that any mental model where "An ad for a BBC documentary about dinosaurs" sounds like a more attractive placement for this pageview than "generic remant inventory" economically is likely flawed. That mental model has not come to grips with the fact that the conversion math would suggest a click on that ad would be worth fractions of a hundredth of a penny to the BBC and cost several orders of magnitude more.
Patrick, your argument is flawless, but you've become a bit of a robot. There must be some reason why they don't put Marlboro ads in a lung cancer clinic or a Ballantine's ad in an alcohol rehab center. Surely they would be perfect choices for the well-defined audience that frequents those places and they would make perfect sense economically, more than whatever else they put on those walls. Someone might even come along and say, hey, as long as it pays for the heating, it's good for everyone, right?
Also, I think you misrepresent Raganwald's point. I don't think he claims that economically a BBC ad would be better than an online game ad, he must be thinking along some other axis, along which it would rank higher.
Economically one might say that raganwald is observing a negative externality resulting from the deal between Google and the publisher. It doesn't cost either of them anything if they interrupt a child's homework to sell them a game of bejeweled because the advertising pipeline was going to run anyway for that pageview, but in raganwald's view it does cost society.
I agree with raganwald on this. Sure search is immensely valuable, and sure, the things that internet use displaces were worse.
We're better off post-google than pre-google. But can't we improve on this? Is this how it's going to be in 100 years time?
He's describing the behavior of a massive real-time international marketplace that's (wild-ass guess) 99% under algorithmic control. I don't see how you could avoid sounding like a robot if you wanted to accurately describe its high-level behavior.
Patrick is talking about how things work today. You seem to be trying to convince him that they should work differently. (Maybe they should, maybe they shouldn't. I'm not going to comment on that right now.)
I know and I appreciate his explanation, although much of it was not new to me. I was not trying to convince him of anything, just commenting on what I think the original story was about.
OC does not misrepresent the point, he does not engage it, (those are distinct). In not engaging it, he provided tremendous value for everyone ITT.
[Thanks, Patrick]
However, if you want someone to bite - I will. Why bother engaging in moralizing if you don't care enough about your values to pay for them? Better yet, how much is your morality worth to you?
"I know that this engine is driven by the money, and the money is in luring people into Google's social thingamajiggy instead of trying to sell someone a book or a course or even a BBC/Discover/National Geographic edutainment special on dinosaurs or natural history.
But you know, the whole point of having values is that sometimes you don't do the most expedient thing or the most profitable thing or the easy thing. That’s what makes them values, you value them more then pecuniarum."
Well, if Raganwald wishes to educate children, why not create a service that serves educational ads instead of selling add slots to the highest bidder? Because it wouldn't be able to compete with Google outside of some tiny niche. Clearly, society as a whole is not willing to pay for this moral value, namely educating children.
It might be tempting to trivialize this by the way of "heartless businessmen" argument, but that would be misrepresenting the point. The point is - in a society where the only over-arching value is money, morality becomes a liability. One could argue that this is an inevitable state of human affairs due to $characteristic_of_human_nature. However, to me this seems to be more of an inevitable consequence of implementation of a universal means of exchange. Not everything boils down to money - true. But most things do. And most things will always be enough for some people. And the rest will ultimately have to follow. That, or find a clever way to monetize their "moral liabilities".
> However, to me this seems to be more of an inevitable consequence of implementation of a universal means of exchange.
Disagree.
Anytime humans get ahold of a metric, they fuck it up and make it mean something it never did intend to mean. But, hey, animals did it, so we don't need to rise above that.
The reason there are no marlboro ads in lung cancer clinics is because it would generate massively bad PR, other than that it's a phenomenal idea.
Especially for former smokers who now no longer have any risk factors from smoking. A lung cancer diagnosis is a perfect "smoke 'em if ya gotta em" moment.
