As the person who originally asked "why" I feel like I ought to respond, though much of it is covered by other comments. I used to work in more trad advertising, so my question wasn't so much an objection to working in advertising itself, but specifically Google's version of advertising, which I see as gross overreach into people's personal lives.
In other comments people have mentioned YouTube subscriptions as being an alternative, it really isn't - OK, you don't see any adverts, but they're still harvesting and selling you. That a privately owned corporation is allowed to read your messages and sell what they find to the highest bidder is vile and honestly makes me wonder how we got here.
I quit advertising after only a couple of years because it blackened my soul. If I was helping to harvest people's personal lives for private profit I can only imagine it would have been worse.
I'm not sure why traditional advertising should get a pass here. Traditional advertising finds whatever fears and insecurities you have and exploits them to sell you stuff. If you're worried you're not manly enough, better buy an $80k truck with at least a V-6. If you're worried you're not a good enough parent, better give your kids some sugary crap. Exploiting people's psychology like this is also an overreach.
To be clear, my comment wasn't meant as a criticism of the person I was replying to, just expanding the discussion of negatives from advertising. I think these ethical decisions are fairly hard to make, and it's hard to blame anyone, unless the career is obviously purely harmful. It's admirable when people even consider these things, considering how many people just take the money and don't think twice about it.
I don't know if the comment has been edited (I doubt it), but I don't see where GP said they quit out of disgust. In fact, this line really does seem to be giving traditional advertisers a pass:
> I used to work in more trad advertising, so my question wasn't so much an objection to working in advertising itself...
(Not commenting on whether they should be given a pass, just noting that GP really did seem to be doing so.)
Do you have a position on a better alternative business model, or do you feel that a service like YouTube shouldn't exist?
It seems to me that YouTube and many of the ad-supported services out there provide broad benefits to people, and I am swayed by OPs point that a regressively priced business model which restricts these benefits to the global rich is a greater disservice.
I disagree completely with the author's point that the ad model is not regressive. The author points out correctly that charging everyone some $ is regressive, because for some people that amount of money is a lot, and for others that is a little. Totally makes sense.
Then, we go on to ads. Ads charge everyone a similar amount of bandwidth, attention, etc. But you know what? Some people who have more resources or knowhow will understand how to block ads. And they probably won't be paying by the MB on a crappy cell phone plan such that they spend their money on bandwidth to load the ads, while the content they want to read languishes below the fold of the ads and they struggle to navigate to it on their crappy device struggling to render ads.
The costs are more abstract than when paying in actual dollars, but surely we can recognize that the cost of ad supported web pages is also not felt evenly by everyone. As a privileged software engineer, I can guarantee you that the impact of "paying" for things with ads is felt far less by me than many others. That is regressive in my opinion.
> The costs are more abstract than when paying in actual dollars
Keep in mind people are still paying in actual dollars. Companies spend money on advertisement because they want something in return, and that comes from the people being targeted from the ads. I wouldn't be surprised if the poor end up paying much more than the rich in the end. It might even be more regressive than a subscription model.
Also worth noting that their are other negative externalities as well. Health for example - the poor tend to have a much worse diet that leads to bad health conditions, and there's likely a large connection between this and the advertisements for unhealthy products.
> Do you have a position on a better alternative business model
Sure! Thanks for asking. One idea I like is this: you pay a small, fixed subscription on top of your internet bill. This amount is then given proportionally to the services you visit.
This is nice for several reasons: even a small amount (~3-5$) gives a similar or higher revenue for content creators than ads do (a very rough back-of-the-envelope estimate based on youtube CPM). Plus, there's no problem with the friction of paying for things: you pay the same, regardless of watching 1 or 1000 videos (the netflix model, the cable tv model, heck any subscription model). Plus of course: no ads :)
Ads should not exist period. Youtube worked without ads before and it can work without ads. I don't need to be paying a premium to use a service.
Why are ads the way to generate revenue? Like I don't care about buying a coffee grinder. Ads not only help contribute to needless purchases but also directly affect the environment cause of that.
Does YouTube need to exist? I think most of us were alive before 2007 and I don't remember it being some kind of apocalyptic hellhole in which I could never find information or entertainment.
Only a couple of years to quit something that blackened your soul? A couple of years is a pretty common amount of time to remain in a job these days.
If I sound judgy there, note that you are condemning a lot of people. Not me, actually, but I still take issue because the basis of your condemnation doesn't even make sense to me...
I think ads are a decent way to pay for a service and I prefer targeted ads to generic ads, especially since they are more effective (and if the idea is to pay for the service you are using, that is relevant).
So the issue is the data, and so the fact that Google has never sold or lost their user's data - you seem to imply otherwise - is extremely relevant, and is why I'm OK with them storing my data. In this industry that is very rare, and yet you consider Google the worst - I'm having a hard time squaring that.
> That a privately owned corporation is allowed to read your messages and sell what they find to the highest bidder is vile and honestly makes me wonder how we got here.
[I work at Google too, not on ads though] Could you clarify what you mean by this.
A natural reading of these two things ("reading your messages" and "selling to the highest bidder") aren't true. There are lots of things you could mean (reading messages could mean reading emails, reading comments on Youtube, reading hangouts messages, and harvesting that data to sell ads) So I'm curious what things Google does that you mean by that.
> you don't see any adverts, but they're still harvesting and selling you
This is concretely untrue, even by the stretchy definitions. Google (and generally most ad companies) don't sell your data. Sometimes people mean sell your eyeballs, in that they gather data and then use it to sell your attention, and some people find that just as bad.
But if you aren't seeing ads, they're not even doing that. There's no one they're selling anything of yours to. Not your data, not your attention, nothing.
>Sometimes people mean sell your eyeballs, in that they gather data and then use it to sell your attention
Does Google collect information about what websites you visit (via Chrome / Google Analytics / Google account cookies) and what search queries you make and what search results you click on and provide or sell that information to advertisers in some shape or form? (Where advertisers includes not just third parties but also Google / Google subsidiaries themselves.)
If so, that's definitely "harvesting and selling you", IMO. I'm not sure what other form of "harvesting and selling you" would be possible, even?
>A natural reading of these two things ("reading your messages" and "selling to the highest bidder") aren't true. There are lots of things you could mean (reading messages could mean reading emails, reading comments on Youtube, reading hangouts messages, and harvesting that data to sell ads) So I'm curious what things Google does that you mean by that.
I assume one of the things they mean is reading Gmail email messages and showing you ads based on the contents of those email messages. My understanding is that Google indeed isn't doing this - but that they did do exactly that up until 2017, which wasn't that long ago.
> provide or sell that information to advertisers in some shape or form?
If you're using "provide" in the common sense, then no I don't think so. No one gets a "Josh is a hackernews reader" report. I just get ads for things that appeal to HN users.
There are arguments that you can use this for sort of targeted attacks to get more info, for example if you have a website and can correlate an ad request with a username, you can then put together that "joshuamorton" is interested in things HN users like. But I'm not sure how real those kinds of attacks are (I think a major limiting factor is that they're expensive, since if your goal is to only gain information, you have to compete but also never win a bid, and that's very difficult and like in practice its just cheaper to do your own tracking).
> My understanding is that Google indeed isn't doing this - but that they did do exactly that up until 2017, which wasn't that long ago.
Yes but my recollection is that even before then (at least for some time), gmail data was siloed. It was only used to serve ads in gmail, so this was very much a first party only sort of thing (same as if I run a forum and serve interest based ads on different parts of that forum).
It's just much hard to explain that than to explain "not used at all", so we stopped entirely.
My understanding is this is how people felt about traditional advertising during the rise of Madison Avenue as well? Or at least, this is how it was portrayed on Mad Men : )
> I quit advertising after only a couple of years because it blackened my soul. If I was helping to harvest people's personal lives for private profit I can only imagine it would have been worse.
I can definitely feel this - I worked in mobile gaming for a little while. The camaraderie was amazing, I keep in touch with a number of coworkers from that job - the company was terrible (like gaming companies tend to be) but the fact that I was devoting part of my life to building a system I knew was deeply immoral and taking advantage of people's addiction is what pushed me away from it in the end.
I really try to avoid judging people over their career or life choices since nobody is as simple as a statistic, but advertising and mobile gaming is where I break this rule - I definitely don't judge marketers as categorically evil, but the vocation is poisonous. In the article the author calls out that...
> One answer is that I'm earning to give: I give half of what I earn to the most effective charities I can find, and the more I earn the more I can give.
As a response to people asking why they're in marketing and I think this is a really bad sign. If you need to justify your work by calling out the charity you're doing with the earnings then I think you, internally, have identified that what you're doing is causing harm to society.
I understand and sympathize with the fact that brands with poor visibility can struggle to break into established markets but these positives seem quite limited when stacked up against over-consumption, addiction exploitation, decreased general attentiveness, a weakening of what objective truths are and leaving a gigantic security hole in our society for disinformation to easily penetrate deep into folks' hearts and minds.
Advertising, at it's most basic, is trying to change the minds of consumers - you're attempting to take someone who is thinking wrong and make them think right - where right is the mindset that leads them to purchase your product. I think that advertising is really an emotional manipulation at its core.
There is probably a distinction between purely informational marketing that's done to increase general awareness of your brand and marketing that's targeting increasing the chances that an uninterested party will impulse buy your product (the later is what can lead to the over consumption of high sugar products and spur on obesity). I, honestly, couldn't draw a line between the two so if we have to throw out the baby with the bathwater so be it.
I've tried to write this up with a calm head and in an even manner, but my apologies in advance if it's too strong - it's a subject I personally have extremely strong feelings on.
> If you need to justify your work by calling out the charity you're doing with the earnings then I think you, internally, have identified that what you're doing is causing harm to society.
You're misunderstanding the author's intent here. He's saying he works so that he can donate to charities. That part of his answer would remain no matter what type of work he did. Charity is important to him. He was giving a large fraction of his income before he ever started working on ads.
I think that because you believe ads are harmful, you're assuming that the author must also internally feel that ads are harmful. That may be your own bias. What seems obvious to you may not seem true to others. The author explained why he feels ads are a net benefit to society (and also acknowledged some negatives of ads).
But, specifically, he mentioned that when asked why he works in that field. There are lots of different industries and different roles within those industries - my understanding is that marketers don't make particularly outsized salaries and as such it doesn't really logically click for me that you'd choose to work as a marketer to maximize the amount you could give to charity.
I could say that I specifically play board games because I need to repay my student loan - maybe board games are a slightly more economic choice than playing MMORPGs but these two qualities are only tangentially related and, if I made that statement - you'd probably be awfully curious why I thought playing board games was a tactic specifically related to paying off my student loan.
I definitely do feel they're harmful so while I'll try to remain neutral in logic I won't downplay the fact that I'm very much not emotionally neutral - but that sort of a statement specifically rings false to me, it sounds like someone trying to make an excuse.
He's not a marketer. He's a software engineer. At Google. They do make outsized salaries.
He's not donating to charity out of guilt from working on ads. We know this because he was giving large amounts to charity well before he started work on ads. His behaviour hasn't changed.
I understand you're interpreting it as, "Really, I'm just doing this (distasteful) job to make money." That isn't how the author meant it. It's more like, "Ultimately, the reason I work at any job is to make money. But here's why I think this job in particular makes the world better."
I'm curious though. If you didn't think he was working for the money, and you also think he feels that ads are bad, then why do you think he chose that job?
In other comments people have mentioned YouTube subscriptions as being an alternative, it really isn't - OK, you don't see any adverts, but they're still harvesting and selling you. That a privately owned corporation is allowed to read your messages and sell what they find to the highest bidder is vile and honestly makes me wonder how we got here.
I quit advertising after only a couple of years because it blackened my soul. If I was helping to harvest people's personal lives for private profit I can only imagine it would have been worse.