Often I hear the argument, people saying "I prefer ads that are relevant for me over random ads". But the result of the tracking is not only that you get "relevant" ads, it's that your timelines and your feeds and your news gets tweaked in ways that makes you engage with ads as much as possible.
Not only do you get manipulated in buying stuff you didn't ask for (ads in general). You're also getting spoonfed content that tries to make you as vulnerable as possible to this manipulation. Up to a point that this is downright threatening democracy and our way of life.
I guess you could call this a form of censorship. Content gets suppressed, simply because it doesn't generate enough ad revenue. It's this type of censorship on "social" media that I consider much more harmful than the type that usually gets most of our attention.
> I prefer ads that are relevant for me over random ads
I froze up the first time someone said this to me. Of course I prefer random ads, cause this way they're less likely to push the right buttons on my vulnerable monkey-ass brain. Do people think tailored ads are good for them instead of consumerism triggers? Messed up worldview.
There are products out there that would increase my quality of life that I'm not aware of or not actively thinking about. In an ideal world ads are about informing the consumer, so absolutely ads can provide value to you as well. One of the recent life improving products I never thought about before an ad is an electric toothbrush - honestly I saw them but I considered it a silly gadget. Saw a plug in a random video, got some cheap version and was really surprised how useful it is I upgraded to a decent model. Likewise I never used an electric razor, tried Philips one blade after seeing an ad and it's also a great improvement. Point being there are products out there that would improve your life if you knew about them.
That being said I dislike tracking not because I might get manipulated - I also prefer relevant ads. I dislike the fact that they can better target vulnerable groups - like depressed people with addictive personalities and gaming - this is the majority of app stores profit, I would bet it's a huge ad% as well - mobile gaming is basically milking people with low impulse control and nothing better to do with their time. It's just like those scamming telemarketing scum targeting old people
>In an ideal world ads are about informing the consumer, so absolutely ads can provide value to you as well.
I agree with you that learning about new products can be a genuinely good thing. I don't think ads are the best way to deliver this information, though.
My wife joined a Facebook group dedicated to house cleaning, and the products the ladies have recommended (Bar Keeper's Friend, Scrub Daddy, Bissell SpotClean) have all been fantastic.
The paid ads on her Facebook are either scams, AliExpress crap sold at full price, or established brands we already know (Amazon, Big W.)
Yes, there are plenty of products out there that I would like to discover. But these are one in a hundred. I'd gladly sacrifice the few valuable ones. In fact I already do this, because I use adblockers and pi-hole as much as I possibly can.
I'm not completely against marketing. I pretty often buy things advertised in podcasts, stuff that obviously paid for product placement in specific places. But those are ads that fit the medium, usually they're very related to the topic at hand. This is not at all the case with all random bullshit that shows up on Facebook and YouTube. Those are most often than not ads full of toxic subtleties like unreasonable standards of living, body image and success.
>That being said I dislike tracking not because I might get manipulated - I also prefer relevant ads. I dislike the fact that they can better target vulnerable groups - like depressed people with addictive personalities and gaming - this is the majority of app stores profit, I would bet it's a huge ad% as well - mobile gaming is basically milking people with low impulse control and nothing better to do with their time. It's just like those scamming telemarketing scum targeting old people
It is more push pull thing.
- pull request for relavant ads, when I actively searching for something (and a search engine would be better).
- push request for ads that is random. If I see something I like I'll click it.
This is why, of all the ad based companies, I like Pinterest best. It's basically a digital magazine. You show up and say, "I'd like to see pictures of cute wicker baskets, and mid-century modern couches please!" and they deliver.
Sometimes ads bring items into your life that improve it. That’s not going to be the majority of cases though, usually ads will bring products into your life for the good of someone else, which is bad.
If you didn’t have ads, your dentist would have told you about electric toothbrushes.
Right -- but the solution here is simple, it just destroys much of the business model for the advertisers themselves:
The answer is, "advertisers, open up to all of us exactly how it all works. Tell me honestly and truthfully what it is you would like to track and what you would like to know about me, and how you intend to use it and from that I will decide what to tell you."
I’m a photographer, and I right now I’m targeting local teenagers and their moms for high school senior portrait sessions. I would think they’d rather see that, be reminded it’s time to get them done, and possibly learn about a better photographer than seeing an ad for an ice cream maker or what have you.
Not a mom, but if I want to learn about a better [photographer/plumber/mechanic/whatever] I will use the tools that list and attempt to give accurate information about businesses (yelp, angi, BBB, ?), inadequate though they may be. My brain doesn't register your ad. If it does, I'm probably less likely to consider your business, because you shoved an intrusive internet ad in my face.
Everyone says this about advertising, it's a tired narrative that has been disproven countless times in the aggregate. Advertising works. Even if you are correct about yourself (many people don't realize the subliminal impact of ads), the loss of your business is more than made up for by others.
I mostly "boost" posts to my page, for what it's worth.
Also, all three of those are worthless for photographers. We're not like a plumber where as long as the job is done right and priced well you're good. Our style is why you're hiring us, so an ad showing one of my images makes a lot of sense.
In other words you want to manipulate them into buying something they wouldn’t have if they hadn’t seen your ad. That doesn’t sound like a good thing for the person on the other side of the transaction.
This seems like an extreme way of thinking about it. Maybe they like taking/looking at/sending the pictures, but between work, summer camp, soccer lessons, making sure everyone's fed, etc, they just forgot to book a session, and seeing the ad reminds them to do it. In this light, it seems like a great thing for both sides of the transaction.
Most people (in my area) hire a photographer to take senior photos. They may hire me because they see my ad instead of someone else they already know of because they like my work better.
Or, let's say they decided to just do it on their own/have a friend do it...until they see one of my images and go "wow."
The second may be spending money when they wouldn't, but that's pretty rare. If they do it's because they decided it was worth it. The others are just being shown another option that they might not have known existed, meaning they're more informed about where they're going to spend their money.
I don't see who is getting hurt in this scenario. I get work that I need to survive and they're getting photos that they're excited about.
A common view is that both sides in an economic transaction gain some sort of benefit. Nonetheless sentiments like "all labor is exploitation" are fairly common, so I can see why that view exists, given the power disparity.
I believe your first point and disbelieve the second.
That doesn't get away from the basic fact that all advertising is an attempt at manipulation. The advertiser is trying to encourage a transaction when there wouldn't otherwise have been one. It would be pointless if this wasn't the case.
If you don't want to be manipulated at all (my preference) then it's better not to see targeted adverts.
Hmm, if manipulation means intending a change in behavior in the recipient then this is true. But by that definition many things are manipulative, like regulation / tax codes (which create behavior changes). So I'm not sure if I quite understand this idea of seeking a change in behavior being distasteful.
Maybe it's that some advertisers create the problem they're solving (e.g. body image issues, etc)? Or that it's used for commercial ends? Or that the best product recommendations typically come from friends and family so why bother having ads anyways?
Having bought some products I discovered from ads myself, I can't help but think that I have benefited from the arrangement in a similar way that both parties benefit in economic exchanges. Obviously I'd rather have had my friend tell me but that might have taken... who knows how long.
You'd be better off doing very local advertising in your area and school districts. Bus stops/billboards/etc all "target" your audience. Contact parent orgs etc, give discounts to word-of-mouth referrals.
For me when I say relevant ads, I truly mean ads that are based on the things I do, the things I buy and the interests I have. If I bought a new 4wd car, I wouldn't mind seeing ads for bull bars or tow bars because these are things I'd potentially be searching for anyway.
If I had random ads as you say (truly random), I don't want/or need to see tampon ads in my feed as a male. Which is what you might end up with. Conversely, if I just purchased a new 4WD, I don't need to see ads for a new Sedan.
If I'm going to see ads I may as well see ones that are somewhat relevant right?
Advertisements are truly that, consumerism triggers and the only way to stop that is to stop ads altogether.
Happy to discuss my thoughts, but that's my line of thought.
I don't use social media and aggressively block all ads, but my wife does so I've seen how it works. While scrolling through she sometimes she's clothing or jewellery that matches her style and will engage with them to see what's available and how much it costs. Nevertheless she hardly ever converts.
The ads themselves aren't a problem from what I've seen, rather it is the incessant stream of memes and emotive content that keeps you scrolling through the feed.
Content was a different story, until ads started showing up in the same place on the page as content. Now ads aren't something on the side you can passively ignore; they are sponsored content.
I've had numerous people say that to me over the years and I still never have a reply, because for me it's just such a mind-bogglingly foreign way of thinking. I just cannot put myself into that kind of mindset enough to actually figure it out.
Most people will be more annoyed than anything else at seeing a "random" ad, in the same way it's just more painful, for example, for a guy to sit through a 30 second women's shampoo TV commercial than a car commercial.
I'd say most people don't even realize they may or may not be triggered, they simply don't want to suffer through a completely irrelevant ad.
Random ads are effectively noise. Targeted ads occasionally are of value. If there's going to be an ad, better it be a targeted one.
I also have no problem with companies tracking for the purpose of seeing which ads work.
I do *not* like the retargeting ads--if I didn't buy the item there's a reason! Either I didn't want it or I'm waiting for a better price, neither of which you're going to solve unless you're telling me about a sale on an item.
And the biggie is how intrusive they get. I'd like to see a system where the browser sends an acceptable-ad policy, a site can either comply or refuse to serve the page.
Ads should be targeted to the content, not the recipient IMO. If you're reading about California wine in an article, advertise based on that - travel, wine, whatever.
Absolutely - And we already have this in the form of e.g. TV commercials, and, more recently, youtube sponsored segments. I vastly prefer getting ads relevant to what I'm currently looking at to something entirely different based on what The Algorithms decided I wanted to see.
But surely, there are car enthusiasts who read about cars that would never read an article about California wine, but would benefit from knowing about it.
In your world, that person misses out on the pleasures of california wine
This is an amusing example. I'd guess that car enthusiasts are aware of Sonoma for various reasons. I suspect they'd get some exposure to California wine inadvertently through that connection.
Also, retargetting ads are intrusive as they are the equivalent of a salesperson of a store following me after I left the store, asking me if I want to buy the item I looked at, when I am trying to do something else.
I have yet to see a relevant ad that is actually relevant to me. 99% of the time I just get things recommended that I either just bought or have generally no interest in. I get better results from random ads, sometimes I find interesting links in those.
> Often I hear the argument, people saying "I prefer ads that are relevant for me over random ads". But...
You don't even need your "but" (so hold on to it), because this is a classic false dichotomy anyway. Targeting does not require spying nor does spying tend to improve targeting. Basic immediate context (what you're doing, not who you are) works better for both advertisers and willing consumers than personally invasive intrusion does.
You should rather ask whether they prefer relevant ads that put them at risk by aggregating everything about their lives into databases that regularly get breached or relevant ads that don't put them at risk. They can get relevant ads either way. They've just been sold a bill of goods on the need for personal invasion to do it.
I'd have no problem telling advertisers that I am between 30-40 years old, male and live in a certain region. And that's information that would help advertisers (if they did not have it yet) very much. So just ask your users to give some information and tell them how they will use it and maybe they will give it, but don't spy on your users every secret.
But not Facebook. That ship has sailed. I can't and won't trust them.
First of all, what makes a bra only suitable if you are over 50, other than discrimination?
You can always find an example of a product that is easier to sell to a specific niche group of people. That doesn’t give the advertiser the right to know that fact about everyone. For the specific case of bras - how would you sell bras for women with large breasts if you don’t know who has large breasts? Do you think that slight inconvenience on behalf of the advertiser should give them the right to keep a database of everyone’s cup size?
> Basic immediate context (what you're doing, not who you are) works better for both advertisers and willing consumers than personally invasive intrusion does
In the early years of ads on facebook they had targeted ads in the sidebar, but the news feed was left untouched. One change that happened is that Likes started giving pages access to space in your feed. Eventually pages that I didn't explicitly like started gaining access there. After that the algorithm for ordering the feed changed (probably more than once).
I was okay with the targeted ads in the sidebar, when that's all it was. I opted not to block ads on facebook with adblock plus. I learned of all sorts of products that I probably never would have heard of had I been getting random ads, or ads intended to appeal to a wide audience. I never felt manipulated.
The tweaking of the news feed feels wrong though even without ads. Maybe it was an inevitable result of the quest for profits, but if I could go back to targeted ads the way they used to be, I would do it in a heartbeat.
The reality is that I've been fed targeted ads all my life, but the targeting wasn't was optimized. Automotive magazines are more likely to have ads for spark plugs than hair products. A cooking website is more likely to have ads for spatulas than tractors. At least, that's how it used to be. With ads fed from Google, ads are likely to be related to what I've recently searched for with their search engine. The result is often comical: I no longer see ads relevant to what I'm interested in at the time, but to what I was interested in 30 minutes ago. I'm not clicking any of those ads; I've already moved on.
> Often I hear the argument, people saying "I prefer ads that are relevant for me over random ads".
My response to that is "I prefer random ads, because relevant ads are an indication that I'm being spied on". My objection to ads isn't the ads themselves -- I'm going to ignore those no matter what -- it's all the spying the ads bring with them.
I don’t necessarily think engagement is the wrong metric, and I don’t mind some personalized tracking of that engagement to increase ad revenue.
The issue is allowing any old engagement.
I’d like to see the hacker news system scaled.
Some things that could make moderators actions go further to keep the cost down:
- outrage detection: before you hit post, you’re warned that your possibly inflammatory post will be flagged for moderation.
-timeouts: if a moderator finds outrage or outrage bait in a post, the poster gets a seven day timeout (cannot log on). ANYONE who replied to or liked the offending post gets a one day timeout.
Why would I ever do anything but lurk in such a forum? The risk/reward ratio would be so out of whack that even if I wanted to learn something, I would rather not risk a drive-by ban if who I'm talking to turned out to make the moderator mad.
I don't see a 1 day ban as much of a punishment. If there's a platform involved it could just block posting/voting for a day.
As far as incentives to lurk, I see quite the opposite. I don't comment on reddit unless I have something funny to say because outrage, point scoring and comedy is what rises to the top rather than reasoned argument.
I’m always shocked at how non-relevant the ads I see are. How many Ph.D’s at Google have dedicated their careers to targeting me more correctly, and yet: constant ads for stretchy water-wicking pants (I don’t go camping), solid brass pencil shavers (can’t remember the last time I used a pencil), and dating sites for seniors (I’m married and in my 30’s). Are these people just bad at their jobs?
Don’t get me wrong, I prefer it this way. But you’d think they’d be better at it by now.
> I guess you could call this a form of censorship. Content gets suppressed, simply because it doesn't generate enough ad revenue.
Absolutely. I've seen entire websites completely reinvent themselves because someone complained to Google about some "offensive" page and got their ads pulled. Stuff I used to like got deleted because of advertisers.
If this "sanitized advertiser friendly web" is the future, I'd rather not have a web at all.
Do people really prefer relevant ads? I just disregard them, and it doesn't matter to me whether they are relevant or off the wall.
The only ads I specifically don't like are the ones Youtube have randomly showed my wife and I. It's only happened twice to each of us, but they were a bit adult themed. Having a child in the house, I was pretty peeved.
I vastly prefer irrelevant ones. If I browse e-book readers because my coworkers were talking about them and I was curious about the current state of the art, I don't want ads to pester me into buying something I don't need. On the other hand, no amount of ads will manipulate me into buying diapers or a timeshare.
"Content gets suppressed, simply because it doesn't generate enough ad revenue."
Why is it that the only the first page of search results in a search engine "matter". (Some search engines are now showing a total of 5 (!) results. Brave's new search engine does not even have a page 2!)
Why is it that an "app store" has limited search discoverability but instead provides "Top 10" or "Top 20" lists. And more recently, "recommended apps".
Why is it that a video hosting service has "recomendations" enabled by default, recommended videos show up in search results and the top "recommended videos" always have the highest view counts.
"Tech" has no viable "business model" except advertising. (Time will tell if this "model" is actually sustainable.) This is because they are nothing more than middlemen. They do not produce content and offer nothing of value that they in fact own. Whatever they offer can be obtained directly from its true owners, provided there is motivation (e.g., avoiding payment to a middleman). If "tech" did have something of value they own, it stands to reason they would charge for it. This would provide others with the motivation to cut out the middleman. Hence, "tech" cannot charge "users" money for middleman services.
I'm curious how much manipulation people think is involved in terms of buying things you didn't want. Enough to absolve someone of their financial responsibility for buying?
> I'm curious how much manipulation people think is involved in terms of buying things you didn't want. Enough to absolve someone of their financial responsibility for buying?
Well, marketing has some famous stories where seemingly counterintuitive things resulted in more buys, eg. Actimel (not sure whether it is called the same in the US as well, but this fruity milk drink with some added vitamins) was having trouble selling at their original price, but increasing the price and thus making it appear a more luxury item did the think for them. There are many small “hacks” in the human brain that are actively exploited by marketing so while I would not say that we are not responsible for our financing, we are at the very least heavily manipulated when shopping - and also, some people are easier to manipulate than others.
I dislike being tracked as much as the next guy, but I often wonder what "our" ideal end-game goal is? By "our" I mean the typical HN crowd that understands both the technological and the economical implications of this.
If we want top-grade products to remain available without a direct monetary transaction (i.e "free"), it seems we must give something that the product providers can turn into monetary value indirectly somehow. Yet it seems we are actively against any such options: We block ads guilt-free, we rally against any attempt at collecting valuable personal information even anonymously, we consider crypto mining in the background (which is basically paying via your electricity bill) borderline malware.
I am part of this "we", and yet I ask myself, what am I willing to give as indirect payment? What other options are there?
Not that long ago someone posted this beautiful Banksy quote about it on HN:
> “People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you. You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity. Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head. You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.”
- Banksy
I’ll damn well block all shitty ads on every site.
You’re a newspaper site and want to block me for using an ad blocker? Feel free, I’ll leave your site.
You’re an advertiser who refuses to bid on ad space as too many people block the ads anyway? Please stop bidding then.
But don’t pretend that by offering your site for free and me using it for free somehow requires me to see shitty ads.
If you want my money, ask for it. If your content is worth it I’ll pay for it.
> But don’t pretend that by offering your site for free and me using it for free somehow requires me to see shitty ads.
If you want my money, ask for it. If your content is worth it I’ll pay for it.
One of my personal favorites: movie theatres.
You pay, a handsome amount of money, to see a movie, once, and if you happen to have the weird idea of not be just late enough to the movie, you get the wonderful, once in a lifetime opportunity… to get ads shoved in your face. Ads for food, ads for random stuff, and ads for other movies.
The best of both worlds, really.
Used to drive me crazy. Now I simply don’t go anymore.
I went to the theatre last weekend (first time since before the late unpleasantness) and showed up about ten minutes after the posted showtime. The attendant at the ticket booth confused asked "are you sure you don't want the next showing that one has already started". I confirmed no I wanted the one that had "started". I didn't miss any movie though just the ads.
Trailers are the kind of ad targeting that I don’t object to. Advertising movies to me right before I see a movie is:
* Relevant. You know I’m interested in movies, since I’m at one, so you don’t have to spy on me to do it. Some theaters might be spying on me, I dunno, but they don’t have to in principle.
* Not directly interfering with my original purpose. The movie hasn’t started yet. The only thing you might be showing me before the movie is, maybe, cartoon shorts? I guess that would be more fun than ads, but the ads aren’t going to give me malware or pretend to be from the FBI when they’re not, so it’s not as bad as internet ads.
* If the theater starts advertising scams, they have a brick-and-mortar address, they’re in the same legal jurisdiction as the visitors, and everyone sees the same ads, so suing them should be an option. Everybody who visited the movie saw the same set of ads, so if it’s a scam, there’s plenty of witnesses.
> If the theater starts advertising scams, they have a brick-and-mortar address, they’re in the same legal jurisdiction as the visitors, and everyone sees the same ads
That’s something else that drives me crazy with both YouTube & Twitter. The number of scams that run in their ads.
Some falsely referring to some local celebrity only to sell some dodgy pseudo-financial product. Others selling medical products that would be heavily regulated if they did anything close to what they promise, sometimes vaguely citing "medical research" and "new discoveries".
Almost as if they didn’t review them before letting them go live!
But we never hear a word about that, no.
Governments try to have all our online chats preemptively monitored to chase after pedophiles[1] (and then it’ll be terrorists, and heck, after that, why not copyright infringements while they’re at it? ie Hadopi)…
The news and our Dear Leaders keep ranting about Facebook, Google and Twitter because of how they are used to spread disinformation to further some political goals…
They also all keeps bashing Facebook & Google for supposedly causing the ruin of the news media (all of which then rants on about it whenever given a chance, mostly spouting nonsense, even those I like).
But big, supposedly (and probably wrongly) trusted platforms spreading scams at scale all over the world? That’s apparently not worth any widespread effort, fine or headline.
I keep seeing adverts for what's basically a bedsheet with £5 worth of copper wire in it sold at a ridiculous price as an "earthing mat". Not only is this shamelessly a scam, it also plugs into the mains so if they wire it badly (which as a shameless scam seems pretty likely) that's 240 V directly into your sleeping body. I've reported it as a scam so many times but nothing gets done.
If that bullshit worked you could just throw yourself in the sea for free rather than paying some pillock on Facebook. No better connection to earth than that!
But they are interrupting your original purpose! You bought a ticket for a movie starting at time X. At time X the theater is showing ads. This means at time X+length of movie you're still not done. Your schedule was delayed for the ads.
Oh, true, forgot that one; it’s even better! Some also (used to?) connect to any open wifi nearby if you forgot to give it access to yours. How thoughtful…
Pretty much the reason I scorned every single "smart tv"
My TV seriously wanted to put itself in some sort of demo mode if I didn’t connect it to wifi. That included restarting itself and redoing the settings every 30 minutes or whatever. It’s an insane ultimatum! So yeah it’s in a zone it can ping home base and nothing less. But for the 99% of people who can’t do that crap it sucks.
I am not surprised. Samsung are well known for bundling a load of crapware on Android phones to the point where every review of lightly themed Android phones screams "clean, stock interface".
I haven't had a TV in years, but if I had to get a large display for some reason I'd go for a dedicated large monitor + a set top box or some media centre appliance to actually play the media/tune in to TV. You pay a lot more (I was looking at a Dell 55" monitor for around $5k AUD, where an equivalent size TV is $1K from a name brand manufacturer), but IMHO it's worth it.
Or maybe skip straight to an LED projector, I hear those are nice.
Look into digital signage displays. They're just big dumb monitors, but tend to be cheaper than similarly-sized displays that are marketed as monitors.
Just glancing at Amazon, I see a 65-inch 4k digital signage display for under $1200 USD.
I always wanted to experiment with one of these but fortunately I managed to avoid them so far.
I wonder what would happen if you limited their bandwidth to a couple of kbps. Just enough to get the pings across but make any ad download excruciatingly slow. Or write some kind of DPI rule that drops packets to the internet above a certain size.
Blocking outright is probably an edge case these devices will detect and handle differently in the following years as more and more people will be aware of the option.
That's why I think experimenting with more advanced sabotage will pay off in the long run.
When I lived Brazil, they used to do like 1 ad (plus trailers), so it was pretty quick, and because everywhere (where I lived) had numbered seats, you could just be 5 min 'late'.
Now when I moved to Canada: no numbered seats, and 20 (yeah, TWENTY) minutes of ads + trailers. WTF is wrong with you people? I just don't go anymore
Either you get a random seat, perhaps apart from your party, perhaps miss a bit of the movie (although unlikely), and get not to watch ads.
Or you arrive on time, perhaps slightly early, get to pick where you sit, together, and get a shit ton of ads shoved down your eyes and ears for nearly half an tour, in full IMAX & DolbyVision 20.8.
Edit: Oh, and you don’t know at what time the movie actually ends, because they tell you when the ads start, and how long the movie lasts. But you have to factor in the very important ad time.
I just straight up refuse to pay for no numbered seats, specially if it's not only me and my wife. I want to go to the theatre for the experience, and having to stress if we are going to sit together/in a good spot is not what I have in mind for that
Are you upset about movie trailers? I'll be honest I haven't been to the theatres in quite a while so I don't know if they actually show ads now but back when I was younger all "ads" before a move were just trailers for upcoming films which I loved because it let me stay current with what was coming out in the future. I don't mind that at all considering I'm not spending a lot of time at home Googling upcoming movies
There still are trailers which, even though they still are unasked for advertising, don’t annoy me much (except for the occasional pseudo-horror gruesome jump-scare movie trailer now and then. Seriously, being at a showing of a movie for people over 13 doesn’t mean we want to deal with that).
But there’s also, before those, ~20 minutes of "regular" ads. Ads for M&Ms. Ads for cars. Ads for some pseudo-luxury perfumes. Ads, ads, ads… even ads for the company that places the ads in movie theatres!
"All institutions & organizations must shut the hell up. To all egregores: you do not speak unless spoken to, and I will NEVER speak to you. I do not want to hear 'thank you' from a corporation. I am a divine being : you are a construct. You have no right to speak in my holy tongue."
A complete collapse of the viability of targeted advertising would be totally fine with me.
The business models that would become viable in that reality would be a better equilibrium and the incentives would be better aligned between software companies and their users.
Highly targeted advertising disproportionately benefits the little guy. I say this as a little guy, running a small dog treat e-commerce company. Almost all of my new customer acquisition is by way of Facebook ads.
If you get rid of Facebook ads and go back to the non-targeted, TV commercial and newspaper type ads, my company might not survive. Purina, though? They'd be fine. They can afford to spend enormous amounts, and they've got a range of products that means their potential customer base is much bigger than mine.
Your local vet can affordably reach pet owners in their area with targeted advertising. If it goes away, that will hurt them and greatly benefit VCA (huge, nationwide chain of vet hospitals).
You're right in the sense that my business model would become inviable, but the result is that you're going to concentrate power even more heavily among the largest corporations. Is that really a good thing?
The cancer of targted advertising has only been with us for like 20 years. Small companies have existed way before that. Blaming people who want to protect those who don't even know what a server or a company is from their data being harvested because you can't sell them dog food is just ridiculous.
That being said, if you are concerned about monopolies, there are better ways to fight them. Unfortunately they have been neglected in the last few decades. Perhaps channeling your money/influence towards that instead of ads would be better for everyone.
To channel my money towards anything I have to make money. To make money I have to sell things to customers.
The world prior to 20 years ago was a very different one in terms of the scale and reach companies could achieve. Pretending as though the situation now is comparable is just naive on your part.
And honestly, the drama of calling it a cancer is just silly and dramatic. If you think this is all so terrible, go live in a commune instead of posting on a message board that is run by an organization that is deeply connected to big tech and all the things you're complaining about. I guess you probably can't see that connection all the way up there on your high horse, though.
>To channel my money towards anything I have to make money. To make money I have to sell things to customers.
Nobody said you should stop in this instant. I was criticizing how your approach to fighting your competitors inadvertently does a lot of damage to people that don't know any better.
>And honestly, the drama of calling it a cancer is just silly and dramatic. If you think this is all so terrible, go live in a commune instead of posting on a message board that is run by an organization that is deeply connected to big tech and all the things you're complaining about. I guess you probably can't see that connection all the way up there on your high horse, though.
This argument is basically the "yet you live in a society, curious" meme[0]. I work also work in tech(as an industrial automation contractor to be precise) so I enjoy the technical aspect of the conversations here. That being said I set a goal 5 years ago to not give SV gigacorps a single cent either directly or indirectly. It helps me keep a clean conscience in arguments like this.
Make no mistake I'm no leftie. I just find the direction the online world is heading deeply concerning. Social cooling[1] and all that. The fact that your means of making money is caught in this crossfire is not what I'm aiming for.
It’s nice that Facebooks enables you to reach customers and make your businesses viable and profitable.
Doesn’t mean that Facebook isn’t a cancer on society, enabling a skyrocketing in polarization, setting groups up against each other against their best interests, giving megaphones to the most vile humans turds imaginable etc.
The nice and civil “Mount Pleasant baseball league” Facebook page that your ads run on and that make your business profitable are at best an unintended side effect of that.
I think you’re being unfairly downvoted and your point is valid. It’s the strongest argument in favor of targeting and I think it’s also true - it gives big advantages to smaller players so I concede all of that.
I think on net the problems targeting creates are worse than the small business benefits, but that’s an easy position for me to hold because I don’t run a small business.
I also think in a world where advertising models are not really viable for supporting software companies (or media) - you get better models that have a better outcome for the group. Things like Substack.
I’d imagine in that world there’s still room for your company to succeed, but the model is probably different. Maybe niche community sites where people review high quality dog food? Someone from your company could be part of those communities in a genuine way. There’d still be advantages for little companies - it’s just hard for people to model what that kind of world would look like.
So I both agree with you that targeted advertising today helps the little guy, but I disagree that a world where that model isn’t viable is one where the little guy can’t exist.
Comments like the sister reply to mine don’t help because they make it seem like I don’t care about the trade offs - I do, I just think they’d be different and the costs today are pretty bad.
So just because someone’s poor it’s ok that Facebook treats them like a chump (invade their privacy and show them dumb ads), because they offer their product for free?
Facebook doesn’t give a rats ass about equity. If they did they’d copy a model like Apple’s App Store: as developer you pick a price tier for your app or subscription. That same tier translates into for example €2,99 per month in Europe, but the equivalent of €0,25 in less privileged markets. So the luckier people of the world subsidize the less fortunate, as it should be.
I think it’s worth pointing out that ad blockers only became popular because ads came to be so badly behaved.
The earliest iterations of banner ads weren’t that bad. They were basically print ads with some low-key animations added at worst, and many weren’t even graphical.
But then arose an arms race to create the most attention-grabbing, obnoxious ads possible, and ad supported pages quickly became neon disco raves that sucked up CPU cycles and sometimes even hijacked users’ browsers. This was the first tipping point.
And then ads became ever more invasive, fingerprinting users in any way possible. This was the second tipping point.
Had web ads stayed lightly-enhanced, unscripted print ads, I doubt anybody would care to install an ad blocker, but here we are today where doing so is practically essential not just from a privacy standpoint, but also from a security standpoint (since ads can exploit 0days).
So the industry largely brought this upon itself, at least in my eyes.
This is prisonner's dilemma / tragedy of the commons. The best-performing ads made more money, anyone who didn't grab attention enough would be strongly pushed towards grabbing more attention by industry norms. It was rational for every individual to grab more attention, but it was bad for the group.
Who's gonna ban? I'm cynical but if it's the ad network, then other ad networks will not ban that behavior and in turn outcompete the one that did. If it's the government (somewhere), there's a high probability the implementation of it will either be unenforceable (slap on the wrist for players making crazy money) or poorly implemented to the point of being counterproductive (can even happen if different governments have contradictory frameworks).
Google is now blocking ads for all Chrome users for sites that have shown ads that are considered bad.
Of course there's a bunch of companies doing rules lawyering to squeak by and they haven't been adding new bad experiences like they should. It does seem like something an online petition would help with though, as the non-CMA members of the coalition would then have more data to throw around about how users view these annoying ad experiences.
The first banner ads were certainly less annoying; but since I definitely remember my reaction to seeing Canter+Siegel posts... I'd still say online advertising has always been relatively obnoxious.
I personally tend to think your framing is letting the publishers sneak a bit out of frame, though. Publisher in this context refers to an entity that has a site or app that attracts eyeballs into which ads may be emitted.
Once upon a time, as you're mentioning, sites had only a few rectangles and skyscrapers that they had to sell themselves. By and large any site capable of bringing in real money had to hire ad sales folks to sell those slots (yes, to real ad agencies!). Some others would join consortiums to split the cost of ad sales folks, etc.
Those publishers needed to hire programmers in addition to those ad sales folks to develop targeting tools in order to make better pitches to the ad agencies. This was similar to how "old media" (newspapers, radio, and television companies) used to do it: you had to create spaces for ads (commercial==ad slot), go out and find people who wanted to buy those slots, and then rent them your ad space (and, of course, the eyeballs associated them).
All of that costs effort and money... plus ad agencies are also expensive so only "reputable" brands had ad budgets that could move the needle. This meant the publisher's content had to be something a reputable company would want to be associated with. That's even more costs for the publisher; i.e. not just hiring programmers and sales folks, but editors and actual journalists, etc.
Your incentive in this game is to produce content which can attract reputable merchants by having an audience that those deep pocketed merchants want to reach. Or, otherwise, to become so popular and well read that the advertisers would naturally want to pay you.
---
So, what changed?
Even with ace ad sales folks most publishers couldn't actually sell all of their available slots (side note: anyone seen a real house ad in the last few years!)
What if a company offered to pay you for all of your unused slots?
You're not going to get a huge contract like a run-of-site takeover campaign, and in fact you no longer have any relationship with the advertiser at all, just with the remnant ad broker.
But they will toss you a few pennies every time you can scrounge together 1000 eyeballs. Kind of like pull tabs or collecting aluminum cans, it's now a volume game.
But, consider what became of the incentives for the publisher: you no longer have to get great or respectable content or become super popular so "respectable" merchants will pay you... you can just focus on the numerator now: eyeballs == money.
In fact, with that incentive system you might start shoving modal dialogs and interstitials and just plain adding ad slots everywhere! If you can sell the same eyeball a dozen times instead of once that's even more money! So... ad slots took over the web, and you suddenly had to scroll a lot more.
Note that I haven't once talked about the content of the advertisements themselves just how inexorably the dynamics of this market lead to more obnoxious webpages and apps into which those ads (good or bad) would appear.
---
What about the remnant merchants? Well, they hired sales people and programmers. And then they consolidated, and merged, and consolidated some more.
And they'd built software to schedule campaigns and produce the targeting reports for publishers and ad agencies to do remnant! Plus ad agencies preferred not having to deal with 1,000 websites if they could just work with a few brokers.
The BMWs, PepsiCo's, Unilevers were all still hiring ad agencies to design campaigns; but now everyone worked with the ad brokers.
But for the publishers,not only do you not hire programmers and ad sales folks, you don't really need editors or to pay your "journalists" much... You might even just pay your "content creators" based on how many eyeballs their arti^h^h^h^hlist-icle brings in. The publishers could become brokers of eyeballs too!
If you're keeping score we're now in the rapid descent phase... tragically you've no longer got a newspaper or an essayist or a journalist or whatever... just a bunch of dealers trying to sell eyeballs.
Of course kutsunesoba's right that the advertisers (folks with ads looking for eyeballs) were also complicit, though. They quickly realized they were competing with 10 other ads appearing on the same and this meant almost instant neon-disco-ball obnoxious ads!
But, from my perspective, in addition to the scuzzy advertisers, and those scummy ad brokers, all this time swimming right alongside them were the publishers.
And this whole article is about one of them (being upset with Apple).
Your post inspires me to look at it from a real-world analogy. If I imagine that online ads are the same as offline ads, I start to think about what offline ad tracking would look like. I imagine cameras being on the streets to watch me walk down the street, following me to different stores to see what I buy, with whom I meet, and other activities to inform which billboards/street advertisements should exist. I think about ads being not just on billboards and bus stands, but on the sidewalk, on every skyscraper, or even more functionally annoying, having to physically remove an ad to open a door to a building, or going halfway up the stairs to be hit with a physical ad that drops from the sky and stops me from entering unless I swipe my ID card.
I could go on and yet I think some points start to emerge. I'm OK with ads, I don't like the pervasive tracking. I'm OK with ads, I don't like them interrupting the functionality. I actually even like ads when I have some control over them, not them controlling me. Give me more options to choose which types of ads I want to see (not only don't want to see), don't track me to try to guess/manipulate which ones I want to see.
Lastly, I think in physical real estate, there are laws about who can advertise, where, and when, and I think in digital real estate, there don't seem to be those regulations and advertisements and ad-tracking creep more and more. While advertisements seem to be one of the best ways to grow income (i.e., more people viewing/more accurate audience = higher ad price), I think an ad does have a ceiling price and then once it hits it, companies start to make more ads, more intrusive ones, and more tracking ones.
I think more than anything, I want more agency over the process, and right now, my options for agency are often do nothing, avoid the site completely, constantly click on ads to say "I don't want to see ads like this" and end up seeing more ads tangentially like it, install an ad-blocker, or one of many other almost guerrilla-like tactics to gain some semblance of agency.
Performing the same though-exercise, I find myself with a different conclusion; I despise physical advertising. I hate driving down the high-way and seeing a massive billboard for who-even-cares interrupting the fields and forests. I don't want to have products pushed at me while walking around downtown. São Paulo removed all billboards/branding/advertising with their Clean City Law [0] in 2007 and the difference before and after is massive. It immediately looked so much more clean and beautiful (at least for the parts of the city they photographed, probably some selection bias here). Assuming that billboards and advertising are somehow putting money into the government's pockets, I would gladly raise my taxes to eradicate public advertising permanently.
Bringing the analogy back to digital advertising, I'd be happy to pay some sort of monthly fee to "The Internet" to receive access to it and never see an ad or be tracked again, perhaps similar to what Coil [1] is attempting, but somehow at full-internet scale.
Naturally, how this could be implemented is far beyond me, as are the economics behind advertising, so I suppose I'm doing little more than wistful thinking.
If I had to compromise, I would agree that more agency and less intrusive ads and tracking are a start.
> São Paulo removed all billboards/branding/advertising with their Clean City Law [0] in 2007 and the difference before and after is massive. It immediately looked so much more clean and beautiful...
Reminds me of how one day, I think in SF, I was trying to go around without reading things and just realized there are so many things shouting at me with words, especially billboards and other forms of public advertising. I would love to even have a city here in the US experiment with something like this.
> I would gladly raise my taxes to eradicate public advertising permanently
I would, too, especially as a consumer, and yet, as a producer, I wonder how annoyed I would be without ads. Maybe there's a balance, and I believe needs to be have more consumer voice, and less producer voice.
> Naturally, how this could be implemented is far beyond me, as are the economics behind advertising, so I suppose I'm doing little more than wistful thinking.
Lol, me too. I guess it comes down to how much does advertising actually work and if advertising disappeared, what downstream impacts would it have on the economy (and would those be "bad")?
I think part of the reason I'd like to go into public office is to run these experiments and also I feel sad that more public offices don't seem to run that many experiments :-)
> Reminds me of how one day, I think in SF, I was trying to go around without reading things and just realized there are so many things shouting at me with words, especially billboards and other forms of public advertising. I would love to even have a city here in the US experiment with something like this.
I'm in the exact same position, I'd love to see a large-scale experiment to determine the economic and psychological impact of removing public advertising, or at least reducing it to a more "comfortable" level, whatever that may be. The Canadian government experimented a bit with universal basic income in the 70s, and more again recently with COVID, so perhaps they'd be willing to give this a shot as well.
> I would, too, especially as a consumer, and yet, as a producer, I wonder how annoyed I would be without ads. Maybe there's a balance, and I believe needs to be have more consumer voice, and less producer voice.
Another concern/shortcoming I forgot to address above is what companies will do to get their products out there; will advertising take a more subtle, perverse tone if they're not allowed billboards and banner ads? Perhaps a middle-ground will stop a more covert extreme from appearing. Perhaps I'm falling for the middle ground fallacy.
I agree totally. There's not that much physical world advertising in my part of Europe (e.g. almost no road side banners at all), but I still despise how we've sold bus stops and metro walls to the highest bidder. Public space should be advertisement-free as you can't opt out of it.
Private spaces like inside shopping malls is fine for me.
I like that distinction between public and private spaces. And I think those rules exist in many places (at least in the US) but maybe not as strict as you may be desiring. I'm pretty sure my town has restrictions on how tall/big billboards can be, and I know they used to have restrictions about how tall the McDonald's or other restaurant signs could be.
I like the idea that inside a private building is opt-in/consent, whereas outside of it is not.
Parroting jimkleiber, I like the distinction between advertising in public and private spaces, although I suppose it would be a matter of being adamant that anywhere that isn't in a private building, isn't private space.
> There's not that much physical world advertising in my part of Europe (e.g. almost no road side banners at all), but I still despise how we've sold bus stops and metro walls to the highest bidder
I lived in Germany for a few months and was shocked to see advertisements for cigarettes on the sides of the local buses. I suppose this will be changing in 2022, so a good first step [0].
Totally agree. To that end, I'd like to propose a new inverse model for advertising in America where every consumer gets to sell airtime on their eyeballs. Each time an advertiser wants to promote something to me, I get to charge them a fee — aprice that's set by me. Henceforth, every advertiser who wants to stick their ad in my face must pay for the privilege to do so.
Now that Near Field Comm has arrived and active invasive advertising soon is likely follow us everywhere we go, it's time we consumers reasserted ourselves and took back control of our eyeballs.
Absolutely agree with this. Both from a consumer perspective and as a website owner I'd prefer to have ads that are simply intended to appeal to the expected audience for that site/content, as you would expect for offline ads. Unfortunately it doesn't tend to be a good use of time for small to medium operators to curate their own ads directly, so in order to get there we need major ad networks to support this, and, critically, advertisers on those platforms to see value in contextual ads vs precise targeting and tracking.
I do think that value is there though. Some of our best marketing for AutoTempest has been through youtube sponsorships where we find creators and videos relating to cars and car buying, and work with with the creator to include a pitch for our service in exchange for (usually) a flat fee. It's dead simple for both sides, and as long as what you're advertising is legitimately useful and you're transparent about the relationship, the response from viewers tends to be very positive. I suppose it could be trickier if your product had a very niche audience, but I would think these days there are corners of the web targeting every niche, so you just need to find where your potential customers hang out, and go there, rather than trying to target them wherever they might be.
Some of that 'offline' pervasive tracking you describe does exist!
Not on the scale of the internet and you give some good examples that are egregious. a lot of it is just 'adtech' bs, but it's there.
and the traditional in-store transaction data marketplace is huge. Companies have been tracking you and your purchases around forever.
passive bluetooth IDs track you in store - though didn't iOS mitigate that by changing them frequently? idk maybe not.
There are some 'eye tracking' billboard tech but it's kind of dumb imho. The simpler is just trying to estimate impressions.
though maybe that's more digital ads than not. but collecting, selling, aggregating consumer data, combining it with purchase data, and using that for direct marketing ha been around for ages.
I suspect that in the early days of internet advertising casino/poker/porn was much more common because they were the ones willing to take a risk on advertising in the new media. Over time other more mainstream industries joined in.
I don't agree about the good intentions. The tracking is a means to an end. People are tracked to measure engagement and to target ads, both of which have the purpose of increasing the value of the advertising to the benefit of the ad networks. They don't care if you get relevant ads. They care that they can charge more for your eyeballs because they can classify you as "male, 19-29, in USA, interested in technology, art, exercise" and sell you as part of a package to companies wanting to target that market.
Yes, no one at the advertising agency is going "let's make sure each person gets relevant ads." They are saying, "let's make sure we can charge more by assuring the buyer that their ad went to the demographic they asked us to show it to."
They need to track so that they can "prove" they did what they sold.
Of course is about money. The world is based on money. Advertising has existed for years, but it is only now being able to target with more precision. I know this might be an unpopular opinion here in HN, but I really don't see the problem with target advertising.
For me, I don't seem to care much if it's a company trying to sell me a refrigerator, but when a company/org is trying to sell me an idea that a group of people is evil and out to get me and all my problems will be fixed if I vote for X or distance myself from my "evil" friends and family, etc., then I start to worry more.
The challenge with having access to that much information is that it can be very powerful and a very lopsided/asymmetric power. I remember when Facebook had Open Graph Search-when any user on the platform could perform complex searches of their friends, friends of friends, and more. It was so powerful at times it freaked me out how powerful it was. I could search for friends of friends who are women who live in San Francisco who speak Spanish who are single and who like Dave Matthews and it would give me a list. Facebook shut it down a few years ago, but I imagine something similar still exists on the advertising side of things (side note, there was someone a few years ago that used the advertiser tools to send ads specifically to his one friend as a prank). So for me, why should some groups have access to this information and others not? Who gets to control who has so much info?
Again, the info itself is not necessarily the problem I see, it's the asymmetry and how those people use the asymmetric info they have on me, which can be to powerfully help me or hurt me or maybe even ignore me.
physically remove an ad to open a door to a building
"Oh, that's where it is. I couldn't find the product because the ad was in the way." Grocery store standalone displays partially blocking aisles and shelves are a pain during busy periods. You get cart jams.
I'm in the same boat as you and I don't have a solution but I would say that I'd be fine if the web were far, far smaller. Most content on the web is trash. The information density of most YouTube videos is so low that it would be quicker to read a concise text article on the topic if such a thing existed (it usually doesn't). Gone are the days (perhaps before 2007 or so) when most blogs were labours of love; now they're mostly clickbait to show ads and affiliate links. Maybe a partial solution to paying for it all is to reduce the amount of content being pumped around the internet in the first place.
As a side point, many labour-of-love websites start to monetise to sustain the hosting costs. But some of the best blogs I read are flat HTML. The running costs of such websites must be negligible for all but the most heavily trafficked blogs. When my blog got hit by hundreds of views per second over the course of a few hours via reddit, Apache on a Core 2 Duo barely broke a sweat because it was flat HTML. With modern CSS websites can look fantastic with minimal assets and bandwidth. I'm happy to pay €20/month for such a server myself, and donate my content to whoever wishes to read it.
> it would be quicker to read a concise text article on the topic if such a thing existed (it usually doesn't)
Often it does, but Google pushes youtube videos to the top of the search results. The same Google that earns money from ads shown along those videos of course.
I think people have shown to be willing to give direct payment. Twitch subscriptions, Patreon, Kickstarter, even OnlyFans. People will invest in the people and the projects they like.
I don't want anything that's advertising supported. Anything. There is no media I want to consume so badly that I'll tolerate ads to watch it. There's no product so interesting I'll view ads to use it. No website contains information I need that badly.
People keep saying that without ads we'll have to pay for things. Fine. Sure. Set up a Patreon. I give money on Github to a few projects I rely on to make sure their maintainers don't get day jobs. I couldn't afford to pay a programmer's salary, but I can afford to pay a small percentage of one.
I think the problem has actually been the donation button itself. You want $1 a month out of me that's a pretty easy sell. You want me to sign up for your website and give you my credit card information and you're SOL. I tried to donate to VoiceMeeter a few months back because it's so good. They only accept $20 donations, no more no less, and their payment system wasn't working.
On the one hand I want something like a "Donation Feed" similar to an RSS feed.
Something that I can put money into, set rules for, and over a period of time dispense cents/fractions of a bitcoin/whatever as per rules.
The rules - and default rules in particular! - would be important.
Maybe you like the author so much you donate on the regular just anyway.
Maybe a plugin in my browser can see when I visit a site and automatically donate. If I don't visit the site, it doesn't pay.
Maybe you donate 0.1 of a cent to ANY website that has no ads or doesn't trigger your adblocker. $1 buys you 1000 such visits.
Then a RSS-like "Donation" button would be meaningful for longer term income, without all the hassle of Patreon etc.
OTOH, I worry that sites would then start watching such transactions and try setting floor limits for how much you need to donate before they serve you.
Give me the web from 1997, but just with a little more. Mostly ad-free, text, tables, webpages measured in kilobytes. It was self-supporting and didn't require megabit connections. It had chatrooms and forums and craptons of technical documentation. It was a maker's place, a hobbyist place, and a place where Mom&Pop shops could have national or global reach. There were oodles of online stores. It was considered rude to track visitors, and cookies weren't even a thing. Amazon and eBay were already a thing.
The small additions I might enjoy might be some flash games, Wikipedia, and blogs; these were early 2000s IIRC. I would actually draw the line at Youtube. It's great and all, but it could as well not be the web, but a dedicated native app for all I care, but give me the old YouTube at its very first breakeven point[1].
We pretend like the current multi-hundred billion dollar Crapshow Creeper Web full of carnival barkers hounding you every second is absolutely necessary, and it's not. What fucked up the Web was money--way too much of it. We're in a denial phase with the Web bubble desperately pumped up with steroids to support multiple 800 pound gorilla/leeches that provide little value other than "scale" (or some shit).
[1] (and Google will never publicly say when that was, but definitely before 2010--it's just that the stupid growthism mindset required absurd revenue growth to keep up with stockholder and executive greed).
> By "our" I mean the typical HN crowd that understands both the technological and the economical implications of this.
If we did really understand the implications of the society we live in, we would not stop at selecting "don't track me" on a phone.
We're living through a major extinction, we know that the next century is going to be a bloodbath, we know this crisis has been brought to us by productivism, and we're discussing whether it's fair to ignore calls for more consumerism on our phones.
1. I want more honesty and transparency in products and services. I'm tired of being sold something to "Connect with friends and the world around you" that are actually just a front to collect as much information about me as possible to for advertisers.
I'm not even opposed to targeted ads, but at this point have to assume that if a product is capable of collecting ever bit of data it can and selling it, it will. Even privacy policies and user agreements are meaningless because they all contain text of the effect that the provider can change the terms at any time.
I just want companies to be honest about what they are actually doing and what the cost to me really is.
2. I want ads to back the hell off.
I don't mean they need to go away entirely. There are times when I _want_ to learn about different products and find new things to solve problems I have.
But I'm tired of them them pushing to get as in my face as possible, of them beating me over the head with problems I don't have, and of them trying to manipulate me into giving them money instead of helping me find things that will actually help me.
It's as if product discovery isn't profitable; like companies are afraid to be honest about their products. So instead of making better products, they entire market just makes different colored cheap boxes with nothing inside and uses ads to manipulate as many people into buying them before they figure it out.
I block ads guilt free because at this point I honestly don't feel like I can trust any company that participates in this racket.
Personally though, I'm might just be willing to give up on products that depend on ad revenue. While I admit I do use some services based on ad-tech, I'm pretty quick to leave any site that complains about my ad-blocker and don't really feel like I'm missing anything. I could probably be convinced to leave most these other services behind if they started making a worse experience of it.
>> If we want top-grade products to remain available without a direct monetary transaction (i.e "free"), it seems we must give something that the product providers can turn into monetary value indirectly somehow.
For the sake of argument, lets assume FaceBook is a top-grade product that people currently don't pay for with money. It exists because advertisers pay FB. The targeting of ads to individual users allegedly results in a high CTR or whatever. Without targeting, FaceBook can still sell ads but they will be less targeted, and presumably have a lower CTR. That means they will be less valuable than other forms of ads and the ad spend will be adjusted accordingly. That seems bad for our "free" service. OTOH if we stop targeting in all areas, there will be no medium that is "better" to put ads and so the spend will likely move in proportion to where peoples eyeballs and ears are, as things used to be. That might actually result in more ad spending in areas like radio, TV, and any other medium that never gained the ability to target specific people.
Without targeting we will just see mediocre, if not shitty, all-terrain ads, like those on TV. Men will see ads of women products and vice versa.
Internet advertising will become the home ground of big companies, which don't mind spending tons of cash for widest possible audience reach. Small business will be effectively cut out of online ads, except search engines with their keywords targeting.
The original AdSense was able to target pretty narrowly by matching adverts to the content, not to the user. The same thing seems like it would work for Facebook and YouTube.
I don't really even mind if Facebook is targeting ads to me based on the stuff that I do on Facebook. It's when Facebook, and Google, Amazon, whoever, start reaching their tentacles into other spaces where I can't get away from them or don't give them consent that I have a problem.
>I am part of this "we", and yet I ask myself, what am I willing to give as indirect payment? What other options are there?
I would like to see us move to direct payments. If direct payments were the norm, the web would be less polluted with UX anti-patterns and other crap.
There's nothing particularly extreme about this idea. We pay for all our products and services in the physical world. We pay for streaming music and video. Heck, even in social networking, people pay/paid to use WhatsApp, iMessage and BBM, which are/were two of the largest messaging platforms (BBM and WhatsApp had monthly fees and iMessage is paid for with device purchases).
If your social media platform cannot convince people to pay, say, $1.99/month, perhaps it just isn't enriching the lives of your end users, and thus shouldn't exist. A lot of people (particularly those focused on growth hacking) would say this is a flaw of direct payments, but I view it as a feature.
I would honestly have paid Facebook a monthly sub long ago if they had asked, but they've grown to such a creepy state that I've lost interest in giving them any money. I refuse to buy the Occulus because of the creepy lock-in they're attempting. They've also worked hard to merge IG and FB, they're just waiting for the right moment to do it. It's really telling when if one of their services has an outage, the rest do as well.
The average HNer has absolutely no clue the economic impact derived from invasive privacy tracking and the not-so-secretive data industry. It's absolutely massive across finance, consumer-facing-anything, insurance, and government.
One particularly good journalist covering the topic is Joseph Cox [1]. Follow his work and you'll start to get a tiny sense of how massive we're talking.
Perhaps the answer is a lot of these services are less vital and desired as their MAU figures lead everyone to believe.
If someone really wants or needs something, they'll find a way to pay for it (directly or indirectly) if access cannot be had any other way. Everything else is "nice to have" until the cost or friction gets a little higher than zero.
The fact that people are increasingly unwilling to "pay for" things like FB seems to suggest these services are not actually _that_ vital despite their high usage figures.
nobody pays (directly) for Google search but surely most would agree search engines are vital. clearly the advertising business model has enabled certain products in a way that direct purchases could not; to reject the model wholesale seems like luddite conservatism
Not what I'm implying. Google has kept the friction & effort minimal (by it's very nature, their search engine advertising is a lot less creepy & personally invasive than FBs). The utility of google search is also high enough that I'm quite sure a decent chunk of people would pay a small monthly sub for it if needed (or offered as an alternative option).
I think the answer is going to be a form of micropayments.
The system we have now is micropayments. Personal data has economic value and we pay with that.
The engineering problem is to figure out how to make the payment system less indirect so that companies can't rent seek by extracting more data (payments) for the same service.
Switch back to content based ads, which is what we had prior to the internet. If you have a car related product, advertise on car related websites. Don't try to advertise to a car person visiting a Jazz music site.
I think going back to content based advertising will greatly improve the quality of content on the internet.
The way it works now, the most valuable content is the cheapest content that can get valuable eyes to look at it, which leads to clickbait and low effort content.
If advertisers can only make ad decisions based on the content, quality content will be more valuable.
It’s undeniable, though, that such a limitation would shut off access for people who can’t afford it. You see it today with newspaper paywalls and the like.
I suspect the vast majority of us in HN would have no problem paying for most of these services but I’m not sure how I feel about us making those choices on behalf of those that can’t.
This argument just shows how blind people have become to the possibilities. It's not either/or. There should be at the very least an option to pay and not be tracked. Most services offer no such option.
why should there be an option? is there some kind of moral imperative?
At the market there is one way to buy, I don't get to ask for alternatives to paying upfront. This (for lack of a better term) entitlement really puzzles me. In the physical world, if I don't like the terms, I leave and don't do business. But on the internet, when people don't like the terms they flout the rules and consume anyway.
edit: I think it would be ideal to have multiple options, I would rather pay directly myself than paying by watching ads. I just have a problem with justifying refusing to pay in the way the business wants, yet still consuming their content.
If its vital enough that everyone must have access, then it should be considered a public utility like water, or something the government should subsidize like food stamps. I'd be happy for my tax dollars to go towards a well-moderated social media platform that everyone can access and by design doesn't do shit like optimize "engagement" or whatever monetizing nonsense current platforms do to try and make a buck.
If you wan't social support nets, get your government to create social support nets. Using "but think of the poor" as an excuse for an industry that is designed to get you to part with as much of your money as they can is absurd.
If its an important service it could be subsidized. You can get past newspaper paywalls with a library card in most cases, people are just lazy and prefer to spend the 20 seconds it takes writing a comment complaining about a paywall rather than the two minutes it takes to find out your library covers these newspapers.
Not entirely, historically newspapers had both ads and a sale price. That price was subsidised by ads.
But you’re right that it’s not so clear. Maybe a more straightforward example is broadcast TV: ABC, NBC and the like. Free at delivery, paid for by ads.
I pay for a bunch of services (Caltopo for topographic maps, bazqux for RSS feeds, google drive for storage space, streaming services, Garmin inReach for satcom). The ones that I don't pay for, I probably wouldn't pay for if they changed models and wouldn't be terribly upset if they went away (Strava, Instagram, Facebook). Some I would miss and might pay for in some form or another (Reddit).
The other option of "what you can give" is "give up using the service". That is, if you don't want ads, if you don't want to be tracked, and you don't want to mine crypto, the remaining option is to not use the service. If you insist on none of the first three, the service providers will eventually force the fourth option on you.
Or, as continuational said, you will have to pay for it.
The option to walk away if you don't like it is an illusion. Facebook and Google can get an incredible amount of data on you just by tracking your friends. Communications logs, location data, calendar information, and more. The mere existence of the model also funds the continued development of mass surveillance capabilities. I don't see the will to make it happen, anywhere, but the only way out of the current situation is total abolition.
They also track and profile you across the web. Even if you have no account with them, you still get assigned an advertising ID. Everywhere you see a "Share on Facebook" button? Yeah, that button tracks you even if you never click it, and that's just one of zillions of sneaky ways you're still tracked and profiled by the modern advertising industry.
It would be good to list what features are really of value to us that are funded by ads.
For me, I pay for email and web hosting. The only big thing I rely on is news, I believe. And Internet search.
Youtube is mostly useless except when I'm trying to repair stuff at home. Almost everything else falls into the category of "entertainment", for which there are plenty of alternatives that don't involve ads. If there is one thing there is no shortage of in this country, it's entertainment.
Most of the (non-news) articles I read online really don't add much to my life, and there were plenty of choices pre-Internet (e.g. magazine subscriptions).
I'm happy to get ad-subsidized stuff like they did in the old days (news + magazines) because although it was annoying, it was not invasive.
So apart from Internet search, I'm having trouble finding anything that is (invasive) ad supported that benefits my life. If most of these things will go away, I will happily revert to the old ways. I'm definitely not happier now because of ad supported services.
> I am part of this "we", and yet I ask myself, what am I willing to give as indirect payment? What other options are there?
I am perfectly willing to see ads as an indirect payment for free services. Show me some ads with tasteful photography, good art, or a nice pun. I might even click on them and buy something! This is not new, we have been doing this for centuries.
What we currently have are hardly good ads in any way, shape, or form. They rely upon invasive tracking to show you lazy creepy notifications like “Oh you live in 123 Evergreen St. and bought a toaster recently? Here are ads for five other toasters!". Ugh, no thanks.
Advertising is fine. Getting rid of invasive personal tracking will allow the creativity and art to come back into advertising.
> If we want top-grade products to remain available without a direct monetary transaction
Fantasy world. These products do not exist, as far as I'm aware. The reality is trash products. I couldn't care less if all that trash just vanishes from the internet.
> If we want top-grade products to remain available without a direct monetary transaction (i.e "free"),
Is Facebook a "higher-grade" social networking product than other free ones that exist without the same monetization of personal data, or than other free ones that could exist without the same monetization of personal data if such monetization of personal data was considered unacceptable? I don't doubt that Facebook delivers more value to shareholders than if they were not able to monetize personal data to the same extent, but I see no reason to believe that they or their competitors would be less of a "top-grade product."
Do we have any proof that regular, old non-tracking ads could not sustain a top website? I’ve heard stories that websites can actually earn more by excluding all the ad tech middlemen from the equation.
How about ads without surveillance? Sure, they are paying less, but how much? 2 times? 10 times? 50 times?
Does this change if nobody is allowed to do surveillance? I.e. if privacy-respecting ads are not competing with more intrusive ads, does the price change?
I think discussing options is a waste of time if we don't have any data to base our decisions on.
I think most HN users will agree that the good stuff costs money. So the question is really who pays, and how.
For me the ideal end-game is ability to get what I want through a direct pay-as-you-go transaction. In the ideal world this transaction is explicit, instant, anonymous, nearly zero overhead and non-recurring. Explicit, because as a consumer I want to be able to say no, and know exactly when I engage in a transaction. Instant, because waiting X working days sucks. Anonymous, because there are many reasons to stay anonymous. Zero overhead, because we want to cut middlemen. Non-recurring, because a recurring payment is _always_ an up-sell. Paper money works great in the offline world.
Any kind of an indirect payment is not ideal because it takes control from the consumer and gives it to someone else.
I think the path of centralised internet advertising organisations is to blame for many ills. IE Google.
By outsourcing ads to a 3rd party the website has lost an element of control over their "own space on the internet" and hence led to mish mash crap on so many sites - and it follows you making the sites all blend into one another!
I would accept a website to host it's own static advertising - not GIF, not video, not audio - that doesn't discriminate between myself and fellow humans. A website on my browser, or any similar browser around the world, should be the same, barring accessibility differences.
This would bring us back to motoring websites having ads for cars, tech websites having ads for tech etc. People don't get tracked, they get ads relevant to their interests, and pages look cohesive and have an identity.
My end game would be knowing who has my data and being able to say no to 3rd parties getting my data.
Fine, Facebook knows which hobbies I'm looking at on Instagram and has incredible ads and suggested posts. Ok that's fine. But random 3rd party I don't know getting that data... No thanks.
> If we want top-grade products to remain available without a direct monetary transaction (i.e "free"), it seems we must give something that the product providers can turn into monetary value indirectly somehow.
Do we want them to though? What would a web without free look like?
There are plenty of examples: Microsoft Office 365, Netflix, YouTube's paid service, Amazon Prime. Let me pay Facebook or Google for the services I value. They might even be cheaper to deliver if my data wasn't constantly harvested and correlated.
I wonder this too, and don't forget this is only half the equation. The free platforms need ads to support them, but a lot of the businesses buying the ads might not be able to exist without the direct ad targeting that has been possible the past 5 to 10 years. I'm a big fan of direct to consumer brands, yes some of them turn out to be completely ridiculous (like the infamous Juicero a few years ago), but it's amazing that a small team can dream up a new product or better design and start selling it quickly with minimal risk. The loss of ad targeting definitely benefits big existing retail players and makes things more difficult and costly for consumer product startups.
There was a time when I cared a lot about small publishers' abilities to monetize their cool free site. Those sites are all gone, and never made enough money to break even anyway. I say screw it, drive the ad industry into the dust.
A global ban on targeted advertising. Fines in % of global revenue instead of fixed sums. Bankruptcy of adtech companies and concerts in the ruins of their headquarters.
I think the issue is that there isn’t a transparent option to pay directly. Why not say “opt out of tracking and pay $5/mo, or allow ad tracking” and see what people choose?
I don't mind to pay for privacy and transparency.
FB and other platforms are hoarding and abusing highly personal information for profit, they're parasites.
I stopped using classic ads for monetarization years ago. Coming from someone who lived of AdSense for a while.
What I do is Building relevant ads to my content when I find fitting affiliate programs. As they are just text (or image) with an link they ain't blocked and respect my users privacy.
I would argue that are the only actually targeted ads. And lucky content creators won't be blocked either (usually)
Other projects I just go for a paid or free/paid model.
Yes, and I'm sure you can jailbreak/root your mobile devices or use a VPN running Pi-hole to remove all YouTube ads. You can also download YouTube videos with youtube-dl (another feature of YouTube Premium). But for me it's well worth the $12 a month to remove ads and get mobile downloads without any hassle or nonsense.
I'm less concerned about incompetent advertisers (99% of the ads I see are poorly placed) than I am about rogue states (like Saudi Arabia, who buy a lot of personal data and metadata), finance and investment companies (who use our private data to rig the system against us), and criminals.
> If we want top-grade products to remain available without a direct monetary transaction (i.e "free")
I don't actually. If I could pay for something that gives good value and by doing so I also shut off all tracking of any kind, I'd do so, assuming it was something I was interested in.
I just think advertisement is when other people pay for the media products you get for free, if you don’t buy the ad product. It’s a plus. Why are people so charged up about it? If you don’t want to be manipulated by ads then just don’t be.
Run ads internally for a period of time disconnected from the number of clicks. It's worked well for decades. Basically, to reduce the integration of ads and browsers.
Thought-provoking questions! For me, ad-tech creates a few interrelated concerns:
1. Pervasive, asymmetric surveillance increases the power differential between individuals and big corps/governments. The latter groups can use that power to preempt healthy competition, causing individual quality of life to stagnate in a local maximum.
2. Ads themselves are attention hijacking, thought injection, and manipulation/coercion—all forms of mind control. Most people consider their mind central to who they are (often along with body, memories, and personality), it's wrong to mess with that non-consensually. (No, clicking "accept ToS" isn't consent.)
3. Centralizing surveillance data (as by companies and governments) prevents the surveilled from protecting their own vulnerabilities from bad actors. It's like passwords: you can invest in memorizing many strong ones, or re-use one that's written on a post-it on your desk, but since in this metaphor the surveillants are also storing your password in plaintext in paper filing cabinets, so it doesn't matter how much effort you put into protecting your passwords. Put another way, if the Coke recipe or a Boeing blueprint were leaked, it's the company's loss, so they work hard to protect their secrets. But if someone hacks a consumer company's user data, it's the users who are affected; if it weren't for regulatory fines and news exposés, companies wouldn't even be hurt by such breaches.
As for the end-game goals: Companies surveil and advertise because they're allowed to and it works.
We see futuristic attention hijacking tech in sci-fi films and TV, like giant holograms [Blade Runner], ads that address each individual [Minority Report], or ads that stop until you're paying attention again [Black Mirror]. But it's less common to see futuristic attention protection tech. (That makes sense if you consider the funding source of these sci-fi productions.) Black Mirror did have one episode where a person was exiled from everyone else's senses, but I can't think of others.
[It works] The individual's goal could be total control over perception of the world. As a natural-born human, you can easily close your eyes, but your other senses are harder to dampen, and so provide vectors for involuntary thought injection (ads). Now with widespread earbud use, you can sort of close your ears too. But imagine installing an ad-blocker so your senses just didn't report ads, or your brain didn't perceive them? As with many technologies, it'd be quite dystopian if centrally controlled, quite freeing if under individual control. Even more fantastical would be the ability to experience but be unaffected by stimuli (including ads), which might not even be a technology exactly.
[They're allowed] The other goal could be simply to use our collective power (i.e. government) to more strictly regulate—or even ban—surveillance and advertising (and enforce it!). While this always possible, I'm afraid it's no longer realistic in U.S., though other countries could still pull it off, as could whatever government eventually replaces the American one.
Lastly, what if nothing were free? Part of the problem is that the difference between $0 and $1 is much, much larger than from $1 to $2, i.e. free is a way better price than even dirt cheap (or sometimes even being paid). Tech start-ups are especially guilty abusing the marketing power of "free" in combination with unsustainable infusions of venture capital, which is dishonest if not somewhat fraudulent. Business would survive the removal of tactics like "free + ads" and "loss leaders".
I had an old dream of building a good micropayment scheme for the web. Notionally, I'd like to pay $10/mo (or whatever) for "web content", and have some algorithm divvy that up into fractions of pennies for sites I momentarily visit.
The devil's in the details, for sure. Such a system would immediately turn into an arms race between running it fairly and gaming it. At the end of the day, what I want the internet to give me is neither impressions nor time spent, but value, and only I can really judge that - but I don't really want to be thinking about judging it all the time. The best scheme I came up with was one that tracked time/impressions/whatever and came up with a default payment for a given site, and let me adjust it if I felt it was high or low.
The second problem was -- what's up with $10/mo? Might that be low, for specialized content? High, for poor people? I had set it based on gut feel relative to the price I was paying my ISP at the time. I thought that perhaps what I'm paying by default can be negotiated with paywalls behind the scenes, and if it isn't high enough they can ask me for more for the one impression, and I can set it higher ongoing if I like what they have. An alternative approach was the one pursued by Project Wonderful, which had advertisers bidding against each other for space on a web site and (maybe it was this project or another) users bidding against those advertisers for those spaces to be blank! The free market enthusiast in me loves that in principle. In practice, projects in that vein all failed for reasons I don't understand.
That leads into a third problem, though. A lot of the value I get out of the internet is user-generated on larger sites -- like comments on this one. I appreciate Reddit pioneering some ways to thank these people, but as for making a larger and more general fair solution, I must admit I'm a bit lost. I dislike the idea of paying Facebook for aggregating the content of people I really want to be thanking and taking all the money for it (which is in fact, more or less what happens now).
With that said, I do like services that have this sort of fee for subscription for all content model. It seems to be dominating these days, and I take that as validation that the scheme is fundamentally the right way to go about solving the problem. But it needs another iteration. I hate having a dozen content subscriptions. I hate that they come in "a month" as the smallest size. And I hate that it gives the network so much control over where my money goes -- these schemes are notoriously unfair to creators. It would be much better if my relationship was with the creators directly, as I know what things are worth to me. If I could just cruise onto YouTube and it would hit my GlobalContentPayer up for $0.30 for an hour of ad free viewing (or $19.99 for a movie that just came out) or whatever, I'd be a much happier camper. I'm willing to pay you, but I don't really want that much of a relationship.
I definitely hate one-sided ad relationships. I don't mind ads like the old newspaper classifieds -- where both I and the advertiser got value out of it and that's the only reason it worked. Information exchanges are good, and if both parties are paying for access, that's a good sign of their health. One-sided ad relationships in which I am a product and not a party are inherently toxic. While I am sympathetic to creators needing a way to support themselves, that sympathy doesn't extend to allowing that sort of psychological abuse into my life. I avoid these sorts of ads whenever I can, in any way I can, without remorse.
I own an advertising agency. I've tracked ios impressions % over time on all of our remarketing campaigns (as a proxy), its down about 30% from peak and stabilized. Not a huge deal.
LOL at this below:
"Seufert estimated that in the first full quarter users see the prompt, the iOS changes could cut Facebook’s revenue by 7% if roughly 20% of users agree to be tracked. If just 10% of users grant Facebook tracking permission, revenue could be down as much as 13.6%, according to his models. The first full quarter with the prompt is the third quarter. Facebook reports second quarter earnings at the end of July."
FB revenue is going to be up in Q3, not down, would bet $10k on that.
iOS impressions down 30% from peak is "not a huge deal"? This is very counterintuitive to me, as iOS both holds the majority share of the US market, and 30% seems like a very high number. Can you explain?
This is key: "on all of our remarketing campaigns"
The discrepancy is that a 75% reduction in users opting into Facebook tracking is leading to only a 30% reduction in iOS share on the highest ROI ad campaigns. 30% is big but not 75% big.
Another possible explanation is that opting out of tracking in iOS doesn't make you invisible. It just makes it hard for Facebook to correlate your off-app/non-Facebook.com web activity, but there are ways around that. So what 30% means hinges a lot on how the 1st touch -> 2nd touch leap is done, and the data for that leap doesn't always come from Facebook.
They aren't going anywhere. They are, along with Google, scared of the current head of the FTC. They claim she is biased.
"scared" is the wrong word for these powerful companies. She is probally the last thing Mark is worried about. Does he even have worries at this point?
I think it's a bit early to be claiming that iOS impression loss has "stabilized".
I'm the first one most of my friends come to for tech questions, and I make a point of explaining privacy issues to them and helping them counter creepy behavior in apps/websites. When my parents buy iPhones, the first thing I'll be telling them is which button to push when apps want to stalk them.
By myself, I'm an irrelevantly small data point, but it's not just me—most of my "tech support" friends are privacy-aware and evangelize it. I suspect iOS losses have only just begun, and will continue.
> When my parents buy iPhones, the first thing I'll be telling them is which button to push when apps want to stalk them.
There's a "always, silently, deny" option in settings for this. It's labeled something like "allow apps to request tracking" and if you turn it off, they can't and just get a "no". No more asking per app, which is fine because it's not like anyone would ever want to allow it. It's not as if it's the kind of prompt where someone might actually want to say yes, sometimes. The screen is easy to find by searching "track" in iOS settings.
I know because this headline prompted me to double check that I had it set correctly.
I think so too. Previously we have a naive model of how facebook does tracking. now that apple closed this pathway, it's pressuring Facebook to reveal how they REALLY track or hide the fact they able to do so at some financial cost.
Targeting larger pools should reduce per impression costs, because FB has more options for where and when to place your ad. Smaller groups have fewer opportunities, so if you want to show your ad to them specifically, you have to pay more.
No, this isn't right - because FB can no longer tell you as much information about the ad they're about to display, they're going to collect less money for it.
They can't correlate that ad to an action, which means they can't make you a happy chart that says the ROI is there. So you're going to pay less for it.
This isn't going to harm small businesses no matter what FB says.
That's one possibility. I'd like to offer a second one: that Facebook will charge the same amount and we are going to pay it. It's not like there are that many successful Facebook clones around.
Except that's not how the ads work. They're all being bid in real time, by both people using FB tools (small biz) and 3rd parties.
Whoever submits the highest bid wins that ad impression. Less information will mean people bid less, and the targeted ad prices will revert to their less targeted peers from a price perspective.
Marketing, the entirety of it, is a machine of lies. Its sole purpose is to convince me to buy a product I wasn't looking for in the first place.
Marketing is arrogant (we are the best), misleading (overpromise, leave out unfavorable information), manipulative (fear of missing out, social pressure, pricing something as x.99$) and loud.
Imagine the above as a person, randomly popping up in your view about a thousand times a day, screaming at you. The person also follows you everywhere, takes notes of everything you do.
Marketing perpetuates consumer culture, stimulating demand that didn't even exist.
Marketing lacks any form of basic human decency.
It's depressing that the smartest minds in our world seem to have an existential dependency on the above.
> It's depressing that the smartest minds in our world seem to have an existential dependency on the above.
Not only dependent. Don't forget how many psychology PhDs get jobs at Facebook and Google instead of "helping people". Why would you work with a bunch of depressed drug addicts and wife-beaters? Why not get a joint degree in PhD and Marketing? https://marketing.wharton.upenn.edu/joint-doctoral-degree-in... You'll make 10x as much.
> For consumer researchers, psychology is one of the foundational disciplines that comprise the field of marketing. For psychologists, the marketplace is filled with questions and insights about human cognition and behavior.
It's so on the nose it's painful - I truly think limiting the amount a business spends on advertising would have a net good for society.
Exactly right. The best minds are working on algorithms tricking you to click on something. This also explains why big tech products hardly ever really get new features.
That's not what the engineers are working on. They want you to click. It doesn't matter if it leads to depression, anxiety...just bloody click. Or read. Or watch that video. And then the next one.
Even with all the tracking, the generated ads still suck, showing things already purchased.
This reminds me of the overhyped lead generation tools out there, they do not work as expected.
Someone's financial interest is the root cause here, someone is making good money with ads.
The ones who sell ads? For sure.
The ones who buy adds? Not many success stories out there.
Where are you getting your information? There are entire businesses built solely on top of FB/Insta/etc ads. I went 15+ years on the internet without buying anything from an ad, and then in the last 5, I've made at least 5 conscious, purchases from Insta ads. They've become really good in recent years.
This is called retargeting. Aside from possible repeat purchases, my guess is that enough people browse a site or never complete their checkout that advertisers are happy to take the chance that 50% of people who see the ad might no longer be interested because that's still higher interest than you can get from almost any other channel.
To add to that, the retargeting setup is mostly the job of the advertiser / agency, so it's not Facebook's fault when it's badly implemented. The advertiser often doesn't notice, because even terrible retargeting will usually perform really well.
The explanation I have heard previously is that people have bought an item are actually more likely to buy another: unhappy with the current purchase, or people who need multiple items. Sure, for most people it’s irrelevant as they are happy with their purchase, but most ads are ignored anyway.
One of the other things to consider* is that the details of person X that is looking to buy item Y are a snaphot at the time that information was brought/sold.
When person X buys item Y from company Z, company Z is unlikely to broadcast that fact. Ergo, the 'system' doesn't know that you have now brought item Y and that you no longer have an active interest in purchasing Y.
*Things may have changed in 20 years so the above is just an outdated observation based on a brief stint at a turn of the century B2B marketing start-up.
This is partially the answer. Sometimes people are running ad blockers that block sending events to Facebook, so the "Item Purchased" event never gets sent, but the account was created with an email that can be used in custom audiences, so the email is retargeted as if they never purchased the thing.
Or someone goofed and forgot to include the exclude "item purchased" event in the criteria
at the same time it's very easy to run into anecdotes people have like "you bought the 5th edition of this college textbook? do you want to buy the 3rd edition in Spanish?"
Retargeting typically has very favorable CPC (cost per click) and other "ROI" metrics that marketing managers use to determine the success of their advertising campaigns.
This may conceivably be because having previously visited a website is a stronger indicator of interest than say, male 18-30 making $XYZ/yr.
It may also be purely coincidental and garbage. You were going to buy anyway/you already bought it.
The truth most often lies somewhere in-between.
The statistic rigor of the people purchasing these ads is not always the highest. The companies offering these solutions typically have very little reason to not sell as many ads as possible, as long as the metrics look good.
In the end consumers are blasted with stalking ads that they don't want and the entire industry is shooting itself in the foot
Snake oil salespersons can sell to companies as well.
Seing how massively even Google have mistargeted me and lots and lots of others I'm even sure it is a fluke anymore:
AFAIK Google sells ads not by the click anymore but by the impression. Now, how do you maximize revenue? You show the most expensive ad to as many people as possible.
A little (ok, a lot) of fudging here and there and I am a target demographic for shady dating sites / mail order brides / senior dating / gay cruises for 13 consecutive years.
Was it ever relevant to me? No way. I even repeatedly reported those ads.
Does relevant ads exist? As Facebook has proven a few times: yes.
They don’t know you purchased it because it’s not commonly shared to ad networks unless they are making cohorts but that is usually done at the product category level.
There are many success stories with ads. I’ve been involved with two exits that is all attributed to digital advertising. No where else do you get a ROAS in the double digits. Here is a good example of the difference. When I worked for a challenger bank. We paid under $75 per signup and $10 per app install. Chase and BOA pays $1200 per new customer in marketing expenses using traditional marketing channels.
[Eric] Seufert [a mobile analyst who writes the Mobile Dev Memo trade blog] estimated that in the first full quarter users see the prompt, the iOS changes could cut Facebook’s revenue by 7% if roughly 20% of users agree to be tracked. If just 10% of users grant Facebook tracking permission, revenue could be down as much as 13.6%, according to his models.
If those figures are even near the ballpark, this would surely represent a significant blow to FB. If widely circulated, this could be wielded to some effect in a campaign by FB detractors/rivals.
> If widely circulated, this could be wielded to some effect in a campaign by FB detractors/rivals.
But who are the FB ads rivals that aren't affected in a similar manner by this change? Since the tracking permission isn't specific to FB, wouldn't other players with a similar business model also be negatively impacted?
I should have been clearer, sorry. I wasn't considering those competing against FB for ads in the same medium. I was thinking more of rivals for ad spend generally. Perhaps some of it would revert to print titles, or broadcast, as a result. I'd like to think that sometimes an advert can be effective even if you can't measure its impact precisely.
Perhaps I am unduly influenced by the sorts of ads that I like, which tend to be posters, billboards or, just occasionally, TV/cinema/online pre-rolls. My favourite example would be the success of a Levi's ad from the '80s, see [1]: ‘It was a piece of magic’: How Levi’s ‘Laundrette’ ad led to an 800% sales boost
Yes, I realise that no small company can afford such advertising as that, but in a previous life, when I spent about a year in advertising sales for a local newspaper, I was wined and dined about a dozen times by local firms who'd let me come up with ad copy for them, and sometimes a campaign, who (rightly or wrongly) attributed a sales boost to my efforts.
I mean it doesn't have to move to dead venues like print or tv broadcast in order to just get away from targeting. It's not like internet advertising requires narrow demographic and individual history targeting for some reason, it's just that it made that more convenient.
> Yes, I realise that no small company can afford such advertising as that, but in a previous life, when I spent about a year in advertising sales for a local newspaper, I was wined and dined about a dozen times by local firms who'd let me come up with ad copy for them, and sometimes a campaign, who (rightly or wrongly) attributed a sales boost to my efforts.
I mean, the fact that this isn't really a thing anymore is almost certainly part of what kills local media nowadays, and by a kind of vicious cycle also helps kill local businesses. It used to be that small, local businesses weren't competing on the same playing field as large (inter)national businesses. They'd get local eyes on local ads in local venues. That would keep local media alive, and the ads would keep local businesses competitive.
Now they fight with national brands for ad space on national platforms where they're outspent for more narrowly targeted ads than were ever possible in the old days. Local media dies to national media, local businesses die to national businesses, meanwhile the national media gets bigger and richer every day.
I think this will affect different advertising platforms differently depending on how much they rely on targeting to begin with. Facebook's ad platform has some crazy tools for targeting to begin with--it's a big part of the platform's value in the first place. Less so for most competitors.
> But who are the FB ads rivals that aren't affected in a similar manner by this change?
Google. Apple's privacy changes restrict tracking from within mobile apps like Facebook and Instagram. Google is primarily browser-based and remains largely unaffected.
No they don't. They only prevent tracking _across_ apps. Facebook will track everything you do and show you just as many ads in their properties as they did before. This really does harm smaller companies more than Facebook.
It looks like the 7% and 13.6% figures the article quotes are the initial revenue decreases for a single quarter, which the model assumes would recover thereafter. In general, the model is based on some very, um, stylized assumptions. I'm really skeptical that a 12.5% increase in the number of users who block tracking (from 80% to 90%) would result in a 60% increase in the impact of that blocking on revenue.
That said, I don't think the numbers are drastically out of line. Apparently >60% of Facebook's revenue is from iOS, so it wouldn't take that large of a decrease in efficiency for the revenue hit to end up in the 10% ballpark. The main question to me is the extent to which the loss is borne by Facebook or by advertisers. It's possible that advertisers are effectively price-takers and will keep paying basically the same amount despite a decrease in efficiency.
7% is about a quarter or two of growth, but not a fundamental blow. The upper end of 13.6% is much more painful, but probably still only like a year of growth. Will this make Facebook change its business model and incentives completely - I don't think so. We'll still have to deal with design for engagement and data harvesting/storage/analysis at a grand scale.
According to a sibling comment, ">60% of Facebook's revenue is from iOS". Our society is selling out on privacy and subjecting itself to mass 24/7 surveillance for a paltry 22.5% of Facebook / adtech revenue. In other words, we could outlaw user tracking tomorrow, and Facebook / adtech would continue just fine, with only a moderate haircut. Are we that desperate to milk the last possible $ right now?!
It isn't just facebook that will see this decline, they are the bellwether in social media so to speak since they are the largest player. Expect an across the board drop in revenue for social media and any company that uses ads and tracking of users behavior as its primary form of income.
Hopefully this will signal a pivot in ad tracking and lead more companies to try subscription based services.
> Hopefully this will signal a pivot in ad tracking and lead more companies to try subscription based services.
I highly doubt this. I suspect this will instead signal a pivot to products that are intrinsically "trackable".
It's important to remember that ATT doesn't disable tracking in its entirety, it only disables cross-app tracking. It's only harmful to your business if you are reliant on tracking users while they are not using your product.
Lots of products will continue doing fine - think about Google Search, where you directly tell Google what you want. There is not necessarily a huge need to track you while you are not using the product - after all, the product literally revolves around you directly telling Google what you want.
The products that will benefit the most are the ones that a) shows ads, and b) where the product's functionality intrinsically collects information about the user without the need to rely on third-party data.
Oddly enough FB's apps fit decently into this. Your behavior within the FB main app are still "fair game" as far as tracking goes, and FB shows ads directly in the app.
I have worked in ad tech for a while and I am not sure that I really believe a lot of this article.
I am not quite sure what advertisers are complaining about. Facebook should still be able to track purchases of physical goods, since most of those will require an email address and facebook can use that to link up the sales.
Web site retargeting is not really affected by this. I guess people using shopping apps would be impacted, but a lot of those folks will be logged in and trackable. This article references "Most retail websites" but they are not affected by the recent change (ITP does affect them, but that is not new).
App downloads are probably much less trackable and that would definitely be affected.
It's not that "stock markets don't seem to agree", it's that the revenue of social media companies doesn't agree. If this new scenario has any appreciable effect on how many users Facebook can track, it will hurt their future revenue potential, which will impact their stock price.
Plenty of people find value in things like better ads or more connectivity across sites. Tracking can imrpove some services (I let maps keep my location history) and while I always use adblocks on PC, I admit to have found interesting relevant to me stores on instagram presumably because they keep data about me.
I really nearly fainted when I saw my location history on google and now that I have a firewalled Huawei with Google forbidden on it, I finally feel a bit location-safe :D And it's not that I care that americans know where I am, it's that people can just get my phone/account, people close to me, and track me, eww.
I really am impressed you found relevant stuff on instagram, but I found that desiring less things is usually just as rewarding as getting an add for the right flavor of yoghurt.
>I really am impressed you found relevant stuff on instagram
It's mostly been small alternative-type stores, typically for clothes which I'd have never even found out about otherwise but match my aesthetic presumably because they just advertise to a niche audience like me based on the data.
I’m surprised it’s so low. These sites are used mostly for indulging in narcissism, and people who tend that direction generally prefer to have their lives be less private.
If Facebook and its child companies blocked users who opted out, users would eventually opt in, they could even do it in rolling waves to prevent a mass exodus. Facebook and Google would likely be able to beat Apple and both depend on Ad revenue.
And Apple could then decide that the Facebook SDK is banned from their ecosystem due to abusive practices, and require any apps incorporating it to submit a new version with the SDK removed or face delisting. This is an arms race.
I'm sure some of you have some experience working in the "ad supported" space, and obviously most of the internet and many of its services run on the ad model. So where are we going to end up if there is a full on public distrust of the current ad model?
We go back to the stone age. Me make product ('content'). You want product. You pay money.
Patreon, paid newsletters and paid news subscriptions are all mature industries now. Why do we act like the sky's going to fall if the spigot of useless memes, influencer primping and political propaganda gets turned off?
Wait. Influencer pimping is going to get significantly worse in a "3rd party tracking-free" world. Coupon codes and "link in bio" are one of the few channels that aren't affected by this.
Influencers have direct deals from sponsors, so the sponsors are less reliant on FB's ad-targeting capabilities.
Influencers get their own vanity URLs with discounts and tracking attached, so attribution is no issue, beyond the friction of the extra 'link in bio' step. It'll be recorded accurately whether or not the vendor's site has the Facebook Pixel installed.
Short answer is that so few people are willing to pay for that, it's generally not worth the time. (Unless there are other premium features you can add as well, without completely hamstringing your free version.)
With a different ad model. It wasn't really that long ago when it wasn't possible for ad companies to engage in such widespread spying -- but ad-supported things existed nonetheless. It's not like nobody knows how to do this correctly.
> Media buyers who run Facebook ad campaigns on behalf of clients said Facebook is no longer able to reliably see how many sales its clients are making
Not sure I get this. Presumably an e-commerce site knows it’s been clicked from an ad due to the url. This must be referring to sites that aren’t recording that and relying on some Facebook pixel in the checkout or aren’t handling cookies themselves to remember when people have visited before.
The sites are recording the sales, but in order to optimize advertising you would want to know which of the advertising channels (google/fb/etc.) is the most efficient or even which campaign (or creative) on a given channel works best. What facebook tracking did is connect a given marketing campaign that a user saw to the purchase they've made. Without allowing FB to track you on a vendor's site you don't get that information. There are ways to approximate it (see Market Mix Modeling), but those are statistical models that have mostly been the domain of big companies as opposed to SMEs that could afford them (even though now with the proliferation of ML it's getting better).
Couldn’t Facebook include a parameter in the url that ties back to the click? Then the destination site just calls back to Facebook with that unique event id.
A lot of apps started to prime users before iOS asks to allow tracking by showing an innocuous screen that describes some "feature". It says something like hey, do you want us to enhance your experience by x, y, z? Or it's written like hey, just agree to the terms so you can use the app. It would be great if apps didn't have an option to show anything before this prompt.
Facebook is probably clever enough to have optimized the layout and button placement of their initial alert to generate maximum mis-clicks on the “Allow app to track” button
If people opt out of what you're doing to them as soon as they're made aware you're doing it, then perhaps that's a sign that you shouldn't have been doing it in the first place.
I don't even believe that 25% of users actually wanted tracking. I think a lot of people just blindly tap buttons to make annoyances go away, and these guys just hit the wrong button.
As soon as ad supported free services start shutting down because of ad blocking and lowered clickthrough rates on ads because of targeting being blocked, most people will probably start changing their minds. (The alternative being maintaining 10-20+ paid subscriptions.) For now, all this change means is that users who are opted-in to tracking are subsidising those who aren't.
How about tracking back to content related advertising rather than tracking based advertising? All related studies are showing that the latter isn't working anyway. And, as these metrics (and ethics) suggest, it has been an illegitimate invasion, right from the beginning. The fancy "conversion rate" dashboards are just not worth it.
Bonus: Maybe this will be an opportunity for content providers to reset the decline of advertising prices that has happened over the last decade. (Remember the blooming blogger scene in the 2000s, when you could still make substantial revenues? Remember the thriving online news papers? We could get back there, if advertising became less invasive and less aggressive and also more profitable for content providers, e.g., how it had been in print.)
> All related studies are showing that the latter isn't working anyway.
This is very common on HN these days - stating something with a lot of confidence that turns out to be some self-constructed mental model that has nothing to do with reality. Then, add the obligatory "all related studies are showing it" and you have met the publishing standards.
Legally or illegally, morally or immorally, for better or worse, Facebook has created the most sophisticated ad targeting engine the world has ever seen. You want proof? Look at their financial statements. You want more proof? Look at all the companies that went public on the back of Facebook's ad targeting engine. Again, perhaps it shouldn't exist in the first place, but trust me, it works.
Disclaimer: I studied media theory and publishing, but well before the Web became the all-decisive factor. Meaning, I have some idea about those things and have still an interest in them. (Also, I actually programmed ad embedding mechanisms for ad networks, but quit this field, when things became too invasive and ads too aggressive and I couldn't justify this any longer. – At this time, tracking was commonly done for multistage campaigns only.)
That said, I've never come upon a study that showed significant gains due to targeting, rather to the contrary. – So, after a decade, I'm still waiting for any proof in favor of targeting. (The suspicion must be still that targeting is rather a lazy alternative to media analysis and its perceived advantage is rather rooted in minimising efforts than in effectiveness.)
Regarding "Facebook has created the most sophisticated ad targeting engine", this is a rather biased proposition. It has enforced Facebook as a broker, made advertising cheap, while less effective, and has driven ad revenues for content providers downhill. (Google is to blame, as well.)
* There is a pervasive belief on HN that marketing teams are making easy errors, i.e. there is low hanging fruit
* Consultancies that improve marketing campaign efficacy make lots of money
* HN users are making small fractions of that money and constantly complaining about it
* Any HN user capable of picking this low hanging fruit could do this for two years and retire for life
* They are not
* Conclusion: Either there is no low hanging fruit, or the HN users observing this are making millions of dollars, or these HN users do not care for money at all and get greater utility from complaining about money.
Maybe, there's a biased view in ad business and some of the perceived benefits and effects are rather tautological? (This is why we have studies.)
You could also conclude from your remarks that there is a pervasive idea around ad teams that former generations (in the times of media analysis) were just delivering complete failures. However, this model had delivered for more than a century. How could this model perform with todays instruments and data?
The best thing about startups is that they test questions like that in a way that these studies can't. Because the participants have a very real and strong incentive to succeed they will perform that continuous search and hypothesis adjustment till they hit gold or die. If you truly have a Thiel hypothesis, you're going to get very rich.
In software, we call this "talk is cheap; show me the code", but of course here you don't need to show me the code. It's just that you're letting this golden opportunity go to waste. Up to you, I guess.
The problem being only that these startups are still acting in the bubble of common beliefs of the field. So these are actually testing the beliefs, not their real-world effectiveness. (Also, at this stage, you have to comply and conform to the delivery networks right from the very beginning with little chance of competing with the big, established ones.)
Edit: Moreover, you had to compete with the paradigm of low effort, high interchangeability and big data. (Meaning: interchangeable code, interchangeable users, interchangeable professionals, interchangeable clients, and lean know-how stack as it's "all in the data". While this adheres to criteria of optimization, it doesn't necessarily mean that it represents an optimum of effectiveness, as well.)
Alternative conclusion: as with all things in a capitalist society, there is a small minority of people that is killing it, and they are not making it easy for everyone else to discover their playbooks.
That doesn’t work because we’re assuming that most marketers are making easy mistakes. The playbook is so simple that people on HN could write it, supposedly.
> That doesn’t work because we’re assuming that most marketers are making easy mistakes. The playbook is so simple that people on HN could write it, supposedly.
Those are someone else's words, not mine. I never argued that winning on Facebook is "easy" (and for the record, neither is it on Google). It's not easy, it's just doable. And for those who have the skills and resources to do it, it's massively profitable. I would even argue that if you're letting an agency run your Google or Facebook account, you're lacking the resources to do it right. What you need is top-level talent competing against your nearest competitors, and winning battles inch by inch. An agency will never give you the talent you need to go up against a company that just raised $100m and is running their performance marketing in-house (and if you don't have such a competitor, then you're either smarter than anyone else in the world, or simply not pursuing a VC-investable market).
So no, it's not easy at all. But it's doable and totally worth it.
Call it what you want, the outcome is the same. You want to say [A], but before you say it, you have to start with [B] just not to get the conversation derailed by call-it-what-you-wants. And it turns out, the call-it-what-you-wants are still going to do their thing, pretending this is Reddit.
Would you mind to elaborate? I am genuinely wondering if you're a troll or if I am mistaken in my argument. To summarize, I responded to the claim below that Facebook's ad platform is ineffective:
> All related studies are showing that the latter isn't working anyway.
I pointed out that Facebook wouldn't be profitable if the ad platform is ineffective, and you called that argument fallacious. I am really curious to hear what's fallacious about it.
I guess we have to define effective. Is it effective from the consumer point of view? That might be a long discussion, and we might assume that a world without advertising might be the most effective way to live your life, etc. But is it effective from the advertisers' point of view? Unless you want to call 5+ million marketing teams around the world total idiots, you have to assume that they are meeting or exceeding their ROAS targets and therefore pouring a lot of money into Facebook.
> It just means that Facebook is good at selling ads, whether they are effective or not.
Facebook doesn't sell ads. Marketers choose to sign up and spend money, because their jobs depend on being able to achieve ROAS targets. Contrary to popular belief, the world of marketing is very quantified and apart from experimental budgets, most of the money is spent on channels that are proven to work.
But without getting any deeper into all of this, I think I found my answer - it appears that at least a subsegment of people on HN believe that over 100BN of ad dollars (25% of overall digital ad market) is spent on Facebook in an unprofitable way, and that 5 million marketing teams get away with it, year after year. Hence, it's possible for Facebook to achieve great financial results without their ad platform being effective.
If that's your takeaway, then I think you need to read this thread again.
1) Nobody is saying that ads aren't profitable or that marketers are throwing money out the window because they are stupid. The discussion is about whether invasive user tracking is effective. Ads can be profitable even though user tracking is ineffective.
2) This thread also is mostly about your very weak argument. You wrote:
> Facebook has created the most sophisticated ad targeting engine the world has ever seen. You want proof? Look at their financial statements.
That's just not a good argument. Who knows, maybe Facebooks tracking really is the best thing in the world, but the fact that Facebook is raking in loads of cash on its own tells us very little about how effective their user tracking is.
You're just confused about how marketing works. The fact that you're dissociating tracking sophistication from performance tells me all I need to know. To learn more, dig a bit into the iOS14 impact on the Facebook performance results.
Indeed, maybe it's about time advertisers got back to sponsoring quality content their target audience enjoys, rather than direct marketing through the back door on the lowest common denominator.
Still not sure why that didn't become predominant. Dynamic content based ads seemed to be the new fad in late 00's, then it kinda disappeared, with user tracking becoming the norm.
Tracking is necessary for the advertising economy to control bad behavior on the part of publishers and advertisers, not just to serve targeted ads.
No matter what there would be discrepancies in the numbers (publisher says it sent 75 clicks, advertiser says it got 70) and that breeds mistrust. Participants have a reason to lie. Having multiple third party watch the whole thing helps them trust each other.
This has been possible before. Google was built around content based advertising. Also, maybe click-through rates are not that important? Maybe exposure is a more decisive metric? As a side-effect, we may reduce social bubble effects and maybe even return to a shared reality? (Many of the unwanted effects of the Web are really due to targeted advertising and its consequences.)
You're clearly under the impression that all that Facebook does is get you good click-through rates and low conversion rates. Similarly, you're under the impression that Google's conversion rates are through the roof. Did you ever stop to ask yourself if your world view might be limited to a small sample size (eg: your own experiences)? I know plenty of businesses where the conversion rates are exactly the opposite of what you described. It turns out, the right marketing platform is related to the product you're selling. For example, if you want to buy a vacuum, Google will do a great job in connecting you with the right advertiser. But what if you just started a new hobby and don't yet know what it is that you need in that hobby? Eg, you started racing, but have no idea that upgrading your suspension will get you more performance than upgrading your exhaust? The advertiser selling suspension components will use Facebook to share this information with you (and Facebook will do a much better job than Google of identifying the person who needs that component but doesn't know it yet), and they will also advertise on Google as well, but Google will only be relevant once the buyer starts researching suspension solutions. Kind of nice to be the first one to pitch a suspension solution to a willing buyer, don't you think?
On the other hand, if I'm not on FB, I probably miss those vendors of suspension components all together. Advertising "in the bubble", as opposed to "in the world", comes with its disadvantages. With content based advertising (media analysis), you'll probably catch me at the related watering holes and communities. Also, excluding non-targeted audiences doesn't exactly benefit a shared world view.
P.S.: The general idea of targeted advertising misses the concepts of state of mind and focus of interest entirely. There's a (significant) difference in delivering a message in context and out of context. (The latter may have even adversarial effects.)
> Advertising "in the bubble", as opposed to "in the world"
Is this an argument for the open web, or is this an argument for Google being more popular than Facebook? If the former, I am with you. If the latter, the gap is not as big as you might think - 4 billion worldwide users of Google Search vs 2.85 for Facebook [1]. Slight advantage to Google, but how many US advertisers really care about international buyers? When it comes to advertising, you want people with money burning holes in their pockets. Facebook's financial results show that they plenty of access to this demographic.
> The general idea of targeted advertising misses the concepts of state of mind and focus of interest entirely. There's a (significant) difference in delivering a message in context and out of context.
You're slightly lagging with this argument. This exact reason was why Google was so dismissive of paid social back in the formative years of Facebook ("who gives a shit about what college students talk about on social networks?"). And then the oh shit moment happened in 2011. Eric Schmidt had to step down and Larry Page tied bonus payouts to the success of Google Plus. You have to give Larry some credit here - while a bit slower than Zuck, he did see the writing on the wall before the rest of the world did. If you tried advertising on both platform in 2011, Google would just crush you with their results. By 2016, Facebook was already competitive with their interest and lookalike targeting for a large group of advertisers (and even enabled Trump to win the presidency), and by 2018 the game had advanced to the new concept of "creative targeting" which is basically entirely driven by the algorithm and takes minimal targeting input from advertisers. At that point, paid social became so good that it got creepy and turned the public sentiment to negative and incentivized Apple to jump on the band wagon with iOS 14.
So I wouldn't agree with your argument that Facebook has a fundamental problem with recognizing intent. If anything, they are too good at it for their own sake.
I wouldn't pose this as FB vs Google. Google is dealing intrinsic conversion metrics, as well, which are highly problematic regarding the total impact. (So, Google is yet another, while maybe broader bubble.)
On a historical note, as it turned out G+ was soon scrapped and quite a loss, while we're dealing still with the fallout of Google's uniform platform strategy, which was put in place to provide for G+.
Some kind of verification is necessary for impression-based advertising too.
For instance, there are discontents around Nielsen (they've had scandals in India, and I infuriate people in the TV industry with the suggestion that a Nielsen home got bribed to blast MTV in an empty room) but the participants believe in Nielsen: people know probability-based sampling basically works.
P.S.: An interesting experiment may be an ad-blocker with an option "block animated ads and tracking only" (or rather, "show static ads only"). And maybe another option "filter ads to greyscale".
I guess, reducing distraction and moving towards a client-based and user-controlled "ads manager" may have a decisive impact on overall blocking habits.
This is not destroying the whole concept of ads, it is only pushing back against awful variants.
It is definitely possible to have “nice” ads, like simple text or images, with no creepy or CPU-draining elements in them. Nothing is preventing those ads from supporting free services.
However, the reason companies looking to place ads, will choose modern-adtech-platform-X (Google, Facebook, etc.) over traditional advertising medium Y (billboards, TV, etc.) is that the former promises to be more targeted (using the ad”tech”) than the latter, such that there’s higher value-per-click or value-per-impression.
Without that promise, there’s no reason to favor advertising on these platforms over other platforms. Which, if you flip it around, means that there’s no reason that these platforms should be valued in excess of the traditional-advertising-impression-value of their MAU. (Which is, to be clear, a lot lower than the value these companies currently have!)
Many companies are prohibited from doing stuff that they would profit from. I am sure soda companies would love to be able to add heroin to their products etc. However, maximizing random companies profits isn’t societies only concern.
My point wasn't so much about maximizing profits; it was more that these free-service companies might not even be tenable (at least at their current scales, or anything like them) with the drastically lower profit-margins of traditional ad impressions.
The GP comment said:
> Nothing is preventing those ads from supporting free services.
And my thought is, a zero-or-negative profit margin might very well be. It costs a lot to run Google/Facebook/etc. — probably a lot more than it costs to run the types of services they compete with. For the companies to not go bankrupt, their ad clicks/impressions need to be of at least as much value as their CapEx+OpEx. With adtech type ads, they certainly are at least that valuable. With only traditional type ads, would they still be?
I'm not arguing that these companies should be allowed to do this because they have some fundamental right to exist, mind you. Just pointing out that taking adtech out of the equation could "pop the bubble" drive margins negative, and just erase the whole free-ad-supported-services market entirely.
(Consider: why don't traditional-ads companies offer free web services supported by said traditional ads? Is it only because nobody cares about buying placement with them when targeted placements are available from Google/Facebook/etc.? Or is it because, even with full dealflow, it's still negative-margin?)
Tracking doesn’t actually add that much to how much they can sell advertising for. As to traditional advertising companies it’s simply a question of competence, you may as well ask why they don’t sell vacuum cleaners.
> Without that promise, there’s no reason to favor advertising on these platforms over other platforms.
Precisely. Instead, there will (again) be reason to favor advertising on high quality content.
Redistribution of income away from ad platforms and content spam mills to original journalism and high-quality entertainment would be an unambiguous win for society.
Yes! So money will flow back to magazine ads, billboards, radio, tv, and other media that has seen money flow away the last decades. Because their untargeted ad model is now not much worse.
Consider how much profit a company like facebook makes. Ad value could take drop a lot and they'd still be a viable company. They's lose, but from a societal perspective I'd argue that probably a positive.
That used to be all they did. You'd see a lot of "of course I block all ads—except Google's, they're fine".
They also didn't used to trick unsophisticated or distracted users into clicking ads by putting them inline with search results.
Both changed, I assume, when someone was allowed to run an experiment and the projected profit trend line went from "exceptionally good" to "holy shit, it's all the money in the world". And all it took was being evil. Go figure.
Some tie this to internal fallout from the the DoubleClick acquisition, which checks out pretty well timeline-wise.
And we don't even know if their measurement is right--they probably got a high rate at first because people weren't used to them and were deceived. As people wise up the effectiveness will drop.
All the non-tech-nerds I see use phones or computers hit the inline ads at a very high rate. As in, on most searches. They do not realize they are ads, mostly, or do but aren't paying attention.
I think the OP meant AdSense (now Google Ads), which is when publishers display ads from Google's advertiser inventory. Those are a combination of text-only or banner ads. Although I mostly see banner ads on the rare occasions I turn off my adblocker.
Actually your sibling's comment made me realise that you were talking about the old style of ads in web pages.
Within the Google search itself, I was surprised by the number of ads that are disguised as search results. It's grown significantly. Now I have to scroll to get real results...
I've thought about this a lot, but the stumbling block for me is getting services onboard.
The problem is that subscription services make billions annually on forgotten subscriptions. None of them want an easy "disable" slider next to their name in a convenient app. It also makes à la carte subing easy, where you sub for a month every few months to "catch up".
Basically, good luck getting an API with an easy unsubscribe command from any subscription based service.
I think that this happens to be the case now, but is not an intrinsic property of humans. I think that we're living in an age where most consumers have been "programmed" to expect things for no financial cost and only a privacy cost.
The key word here is "programmed" - and what has been programmed can be deprogrammed. I honestly believe that we can re-rehabilitate people to no longer automatically give away their privacy for a service, and instead consciously and carefully assess the financial cost vs. utility of a service.
This could lead to both a reduction in the amount of available services (as smaller ones go out of business because people realized that it wasn't really worth it for them) and an increase in the number of services people are actually willing to pay real money for.
Also, if the subscriptions were far cheaper (say, $2/month), I think that 20 concurrent subscriptions would be acceptable to many people.
If sites can’t fund their content with ads based information I’m willing to give up, then they can beg me for money, or charge for the content, or beg me to look at ads or whatever. But I want that transaction to be transparent and deliberate. And I don’t care if 90% of content online just disappears because we click the privacy button. Then it was never a viable business model to begin with.
> Then it was never a viable business model to begin with.
I think there's much more evidence to the contrary than there is for your position.
Facebook is absurdly, staggeringly profitable. Uber and WeWork by comparison are the BS business models, needing to break local laws and requiring nation-state levels of VC backing and still nowhere near profitability.
I didn’t mean “it doesn’t work” I mean it only works because one end of the transaction doesn’t really understand what they are paying, and if they did - they wouldn’t. That’s not viable. It’s similar to a business model that relies on people mistyping a search term or forgetting to cancel a subscription. It only “works” (is profitable) because of the lack of transparency
Ad account managers do not care about impressions that the FB application reports (unless they're Coca-Cola or J&J). They care about the actual conversions, i.e. sales. Those are happening on their internal ecommerce platform, so those aren't stats FB can juice. You can see where the converting traffic is coming from.
If FB's targeting wasn't working, then nobody would have a reason to move away from paying Google and Bing to post ads on search results. FB and Google now own the online ads market, and FB got there in well under a decade.
It seems that the news is only appealing to people when it's free. In part that's because it's competing with a lot of other things that are free -- including "news" subsidized by those who want to influence what news you consume.
People really like free. When it's there, it will tend to suck the air out of almost everything else. Including things that are almost-but-not-quite-free.
I don't know. I think when ad supported free services start shutting down people will move on with their lives. We'll find out instead how really unimportant Facebook, etc. was in people's lives. Put another way, how on earth did people get along without Facebook before there was a Facebook?
I'm reminded of a comment from the guy that created the TV-B-Gone. He would turn off TV's in public places like self-service laundromats, etc. He said he was surprised by the general reaction of those that had just recently been transfixed by the flickering 60Hz cathode glow. Mostly they just turned away form the TV and went back to quiet thoughts or whatever.
It was like the TV could go away and people would be like, "okay".
This might just be me, but I've always found that TVs in public have this weird pull to them. Even if I have no feelings at all about what's on the screen (a soap opera I've never seen?) my gaze is still repeatedly drawn to it. If there's one around I generally try to position myself so it's not in my peripheral vision or I have to spend some effort ignoring it. It feels like whatever it is that keeps kids, as we say, "glued to the screen" doesn't always go away in adulthood.
I would definitely find it relieving if someone showed up with a TV-B-Gone and clicked it off.
You seem to think it’s a bad thing. I’d argue “Free” products destroy innovation. It’s extremely hard to beat gmail or Facebook without massive VC funding.
Yes, and just to underline your use of quote marks there, those "free" products aren't even remotely free. You're just paying with a different currency, and -- in my view -- it's absurdly expensive.
1) People want the services more than they value their privacy. Maybe they'll just not use the service if they can't use it without tracking
2) That invasive tracking is required to sell ads. The media industry made billions (trillions?) of revenue from ads before tracking became a thing.
3) That platform ads are the only way to make services that are free for consumers. For example, Vimeo offers an ad free video delivery service that the content creator pays for. If Youtube was no longer free, maybe content creators would just pay for content delivery instead of having consumers indirectly pay for deliver with ads. Content creators have no issue selling ads / sponsorships without any tracking whatsoever. The result would be the same as now (content free for consumers) only that now non-targeted ads would pay for everything.
4) And finally, you are assuming that targeting via tracking actually works well enough to make it worthwhile. From what I've read, ad targeting is nowhere near as good as Facebook et al would have advertisers believe. Maybe invading your users privcy just doesn't make such a big difference in the end.
Mark my words: as soon as the world starts to turn their back on advertisement, there will be several micropayement unicorns flourishing in the next 6 months.
20+ paid subscriptions make no sense, but checking a box with your ISP to get a 2 USD monthly credit to use on the articles you click on, could work.
> As soon as ad supported free services start shutting down because of ad blocking and lowered clickthrough rates on ads because of targeting being blocked, most people will probably start changing their minds.
Or they'll just go outside and find better uses for their time.
Or these ad companies could come up with ways of making money that people don't want to block.
I despise ads, and generally approve of anything that makes ad companies sweat, but it didn't have to be that way. We are where we are because those ad companies have a sociopathically disrespectful attitude towards the people whose attention they need. With tactics like auto-playing videos, popovers, animated ads, and hideously obtrusive design, it was simply inevitable that people would try to get rid of that garbage. That approach to advertising is borne of greed and laziness, and it deserves to fail.
But there are tech blogs I read that do not adopt that approach. They have small, tasteful, non-animated ads. They don't need to violate my privacy to have a good idea of the kinds of things I'd be interested in; the fact that I'm on a tech blog means I'm more receptive to ads for tech-related tools and services. The people who run these sites have more respect for their visitors, so they choose a more respectful approach to ads.
Like I said: most companies' approach to ads is rooted in abject contempt for the people they need. If your business strategy is based on treating people badly, you have no grounds to complain when they decide not to put up with that anymore. You can either whine about how unfair it is and fail, or you can identify an approach that is appealing enough to be sustainable.
This could be a chance for that much-vaunted market-force-shaped innovation. Facebook's current strategy—whining—suggests they're still stuck in the old way of thinking: greed and laziness.
This sums up my thoughts perfectly. I would add a comment--all of the anti-apple voices in the article talk only about the poor business that will be hurt. The never talk about the benefit or drawback to the people being tracked. Their approach can be summed up as "we have a right to this data and telling people about our tracking and asking if it is alright with them is not alright." So businesses have rights but individuals don't.
Personally, I hope things like this start to kill off the "free internet." I'd much rather pay for the things that I use.
Or people will realize the service isn't as valuable as what's being charged. No one asked for 80% of facebooks features, it could be run/maintained by a much smaller team.
So much this. All I wanted was a simple way to share pics and updates with family and friends. Instead, I got an anal probe and mind control. Seriously, it is harder and harder to actually find my family and friends on their convoluted mess of a site.
It's hard to know what the Web, social media, and tech generally might look like if the spyvertising money-spigot gets shut off. Paid and fully-free-and-open alternatives to spying-paid "free" services & content are nearly impossible in the former case, and discouraging to participate or work on in the latter, in the current environment. There may be other models, too, that are in some sense better or preferable, or at least acceptable or sufficient, but currently not viable.
I loose no sleep if these products go paid only and facebook loses its influence massively and with it their ability to censor and manipulate information and our elections.
The problem with this kind of thinking is that if Cable TV is any indication, things that start as subscription services will slowly begin to double-dip and you'll be paying money upfront and watching ads anyway.
I agree. My guess is that Apple suspects it can't be 100% effective at preventing apps from tracking, so they're trying to set expectations accordingly in case someone figures out how to track users anyway.
But yeah, my preference would be just something like "Do not track".
1) It denies the app access to the IDFA identifier that is used for tracking. This is 100% reliable, apps just will not get this if you click "Ask app not to track".
2) It signals to the app that it is not to track you using any other method either. There is no technical way to enforce this, so it is up to the app developer to honour this themselves. Apple will do some checks to make sure you follow this, but there is obviously no way they can detect this reliably. All they have is the threat of kicking you out of the app store if you get caught.
Perhaps because you login to Facebook on the Facebook app, they obviously know who you are on your phone. They won't have access to the advertising identifier, but they can still track everything within the app, if they want.
The strange wording may be intentionally used to stop users from skimming the way they would for more “necessary” permission prompts like camera, notifications, etc. I know it pauses me for a second longer than the others.
It is dark because it is not clearly written in the standard language that iOS and apps have been using for 15 years. It is deliberately designed to make it unclear as to the purpose of the choice, which is then not a real choice.
At another point the author mentioned that the iOS new version uptake is currently 75% so maybe 100% of people who have seen the prompt hit no… (obviously the numbers are not exactly representing that)
Well, of course. But there's a free-rider/tragedy-of-the-commons problem here: people might reasonably think the monetization of their eyeballs is an acceptable cost to be able to use something like Facebook, even if they choose not to be monetized when they get to use Facebook either way.
However, if nobody could be monetized, then Facebook couldn't exist, making those people (for whom monetization of their eyeballs is an acceptable cost in exchange for Facebook) to be worse off.
The only reason piracy and ad-blocking haven't totally killed for-profit media is because most people don't use them (either because they don't know how, for legal or ethical reasons, or because it's a hassle).
It's a bit of a cynical take, but maybe it'll help cut useless apps and help people focus on what matters a bit more. A good thing about paying for something with money is that it makes you conscious of what you're doing. When you're paying with your data, it's harder.
Agreed. And I have to wonder if online extremism would be less of a problem if sites like Facebook switched to a payment model. State-sponsored troll farms might be willing to pay for access, but most regular-Joe crazies/griefers probably would not.
(Making social media harder to access cuts both ways, of course; it's entirely possible that limiting social media to those who can pay would only amplify the voices of bad guys with money. Does make me wonder how much social media toxicity is related to these sites being totally free, though.)
> It’s almost as if, given information and a choice, people prefer not to have their eyeballs monetized.
I wonder, are people who use facebook and who would prefer to not have their eyeballs monetized like this not aware of Facebook's business model?
How do they think Facebook will stay operational? I personally think it's best to just drop Facebook, but I'm sure my parents and grandparents would rather have Facebook with adds than no Facebook.
Facebook has x billion users. What you do have net 0% impact on them, but a large impact on you. So people block ads and use Facebook anyway.
But a more direct answer to the question is they don't think about it, they don't care about it, or they don't want Facebook to stay in business. If Facebook crashed tomorrow I would need to start emailing a bunch of people to put together contacts but other than that it would be a net benefit.
> If Facebook crashed tomorrow I would need to start emailing a bunch of people to put together contacts but other than that it would be a net benefit.
They could just use something else, instead of using Facebook while complaining about it all the time how they don't want to use it because it monetizes their eyeballs.
Seems to me like using something else would be easier, or at least make for a happier life.
Like if I don't like spinnach but I really need to get some fiber, it seems like the simpler option is to find another way to get fiber, rather than eating spinnach while constantly moaning to the whole world how spinnach is just the worst.
> [Disruptive Digita] is also looking into technology that would let Facebook deliver personalized ads based on targeting data stored on the user’s device, meaning Facebook wouldn’t need to access it.
Anyone know how this would work? My spidey-sense is tingling here at the thought of apps scanning data on my phone!
My idea? FB app stores data locally, uses this local data to pull ads onto your phone to be served/rendered. Don't need to send user data out. Just identify the ads this phone should be targeted by and render them as needed.
Good point about the scanning, though. These scumbags certainly would try to pull something like that off.
probably just like google's federated learning of cohorts thing.
they still cluster you, but instead of collecting your browsing activity from partner websites, they do it locally using browser history that doesn't leave your device, and the net effect is that you have an equivalent of a browser cookie or additional http request header that doesn't identify you, but does identify your cluster memberships.
some people are still not ok with this, i'm on the fence.
I have zero sympathy for Facebook, advertisers, and businesses whose models depend on a fundamental privacy flaw in the design of the web. Business worked fine before that flaw existed and it will be fine after it's fixed.
My guess is that even more than accidental mistouches would just be how many users are used to blindly accepting things because it's the only way to not get harassed with pop-ups. They might automatically assume that if they don't accept now, they'll get prompted again every time they open the app.
I imagine a pop-up like this would auto-register for a lot of people the same as "accept the terms of service to continue"
> Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg said Facebook “may even be in a stronger position” following the iOS changes if it means more businesses start to make sales directly within Facebook’s apps instead of sending users to a web address.
Does anyone know what he's referring to in this quote? There isn't a way for advertisers to move their purchase flow onto Facebook's app is there?
Do legitimate companies actually put products on there? Whenever I check that its like craigslist but with more spam and likely stolen products. craigslist seems to have much better moderation.
For the past year I've had this ritual of clicking on every advertising tile as soon as it appears and mark it as irrelevant and that I don't want to see any more from that company. Currently this happens for a couple of days at the start of some months.
So far I feel like this strategy has worked fine, 90% of the time I don't get served any unwanted content and I can view a decent timeline.
You're still served ads though. To me it doesn't matter if the advert is relevant or not - I still have zero interest in clicking on it or pausing to read it. Little point in wasting time "marking" adverts.
For Instagram the web based app has no adverts, at least not on iOS/Firefox/NextDNS.
I don't know if or how it could be leveraged, but marking something as irrelevant is also providing information to the ad system. Even if that data is "Less of this, please".
How about tracking, aggregation, selling and reselling your data, and abandoned privacy therefrom? Malware? Bandwidth from downloading all the non-content? Burning cpu's to run the teraquads of javascript?
I do not want any ads. I'm using Firefox containers for isolating Facebook on regular websites, I liked 4 total pages, I removed most of the information from my profile, I have scrubbed 90% of my past activity. The only things I deliberately allow Fb to know are my friends and my old pictures. I feel like that is an equitable exchange for me using their website.
I've been doing this for several years, and it doesn't seem to reduce the number of ads I get. I just start getting absurdly irrelevant ads. A memorable one was for @7Up_Nigeria. I live near NYC.
I'd count that as progress as they are easier to ignore. The ones I don't want are those that are relevant enough that they might prompt a change in my behaviour.
I use uBlock origin and uMatrix on top of Firefox's regular tracker blocking. I never heard of regular Facebook ad tiles being blocked by anything, but maybe I just didn't look into it enough. If you have some info about it, feel free to share.
If advertisers put in the effort and allowed for an opt-in only option.
They would realise that the quality of their audience is far more interested in the advertisments being shown than those that are thrown into peoples faces, tailored or not.
If I want to see ads, and I select "tailored ads on" my value as an audience should be far higher.
I'd go so far as to say that for a decade advertisers and social media experts have been given a more or less free ride.
It's often not the companies themselves who manages the ad buy, it's agencies who only knows how to click around in Facebook or Google AdWord. They have NO IDEA how to run an effective ad campaign or how to buy ad space.
The advertisers just see the numbers the agencies gives them, and in self defence user privacy is attacked and not the competency of the ad agencies.
"have already seen a decrease in effectiveness of their ads"
I take it rather they cannot tell anymore what's going on. Maybe the ads are less effective but maybe they are more effective. They just can't reliably tell anymore.
How delightfully ironic that this article cannot be read without agreeing to tracking (cookies), or having to pay for a membership. In the European Union this would be illegal.
Why a webpage needs to know more than what I click?
If you put legitimate ads that are relevant to the media that I am consuming per se, I guess I can bear with that.
How in the world can this be considered reasonable for them to track you across other apps and sites? This like if the local grocery store owner would install hidden cameras to spy on me at home and at work and in the car and one day somebody forced them to ask if I'm sure that's what I want them to do.
This all makes me start feeling like I might finally want an iPhone...
...and then, when finally prevented from doing so, they issued a quavery-voiced lament about how not being able to secretly film people without their consent will "hurt my ability to run my camsite efficiently and effectively."
>This like if the local grocery store owner would install hidden cameras to spy on me at home and at work
The more accurate analogy would be the grocery store owner teaming up with other local businesses to aggregate your shopping habits across stores into a central database. What you're describing would be if facebook installed a RAT on your computer after visiting it.
I'm not sure that always is really voluntary. Perhaps they don't have much choice. I don't know how can Facebook force them but e.g. with Google you have to use Google Analytics to score good in the search results AFAIK.
Any app that uses Facebook SDK, of which there are thousands. Zoom only removed it in March 2020, after it was raised as a privacy issue. they are a massive, publicly traded company, and they were fine with keeping it in their codebase, until enough people complained.
Anyone who advertises with FB sticks the FB pixel SDK in their app to track conversions and performance of their FB ad spend. This pixel tracks a lot and reports back to FB.
Can you actually use PiHole to serve DNS for your Android? I was able to direct my Linux systems to my PiHole but my Android phone seemed to not care a wit about my internal DNS.
Yes, absolutely. A few apps (notably chrome) use secure dns by default, and given the state of that ecosystem they default to their own provider. You'll need to set up secure dns on your pihole and tell chrome to use that provider (or disable it in chrome).
If I'm understanding their desired goal correctly they'd like to get that kind of DNS-level blocking everywhere, not just on their home wifi. I know I appreciate having those nuisances blocked remotely -- some apps don't even run with poor cell service for me without DNS-level blocking because of all the extra data they're trying to transfer.
I've solved this problem by hosting a VPN server behind the network-wide PiHole DNS, and I have my Android phone connected to the VPN whilst on mobile data.
(I haven't yet worked out how to automate connection to VPN once out of range of my home wi-fi, or disconnection when in range, but doing it manually isn't much hassle).
I also have a cloud-hosted PiHole instance (planned as a service to friends and family), but that's still a work in progress that I'd actually semi-forgotten about...
I setup a Pi-hole yesterday with two Android phones (manually setting the DNS on each device at the moment until I'm sure there are no issues and I want to set it at the router level for all devices on the network). Both phones worked as expected. One is a Pixel 4a with Chrome as the browser and I didn't experience any issues or have to do anything special during setup.
Yep go delete your WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram accounts now. Takes 10 minutes. No one truly needs them. Don't make excuses why you need them. In fact these apps only hurt you. So don't hesitate, just do it. It can feel uneasy, but in only a week or so you'll be happy you pulled through.
Too bad it takes 1 month for any of those services to permanently delete your account -- logging in up to a month after clicking the "delete" button, even accidentally, fully restores the account and you have to go through the entire process again.
Need more incentive? Just try finding the delete button on your Facebook or Instagram account. Go ahead, just look for it right now.
You weren't able to find it, right? Just "disable"? That's because you can only delete either account through the delete account page, which you can only navigate to via... a link. Nowhere in the UI leads to this. And the Instagram one clearly hasn't been maintained since 2007 or so.
Haven't deleted your account yet? Just think for a minute about why you maintain an account with a company that respects your autonomy so little that they make you jump through multiple obnoxious hoops just to delete your account. And make you wait a full month, just in case you aren't 100% sure. Because they're your friend.
Yes, luckily I was able to find the delete button :) WhatsApp was instant, only FB & Instagram took 30 days. But that's not a reason to not delete the accounts, isn't it? Just hit the button, remove the apps, and forget about it, a month later the accounts will be gone.
I got an iPad and was shocked to see an ad load on the web twice that on an Android tablet or on an ordinary computer. For instance, two prerolls instead of one preroll on Youtube.
I installed an adblocker and found that almost all sites with advertising would refuse to server content to my ipad, whereas an adblocker on my computer gets blocked only occasionally.
It seems if you have a iDevice people think you're made out of money.
We'll, so much for the myth of privacy apathy. I've seen it mentioned before that for many people, the younger the more prevalent, the sense was "well the genie is out of the bottle so who cares."
Clearly that was either never the case, or things have changed. Or now there is the sense of "well maybe we can shove that genie back where it came from."
If it's as easy as tapping a button, anyone will choose privacy.
If you have to leave your social circle, or try to convert them all to something else, (or in the case of all those noncompliant GDPR warnings, tapping a button, waiting 15 seconds, tapping 4 more buttons) that is too much work and you give up
> “What Facebook was great at is they were able to see who bought and find that user’s buyer behavior – what other websites are they visiting, what other things are they doing,” Stuck said.
I'm not going to shed too many tears if businesses which were in the business of making my business their business go out of business. It was a bad business to begin with.
If ad publishers like Facebook generate less revenue per ad impression (which is what these tracking changes do), publishers will inevitably end up showing users more ads not less (to make up for the lost revenue).
This is true. Look at the TV landscape. How long is a 'one hour show'? 45 mins these days? At one point it was 55. Toss in some overlays and so on. Crush out the credits in speed and split screen it.
I have been using an adblocker for a long time. But a few weeks ago I turned it off 'just to see'. The internet was a lot more 'noisy' than I remember it. I remember when one simple banner ad at the top of the page was considered 'crazy'. If only we knew.
People’s attention is a marketplace. If only one platform increases their ads then likely people will move to other platforms. I think it’s more likely all platforms (or no platforms) will increase their ads because all social media will have this problem.
Can someone help me understand if users saying they do not want to be tracked affects CPMs on Facebook? We've seen a large increase in CPMs and I'm wondering if the two are related. Thanks.
I have a friend who is a publisher and he's seeing the effect of these changes as we speak.
FB allowed best user targeting. He believes the next quarter results are going to be a blow to FB.
The article mentions influencers as a revenue stream and I personally love makeup and make purchases and recommendations based on a creator building a reputable brand. I would like to see that model in more spaces. Make up brands give influencers press kits and they give their honest thoughts. Today a TikToker “mass hole” got Kylie Jenner’s updated product and I watched 4 videos of her trying it out and the product that stood out the most was not liked by the creator (upgraded highlighter formula if you’re curious) but because I trust the channel I saw a product that fits into a niche I care about (a more subtle highlighter). Marketing might be getting meritocrized?
Those in-app browsers are so annoying. They make it intentionally difficult to open those pages in Safari
A potentially controversial take, but I believe that Apple can force developers to use SFSafariViewController to enhance privacy and UX, without too much blowback. SFSafariViewController is a privacy-friendly alternative that prohibits third parties from seeing your browsing data (unlike the custom in-app browsers used by apps like Instagram). I’ve yet to see a custom in-app browser that has ever provided a better experience than SFSafariViewController.
Exceptions could be provided where it makes sense. For example, I would still permit apps to load webpages owned by the developer in their own in-app browser (this is necessary for web-based logins, for example).
yeah on wifi, but if your home, its only your household. i thought cellular you get a unique ip? or does the cell operator hide your ip. i'm not aware how routing on cellular works.
It would be great if someone created a non-profit simple website for sharing pictures and updates with family and friends. EFF could promote it and all the smart people who hate FB could volunteer to build it. I'd donate buckets of $ to it to stick it to FB and show the world that the current model of surveillance capitalism is not the only way.
I'd wager that 2/3 of software industry jobs market (number of positions and compensation figures) are built on online advertising industry. Now you tell me what is good or what is bad
Advertising used to be a creative industry. Online advertising has pretty much destroyed that. Perhaps anti-tracking measures will put the focus back on quality in advertising.
I would not put it that way. Criminals, all manner of bad actors, too can be creative. Creativity alone is not enough of a good to rescue a practice, there are other things to be considered.
Advertising and marketing have been, at least as far as my cultural memory extends past the 80s, cynical and soul sucking. Always trying to figure out what was going on in people's heads and spit out some amalgam of an image or lifestyle or identity for people to latch onto and, critically, for businesses to exploit.
The wrapping paper has eternally been "what's wrong with matching a product to a customer" and justifiably that is a difficult point to disagree with. If we are to have products and customers it is almost self-evident that they should be harmonized. But the premise in question presupposes that a customer will have a need; to the degree that needs are invented as much as the product even to justify the expenditure of resources to create a product in the first place. In the end we loop back to the the previous paragraph. Creativity in service of what? pure exploitation.
Software Engineering is, or can be, an exceptionally creative profession. That alone isn't justification for whatever we design! We must be more careful.
Maybe because back in the day you needed big money for a big audience. Local channels on TV had worse ads than national channels. The best ads were on the most expensive airtime and became part of the Superbowl experience. On FB, anyone can buy ads.
Advertising is a super creative industry. One time we targeted people who worked at a particular (large) company in a certain capacity with ads that were specific. This is just standard Account Based Marketing, but we had great conversion rates and one of them was like "I saw your guys' product advertised to me between Words with Friends turns like 'This is how [our company] can help [his company] with [problem we anticipated they'd have]' and I was like woah this is cool, is it kinda creepy? I don't know. But it's cool!".
That needed some pretty clever set up from the marketing folks, company-specific graphics and stuff, and the pipeline to be per company. It was cool, man.
I mean, yeah, sure, lots of you guys would be like "OMG I would hate your company for that" etc. etc., but it turns out that's not how directors at big firms think.
A campaign who's willing to do the legwork to actively identify potential customers/decision makers and advertise to them in innovative ways is perfectly reasonable. The issue is always going to be how they identified the targets and if the sources of data are ones actively consented to, which is different than what Facebook are collecting and providing. A lot of these firms are assuming consent and then reaching as far as they can, and that's always been the problem. I consent to plenty of sources of advertising data through contests, conferences, newsletters, accounts and actions on a particular service, public social media, and so on. If you want to aggregate that consented to information from multiple providers it is fine as long as their privacy policies make that clear. What I don't consent a single provider assuming they can just leech off other providers through device snooping/super cookies/other shenanigans. When some of these inputs are coming from these shady or overreaching sources the campaign itself and anything that's an outcome of that becomes fruit of a poisoned tree. If you look at it from that perspective what becomes 'good' compared to 'bad' becomes straightforward.
If facebook wants this correlating data for outgoing traffic they should be asking to buy it from individual providers instead of assuming consent and scraping it via a side channel on your phone.
At least theoretically, you could have the whole logic deciding which ad to show you running locally on your device, without the need to send any private data to Facebook?
Because the issue isn't where the data is stored, the issue is what the data is used for. In this case, it would be used in a way that still reveals personal information about me -- for instance, in a FLoC-type setup, it's still being revealed which cohorts I'm a part of.
Having the data stored locally is certainly better than having it stored in someone else's database. No argument there, that's an improvement. But that's just making the problem slightly less bad, not solving it.
These sort of schemes just strike me as being sneaky ways of continuing to engage in the abuse that the adtech world loves so much. The major difference being mostly what machines are doing the tracking.
Also, of course, your browser history isn't exactly private even though it's stored on your machine.
So is the argument that personalized ads are inherently bad?
Arguments against tracking/personalization I have heard in the past, which make sense to me, are that having all the data stored remotely gives a lot of power to an evil engineer or government to exploit your data. With a 100% local approach, based on data that is stored anyway, that aspect would go away.
I don't see how in that world personalized ads are worse than unpersonalized ads. Ads in general can be argued to have negative externalities (though I am not 100% convinced of that), but if we take their existence as a given, and the choice is between personalized and unpersonalized, I think I would prefer personalized.
>So is the argument that personalized ads are inherently bad?
No, the argument is that collecting data about me or my machines without my informed consent is bad. The purpose to which that data is put doesn't even come into play.
> With a 100% local approach, based on data that is stored anyway, that aspect would go away.
No, it doesn't. The exposure is certainly reduced, but companies can still determine quite a lot about you by combining the "cohorts" you're a part of with other data.
>I think I would prefer personalized.
I understand that. Personally, whether an ad is "personalized" or not doesn't increase or decrease the ad's utility to me, so I don't care about that directly (with one exception -- personalized ads deprive me of useful information about the site/app/whatever that I'm using: I no longer have clues as to what the target demographic of the site/app/whatever is.)
What I care about is stopping the incessant assault by the marketing companies in terms of spying.
Perhaps facebook could advertise to me using the data that I have put into their site directly rather than snooping on me on other websites through cookies.
Exactly. On instagram, I follow and like content on the d&d and 3dprinting hashtags, so show me related ads. But don't try and follow me around the internet to see what other sites I visit. This allows them to still personalize ads without me feeling that there is a private investigator tailing me everywhere I go.
Well, you don't need to know a person's name and home address to advertise. A profile could include a list of interests. The trouble is that identifying the user across different websites to build the profile requires, you know, an identifier.
Tracking users is necessary, otherwise we would have to spend way too much on ads. Tracking users is necessary, otherwise my small business can not survive. Tracking users is necessary, otherwise we can not understand who our customers are. Tracking users is necessary, otherwise we can not identify new customers. Tracking users is necessary, otherwise we can not evaluate the effectiveness of our ads.
If your business success relies on tracking everyone all the time, then you have no fucking business and should go out of business.
I love the personal entitlement people have when using free email, free social media, free search engines and everything else to the point they are offended if they try to make ends meet by making profit.
Do you think Y Combinator investments don't use tracking? You would get laughed out of a room if you said you track nothing and have a solid product. A phone call to ask about your product is tracking because it all gets recorded and noted.
This is a little, cart before horse; obviously, nothing is free.
Charge customers. Go ahead. In the first place, Advertisers are the actual customers. Freemium models for retail consumers are a business choice.
People are notoriously bad at processing obscured costs. You see it with things like plastic pollution and waste - that cost is never added to the price of M&M packaging. Tomorrow if it were, people would respond logically and change their buying habits.
To call this entitlement, when its an issue of market structure, is to drive this conversation into identity and morality arguments.
The dominant models in tech are some version of freemium, because “network effects”.
Solve for that either technically or legally and you don’t have to start attributing blame where none exists.
This. If something has commercial value, then put a price on it. We've had currency for thousands of years now. It's a really useful way of signaling value in a commonly understood way. Much more efficient than barter.
Stop asking us to barter away data for services. If the service is truly worth something, then put a clear price on it and show some respect to your customers instead of trying to trick them.
The irony you manufacture doesn't hold. Yes, these products are cheap (currently free) no small part due to the market aberration caused by the tracking and advertising. But it's not certain that they would go away if advertising had to revert to a model less driven by privacy intrusion.
I welcome the day such intrusions are rendered illegal or impractical, so that the market can price these offerings appropriately. Until then, why not use what exists?
> such intrusions are rendered illegal or impractical
The GDPR was an attempt. Guess what happened? Everyone implemented it in such a way as to appear compliant but not necessarily be compliant, and to cause maximum annoyance to the user.
What the solution is here is to have an educated population and powerful privacy tools, like uBlock Origin. [1]
But of course, the surveillance oligopoly is developing its own browser [2], specifically to maintain control and make it hard to implement such tools [3].
Quality for consumers has only ever been truly won by regulation - all major economies heavily regulate all industries. The market didn't make food safe, regulation was needed (see history e.g. https://www.hygienie.org/a-brief-history-of-uk-food-safety-l...).
I love the personal entitlement people have when using free email, free social media, free search engines and everything else to the point they are offended if they try to make ends meet by making profit.
Those are not free, the users are paying for them with their share of the ad budget in the price of all the products they buy. And I am not complaining about ads per se - even though I would personally prefer if they disappeared and I could directly pay for the services I use - but about the tracking behind them.
But 1000 HN readers paying $X per month for a web browsing service is not going to pay for the R&D needed to overcome Google's amazing ability to search the web.
ex. $5 per month from 1000 HN readers is only $5000. This is petty money if you want and all swinging, all dancing product, profit and work/life balance.
You should check out Indie Hackers which is essentially a graveyard of products, ideas and people asking why their $3 per month product is not being purchased or used.
You using software for free and in return providing some data in return is the old barter system. Which many people would love to go back to...
Sure, if you are not paying for a service you are the product. I get that. You get that. We can make informed decisions about balancing cost/privacy. But the same cannot really be said for the average consumer. This is not because the average consumer is too stupid to understand, but more so because the services themselves deliberately obfuscate their data collection and its consequences forcing users to do their own research to try and understand what is happening.
Honestly what would be really interesting to me would be to give users a clear-cut choice between tracking vs paying. E.g. replace the dialog in the article with a choice between allowing Facebook to track your activity across other companies' apps and websites or paying a $2/mo subscription fee. I am not so delusional as to think that 75% of people will opt for the subscription, but it would be really interesting to see how many actually would!
[...] paying a $2/mo subscription fee. I am not so delusional as to think that 75% of people will opt for the subscription [...]
Which is weird in itself, not exactly sure how we ended up in this spot. People in a restaurant or a bar are never thinking whether they should order another drink that will be gone in a couple of minutes based on the costs but they refuse to spend one dollar on buying a mobile game that they play for hours and hours and that forces them to watch an ad every minute.
Because people like products and tangible things. Look at the Apple accessories - overpriced, overengineered yet people will happily overpay, lose it and then pay for it again.
Ask someone for £3 for a full vehicle check to know if it's been stolen, crashed, written off, still on finance (basically major headaches) is way too much of an ask.
An example that I have is my project that does the above. 300 free checks and 5 premium checks 6 months later, I still scratch my head at how people are scared of buying 2nd hand cars but literally do nothing to protect themselves.
There is a huge difference between the tracking Facebook does and "a phone call yo ask about your product". Having no tracking at all forced onto you might be the idealistic end goal for users, but it sure is unrealistic. Of course that doesn't prevent you from criticizing the intrusive, overboarding tracking of some social networks or advertisers.
You're identifying the wrong problem. Users aren't upset because they can't use social media for free while not being tracked, they're upset because they can't use social media without being tracked period.
You have it entirely backwards. The advertisers on things like facebook should be paying the users for using the site and getting their ads in front of them. facebook is not even worth $1 a month to most people, that's why the won't charge for it, and shows it's actual value to the end user. The real benefit of facebook is to the companies trying to shill their wares on facebook.
While I dont mind some tracking and telemetry, platforms have abused that trust and track everything they can now. I'm all for going scorched earth policy.
Similar to how if an app sends just one spam notification, it's an uninstall and a 2 star rating.
> platforms have abused that trust and track everything they can now
The frog boiling that got me to block tracking and advertising in every way available to me was the era of the advertising hyperlink (late 2000s). An article would have what looked like hyperlinks to other stories or sources but were really just links to ads for products that matched that keyword.
If your cursor even hinted at hovering over them they would generate a popup with some obnoxious ad with a "close button" so small it was virtually impossible to click it without going to the advertiser site. Such sites would almost invariably spit out pop-unders, resize browser windows, and try to install browser toolbars.
When that style of ad got popular I started blocking domains in my hosts file and using GreaseMonkey scripts to block ads. I haven't stopped in the decade and a half since then. I don't oppose advertising nor do I necessarily oppose tracking since at the very least I can't hide from a server's access logs. I do oppose the absolute bottom feeding of AdTech companies.
There's an argument to be made that "tracking" has had less real world harm to humanity than the push to get rid of it. Real harm will come to people/business through loss of income due to the clamp down on tracking. Not to mention that ads are the foundation of all the content we get for "free" that we've come to rely on.
What is worse though is I have bought many products from non-targeted ads because I didn't even know I wanted the item until I randomly ran into.
I loved my grandmother but targeted ads always remind me of the junk my grandma would get me for Christmas. She knew enough to be in the ball park but because she was in the ball park my taste is more picky and ultimately I never liked almost anything she got me.
I would personally not agree to tracking, but who should be and shouldn't be in business based on tracking is not for you (or me, or anyone) to decide. If there are people who are fine with tracking in exchange for services, then they should be able to make that exchange.
> but who should be and shouldn't be in business based on tracking is not for you (or me, or anyone) to decide
I generally agree with the poster. A majority of "modern" companies that pop up have one of two strategies nowadays:
1. No sustainable business model, nothing to sell to users. Grow as fast as possible, get bought by one of the established megacorps.
2. The product is kind of there, but it is only an excuse to grab as much data as possible. Again nothing to sell to actual users.
The ad business has kind of become a market that trades among themselves, they don't sell anything but the promise for others to sell more, except now companies that mainly sell ads also buy advertisements for their business.
It's become a huge house of cards and you really have to wonder what the reason for their existence is.
Thinking purely as a customer the fact that I have just no way to just give a company my money and in turn they'll just leave me alone with all of their useless and hostile bull** is hugely frustrating and I think they deserve to go out of business if they truly have no other way to keep the shop running.
No, I do not want this single strawberry for free just for you to break into my house and photocopy as many documents as you can (and leak them to the public a few months later because you don't care a single bit about keeping your data secure)...
i agree, nicely put. just a small addendum to your two points: having very little product for users to sell only works if the product is free-as-in-beer for them - and the way to get there is to sell data about users to paying customers. these are fundamentals of engagement economy: get users kind of addicted to something which has barely any value and they wouldn't pay for it if they had to and sell everything they tell about themselves in the process of using it to people willing to buy the data. due to network effects user data value grows super-linearly, so you can perceive your own data as 'worthless', but it becomes worth much more once you get data about others.
In principle I agree. On the other hand, are people agreeing to be tracked really aware of what they agree to and what the value of the resulting information is? Would they still agree if they knew? And this of course also requires that my choice is actually honored and I currently have very little trust in this respect, after all we already had Do Not Track and nobody cared.
This is the kind of false choice that simply can't be allowed; similar to selling oneself into slavery or selling one's organs are not considered valid transactions. If it is allowed, the market will converge on it. Without a price and disincentive to implementing pervasive surveillance, it will be guaranteed to happen.
> If there are people who are fine with tracking in exchange for services, then they should be able to make that exchange.
Informed consent is almost always lacking. 99.999% of people party to it do not understand this bargain. Do you fully understand it or just "in principle" - which is fine until the rubber hits the road.
"All you have to agree to is being warm, sensitive and caring to our clients." Fine. Prostitution should be legal and absolutely nobody should be subject to it on that basis of understanding what they're signing up for.
Properly informed consent is always crucial to this argument that people are fine with it. The dishonesty, bait and switch, ongoing secretiveness of it should not be necessary and would not happen if it were informed consent. But that consumer fraud being perpretrated 100% built google and facebook. There is not now nor has there ever been consent. Morever when consent is completely withdrawn - you delete your account - they keep a shadow account. To HELL with them and those who pretend all this is honest and above board because it just isn't.
This is fine, and I know some people who are aware and are happy with the ads they recieve.
I do personaly have a problem with not being given the choice, also it should be an opt-in option. Privacy shouldn't be compromised and then restored after the data is already gone.
No. It is in fact your sense of entitlement that makes us sick.
Update: ok, after checking danbruc's comment history, they probably weren't arguing for tracking, and the second paragraph should be read in third person... I'll take my downvotes ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I prefer privacy too. But there is something entitled about wanting to interact with a company but keep the details of that interaction secret from that same company.
That sense of entitlement that you can get stuff for free without having to pay for it in some way. You use facebook for free, it seems to provide you some value, why do you think you are entitled to get this for free?
I am not getting it for free, I am already paying for it with my share of the ad budget included in all the products I buy. And I am not asking for anything to be for free, just allow me to pay for it.
This is such convoluted reasoning and you keep mentioning it. For example I could say: "I don't want to pay the road toll, I pay for it with the gas tax I pay" or "I don't want to pay for Disneyland, I pay for it with all the things I buy inside". Technically Disney could make entrance free and charge ridiculous rates for everything inside but I'm certain that makes theme parks significantly less viable as a business - maybe even straight up unprofitable.
What is convoluted about that? I buy a product, some fraction of the profit goes into the marketing budget, some fraction of the marketing budget goes to Facebook. How am I not paying for using Facebook? Where does their revenue come from if not from me?
Take my Disney example. All what you said applies to that example too. Where does their revenue come if not from you? They could make entrance free and make money on what you buy inside. In fact, you can go further with this. You should not pay for any government services other than taxes. Where does the government revenue come if not from you? Why should they charge for things like drivers license renewals. Everything should be free and come from your taxes...
What's convoluted about your argument is you are asking the service provider to change their business model by pointing our somewhere along the chain they are making money from you so they should be happy. Changing business models might also mean completely changing the way they provide the service. The whole service might have evolved differently if this model was enforced from the beginning rather than suddenly springing it on them now and then saying "make money in a way that's more convenient for me, I don't like how you make money now".
Their business model, leaving aside the ethics/merits, is pretty simple. They offer targeted users on a platter to advertisers. It's easy to package up and sell. Suddenly that's being taken away. Of course they will kick and scream because they've depended on this predictable money making model. Saying "I buy things so you make money" doesn't even make sense. They become no different to a billboard provider.
I don't get your Disneyland example. I replied to comments saying users are getting to use Facebook for free but that is not true, they are paying indirectly via ads. Did anyone claim that you get Disneyland for free? No, you pay for it. Some part with the ticket price, some part when you pay food and drinks, some part with merchandise, some part maybe later when you watch your next Disney movie as the whole thing is to some extend a gigantic ad.
And it matters how you divide it up. You could have a high ticket price and give away all the food for free but that big upfront payment would probably be off-putting for many even if they end up not paying more. For people who only want to ride some roller-coaster and not eat and drink your offering is now not attractive. Other people would exploit your offering, eating only the most expensive stuff in huge quantities.
You could also do it the other way around, have no tickets and pay for everything individually. This will change the entire experience and you have the added complexity of processing payments in many more locations. And all this also applies to you tax example, some services are only used by some part of the population, the other part might be unhappy to also pay for it. If you do not have a driving license, why should you pay for driving license renewals? On the opposite end of the spectrum you might have healthcare where you want to spread the risk across everyone and not only have those pay that actually need it. Its all mostly a matter of trade-offs and incentives how you structure it.
To make the analogy more fitting, imagine Disneyland not charging you for tickets. But they put up cameras and track you all day long, record what you eat, with whom you visit the park, what merchandise you buy, and measure some chemical indicators when you use their toilettes. And then they sell this information to other companies to pay for your visit to Disneyland.
> And it matters how you divide it up. You could have a high ticket price and give away all the food for free but that big upfront payment would probably be off-putting for many even if they end up not paying more. For people who only want to ride some roller-coaster and not eat and drink your offering is now not attractive. Other people would exploit your offering, eating only the most expensive stuff in huge quantities.
Bingo! This is exactly my point! To go off what you said, if Disneyland operated like how you described (selling your data for income), the park would be completely different. They would be optimized to collect that data because the whole park was built on the premise that everything is free and we are going to siphon as much from you in the form of data. Every ride in the park will be built to gather that data. However since Disneyland is not that, they haven't optimized for data collection. It's built on making you happy by the time you leave, not making you spend as much time as possible in the park. You seem to want to walk into a Disneyland that's optimized for data collection and be like "Wow you guys are collecting too much data! You guys anyway make money from me buying stuff! Just stop collecting my data! I pay for all I use indirectly though the stuff I buy!" <--- That's convoluted and unfair. Your sudden awakening for privacy concerns doesn't suddenly replace all the lost income that they have depended on and everyone has willingly given for so long. You can't just wave a magic wand on such a fundamental business model change and expect it to be fixed after your sudden change of mind. It's incredibly naïve to thing you can change business models like that. Companies live and die on their business models.
Again looping back to the things you mentioned about two Disneylands - they are completely different. It was you who changed in between. Suddenly you feel that they are not entitled to your data. But you've been giving them your data for years, and got them hooked on it. And now suddenly you are disgusted. Nothing wrong with changing or wanting different things but you feeling disgusted suddenly says a lot more about you than them.
Personally I think its a necessary change but I would have liked to seen it implemented in a more regulatory level but over a longer period of time so everyone has time to change. Apple is acting in an extremely predatory manner. They are forcibly lowering the quality of their competitor's ad network quickly so suddenly their ad network becomes a lot more viable. I wouldn't be surprised to see a big jump in the ad network spend over the next few years. They're doing all this under the guise of protecting the user but it's obviously bullshit. This is very clear with their vehement opposition of right to repair. They don't care about the consumers. They want to keep growing and they will keep doing so by whatever means necessary (under the guise of protecting consumers) to achieve this goal.
Isn't that up to facebook to determine how they want you to pay for their services? Just like it's up to disney, apple, microsoft, tesla to determine what their pricing model is. And it's up to you if you can live with this pricing model, and if you don't, don't use the product or service.
We pay for internet access. When I first used the web in 1993, the internet fee was covered by the tuition I paid, as only universities, government and a relatively small number of corporations were connected. Later, ISPs were formed and we began paying for home access. The "entitlement" we pay for, IMO, is access to a network free from surveillance and advertising, or at least one where we can navigate around that. The 1993 web was full of free content. Few web users paid for anything. (As remains true today.) The beauty of the web is that anyone can set up a website. However no one is entitled to traffic. There used to be this idea of "netiquette". I think it is fair to say that these enormous websites like Facebook with massive traffic are playing by their own rules. They do come across as having a sense of entitlement. It is not their network. It is our network. Most if not all of the "content" they use to draw the traffic they get is user-generated. You pay your fee and you are entitled to access the network but (arguably) that does not include conducting mass surveillance and sustaining a massive advertising campaign that targets people personally.
Tha value of Facebook is in its users, not the people who write the website's PHP and run the servers. It is commonly agreed that writing a Facebook clone is not a difficult task. That value is the users. There is a reason Facebook will never charge a usage fee to anyone.
How much of that money for internet access goes to facebook? How are they supposed to develop and maintain their website from zero money they get from you paying for internet access? How are you going to put all your content online if they don't invest in developing and maintaining their services?
"How much of that money for internet access goes to facebook?"
Zero, hopefully. I am not much of a Facebook user.
"How are they going to maintain their website from zero money they get from you paying for internet access?"
That's not my concern. They ran the website without ads for years. They later received millions in investment. There is no such thing as infinite growth. The multi-billion-page website with content of pages uploaded by users for free and moderation performed by low-paid workers in other countries idea is an experiment that might be a failure. Time will tell. But as I said, I am not a user, so it is not my concern.
"How are you going to put all your content online..."
I am not going to do that. Not really my thing. I prefer to submit my public thoughts and ideas to HN. If I want to communicate and share stuff with family, friends and colleagues I do not think using a page on someone else's website is a great solution. Peer-to-peer makes more sense.1 The fees I pay for internet access cover that cost.
I stay with my rule of thumb: Any corporate press release that contains the words "we believe that" is trying to bullshit an unethical business practice into something positive.
Screw them, really, these advertisers are super nontransparent, to us, humans, while our very attention is their product. And when we don't like it, they come up with dark patterns that shove it down our throats using pure confusion.
I still cannot imagine that it is more effective to completely get to know me and subsequently serve me Makita ads for weeks because I looked for and bought a cordless drill months ago, then to serve me a context relevant ad. Like an SSD ad next to a benchmark article on SSDs. And that is on them, because they don't communicate. We should all try to make those companies fail. Our collective human attention is not something to be taken lightly. It was about time some company made a move that is pro their own paying users.
Reading this article also makes me feel like FB orchestrated this whole privacy horror, using consultants and lobbyists to convince the world they need tracking for good ads, because tracking is what FB does. But maybe we don't. I really wonder what happens if all these companies tell FB and the trackers: Let's see where this ends up, it may well be proven that they didn't need FB and its inane tracking in the first place. If you sell Mountain Bikes, just pay a website owner that lists MTB trails when you want some ads on their site. Disintermediation, it's what the internet is about. Sure there can and will be third party advertisers, but they could focus on site content rather than site visitors. And who knows, maybe I'll come to your site more often when I don't see that I blocked 79 trackers, downloaded 3 MB for some text and had to dig 3 pages into "options" for disabling tracking cookies finding out that I actually really can't.
You know who is a lookalike? All those other visitors on that site that targets a certain demographic.
“I don’t think anyone truly understands how many businesses in the world are 100% dependent on Facebook,” I think you have more problems when you are one of those companies, what's your plan B? Evidently you are not just dependent on FB, you are also dependent on something that the majority of your users really don't like.
> In predictive analytics and machine learning, concept drift means that the statistical properties of the target variable, which the model is trying to predict, change over time in unforeseen ways. This causes problems because the predictions become less accurate as time passes.
This is true, but...meh? OK? Perhaps there are places where inefficiencies are not a bad thing, and perhaps advertising is one of them.
Perhaps, even, we should require people to think and empathize and communicate rather than feed a pile of unvariegated data into a black box and do what it tells us to.
I'm shockingly OK with having to make a connection with people to try to sell them something, and to have that be an upper limit on a company's reach.
> Losing the ability to re-target products to customers after they viewed them online but didn’t buy hurts businesses trying to sell more expensive products, advertisers say
How is this the case?
If I have an online shop using any of the major tools and platforms out there, they all have the ability to tell when someone puts something into their carts and did or didn't buy it. They can all send an email to say "oi there, you forgot to buy <thing>. Here's a 10% discount if you buy it". In addition, I do know that there are addons in Shopify that will re-target stuff along the lines of "customers who bought X bought Y".
It sounds like advertisers are the ones losing out and crying here, not the shop owners!
As put succinctly by the character Malcolm Reynolds on the tv show Firefly: "'Bout 50% of the human race is middlemen, and they don't take kindly to being eliminated."
Publishers (people that sell adds) do not want tracking. They want to take inventory space, display an ad then charge you money per impression. They do not want tracking,reports,clicks or any accountability. IMHO fraud is a large portion of publisher business.
On the other hand, ad spenders (people who buy inventory) want cost per action. You click my ad, you signup, then you purchase something, then pay the publisher a cut. FANNG pretends cost per action does not exist.
The current compromise between the two is cost per click. Removing tracking on the click would be a HUGE win for publishers (Google/FB). They could increase fraud and revenues. Ad spenders would be completely screwed spending money on fraud with no accountability.
