"Chess is as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you can find outside an advertising agency." - Raymond Chandler
How many Wikipedias might we build every day if we didn't watch advertising? [transcript]
"Shirky defines as a unit of attention "the Wikipedia": 100 million person-hours of thought. As a society we have been burning 2,000 Wikipedias per year watching mostly sitcoms"
There is something irresponsible about making money from advertising. The idea of monetizing people's attention makes me feel the same way I'd feel about burning books to stay warm.
2 comments:
I'm broadly sympathetic to the point, but I feel like there's an element of possibility in advertising that's almost invisible in the ugly actuality. Advertising is a service -- it provides information. People hate the idea of targeted ads, but a well-targeted ad is almost definitionally a good thing, inasmuch as it alerts you to a product that's worth more to you than the cash you'd pay for it. (That's a pretty naive economic analysis, and I wouldn't expect anyone to read it uncritically, but I think it's worth reading.)
In a sense, the problem with advertising is its stupidity. I'm sure an ad agency would rather serve you five ads a day, each with a 1% probability of turnover, than almost anything it is capable of doing now. That's at least plausibly a fairly good situation. The problems with it are (a) can you afford that level of turnover? (b) what does it take to achieve it? and (c) if they can serve you five incredibly effective ads, what's to stop them serving ten, or a hundred?
I have more thoughts on this, but they're mostly obvious extrapolations and qualifications of the above. I would be interested to know how many Wikipedias per annum we spend on reading Wikipedia.
Greg,
What do you think about search engines, and sites like Facebook? How would they exist if they didn't make money through advertising?
Richard
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