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wasoxygen  ·  1297 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Social Cooling

I think we should be careful about thinking that advertising is annoying like mosquitoes, and anything we do to make life harder for mosquitoes makes life better for us, so we should similarly make advertising harder.

Advertising is mostly wasteful; probably very few purchase decisions are altered by ads. Yet advertisers have a high tolerance for this waste. If we make it harder for advertisers to find their targets, the result could be a much larger volume of less discriminate advertising.

Suppose Mazda USA wants to advertise to potential customers in North America, but 90% of the online audience is outside North America. Do you have a preference between seeing ten times as many ads versus YouTube geolocating your IP address into continental sectors? Consider that YouTube already provides faster service by caching content on a geographically nearby content delivery network.