The reason I hate ads is that 99% of the time are interrupting me and telling me about things I do not want to know about. If I am chatting with a friend on Facebook, there's no way any kind of ad is going to do anything but get in my way. If, however, I am actually looking to solve a problem, I go to a search engine and start bringing up web pages. In this scenario I am actively seeking something -- perhaps something an ad might be able to help with.
So content ads on informative sites and as part of search seems to me like a lesser evil of all ads. I have a few sites and ideally I'd like to remove all Adsense from my site and replace it with links to stuff people want. The problem is that there's such a long-tail phenomenon going on when people go looking for stuff. For instance, if I have a informative site on dinosaurs I know people coming there via a search engine want to know more about dinosaurs. But would they like a book? A museum trip? Tickets to a dinosaur movie? A college education in paleontology? The answer is yes: some of them would like all of that stuff. And even more. The only way that I know how to assist these people is somehow rotating ads that solve a large variety of problems. Ideally you'd use some kind of machine learning to gather what you can and continue to optimize. Google does this for me, so while I hate ads, providing people with a _little_ bit of randomized assistance from a large catalog of options in a location where they are already looking for stuff seems like a pretty good deal for both the reader and me.
In social media you are no longer trying to respond to a searching reader. Instead you have readers that are doing other things that you are trying to interrupt. Perhaps using their friends as interruptions might work. Perhaps if you only interrupt by providing material related to what they are already doing. But no matter how you hack it, as a social media advertiser your game is to take a reader that is doing one thing and get them doing something else. We've gone from ad-supported radio and television, where listening to the ads were a form of saying "thank you" to the advertiser for providing the material, to a place where advertisers are using technology to try to pry into and control every part of our lives. And yes, it's because of everybody wanting things for free. This is not a happy symbiotic relationship anymore.
ADD: In fact, it's mind-boggling if you think about it. Facebook is trying to take a billion people and make them do things they would not normally do. Yes, people waste their time anyway, but not everybody, not all the time. Wonder how much lost productivity are they creating? How many man-years? How many people making purchases for things they never wanted? How many people playing games with imaginary farms and such for hundreds or thousands of hours? People said the television had an on-off switch, and so does the net. But people are social animals, and the net is the way we communicate. If all of your friends and family are on Facebook, you're going to want to know what they are doing. Facebook uses your friendships against you in order to purposely divert you from things you'd normally do so that you'll spend all of your time on their site playing, gossiping, and purchasing. Ouch. Doesn't sound like an imminent failure. Sounds like a new form of crack. If that much social damage were done by a drug, it would have easily been outlawed by now.
Someone posts "aargh damn I'm locked out" on Facebook - Needium converts that into a lead for local businesses.
Think that's interesting because it seems to me to be the essence of the discussion - active vs passive. You can actively solve your own problem by going to Google and / or you can take the passive step of complaining about your situation on Facebook and have Needium convert that into a lead for you. This passive model of solving your own problems seems to me to be pretty weak but perhaps it works if your have have a large, docile audience ?
I have an idea: how about a "this is interesting, save it for later" button on ads? So if something comes up that's useful, you can minimize the distraction for now. Maybe it would wait a while to put another ad up. Advertisers still pay per click in the "looking at it later" phase.
Of course you would need a natural way to put them back in front of the user. Some of my app ideas already have a natural "deal with it later" mode. I'm sure Facebook could come up with something.
I mostly hate ads. But I go out of my way to look at my amazon recommendations, which are basically ads, and work the way you describe (wishlist). I can see a future where they or something like them (I guess pinterest is kind of similar?) displace most advertising - as long as people who want your product (whether they know it or not) can find it, you don't need ads.
"Wonder how much lost productivity are they creating? How many man-years? How many people making purchases for things they never wanted? How many people playing games with imaginary farms and such for hundreds or thousands of hours?"
How much of a difference is there with that and time spent on HN?
Before anyone jumps at that you might say FB is pure entertainment, voyeurism and HN is learning with bits of enjoyment and entertainment (and maybe some voyeurism as well).
But the truth is much learning is actually enjoyment not something you have a reasonable chance of needing at any time. Sure it enhances your life and sure maybe it makes the rest of your day go better. (But so would a nap in the afternoon, right?) And all of these things create "addicts" in a way and the question is also "how many people". HN has setting for to much activity so this has been recognized as an issue.
The problem with all of these things (FB, HN, Twitter) is that they are addicting and so there is no doubt lost productivity. So is TV. But that was generally confined to being in the right place (around a TV) at the right time (not at work).
Targeting ads based on activity is a dangerous game. I was once shopping online for underwear. For the next couple of days ads would show up from this site showing pictures of men in underwear, trying to make me go back and buy the garments in question. That is very annoying, and creepy. Surely the more profitable the product, the more creepy it will seem.
The reason I hate ads is that 99% of the time are interrupting me and telling me about things I do not want to know about. If I am chatting with a friend on Facebook, there's no way any kind of ad is going to do anything but get in my way. If, however, I am actually looking to solve a problem, I go to a search engine and start bringing up web pages. In this scenario I am actively seeking something -- perhaps something an ad might be able to help with.
So content ads on informative sites and as part of search seems to me like a lesser evil of all ads. I have a few sites and ideally I'd like to remove all Adsense from my site and replace it with links to stuff people want. The problem is that there's such a long-tail phenomenon going on when people go looking for stuff. For instance, if I have a informative site on dinosaurs I know people coming there via a search engine want to know more about dinosaurs. But would they like a book? A museum trip? Tickets to a dinosaur movie? A college education in paleontology? The answer is yes: some of them would like all of that stuff. And even more. The only way that I know how to assist these people is somehow rotating ads that solve a large variety of problems. Ideally you'd use some kind of machine learning to gather what you can and continue to optimize. Google does this for me, so while I hate ads, providing people with a _little_ bit of randomized assistance from a large catalog of options in a location where they are already looking for stuff seems like a pretty good deal for both the reader and me.
In social media you are no longer trying to respond to a searching reader. Instead you have readers that are doing other things that you are trying to interrupt. Perhaps using their friends as interruptions might work. Perhaps if you only interrupt by providing material related to what they are already doing. But no matter how you hack it, as a social media advertiser your game is to take a reader that is doing one thing and get them doing something else. We've gone from ad-supported radio and television, where listening to the ads were a form of saying "thank you" to the advertiser for providing the material, to a place where advertisers are using technology to try to pry into and control every part of our lives. And yes, it's because of everybody wanting things for free. This is not a happy symbiotic relationship anymore.
ADD: In fact, it's mind-boggling if you think about it. Facebook is trying to take a billion people and make them do things they would not normally do. Yes, people waste their time anyway, but not everybody, not all the time. Wonder how much lost productivity are they creating? How many man-years? How many people making purchases for things they never wanted? How many people playing games with imaginary farms and such for hundreds or thousands of hours? People said the television had an on-off switch, and so does the net. But people are social animals, and the net is the way we communicate. If all of your friends and family are on Facebook, you're going to want to know what they are doing. Facebook uses your friendships against you in order to purposely divert you from things you'd normally do so that you'll spend all of your time on their site playing, gossiping, and purchasing. Ouch. Doesn't sound like an imminent failure. Sounds like a new form of crack. If that much social damage were done by a drug, it would have easily been outlawed by now.