
Samsung Buys Every Ad Position on CNet On New iPhone Launch Day - ultimatedelman
http://news.cnet.com/
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pearjuice
For a brief period of time I turned off my adblocker and temporarily reverted
my hosts file to the default to see what was going on. It is 2013 and internet
advertising still ruins the browsing experience. Very quickly I've put
everything back in place. I don't even care about how I am not supporting
website owners. This isn't worth it.

~~~
robomartin
Ad blockers are tools for theft. Do you avoid all websites that rely on
advertising for all or part of their income or are you perfectly fine stealing
their work/services by denying them the opportunity to make a little money
during your visit?

Alternatively, do you only use services for which you pay a fee?

Which search engine do you use?

Email?

Social sites?

Just trying to understand this position. Unless someone explicitly gives a
product or service away (HN being a good example) the correct moral and
ethical position is to not tamper with their revenue generation strategy or
otherwise not use their product or service. Anything else is theft.

Being annoyed does not entitle you or anyone else to steal. It doesn't
magically make it OK.

~~~
john_b
If you want to make the case that using ad blockers is akin to theft, you have
to explain what the advertiser is deprived of when a person chooses not to
view their ad. Sure, the advertiser is paying a website to put an ad on their
page, but just because they paid to put it there doesn't entitle the
advertiser to a certain amount of your attention. It may or may not be
profitable to put it there, but the advertiser has no moral claim on anybody's
time or attention as a result of their business model.

The only reason this argument ever came about is because it's easy to measure
who sees an ad on the internet, which is not the case for billboards, TV
commercials, newspaper ads, and so on. Since the measurement was cheap and
intuitively it made sense for advertisers to charge based on the number of
people that see or click on an ad, they chose to pay website owners based on
the fine grained statistics of the webpage rather than by assessing a priori
the market value of an ad on a particular webpage for a particular length of
time.

The "theft" here is imaginary and entirely self-imposed by the business model
of the advertiser. Especially when you consider that the demographic that uses
adblockers probably wouldn't click on very many ads if they didn't use the
adblockers. And whatever impression the mere presence of an advertisement
would create might very well be a negative one to this demographic.

The conceptual leap from "our business model requires ads to make money" and
"some people don't want to view these ads" to "those people are stealing from
us" is a syllogistic fallacy.

~~~
robomartin
It's really funny to watch people who don't want to pay for anything run
around in circles trying to justify their actions. The only morally and
ethically correct behavior is NOT to visit sites with advertising. It isn't to
use the sites and block their ads. It's as simple as that.

Don't want ads? Don't use the service. Go pay for a service that will use your
money to build a site without the ads that bug you so much.

~~~
john_b
> _" Don't want ads? Don't use the service. Go pay for a service that will use
> your money to build a site without the ads that bug you so much."_

Where possible, I do exactly that. For example, I have a Netflix subscription,
but don't watch regular TV.

The reality is that many services are simply not offered in an ad-free model.
Most people are ok with ad-supported services in exchange for not paying for
them, so the business case for creating an ad-free version for the minority
that isn't ok with ads doesn't always exist. But those who don't want to have
their browsing experience polluted by distracting and space wasting ads for
irrelevant products aren't suddenly going to change their minds because
they're in the minority.

Personally, I would be willing to pay a small monthly fee for an ad blocker (I
did make a donation once) and have a portion of that distributed to website
owners whose ads were blocked. It's probably not a very realistic scenario,
but the bottom line is that an ad blocker is something that many people find
useful and which some would be willing to pay for if there weren't ample free
alternatives. The adblocker provides a service to me 100% of the time I visit
a website with ads, whereas an ad is only useful to me if I find it relevant
and choose to act on it (0.000001% of the time).

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headShrinker
Every company has it's moments, but why does Samsung so often come off as
particularly petty. Whether it's completely knocking off designs or launching
half-baked products, or buying all the ad space on the day of an apposing
company's product launch. The rules of capitalism allow all of this behavior,
but generally mankind frowns upon it when this behavior is exhibited by a
person. Why is it not frowned upon when it is exhibited by a group of people
operating as one; as a corporation?

~~~
mikeash
Apple does stuff like book so much air freight space from China that they
squeeze out other users:

[http://www.cultofmac.com/150519/massive-apple-air-freight-
de...](http://www.cultofmac.com/150519/massive-apple-air-freight-deal-could-
mean-ipad-3-will-ship-even-sooner-than-we-thought/)

Bad for the planet too, and all just to save a couple of weeks on a boat.
Buying up ad space seems pretty minor by comparison. I guess minor does go
along with "petty". Funny how we're sometimes much more upset about a small
slight than a large one.

~~~
astrodust
Inventory sitting around on a boat for a couple of weeks costs you a lot of
money. We're not talking about sewing machines or anvils here, we're talking
about a high-margin item that weighs very little and is extremely
"perishable". Air-freight is perfect for this.

~~~
mikeash
Well, they only do it once a year. I have to wonder just how much it would
really cost to move production up a couple of weeks, or move the release down
a couple of weeks. Most of the time they're fine waiting for inventory to come
over the slow way.

~~~
astrodust
The cost of shipping a phone by plane is insignificant because they're booking
so much capacity. This isn't like FedExing one phone from your house to a
friend. This is a whole other scale. They probably only pay a couple of bucks
and they save way more than that by not having to stockpile these phones
anywhere, with heavy security to keep them from "leaking", for weeks on end.

Apple turns over their inventory almost as fast as McDonald's. Think about
that.

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greenburger
I'm not sure this will be particularly successful. Looks like well over half
of the content on the CNet homepage is iPhone related. That's the kinda of
advertising only Apple seems to get, much better and a lot cheaper. The amount
Samsung has to spend to overcome the "organic" Apple advantage must be rather
large.

~~~
Pxtl
> The amount Samsung has to spend to overcome the "organic" Apple advantage
> must be rather large.

It is indeed. Samsung spends a roughly-flat 15% of their revenue on
advertising. As their cellphone share grows, this spending grows... to obscene
levels.

[http://www.asymco.com/2012/11/29/the-cost-of-selling-
galaxie...](http://www.asymco.com/2012/11/29/the-cost-of-selling-galaxies/)

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sologoub
Seems like a run of the mill homepage takeover... many advertisers do that.

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dale386
Obligatory "CNet has ads? I use AdBlock!" post.

~~~
astrodust
Yeah, I didn't see any ads. Ignorance is bliss.

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zmmmmm
I remember hearing that Samsung devotes a fixed proportion of its sales
revenue to advertising, so in boom times they end up with ridiculous amounts
of money in their marketing budget. This smells to me like their ad people
literally have so much money now they can't work out what else to do with it.

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jnardiello
This is genius.

~~~
modfodder
I thought so too until I actually saw the page. Every single article is about
the iPhone, it's actually hard to notice the Samsung ads (imho). I still think
it was worth doing on the part of Samsung, but they'll probably get more
traction from the press about buying all the ad space than the actual ad space
itself.

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gesman
+1 to AdBlocker

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sigzero
I don't see anything on that page that says that?

~~~
lumens
This is more of a 'show and tell' post. There is no article about this
happening... the OP just linked to CNET where this is happening.

If you don't see it, perhaps you have AdBlocker on?

~~~
sigzero
Ah, I was expecting an "article" on CNET about it. Totally see the ads now.

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dan1234
It just shows Barclays adverts for me (UK IP address)

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dangerboysteve
people use cnet ?

