On Advertising ...

If there's one thing that seems to be ever present in our lives, it's advertising.

Someone out there, many people ... want your time, your money, your attention.

Me too ! Although I'm not nearly as persistent or intrusive about it as the advertisers are.

The advertising people are a bit too intrusive though. I don't like advertising people for many reasons :

They get in the way of what I want to do. BBC are actually really bad at this, they will be running late yet they still have time to put a few trailers on for their stuff before starting your programme late. This is really bad when the programme overruns past what your recording box is set for.

They're intrusive. Sport watching over here is cursed at the moment by the betting ads. They're loud and designed to grab your attention. They portray gambling as a glamour thing, they portray it as something everyone does. I want to be chilling out to the cricket ! I don't want to be shaken rudely out of half dozing (need all the sleep I can get) by a gambling ad that's twice as loud as the programme I was watching.

They're offensive. One gambling ad with the cat in particular. Thought that advert had been banned but ... apparently not.

They're dangerous, at least on computers they are. I run an adblocker on most websites due to the very real chance that a site has third party advertising that is pushing malware to your machine. The malware people can do this legitimately too by buying advertising space and feeding poisoned pictures and videos to it. Our only defence is an adblocker and anti-virus and anti-malware scans.

They have double standards too.

This post is mainly inspired by a story I was seeing hit the Twitters over the last week. Turns out some youtubers are being hit by the execution of a change in the Terms and Conditions that happened a few months ago. YT is just now doing something about it.

Some people make money off Youtube, via the adsense advertising. The change is that the advertisers can now pull their goods from videos due to them not liking the content of the video. Too much swearing and the advertising will get pulled from the video. Disturbing content will get the ads pulled.

There's a few key things there :
1 - the advertising we see tends to be targeted according to the sites we visit. So we should only be seeing the adverts that are appropriate to us. People who like mature content should see mature adverts.
2 - we don't get a choice over the adverts we see. So there is a double standard between ad people saying where their ads will appear and us being able to choose what ads we think are appropriate.

And probably a few more things too. Brain is a bit fuzzed.

I hope you see my point there though. The advertising hierarchy are picking and choosing where they want their ads to appear, yet we do not get a choice as to what adverts we see (mostly). For me, I'll tolerate the adverts that are useful to me and the others, the gambling, the moneylending, the offensive get :

Fingers in the ears for I'm Not Listening. And I can do this too on the Twitters by blocking the gambling sites and reporting them for spam. Because spam it is. In effect, by drawing my attention to them by advertising, I act and they don't reach me any more.

If only you could do that for the other sources of advertising. Like ... right click on that banner ad, choose "This is nasty", never see anything from that company again. Or even a "This company tells rotten lies" and have them blacklisted from the advertiser.

I'm not intending to change how I tackle advertising here :

No adsense for the blog template;
(And there was much rejoicing)
Only pushing the "I've posted something!"'s to Facebook and Twitter;
And the occasional "I've written nice things about you" to select people.

That last doesn't seem to get any response though or views. Perhaps it's something I said. Maybe. I like to say Nice Things about people. I think Bad Things about some people but ... it's not for here. It's a bit like a : I like you, I don't like them. I'll draw attention to the people I like but effectively ignore those I dislike. With the youtubers, they're trying to make a living from the videos, it's not my place to try and demolish their livelihood by saying Bad Things about them.

But I will quite happily talk about the good ones.

So ... there is actually a little bit of advertising here. But it's me talking about things I enjoy, things I think you might enjoy. There's no monetary consideration there.

It's curious where the line gets drawn isn't it ?

My brain is fuzzed so I'll leave it there. My ankles have been improving ! Hopefully they'll survive the week without getting shredded which means they will be well on the road to recovery. The ankle protector is working ...

Early night tonight. The Chrissa Streamer I would be watching isn't feeling too well so no late night stream watching for me. I could do with that early night though. Just hopefully it'll translate into good sleep !

Nite all.