
‘Going where the customer is’: Marketers are coming for messaging apps - elorant
https://digiday.com/marketing/monetizing-messaging-apps/
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mikenew
> Canning said he expected Facebook to continue leading the way with chatbots
> and ads in Messenger, along with WhatsApp

I think Facebook has truly pioneered the worst form of advertising. Compare it
to YouTube. YT puts ads at the beginning of videos, and tries to make the ad
as relevant to the video's audience as possible. They're still ads, they're
still annoying, but at least they are clearly and obviously ads. It also
incentivizes good content. Both the audience, the content creator, YT, and the
advertiser benefit from the videos being as high quality and engaging as
possible.

Facebook does the opposite. The vast majority of the advertising spend on
Facebook is to "boost" a post, which just means that Facebook biases the
algorithm to cause the post to be more visible to more people than it
otherwise would be. This means that 1) that post pays money to displace other
content. Content that the viewer would have enjoyed more. Generally it's
organic content from actual friends. 2) that post is in no way marked as an
advertisement. The viewer does not know that someone is paying money to
influence them. Something as simple as "<friend> likes <company>" can be shown
in your news feed just because that company is paying money to show you that.

It's as if someone paid your friends to say things like "wow, I love
McDonalds" when they're around you. Except that both you and your friend don't
know they only said that because McDonalds paid for it. It's deeply
manipulative. And there's really no line between advertising for some company
selling a product and advertising for a political candidate or platform. The
fact that they want to expand into private conversations is genuinely scary.

~~~
ilovecaching
I find Youtube advertising to be way worse, primarily because I can’t skip the
ad, I have to sit their for some minimum number of seconds, and the ads never
seem relevant.

Compare that to Facebook, where I can just keep scrolling. I’ve also found a
few hobbies through Facebook ads, I think their targeting is pretty good.

No advertising company wants you to see ads you don’t care about. It just
wastes the advertisers money. Ads that are boosted are still trying to target
audiences that will actually click on the ad.

~~~
elorant
You don't need to skip the ad. Just install uBlock Origin and optionally
uMatrix and there will be no ads anymore, either on YT or any other site for
that matter.

~~~
a1369209993
I'll chime in to recommend youtube-dl[0], which in addition to fixing ads,
also means you have a local copy that can't be stolen by copyright trolls or
otherwise bitrotted.

0: [http://youtube-dl.org/](http://youtube-dl.org/)

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gumby
> Marketers want to put ads everywhere — on boats, in Ubers and even inside
> fortune cookies.

Can't wait for good ambient AR so we can wear IRL ad blockers.

~~~
door5
Why not just ban all commercial advertising in public spaces and online? I
don't think anyone thinks advertising is a public good, why do we tolerate it?

~~~
TeMPOraL
I'd very like that, but then again, how much of "public space" is actually
public? Most meatspace ads tend to hang off someone's private property. And
on-line world is really closer to private than public, as most content is
served from privately owned machines.

~~~
xoa
> _I 'd very like that, but then again, how much of "public space" is actually
> public?_

It's not simply a matter of raw percentage, it's also a matter of advertising
value (eyeballs) which is a different question. A significant amount of the
most valuable space is publicly regulated, such as along highways. So for
example in the US four states ban billboards entirely (Alaska, Hawaii, Maine
and Vermont), and it's really nice even just driving through them. For Maine
and Vermont (since they share land borders with the rest of the contiguous 48)
it actually makes for quite the state border transition in some cases, where
leaving you suddenly cross and instantly face a pile of advertising. It
doesn't _have_ to be that way though, and as a quality of life goal it
wouldn't be wrong for people in other states to give it some thought. Constant
ads IRL may somewhat fade into the background just as in other contexts, but
that doesn't mean it has no impact.

~~~
walterbell
Do other states earn tax revenue from billboards? Why did those four states
ban billboards?

~~~
gumby
They banned them on aesthetic grounds.

There was a move in the 1960s led by the wife of President Johnson to get rid
of them. One success was, I believe, a freeze on erecting new ones on
interstate highways. I don't know how well that worked, but they don't seem to
be the worst offenders.

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arvidkahl
Sounds like message-based advertisement is essentially crowd-sourcing a
gigantic Turing test. Looking forward to trying to figure out if my chat
partner who casually mentions another product or service is a sales person or
a ML model.

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josteink
Make that a messaging service I won’t use.

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SpaceManNabs
One of the many reasons in why I aggressively push all my friends to use
Signal.

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xte
I do my best to avoid messaging apps, for people willing to contact me I have
mail (with proper tons of aliases and filtering) otherwise plain SMS.

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Big_crimpin
As each day passes, I wish more people in marketing would put as much effort
into something that benefits society instead of eroding it.

~~~
adetrest
While I agree that marketing and advertising is bad for the world, suicide is
no joke. Words can have big consequences, especially online when they can
reach so many and you can't see who reads them.

~~~
Big_crimpin
Fair point, edited.

