

Ask YC:  Would it make sense to have an "ad captcha" to force people to look at ads carefully?  - amichail

For example, you can have a video ad that contains the captcha elements throughout.  You would need to watch the entire ad carefully to pick up the captcha elements.
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dfranke
If your objective is to set a world record in pissing off your users, then yes
-- this makes perfect sense. Otherwise, not so much.

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amichail
The problem is that many people have learned to tune out advertisement.

Also, you might want to build an ad exchange site where if you look at k ads
carefully, then your ad will be looked at by k people carefully. So how would
you enforce this?

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dfranke
_The problem is that many people have learned to tune out advertisement._

I'd take that as a pretty strong hint that it was unwelcome to begin with.

 _Also, you might want to build an ad exchange site where if you look at k ads
carefully, then your ad will be looked at by k people carefully._

That's a reasonable arrangement if people viewing your ad are your peers,
e.g., if you're blogging about your cat and you want other people who blog
about their cat to find your blog. But if you're a startup trying to drive
people to your site, it's a terrible investment. It means you're not being any
more productive than people sitting at their home computers watching your ads.

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amichail
It doesn't have to be an exchange. You could pay people to look at your ads --
but only if they so carefully.

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dfranke
That once seemed like a good idea to me, but several companies tried this
during bubble 1.0 and they all flamed out spectacularly. The trouble, it
seemed, is that it just isn't an effective investment of people's time. Anyone
willing to get paid $X/hr to watch an ad doesn't have enough disposable income
to make it worthwhile to spend $X/hr on their attention. The market doesn't
clear and the price just shoots to zero.

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iamdave
No. It would not. In a quarter of the time it would take to watch an entire
advertisement, the user could simply have typed out the appropriate letters,
and moved on to the next stage of the application process if you want to
consider the fact that users have to load the video, wait for it to
continually stop and buffer (for those on slower connections) and then fill
out the information.

Entirely pointless. Sorry.

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amichail
The idea is not to build a better captcha, but rather, to find a way to force
users to look at ads carefully.

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iamdave
Read what you just said aloud. You want to force users to do something they
don't want to do. If that's the case, what's going to stop them from finding
alternatives to access certain features of the site they need where they don't
have to look at ads?

Users control software, not the other way around.

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kingnothing
I would refuse to use any site doing that. If the site had anything worthwhile
on it, the content would be ripped to a blog, thus completely subverting your
efforts.

