This article misses by far the number one benefit of advertising: it makes products and services cheaper.
That notion obviously applies to the plethora of "free" (free in quotes because I am not trying to dodge the fact that you are always paying something) websites which everyone frequents, but goes beyond that as well.
There's a comment on here complaining about how Hulu shows ads despite the fact that they are paying for the service. Well, you can pay more and not see those ads, but you have made a conscious decision to pay less for the service, so you get to pay some of your attention instead.
Back to the article -- it claims that "a hypothetical doubling of advertising expenditure would result in a 3% drop in life satisfaction." What I would like to see is some analysis of how much life satisfaction is earned back if all relevant products become proportionately cheaper. Then we would be in position to figure out what the sweet spot for society is using a price:advertising ratio as a slider.
That would be very interesting and result in a more productive conversation.
this talking point just doesn't die, and that's not how economics or profit maximising agencies work. It also fails to explain why, over time, advertising encroached on almost all platforms unless actively resisted and why it's so difficult to find a genuinely ad free service.
in short, these platforms work to maximise profit. ads serve to form another income stream, and as long as they don't push sufficient numbers of customers away, it's always in the short term interest of the provider to expand advertising income until the marginal gain equals the marginal loss in marginal revenue from the consumer base.
In most mediums and content/ subject matters, this is at a non-zero level of advertising, especially if everyone else is already advertising.
while advertising does really result in free services (if you do not account for negatives of advertising or assume all increases in consumption generate positive utility), it is not generally the case for most consumers that advertising results in cheaper products, or that you could pay 5% more and be rid of ads.
Hah, perhaps I was not clear enough in my original comment because I agree with everything you wrote after the first paragraph.
I strongly agree with this sentence: "in short, these platforms work to maximise profit. ads serve to form another income stream, and as long as they don't push sufficient numbers of customers away, it's always in the short term interest of the provider to expand advertising income until the marginal gain equals the marginal loss in marginal revenue from the consumer base."
That is 100% accurate. However, that doesn't mean that ads do not affect the price of goods and services.
Businesses are always looking to find the sweet spot to maximize profits by pulling on different levers. These levers could represent price increases, advertising, lowering production costs, etc. Businesses will always be looking for the most efficient lever to pull. And I guarantee you that if you somehow figure out how to take the advertising lever away, they will pull a different lever. This could result in a higher price, a lower quality product, or something else, but ultimately something has to give.
This explains why advertising is likely to encroach on all platforms, because as users become more accustomed to it there is a higher likelihood that it is the most efficient lever to pull.
And of course I agree that it is generally not the case that you could pay 5% more to be rid of ads. The Hulu example was just a good illustration of how to think about the relative value of advertising to Hulu / the consumer.
That is, the services don't become cheaper in total, but their cost structure changes. A part of voluntary paying is replaced by a part of involuntary seeing, and the feeling that you are letting go some valuables is blunted.
> What I would like to see is some analysis of how much life satisfaction is earned back if all relevant products become proportionately cheaper.
There’s a reason services refuse to offer paid plans: people would realize how much the functionality of these services are destroyed in service of showing ads—you can see a tiny fraction of this reaction with the hulu anecdote. It’s also at the core of our “screen addiction”: imagine the savings in mental health care alone if ads disappeared....
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We're a fast-moving, well-funded internet publisher that is pushing boundaries in the way content creation and technology converge. Yet our business is simple: we blend original, in-house, licensed and freelanced content with the highest quality photography on the market to deliver an overall informative and entertaining experience. And we do so on a massive scale, with four consumer sites: Livingly, our flagship lifestyle destination, Zimbio, a Top 10 Entertainment News site, Lonny, a Top 20 Home Design site, and StyleBistro, a Top 10 Fashion and Beauty site.
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SOFTWARE ENGINEER (Python/Django, On-Site in San Carlos, CA or remote in USA)
We're a fast-moving, well-funded internet publisher that is pushing boundaries in the way content creation and technology converge. Yet our business is simple: we blend original, in-house, licensed and freelanced content with the highest quality photography on the market to deliver an overall informative and entertaining experience. And we do so on a massive scale, with four consumer sites: Livingly, our flagship lifestyle destination, Zimbio, a Top 10 Entertainment News site, Lonny, a Top 20 Home Design site, and StyleBistro, a Top 10 Fashion and Beauty site.
Details:
- Build and maintain core features for our network of websites.
- Ship your code quickly and get it in front of tens of millions of people.
- Contribute to all aspects of project lifecycle design development testing and deployment.
Requirements:
- 2-5+ years web development experience.
- Excellent Python and Javascript knowledge.
- Exposure to Django in either a professional or personal setting.
Additional:
- MySQL, Redis, CSS, Django REST Framework, Backbone.js, Google BigQuery experience are plusses.
- Experience with start-ups and iterative project cycles, experience working on large-scale projects with millions of users or databases with large amounts of content.
Special Perks:
- Profit sharing.
- Work from home Wednesdays.
- A highly cohesive dev team. Tenures range from 2-10 years with Livingly.
Livingly Media | San Francisco Bay Area | On-Site or Remote
We're a fast-moving, well-funded internet publisher that is pushing boundaries in the way content creation and technology converge. Yet our business is simple: we blend original, in-house, licensed and freelanced content with the highest quality photography on the market to deliver an overall informative and entertaining experience. And we do so on a massive scale, with four consumer sites: Livingly, our flagship lifestyle destination, Zimbio, a Top 10 Entertainment News site, Lonny, a Top 20 Home Design site, and StyleBistro, a Top 10 Fashion and Beauty site.
Special Perks:
- Profit sharing.
- Work from home Wednesdays.
- A highly cohesive dev team. Tenures range from 2-10 years with Livingly.
We have several positions available, listed in comments below:
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SOFTWARE ENGINEER (Python/Django, On-Site in San Carlos, CA or remote in USA)
Details:
- Build and maintain core features for our network of websites.
- Ship your code quickly and get it in front of tens of millions of people.
- Contribute to all aspects of project lifecycle design development testing and deployment.
Requirements:
- 2-5+ years web development experience.
- Excellent Python and Javascript knowledge.
- Exposure to Django in either a professional or personal setting.
Additional:
- MySQL, Redis, CSS, Django REST Framework, Backbone.js, Google BigQuery experience are plusses.
- Experience with start-ups and iterative project cycles, experience working on large-scale projects with millions of users or databases with large amounts of content.
I think it's pretty common to eat milder foods when you are ill. I know I do. If that is universally true, and all else being equal, you could probably simplify this headline down to "getting sick less linked to a longer life."
Reminds me of the Dilbert cartoon (wish I could find it now) where the discussion was on how a survey showed that heathy people exercise more. Wally commented that's because sick people are too sick to exercise.
Right vs. wrong isn't what he's concerned about, I think.
Every company/organization/person should have a long term strategy. That way you can weigh potential actions to see if they are moving you toward or away from your goal. If you don't have that goal, or it isn't well communicated, everyone scrambles to optimize for different things, which frequently leads to people pulling against each other.
It's totally acceptable to update the long term goal as you go along, but it's very helpful to always keep one in focus.
I think that's becoming an increasingly popular opinion, but I really don't buy into it. If you have one year of runway, certainly you should have a one year plan, but I like to see something longer term as well.
Livingly Media - San Carlos, California (30 miles south of San Francisco)
---------------------------------------
We will help cover relocation costs if you want to come to the Bay Area. We are open to H1B.
We are hiring junior and senior full stack engineers.
Day to day we work with Python/Django, MySQL, iOS, JS, CSS, HTML, Sphinx, among others. All positions are on-site and full time.
We are a tech driven media company with large traffic and a very small, tight-knit team. Our 3 websites receive 40 million unique viewers a month and we currently have 5 engineers.
You will ship a lot of code, you will build a lot of new features, and a lot of people will use what you build! That is not recruiter BS; I am an engineer on the team. If you love to build stuff and you can program, you will enjoy this.
Feel free to email me personally at cleve@livingly.com! Let me know you're from Hacker News!
Thanks for the thorough feedback! We will look into the Chrome issue immediately. We all use Chrome as our preferred browser, so I'm a bit shocked that it completely choked. I suspect one of the add ons, but you are right, it should absolutely fail elegantly.
The multiple index photos pointing to the same stories was an editorial decision, as they wanted a location to show off all of their favorite imagery from the issue, even if some of the links were duplicative. This is similar to a magazine's ToC, where they will occasionally have multiple items referencing the same page number, however point taken that this creates an annoying experience if you accidentally hop to the same story multiple times. Perhaps we'll explore some sort of visual indicator for already visited stories.
Side by side pages forming a spread is a tricky issue. We wanted to allow our editors the freedom to create magazine-like layouts with text interacting with other elements such as images, videos, and lists, but building layouts which conform to the dimensions of all devices is difficult. In print, designers only have to deal with one canvas size when laying out their spreads. On the web, text will wrap in different places and you need to dynamically resize elements so that text is readable and images are suitably sized. This results in inconsistent page breaks, which makes side by side viewing difficult to achieve cleanly. Some products have attempted to achieve this affect on the web, but we ultimately thought the tradeoffs necessary to implement those techniques were not worth it and that we would have a richer product with entirely vertical layouts. There is an additional UX consideration there as well, but I'm droning on.
I agree on the slideshows lacking the gravitas of the cover. We have already begun product planning to improve that feature.
My team was granted a couple of months to explore creating a new magazine-like medium for our home decor website, Lonny. A major goal of the project was to preserve ideas that make magazines what they are (rich layouts, big imagery, editorial driven pacing) and to accent them with technology.
This is our v1. We have a lot of updates planned and are excited about the upcoming months.
We would mostly classify ourselves as backend engineers, so for us the majority of the technical difficulty came from developing the front end. We used Backbone as our MVC framework and GSAP as our animation platform. It was our first large project with either library and we really enjoyed both of them.
All in all, it was a great project to work on and we thought you guys might enjoy seeing it, even if you don’t have any interest in home decor. We’d love to hear any feedback you have to offer!
San Carlos, California (30 miles south of San Francisco) - Livingly Media
We are open to H1B and can also help cover relocation costs.
We are hiring:
- Junior and senior full stack engineers
- Junior and senior frontend engineers
Day to day we work with Python/Django, MySQL, iOS, JS, CSS, HTML, Sphinx, among others. All positions are on-site and full time.
We are a tech driven media company with large traffic and a very small, tight-knit team. Our 3 websites receive 30 million unique viewers a month and we currently have 5 engineers.
You will ship a lot of code, you will build a lot of new features, and a lot of people will use what you build! That is not recruiter BS; I am an engineer on the team. If you love to build stuff and you can program, you will enjoy this.
Feel free to email me personally at cleve@livingly.com! Let me know you're from Hacker News!
That notion obviously applies to the plethora of "free" (free in quotes because I am not trying to dodge the fact that you are always paying something) websites which everyone frequents, but goes beyond that as well.
There's a comment on here complaining about how Hulu shows ads despite the fact that they are paying for the service. Well, you can pay more and not see those ads, but you have made a conscious decision to pay less for the service, so you get to pay some of your attention instead.
Back to the article -- it claims that "a hypothetical doubling of advertising expenditure would result in a 3% drop in life satisfaction." What I would like to see is some analysis of how much life satisfaction is earned back if all relevant products become proportionately cheaper. Then we would be in position to figure out what the sweet spot for society is using a price:advertising ratio as a slider.
That would be very interesting and result in a more productive conversation.