You're contrasting authorship with distribution. The advertising equivalent to paying a technical writer is paying an ad agency to create the ad. The customer isn't a party to that transaction either.
I am not making such an error. Paying a technical writer for labor is not the same as paying a publisher for conversions. The scenario you posed was "hire someone to write the documentation and then someone else to distribute it." Those are two parties, each of which is paid independently for services rendered. The customer is not selling their attention, here. The customer is (presumably) purchasing a product and is reading the documentation to understand how to operate it.
Advertising is not distribution. Publishing is distribution, and advertising sometimes comes along for the ride.
The proposal was to "outlaw compensation for advertising". That would presumably include paying people to create ads and not just to publish them, hence the first example. What you're arguing is that the first example is different from the second one, but they were intended to be, because they map to two different parts of the process.
> The customer is (presumably) purchasing a product and is reading the documentation to understand how to operate it.
Product documentation is also available to prospective customers so they can review it to decide whether they want to purchase the product.
And then the question is, how do they get it? There are many ways to distribute. They could pay to print it out on paper and put it in the lobby in their corporate offices, but then customers would have to come to their corporate headquarters to get it, which most won't do, so obviously some methods of distribution have a higher likelihood of being seen. Then companies will prefer the ones that allow them to be seen more.
But they're paying someone for any of them, so "is paying for it" isn't a useful way to distinguish them.
And then we're back to, suppose you pay Facebook to host your documents on your company's Facebook page. Furthermore suppose that they, like most hosting companies, charge you more money if you get more traffic. Meanwhile their "hosting customers" on the "free tier" (i.e. ordinary Facebook users) have a very small quota which is really only enough for their posts to be seen by their own friends. So paying them for distribution -- like paying for any other form of distribution -- causes your documents to have better visibility. Now you can show up in the feed of more people before you run out of quota, just like paying more for hosting means more people could visit your website before you exceed your transfer allowance.
How do you tell if someone is paying for computing resources or eyeballs when the same company provides both? Notice that "don't let them do both" is a bit of a problem if you also don't let them sell advertising, because if they can't sell ads or charge for using the service then what are they doing for revenue?
Indeed, advertisers would layoff or displace their marketing teams, as the role would have no value to the company if advertising was outlawed (meanwhile, technical writers would be just fine). I'm not disputing that. I'm disputing the framing you put forth that equates advertising with technical writing.
> Product documentation is also available to prospective customers so they can review it to decide whether they want to purchase the product.
I agree with this statement, but it is irrelevant. The primary purpose of documentation is what I said: for understanding how to operate the product. The only purpose of advertising is to make a sale. Advertising has no secondary purpose. These are not the same thing.
The test is quite simple: Is the sole purpose of the payment to make a sale? If so, it is advertising.
We don't really need to discuss documents any longer. Documentation is not an advertisement.
> Indeed, advertisers would layoff or displace their marketing teams, as the role would have no value to the company if advertising was outlawed
They would obviously redeploy them to drafting or working to influence whatever means exists that still allows them to get new customers.
> The primary purpose of documentation is what I said: for understanding how to operate the product. The only purpose of advertising is to make a sale. Advertising has no secondary purpose. These are not the same thing.
This is like saying the primary purpose of advertising is to display media content.
The only purpose of the entire company is to make a sale. They ship the product from the factory to retail stores because that makes more sales than requiring the customer to come to the factory. They write documentation because more customers are willing to buy a product with documentation. And the documentation carefully portrays the product in a favorable light and directs customers to the company's own offerings -- how often do you see a commercial product's documentation recommending that the customer use a competitor's product under circumstances when that would actually be to the customer's advantage?
Meanwhile advertising also has secondary functions as well, like informing customers of product features they might not have been aware of, or informing them of risks or drawbacks of competing products, or providing active rather than passive notification for time-sensitive information like that a sale is happening, etc.
> This is like saying the primary purpose of advertising is to display media content.
No, the only purpose - and therefore the primary purpose - of advertising is to make a sale.
You are arguing economics. And while that is a valid stance, it is not the only point of view. You might even be arguing that word of mouth is advertising. That doesn't fit the definition of paying some party with an expectation of a larger return. That's the only part of advertising that needs to be addressed (e.g., banned or reformed). The part that is most harmful. Word of mouth and other means of non-exploitative ways to gain customers are completely reasonable.
You're trying to weasel your way to finding some inescapable loophole for some reason that I cannot understand. There's no need to protect predatory behavior like advertising.
> how often do you see a commercial product's documentation recommending that the customer use a competitor's product under circumstances when that would actually be to the customer's advantage?
Since you are really digging into semantics, here, I'll bite. The documentation doesn't need to explicitly say this. It implies that the product's feature set may not fit the user's needs by their very descriptions. The user will go to a competitor on their own accord when those features do not meet their needs.
> Meanwhile advertising also has secondary functions as well, like informing customers of product features they might not have been aware of, or informing them of risks or drawbacks of competing products, or providing active rather than passive notification for time-sensitive information like that a sale is happening, etc.
The products themselves do that. The company's website, brochure, or product catalog have the information. They don't need to broadcast the widest net possible with the MicroMachines guy speedrunning their feature list to fit a 60-second ad spot. In fact, ads have such space and time constraints that the pertinent information literally cannot fit the allocation. Ads can only give very brief and very high level tidbits. It's a terrible model for information dispersal.
On the other hand, infomercials are 30 or 60 minute advertisements that tend to repeat the same thing ad infinitum. There's only so much you can say about knives, sunglasses, or exercise equipment. And yet, we have QVC. But here's the thing: I don't have to watch QVC. QVC isn't embedded into every website.
Although, plenty of low effort news sites really like to pin an autoplay video to the corner of my screen when I scroll down. These are nuisances. Somebody paying someone else to force me to watch or read something in the hopes that I will make a purchase. No. Just no. There's a good reason popups have been blocked on browsers by default for 20 years. Advertising is overly aggressive, and the margins are so piss poor that publishers are effectively getting ripped off by ad revenue. It's insulting to publishers and much worse to consumers.
At least on Twitch, the largest contributors to a streamer's income are donations, subscriptions, bits, and Twitch Turbo viewers. Possibly in that order. Ads are worth practically nothing.
Shroud is one of the most highly paid streamers on Twitch/YouTube. He recently described that his YouTube ad revenue nets between $5,000-$9,000 per month [1]. This might seem like a lot, but his gross income is estimated to be up to $10 million to $12 million per year [2]. YouTube ads account for approximately between 0.5% and 1% of his income.
Smaller publishers (e.g., content creators) don't even break double digit ad revenues per month [3].
Please, stop defending advertising. It is indefensible. It's bad for everyone.
In general there is the entire category of issue advertising where someone is trying to convince someone to do something rather than buy something. Non-profits also advertise to solicit donations, without which they would have a lot of trouble existing.
There are also ads for things like jobs where they're trying to hire someone rather than sell something and it's easier for everyone for the employer to take out a help wanted ad and the job-seeker to read the help wanted section than for everyone who wants a job to each try to identify who is hiring by visiting the listings page of every company in the world. In modern day people use job search sites rather than newspaper classified sections, but those are the same thing -- the revenue of those sites is from listings or placement, i.e. the listings are ads, and if they weren't charging for that they would have no revenue to cover their expenses. Even Craigslist charges for job postings and car listings etc. and indeed that's how even they keep the lights on.
Likewise, eBay is an advertising company by your definition. You pay them in order to make a sale, they display the ad for your product on their website in exchange for money. Are we banning eBay, or how are you going to distinguish it from Facebook Marketplace?
> Word of mouth and other means of non-exploitative ways to gain customers are completely reasonable.
That's pretty quickly going to lead to atroturfing which is even worse than advertising because at least ads tell you they're ads.
> The documentation doesn't need to explicitly say this. It implies that the product's feature set may not fit the user's needs by their very descriptions. The user will go to a competitor on their own accord when those features do not meet their needs.
Would you accept that line of reasoning if it was applied to "advertising"? The company knows better than a neophyte prospective customer the areas where their product is lacking or a competitor's is superior and is choosing to tell you the things that benefit them and not the things that don't.
> They don't need to broadcast the widest net possible with the MicroMachines guy speedrunning their feature list to fit a 60-second ad spot.
What if sometimes they do?
Suppose you overstocked some product and you need to get it out of your warehouse to make room for other products that will be delivered next week. So you lower the price, and you can publish the lower price on your website, but you need prospective customers to know about the lower price right now, not in six months when they next visit your website, because you need that stuff out of your warehouse in the next 7 days. And they need to know about the lower price right now because that stock will only be available for a week, so checking the website twice a year would cause them to miss the discounted price. So how do you make thousands of prospective customers aware of a time-sensitive discount without making them check prices every day?
> Advertising is overly aggressive
That seems like a different problem, i.e. you need a better ad blocker rather than a ban on advertising.
> the margins are so piss poor that publishers are effectively getting ripped off by ad revenue.
This again seems like a separate problem. Nobody is requiring publishers to use advertising instead of charging for subscriptions in order for companies to be able to buy ads on search engines or billboards or television.
Sorry for the wall of text. This is going to be really bad to read on mobile. I should probably be more selective about how I reply to the points raised, but it was hard to leave some stones unturned.
> Even this isn't true. There are ads like this whose purpose is to encourage girls to learn to code:
Not an ad. They aren't paying the publisher (YouTube) to advertise the service.
This is the biggest issue I have with this thread. You are conflating "everything can advertise things" with the harmful behavior of paying for the privilege to place an advertisement in what is generally unrelated content. I'm aware that everything can advertise, and I'm unconcerned with that.
> There are also ads for things like jobs where they're trying to hire someone rather than sell something and it's easier for everyone for the employer to take out a help wanted ad and the job-seeker to read the help wanted section than for everyone who wants a job to each try to identify who is hiring by visiting the listings page of every company in the world.
Classified ads are in a different realm entirely. If you want to find a list of businesses that are hiring or a list of contractors willing to work, what better way than going to a classified ads directory? The act of intentionally looking for a directory is different from product placement and promotions. The latter are things that just materialize out of greed because advertisers want to steal attention away from the task the consumer intended.
In my book, advertisers could continue paying for all the classified ads they want! I don't have to look at the classifieds. They aren't being blasted to my screen or landing in my inbox until I intentionally go looking for them.
Alright, so the simple definition could use some work if exceptions like classified ads are wanted. (I'm not opposed to banning them, too, but what the heck. Let's complicate matters for no good reason.) Add some more constraints like, "Is the advertising embedded into content that is not solely a directory of ads?" until satisfied.
Eventually, it will contain so many exceptions that it will be useless. Which is perhaps your point. But I reject that point because I would just ban all ads without exception. No problem.
> Likewise, eBay is an advertising company by your definition. You pay them in order to make a sale, they display the ad for your product on their website in exchange for money. Are we banning eBay, or how are you going to distinguish it from Facebook Marketplace?
eBay is not an advertising company by the definition. eBay charges sellers to sell on the eBay platform. That is a service charge. Consumers must go to eBay to find things they wish to buy. The advertising part comes in from sellers who advertise by promoting their products in search results.
eBay is much closer to a brick-and-mortar retail store than an advertising company.
I know most people agree with the statement that "Google is an advertising company". But it's hard for me to fully accept that framing. Google has email, document storage, YouTube, phones, and hundreds of services and products that are not advertising. The fact that their primary revenue stream is siphoning from advertisers is concerning. But that doesn't make Google an advertising company. They mostly act as a publisher in that relationship. They also take a cut off the top of other publishers through AdSense and related advertising products.
> because at least ads tell you they're ads.
Yeah, that wasn't always the case. FTC's Dot Com Disclosures guide was originally written in 2000 and significantly updated in 2013. It's been more than 12 years since, and publishers are still trying to make ads appear "more natural" in content feeds, blurring the lines between disclosure and deception [4].
If you still have a landline, telemarketers are relentless and many of them to do say who they are advertising for, even if they are required. (My first job was in telemarketing as a teenager. I lasted one whole week before quitting. This might have something to do with my absolute opposition to advertising. Who knows.)
> Would you accept that line of reasoning if it was applied to "advertising"? The company knows better than a neophyte prospective customer the areas where their product is lacking or a competitor's is superior and is choosing to tell you the things that benefit them and not the things that don't.
I am unsure what you are asking. Companies always want to make themselves look better than competitors. Which is why their technical documentation reads the way it does. (E.g. not saying "don't use Acme products!" or "our product is superior to Acme's!") So, I agree with you, but I don't see how this line of reasoning applies to advertising.
Ads are incentivized to say things like "better than the leading brand" because the short form content doesn't give a lot of room to provide actual sustenance. Is that what you are getting at?
> What if sometimes they do?
First of all, "not my problem". But realistically, if I overstocked a product that isn't selling, that's a good teachable moment. A wise conclusion would be to not overstock risky investments in the future.
As for how to correct it without advertising your horde to every possible consumer, there are a few options. 1) Make it all someone else's problem. Sell it in bulk at a discount to a liquidator, bin store, or auction house. 2) Put the products into more marketplaces. eBay, Amazon, Newegg, even Wal-Mart has a marketplace [3] you can sell on. 3) File it as a loss and trash it. Landfills are filled with unsold goods. That's a cost of chasing the consumerism dream on the back of advertising.
Secondly, if the company is selling this stock on their own website, as you posed in this scenario, they can do all of the "SALE!" advertising on their own website that they want. This is like seeing "SALE!" signs when you go to Wal-Mart. You expect to see those inside Wal-Mart. You don't expect to see them in restaurants, on the sides of buildings and buses, or while reading the news. Let me make a small correction: I don't expect to see "SALE!" signs in places that are unrelated to buying whatever product is on sale. That's the problem to solve. Always has been.
> That seems like a different problem, i.e. you need a better ad blocker rather than a ban on advertising.
Ad blockers are sufficient for removing ads. I don't have a gap in my capability to block ads, including aggressive ads. I just hate ads. There is a gap with devices outside of my control, however. Some of those gaps can be covered by blocking at the network layer. Some cannot.
But are we really having this conversation? I'm the problem, not advertising? That gives me a lot more credibility/accountability than I would expect! I am in fact not more powerful than global syndication. So, I can't be the problem.
The fact that ads are overly aggressive is not my fault. Nor is it my problem that I have already blocked them all. My problem is that I just don't want ads polluting otherwise good spaces for leisure or intellectual pursuit. That's it. Ad pollution = bad.
> This again seems like a separate problem. Nobody is requiring publishers to use advertising instead of charging for subscriptions in order for companies to be able to buy ads on search engines or billboards or television.
Not a different problem. Same problem. Twitch [1] and YouTube [2] do not give content creators a means of opting out of running ads.
Search engines are publishers, and advertisers pay them to promote their products in search results. Billboards are built on private land, and advertisers pay the landowners to advertise on their billboards. These are the same business model. Publishers take a small cut and advertisers hope to take a big cut. But in some cases ([1] and [2]), Twitch and YouTube are the publishers, the content creators are not the publishers in these "forced-ads" relationships. (There are cases where the content creators are the publishers. E.g., becoming a parter to take a small cut of an already small payment for ad revenue; the Shroud case we explored earlier in the thread. And sponsored segments.) Twitch and YouTube take all of the ad revenue. That's the Google/Facebook model, lovingly referred to as enshittification.
But now how are you distributing either of them?