Searching for interesting essays about ads +/- internet

March 29, 2024 8:48 PM

I’m looking for interesting essays about advertising, especially but not solely in the context of the ad-supported web.

I’m teaching a college course on social issues and computing, and the curriculum my predecessor designed doesn’t talk about advertising at all, which feels like a big oversight. I can think of many pieces of writing on these ideas, but am interested in more things to think about and contemplate assigning to my students.

I’m also interested in ideas about the structure of money in tech more broadly (eg a dimly-remembered piece about how low interest rates for a decade —> lots and lots of startup funding for the gig economy as actors like the Saudi sovereign wealth fund looked for ways to make money, which I’d definitely be interested in if someone could find it!), but advertising is the main focus here. And it doesn’t have to be tech-industry related; I’m also interested in older pieces about the advent of advertising, concerns around its use, etc. Likewise would love summaries or analyses of past watershed moments in internet advertising, or anything else you think I might find interesting.

Any type of piece is fine — journalism, academic, artful, etc. Books are great too, even if only part of them is directly related to the topic.

posted by elanid to Technology (7 answers total)

First, I think it's essential to look at the role that Google's PageRank algorithm and AdWords platform played in shaping the early web. PageRank was revolutionary in using the link graph of the web to determine the importance and relevance of pages, while AdWords built on top of that to allow advertisers to bid on search keywords. Together, they created a powerful new way for websites to monetise through search traffic and contextual ads.

This was a huge boon for community sites like MetaFilter in the early days. MetaFilter's high quality content performed well in Google's search rankings, which drove significant traffic and allowed the site to thrive on AdWords revenue for many years without needing more intrusive ads or paid subscriptions. You can really see how the incentive structures created by PageRank and AdWords shaped the ecology of the independent web.

However, this also created vulnerabilities. As SEO competition grew fiercer and low-quality "content farm" sites proliferated to game the algorithms, MetaFilter and sites like it faced an uphill battle to sustain their search traffic and ad revenue. It's a poignant example of how even web communities not explicitly "about" ads can find themselves disrupted by shifts in advertising tech and markets.

All this to say, I think looking at the story of MetaFilter is a great way to ground the more abstract ideas and see the very tangible ways that advertising has shaped the modern web, for I think the worse.

I recommend he original PageRank paper by Page and Brin - a bit technical but fascinating for the history and vision it lays out.
posted by ben30 at 12:31 AM on March 30 [1 favorite]

I read The Hidden Persuaders as a small child, and it's only ever got more relevant as I've aged. It was the seed of a lifelong policy of insulating myself from advertising to the greatest extent achievable, which has allowed me to work less hard in order to retire earlier than almost all of my peers.

Wikipedia says

While the book was a top-seller among middle-class audiences, it was widely criticised by marketing researchers and advertising executives as carrying a sensationalist tone and containing unsubstantiated assertions.

That's ringing endorsement if ever I saw it.
posted by flabdablet at 1:01 AM on March 30 [1 favorite]

This essay by Maciej Ceglowski is pretty good and there's more where that came from.
posted by crocomancer at 1:49 AM on March 30

Michael Rosen (BBC Word of Mouth) has two relevant interviews
Snap Crackle and Every Little Helps - the language of food advertising, with Giles Poyner
Words for Sale! how language is an online commodity, with Dr Pip Thornton

Shaving brushes / You’ll soon see ’em / On the shelf / In some / Museum / Burma-Shave
posted by BobTheScientist at 2:49 AM on March 30

Had the great good fortune to hear Naomi Klein present her "No Logo" book back in 1999 at the Taos Film Festival. That was a real wake up to the effects of advertising.
A good foundation before heavy tech marketing assimilated the world.
posted by Mesaverdian at 12:22 PM on March 30

Best answer: Please enjoy my entire linkspam for a similar topic in a similar class. Thank you for teaching this.
posted by humbug at 1:51 PM on March 30

Response by poster: Thank you, these are great! I marked humbug’s as best answer because I’m boggled (and humbled) by the number and quality of the links there, but several of the other suggestions are really interesting and deeply topical.

ben30, do you know of any sites that lay out the history of metafilter vis-a-vis ads in detail? I’m broadly familiar with the story myself (and I think there was a particular change in the Google algorithm that really de-ranked askmefi), but I’d want a more canonical account to fall back on if teaching.
posted by elanid at 6:55 PM on April 6