I’m not on Instagram, but I don’t think this issue is really confined to social media. I’ve become quite concerned about is how advertising is drowning out useful information everywhere else as well.
We recently had a baby girl, our first, and this has lead to quite a lot of internet searching. I’ve been completely unable to find anything resembling an authentic answer on google. It’s all commercial content trying to push products rather than give any form of useful information. The government sites, to their credit, work really well, but what happened to the actual people on the internet? People sharing their stories without getting paid to push a product?
In the end we ended up subscribing to a national NGO that does consumer testing and has an excellent decade long track record, but what good is the internet if you can’t find honest information?
Search without the top 1m (or 100k) sites. Far from perfect, but it tunes out an awful lot of the commerce that Google prioritise. You start finding the old school forums and info sites that are mostly invisible to Google.
I try to use this as much as I can, especially if I'm looking for content from "real people" sites, i.e. blogs set up by individuals to share their thoughts.
Those are a breath of fresh air in this day and age, when 90% of blogs appearing on search are SEO-optimized solopreneur websites that hit you with cookie warnings and "free ebook" email lead gen popups the second you arrive on the page.
Great suggestion! I'd not heard of the site before. Just searched for smoothie recipes and was shown lots of small blogs/food sites instead of the usual suspects with heavy advertising.
Same situation, we just had our first child, and the amount of ads and branding we were (and are) exposed to now is just staggering. We've been given a bunch of "helpful" boxes that contained some content-marketing bullshit booklets for parents + samples of commercial care products + a lot of ads for said products. Hell, even the health book for our child that we were given has several full-page ads of baby care products (that last made me feel sick in my stomach a bit, advertisers jumped the shark here IMO). And that's all off-line.
On-line, I didn't expect much. Any topic that's highly relevant to regular people is already gamed by advertisers to the extent there's nothing useful to be found on the mainstream Internet. It's all content marketing garbage. For good information, you have to visit places like official government sites, or niche subreddits & web forums.
Do you think mainstream search engines someday will provide a “commercial search” and “non-commercial search” buttons side-by-side? SEO/ad gamed and non SEO/ad-gamed?
I dream of the day, but unless the government makes it a requirement I don’t see them doing it as it could undermine their business model to some extent (although I think people who want to buy will make use of the “commercial search”)
>Do you think mainstream search engines someday will provide a “commercial search” and “non-commercial search” buttons side-by-side? SEO/ad gamed and non SEO/ad-gamed?
If we put on our computer science hats on to attempt an algorithm to classify the "commercial" from "non-commercial", what would that look like?
Distinguishing ads that are disguised as innocent posts vs authentically innocent posts is a very hard problem. What would the AI machine learning rules be?
Let's take one example thread that's currently on the HN front page: "Ask HN: What do you do with your Raspberry Pi?"
Was that post submitted for discussion to spur sales of the new Raspberry Pi 4? Or was it a genuine question free of any hidden commercial intent? How would a computer algorithm know? Likewise, how would we, as humans, be able to truly know? To me, the thread doesn't seem like it's advertising-motivated. But do you trust my judgement on this?
Notice that Google includes that very HN thread in its results. Should the hypothetical "non-commercial" search button include that HN thread or not?
Here's an example of the opposite effect where people misclassify something as commercial when it isn't: A HN user accuses me of selling something[1] even though I actually wasn't! I just happen to view hundreds of videos about entrepreneurship and I keep copious notes. It was easy to share my notes with HN readers. I have no commercial or even personal affiliation with any VC.
I guess I’m wondering if we could see a return to a more no frills SERPS like we used to see with Page-rank or
Altavista
I don’t mind the ads, but I do mind the content farms and useless fluff that ends up on the first SERP of a query. Or links to pages with no substantive content related to a query except SEO.
Yeah it is really horrible: Years ago you could google specific products or product categorizes to find meaningfully reviews to choose the „best“ product. Nowadays google is filled with shop listings (for specific products) and listings of some products with amazon referral links. The review part is completely gone.
Agreed. Unfortunately, as useful as it used to be I tend to not use Search Engines at all anymore. I've had to return to the days of old where SE's didn't exist in any useful capacity, and bookmark everything of value. It's filtered out all of the crap I used to have to wade through though. My only regret is that I don't see much outside of the regular websites I visit anymore, but Google was becoming less of a useful place to find new content anyway and I'm more receptive to finding new quality websites via Reddit or HN now.
One interesting thing I have seen is when I search for a product review, google suggests I add "reddit" to the end of my search. And this conststantly gives me better results but its not long until reddit is completely full of shills which it partly already is.
That's interesting because I frequently add Reddit to the end of my searches. Particularly when it's a niche topic and increasingly for regular topics. Apparently a lot of other people who are fed up with search engines had the same idea. It's a very unfortunate development but nowadays Google search is almost unusable for some topics.
Music reviews on Amazon were a dream back in 2008 or so. Far from the pretentious babble on Pitchfork and sites of that ilk, you could get concise, single paragraph reviews from regular people trying to explain what they liked/didn't like on the record.
Those days are long gone, since everybody streams now, and genuine user reviews have dried up. Last.fm was another great site, but it's a ghost town now, and the band comments sections are full of spam.
At least rateyourmusic.com is still chugging along.
I didn't notice this problem until recently. Whenever I found myself looking for an opinion, I would search: "{phrase} site:reddit.com".
Far from perfect, but it's been a habit I've been taking more and more in order to avoid all the garbage SEO / Lead Gen / Promotional content out there that's diluting searches.
This is not that helpful. We marketers have aged accounts to post from. Reddit is highly manipulated but in a fashion that looks like genuine curiosity and being helpful.
Just yesterday, I was searching for inspiration to spruce up my small apartment. Did a search for "studio apartments Reddit", and got back search results from non-Reddit interior design blogs that had "Reddit" in the post title.
Caught me slippin'. Reminded me to always use "site:reddit.com" after the search query.
I got back into a video game the other day that was released 15 years ago (also when I first played it). There were plenty of dedicated websites around the game, most of them with forums that contained guides, little details and secrets and whatnot (matter of fact, I ran one of them for a while).
All of those are long gone, with all associated content - which I suppose is not surprising, given its age. However, the issue remains - as interest in a topic dwindles, fewer and fewer people see the point in spending the money and effort to maintain these sites containing (mostly) unbiased information and the information, alongside potentially thousands of user-generated posts/content in the forum, gets lost in the void. If you happen to look something up you saw a decade ago, you might find it on the wayback machine, but certainly not via a search engine.
I feel like reddit.com has taken up a lot of this slack. Now with millions of "micro-communities" about sharing the specifics or appreciation posts for specific games and topics. Replacing the traditional PHBB forums we used to have for each community.
I think these are mostly the more loose groups, the "real" communities are still in the forums. The more niche / dedicated it gets the more likely is it to have a forum.
To be fair I only have experience with old car restoration groups but there may be some FB groups where people post selling / buying things but the real discussion is still in old-school vbulletin style forums.
It would be nice if there was a whole segment of the internet that people used that was completely ad-free. Something that a network of blogs, forums, etc could be on. Server costs could be carried by donations.
>It would be nice if there was a whole segment of the internet that people used that was completely ad-free.
Well, it would be nice but it's not possible to implement a truly ad-free community at (large) internet scale.
The issue is that a supposed "ad-free zone" of the internet will become an attractive magnet for stealth ads that don't look like obvious ads.
Ad-free zones can work if the community is small and everybody knows each other -- such as an Amish community in a small town. Members can interact without ulterior motives of selling something.
But we can't scale that ad-free ideal all the way up to millions of anonymous and pseudonymous bloggers, webforum members, and website owners. When a community becomes too large, it exceeds the ability of its regular members to trace the money trail of everybody else that's participating in the commercial-free internet zone.
In the end, if you're interacting outside a small circle of trusted friends, you just have to keep your wits about you to hopefully detect hidden agendas of advertising.
I've contemplated with the idea of building a plug-in that would disable all affiliate links on a page. What's holding me from doing it is that I find it unethical because some people are making a living out of promoting stuff. From the other hand, native advertising has become a scourge for modern web. It's not enough that every site has a dozen of visible ads, now we have to fight through promoted content everywhere.
I think that's where all that SEO stuff has lead us, only the one with stuffs to sell do it (or pay someone to do it) and so end up on top of the rankings.
A while before the social media platforms emerged were bulletin boards which morphed into web based forums. You know, the one you sign-up and post to, that are usually focussed on some defined topic.
Web forums are still great places to engage with real people and real opinions. I'm expecting that web forums will remain after the social media giants are privacy-legislated out of existence.
This is really disturbing. It made me rethink who I'm following.. I'm going to go through my feed, with a good cup of Hill Brothers cappachino mix (my favourite is the classic!) and really look hard at who's worth keeping in my followed list.
You forgot to post your affiliate link for Hill Brothers!
I jest but isn't that drink something:
Sugar, Nondairy Creamer (Partially Hydrogenated Coconut Oil and Soybean Oil, Corn Syrup Solids, Sodium Caseinate (a Milk Derivative), Dipotassium Phosphate, Sugar, Mono and Diglycerides, Silicon Dioxide, Sodium Stearoyl Lactylate, Soy Lecithin, Artificial Color, Artificial Flavor), Nonfat Dry Milk, Instant Coffee, Natural and Artificial Flavors, Cocoa Powder (Processed with Alkali), Silicon Dioxide and Sodium Aluminosilicate (to Prevent Caking), Carboxymethylcellulose, Salt.
How do we get sold into buying this stuff? Instagram? Inadvertent product placement on HN?
Seems that the product is cheaper than take out Starbucks, so it is a deal. But is it?
I drink tea (I am British) and my preference is for the cheap stuff. So that means the 40 Fair Trade bags for 50p from one store or 80 non-Fair-Trade bags for 58p ($1) from the other store. No milk, no sugar and certainly no Dipotassium Phosphate needed.
$4.99 for 15 cups? That is 33 cents per go. I am sure I could get hooked to it. To cost myself $2.50 a day or approximately $17 dollars a week more than my current beverage costs (ignoring electricity). That is getting on for $900 a year for getting Sodium Stearoyl Lactylate and the like into my arteries!
But, the Hill Brothers delicacy is still a bargain compared to one Starbucks treat a day.
> You forgot to post your affiliate link for Hill Brothers!
Pffft. Are you new to "accidental" comment product placement? It's all about brand awareness. Brands like the delicious Lavazza coffee i m drinking right now.
Actually the brand you mentioned seem to be legit, as in not one face of a vast multinational. They do just the brand you mention. They are not owned by Nestle or anyone else.
Meanwhile, Hill Bros are anything but. They were owned by Nestle but are now part of this outfit:
It is crazy how the core product is merchandised to different people around the world.
In the UK we get one of their brands at train stations and it all seems cool and locally British. But what is not so obvious is that the other coffee place at the station that seems not connected to the chain is also selling the same product with Italian branded beans. So the apparent choice is lining the same pockets of the global mega corp.
Obviously there is choice but sometimes the choice seems imagined, the megacorp can monopolise a locality such as a station.
Coffee is a product for grown ups but when you look at the MZB portfolio it seems that only in America do they treat their customers to a dumbed-down, sugared-up childish product with garish packaging. This is not just this mega-corp, if you go into a British supermarket and find a special shelf area with American products you will see some true crimes when it comes to ultrabright and childish packaging. Sometimes the cereal boxes have to have stickers over some of the nutrition claims on the pack as Trading Standards would just have those products off the shelves immediately if they weren't sanitised that bit.
The mega corp will sell the ultra adulterated products for the US market and have another brand to cater for the hipsters that want heritage, eco-whatever, taste and what not.
I think I really will be sticking with plain tea or skipping the intermediate steps and just going for sugar coated crack cocaine. It is all pulling the same levers in the brain.
I would think that the differences in american marketing is because they are selling to a market that is 4-20 times larger than any european market, so you get more common denominators. Plus they have a longer tradition of consumerist culture.
Slightly OT, but I deleted my Facebook last year. Ever since, the Instagram ads I see are woefully targeted. I'm a 30 year old man living in New Delhi, India, yet in the past few weeks, I've seen ads for:
- A real estate company in Denver, Colarado
- Sanitary pads for women
- A Dubai property brokerage
- BMW Las Vegas
I really don't know what's going on with these ads because geographic and gender exclusion would be the first step in any targeting
You don't know who you are, it is about time you go buy your BMW in LA and sort out your prop investments in Dubai.
But on a serious note, the notion that any insurance company or even governments give any weight to the "data" from social media and the like makes me uneasy, specially when you realize how off they can be!
Same here. Instagram is absolutely convinced I'm in Norway and no matter where I actually am (UK, Asia, Africa, USA) it only ever shows me ads in Norwegian... which I don't speak.
The ads in my wife's feed, who still has her Facebook account, on the other hand, are very well targeted.
This makes me think that maybe Instagram depends heavily on your Facebook data for targeting, and that deleting your Facebook (not disabling; deleting) actually does delete your data from Facebook
On facebook you explicitly provide them information on things like gender, language and basic demographics that advertisers use for targeting. On IG they may need to infer this information from your online activities if your FB is closed.
That said, I don't see this being a data gap for too long.
They could also target your friends. Maybe soon, one of your friends or siblings will announce you they are considering buying a BMW, and your reaction to this announcement might be better than without seeing the ad. Your reaction could confirm/trigger the final decision to buy a BMW for your friend.
In that case, Instagram knows my friends even less than it knows me. None of my extended group of friends are in any position to buy a used BMW, let alone a new one.
(BMWs, by the way, are very expensive in India. An entry level 3-series costs roughly $70,000)
I'm surprised no one's mentioned this yet, but the photo of Gretchen referenced as a "candid shot" at the very start of the article (and shown on right a bit lower down) is anything but.
There's at least 5 (!) different kinds of branded 'Hills Bros' merch filling the shot. It's hugely obvious that it's an ad.
Weird leading example for an article included "Do you know it when you see it?" in the title.
Oh it is obvious - in this specific case - but the main issue is that the line between original content and advertisements is blurred. I noticed the same on Facebook - if it's not actual ads, it's my FB friends raving about a movie, a game, a destination (think Disneyworld), a thing they got, etc - so basically most content is ads.
The They Live sunglasses should be an extension that can abstract these things to keywords like "CONSUME" for product promotion and "MARRY & REPRODUCE" for relationship updates / family pictures.
However, it is missing the disclaimers that the article says this influencer insists on using
> Van Ness's posts are clearly labeled as ads, with the caption #advertisement or #sponsoredcontent [...] Altman is diligent about using those hashtags.
It wouldn't be too hard for the FTC to crack down on sponsored content that isn't tagged as sponsored. Of course they don't have the budget to go after everyone, but they can fine one big player and make a heavy handed example of a handful of small ones (who won't actually get hurt, the free publicity will be worth it to them). The cost of compliance is cheap, so everyone will make sure to display the "sponsored content" sign.
That, like the article, misses the point, however: like placebo drugs, ads work just fine even if you know they are ads.
Came here to point this out as well. I didn’t read the entire article because I was too confused by that being called a “candid shot”. I’m sure there is a real issue to discuss here, but what a terrible way to introduce people to it.
I’m not on Instagram, but that post was quite obviously sponsored: nobody has that much coffee merchandise or talks about things they like as was done there. I’m more concerned about people who have a small but not unreasonable bias in a certain direction swaying people than sponsored Instagram posts.
It is getting increasingly difficult to guage what's native advertisment and what's not. It is not just social media or e-commerce websites but the enthusiast blogs, review sites, and YouTube channels doing sutble paid pieces.
The erstwhile online forums driven by volunteers and like-minded individuals are the only last known place remaining that don't seem to have hidden agendas. And I dread their demise.
The eternal october [0][1] of advertising is here. The only way I have managed to escape is firewalling them out of my home network, but that's like isolating myself in a cocoon and leaves a large part of today's internet inaccessible.
>It is getting increasingly difficult to guage what's native advertisment and what's not. It is not just social media or e-commerce websites but the enthusiast blogs, review sites, and YouTube channels doing sutble paid pieces.
It's getting even tougher to find reviews of uncommon products. I had a family member ask me suggestions for a car DVD player. I got a fair amount of hits for different brands and players, but when I looked for reviews on these products outside of commerce sites, they were all lists with affiliate links with little blurbs likes, "10 in screens, 6 hours of battery life, headphone jack, and plays media via USB." Gee, thanks for the product description.
I just assume that if a product is mentioned descriptively by someone I don't know well—[product name] is a [category] that will [benefit]—and I can easily purchase it online, it's being advertised.
Maybe it's my past-experience of knowing many people in an MLM once and seeing the differences between them being themselves and them “working on their business”.
Maybe the answer to understanding what authentic advertising is, is being exposed to all sorts of it more, in a safe environment where your money doesn't evaporate, and being able to reflect and think critically about what you're experiencing and what the intentions of the other party are.
I'm really surprised that someone with only 6000 followers can command such high rates. I know from listening to podcasters that they make around $20-30 per 1000 listeners per ad. She's earning between $50 and $130 per thousand (potential) impressions.
(I thought these might be multi-ad deals, but from scanning her page, I only see each product featured once.)
Instagram/Facebook have some of the most sophisticated advertising technology in human history. They know my location history, they can determine the language I post in, and they surely have countless other data points they can use for advanced targeting.
And yet, Instagram is adamant that I speak Serbian and that I am in Serbia. I don't speak Serbian, and I haven't been in Serbia since I stayed in Belgrade for the month of June last year.
I have the same for Norway & Norwegian, since I visited there for 3 days last summer. Instagram has access to the location on my phone and knows where I am down to the metre.
Latest amusement from Instagram: my comment was removed as it violated their community guidelines (no threats of violence), and if I make more comments like this my account would be suspended.
In my comment I said I would rather see 100 lab mice euthanised than see a single child suffer from cancer.
Does Instagram just employ the world's stupidest people or what?
I'm definitely NOT the target demographic for fit teas, gym bands, detox treatments, bikinis or sports drinks. The pictures accompanying said products are nice to look at though.
Goes way beyond that. Ton of advertising on here, Facebook groups are probably 95% ads, half or more of the Reddit subs are ads. People who do not work in the advertising industry sometimes have no idea when they are being sold to. These people are not dumb either, they are engineers, doctors, lawyers, you name it, but all are equally prone to psychological manipulation. The Instagram article is mild in comparison to some of the other market research and sales strategies out there. Paid content advertising can be so well done that most readers won’t have a clue they are being taken advantage of. Some will even go to lengths to defend the advertiser saying that the ad was relevant to them.
I was thinking of making a stock-photo site based on product placement. Instead of tricking people to buy subscriptions for downloading one image, give the image for free or very cheap with some product featured "accidentally" .
Clearly not, because i do not use social media, and i see no point in instagram either - because those platforms offer nothing of value to my life - other than being a platform for harvesting tons of personal data, so they can sell targeted ads towards you.
On a side note, plaintext site is a pleasure to read, and loads lightning fast - i really recommend it.
Influencers are basically a walking, breathing marketing platforms, that seem more down to earth or intimate than typical ads - basically a human version of targeted advertisement mixed with surreptitious advertising.
About advertising in general: we know it is sort of a prisoner's dilemma.
If only nobody did advertising... Only trustworthy and non-promoting information about products findable by search (pull instead of push)... It would also be a lot cheaper for the companies.
It's true. And the one good solution to prisoner's dilemma is to have an external actor that precommits to punish defectors. In real-life scenarios, this external actor is very often the government.
That's why I believe that advertising industry ultimately needs to be burned down to the ground through legal means. It'll be better off for everyone - including companies, who will be able to spend much less on the little informative advertising that would be allowed.
Wait. I am confused. Are the types of posts like in the article considered "stealth advertising" now? Do you people regularly buy a product because someone you follow on instagram uses it?
Whenever someone mentions a brand on social media you should assume it's an ad. At that point you should unfollow them. There are millions of others you can follow who aren't shills.
I have never seen an Instagram ad on my phone using both the Android and iOS apps. I don't know why, but there are certain accounts that have ads disabled (I'm not the only one [0]). I guess I just got lucky. My alternate accounts all get ads like normal. I don't think I would use Instagram if I got ads like my friends do.
At least on Twitter, it's fairly easy to build a filter for µBlock (or similar blockers) that will trigger on having "promoted" within a Tweet <div> and hide it. At least in the Instagram app, the ads have the same "promoted" text in their heading, so similar filtering can probably be applied to the web version.
"Facebook adds 5 divs, 9 spans and 30 css classes to every single post in the timeline to make it more difficult to identify and block 'Sponsored' posts, oh my."
The real question is Does it matter if you know when you see it or not? Marketing has the ability to effect your decision making, whether you know its marketing or not.
It is actually quite difficult to enforce. You would need to have access to bank accounts of people to make sure they didn't received money for their stories. And even then, there are other forms of benefits, such as free passes, free products, etc ("gift") which leave no trace
If Kim Kardashian gets paid to post a photo wearing a brand, is that an ad? What if she just gets paid to wear a brand for the day, and it happens to make it onto Instagram? And why stop there? If a TV show or Movie has some product placement in it, should a ‘sponsored content’ subtitle be displayed every time the product appears?
Trying to protect people from content is an endless rabbit hole of ineffective strategies that usually end up doing more harm than good. Why not just leave it up to people to take some personal responsibility for how they consume instagram content?
No- you just have a human look and make some judgements for a few cases as an example. If these influencers knew there was a real threat of getting kicked off the platform for lying to their followers they wouldn’t do it
We recently had a baby girl, our first, and this has lead to quite a lot of internet searching. I’ve been completely unable to find anything resembling an authentic answer on google. It’s all commercial content trying to push products rather than give any form of useful information. The government sites, to their credit, work really well, but what happened to the actual people on the internet? People sharing their stories without getting paid to push a product?
In the end we ended up subscribing to a national NGO that does consumer testing and has an excellent decade long track record, but what good is the internet if you can’t find honest information?