When they stretch the p-value threshold for significance to p<0.1, they claim magazine advertising expenditure reached that threshold.

TV, Radio, and Cinema advertising did not reach significance even at the expanded p<0.1 threshold.

The methodology of the paper is also not great at all. They looked at changes in advertising expenditure and changes in happiness measures and then tried to correlate the two.

it’s always really jarring when I visit my parents and I’m forced to watch cable TV. It’s like being assaulted.

What can we as individuals do about it? Recognize advertising as hostile and banish it. Most of us, instead, are trying to assemble a worldview out of mismatched pieces of advertising, which is not working out very well. When we write and think, we are often thinking in units of advertising, which is a horrifying realization.

Even the fact that this discussion is being framed in terms of Happiness and Satisfaction is downstream of those qualities being centered by the consumer value system. Previous societies might have considered integrity or duty primary.

It is not advertising. It is a targeted attempt by other people to persuade you to do something for their benefit, their good. Without regard to the effects on you.

Do you remember the Marlboro Man persuading people to buy cigarettes? Many people made lots of money from owning that stock. Lots of people died. Lots of people got addicted. Lots of people suffered.

Do you remember Purdue Pharma? They made billions after persuading doctors to prescribe their drugs. They destroyed the lives of millions of Americans. Calling that "a source of dissatisfaction" is just wrong.

Targeting makes this persuasion more effective and more abhorrent.

You live your life, but targeted propaganda is designed to ensure that someone else gets the benefits. As though you were some domesticated animal.

It's population-scale digital pimping. They put your ass on the RTB street to turn tricks. You get mindfucked by--and maybe catch some viruses from--any John who wants to take a crack at you. In return, you get this nice cheap TV/YouTube/Gmail/article.

It's exploitative, dirty, exposes the bitches (i.e. you and your kids) to risks, and on a population scale it poses a serious safety and national security risk to our country. RTB bidstream surveillance means that all the data used in the pimps' matchmaking services can be used by many nefarious actors to physically track and target people, including spies, politicians, and other politically-exposed persons.

Would you let your kid turn tricks for a pimp to get a Gucci handbag? No? Then why would you let Alphabet pimp your kid out to get a YouTube video?

https://www.academia.edu/download/49742224/Social_Comparison...

Lower Life Satisfaction Related to Materialism in Children Frequently Exposed to Advertising (2012)

http://www.pattivalkenburg.nl/images/artikelen_pdf/2012_Opre...

It would at the very least reduce the amount of it and select for advertising of a higher quality, cutting the noise a little.

Newspapers & magazines drive the negative link. TV/radio/film ads show no clear effect

Making as much money as possible off consumers is considered the highest business goal. Of course that leads to developing expertise in manipulating them.

some evidence of the contrary: DTC pharmaceutical ads about Zoloft, a depression medication, cause better health outcomes

https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/695475

not merely correlation but causation. the approach used here was part of a family of approaches that won the Nobel in 2012

another good one: advertising caused increases in treatment and adherence to medicine

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37275770/

there is also a great paper that scary lawyer ads about statins CAUSE lower adherence to statins, so negative advertising causes negative outcomes. unsurprising.

i'm not saying that these two papers generalize to the whole of digital advertising. it is as difficult to generalize about global digital advertising at it is to generalize about the US defense budget - they are comparable in size (about $800b/y both) and complexity of missions. it does feel good though. i'm glad this comment will get downvoted by people who are not interested in actually discussing the merits of the paper versus their vibes.

instead you could look at it as a victory for the FDA, it has done a great job at regulating drugs (at least since 1965 when the SSA created medicare and the regulations started to matter) such that advertising them is mostly a good thing. You can extrapolate from there to say, well we should regulate what you can advertise instead of delegating it out to upvotes and downvotes on Facebook, which is really how bad and good ads are controlled.

So far there are a few known theoretical approaches to reward content-creators:

* subscriptions/paywalls

* advertising

* micro-transactions

Paywalls work if you have a high brand value with a relatively fixed audience that will accept a steady stream of content. The WSJ, NYT, etc. can command these. Even Slow Boring et al. can do that. But the majority of smaller brand value content creators face the terrible fact that brands have a Pareto property: the top few ones occupy almost all of customers' minds and then you're battling for a tiny portion of their attention. The subscription revenue is similar to a patronage model, and information in general has to be like this because replicating it is zero cost but obtaining it is high-cost. This means that you can easily be out-competed by the guy who just copies your stuff and posts it. You have to somehow convince your audience that it's worth paying for your next stuff.

Micro-transactions are the weakest model. They are infeasible and socially unacceptable because consumers expect the full range of financial protection they have on 'macro'-transactions - and that cannot come for free. This sets a floor on micro-transactions and the overhead makes that not worth it. To make it worse, a micro-transaction-based economy has the problem that you don't really incentivize the content creator. You incentivize the guy who can best capture your attention. Either SEO or submarine Word-of-Mouth or native advertising. It doesn't matter which. That guy can always undercut the creator because he's not producing the thing he's selling. It's worse for information-things like Slow Boring etc. Matt Yglesias cannot stop someone from copy-pasting his stuff.

For the vast majority of content creators, advertising is a fantastic thing. It allows this massive three-sided marketplace between consumers, content creators, and brands. It lowers the marketing effort so more creators can participate. It allows consumers to pay for content by getting things they want. It allows brands to reach consumers they want.

To be honest, I think Internet Advertising and especially the real-time bidding approach is as good as one can imagine for the vast majority of people to be able to consume all the content they want. It's led to this absolute explosion of services and information that no one could ever have imagined.

And the low barrier on running targeted ads has meant that even small indie bands can survive with a good marketing effort. Gone are the days when only the big multinationals were taste-makers. Now you have micro-audiences that smaller creators can reach and for whom it's worth them producing content for.

Honestly, it's fantastic to see. I'm a huge fan of advertising for what it's enabled. I prefer to use YouTube Premium, and I have my subscriptions, but when I didn't have as much money it was much nicer to be able to trade by allowing brands to be seen by me. So yes, there are the shady football streaming sites that will shove porno into your face, but you know the game going there. For the rest of the world, I think the websites are correctly on the frontier of value vs. annoyance.

Also, is it just me or are the results mostly statistically insignificant here? It seems like a grand claim with very weak evidence.