No ad revenue, no free content. Get ready for paywalls everywhere.
What the ad networks want, though, is pervasive, persistent, personally identifiable cross-domain tracking across the entire WWW. Obnoxious and unskippable autoplaying videos. Obnoxious, garish popups. 1/5 of the on screen real estate to be advertising often only loosely related to the content, more often than not totally disinteresting to the reader, and potentially serving up malware via their active content.
No. Apple is doing the right thing, and the networks brought it on themselves. I have ZERO sympathy, and anyone who relies on their parasitic behaviour to exist doesn't really offer any value worth paying for anyway. I bet content becomes meaningful enough to be worth paying for, as the rest will die.
TL;DR they want effective attribution, not to wreck your browsing experience.
Those other things mean that the next big data hack/leak won't be your SSN & DOB, but your SSN, DOB, and porn preference.
What advertisers want is a real, credible KPI.
When it's television, and you can show evidence that 2m people watch this program, so sponsoring gets you 2m of your target audience (or whatever you want to argue).
With online, there are few web pages that get 2m people to read them in a day... and surely there's some effect from all those other sites out there. Some of them are even niche, so they might be a hard audience to get...
Ad networks offer "all those other sites", and since you can't verify that the 50 people who went to that web page aren't included in the 20 people who read that other web page without "cross-domain tracking" you can't piggy-back on that argument being made in Television.
Then you've got the second-screen phenomenon: Few people had two televisions in the same room, but almost everyone has at least two screens. Did I get this part of my target audience on their phone or on the desktop. Choices are, buy everyone twice (halving the advertising budget), or be a little more efficient: Ad networks know what they'd prefer, so they want that tracking to personally identify you now. These ad networks are the ones convincing advertisers they need a super mega cookie to track everything.
And so on.
There's also distrust between ad networks, advertisers, and users. So even if they collect all this deep information, you can't trust the other group to be telling you the truth to the other group.
I would love a scenario where I get personalized matches for my needs even if that means me handing over more info. Podcasts seem to be the only place where they're a) big enough to get direct sponsorship but b) small enough that the sponsors are still relevant...and they're using the same techniques as traditional media like TV/radio.
The thing that counts most is knowing who visits their website, what they do and how they do it. The website itself is almost an afterthought.
It's come to the point where basic functions like a contact form simply don't work when you have adblock or Disconnect running.
It's not something ad networks can fix. Once active content is blocked on the client, it's game over. Your content simply doesn't work, and we'll to your competitor with the working site for what we need.
Look, let's not get drastic. Obviously the first step is to whine about it, and behave as if the user's respect for privacy is tantamount to theft. Ooh, maybe try getting some laws passed criminalising ad blocking! (I am not sure whether that is implausibly ridiculous or a simple description of facts.)
Wow...
"Won't someone PLEASE think of the children!!!!"
There are already non-ad-supported funding alternatives for small creators (like Patreon). Maybe the loss of an ad-supported web would finally create sufficient interest in development of micropayment and microfunding services to help the rest.
Edit: and maybe we can finally rid the web of clickbait and Taboola-style garbage content.
Ads work because you're trading something that is worth more to the publisher than to you.
Let's imagine a utility currency called bananas.
A piece of your attention is worth 0 bananas to you. But it is worth 10 bananas to a publisher.
The cost of creating and serving you a piece of content is 5 bananas to the publisher, and the value of it to you is 2 bananas.
If there were no ads, you'd be willing to pay 2 bananas to the publisher, which would not cover the cost. Therefore, the publisher and content creators would go out of business. You wouldn't be willing to pay the full cost (5 bananas), because the content isn't worth that much to you.
Outome:
You: 0 bananas
Publisher: 0 bananas
By seeing the ad, you generate 10 bananas of value to the publisher and content creator, while you get 2 bananas of value by receiving the content.
Outcome:
You: 2 bananas
Publisher: 10 bananas
Direct funding will never fully replace ad revenue.
Consider all of the modern content industries that aren't primarily ad supported - movies, music, AAA video games, books. In this context the ad-supported nature of web content looks like an aberration, not an ideal to strive for.
Might be for you, but for those people who are out of jobs, and those who will lose access to content might think differently.
Seriously?
Advertising has diminishing returns, when you decrease the efficiency of advertising, you decrease the spending.
Another way to think about it: line up every marginal $ you could possibly spend in ads, and sort it by efficiency from max to min. Find the point where efficiency = 100% (spending $1 more generates $0 marginal profit).
As a company, you'd buy all the ads until that point.
When you lower the efficiency of the ads, the intersection moves, lowering the marginal returns, and resulting in lower ad spending.
Anil Dash had a good thread about this recently, and he puts it much better than I:
But these days I get most of my content from podcasts. Their ads are more relevant, less intrusive and I can press a button on my headphones or in my car to do a 30 second skip. But usually I'll listen to an ad read by a new sponsor.
It's a win-win. The cpm's for podcast are much better than for the web or even YouTube.
If your content is so shitty that nobody would pay to view it, then it's worthless.
I'm fine with that. Let the media get its money by providing content that I like and want to pay for instead of by trying to game social media clicks.
Most of the "content" online is the reading equivalent of junk-food anyway.
Besides, there is a version of an ad supported economy that is actually respectful towards your users. You just do sponsored posts and unobtrusive banners. That's fine for small time outfits.
The big barrier with paying for content isn't that I can't part with the change to read an article that piques my interest. It's that I don't want to hand over payment information to any random website. Both for security reasons and because it's a giant hassle. Fix that problem and you're good.
Whenever they want to advertise a YC business, they can just pin a story to the front page for a few hours. It's smart, subtle, seamlessly non-intrusive, and one of the better advertising experiences (relative to other ad-delivery systems), in my opinion.
If you haven't noticed, you need to tune your detector a bit closer to the noise floor.
Currently invasive advertising is better payed. However, there is no reason to believe that prices will stay the same if all advertisers are forced to satisfy some reasonable privacy standards. That is what is being suggested, not abolishing all forms of advertisement.
Sustained interaction and user satisfaction require more thought process than just slapping a clickbait title on something. In reality, clickbait titles work all too well.
Will we lose some good businesses and content creators? Most definitely, but the good (and lucky) ones will adapt and it sets a MUCH better model for future creators.
Well, paywalls lots of places. There'll be less incentive for clickfarming sites, and some-to-many-to-all of the big sites will probably go for-pay, but lots of smaller sites will still provide content because people like to communicate with the world.
It doesn't sound like a bad thing to me—especially if we're being told that the trade-off is paying for content, versus giving up rights to our privacy.
How many would be willing to pay for a simple non-js HTML that’s just plain content?
They're not going to overlook that additional source of income just because you pay them, just like print newspapers didn't keep ads out of subscribers' newspapers.