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Is Online Advertising Worthless? (zerohedge.com)
turkeydance shares a story from ZeroHedge:
Category 1 storm clouds are gathering over what has traditionally been one of the most lucrative, and perhaps only profitable, sectors to come out of Silicon Valley in decades: online advertising. Two months ago, it was P&G which fired the first shot across the "adtech" bow when not long after it announced it was slashing its digital ad spending because it thought it was not getting the kind of return on investment it desired, it made a striking discovery: "We didn't see a reduction in the growth rate." CFO Jon Moeller said "What that tells me is that that spending that we cut was largely ineffective"...
So fast forward to last week, when during Thursday's Global Retailing Conference organized by Goldman Sachs, Restoration Hardware delightfully colorful CEO, Gary Friedman, divulged the following striking anecdote about the company's online marketing strategy, and the state of online ad spending in general... What Friedman revealed - in brief - was the following: "we've found out that 98% of our business was coming from 22 words. So, wait, we're buying 3,200 words and 98% of the business is coming from 22 words. What are the 22 words? And they said, well, it's the word Restoration Hardware and the 21 ways to spell it wrong, okay?"
Stated simply, the vast, vast majority of online ad spending is wasted, chasing clicks that simply are not there....One wonders how long before all retailers - most of whom are notoriously strapped for revenues and profits courtesy of Amazon - and other "power users" of online advertising, do a similar back of the envelope analysis, and find that they, like RH, are getting a bang for only 2% of their buck?
So fast forward to last week, when during Thursday's Global Retailing Conference organized by Goldman Sachs, Restoration Hardware delightfully colorful CEO, Gary Friedman, divulged the following striking anecdote about the company's online marketing strategy, and the state of online ad spending in general... What Friedman revealed - in brief - was the following: "we've found out that 98% of our business was coming from 22 words. So, wait, we're buying 3,200 words and 98% of the business is coming from 22 words. What are the 22 words? And they said, well, it's the word Restoration Hardware and the 21 ways to spell it wrong, okay?"
Stated simply, the vast, vast majority of online ad spending is wasted, chasing clicks that simply are not there....One wonders how long before all retailers - most of whom are notoriously strapped for revenues and profits courtesy of Amazon - and other "power users" of online advertising, do a similar back of the envelope analysis, and find that they, like RH, are getting a bang for only 2% of their buck?
Clearly they are spending their advertising budgets with the wrong consultants.
Anyone decently competent at online marketing knows how to narrow their most effective keywords, and push them harder, to achieve better click-through rates.
Yes. Please kill it.
You're clearly just not making your ads obtrusive enough.
When you search for a company or website on google there is an advertisement for it right above the search result taking you directly to the web site you were looking for. I always click on the search result because clicking on an ad is just weird to me, even though they both likely take me to the same spot. But what is the point of buying an ad like this if they are already trying to get to your site in the first place? Why convince someone to do something they are already doing? Are they afraid another company is going to buy the search ad and someone is going to randomly click on another website instead of the one they were specifically looking for?
Banner ads? Absolutely. Sponsored search engine results? Those probably have some return but may or may not be positive. Search engines bumping their own online stores in the shopping section or adding their afffiliate codes to Amazon links when you search for a random product? I guarantee those make money.
Some is worthless, some is not. For example, Amazon advertises products you have looked at in your Facebook feed, and I'm sure those ads are well worth it for Amazon.
Real lawyers write in C++
But it has a freaking kick stand!
...or someone who said half of his advertising budget was wasted...but identifying which half was the problem?
Given that this advertising is usually targeted at the 80% or so of the population that barely know what an internets is, I wouldn't agree with you. I still come across plenty of people that install stupid shit like Honey or coupon printers, so SOME advertising works, you just need to target it in the right way.
Personally I'd rather have my idiots at home glued to the TV than out doing idiotic things
I am one of those who ads do not do any good.
I am the one who uses lynx (linux text mode browser) that does not bother with pop ups. I get the text of the article without the pop overs. Therefore I do not see about 80 percent of the ads on sites.
And I cannot be the only one doing this. . . .
Most Respectfully Yours Mark Allyn Bellingham, Washington
What does this mean for Google's future?
The idea that if your brand is not been seen everyday it gets selected less and less when a consumer goes shopping. The other band that spent big on new ads got selected for been new. A consumer has the need to try a new look competitor again due to more new ads.
No matter how near a monopoly a brand gets due to quality or price it has to keep spending big on its name as if it was entering the market.
Classic TV, print, radio, billboards ads gave way to banner ads and deep tracking internet ads. Anything to keep humans seeing the trusted brand name and its products everyday.
The new problem for the ads is the old separation of TV, print, radio, billboard ads is now their direct online competitor. Social media wants to sell and build their own trusted consumer and entertainment brands.
Private label https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... and other ways computer company/social media owners/shopping sites now want to sell are replacing or buying up decades of generations trusted names.
Browsers are considering blocking outside ads. Social media and online shopping push their own new brands or partners that profit share.
The need for ads has not changed. The way select products get presented on a few captive platforms has changed.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Certainly it is, it cherry picked the one example it could find supporting its clickbaity headline and then congratulated itself on all the clicks, and subsequent advertising money, it got itself for doing so. Proctor and Gamble just cut back to the advertising space it found most effective, it didn't stop it all together. Nor did the company in question suggest it was going to stop advertising all together. The general consensus of the conference was that online advertising should be more targeted than the weird blanket coverage many companies do now.
/.
That's an article that might be worth writing, reading, and posting to
Instead what we get is clickbait bullshit that implies Apple, the most valuable publicly traded company in the world and one that doesn't do online advertisement, is worthless along with any number of other things, just to be even more clickbaity.
Given that this advertising is usually targeted at the 80% or so of the population that barely know what an internets is, I wouldn't agree with you. I still come across plenty of people that install stupid shit like Honey or coupon printers, so SOME advertising works, you just need to target it in the right way.
The same could be said for Nigerian Phishing scams.
Just in time, coin mining is coming to replace ads.
I suppose the next step will be to make all links internal to a site with ajax, so the coin mining script can run continuously as long as a user is on the site.
(T>t && O(n)--) == sqrt(666)
Imagine a fair amount of advertising on- line much like off-line worthless but part of the discovery process. Try X campaign if positive results then maybe effective if not a learning cost. Need to learn before going bankrupt. Advertising does work if have a desirable product and reach correct audience. Advertising also bothers a lot of people who are irrelevant and adds unnecessary costs to products when not effective. I find products and services that offer discounts for registering most effective for me since I have an interest to begin. If I can get a deal then more likely to buy within reasonableness. Only buying so much stuff. I have not purchased anything from a FB advertising to my recollection. Yet FB and Google know more about me then I care.
My observation in retail has been that appeal to brand loyalty is the most effective form of advertising. You probably aren't surprised by that, but you likely don't realize how insane it gets. It's extremely common for my customers to think an HP printer will work better with an HP computer.
As for advertising: Fake reviews. They work. You don't even have to explicitly buy them; give someone a free product and they'll give it five stars about 90% of the time. Doesn't hurt that Amazon customers reliably upvote five star reviews and reliably downvote negative reviews.
He's too busy upgrading his file server to FreeNAS 11 — and laughing at all these stupid comments. Seriously, you people need to get a life.
Whenever I see a food advertisement, and I have it at home, I feel the urge to eat. It turns into a sale later, after it's gone.
83% might be a little high. The Surface is a $1,000 buy at minimum, for a device with decade old specs, and is non-upgradeable. It is a very expensive toy, and perhaps business device. If my Executives didn't need technical support for such a complex device, or had bought me one to get the "lay of the land", I wouldn't have bought one myself. It is a nice piece of tech, but there are less expensive options which accomplish similar.
Because Russia didn't swing the election.
Yes it is. The only ad's that I see these days are reasonably well-targeted youtube ads on my kid's device. Those are just the same as broadcast commercials. The rest is garbage.
Every computer I clean up has crap I know got there via clicking on ads or downloading computer speed up and optimization apps. Every customer I warn about this has no clue what I talking about and assures me that they don’t click on ads.
Clearly P&G just needs to be more deceptive in the placement of their advertising if they want clicks.
...a device with decade old specs, and is non-upgradeable...It is a very expensive toy, and perhaps business device...It is a nice piece of tech...
You seem to be a bit undecided!
The ironic thing, like the crazy dude on the corner proclaiming the end of the world for the last 50 years the night before the Sweet Meteor of Death finally arrives, you have actually posted something as relevant as it is accurate.
Congratulations!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Given that this advertising is usually targeted at the 80% or so of the population that barely know what an internets is, I wouldn't agree with you. I still come across plenty of people that install stupid shit like Honey or coupon printers, so SOME advertising works, you just need to target it in the right way.
The same could be said for Nigerian Phishing scams.
Than those phishing scams are amazing, because on my domains I see a lot of traffic hitting tracking URLs that are not indexed and are only linked to garbage ads for which I pay pennies.
I don't know why, but a lot of people click on ads.
10 Shocking Things You Didn't Know About Ads that will Shock You Into Clicking Links About Shocking News
lucm, indeed.
It is a very expensive toy .... and now you all know why it's a good idea to advertise here.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I was going to update my FeeNAS server today. I guess I shouldn’t have wasted so much time in the foums!
P&G can't sabotage their rivals with someone horribly unlikable and full of skeletons like happened with the Trump thing.
a device with decade old specs, and is non-upgradeable.
Are you talking about Surface or Macbooks?
lucm, indeed.
The three ad types are:
1) Sales. Click here to instantly buy this thing we are advertising. This is the most common and the most useless. You can measure it's effectiveness exactly, which is what makes them popular. But they are remarkably uneffective. If you want to buy it now, you google it. (Or just go to amazon/ebay/etsy directly)
2) Branding. Hey, remember our product? We still sell it. People in X group love us. We are cool. You want to be cool right? When you need product like ours, remember we are the COOL one. This is more common outside of the web, but still is found here too. Basically, most Superbowl commercials are doing this. Harder to measure effectiveness, but over the long term can make or kill your business.
3) Informative. Hey, did you know that our product is on sale/now fights gingervitas/ is the first cure for the common cold?
This is relatively rare, but if your product is good and fills a new need AND no one knows it, it can instantly make you successful. Best example is going on Shark Tank. That's half the reason why people go the show.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
A Core M3, 4GB of RAM, integrated graphics, and a 128GB hard drive is not much better than a Core 2, 4 GB of RAM, and Vista. The thing benchmarks about the same.
The SSD packs a punch, but not an extra $600-$700 worth over an equivalent desktop, performance wise. What you're paying for is the smaller form factor / footprint, and the accessories.
It functions as a business device in a space where other devices will function for a lower price.
It really is a luxury item, and thus is an expensive toy.
What laptops 10 years ago had quad core processors, 8+ GB RAM and 512+ GB PCI-E class SSDs and a higher than 1080p display?
Are you talking about Surface or Macbooks?
lucm, indeed.
Honestly I'm not a fan of Surface because the keyboard sucks and I'd rather chew glass than use Windows. But it's not a device with decade old specs.
lucm, indeed.
If they'd just app apps instead of spending on LUDDITE ads they would be getting 100% return from app appers app apping their apps. APPS!
I agree, it is all about payments for added value, like freemium.
If I'm buying stuff from an online store, there is not really much value for a middle-man to add. I'd much rather the store itself just have a searchable catalog.
Here's an advertising idea: instead of paying for a click on the ad, pay only when the click results in a sale. (Surely modern tracking technology can figure out whether that happened.) Then you'll have a 100% accurate measure of effectiveness. If Google won't agree to it (and of course they won't), start a competing company that will.
Of course successful clicks will have a significantly higher price, but you pay only when the product is sold. Just like a salesman who is paid a commission only when a sale is made.
The keyboard is a defining characteristic device, but as a desktop replacement, its specs are a decade old.
The higher end models cost close to $2,000, when all is said and done. And none of the Surface Pros are quad core, they are merely hyperthreaded.
Surface Pros are not laptops, they are three-in-one devices. A tablet, a laptop, and a desktop. By desktop standards the specs are a decade old.
The base model is $1,000 by the time you add up the essential accessories. Not much point in buying a Surface without any accessories.
How much storage does it have compared to, say, a Nomad?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I've mostly seen the advertisers coming back. There's a lot of stuff out there I just plain don't need but that I might actually want. If you don't advertise to me I honestly forget the stuff exists. Video games are an obvious choice. But there's other stuff like computer hardware upgrades, cool parts for my bike and other misc hobby stuff. And when I still had a kid under my roof there was the nonstop cavalcade of adverts for cloths and movies she was into.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Ad-tech generally means google. I'm a consistent increase in anti-google news articles recently (some justified, some just speculative to add fear, uncertainty, doubt). I wonder who is pushing it?
Base model is 128GB. So much less than the Trimble Nomad 900 series.
Top tier models are comparable. I'd be more specific but the Trimble website is giving me 503 errors now.
The Surface is a Windows 10 device, whereas the Nomad does not appear to be. The Surface is a primarily luxury indoor office use device. The Nomad appears to be a rugged/outdoor use device, the added price comes in durability. So the comparison is apples to oranges despite being in the same price range.
I don't know if you have been paying attention to what's going on lately in the world, but most anyone with a passing familiarity with the internet in 1999 was already being ignored then and that hasn't changed.
I've been using the internet for almost 30 years and I think I've intentionally clicked on an ad twice.
I believe most users train themselves to not look at ads.
What particularly bewilders me is when some news sites load then a few seconds later the entire page is overtaken by an ad. That and the super annoying ads on mobile that scroll up from the bottom when the user is intending to scroll the article.
I cannot fathom why any respectable news company or big retailer would think this was a good practice. It makes me want to boycott them both.
I don't know, the Russians sure did a lot with $100,000 in Facebook buys. Maybe they just know their 'consumers' better.
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
The Democrats swung the election. Them along with most media outlets predicted Hillary in a landslide so why even bother running on a good platform or picking a good candidate? I lean towards Libertarian but still liked Bernie for the same reason the Democrats hated him. He doesn't take corporate money. No way would they stand behind a guy who can't be swayed by corporations.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Online ads have become far too annoying for me to pay any attention to them. Just because the advertisers are able to place ads in front of me, they think that those ads leave me with a positive impression of the company and its products. On the contrary, I shun the products that are advertised to me in an annoying manner.
I was going to update my FeeNAS server today. I guess I shouldn’t have wasted so much time in the foums!
I spent half the day in the forums to confirm switching from a single six-drive RAIDZ3 vdev to three two-drive mirror vdevs. Found this article that convinced me.
http://jrs-s.net/2015/02/06/zfs-you-should-use-mirror-vdevs-not-raidz/
Tomorrow I'll spend half the day cleaning up my home office from blowing out two years of dust bunnies from inside the file server.
Advertising anywhere is wasteful. The problem for all those advertisers is that they are selling commodities. Products and services that are indistinguishable from (or inferior to) their competitors.
The solution for those people is simply to produce a better product. As we hear daily on this site; Apple didn't invent the music player, the cell phone or the tablet device--but they made them better. They made them compellingly functional and attractive. While HP, Compaq, IBM and others were assembling generic parts into ugly desktop boxes, Apple was offering colorful, graceful computers that just happened to appear on every interesting TV show. Many consumers were influenced by the look and a growing reputation for ease of use, reliability and service after the sale.
Smart Americans are buying more Toyotas, Nissans, Hyundais and fewer Chevys and Chryslers. Nissans? Damn, most are UGLY! But they have a good reputation for reliability. I bought a Papa John's pizza today- their slogan: Better Ingredients, Better Pizza.
It works the other way too. Walmart has a reputation for lowest prices, which is enough to bring in hordes of buyers. Nordstrom's has a reputation for quality and service that places them high in retail sales. Radio Shack had a market niche that faded away and they couldn't adapt. Every seller needs a unique place in the market or they will have to advertise like crazy.
So long as there are commodities, there will be sales costs. The best investment for products is not advertising, but R&D topped off with functional and/or fashionable design principles. And IP protection. And reputation over the long term.
...omphaloskepsis often...
I propose that businesses that use online advertising perform their own test - no consultants, no biased salesmen - their own people.
Method:
1. List all the various media you advertise on
2. Make a schedule where you drop each media in turn for say 2 weeks, returning for 2 weeks to all media as before between tests.
3. Track, track, track.
4. Run the numbers.
5. Make real business decisions.
My bet is you will end up firing your marketing manager (or even the whole team). Or have building security "welcome" that marketing / advertising consultant on his next visit...
I always have a shop-vac hose next to the the dust-off whilst blowing out the dust bunnies. I’ll read the article you recommended.
that that spending that
Will someone PLEASE introduce the editors to the works of Strunk and white?!
~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.
Twitter is fucking worthless. But we all already knew this. But just for shits and giggles, lemmie tell ya some numbers.
Twitter gave me one of those ad trials for their service, a free $100 credit to try them out as an advertising system.
My company received a 0% click-through rate.
I guess I got exactly what I paid for, absolutely nothing. But one thing was for sure, Twitter made sure I absolutely NEVER gave them any actual money for advertising, since it was literally useless and worthless for my business.
...ads are either blocked by software or my mental ability to completely tune them out as visual noise. If I want something I search for it.
It's less than worthless.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Let's suppose this trend continues, and the whole online advertising business goes down the tubes. When they can no longer claim it's "ad revenue", how will Google account for all the black budget money they get from fedgov and other repressive regimes in payment for conducting mass surveillance?
They sell something like 90% of the detergent in the world under a variety of names. They have trouble getting more people to buy their detergent for the same reason Facebook is having trouble getting people signed up - the population of the world is an upperlimit.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
I get it, you bought an iCrap.
People only have so much money to spend. Advertising can't make more of it. All it can do is possibly get it to spend on your brand rather than another. There's nothing special about online there. Advertising is mostly a drag on the economy, it only actually provides value when it informs people of goods/service they otherwise wouldn't have known about. The vast majority of ad spending, especially by major established brands, doesn't do that.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
If you actually were Libertarian, you wouldn't have a problem with corporate money in elections because its their money and they can spend it how they want to. Either you don't actually know what Libertarianism is, or you're a troll. Leaning towards the later.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
The main reason the internet has become a corporate surveillance nightmare is because the only way to really pay for small bits of content has been through advertising.
"Surveillance is the businessmodel of the internet" - Bruce Schneier
HTML6 needs to have a micropayment feature. I want to be able to choose to pay google 1 cent per query in return for not being tracked. All this talk about innovation, yet this simple payment system has still not materialized.
A blockchain payment system might seem like an obvious fit to this problem. However, I suspect that in the long term the blockchain might pose an even bigger privacy risk. When the cryptography of these distributed leggers gets broken, everybody could know which websites you visited.
> Maybe you don't see this because you don't understanding how marketing works?
I don't see it anyway because I understand how an adblocker works.
Jaron Lanier — 'Funding a civilization through advertising is like trying to get nutrition by connecting a tube from one's anus to one's mouth.'
Answer: P&G doesn't sell fear.
All Russia had to do was help convince the moderate Republicans that we're being overrun by dangerous immigrants at an alarming rate.
Nothing sells Republican votes like fear of immigrants entering the US to take their jobs, marry into their families, and spread "wrong" religions.
It's certainly heretical to the doctrine of "Libertarianism" but I think there is a kind of neo-Libertarianism out there that generally aligns with traditional Libertarianism but rejects Libertarianism's reflexive and doctrinaire support for existing corporate power structures.
I think there's a notion in this neo-Libertarianism that too much corporate power is just as bad if not worse than too much government power. Democratically elected governments are at least nominally constrained by constitutions and civil rights protections, while corporations appear increasingly unconstrained, by either government or by the market forces which are supposed to constrain them.
I think these notions are what drive some Libertarian-leaning people to find Bernie appealing, despite his obviously socialistic policy goals.
And I think to a certain extent, people tire of the recursive logic of doctrinaire Libertarianism. Defending general corporate behavior under the guise of individual freedom and then rejecting criticism of specific corporate abuses which actually constrain individual freedom as being the result of government power and non-libertarian policies. "$Corporation should be free to do whatever it was. If we had real Libertarian government, $Corporation couldn't do that specific thing,"
There seems to be no room in Libertarianism to acknowledge the abusive levels of power for which concentrated economic wealth is capable of or any room to accept government regulation is likely the only way to mitigate them, at least in the real world we live in, which is unlikely to ever be organized under "real Libertarian" policies.
About 3 years ago I performed a little experiment.
Had 20 EUR to spend. Spent them on Google AdSense (or AdWords? well whatever) to boost my Youtube channel which had many (unmonetized) World of Tanks replays. This was not to make any money, but to verify what would happen if I did go that way.
That 20 EUR lasted about a week, during which the amount of views of my channel increased tenfold, from about 200 accesses a week to over 2000. then it dropped straight back to 200-something a week.
Now, the question in TFT (The Fuckin Title) is retarded. Online Advertising can be very anything from very lucrative to worthless. The outcome depends on a shit ton of factors and decisions.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
One of the points of all this shouldn't be mixed: if online ads are worthless, doesn't that mean all this data collection is mostly worthless also? Thoughts on this?
Also FYI, I just clicked an ad 4 times on the site here with my finger because I was trying to close the ad...
I'd much rather go to a world where I pay a dollar a month for Google and Slashdot.
-
The advertisers primary job is not to sell, but to inform that the product exists. As a side note, 99% of all business models fail within the first 24 months of business because no one knows the product exists.
You will not see many Linux user in a webserver statistics. Why? Because you obviously will only get a sample of desktop computers. My expectation would be that the Windows demographic will also show a VERY tiny amount of Windows Servers hitting your webpage, unless you offer some Windows Server components. Because few people are stupid enough to browse online from their servers.
Linux is still (and probably will be forever) a system that you'd rather use on your server than your desktop. I'd even expect the majority of Linux installations around the world to not even have a GUI installed.
In other words, if you ask around who's running Linux or Windows on their servers here, you'd probably get a single digit percentage result for Windows. And I'd guess it might even be in the single digits again if you ask who's running Linux as their main desktop system.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The problem is that you want to have people click on something and buy it. That's not going to work. Ever. For more than one reason. And it all comes down to feelings.
First and foremost, when I go to a page, I go there for a reason. To read something, to watch a movie, what I certainly did NOT go to the page for was your ad. Even if it was the most topical ad, even if it advertised something that would solve all my life problems, it still is NOT what I wanted to get at that very moment. The worst thing you can do now is force me to see your ad before I can get to what I wanted to see. Because that loads your product with negative emotion. You and your product are between me and what I want to have.
Instead, what you should do is make me feel like you made what I'm looking at possible. The whole "sponsored by" and "brought to you by" ad line works wonders. We get a good feeling about you and your product if we feel like you're the one that gives us what we want and maybe even love. It needn't even to have anything to do with your product. You could be making car windshield wipers, if that's what allowed me to find the solution to a coding problem I had, I feel good about your wipers and next time I need some and they're offered, I'll probably even prefer to buy them because subconsciously they are connected with solving a problem I had.
This way advertising can work.
Being obnoxious makes us feel bad about your product. Yes, we will more likely remember it. But it will be remembered as the product that stood between us and the content we wanted to see.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Back in the day, when advertising on the web was just a simple banner ad that appeared on a page, things were good, we didn't feel a need to install advertising blockers, cuz they weren't disruptive to our experience of web browsing.
Fast forward and the rise of pop ups, pop under, video, sound, splitting articles into multiple pages so you get more advertising thrust in your face. So most of us said enough is enough and the rise of the ad blocker occurred. And now they wonder why advertising is so ineffective? You guys did it to yourselves, you made yourselves so frickin' obnoxious and a bane of the browsing experience, we've tuned you out, either with our brains solely, or with technology to assist in removing your garbage from our monitors.
Traditional libertarianism is not anarchism. However it does hold 'doctrine' that monopolies only happen _with_ government assistance, hand waves away 'natural monopolies'.
Like all 'isms' it's only reasonable to discuss it in context of 'mixed mode' economies and government. As exists on the ground. Some 'isms' refuse 'mixed mode' which makes them irrelevant.
In the USA the Ds _never_ had a 'mind your business' principle, the Rs sold it out, decades ago.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
I'm socially liberal and fiscally conservative. What party does that put me in?
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Well perhaps that is good for you. Some of us have rather larger boxes with 4-8 drives. I also use FreeNAS in my office. Rather less expensive than a Windows file server.
I say that when the proportion reaches 98%, it means you took your eyes off the ball long ago.
I wonder how much of the rise in Libertarianism in the last 50-odd years is the result of genuine interest in largely unfettered capitalism and tiny government and how much of it is a kind of way to latch onto a kind of political conservatism that allows for non-traditional personal behavior (pot smoking, sex, etc).
I'm sort of convinced that most people are into it for its contrarian appeal than as any sort of organized socio-political system, especially as one with any realistic chance of implementation.
Libertarianism won't be implemented, just like Socialism won't.
But principles of libertarianism will continue to be part of the United States government. It might take bankruptcy to get the government to 'mind it's business', but it will, one way or another.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
i just can't seem to care
Free speech was meant to be free for all... how can anyone grow up in a nanny state ?
On the contrary, I shun the products that are advertised to me in an annoying manner
I shun the products that are advertised to me IN ANY MANNER if I haven't opted in to receive that advertisement.
By "receive that advertisement" I include email, surface mail, calls, door-to-door, and billboards.
I'll go further, and shun not just the individual product being advertised, but ALL products of that vender or business, when I can do this.
Unfortunately, abusive laws that grant artificial monopolies make this difficult in many cases - but the mere fact that I received an ad from somebody and didn't ask for it will make me look FIRST at their competitors.
Note that going to a tech conference does NOT mean that I have opted in to receive advertisements from ANY vender that receives the attendee list for that conference.
It means you at least lean Democrat, of the two major parties. Since 1980, they've been the more fiscally conservative party as well as the more socially liberal.
If you wanted a party that was seriously fiscally conservative, like the pre-1980 Republicans, I'm sorry for you.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Does anyone do metrics on the negative impact of digital advertising?
> Remembering and advertisement that came with an auto start video over the top of the article you are reading and avoiding that product in the future.
> Remembering the product that was in your face obnoxious on many different web pages and avoiding that product in the future.
Curmudgeonly avoiding many products due to obnoxious an inane advertisements for years. (I haven't entered a Quznos since the singing sponges.)
NRRPT/RCT