Value of Working in Ads?

Jeff Kaufman 🔸

Value of Working in Ads?

Jeff Kaufman 🔸

3 min readApr 9, 2019

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Cullen 🔸

Epistemic status: highly speculative and somewhat humorous

I wonder if, for Google engineers specifically, the effect might be dominated by Alphabet investing some small portion of its ad revenue in AGI-relevant things.

kbog

Low confidence - I think the internet shouldn't run on ads. Making people pay for content ensures that the internet is providing real value rather than just clickbaiting, and the dependence on advertising creates controversies where corporations compel content hosts to engage in dubious censorship. The government can always shift tax and welfare policy to account for the additional financial burden on low income people. Yes in theory people could always create and use paid websites, but there is too much inertia, both economically (network effects) and socially (people now feel very entitled to the Internet). That being said, marginal ad work doesn't seem substantially bad or anything, salary is much more important. With any industry, if you imagine the hypothetical where all of its employees donate to EA causes, the total consequences would clearly be net positive.

Jeff Kaufman 🔸

I think the internet shouldn't run on ads. Making people pay for content ensures that the internet is providing real value rather than just clickbaiting

Before the internet you still had tabloids with shocking claims on the cover that, after you bought the paper and read it you realized the claims were overblown. If we moved away from ads the specific case of "you pay, and afterwards you realize you were baited" would still exist.

the dependence on advertising creates controversies where corporations compel content hosts to engage in dubious censorship.

The role of middlemen like Google diminishes this substantially. Since the advertisers and publishers aren't talking directly to each other we end up with censorship only on the sort of thing that advertisers generally agree on: things like "adult or mature, copyrighted, violent, or hateful content" -- AdSense policies: a beginner's guide

Yes in theory people could always create and use paid websites, but there is too much inertia, both economically (network effects) and socially (people now feel very entitled to the Internet).

I'm not convinced this isn't just "people don't want to have to pay for things, and mostly don't mind ads that much". Newspapers, magazines, and cable TV both cost money and have ads. Analog radio sticks around on an ad-funded basis and people keep listening because it's incredibly low friction.

The government can always shift tax and welfare policy to account for the additional financial burden on low income people.

Ok, but in practice the government mostly doesn't do this. Figuring out how to get it to do this would open up a *ton* of valuable policies, but we also need to make reasonable choices in the present.

Milan Griffes

cf. Gwern's Banner Ads Considered Harmful.

Holocron

This reasoning makes sense to me. I think it's difficult to measure the net impact of the global advertising industry, but that might not be relevant. Thinking counterfactually, if we assume you are purely executing a plan that others at Google created with programming skills that Google could hire other engineers to replace, the marginal impact of doing software engineering for Google Ads is essentially zero. I would be more concerned about the impact of your work if you were making high level business strategy or product decisions that could affect millions of people or the state of the ad industry and Google's role in it.

One interesting consideration is that while digital advertising might be net positive, it is net negative compared to other advertising models that could otherwise exist. For example, a hypothetical "ethical ads" business that recommends products and services that actually improve people's lives would be both profitable for advertisers and beneficial to society. The current advertising model involves things like advertising e-cigarettes to smokers and teenagers alike, which could be extremely positive for smokers to switch to to extend their lifespan but negative for teenagers to switch to. I would personally be interested in the expected value of pursing an ethical advertising venture.

Linch

Thinking counterfactually, if we assume you are purely executing a plan that others at Google created with programming skills that Google could hire other engineers to replace, the marginal impact of doing software engineering for Google Ads is essentially zero.

I don't think this is true.

1. Headcount for teams at tech companies, including Google, regularly takes 3-6 months to get filled, if not longer. So if Jeff doesn't take his job (or alternatively, if he chooses to leave now), the projects he works on gets delayed by 3-6 engineering months, as a first approximation. 3-6 months is significant in an industry where people regularly change jobs every 2-3 years.

2. There is a lot of variance in engineering productivity both in general and in Google specifically. Perhaps the prior should be that your productivity is average for your job, however.

3. Even if Jeff has no say in high-level strategy or product, there are a lot of small, subtle, design decisions that engineers make on a daily basis that makes the product more/less usable, easier-to-maintain, etc. Though again maybe you should have a neutral prior.

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