agreed about "best" but in terms of population it's not a "relatively small group" it's the majority.

They are all working to sell stuff - digital marketing for other companies or having ads as a core income for a site. They don't need to be devising the advertising frameworks, they just need to be thinking "how to make people click on ads".

chippy, I'll agree with you about the population (the number of people working with the LHC or Mars landers---even indirectly, as the majority of Google employees aren't working on ads---is tiny compared to say, the ad- and social-media-supported technical population of Silicon Valley), but I'm going to have to disagree with "best".

The cohort of people working on the LHC, cancer research, etc., is largely the same as the faculty of any medium sized or larger university. If you went to any research-oriented university, your professors were the ones doing that kind of research. Still impressed?

Hammerbacher said best minds of his generation. He is Gen Y. And the problems you listed require more domain expertise than most Gen Y people have today. I mean, pioneering surgery techniques? One needs to be a surgeon for a few decades before they can pioneer anything in that area.

I presumed it was a reference to employees of Facebook/Google/etc? I.e. some of the most talented engineers aspire to work for companies whose purpose is to become the dominant ad distribution network.

Most of the employees of those companies do not work on those problems. This seriously underappreciates all of the amazing products, open source work, and research that these companies have provided - and that is what the vast majority of their employees work on.

Well, agreed that they don't directly work on those problems, but as far as I'm aware, these companies make no profits from "products, open source work, and research" - it's practically all from the advertising which can be integrated with, or come as a result of, those ventures.

I'm not looking to discredit the work of talented individuals at those companies - just pointing out that the driving force behind where innovative efforts are focused by senior management is likely to be what can generate the most ad revenue.

That was my interpretation of the quote - so not a literal "they all spend most of their time thinking about ads", but "they're employed by a company whose success is driven by how many ads get clicked".

It's still a dumb quote. Discounting important projects because of where their money comes from makes no sense. For example, Google's search engine is an amazing achievement. Switching to subscriptions would not make it technically any better or more useful to its users.

I think you'd find that would make it better, because the top results would no longer be ads belonging to the highest bidders, but would actually be the most useful and relevant links.

Yes, you can avoid this by having an adblocker installed or being savvy enough to recognise what is and isn't an ad, but that doesn't apply to the majority. Just did a search now with adblock disabled, and 70% of the page is taken up by ads that look extremely similar to organic results.

Can't find the link right now, but there was a well documented case about companies who buy Google ads for things which should be provided free via the government, and slap a large processing fee on top of it. These companies end up making big yearly profits by duping people who don't know any better, and trust Google to show them relevant results, not realising that it's actually showing them the most lucrative results first.

Yeah that one might not bother you, but it's just one example... there are many more ways, some a lot more subtle, that having a primary focus of ad revenue degrades the quality of products.

They are always marked. For me, ad blindness works almost as well as an ad blocker. Of course not for everyone, or people wouldn't pay for the ads.

On the other hand, making money from ads requires attracting users at very large scale. You can see this with Facebook and Google who try to make their product universally used, to the point where they have major initiatives to make their services available in third-world countries.

A subscription-based service deliberately leaves out people who are unwilling to pay. Even if those who do pay get better service (sometimes but not always true), there is a loss of utility from serving fewer users, particularly on the low end.

"Ads or subscription-based" is a false dichotomy though. There are many other options (https://gist.github.com/ndarville/4295324) which don't require excluding those who can't pay, and don't, as the quote describes, revolve around getting people to click more ads.