Problems coming for online publishing

> While the split used to be 50/50, it is not much closer to 75/25 (subscriptions/ads).

Thank Trump for that. This didn't happen naturally for them and was only made possible by the election of Trump. Its unlikely that this is going to sustainable for them beyond trump presidency.

The mentions your first point, fairly early on.

It's plausible that a world of ad brokers (with many smaller ad buys) is better than a world of few but very large ad engagements, vis a vis the Chinese firewall. In that world, a single advertiser would have enough (purchasing) power over the newspaper, to the point where they could veto an article critical of that advertiser.

> (b) There's one big difference between Facebook and generic advertising technology: the New York Times doesn't require you to sign up.

> (c) Ad tracking knows which websites I visit. Facebook knows which nude parties I attended in 2005

Facebook tracks you off the site and has been known to build shadow profiles of non-users.

Arguing against one's interests should not necessarily be taken at face value. It's a viable persuasion strategy if you are in for a long con.

Having worked at nyt I worked on nyt_cookie.so an Apache module for parsing and forwarding some of the early tracking systems . So back on the topic over hacks . The source for it was in a cvs repo hosted on this guys second office laptop , running FreeBSD 3.2-STABLE . So one it was 2009 and 3.2 was incredibly old ; as was the laptop . One day the laptops disk dies and no one had backups of the repo . Nyt_cookie.so was kept on the prod web servers for another 4 or 5 years before it was abandoned. We used to binpatch the binary to fix it up .

It's pretty annoying when you pay (a lot) for local newspapers and still have to see advertisement.

Might I suggest reading the article and not just the title?

>By the way, I want to make clear that Zeynep, Brian and Natasha are all innocents here, thanks to the “Chinese wall” between the editorial and publishing functions of the Times. In fact same irony applies to countless other correct and important reporting on the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica mess by other writers and pubs.

> Every time you change devices or delete cookies, the ad targeting starts from a blank slate.

This hasn’t been true for quite some time. These banks on you are really elaborate. They know where you live, they know where you work, they know where you drink your coffee and they know your online behavior.

Those factors mean that you’re never truely anonymous anymore. When you buy a new device it gets tiered to your access points, then your online behavior gets profiled and matched to people who frequent your access points.

Last summer I was on a business trip to another region of my country. Just before I went I had to turn in my work pc for repairs, which meant I had to use the borrow device from our IT department. Despite never having used this device before, and never having logged in from that particular hotel I still ended up getting adds for a very specific online course that I had taken earlier that month as well as a pair of shoes I had just bought.

I guess the irony in that is that even though they we’re able to pinpoint who I was, through what seem like impossible means, they still didn’t know I had actually already bought those products they were advertising.

Regarding (b): That's odd, maybe this differs depending on where the web surfer comes from? The New York Times definitely does require me to sign up.

Happens that I just posted an essay on that topic: http://yuhongbao.blogspot.ca/2018/03/google-doubleclick-mozi...

You are normalizing data collection by third party companies. The article is about selling our data to third party by both Facebook and other websites.

Truth is we don't know what any of those companies are doing besides showing ads. Maybe today they are not doing it, but tomorrow they can use it for other purposes. They know what people are browsing and what their interests are for a location.

Also they can pinpoint users by ip, canvas fingerprinting, fonts installed etc.. https://firstpartysimulator.net/tracker

Can we please keep the reddit style hysterics on reddit? I pretty much left reddit to escape the fake political nonsense. And with all due respect, you are doing exactly what you claim cambridge analytica did. You are pushing extreme fear and agenda. But for what end?

> As I browse, my interests are accumulated into basic interest groups, demographic data, and maybe recently visited websites that use tracking.

You are forgetting installing cookies and fingerprinting ( amongst others ) to track across platforms. You are forgetting using that data to target customers with tailored fearmongering news articles to better clickbait.

> Through that, Republican campaigns also access my grandmother's account, with all of her photos, likes, and comments. They use that data to learn her deepest fears.

I hate to break this to you but everyone does this. Obama did this. The democrats did. Hillary's campaign did this.

I love how you excuse news websites when they cause hysteria and panic over nonsense like campus rape crisis and pay gap in male and female sports. Not to mention the hysteria over cambridge analytica. Seems like the news has done far more harm to you than facebook did to your grandmother, assuming your story is legit and not made up.

I recommend you go watch the 13th on netflix to see how news and media can be dangerous. The problem now is that news has access to tons of data about us ( just like facebook ). The biggest difference is that facebook was pretty much "neutral" whereas the news/media are highly biased. Facebook allowed both trump and hillary political ads.

> yet what worked really well for acquiring users was releasing a JS library for free

I notice this with a lot of new OSS. E.x. Etcher is basically an ad for Resin (tired of flashing SD cards? Use resin and do it with a git push.)

This is the best form of advertising because I get a free useful tool out of it.

I know someone who has a company with over a billion unique visitors a year and they only bring in tens of millions a year in revenue.

I have a site with over a million uniques a year and we did almost thousands a year in revenue.

We are far from experts on selling ads but still it’s a tough way to monetize something small.

To see what's most effective it might be better to watch how ad companies are selling their own services than to follow their advice. It seems like they're getting more through sales staff and content marketing and that online ads are only a small part of what gets them sales.

you don't see users getting smarter about ads. trust me.

you see your close circle of acquaintances getting smarter about ads.

the general population is going downhill, by all metrics we have access to. In one case, people were trying to access a (fake) bank site, which had ads. it was an ad scammer that bought mistyped domains and cloned the homepages, in an automated way. and very badly. yet it had millions of impressions, most with several PVs from same user showing that they did click around.

What doesn't add up is that you and your circle are not typical users. Try talking to advertisers doing direct response on Facebook — they keep a very close eye on ROI. Brand advertising is less trackable, but advertising does and has always worked. If it didn't, businesses that didn't spend on advertising would outcompete those that do.

Really does seem like an interesting use of smart contracts?

And it's not just social data -- there's probably real personal and societal benefit to collaboration around medical data too.

> people don’t share those concerns and would happyily welcome a little passive income stream in their lives.

This is what I gathered from moviepass privacy thread on HN. Most people didn't care about sharing location if it gave them cheap movie tickets.

Great point. Makes you think there may be room for another ad middle man that offers more to consumers because pretty much all adtech right now is built on top of Google, FB, or Apple ad platforms.

> How much is my data worth? I’ll sign a buncb of revenue sharing agreements with YouTube, Google, Mozilla, Facebook etc if the price is right.

That's not how it would work.

In that scenario, you'll have a choice of paying $N per month for the higher privacy version of Facebook, or you can use the advertising supported low-privacy option.

They are not going to pay you. Your other choice will be to not use their platform and they will be fine with that because everyone else will continue to choose ad supported because they do not want to pay $50 or $100 per year for Facebook when they can get it for what they perceive to be as free.

Yeah but it's also crazy how many pubs (the word is nice ;)) already had to close or at least merge which others. Google News made it quite obvious how redundant a lot of content is. Often articles are just exact copies of Reuters, AP, ... texts.

If subscription is the only solution, I expect more pubs to disappear. Being from Germany, if I had to subscribe to nytimes.com to read articles from there I'd stop reading them probably. Just pretending I would subscribe, I would also have to subscribe to 5 more US Newspapers, 2-3 UK ones and 10-15 German ones. NYT Basic is 1.75 € a week, Washington post 10 $ a month. That would be more than 140 € a month. No way :-) (Oh, I forgot all the commercial tech pubs I read)

I hope the publishers come up with a better model.

Yep. I'm not anti-advertising, but I am anti-tracking. Serve me ads, but please don't personalize them.

Media is definitely taking the chance to try and kick Facebook to death, and often for selfish reasons. That shouldn’t distract us from the very real fact that Facebook is a terrible value proposition for users of their service, untrustworthy, and even dangerous. Facebook deserves to be kicked to death, even if the media wants it for their own reasons.

Coupons are a fascinating business, with a lot of middlemen taking cuts. From the agency that creates the advertising campaign (and possibly books the media) to the media platforms that display the coupons (whether inserts in physical papers, direct mail flyers, digital coupons via coupons.com/Quotient and retailer sites and emails, etc). Plus the clearinghouses that process the physical coupons for retailers, and the processors that handle the financial aspect of cutting a check from the manufacturer to the clearinghouse and onto the retailer for the redeemed coupons.

There are a few big names in each of those sections; but "doing the coupons" is an entire process that sets off a chain of necessary suppliers, rather than just a single name like Google.

There is an 80 character title field limit on the HN input field so the title had to be shortened.