
The Perks Are Great, Just Don’t Ask What We Do - dwaxe
https://backchannel.com/the-perks-are-great-just-dont-ask-us-what-we-do-d5abc6867103?source=rss----d16afa0ae7c---4
======
aresant
So what else is new.

If you work at Facebook or Google you're benefiting directly from the
similarly shady practices they used to grow on their way to being "pillars of
tech" today.

Do you remember when at LEAST 20% of Facebook's revenue came from Zynga? Like
less than 5 years ago? Many speculated it was considerably higher, but
Facebook never provided a full accounting (1).

Or do you remember when Facebook literally had an "affiliate marketing panel"
that they worked with at the C-suite level packed with guys selling weight
loss affiliate slop? Almost impossible to find reference of it now, was well
known in many circles and you can still see references of it here and there.
(2)

Or maybe when Google was caught colluding with a notorious gangster when he
turned state's evidence to demonstrate to the DOJ how quickly Google was
willing to skirt around laws to sell illegally imported drugs? They were fined
$500,000,000.00. Google was. (3)

50onRed is clearly engaged in scumb-bag advertising practices, but at least
they keep good company.

(1) [http://allthingsd.com/20120423/zynga-accounted-
for-15-percen...](http://allthingsd.com/20120423/zynga-accounted-
for-15-percent-of-facebooks-revenues-in-q1/)

(2) [http://www.shoemoney.com/2009/11/16/dennis-yu-rise-and-
fall-...](http://www.shoemoney.com/2009/11/16/dennis-yu-rise-and-fall-of-a-
con-man-in-the-affiliate-industry/) &
[http://www.jimcockrum.com/blog/2011/10/19/the-biggest-dog-
in...](http://www.jimcockrum.com/blog/2011/10/19/the-biggest-dog-in-affiliate-
marketing-is-starting-to-sound-a-lot-like-me/) &
[http://techcrunch.com/2009/11/01/how-to-spam-facebook-
like-a...](http://techcrunch.com/2009/11/01/how-to-spam-facebook-like-a-pro-
an-insiders-confession/)

(3) [https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/google-
forfeits-500-million-g...](https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/google-
forfeits-500-million-generated-online-ads-prescription-drug-sales-canadian-
online) & [https://www.wired.com/2013/05/google-pharma-whitaker-
sting/](https://www.wired.com/2013/05/google-pharma-whitaker-sting/)

~~~
cookiecaper
Yeah, I think one of the dirty secrets that doesn't really come across until
you've been in the entrepreneurial trenches for a while is that most people
who make a lot of money end up doing so not by being paragons of morality, but
by skirting rules and doing things other people may find questionable or
unfair. YC itself acknowledges this to an extent by saying that good founders
are moral, but that they are not "goody-two-shoes" and they break rules "that
don't matter".

Of course, the material value of each rule is in the eye of the beholder;
surely the cab drivers of the world felt that there was material value to
adhering to their regulations and that it would not be moral or necessarily
safe to circumvent those regulations. Then Uber came along and its founders
entered the pantheon of those that break "rules that don't matter". Ditto for
Airbnb.

Most types of marketing and PR are morally dubious. But you have to play that
game if you're going to get anywhere.

That's the secret that entrepreneurs have to learn, the secret that doesn't
get shown in the profile pieces or the television specials. "Might makes
right" in this world and if you want to be a successful entrepreneur, you need
to loosen from a theoretical moral ideal to a practical one that is informed
by the competitive landscape of capitalism. You can nitpick and find fault
with most money-making techniques, so you just have to try to do something you
can be reasonably comfortable with, acknowledging that in a competitive
landscape, sometimes uncomfortable choices have to be made.

If you _do_ find something that makes money and has no competitors, thus
allowing you to not worry about underhanded techniques to steal your
marketshare, take advantage of your early position to decisively corner the
market. That means employing the same techniques that would be employed
against you, because those techniques _will_ be employed against you pretty
soon. I know this because one of my companies was roundly beaten after a
spammer started a competitor and engaged SEO link rings to inorganically alter
his ranking, among other tactics that I was morally "above" until my company
was pwned that way. Now I understand you must play that game, that everyone
plays that game, and they just don't talk about it because it doesn't help
them to do so. It helps them to keep potential competitors naive.

Playing by the rules may be the cool way to do it, but in the real world, it
doesn't work, because there is someone who is willing to break those rules.
How many entrepreneurs started on something like Uber but quit because they
saw the regulatory landscape and a) didn't have the millions to fight cities
and the cab industry; b) didn't want to run afoul of city regulations in the
first place? Do what YC does: break whatever rules are in your way and then
afterwards say they were rules that "didn't matter". If you say this from a
position of success, people will believe you.

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _Now I understand you must play that game, that everyone plays that game,
> and they just don 't talk about it because it doesn't help them to do so. It
> helps them to keep potential competitors naive._

Yeah, and that's the primary reason I increasingly _don 't want_ to be an
entrepreneur. Call me naive, but even if I could somehow handle the necessary
sacrifice of conscience to be able to compete in the marketplace, I think I
wouldn't like the person I would become very much.

~~~
jpeg_hero
but then unfortunately you'll be an employee of an entrepreneur that crosses
that line....

..and if you are morally above that, then you'll work as a rent-seeker in a
government office that taxes that entrepreneur.

only way to win, is to not play.

~~~
TeMPOraL
I had an employer once who was about to cross the line, by getting a project
from the gambling business. A cool software/hardware project (service
interfaces for casino machines) that seemed to match my skills. I flat-out
declined participation. He actually was very relieved, he was himself
uncomfortable with it.

The other time I threatened my employer with leaving on the spot if I ever see
the shady spam-marketing tactics they were discussing popping up on my blog.
I'm not sure if it worked or if they decided to never again talk about
marketing strategy in my presence.

There are many jobs out there that are morally acceptable. Not as many as I'd
like, but fortunately I've managed to find one, and I'm sticking to it at the
moment. But yeah, I get your point - after hearing stories about various
shenanigans my non-tech friends were asked to do at their jobs, I'm under firm
impression that most companies are in fact fucking over their customers
whenever possible.

> _only way to win, is to not play._

Let's get on with Basic Income. It will be much easier to stick to your morals
without the threat of going hungry hanging over your head.

~~~
pjlegato
> Let's get on with Basic Income

Won't that just cause all the amoral people in politics to begin promising to
raise the basic income more than the next politician will, reducing all
policymaking to a race to bribe the populace, so that they'll ignore all the
other amoral things the politicians are doing?

~~~
danenania
At least they'd be bribing the populace rather than the wealthy.

~~~
pjlegato
The wealthy would still get bribed, and a lot more than the pittance that the
populace would get.

------
notacoward
Reminds me a bit of an experience I had at an event around 2000 or so. Most of
the folks there were heavily academic, but at lunch I found myself sitting
with one of the organizers who was clearly cut from different cloth, so I
asked what he did the rest of the year. After a couple of rounds of vague
responses about how he helped companies use email to get in touch with
potential customers, it finally dawned on me that I was sitting at the table
with a SPAMMER. Pretty much lost my appetite at that point.

My takeaway is that spammers, malware authors, even identity thieves, are
among us. They can seem like perfectly nice people. They might even _be_
perfectly nice people except for this one bad habit, this one ethical blind
spot, that enables them to do things from which the rest of us would recoil in
disgust. The company in this story might be an extreme case, but I'll bet a
lot of people asking "how could they not know" have themselves worked at
companies that made at least some of their money in less savory ways.
Sometimes it might be why that company survived while contemporaries faded
away. Silicon Valley from its earliest days has been full of people who
benefited from carefully redacted history, whether they knew it or not.

~~~
danenania
You talk as if the 'rest of us' in tech are so innocent and pure. Spam is
small potatoes compared to the ethical violations many big tech companies get
up to on a daily basis.

~~~
pyrophane
Yea, good point. We live in an age when a whole set of duplicitous practices
are now just referred to as "growth hacking"

~~~
busterarm
Ugh, the number of dark patterns trying to cost me money just to purchase a
damned ticket on Ticketbastards today.

Seriously by not clicking the right boxes I could have agreed to pay an extra
$42 in add-ons/services for a $15 ticket that had its own $6 in fees added.

~~~
kbenson
For Ticketmaster? That's odd, I deal with them quite a bit, and while they've
definitely got a racket going on, usually they aren't opting you in for extra
stuff (because you'll juts call to complain to their support and get it
changed). I _have_ seen them accidentally auto-select certain additions
before, but that was a non-standard option on that event, and it was
definitely a mistake.

~~~
busterarm
They like to do things where they offer you something with a yes/no option but
don't explain that it's an offer (no call to action or question) and put the
price of the service in the smallest text possible.

~~~
kbenson
Oh, I would believe that. They'll make it easy for you to add charges on, and
make it confusing as to whether it charges you (if you aren't familiar with
the page), they just don't generally have them defaulted to on in my
experience (and I buy a lot of tickets from them). They're very good at being
just annoying enough to use that you don't like them, but generally not so
annoying that you'll _refuse_ to use them, which combined with their existing
market dominance keeps them on top.

------
pavel_lishin
I worked at a web development studio. One of our clients was MannaTech,
basically a marketing company that sold snake-oil to parents of sick children,
claiming it could "cure" everything from cancer to down syndrome. They were
under investigation by the Texas DA at one point.

We tracked our work hourly, so I donated all the money I made from that
particular work to St. Jude's hospital, which actually _does_ cure cancer in
children, but it still irks me to this day.

~~~
NoGravitas
Looked this up, and it's not only selling snake-oil to parents of sick
children, it's _MLM_ selling snake oil to parents of sick children. I honestly
didn't think such a level of depravity was possible.

Oh, and they had Ben Carson for a spokesman for a while. Amazing.

~~~
pavel_lishin
Yeah. My new policy is that if an employer wants to have any sort of business
dealings with MannaRelief or MannaTech, it's them or me - I'll walk away.

------
donretag
I used to work for a company that was purchased by a Multi Level Marketing
_cough_ pyramidscheme _cough_ company similar to Herbalife. They purchased us
for our technology to power their platform. There was supposed to be very
little overlap with their business, so I did not feel too worried about it.

As time went on, our focus was more on how to sell more of the parent
company's products. I also learned more on how the MLM business really worked,
and I was disgusted at how the system preyed on the vulnerable. With very few
jobs in the area, I continued working there. I eventually moved and turned
down requests to work remotely.

None of my co-workers seemed to have cared. Either that, or they understood it
was still one of the better tech opportunities in an area with very few.

~~~
batbomb
In Utah County, by chance?

~~~
pseudobry
> Multi Level Marketing coughpyramidschemecough company similar to Herbalife

Definitely could be Utah county, but

> one of the better tech opportunities in an area with very few

Probably not Utah county. The greater than 4000 tech companies[1] in and
around Utah County cannot hire software engineers fast enough.

[1]: [http://siliconslopes.com/about/utah-
economy/](http://siliconslopes.com/about/utah-economy/)

~~~
x0x0
where do you look for jobs in utah? Craigslist seems pretty dead. Thanks!

------
socrates1998
Working at this type of company will eat at your soul. Really, you only have
about 40 years of work in you.

It sounds like a lot, but when you consider is takes a few years (sometimes
more) to figure out what you like. A few more to get good at it. And then you
have maybe 20 peak years of productivity, you sure as hell don't want to spend
any of it at something you can't respect.

When you are done with your career at 60 or 65, you want to be able to look
back and say "I did this" or "I created that" or "I helped this many people",
not "I worked at that shitty adware company for 2 years because they have me
free food and beer"

------
seibelj
Interviewed at a company called Rakuten Loyalty in Boston a few years ago. At
that time it was the exact same thing, a malware / adware browser toolbar
company, and they also sold white label toolbars. Took me the entire interview
to figure out what they actually did. Their website [0] now has very little
information about what they actually do, with a generic contact form. But an
archive.org [1] of their old website shows the truth. Funny how they hide what
they actually do now.

[0] [http://www.rakutenrewards.com/](http://www.rakutenrewards.com/) [1]
[https://web.archive.org/web/20121216021038/http://rakutenloy...](https://web.archive.org/web/20121216021038/http://rakutenloyalty.com/solutions)

~~~
hkmurakami
I guess I'm not entirely shocked since Rakuten the parent company and Japanese
ecommerce site has very questionable tactics like emails you can't opt out of
and forcing new employees to sign up a large number of friends/relatives to
the Rakuten credit card.

~~~
nommm-nommm
Huh? How exactly did the "force" you to get others to sign up for a CC? I also
have no problem opting out of Rakuten emails.

~~~
hkmurakami
New employees at HQ have quotas.

------
switz
I interviewed at 50onRed a few years ago soon after I left college. I went
through the interview process, received an offer, and was on the verge of
accepting.

It was at this point I realized that I barely understood what the company
actually did. I set up another in-person interview, except this time with the
roles reversed. I asked them to walk me through their products and platforms
so I could better understand what I would be working on. Ten minutes in, I
realized what I was looking at. I treaded water until the end of the interview
and called them a few days later to decline the offer.

The [engineering] team was solid, the tech was intriguing (a lot of expressjs
microservices and interesting design patterns), and the offices were great.
But given the wealth of compelling opportunities for javascript engineers, I
couldn't come up with a good reason to work on something so insipid and
manipulative. This article is strangely validating, perhaps in a schadenfreude
kind of way.

~~~
kragen
Good for you. If more people were like you, companies like 50onRed wouldn't
exist.

I think you may have meant "insidious", though, not "insipid" — because
"insipid" is the opposite of "intriguing" and "compelling".

~~~
alanh
I think it works. The 'problem' 50onRed is 'solving' is not an intriguing or
compelling one.

------
BradyDale
Worth noting that the reporter on this story is a beat reporter who has been
covering the Philadelphia tech scene closely for years now. She knows it like
no one else.

~~~
kmano8
Agreed- Juliana is top-shelf.

------
dharma1
I had no idea there is a such a large industry doing this type of stuff until
building a Windows 10 machine recently for VR. So many "free", seemingly
kosher apps seem to install sneaky adware in the main app installation process
these days

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Download_Valley](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Download_Valley)

[http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2015/02/25/israeli-
un...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2015/02/25/israeli-unicorn-
ironsource-raises-105-million-ahead-of-ipo/)

------
lossolo
Today my mother got AD on her phone with "Android update", it was a pop-up
from one of normal sites she visit. So she touched "update now" as she
normally do with system messages about update... Then she confirmed, then she
got 2 SMS, in one that deal was finalized. WTF? I've checked with Orange and
indeed she was charged and subscription was started, 20 euro a month for some
3 shitty sms per week. They have turned this subscription off. THIS practices
should be stopped. This is really a plague, I see those on my desktop and
phone on regular basis, i know they are fake updates but most people don't..

~~~
quikoa
My mother had this as well but with a game. We simply reversed the charge and
continued pay the subscription like normal. They made one vague attempt to get
that extra money then gave up. While I'm not a lawyer I doubt such charges
would stand up on court.

~~~
55555
Often the billing is directly on the phone bill which means the traditional
chargeback system won't really help you (it's not a credit card charge and you
probably don't want to try to chargeback your phone company). One interesting
thing many people don't know is that telcos, almost always oligopolists, are
themselves pocketing 30-50% of those fraudulent charges (as they are the
payment processor and their rates are extremely high), which helps explain
their ambivalence to these sorts of scams.

------
yardie
I worked at a company very briefly in the early aughts. I thought I was hired
to be on the team that built the platform. But before we would do that we
needed to have a list of beta users. So my job was writing bots that scoured
forums and other social networks for contact information (emails, phone
numbers, names, etc.)

It took me a week to realize what I was actually doing then another week to
plan and execute my escape. The rest of the team were east european and did
not give a fuck about what they were doing, it was good money to them.

They eventually did release a product with a few thousand users. Not long
after, Facebook changed their signup strategy from schools to the general
public and the rest is history.

------
tonyarkles
Maybe I just forget what it's like to be a beginner, but how on earth do you
work on Ad Injection software and not realize that you're working on Ad
Injection?!

~~~
randlet
I find it difficult to understand how you would even interview & accept a job
without understanding what the company did.

~~~
chii
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends
upon his not understanding it!" \--Upton Sinclair

~~~
8912889219
I really think this quote is a bit unfair here. Especially in the startup
scene, many companies have quite vague product descriptions. I've worked at a
place where it took me 3 months to figure out what they were doing (nothing
immoral BTW, just very complex/diverse products).

~~~
pavel_lishin
But for those three months you had no idea whether what they were doing was
moral or not, and you didn't check.

------
eastbayjake
Pro Tip: The "what questions can we answer about $COMPANY" section at the end
of an engineering interview should be used to ask about the business model and
revenue/monetization, not just the tech stack

~~~
hrktb
More generally, not knowing how a company makes money should be a huge problem
for someone candidating.

Given the choice, a company with a sane business model has less chances to go
under (== not going through interviews again in 6 months), and it should also
give an idea of how much and in which way the comapny has any chance to grow.

------
al_chemist
It's good to hear that all the C[ETF]Os of adware business found their
employment at Facebook/Google/Amazon.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Yeah, this jumped out at me too. I'm not very reassured about such morally
dubious characters working for companies that control most of our digital
lives.

------
mrweasel
>Gill tells me he doesn’t consider himself in the adware business. He prefers,
instead, to describe 50onRed as a company that keeps content free for users.

I love that bit. How does injecting ads into random sites help keep content
free for users?

Who's buying those ads by the way? Sure it sound like a terrible company, but
I can help thinking that their customers are worse.

~~~
etjossem
If anything, hijacking page real estate makes it _less_ likely the user will
click on non-injected ads (which actually pay something out to the content
creator).

I believe content creators have a right to seek compensation for their work -
whether it's through ads, affiliate links, or a subscription model.

But what 50onRed does is thievery from the creators, plain and simple.

------
settsu
I worked in the user experience team at that one big American domain company
(that's well known for mostly the wrong reasons.) Similar situation as the
story: great coworkers, great pay, & great perks.

One of the products I was assigned was the interface for customers to
configure those sites that are intended to monetize a domain with filler
content meant to fool a visitor just enough to milk them for a few cents with
seemingly legitimate articles/posts and an e-commerce feature that was
essentially a storefront built entirely from affiliate links.

Unlike the individual in the story, it was immediately clear what my task was:
make spamming the Internet as user-friendly as possible. Unfortunately there
was no mental gymnastics I could do to reconcile that.

Especially since the second product I had was domain auctions, which alone is
nothing more than virtual real estate, but together with the first product is
the makings of a thinly-veiled means to skim money off the top of online
purchases made by ignorant users AND to fool people into believing they could
profit from otherwise idle domains (by first paying the company for the
monetizing product first, of course.)

And a tiny fraction of our customers did make a good income with those 2
offerings but the significant majority would never net a dime.

Aside from the pay and perks, the only professional payoff was also having the
company's support site in my charge. I was proud of the work I did on that and
it was a feature of my portfolio. But it wasn't enough and I was too
disillusioned and discouraged overall by the day to day work. It wasn't long
before I let it get to me, my performance began to suffer, and I needed to get
out of there. (Admittedly, the nature of the job wasn't well-suited to my
strengths either so it was probably fortunate I lasted as long as I did...)

I was able to cash in quite nicely on the experience gained there with a good
offer on an out-of-state position with a generous relocation package. So, no,
it wasn't all bad and, like the person in the story, the coworkers were
largely really great (some going to work for large, well-known tech companies)
and though I value the experience overall, it revealed just how much money can
be made if you're willing to profit from people's ignorance and greed, just by
framing your product or service in a particular way.

------
TheRealDunkirk
> “Like, man, this is a really nice office,” he recalls thinking. “Open floor
> plan...”

So "Tyler" wasn't a programmer, then. Got it.

~~~
recursive
Programmers don't have to dislike open floor plans. I know this because I am
one.

------
dec0dedab0de
I went to a meetup that they hosted once, and it was pretty obvious that they
were up to something, but they did have a really cool office.

~~~
pavel_lishin
I visited Limewire's offices, once. Three story office in Tribeca, with giant
kitchens that were bigger than my apartment, game rooms, the works.

It seems to me that the more ambiguous your business strategy is, the more you
have to show off to convince others that it isn't.

~~~
draw_down
I think it's more like, if you have a cool office with nice kitchens you can
pay your employees crap and they still think they're getting a great deal.

------
stordoff
Mildly off-topic, but why do sites like this highlight the "top highlight"? I
always find it really off-putting (in a "Oh, you tracking EVERYTHING I do"
sort of way")

~~~
alanh
"sites like this" = Medium.com sub-brands. I don’t know why Medium chooses to
do that. I dislike it, too.

------
coldcode
I interviewed three times at a company once which didn't seem to have a clear
business model. Only in the last interview with the CEO did I realize he was
running a ponzi scheme.

------
univalent
This is like the Mickey Mouse version of the 'The Firm'.

------
pnathan
whenever I am looking at a company, I google it, I scrape Glassdoor, I look
for news articles about it. "How do you make money" is usually on the menu of
"things I specifically care about". I'd advise others do do the same. Learn
well what the company you're talking to does to earn a buck and who they are
beholden to.

I avoid adtech, myself.

------
TheAdamist
I've been to a Python Meetup there previously, nice office, nice tech talks.
Their sponsor overview certainly didn't disclose what they actually did.

Makes me wonder about the other ad platforms in town.

------
vas123
Sometimes this adware crap hijacks legitimate open source projects as well and
installs on unsuspecting users like this guy:

[https://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?t=78825](https://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?t=78825)

------
zekevermillion
There are many businesses that are built around exploiting vulnerable
customers or users, and it is common for such businesses to have contrived
complicated ethical justifications for their conduct. I'm thinking in
particular of law and finance.

------
jobigoud
I also always wonder how the people working on engineering land mines do.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
I once had a conversation with someone who had worked on surface-to-surface
missile guidance.

He did it because he didn't make the connection between the circuits and the
software in front of him and the deaths they caused.

Then there was a war and he saw the missiles on the news with pictures of
casualties, and suddenly it was "Holy fuck - this stuff actually kills
people!"

Some people think small picture, and he just couldn't get from the work on his
desk to dead bodies without the help of front-line footage.

Of course there are also people who are just fine with that kind of work. I
don't understand that ethical space at all - but from what I've seen they
simply don't understand why anyone would have a problem with what they do.

~~~
ShroudedNight
I got this information second hand, but for what it's worth: There was a
graduate student at my university that was well known and highly regarded for
his stellar software engineering skills. At one point he took a job writing a
missile guidance system. His reasoning was that there were two options, either
he wrote the system, and could make damn sure it worked exactly to spec, or
someone else would write the system, and do about as good a job as the other
complex software engineering projects he had encountered. In essence: he took
the job to minimize collateral damage.

------
zem
i'm surprised the article never explicitly spelt out the main point - for most
people, accepting a job offer is a major sunk cost, so it's a lot harder to
quit a job even after a few months than it is to reject an offer from the
outset. i'm pretty sure 50onred were counting on that.

------
alaskanloops
Odd that there aren't any visitor posts on their facebook page..

------
daheza
My friend works at Spokeo. If you don't know about them they are basically a
people search engine. He keeps asking me to work there, but I just cant get
over the moral implications of scrapping peoples lives and putting it up for
viewing for a price. Something about the product just scratches me wrong so I
haven't applied. It is really too bad as their tech seems solid and the
offices are amazing.

------
gaius
_advertisers feel duped when they pay top dollar for what they believe to be
“genuine, legitimate, honest ads_

Yeah right. No clean hands in that game.

------
nommm-nommm
There was an interesting defcon talk a few years back from someone who was a
malware developer about his experiences working at a job developing malware.

[https://youtu.be/k2mdUcOXW6I](https://youtu.be/k2mdUcOXW6I)

------
Spooky23
How do you not ask what the company does before joining as an FTE? Even
discounting moral hazards... wouldn't you want to know what the mission is?
Especially at a startup-y type of place?

------
arcticbull
I'd always wondered how all those Bond villains got their henchmen to work on
crazy remote islands. I guess the perks were good! Just don't ask what we do
^_^

------
askyourmother
I remember interviewing for a search company, but then found most of the work
and business was spent on adverts! No thanks Google!

------
pdkl95
> you’d see ads on sites like Wikipedia or Target.com

Normally we call that vandalism. They should be facing criminal charges, not
civil lawsuits and pressure from Google.

~~~
ikeboy
There's no case afaik, because they disclose everything in the original
agreement when you install their software.

Unethical, sure, but there's little the law can do to prevent people from
agreeing to such things.

Maybe a requirement for certain disclosures to be made more prominent (like
for cigarettes)?

~~~
unsavory
It would be an interesting case if someone tried this with the venerable TV
industry: rent/borrow/buy our special HDMI cable/tuner, let us replace your
ads, and we'll pay half your cable bill if you let us put our ads up instead.

Methinks the broadcasters would pounce down like a ton of bricks and their
lawyers would use every loose corner of the law to bury you perpetually `a la
Aereo.`

~~~
schoen
I have this vague recollection that friends whose families subscribed to HBO
in the 1980s said they didn't show ads at all, because subscribers were
directly paying for the programming through their subscriptions (whereas free-
to-air stations felt they had to run ads because viewer weren't paying
directly). Was this actually true? Does anyone else have a similar
recollection?

I'm just wondering if there was a particular moment when people's intuitions
about where you could expect to see ads on television changed.

~~~
BrandonM
AFAIK this is still true of HBO.

