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Comment by mudil | Hacker News Reader

It is tied to the invasion of privacy.

Facebook and Google control close to 85% of the digital ad market. The rest 15% goes to the content creators and to the journalism. If Google and FB were not able to invade everyone's privacy, that would have created a level playing field for national, regional, and specialized media to prosper. But because they know who you are, they can display an ad for you on any platform. If you are from Denver, here's an ad for a Denver event on your mobile game. So who needs journalism if an article in Denver Post is on par to a Candy Crush screen? Who needs quality content on the internet?

There is a reason why there is no VC investment in the content whatsoever!

Neither Google nor FB should be gathering personal information worse than NSA. Personal information is personal, and free people in a free society should not be followed by multinational corporations.

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The opposite is true: Less personalized ads -> Lower revenue per user -> An even smaller budget for journalism.

There are indeed ethical concerns with this level of tracking. That doesn't change that there's a flipside though. A lot of good journalism will have no monetization model to rely on. Paid content only works for the top publications that aim at a wealthier audience.

But before the algorithm personalized ads journalism wasn’t “dying”, there is ways to do personalized ads without tracking my every move.

There is a reason why there is no VC investment in the content whatsoever. I maintain a website since 2004 for doctors to learn about medical technologies, i.e. new FDA approvals, interviews, product reviews, etc etc, like TechCrunch for doctors. Fourteen years of every day reporting! We should be able to sustain ourselves via ads, but we barely survive. Why? Because of the invasion of privacy, because Google follows users, and it can display ads for doctors on Candy Crush. So who needs journalism? Google doesn't.

You should get higher cpms (more revenue) because doctors/nurses read your site - something that wouldn't necessarily occur without the invasion of privacy.

If there wasn't an invasion of privacy, there would be no open marketplace for buying ads, and small websites would have an incredibly difficult time filling ad slots.

> The opposite is true: Less personalized ads -> Lower revenue per user -> An even smaller budget for journalism.

I think he's got a point but isn't articulating it very well.

Suppose we didn't have any individualized user data but we still knew that people who read articles on medicine are more likely to be doctors and people who read articles on court decisions are more likely to be lawyers etc.

Then specialty publications would have an advantage. If an advertiser wants to reach doctors they have to go to a publication that mostly doctors read or else most of their ad spend is wasted. That allows the specialty publication to charge higher rates, because they have fewer competitors for that viewership market.

Once you have individualized user data, the advertiser can go to a populist media outlet and buy just the subset of users they want. They don't have to go to a specialist media outlet anymore so the specialist media outlets lose advertisers to the populist ones.

Meanwhile it's not actually that expensive to generate horoscopes and celebrity gossip, so there is vigorous competition driving down margins there and the increased ad revenue goes primarily to the tracking companies rather than the content producers.

It's more profitable for a content producer to get 100% of the advertiser's money than to get 15% of it even though the advertiser is spending twice as much in total, with the rest going to tracking companies and fake news outlets.

> The opposite is true: Less personalized ads -> Lower revenue per user -> An even smaller budget for journalism.

I read an article recently that made a good point: personalized ads aren't advertising; it's really direct marketing, just like junk mail, spam, and telemarketing.

"Personalized advertisers" are also very mercenary, and no quality publication can rely on revenue from them. They'll use your content to profile your audience, then abandon you and target them on cheaper websites your users also frequent.

Edit: here's the article: http://blogs.harvard.edu/doc/2018/05/12/gdpr/

The journalists and editors have their own agenda. They used to manipulate the public so easily. Today news is democratized. Everyone publishes news, google, FB, twitter are just platforms. They don't discriminate against anyone.

Do you really believe this or are you just casually throwing it out there to see the response? Google, fb, et al most certainly do manipulate and discriminate against everyone. By design they give you the information you already know, believe and want because this increases engagement and usage. They're not giving you "news" as by definition journalism is intended to be balanced and unbiased. The existing platforms don't want to give you a wide cross section where everyone will disagree with certain components; that would be bad for business.

If you're worried about this (good for you!), broaden your "platform". Don't rely on G and FB to tell you what they aren't telling you. It's somewhere on the web, though.

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