Comment by voidUpdate
6 days ago
I wish we could just ban advertising and tracking on the internet. I feel like so much crap these days has come out of it, all so that CEOs can afford an extra yacht
6 days ago
I wish we could just ban advertising and tracking on the internet. I feel like so much crap these days has come out of it, all so that CEOs can afford an extra yacht
It's already enough to just have plain ads. Like we have them on the streets, at the bus station, newspapers, etc. No tracking needed at all, just give out the message. If you need to target people to it in the context of the place or content you are showing it with. But you don't need to know anything about the user seeing the ad. Targeting by user doesn't work anyway.
> Targeting by user doesn't work anyway.
How did you reach this conclusion? The main problem is that it works way better than traditional marketing medium.
It's the reason Google and Facebook are so massive, why would publishers choose to pay them if it doesn't work?
> why would publishers choose to pay them if it doesn't work?
Because they believe it works and it's impossible to prove otherwise?
I've seen it being used.
Like on the frontend side with Facebook which thinks if I'm interested into cycling I will also be interested in cars (both are on the street, right?) or if I'm interested in some more dirty humor I also want to see more "naughty" stuff.
And also on the backend used by magazines and they mostly don't use the user profiles because it's too targeted and doesn't have enough audience. And if you make the targeting broad enough you'll have again people interested in chocolate so you target them with wine and whiskey.
Or even better on Amazon where you can buy a new TV and when you have done so it will suggest you even more TVs for the next months.
By the same logic cigarettes are presumptively beneficial...
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Depending on the data you collect, targeting by user - unfortunately - works. If the granularity is not one user, it will be a hundred. If not, a thousand, and so on. I've seen apps run ads targeting a total of 5 cohorts(together holding a hundred million users), and I've seen companies run ads targeting 100s of cohorts with the same number of users. They all work better than no targeting at all.
However what you're saying isn't completely wrong. I've also seen user targeting become a self-fulfilling prophecy. What happens is that it's championed by a high level executive as the panacea for improving revenue, implemented, and seen to not work. Now, as we all now, the C*O is Always Correct, so everything else around it is modified until the user-level targeting A/B test shows positive results. Usually this ends up in the product being tortured into an unusable mess.
Before you target 5 different cohorts it's better to target the context of where the ad is shown. i.e. web content normally already has a category and people reading an article about cheap flats in a city might be very much interested in renting or buying a flat. By collecting signals on a user you might only get that interested after a longer time, if you even have a profile, and by the time you pick it up they might have a new flat and are no longer interested.
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I don't think it has to go that far. I think there's a middle ground here that people would accept: show us ads, but make it a one-way firehose, like TV and billboards. If you need to advertise to pay for the site, put up all the banners you want. But don't try to single me out for a specific one.
If it could pay for network TV there's no reason it can't pay for a website.
(You could still do audience-level tracking, e.g. "Facbebook and NCIS are both for old people, so advertise cruises and geriatric health services on those properties")
Reddit has fairly extensive device fingerprinting. And they are selling data for training AI models. It's only a matter of time before there is some premium phone app that monetizes data that otherwise isn't available/for sale.
This type of thing is pure greed, completely distinct from a highly aggressive pursuit of far more lucrative opportunities that average businessmen have been able to accomplish in the extreme interest of their shareholders.
Those true leaders are the traditional examples who have shown success over the centuries, without letting any greed whatsoever become a dominant force, recognizing and moving in the opposite direction from those driven by overblown self-interest, who naturally have little else to offer. It can be really disgraceful these days but people don't seem to care any more.
That's one thing that made them average businessmen though.
Now if you're below-average I understand, but most companies' shareholders would be better off with a non-greedy CEO, who outperforms by steering away from underhanded low-class behavior instead.
Now if greed is the only thing on the table, and somebody like a CEO or decision-making executive hammers away using his only little tool with admirable perseverance long enough, it does seem to have a likelihood of bringing in money that would not have otherwise come in.
This can be leveraged too, by sometimes even greedier forces.
All you can do is laugh, those shareholders might be satisfied, but just imagine what an average person could do with that kind of resources. It would put the greedy cretins to shame on their own terms.
And if you could find an honest above-average CEO, woo hoo !
The majority of internet users are either unwilling or unable to pay for content, and so far advertising has been the best business model to allow these users to access content without paying. Do you have a better suggestion?
They are able, because in the end advertising is also paid by customers. The complications are:
- Paying for services is very visible, whereas the payment for advertising is so indirect that you do not feel like you are paying for it.
- The payments for advertising are not uniformly distributed, people with more disposable income most likely pay more of overall advertising. But subscriptions cannot make distinctions between income.
- People with disposable income are typically the most willing to pay for services. However, they are also the most interesting to advertisers. For this reason, payment in place of ads is often not an option at all, because it is not attractive to websites/services.
I think banning advertising would be good. But I think a first step towards that would be completely banning tracking. That would make advertisements less effective (and consequently less valuable) and would pose services to look for other streams of income. Plus it would solve the privacy issue of advertising.
This!
It's a game. When a merchant signs up to an ad platform (or when the platform is in need of volume), they are given good ROI, and the merchant also plays along and treats it as "marketing expenditure". Eventually, the ROI dries up i.e the marketing has saturated and the merchant starts counting it as a cost and passes it onto the customer. I don't know if this is actually done, but it's also trivial for an ad platform to force merchants to continue ads by making them feel it's important: when they reduce their ad volume, just boost the ROI and visibility for their competitors (a competitor can be detected purely by shared ad space no need to do any separate tagging). Heck, this is probably what whatever optimization algorithm they are running will end up suggesting as it's a local minima in feature space.
And yes, instead of banning ads, which would be too wide a legal net to be feasible, banning tracking is better. However, even this is complicated. For example, N websites can have legitimate uses for N browser features. But it turns out any M of the N features can be used to uniquely identify you. Oops. What can you even do about that, legally speaking? Don't say permissions most people I know just click allow on all of them.
Internet users pay for their services by everything they buy being more expensive due to the producers having to cover the advertising expenses.
>The majority of internet users are either unwilling or unable to pay for content
Except for Spotify, News subscriptions, videogame subscriptions, video streaming services, duolingo, donations, gofundmes, piracy services!, clothing and food subscriptions! etc etc
People pay $10 for a new fortnite skin. You really pretending they won't pay for content?
People were willing to pay for stuff on the internet even when you could only do so by calling someone up and reading off your credit card number and just trusting a stranger.
Meanwhile, the norm until cable television for "free" things like news was that you either paid, or you went to the library to read it for free.
Maybe people could visit libraries more again.
Sure, this entire business model has been cataclysmic for traditional media organizations and news outlets and peoples trust in institutions has plummeted in correlation, so, let’s just fucking scrap it and go back to payed media.
"Traditional media organizations" have been primarily funded by advertising longer than anyone on HN has been alive.
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I think that might be a rhetorical device bequeathed to you by the social media companies.
People of course do pay for things all the time. It’s just the social media folks found a way to make a lot more money than people would otherwise pay, through advertising. And in this situation, through illegal advertising.
The best thing we can all do is refuse to work for Meta. If good engineers did that, there would be no Meta. Problem solved. But it seems many engineers prefer it this way.
I don't pay for network TV but it still gets produced
And it is funded by ads, what's your point?
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The question is how do you ban it, and then how do you prove that people are breaking those rules?
By defining the $thing, banning the $thing per definition by law, and then tasking FBI-like organization enforce the law? It won't completely go away but it will subside, like how gambling on Internet is divided binary and confined into lootbox games without cashing features and straight up scam underground casinos.
Personally I think we should start from separating good old ads(that existed before I was 15) and Internet "ads". The old ads were still somewhat heavily targeted, but less than it is now. There probably would be an agreeable line up to which level advertisement efforts can be perverted.
I mean the comparison of ‘old’ ads vs new ads is interesting in itself, old ads already abide by far more regulation and are far more auditable. Simply bringing digital ads in line would be a big step forward.
Some examples:
In most countries it’s illegal to ‘target minors’ and there’s restrictions on what ads can run on after school hours. Meta has always allowed age targeting down to 13 and has no time of day restrictions.
In parts of New Zealand you can’t advertise alcohol between 10PM and 9AM… unless you do it on Meta or Google.
Most countries have regulation about promoting casinos (or the inability to) unless they’re digital casinos being promoted in digital ads.
Or just look at the deepfake finance and crypto ads that run on Meta and X. Meta requires 24 strikes against an advertiser before they pull them down, if a TV network ran just one ad like that it would be a scandal.
Audit-ability is the biggest issue imo. If a TV ad runs we can all see it at the same time and know it ran. That is simply impossible with digital ads, and even when Meta releases some tools for auditing the caveat is that you still have to trust what they’re releasing. Similarly with data protection there’s no way to truly audit what they’re doing unless you install government agencies in the companies to provide oversight, and I don’t see how you could really make that work.
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Yes - although I disagree on one point.
All we need to do is define the $thing and mandate that lawsuits can be effective.
No agency enforces that potato chips need to fill up 92% of the bag or whatever, or that McDonalds cannot show pictures of apple fritters with more apples than they actually come with (this happened).
You just incentivize a cottage industry of legal that can squeeze a profit out of suing peanut butter companies for labelling incorrectly, or advertising dishonestly and it sort of takes care of itself.
I think the main problem is lots of money are made from it, and money influences politics hugely. The technical difficulties are low on the list of reasons this is not happening.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43595269
I like the idea, but where do you draw the line on what advertising is.
Is affiliate marketing still allowed? Are influencers allowed to take payment? Can people be a spokesperson for a company? Can newspapers run commentary about businesses? Can companies pay to be vendors at a conference?
No matter where you end up drawing the line you’re just shifting the problems somewhere else. Look at the amount of money Meta and Google make, the incentive is just too large.
I know. It's wishful thinking that will never become a reality. I pray for a solarpunk future in the same way
The problem is their greed is unlimited and their power/influence and purchasing power is relative to all of the other billionaires corrupting government and making every little facet of life of ordinary people more expensive, miserable, transactional, and punitive.
It's impossible and we all know it. Instead, donate or help with the huge adblock lists that are being maintained by a lot of people
A lot of things I would have previously said were impossible have happened in the last half year. If only a few of those things were of the impossibly good type.
As said in a reply to a sibling comment, I am very aware. This is wishful thinking
>all so that CEOs can afford an extra yacht
...and so consumers can use services/products without having to fork over money.
People love the ad-model. Given the option to pay or use the "ad-supported" option, the ad-supported one wins 10 to 1. This means in many cases it doesn't even make sense to have a paid option, because the ad option is just so much more popular.
As bad as crypto is, with all the negative things attached to it, BAT was probably one of the smartest things to be invented. A browser token that automatically dispenses micropayments to websites you visit. Forget all the details to get snagged on, the basic premise is solid: Pay for what you use. You become the customer, not the advertisers.
Also a note about ad-blocking - it only makes the problem worse. It is not a "stick it to the man" protest. You protest things by boycotting them, or paying their competitors, not by using them without compensating them.
There is no such thing as a free lunch. Consumers on average are forking over the money. Otherwise no one would pay for advertising. And they are paying more than they would have otherwise since this dystopian tracking apparatus isn't free either.
Yes, we need ads for a free internet, today. And, as a result, we also have our privacy eroded - eroded in ways we may not care about today, but will probably regret tomorrow.
If we must pay for the internet, give me an option to pay to use it where I see no ads and my privacy is preserved. Let me know what that cost is and I'll decide what I want to do.
Right now, the actual pricing is obscured so we just "accept" that the internet in its current form is how it needs to be.
>give me an option to pay
This will depress ad revenue as the people with the most money will be the people who pay to remove ads. This will make less sites and content viable.
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I really liked the concept of BAT but the reality left me wanting.
Things like "we'll hang on to the tokens of sites that don't use BAT yet for them until they join" gave negative vibes.
It all felt a little underbaked. I swing back to Brave once in a blue moon and then remember I've got at least $20's worth of BAT lost forever somewhere.
I'm not a big fan of it or anything, it's just the only crypto I know that was targeting that idea.
I'd love if there was another one that was totally open and just a browser extension away. But I do not think it would ever get off the ground because...
People love the ad model and hate paying for things.
The deprecation of third-party cookies, that all browsers were at one point on track to implement, was pretty much the most realistic first step to that. Which is why Google killed it last year by leveraging their control over Chrome.
While not technically a crime, it was a disgusting, unethical market manipulation move that never really got the public outrage it deserved.
Google execs’ initial support for it was also telling: leadership at Google must literally thought they would find another way to stay as profitable as they are without third-party cookies. Put another way: Google leadership didn’t understand cookies as well as someone who’s taken a single undergrad web dev class. (Or they were lying all along, and always planned to “renege” on third-party cookie deprecation.)
I don't think that's quite what happened. Google got in anti-trust trouble because they have an unfair advantage in user-tracking, given logged in Chrome accounts. Removing third-party cookies hurts other privacy-invading companies without substantially affecting Google. It was still somewhat on track to be removed from Chrome until they lost their antitrust battle, and Chrome was required to be spun off. With Chrome's new future, and Google's new legal constraints, there's less incentive to try and make Privacy Sandbox work. At least, that was my understanding; I didn't follow it all that closely.
This is very misleading. Google was prevented from disabling third-party cookies due to intervention by the CMA, who felt it would provide an unfair advantage over other advertisers. Google argued their case for years, proposed competing standards to act as a replacement (see Topics API), and eventually gave up on the endeavour altogether and simply made it a user toggle.
Google gets no competitive advantage from removing third party cookies from chrome. The anticompetitive monopolistic tactic was the plan to replace third party cookies with FLoC/Privacy Sandbox/Topics AI, and THAT is what they were not prevented from doing.
No one is trying to stop google from removing third party cookies. Google is just unwilling to remove them without introducing a new anticompetitive tracking tool to replace them.
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Insidiously calling it "Privacy sandbox", and now setting everything opt-in every time I login to Chrome is really not Googly.
Most commenters on Hacker News hated Google’s plan and hoped it would fail. Were they wrong?
It seems like damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t.
That stemmed from “dammit Google now every SaaS developer has to work nights to meet your arbitrary deadline”; here we’re caring more about the impact as consumers. It’s ok to think about things in two ways.
source: a developer who actually did have to do this (and did it, and now didn’t have to, but it’s done)
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