"Silicon Valley people don’t click on ads... Similarly, they appear not to be commenting or liking posts as frequently"
The most successful drug dealers don't use their own stuff, I hear.
Edit: I think I sounded a little snarky here. To be clear, I'm a huge fan of silicon valley. But I thought the analogy was humorous and thought provoking so I thought I'd share.
I find your edit extremely disappointing. The fact that you need to automatically defend yourself against the accusation of not liking Silicon Valley is telling of a diffuse perception of how one should pose one's opinion to please the audience. Horrid.
On that note, does anyone know anything about the impact of internet use in drug addiction (and crime)? I have a very speculative hypothesis that internet (social networks, porn, etc) might work as a super-crack, competing with (and crowding out) other addictions because it's cheap, abundant, and instant.
When trying to think about how you might prove this (I'm taking a break from proofreading an acquaintance's criminology paper this very moment), it occurred to me that by virtue of keeping people off the streets, the Internet will decrease arrest and other criminal statistics simply by decreasing exposure to predatory police who have arrest statistics to maintain.
Taking that further, it could mean the focus is even more intense on those who do go out, and when you go out. I suppose you could try to measure this by finding historical statistics on where people spend their time, inside our homes our outside. After dealing with confounding factors like decreased employment.
Non-substance addictions (including internet use) lack the physical dependence created by drugs like cocaine. So, it would be hard to compare them to "super-crack".
I could certainly see how, for example, repeatedly checking your phone could mirror the behavioral aspect of smoking cigarettes. However, losing your phone won't cause withdrawal symptoms like headache, nausea, or fatigue.
Also, I'd agree that social behavior being focused around online interaction could potentially serve as a deterrent (or at least distraction) from drug use / crime. Based on Todd Kendall's paper [Pornography, Rape, and the Internet](http://idei.fr/sites/default/files/medias/doc/conf/sic/paper...), porn has been responsible in some part for the decreasing rate of rape, but not other crimes. I can't find much research on non-rape crime being affected by internet use, but the St. Helena TV study by Tony Charlton did show that aggressiveness in children was reduced by the introduction of TV. Obviously TV is far less interactive than web-browsing, but it's the most similar study I can find. :P
"Physical dependence" with respect to addiction really is nothing. Substances that create physical withdrawal symptoms can certainly be very very unpleasant (even dangerous), but if they were at all the main factor in addiction, drug abuse treatment would be a glorious, happy, incredibly successful industry.
Think about it: Even the worst "physically addictive" substances, let's say heroin, will be completely clear from physically in 7-10 days. Two weeks tops. Anybody can put up with that and, in fact, many addicts do it all the time. If that was the differentiating factor, locking up an addict would work because they would come to their "senses" after no longer physically dependent. Obviously, that's not how it is. Real addiction is something much deeper and cognitively still mysterious. Physical withdrawal (those first two weeks of hell) is called, in the treatment community, the easy part.
I think when most people use the "physical dependence" reference like you did, they are really trying to categorize and emphasize (internally or externally) that among substances and behaviors that are addictive, certain ones more often consume a persons entire being. This process is still a complete mystery and even if people can't or won't accept the amazing power and bizarre scope of cognitive function...it is certainly not 'physical dependence' and I therefore don't think there is any real need to continue with that minor classification.
You're on the right track here, but opiates and alcohol also create a lingering hell for the sufferer called PAWS. The longer a person abuses a substance, the longer PAWS lasts. It is not uncommon for PAWS to last a year or more.
To be successful, a person has to somehow manage & deal with PAWS, while also facing life, and the deeper causes of their addiction. This is why I am an advocate of recovery that includes bupenorphrine. It allows a person who has the right motivations the space to recover.
It is an unjust tragedy the way this country/world treats people who suffer from addiction.
I think this has a large effect on opinions in an often revisited internet topic "moving away from ads". Whenever a service starts to offer a paid alternative, or people get on the topic of tracking, or micropayments comes up, it's always struck me that commenters seem used to effectively free content and seem to just ignore that there are people subsidizing their internet usage by clicking on ads comparatively all the time.
I think it would be wise for us to reflect on, and admit, that we (power users) are currently getting a far better than average deal in providing for the web services we use.
Quality content, services, and products are expensive to make. An internet where we pay for it instead of it being supported by user targeted ads isn't going to be covered by paying 10 cents per article you really liked.
> Quality content, services, and products are expensive to make. An internet where we pay for it instead of it being supported by user targeted ads isn't going to be covered by paying 10 cents per article you really liked.
Searching tells me that CPM is typically between $1 and $10. That implies ad income per site view of $0.001-$0.01, right? The fact that clicks are worth $1, or even $100, is irrelevant. What matters is ad income divided by site views. If every viewer paid that price, enforced by a paywall, the owner would earn as much as they had from ads.
The barrier for ignoring ads is lower than bypassing a paywall. People will just be choosier about where they go and the site owner won't necessarily make as much.
Paying $0.001-$.01 to bypass a paywall is arguably a very low barrier. Allowance for children, poor people, etc would be needed, of course. Maybe amusing image-mapping captchas would be workable. That could even be an income stream, Mechanical Turk style.
That may be true for countries with online payments that actually work, but keep in mind that for many third-world countries the jump from $0 to $0.001 is hard, since people often do not have any way to perform an online payment.
Paywalls also have a negative effect in the linkability of the Web. If I suggest you to go to some page, and you have to pay for it, then independently if the price, I have a much higher responsibility for the content actually being relevant for you.
The cost is just not money, but also time. It takes some time to fill in payment information, even if only a minute, and even if only once per website.
Just like someone reading playboy for the articles, I typically read news aggregator sites for the comments.
Major news organisation provide a couple of paragraphs about the latest development and the interesting part is not the journalists opinion, but what the thousands of people reading the article have to say about it.
This holds for good sites, for e.g. youtube and some others - the comments are mostly worthless.
> An internet where we pay for it instead of it being supported by user targeted ads isn't going to be covered by paying 10 cents per article you really liked.
There's Google Contributer, which lets you pay several pennies per article rather than see ads. It could work if existing ad networks let you opt out of ads and cover the display impressions.
Google is the biggest ad network but still does not run most of the ads you actually see on any given webpage. The price is a lot higher if you really want to subsidize everything.
I agree, quality content is expensive to make. But at the same time, we have access to an incredibly large amount of content (good or bad), and mostly for free. Wishing it away won't make it happen, and maybe it is a good thing.
Ad clicks are studied pretty extensively. A good search term is "compulsive clickers." The cariacature-with-a-bit-of-truth version is less-educated older white woman in Iowa. The heavy clicking user population, roughly 4% of users, is generally believed to contribute more than a majority of total clicks.
This is as well-studied as you'd expect of clearly quantifiable data worth billions of dollars, and remains socially contentious.
Not forgetting massive variations across nations. A company I used to work with did some FB advertising, targeting nations they did good business with via Adwords.
UK and USA were the worst for clicks, the rest of Europe a little higher, and apparently in the Far East everyone clicks everything multiple times. Click through rates were ridiculous.
Also interesting to note that despite being online and profitable for yearss they never did find a way of making Facebook pay, in any nation.
Perhaps they were automated click-throughs? Asian browsers are different technology (every page needs automatic translation) - perhaps that tech was doing the clicking?
That's possible I guess. They were gaining page likes and post likes pretty well off the back of it, it just in no way compared with Adwords click through rates.
It was killed off fairly quickly outside US and Europe as it was just burning money.
This definition totally reinforces Rushkoff's vision of most contemporary Web Businesses as value extracting entities.
By the way, the fact that you have to be mildly stupid or technologically illiterate to really be clicking on ads is the proverbial pink elephant in the room. To further extend this reasoning, building up stupidity and lessening tech literacy is actually functional to Facebook's and Google's business models.
Also as I remember the 2-4% of people who ever click on ads tend to be older female population. Microsoft Advertising used to have some good research on it, can't find it now.
It's said often you are more likely to survive an air crash than click on an ad.
As much as I like HN, there seems to be a lot of confusion and misinformation when it comes to ads.
People absolutely click on ads. All the time. Regardless of where they live. Digital advertising is not some mystical industry but actually one of the most scientific and data-driven with a massive amount of metrics generated everyday.
I know the author of this article but it's a very slim look at the entire ad ecosystem. There could be a thousand reasons why SV just has less ad clicks with anything from less facebook use to more adblocking to less fit for the audiences that many companies (that are advertising on facebook) are actually after.
There are just as many other adtech companies and channels that show that SV has very high interaction rates in clicking on whitepapers, signing up for emails/newsletters, webinars, etc and other kinds of advertising outside of facebook. Even google gets tons of search ad clicks in SV.
Facebook metrics are cool but it's important to remember that they are just a little sliver of the larger ad market and that the larger context matters anytime you analyze numbers like these.
More: I accidentally click an ad, get angry, click it another 100 times, and end up laughing about it.
Next week, when I have time, I’ll just root my device again and install AdAway and XPosed with YouTube-AdBlock and YouTube-Background-Playback, and the issue is resolved.
"Contextual advertising is a form of targeted advertising in which the content of an ad is in direct correlation to the content of the web page the user is viewing. For example, if you are visiting a website concerning travelling in Europe and see that an ad pops up offering a special price on a flight to Italy, that’s contextual advertising. "
For this reason, I think the ultimate ad network would be a combination of Google's data, Facebook's data, and data from a payment processor (PayPal or Stripe).
Google knows what you're after, right now.
Facebook knows what you're into, in general.
PayPal/Stripe know your propensity to spend money online.
I would argue that the perfectly targeted ad will want to know about all of these. Google's data & mechanism (search) is probably the most useful; there's a pretty good chance someone searching "where to buy X" is looking to buy X. Combined with purchase data and personal preference data, the ability to target would seem near-perfect. Not only would you know whether the user is likely to buy X online, but you would also know what brand of X they might be interested in (eg. if they liked "Dell"), where they would prefer to purchase it from (eg. if they liked "Amazon"), and what bundling might appeal (eg. if they liked "Logitech").
For some people, this is the nightmare scenario. All these big companies putting together their data to algorithmically know what a consumer will buy before the consumer knows what they will buy. I'm with you, though. I think it would make advertising a lot less annoying, especially if it leads away from "we need your attention!" video ads into hyper-targeted text & images.
The underlying assumption, though, is that advertising companies would be more successful if targeting were better. Undoubtedly, a segment of their audience would be in much higher demand than they are now. I suspect that a lot of other segments would be in much lower demand, though. Would Emirates bid as high on Google for "holidays in Europe" if they knew I had never spent online, was elderly, and liked "Cruises" on Facebook?
> For some people, this is the nightmare scenario.
Because the power balance is completely in favour of the advertiser. They employ psychologists[1] to improve the effectiveness of their adverts — that is, to make people buy things they didn't actually want to buy.
What? No. if you've done any online marketing employing a psychologists would be stupid for 99% of businesses (Walmart being the 1%). You just analyze mountains of data, learn best practices, and you'll be successful. That link is trash, asking people to pay for training.
You dream about things people don't want. There is no reason to solve it with complex technical solutions, when "contextual advertising" makes sense and is relatively easy to implement - and everybody loves ads that make sense too.
If I read an article about a book (book review), please show me an ad to buy the book.
Unfortunately, this is at odds with the privacy/tracking debate, even though I think most people are worried about all the wrong things when it comes to ad network tracking vs real threats like government surveillance, malware, etc.
Agreed. I have clicked on many Adsense ads and never a Facebook ad. I have also clicked on a couple of Stack overflow ads, and got my current job thanks to stack overflow careers.
These advertisements add value to me and the site owner, and while I don't like them, I do not mind them if they are appropriately done and non intrusive.
I don't give a crap about the latest clash o clans rip-off, and if you advertise that to me you're hurting your CTR.
Most people here seem to think that one clicks ads only by accident. If this were true such clicks would never lead to a purchase or just associate a brand with annoyance. I simply can't believe that. Sure, mostly, I see ads for stuff I have just purchased, sometimes for months but there also have been useful ones from time to time for me (mostly home automation/Raspberry Pi stuff), also my brain seems wired not to ignore such ads.
Aren't geeks missing out by ignoring things targeted specifically to them (us)? Are geeks just stubborn? If you say things like "we get a better deal because stupid ad clickers pay for our internet experience", you are completely missing the fact that such an ad clicker probably made a valuable discovery through an ad, one that was even worth real money!
Do most HN-ers really believe all ads are fraudulent rip-offs designed to trick us just into clicking on them? Sure some are, but people here seem to think they all are.
The problem is there is no filtering, thanks to having a paying customer (ad maker), and then horrible ads get shown. And they slow my experience down, take over my website, use technologies that can infect my otherwise uninfected computers, and confuse me when I want to click download.
I learned from an early age that every single ad was essentially evil. All of it was a trick to get me to click something I did not want. Maybe, if they hadn't done that (and if they had ever really stopped... cause they haven't) I wouldn't have Privacy Bader, uBlock, and Disconnect running all at once.
In the beginning all I had wanted to do was get actual information on a topic or download the latest version of something for Windows. And every time I see someone not running highly aggressive adblockers I can understand why they think somethings on the internet are so complicated. "Just google it" -> "Yea, and click which irrelevant ad which takes up the whole first fold of the page on my not Retina MBP?"
Personally, I've never discovered anything specifically from an ad worth purchasing, but I have found interesting things to purchase after an advert inspired me to research a topic further.
Frankly, your comment reads as someone whose livelihood depends on advertising.
I also hate ads in general, my livelihood certainly does not depend on them. But there are sometimes ads that are useful. This must almost be the case as ads (excluding punch the monkey-like ads) try to be useful.
Well, according to the numbers SF people do click ads from time to time. I just can't imagine all ad clicks to be by accident and so by definition not all ads are useless. So maybe HN-ers that never click ads and always ignore them, do miss out.
> Do most HN-ers really believe all ads are fraudulent rip-offs designed to trick us just into clicking on them?
Some ads are pushing adware, malware or worse, for sure. And some AdSense ads are designed to look like search results, to trick people looking for Chrome or whatever. But even honest ads are designed to trick us into buying stuff that we hadn't planned on. Or to trick us into impulse buying, without proper research, reading product reviews, asking friends, and so on.
I really wish there was a service which would let me gripe about my problems and it would email me 10 Ads a month of products trying to solve those problems.
You mean like some sort of text box, where you type in your problem, and get results, perhaps augmented with some paid advertising from folks that know their offering would solve your problem? :-)
"Advertize what you want to buy, not what you sell" I forget the name but there was a site trying that about eight years ago. Argentinian startup I think. Might be worth trying again, you could build early adoption from twitter maybe? Usual problem building a two sided market...
I'm glad there is real data on this. I kept explaining to people that our email and social habits in SV are a complete outlier vs. the rest of the world.
So, before knowing there was reliable data, you constantly made unfounded claims?
You made a good guess. Is that something to brag about? An opinion that you feel the need to "constantly explain to people" borders on ranting... (an embarassing past-time of my own)
Let's say it was strong empiric evidence (e.g. on event invites, I always saw this, SV event invitation emails had the lowest open/clicks vs. other parts of the country) Same email, different regions. Same result. I also get the regular 'I hate emails, I don't click or read them' from a lot of coworkers, despite being the main revenue channel. Yeah, it's fun to be right. I'm bragging about it.
1. Knowledge - I know an ad when I see one. And I know someone's getting paid for that click. It's like knowing the trick behind a magic trick.
2. I used to click ads - I clicked a ton of ads when I was still learning to use the web. So now, my bullshit detector is well trained. It can tell spam just from the URL, the wordings, the color...
3. I see fewer ads now - Host blocking + ublock block origin.
It actually looks more like people don't use Facebook nearly as much in general? I don't think this data supports the suggestion that people in Silicon Valley don't click on ads, they also have very low comment, like, and share frequency as well. I think active time on site per user in Silicon Valley is just lower than the national medians.
Also note that this seems to be rounded up to the nearest whole number, so we can't figure out like:ad click ratio or something like that from the data.
Note also that this could be due to the fact that clicks (and I suspect likes as well) that come from the internal company networks (which includes VPN) are not billed to the customer, and are not counted for anything involving revenue. Google/FB employees spend much of their time at work or connected to work.
Clicks are a bit of a weird metric in my opinion. It encourages optimisation for single instances of ad views, whereas what makes ads effective is the cumulative effect of multiple viewings. This may not even lead to a click, but to someone feeling more inclined to go a certain way when making decisions.
Also interesting is the skew in visiting Facebook via desktop computers vs. mobile in tech-centric areas vs. non-tech-centric areas. In addition, it was interesting the see the difference in usage patterns between Denver and Boulder, given that they are so close geographically.
Funny considering two of the biggest companies in SV in Facebook and Google make incredible revenue from ads. I wonder if their employees use AdBlock or click on ads.
Anecodotal: a friend of mine worked at an ad tech company (not one of the big brand names, though likely one that's served you ads at some point).
He said that everyone at their company used Adblock, to the point where it was part of their developers' standard checklist when debugging issues that their clients were having ("first, disable Adblock").
Oh man, I remember the days. When I was younger my dad had to teach me that it was an Ad. I wanted that free (X) so badly. I also loved punching the monkey. So horrible, yet so much fun.
Most ads seem to link to products/services that are not related to the content of the page that I'm currently looking at. Instead, they present targeted content based on browsing habit profiling. I'm far less likely to click on an ad that is out of context with what I'm currently thinking about.
Right. The ad might remind you that you need something. Or it might trigger a flash of insight. But it would not likely lead to any reliable information about the issue.
And that reminds me. It's very hard to get reliable information about new products. Just about all "reviews" are just advertorials.
Does Ads need to be clicked for it to become good ads? What has happen to display ads? I personally think some ads are like reminder, remind be of a brand, remind me of something i know, reiterate, stating the obvious, all these are marketing, and what ads should be.
A curious note on my own behaviour. I've been on the internet since...roughly 1993/94?
Reflecting on how I act, even back in the day "before ad-blockers", even if I saw an ad that seemed to link me to the place I wanted to go, I wouldn't click on it.
Instead I would open up a new window/tab, actively go to a search engine, search for the website/company/product I was interested in visiting (perhaps the one mentioned in the link/ad) and enter via their website/front door.
I think this is a behaviour I've picked up from the historically learning that banners/popups are just BAD NEWS...no exceptions. Like powerpoints, attachments or strange emails, I just have ingrained in me these things are not to be trusted and to not engage with them. Who knew where they're really taking you with their redirects, what they're doing, if they're really sending you where they say they are, or whether there's some hijack/virus/whatever. Back in the day, they were just generally something delivered from the seedier side of the internet: something to be avoided.
Nowdays, the seedier/annoying side of the internet has of course become the mainstream, but that's why we have ad-blockers.
I'm curious to know though, if I'm the only person who, through their own behaviour/history/preference, has been trained to go straight to the company/source/product rather than through an ad even when its presented to us...
Me too. Back in those days, they got paid per view. So it didn't matter if one click the ad. Nowadays most(?) ads are paid per click ("thanks" Google making that a thing). Those ads that follow you around aren't that fun at all, rather pretty creepy - the number one reason (I would say) that drive people to ad blockers. Another reason are ad overloaded sites that crash your mobile browser because of excessive memory usage.
You're not alone, I do the same. Anything living in the traditionally scuzzy bottom of article and right sidebar areas is guilty until proven otherwise. I'd be curious to see some research on this because I've actually had trouble finding things I was looking for when they were in traditionally bad screen real estate. When something does manage to seem interesting my assumption is that it's simply lying to me and won't take me to the thing I'm actually looking for. So rather than spend the extra time being disappointed and hitting ⌘+[ I just open the new tab and search.
I use vimium so I do occasionally fat-finger or mis-read a flag and end up following an ad.
I do the same thing, but I expect that advertisers have our number, in the same way that they track hits to their website when their TV ad or product placement runs in a market.
> Could this be explained by technical people using more ad-blockers?
I don't know, but I wouldn't think so. I don't use ad-blockers (never have), and I don't click many ads. I go around them or close them, but for the most part have learned to ignore them. The only ads I click on are targeted ads that are relevant to my interests. I would think that technical people are less likely to be duped into clicking them, but I wouldn't attribute it to ad-blockers.
Couldn't agree more. I believe people who know how ads work, call them admen, are less sensitive to ads than people who do not work in this field of work.
here is what he wrote: If I were back in high school and someone asked about my plans, I'd say that my first priority was to learn what the options were.
Silicon Valley, or people on HN generally, are doing this unconsciously. I was shock that a lot of (non tech)people accept things as they are (as default). They let phone APP like LinkedIn scan and grab the contact list; buy things that are in the trend; over estimate price but underestimate value, etc.
ADs is good only if they introduce something new, CES-ish new, something that are not in the trend but available up on request. Something that you are not aware of, hope we get to that type of ad-era soon enough.
It's not 10 people. This is data that Facebook gives you and each of those numbers is per user in the selected region. The proper way of reading that first graph is that for all Facebook users in San Francisco, on average they liked 6 pages ever, liked 1 post in the last month, etc.
Oh, "we" are so good, we are sooo leading. We even ignore things we don't want!
Or do "we" also ignore ads for things we do want and the rest of the populous does not, and are the rest of the people therefor smarter and better of? Are ads always fraudulent rip-offs? Really?
Being an early adopter doesn't imply being smarter or better. The fact is, early adopters may frequently be considered as advanced types of guinea pigs, where they are willing to put up with shit other customers might not.[1]
I don't know the comment about the Bay Area being "sooo leading" is necessarily accurate. We "lead movement" in a group of users based on the fact we adopt (and work in) technology more than other groups. This isn't elitism (which your comments lean toward implying) but more realism of the situation. Silicon Valley is where most of the high technology in the world originated. It only makes sense the natives that live near that region are more likely to be designated as early adopters. Of course, you can take my comment any way you like.
The most successful drug dealers don't use their own stuff, I hear.
Edit: I think I sounded a little snarky here. To be clear, I'm a huge fan of silicon valley. But I thought the analogy was humorous and thought provoking so I thought I'd share.