GDPR: Programmatic ad buying plummets in Europe
digiday.com
digiday.com
Also, I find it interesting and confusing that the site puts up a panel on the privacy policy, which says "By using our site, you agree to these terms". But then it has an "Accept" button, as well as an "X". So (not that this site is unique) what does it mean if I don't click Accept (as is my wont)?
So the website has to block users that don't explicitly agree, a simple statement won't do.
There are exceptions, GDPR having the notion of "legitimate interest", which many services will try to abuse, however it has a precise definition and user tracking, ads targeting, marketing, or other interests like that that don't cut it, even if by not doing so results in less revenue for the service.
The GDPR has teeth, which is why companies that have been violating user privacy are freaking out ;-)
We don't know how GDPR works. Its structure grants immense discretion to political bodies. Given the EU is undergoing another cycle of political weakness, it would not be safe to assume anything about interpretation or enforcement.
This is a good principle for Constitutional law. It's a bad principle for general law, as it introduces political uncertainty and authoritarian risks into everything.
For example, the legitimate interest. Who determines that? The authoritaa. But then the authoritaa might approve Google and disapproves small-naughty-trackor. Both are doing the same privacy invasion. So why one gets a free pass and another is reprimanded.
Even if the current regulator (persons) are honest, they are not irreplaceable. Maybe the guy after them will be corrupt. And since there is a lot of money here, money corrupts.
For example, when you are a EU citizen using a US social network that operates world wide (and thus also targets EU markets), you are still covered when in the US.
* If your company is EU-based, you must comply with GDPR, whatever the location of your users/clients
* If your users/clients are EU-based, idem
* If your users/clients are EU citizens located abroad, it applies *only* if you target EU as a market. If you operate a website dedicated to sell t-shirts to Californian people, and an EU citizen living in California buys from your website, you aren’t expected to comply with GDPR."""
1. This Regulation applies to the processing of personal data in the context of the activities of an establishment of a controller or a processor in the Union, regardless of whether the processing takes place in the Union or not. [i.e. EU companies, or EU subsidiaries of foreign companies, have to obey GDPR with all data they deal with]
2. This Regulation applies to the processing of personal data of data subjects who are in the Union by a controller or processor not established in the Union, where the processing activities are related to: [foreign companies dealing with the data of people physically inside the territory of the EU have to follow the GDPR if...]
(a) the offering of goods or services, irrespective of whether a payment of the data subject is required, to such data subjects in the Union [they're offering services to those people]; or
(b) the monitoring of their behaviour as far as their behaviour takes place within the Union. [they're tracking what those people do in the EU - but tracking what they do abroad doesn't trigger GDPR!]
3. This Regulation applies to the processing of personal data by a controller not established in the Union, but in a place where Member State law applies by virtue of public international law. [it applies to businesses in places with weird legal status, like some overseas possessions, or maybe the Channel Islands]
"""
IANAL but implied consent, by visiting the site, is not enough anymore. Consent must be explicit and informed, afaik there are a few exceptions there for stuff that's "vital to the sites function".
Tho back then I missed their spin how they are supposedly only targeting "that one specific cracker", they must have come up with that a bit later because on their Reddit they mostly tried to argue "it's only affecting pirates".
I could play and encounter the ocasional cheatet. great f... deal. to this day I still play wii mario kart with some friends and there is still some loser spamming bombs all over the maps because nintendo screwed up (I wouldn't mind games havin root access to a console). we simply couldn't care less. yeah everyone will lose to the loser and switch servers asap, but we still had a good time.
while on the PC every crap you install from steam (which already have root access, expose network ports for who knows what, etc) will also install with root access for what? so people can't cheat on solitaire2000 mmo? I gladly would like all that crap software to run securely in a sandbox and find the ocasional cheater that I will lose to and then proceed to ignore.
heck a blocking list would be better than every single anti cheat code.
I don't even know where I am going with this rant. giving up your entire computer to every crap game is dumb. period.
It would just plain suck. Nobody would have fun, not even the cheaters, when they are going to play against eachother.
The commenter's case was about removing or not allowing it at all, but de facto it's required.
I'm pretty sure non-matchmaked games don't have anticheat features -- it would be dumb, as it is an additional cost.
The commenter specifically complained about giving root access to games, which is a pretty insane idea, security-wise. If anticheating techniques really require root access, then people that care about competitive gaming should have an option to consider this trade-off and turn the anticheating pieces on if they think this has a better reward/risk ratio than not giving root access to a game. It definitely shouldn't be on by default and unconfigurable, though.
In CounterStrike (Global Offensive) this is already the case. The official Valve anticheat is not as intrusive as the anticheat provided by external services like Esea or Faceit. If you choose to use such service they basicly take your system apart. It turns out that in order to get good results this is needed.
I think you underestimate the impact massive cheating can have on a game. Even casual players will leave games that have cheaters in every other lobby.
recaptcha was fine without even having a server side confirmation, until google improved it.
But "pay and agree to get tracked, or else your payment will get you nothing", that would be a surefire way to get in trouble.
Also unconsentable would be a carte blanche for passing on the data to undisclosed third parties for unrestricted use and redistribution. This is where many existing revenue models will still have to adapt and where a lot of bad actors will dwindle or shift from grey to deep, actionable black.
You're free to have ad tracking as long as it is optional and by explicit consent only.
A newspaper might argue that their business is tracking users so they can show ads and afford journalists, but it won’t hold up.
Of course sites will rather try to pull a stunt like this if the option is shutting down your business directly - but I sure hope regulators force sites to turn to paid content or shut down.
I think it will hold up. Newspapers are a big factor in European the courts would not risk anything against them. Especially not if they might loose a big chunk of revenue.
Q is what will actually happen if the law is interpreted the way I want/think? Newspapers are doing quite poorly already.
Not at all: on the surface, it's the difference between "give me a dollar for a bar of candy" and "here, have a free bar of candy (and I'll help myself to a dollar (or two))".
Beneath the surface, it means that the ad-financed newspaper will have to aggregate their PII in-house (or with the help of carefully vetted partners) into targeting decisions instead of blindly throwing it over a wall to random third parties.
Oh totally! That’s why ads have never been a thing until the internet, and why there have never been print ads, television ads, and ads on the radio. No individual data, no ads, it all adds up.
(/s)
> 4. When assessing whether consent is freely given, utmost account shall be taken of whether, inter alia, the performance of a contract, including the provision of a service, is conditional on consent to the processing of personal data that is not necessary for the performance of that contract.
So they have to sit in contemplation for a few hours before going right ahead with collecting data that is not functionally required? Utmost care was taken...
EDIT: Am I really being downvoted for requesting a citation to a claim that seems to have no apparent/straight-forward basis in the law? What has this site became?
It seems like the interesting question here would be what happens if the thing conditional on consent isn't the provision of service but rather something like waiving payment of a fee.
The reason this hasn't been offered historically is economic. There aren't enough people willing to pay to justify the effort, and the people who are willing to pay are also the best advertising targets, which means the fee would have to be high enough that hardly anyone would choose it.
But what happens now if they put a box on the site that says "pay $75 for this article or consent to be tracked and get it for free"?
Would that be allowed by the GDPR?
I don't know about Tuesday, but you should have been shorting any company that derives a significant percentage of their revenue from the EU ad market for the last several months. Online ad revenue from the EU will fall and never rise again, it's just a matter of exactly how much. The only thing that might change this is if there is such a public outcry about the negative effects of GDPR that it gets dialed back. But that seems like a longshot.
What fraction of your investable wealth have you (downandabout) committed to the short?
2) I have not made a single "doomsday" post about GDPR. I am realistic about its consequences, which happen to be negative for the most part.
3) There are many, many people on HN that invest in various things, and I have not once seen a financial disclosure about anything, even from incredibly high profile individuals on here that are known to be investors in or associated with the things they are talking about.
It's good to have multiple viewpoints of course, but I was a bit surprised by your commitment to anti-GDPR commenting. It's as if the previous discussions accounted for nothing, and it all has to be hashed out again.
I would for sure classify your viewpoint as "doomsday" (or FUD), but I have to admit I'm probably biased by my opinion: I legitimately feel GDPR is the best thing to happen to not only privacy, but Internet in general in the last decade.
Everyone should have a chance to learn accurate facts about this nightmarish regulation, especially here on HN where we have many tech entrepreneurs. Most people don’t see every post on GDPR. For the record, I just searched for GDPR stories on here and it turns out I have commented on only a small percentage of the GDPR threads that have been submitted.
""When we do need to apply a sanction, fines will not always be the most appropriate or effective choice," Denham said. "Compulsory data protection audits, warnings, reprimands, and enforcement notices are all important enforcement tools. The ICO can even stop an organisation processing data."
"None of these will require an organisation to write a cheque to the Treasury, but they will have a significant impact on their reputation and, ultimately, their bottom line," she said."
https://www.out-law.com/en/articles/2018/april/gdpr-uk-watch...
This is stuff the ICO has been doing for decades anyway, because they've always had the power.
Remember when they got a warrant to search the London Office of Cambridge Analytica? That was pre-GDPR.
If you think you know more than the UK Information Commissioner's Office about GDPR compliance, you're delusional.
It's simple math. The ad industry has gotten so large because complex ad targeting tools made it possible to deploy ad campaigns profitably. With those tools extremely watered down due to GDPR, most ads that were profitable on May 24th are not profitable today. Most companies will not sustain these losses for long, and will simply shift their ad spend to other markets where they can still make a profit.
Some brand advertisers might stick around in the EU market - Coke, Pepsi, maybe Apple, etc. But with most everyone else out of the picture, the market will shrink. It will likely never again be the size that it was on May 24th.
That's totally fine, and nothing of tangible value will be lost to society.
Some valuable innovations have happened thanks to $$ being fueled into the tech sector via adtech and privacy invasion, and those will suffer, but that's a trade me and many others are happy to make. The "value add" of privacy invasion is purely an arms race.
I don't think anyone really knows this for sure. Of course, Ad Tech companies will come up with some type of "metrics" to show how profitable their particular targeted ads are compared to everyone else. But I think much of the recent technical advances in ad tech are driven more from an arms race mentality - i.e. as an advertiser I feel pressured into using the latest ad targeting tech, not because it is more effective, but because my competitors are using it and I don't want to be left behind (kind of like the VC FOMO herd mentality).
Edit: Perhaps you meant profitable for the Ad Tech companies themselves and not the actual product companies purchasing the ads. In this case, I believe your statement is valid (again, not because of the effectiveness of the tech but because of FOMO).
It’ll work itself out in the end, some think it will increase overall quality by forcing lower quality news publishers out of the market.
This is by far the most likely result. Why run an ecommerce store when you can rely on Amazon or eBay to shoulder the costs and risk?
GDPR will cause further consolidation, and ironically the companies people are forced to use will have everyone opt-out of the GDPR law by spamming them constantly with "opt-in" links until they click the "stop spamming me" button and the situation is exactly the same as it was yesterday, but with less competition.
Unintended consequences indeed.
Hm? I don't see this happening. Under GDPR you have to offer the same service 'without detriment' if the user does not want personalized ads. Most people would pick this option as long as it is clear to do so. I don't think reputation makes much of a difference. As far as I can tell, they could become paid subscriptions more likely.
The high quality news will be gladly paid for, while there will be far less clickbait sites as the ads revenues will drop. We will have less garbage on the internet and this is actually great, on the other side, the real journalism (not news like how to enlarge your penis) will hopefully come back into spotlite.
Quality small to medium publishers are the ones who will get squeezed hard.
It would be pretty shocking if suddenly EU users started happily paying for journalism. It’s going to be an exciting petri dish.
Ironically, the most effective micro-payment or subscription-based system will probably come from Google or Facebook in the end.
I can't find the link where I read this, but targeted ads tend to be detrimental for high-quality publications. Targeted ad peddlers are mercenary. If they want to target a high-quality site's audience, they'll run just enough ads to profile them, then target that audience on cheaper, lower-quality sites which that they also frequent.
tl;dr: Targeted ads and tracking mean advertisers have the technology to shaft high-quality sites in favor of cheaper, lower quality ones.
It allowed millions of web sites to fund themselves and publish content for free, which enabled millions of other people, many of whom don't have a lot of money to pay for content, to access it. Many of those people would never respond to the ads, so in effect, they were subsidized by those who would respond to the ads.
I grew up poor myself in Baltimore city, I could never had afforded to pay for any online content. My parents couldn't even afford cable. We watched broadcast television only. I got all my books from public libraries or used book stores. If most of the services that exist today were behind paywalls and I were still poor, that content would be off limits to me.
On the flip side, advertising used to be incredibly wasteful for small businesses. If you're a local dress shop, bakery, or piano teacher, it was much harder for you to "target" people who were highly likely to use your services. Instead, you had to place much more generic ads in many different channels like signage, local newspaper classifieds, the yellow book, circulars, direct mail, and so on.
The more precise web based advertising is a revolution for smaller businesses to limit their costs, track campaigns, iterate and test what works, and reach customers cheaper and faster. Is your local bakery saving money and bringing in more local business, evil?
Way too much of the rhetoric on HN lately IS literally drinking the cool aid. It's people taking theoretical damage scenarios and way over-inflating them into actual harm. It's worse than the anti-vaxxers who inflate minute risks, or the anti-GMO crowd, who bridge a sledgehammer when a scalpel is needed.
The downside of making ad spending less efficient, or erecting pay walls, is going to be greater centralization of the web. Because if you need to do untargeted advertising, than the greatest efficiency comes from reaching the most number of eyeballs. If you need to get paywall subscribers, most small brands won't be able to convince people to pay $10/mo for subscribers, so this will force small publishers into the arms of large consolidators who sell subscriptions, and then dole out pennies, just like the record industry did to musicians.
So those wishing for the destruction of the ad supported web as it exists today are really, in effect, creating the unintended consequence of even bigger publishing oligarchies tomorrow, while the little guy is squeezed out by lower margins and higher costs. These regulations aren't really going to punish Google, Facebook, or the other large players very much. They'll survive. It's the mid-sized and smaller companies who will face the greater challenges.
All the heat comes from those who want to push instead of provide. It is so obviously wrong.
I don't have a precise answer for that question. I would love to read a good analysis.
>It allowed millions of web sites to fund themselves
Not sure about that number.
> which enabled millions of other people, many of whom don't have a lot of money to pay for content, to access it. Many of those people would never respond to the ads, so in effect, they were subsidized by those who would respond to the ads.
Yes, and it also allowed centralized ad agencies (google, fb, twitter...) to gather and mine their data, to behave irresponsibly and give us the Age of Anger fueled by social and video sites extracting value from human interaction while disregarding the huge social costs of all this.
Your comment accuses people who are opposed to surveillance capitalism of being "hyperbolic" "anti-vaxxers" talking about "theoretical damage" but the only scenarios you provide to argue your case come from your imagination.
"Think of the small businesses!" is not an argument for surveillance capitalism. I have worked in adtech on and off for about a decade. The first adtech company I worked for specialized in software for agencies/directories advertising on behalf of small business.
In fact most small business owners do not have the knowledge and time to effectively market using online advertising. It is very easy to spend all of a small online advertising budget without getting any results. The bigger players have much greater advantages and leverage over small businesses in Internet advertising than they did pre-Internet. In fact this enables the very centralization you hypothesize: the small business discovery space is captured by Yelp, Google's business listings, Facebook pages, etc., in a way that the Yellow Pages never matched. There is no way for a small business today to effectively compete in digital marketing with franchises and national chains.
The statistics support my experience: there are now less small businesses around than at any time since the 1970s: http://money.cnn.com/2016/09/08/news/economy/us-startups-nea...
Of the small businesses I see having success with Internet advertising today, they are also organized differently. Instead of being a traditional small business than happens to do X, they are run like Internet marketing firms that happen to market X. This is more like the TV infomercial business model.
A client of mine leases offices from WeWork. All the offices have glass walls, so you can really see everything about a business. Just from walking around the halls, I see a number of small apparel startups (no production equipment for making samples, no patterns hanging around, no supplies - just some computers for doing marketing), a home improvement gadget than 15 years ago would have been "As Seen on TV" (no actual tools around though - again, only computers for doing marketing), and a couple of fad diet meal substitute companies (I don't see them preparing their gloop in the communal kitchen...).
Literally the exact opposite of what you describe is the reality. Surveillance capitalism is driving a decline of small businesses and centralization into oligopolies.
> I got all my books from public libraries or used book stores. If most of the services that exist today were behind paywalls and I were still poor, that content would be off limits to me.
It really does not surprise me that you missed the point here too. Your first sentence contradicts your second. In fact, books from independent publishers and periodicals are available from public libraries. Public libraries also have subscriptions to digital journals and information databases. Publishing worked fine (in fact, in many ways better) before the surveillance capitalism oligopoly, and it will survive and thrive once the surveillance capitalism oligopoly is dismantled.
And in what concrete scenarios in Europe, has someone's data at say, Google, Facebook, or Amazon actually harmed them? Is it more or less than the people who had a bad reaction to a vaccination? (~1 in 1 million)
> In fact most small business owners do not have the knowledge and time to effectively market using online advertising.
True, the holy grail would be pay for customer acquisition, only pay for ads that work and convert. Which would allow businesses on the margin to precisely estimate their CA costs, and whether the LV justifies it. That is only possible with some kind of end-to-end information, from click to purchase.
>A client of mine leases offices from WeWork. All the offices have glass walls, so you can really see everything about a business.
(Small irony that you're opposite to surveillance capitalism, but as a capitalist, you used access to your client's workspace to gather intel on others :) )
When I say small business, I'm not talking about people trying to ship products, like your WeWork example, I'm talking brick-and-mortar, your local Italian eatery, or French bakery.
> Publishing worked fine (in fact, in many ways better) before the surveillance capitalism oligopoly, and it will survive and thrive once the surveillance capitalism oligopoly is dismantled.
Demonstrably false. The amount of free information I have access to at the touch of a button is exponentially greater than it was when I was growing up in the 70s and 80s. A library in the 80s didn't have "digital subscriptions", they had "subscriptions" to actual paper magazines. And libraries in poor neighborhoods don't exactly operate like a library in Manhattan or Palo Alto.
It's easy to sweep away things as working "fine" if you don't have the experience of only having a public library that stocks few books, doesn't have "digital databases", and to access more information, you have to take a bus far away.
Billions of people now have access to almost the sum total of human knowledge in an instant, except the truly evil people who keep publicly funded scientific papers behind expensive paywalls. This didn't work "fine" 30 years ago, raising the barrier to information to a level that only the truly dedicated would put in the effort to get it.
People who were born after the creation of the internet and of less modest economic means I think have a different perspective of just how hard it used to be to obtain information, especially on demand. I taught myself programming from a ripped up book on 6502 assembly programming, and a VIC-20 register map. That was all I could obtain, and even finding where to find a library that had other books I might want was an epic quest for a child, something thanksfully, today's kids don't have to worry about.
But you have to ask yourself how we got from zero in the 1980s, to trillions of web pages today. Someone directly paid for that out of pocket, and it wasn't me, and it wasn't publicly funded.
_That_ is the positive social externality I was talking about in my original post. It's easy to lose sight of the bonanza of riches you have today that was invisibly funded and not understand how it was funded, nor what model can replace it. It's all too easy for people to bring out the pitchforks and torches over theoretical harm and completely ignoring the concrete benefits since they aren't paying for it.
It may not do that in the long term. Total spend for online advertising is probably a relatively stable figure.
In the short term it will likely have, at least from where I stand, a net positive effect. Now that industrial-grade stalking is finally illegal, companies whose sole business model was based on it will suffer. Possibly collapse. Well boohoo, cry me a river.
If and when large enough portion of the target market may no longer be stalked, the advertisers will have to come up with new (or rediscover old), non-intrusive ways to target their audience. The value of intent- and context-based audience segmentation might just go up again.
But how do you know which ads, and on which sites, ended up working the best? How about generating per-impression [bonus] codes? You don't need to stalk your potential customers if they willingly submit opaque and non-trackable information that allows you to trace the ad campaigns. GDPR does allow incentivisation, after all.
Seriously? Comparing privacy regulations with blithely following a cult leader into mass suicide? Aside from a few emails asking for permission to keep sending newsletters and announcing new privacy policies being mildly annoying, most EU citizens just gained a few basic rights without any significant downsides.
For me it's very clear that while GDPR has many good things, it ís disasterous to some companies, which I really don't like and question myself whether it's worth it.
Showing bullshit ads isn’t.
Think it has anything to do with the HN crowd consisting disproportionately of the tiny minority of the workforce who make a living out of exactly the kind of behavior the GDPR wants to restrain?
And the best jokes where made by those who still have personal memories of the y2k scare. Did you remember to stockpile cash and food?
I never had the feeling in the past that HN visitors were especially pro-privacy. There were a few notable exceptions, but many more were the entrepreneur/hustler, "I don't care" or the "let the market sort it out" types.
In the past 1-2 years I guess there were several data leaks and privacy-related scandals and more and more people have had enough of these Monday to Friday advertisers on this Monday to Friday plane (of existance). Hate would not be a wrong word to describe the feelings those people have towards the advertising industry.
Maybe the pendulum has swung back :)
It's actually quite liberating, yesterday I made Twitter delete a whole bunch of contacts they got off my phone.
Most of my savings are currently in a fund based on an FTSE small cap ex-US index.[1] Average market cap is $1.8B and about 37% is in Europe.
How so? GDPR doesn't make personalized, targeted advertising illegal, rather it gives you (the targeted individual) the right to know how your data is being collected and sed, and to opt out of that collection if you want.
If you want to continue paying for content with your identity, fair enough, but not everyone does.
So under this system a user who doesn't mind personalized ads doesn't have the option to 'pay'. They have the ability to 'donate' their personal information but there would be no reason to do this.
Now if GDPR had allowed companies to either choose personalized ads or pay for the content, that would have been different.
If a web business can still remain profitable with personalized ads being optional, then the targeting behind those ads was never paying for that content to begin with, it was always a 'donation.'
Sorry, I've edited for clarity.
>If a business is unable to make enough of a profit from its new business model, it simply shuts down. It was certainly not always a 'donation'.
What's debatable is whether targeted advertising is necessary for a business to maintain that profit. The GDPR suggests it isn't.
You're right to a degree. You're right, because ad revenue from the EU is a lot lower than the US. Even if targeted ads in the EU aren't a thing, then a service that mostly gets US ad clicks and ad views will be able to handle it just fine. However, this means that EU viewers/readers will be treated as second class citizens.
Doesn't the fact that the rest of the world is scrambling to come to grips with an EU regulation and European privacy standards suggest the opposite?
Google and FB (with their small army of lawyers) can afford to jump through all the hoops to make the regulators happy while "a small Belgian newspaper" will probably just get steamrolled.
The inexorable rise of ad blocking, the increasing pace of adoption recently, and not solely amongst citizens of the EU makes me think most people's trust has been burnt out.
I suspect many people in the US would be in favour of more consideration of their privacy and data security if given a choice.
You can’t measure any effect by looking at the stock market for one day.
"If want to agree to processing your data by Company then click Accept or close this window with the [X] button."
Which is ridiculous.
What changed in the landscape that this is no longer possible?
How likely is a Cosmo reader to be a cis man?
Alternatively: How likely is a Cosmo reader reading an article about menstruation to be interested in a female hygiene product?
The death of tracking-based ad targeting doesn't mean you have to show the same ads everywhere like an animal. You can still make the ads contextually relevant. And you don't even need to disguise them as native content (which, btw, is illegal in some EU countries already).
I’m not comfortable with ad networks deducing those very same parameters from my browsing habits.
Unfortunately short of some type of mandate I don't see how this could work, because it would be next to impossible to get 90% of the population to fallout the cookie.
My company actually did a bunch of research on collecting consent from users to show personalized ads, (aka what everyone is doing right now)
Only 25% of the the users read the 3 sentences before clicking on a selection. 25% did not read anything many thought our privacy dialog was in fact an ad. :(
Many people said they didn't want personalized ads because they thought it would mean filling out a survey like the one you just described even though it obviously (to us) did not.
One person actually said, "I'm okay with them using my browser history to show ads but, I don't want them to use my personal data like my banking records or my medical history." This is very ironic because we presented the option to do exactly what they wanted by they didn't understand what it was because they did not consider the browser data to be "personal".
I really wish that when you first opened a browser their was a dialog about hey these or the things you need to know about how we pay for the internet. Though I have no idea how get to that spot.
This sounds horrible, sorry.
Or you're doing the family shopping and aren't grossed out by hygiene products.
2) Tracking user behavior is fairly important to implement click fraud detection- obviously that doesn't justify shady behavior on the part of ad networks, nor does it necessitate the in-depth amount of personally identifying information they may or may not collect. However, some forms of that data- think IP addresses, click history- may be useful.
3) If you already have some data per point 2, why would you waste an opportunity to display something meaningful by putting up an ad that might be completely irrelevant given what you happen to know already?
None of this is meant to justify targeted ads, only to explain why they have better appeal to both content providers and ad networks.
Training for teachers? Security services? Access control systems? Yes, a lot of those reading are parents, not teachers, but what do you think they'll do if they are convinced something exists that will reduce the risk of school shootings?
Editing: ad "targeting" as it has existed so far has also been insultingly, embarrassingly bad IMO. Even Google tried for years to send me ads for Russian, Ukrainian, Philippine and Thai dating sites. Round robin. I was delighted when they started showing me Wordpress ads.
Those are not relevant either but now we are approaching something useful and not actively insulting (I'm very happily married and have small kids.)
I suspect that most advertising is actually driven by supply (that is, somebody wants to advertise X), not demand (somebody needing Y at the moment), and that's why targeting doesn't really work that well, and the disadvantage of untargeted ads (or targeted by content) is much smaller than advertising industry claims.
2) in a vast global experiment where advertisers knew everything about everyone they still completely failed to show people relevant ads. Most notoriously even the giants who know what you ate yesterday fail to realize you probably don’t want ads for toilets for a year after you bought a toilet.
You want millions of people to loose their lively hood over this issue? That sounds cruel and spiteful to me.
You also have to think of many small companies that make niche products that would no longer be able to find their customers and thus be forced to close.
> 2) in a vast global experiment where advertisers knew everything about everyone they still completely failed to show people relevant ads.
The premise of your statement is false, advertisers have never know every thing about anyone. That was just marking bullshit by ad-tech companies targeted at adversities and publishers, "We know everything about your users! So if you hire Acme Ad Tech your profits will go through the roof!" The fact that users hear the statements and understandably freaked out was collateral damage. The fact this statement was demonstrably false was irrelevant.
The fact is that the amount of data used to do targeted advertising is quite sparse in-fact, no-one wants to spend the effort to individually go through mountains of data and figure out the best advertisment. Really the only data used is
1. demographics (age, gender) 2. location (this is so a NYC based restaurant chain doesn't waste money advertising in California), 3. language (people actually hate seeing ads in a foreign language) 4. interest categories (like do you like Football, or Cars, or video games, this is how facebook advertises a lot they figure out your interests based on posts, then allow advertisers to advertise to you based on that category, (interestingly they don't actually sell the list of interests mostly because that would mean advertisers would not have to buy ads through Facebook and more)) 5. product targeting (this is you visited acme.com and put an acme roadrunner trap in your cart but never checked out so now it follows you around the internet.)
> Most notoriously even the giants who know what you ate yesterday fail to realize you probably don’t want ads for toilets for a year after you bought a toilet.
Yeah, that's my point, using more data (like the fact you bought the toilet) is more work and using the current amount of data works well enough for them so that is all they do.
It's completely subjective, which may or may not be a good thing depending on the mood of the regulator, court, and your opinion of rule by common law.
Plus, the editorial quality of ads is generally so awful, so you need to align with the users interests to help them accidentally click on it in many cases.
The newspaper was a beautiful business. They had a monopoly or minimal competition, and a critical mass that supported everything from classified ads to flyers to the pet store.
Native ads do this. It's a huge industry, and will likely get far bigger under GDPR. But it takes highly specialized techniques to make the numbers back out as an advertiser. There's a ton of fraud, the bidding strategy is very different from programmatic/retargeting, the ads that work are different, etc. Most of the ad industry doesn't know how to do this, and many types of ads simply won't be profitable on native networks.
From what I'm hearing from my friends that do ecommerce stuff, product ads targeted to the EU are no longer profitable across the board either. That will force a ton of review sites aimed at EU visitors to shutdown, along with many YouTube reviewers. As advertisers pull product ads out of the major ad networks because they can't make money, the revenue of publishers/content creators in the product review space will plummet in lockstep. Amazon has cut affiliate commissions to the point where turning to them is no longer an option for any site that costs money to maintain either.
GDPR seems to be on track to wipe out vast swaths of businesses serving the EU market, and not just the "evil" ones it was trying to wipe out. It's a shitshow, but it was entirely predictable.
A situation where your average page contains tens of tracking scripts wasn't sustainable much longer.
If anything, GDPR should be seen as an opportunity to disrupt the quasi-monopolistic online ad market.
The problem is that the market itself is shrinking (as we speak) as a result of GDPR. There won't be much of a market left to disrupt. Ad targeting got as invasive as it did because that was the only way to make it profitable. The moment that ads stop becoming profitable, advertisers will pull out. This won't be gradual thing for most companies - this will be a next week type of thing. Few companies can afford to light money on fire in the form of ad spend if they can't recoup it. Some ads might still work in the EU, but it will be a dramatically smaller market within a month or two.
It might be that big media, everything-and-the-kitchen-sink portals with a large target audience get a cut back, to the benefit of small, focused sites and maybe also paywalled content.
I'd say that could be another welcome collateral effect of GDPR, and give us back the federated Web we lost, though I'm not sure it'll be world-wide any longer given different incentives in US and EU markets, let alone the Chinese and regional (such as Russian and Turkish) markets.
I'm not exactly sure what you mean here. There was quite a bit of money being spent on advertising to people in the EU on May 24th. Due to GDPR, many of the advertisers that were spending this money will no longer be able to make a profit from this activity. They will therefore cease that spend, and the EU online ad market will dramatically shrink as a result. The EU companies that were receiving the money from those advertisers will no longer receive it, and many EU publishers will go out of business.
Some ad-dependent leeches will die off, good riddance. Let others take their place, with a privacy-friendly model.
An analogy here would be someone hating cars' tag readers in public. Law gets passed its illegal, yay! Then 2 months later your car payment goes up 30% and you scratching your head. Yeah well since they couldn't recover enough cars from people who don't pay, they had to adjust their financial models and you are the one to pony up for it.
GDPR will wipe out many niche blogs that make few hundred bucks a month top and - as this article clearly points out - will ironically help companies like Google to make more money and jack up pricing for remaining ads, as the whole ad network will get much thinner.
>"An analogy here would be someone hating cars' tag readers in public. Law gets passed its illegal, yay! Then 2 months later your car payment goes up 30% and you scratching your head. Yeah well since they couldn't recover enough cars from people who don't pay, they had to adjust their financial models and you are the one to pony up for it."
Maybe they should have shown some responsibility, and not just pushed unrealistic loans on every Joe Six-pack who walks through the door.
Also, this culture of instant gratification that advertisers and money lenders have created is truly vicious. It has become culturally accepted to just take another loan to buy stuff you "need" (read: desire, to one-up your peers), never mind the consequences.
Try saving up instead or (shock and horror!) simply doing without the trivial material possession in question. You'll be tired of it in a short while anyway.
>"GDPR will wipe out many niche blogs"
That is purely unfounded speculation on your part.
It's speculation but not unfounded. GDPR will absolutely reduce small publisher revenue significantly, so making the leap that it causes a culling is rational.
I don't know how many those are.
Most blogs I see seem to be run as a labour of love or for content marketing. Anyway, nobody expects to make money directly off the blog.
To the contrary, niche blogs can place content-based banner ads for their audience without targetted advertising because they're much more focussed.
And anyway, the marketing business was already going down, ads became so invasive and annoying that everyone is using ads filters today.
But I don't know why are we talking only about ads. What about people getting some bad credit rates as bank bought the data from ads network? Or things like Cambridge Analytica. Like the marketing and ads world is everything we know of and GDPR isn't bringing any positive effects as it hurts tracking. Tracking market goes down, human freedom and rights + democracy goes up. Who cares for targeted marketing in respect to that.
What I meant is that ad spend for large customers has always been handled such that a budget is handed over to an agency (to the winning one of several ones competing for the budget). That ad spend is allocated to multiple media channels and campaigns; now it will have to find other, more creative ways to get the message across to the customer.
Online ads have been under pressure, and their effectiveness has been questioned for much longer than yesterday when the GDPR came into effect. The GDPR legislation has been a long time in the making, so if publishers haven't prepared for it, then they have only themselves to blame. People have certainly no obligation to sustain a rotten big-data/big-media mindset by giving up their privacy, especially when that only benefits very few.
The situation for publishers has been precarious for many years, so publishers should focus on the opportunities not risks of this change. For example, exactly because clickbait isn't going to be sustainable any longer, quality media might get a boost, and could even make a profit from paywalled content. Holding on to a model that's on its way out isn't a winning strategy.
Performance marketing companies will spend as much as they possibly can for incremental profit, the budgets float based on the results. So the cycle goes:
Worse Targeting -> Lowered Performance -> Lowered Budgets -> Lowered Publisher Revenue
Good. The situation was absolutely unacceptable, and I'm glad the EU decided to shake it up.
It's amazing to me how people manage to fool themselves into thinking there is hope when the world is crumbling around them.
If Google can't make ads profitable in the EU what makes you think some tiny European company will be able to disrupt the ad market?
How would they even do it without tracking? I can see the conversation with major brands now
EU Ad Startup - "Trust us, the ads you are paying for are performing great. We are very confident that they are driving conversions on your website."
Brand- "Ok, do you have any numbers to prove we are receiving conversions due to your ads?"
EU Ad Startup - "No as that would be illegal under GDPR, but please trust our business."
How did the paper and tv industry work? Oh yeah, advertisers would crowd around and bid up the largest players. Small niche products would receive little to no revenue and die quick deaths.
That is what I suspect will happen in the EU. Without tracking Advertisers will be unable to know how their ads are performing. Without metrics such as conversions which require end to end tracking advertisers will need to rely on the reputation of the platform.
Products such as google and facebook will receive significant attention from advertisers. The tiny blog you enjoy reading that is barely scraping by will receive very little.
Yes that's a valid concern. But blogging hasn't been profitable or even sustainable for a very long time now in the way it used to be ten or fifteen years ago, with YouTube, Fb, microblogging platforms, and news aggregators having taken this space instead. Those who keep on running blogs do so for promoting their own services, products, or other agendas, or as a hobby, and will continue to do so. So it's not a terrible loss really; the great starving of blogs has already happened in the past.
But sites such as product review blogs could get a boost by ad money being in need to be allocated in innovative ways. Post-GDRP advertising requires thinking a little bit out of the box, and leaving the "ad" model as we know it behind which isn't very effective to begin with. If you consider attention a scarce resource to compete for, I could imagine ad money going into more and new native advertising sites, temporary sites for local events with direct sponsoring, focused sites for special interests, etc.
The more recent capability of targeting those niche ads also on random click-bait sites didn't exactly help those small niche products.
(Edit, for clarification: with unrestricted tracking, if you publish to a niche with good ad money, the few ads that you do show, for a tiny fraction of the ad budget of your niche, become the information source used for drawing much of your niche's ad money to ads displayed to your audience on unrelated sites. Your ad-network should practically "steal" your content-targeting information to divert on-topic ad money to entirely unrelated sites)
Do you have a link to support that? I believe it, but I'm looking for an article that explains it well. I read one that had a good example of an advertiser basically telling the operator of a high-quality, premium site that he's only going to use them to gather audience targeting information so they can be targeted at cheaper sites.
Maybe you misunderstood what I meant (my wording wasn't exactly perfect), I'm not talking about some dramatic ad-fraud scheme: without tracking-based targeting, all ad-money about scuba-beekeeping (just making up some really small niche) would go to the few sites dedicated to pleasures scuba-beekeeping. This is how Google started their dominance, they were the best at automatically matching scuba-beekeeping advertisers to scuba-beekeeping websites. Content-based targeting.
With tracking, ad-networks show a small, cheap ad (or even just some tracker the site includes without monetary compensation) on the scuba-beekeeping site and take a note that the browser identity a target for scuba-beekeeping. Ads about scuba-beekeeping will now appear to that browser-identity on random news sites and the like while the niche site won't see a cent for the targeting information.
All in all, if the "native" ad market (the one addressable by content-based targeting) of a site has above-average value per eyeball, a site will tend to lose more from cross-site targeting than they will gain from showing ads unrelated to their content (but related to whatever their visitors have visited before), if the "native" ad market is lower then they may win. Visit frequency also plays a role, if the content-targetable sites take only a small percentage of their users' browsing activity, a no-tracking scenario would cause a bidding war amongst on-topic advertizers, if they take a large chunk of their users' browsing, inbound tracking targeted ads (about other topics) could easily more than make up for the losses in on-topic ads.
In the analog world they do this for example via coupon codes which are unique to the ad.
This will severely undercount the number of conversions. It's not atypical for someone to view/click an ad and then purchase at a later date through a different channel.
It was possible to track that before GDPR. It is not possible now.
A reviewer making sales commissions is just a salesperson. Good riddance.
What type of businesses? Do you mean the businesses making vacuum cleaners or the businesses surrounding it like a vacuum cleaner review site?
and nothing of value will be missed
Native ad is just an ad that is formatted so it fits with the aesthetic style of the page, (for example it uses the same fonts and colors). This makes the ad less jarring to the user and makes the overall page look better. Many people don't like them for this exact reason, because they say ads should be very obvious and native ads might look like content.
Native ads can do tracking the same way non-native ads can.
The rest of the comment is more or less spot on though.
Most native ad networks run based on topics, and the ads themselves are usually not targeted to the individual person. I run ads through major native ad networks such as Revcontent. You choose "topics" to target, and then your ad is shown on content that relates to those topics.
The former is a deeply troubling form of government that leads (in my view anvetiablly) to corruption and abuse of power. The latter is plain backwards Google has the resources to be profitable under any regulatory regime it is small companies that don't.
Now without tracking you have to actually understand the audience and the product, this research will make advertising more expensive but also in many cases have better success.
And suddenly there is no reason to rely on google.
I subscribe to Sound on Sound, a magazine about music technology. I pay them $90 a year, but I also whitelist them in my ad blocker, because the ads complement the content. If I'm reading a review of a synthesizer or an article about how to record electric guitars, it's really easy to serve relevant ads with good click-through and conversion rates without intensive tracking. Both the content and the advertising serve to enhance my enjoyment of a hobby that I care deeply about.
A lot of publishers are really going to struggle post-GDPR, because their content is clickbaity and vapid. It isn't worth paying for and it isn't relevant to the readers' lives. It exists because it briefly hijacks your attention, which can be profitably monetised by ad networks that invasively track your activities online.
Some good publishers are going to get caught in the crossfire which is unfortunate, but I think that the overall effect will be net positive. If publishers can't sell their ad inventory without recourse to surveillance, they need to seriously examine whether their business model is honorable and whether they are offering something of real value.
Yep, I really hope that the law incentivizes businesses to really add value by producing better content rather than turning up the frequency and hitting everybody with addictive clickbait.
I run a critical news blog about blockchains and I get about $200/mo on Patreon on this model. It's not a living, but it's a nice extra indeed.
I am delighted to answer publishers who go "but how can we live without spyware-level ads!!" with "have you tried not sucking?"
(I whitelist a few sites, e.g. LWN.net, and I don't block ads from the Project Wonderful network. If you don't suck, I might let you through!)
Its only now, after GDPR, that you finally have an option to switch back to content based ads, but sadly "for EEA users" only.
Ad buyers are uncertain about what the fallout of the GDPR is and are taking a "wait-and-see" approach to advertising. That's causing the price drop, since fewer people are buying. When the dust settles, and they know how to proceed, it will return to normal.
If I could predict how quickly it would bounce back, I'd be tempted to get involved in the exchange market.
Unless there isn't a corresponding drop in product sales. That would show the ads aren't driving sales, and there's no good reason to go back to spending on them...
Look at television in the US, or even in the UK on non-BBC channels. You watch something for an hour, you get 40 minutes of actual use out of it, you get massive breaks in the narative which reduces your enjoyment, and you waste 20 minutes of your life.
Does this mean you get free tv? No, you're still paying. The only reason that $CORP spends $1 advertising to you in your program is because it will make you spend more than $1 with them at some point in the future.
When you watch advert TV, you're selling 20 minutes of your life not for $1, but to shift your $1 expense now to a $2 expense hidden elsewhere in the future.
Far better to save 20 minutes, and that $2 in the future, by spending $1 upfront, and being the customer, not the product.
Most people don't use static analysis tools, so without persuasion the purchase would never occur.
Advertising makes most popular the products with a higher marketing budget, not necessarily the better ones. For example, search for "youtube downloader": at least the first ten results link to shady websites and apps which offer a crappy wrapper around youtube-dl, which is the ultimate youtube downloader but unknown by non-programmers. Even among wrappers, the clean versions are not as popular as the advertised and SEO'd crap.
I think that's completely false. The price of things goes down with volume, and if no one knows about something its going to be far more expensive than something everyone uses.
Advertisings entire purpose is to increase the volume sold, which lowers the price.
http://www.altfeldinc.com/pdfs/BASICECONOMICS.pdf is actually decent reasonably short and enlightening read if you find yourself with some time.
That applies between companies (where you have real competition), but does it apply over a marketplace? And even if over an industry you were able to persuade more people to buy more product, is that necessarily delivering value for the customer? Wouldn't it just be better if they found things by going out and looking for them if or when they need them, and soliciting expert advice?
The obvious example is pharmaceuticals, if patients seeing adverts leads to more prescriptions for a particular drug, is that a good thing? If the pharmaceutical industry manages to get people to take more drugs, is that a good thing? The unit price might go down, but that doesn't mean utility for the consumer goes up.
If anything these days they tend to increase price as market share increases.
Problem is, if everybody does advertising to compete for market share, the prices go up globally, because the entire ads industry consumes resources.
But for now we haven't figured out any better model. We might in the future, or we might not.
How much does a website typically earn from my visit (with adblock etc)? I haven't had a site with adverts since 2000 so no idea
Sky in the UK gets something like 80% of revenue from subscription, but still have adverts on top of that, trying to extract every last penny. Thats why I won't subscribe -- plenty of other choices for entertainment. If your time is worth say £15 an hour, having 2 of you watching a 40 minute program and 20 minutes of adverts costs you £10. Given the income ratio is 8:1 revenue, your £24 subscription brings in £3 of advertising money to sky per month, if you watch 1 hour a day, that's 10 hours a month, or your time being worth 30p an hour.
No thanks.
If you're talking about something like Coca-Cola, where each ad exposure might prompt someone who already has a fridge full of Coke to go grab a can right now, then yeah, that is very much true.
If you're talking about something like prescription pharmaceuticals, where demand is tightly constrained by how many people actually have the condition your drug treats and what doctors are prescribing, then I would bet the GP is correct. Then I'd expect advertising for competing drugs to behave more like a prisoner's dilemma.
I'm not certain that the two are related, but it certainly seems plausible.
Everything in the US healthcare market is similarly far more expensive. From radiologist salaries, to a bag of saline, to hospital stays.
You could cut pharma prices in the US in half through increased negotiating power, imported drugs and government price restrictions for Medicare/Medicaid and still have a very large industry full of advertising.
Procter & Gamble all by itself spends $7 billion per year on advertising.
The top 100 advertising companies in the US by spend - not one of which is a VC firm, a tech start-up, or powered by VC money - spend more annually on advertising than the entire combined value of all venture capital in the US.
You can easily see this in action: when venture capital plunges dramatically every five or seven years, the total US ad spend doesn't similarly plunge with it.
Also in regard to TV, ads are needed even for simple toilet breaks. Excessive ad amount such as 20 minutes per hour is definetely way to much, but some time off the show makes sense in broadcasting where the user can't pause the show whenever they want.
I have only encountered breaks twice: for Titanic and Pearl Harbor.
Infinity War had no break where I went to watch it.
Cinema adverts acknowledge that nobody likes them, and cinemas wonder why people do t turn up. Perhaps they should stop treating paying customers as a product.
Not necessarily. It could be that the advertisement gets you to spend that dollar that you were going to spend anyway on them rather than their competitor.
In other words how would business work without ads?
A chemotherapy that starves the cancer’s food supply by 25-40% overnight sounds like a success to me.
(Edit: USA Today decided to actively remove the cancer tumors and created an adless site for EU visitors. The results are amazing: load time shrunk from 45s to 3s, network requests from 500+ to only 34! Source: https://twitter.com/fr3ino/status/1000167643431784449?s=21 )
And this is not only because of lack of information. Checks out a cellphone from Amazon, buys the cellphone, still get ads saying "you might like this cellphone"
There may be sense to this madness.
I believe rate of returns is increasing as online sales takes over. The only way to actually see and touch many electrical devices is to buy and return them e.g. there is no store in my major UK city that has premium non-mac laptops on display. It means you might buy and return 3 devices to find the one you want to keep. If the return rate is 30%+ then a completed purchase really is a strong indicator that might purchase the same thing.
I think it's much simpler. The chance that any person is say, buying a fridge at any point is very low. If you're 99% sure that person has already made their purchase, that means there's a 1% chance you're wrong, and they're still looking! That's a much better signal than any other signal you're going to get.
According to this article in the Toronto Star, online return rates are around 20%, rising to 30% in the holiday period.
https://www.thestar.com/business/2017/01/15/online-shopping-...
However they also sell returned items to others. There are multiple huge warehouses where I live filled with (mostly) returned products being auctioned off to the public by a middleman. The volume is astounding.
Actually, PC World had demo machines out to play with last time I was in there, but very few in comparison to the tech department of the department stores.
Maybe it's hard to connect Google's idea of who a user is with the store's user accounts. Maybe the ad-buying algorithm is suuper simple, and getting a dev to "do it better" isn't worth the cost.
If it's just "this person searched for car rentals two days ago, let's show them car rentals today," that seems simple enough to make money over "no targeting," with obvious and acceptable failure cases like "already booked a car" and "phone got stolen, should show ads for pawn shops instead."
>> Not to mention the ads keep following you after you buy the thing
If you don't want irrelevant ads for items you already purchased following you around, then you want better targeting.
I think many people just don't like ads at all. If I had to live with ads, I'd prefer to have relevant ads, but that's just me.
I do very much mind ads that stick a massive zombie in my face when i happen to be browsing a url listing that may hold something about games.
While some advertisements can alert you to a product that will be helpful, many have the psychological intent of producing dissatisfaction and are an attempt to compel you to purchase something you do not need and your life probably would be better off without. Advertising is deliberately about producing discontent and it makes people more unhappy and more dissatisfied with their lives.
I would rather see ads that I can immediately dismiss than have ones that make me start desiring that which I don't really need.
That's fine but I don't think there is an alternative business model that doesn't rely on advertising to feed the current demand of entertainment. I hope I'm wrong and people like you who find advertising distasteful can have access to the wealths of society with some alternative form of funding
There's no need for 'targeted' ads that follow me around if the ads are in the places I expect when looking for something.
Content providers should be ensuring they display quality and relevant ads, not relying on 'other' services to come find the consumer.
The same way they do in television, radio, film and every other medium?
Not really. Targeted marketing is about particularly narrow conceptions of quality and relevance. IMHO, the logic of targeting and tracking has severely twisted the meaning of those terms in marketer's minds.
But that's why everyone uses ad blockers.
It's just unusable otherwise
I don't think there is any solution for that when visitors to the web site are the primary source of income for the individual or organisation behind it. All schemes, even Basic Income for journalists, are flawed in some way if you rely on single sources for what you would consider authoritative sources of information. A return to the Coffee Shop model, as advocated by The Economist, seems to be the most viable, given current human nature.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_coffeehouses_in_the_17...
[1] https://pagefair.com/downloads/2017/01/PageFair-2017-Adblock... (If this study lies, what wouldn't surprised me to the slightest, it would be by inflating the numbers, considering they sell counter-measures.)
I meant everyone that even talks about these things, like us for instance.
Also, lite.cnn.com
What's new is that they're redirecting to it if you're EU (like myself)
Edit: It's a pity there's no real archive in the text version, as far as I've been able to tell. No way to scroll down to yesterday's news or anything.
I'm pretty sure that wouldn't satisfy the requirements for the privacy policy being easily accessible if this were an EU company.
Or, in other words: if journalists didn't have to eat.
First I call this the "great unsubscriber" due to the great number of (since) forgotten newsletter i got unsubscribe from. And Now this.
As european consumer (despite being outside europe) i ca only see benefits with this new regulation.
I guess I'll have to check under the bed for my missing billions.
> Also with targeted ads you don't have to hear/read about products you will never care for a moment in your life.
I don't have to look at irrelevant adverts at all because I use an adblocker. Something I started to use because of the battery sucking CPU fan abusing privacy invading toxic wasteland that is the online advertisement industry.
The tech industry in general, and online advertising companies specifically proved over many years they couldn't be trusted to look after people's data and privacy, so forgive me if I don't shed a tear for the shitbags who now have to stop exploiting me and my family's data.
The way targeted advertising is currently implemented is a mass violation of privacy and autonomy, a clear and present threat to democracy and liberty, and an indicator of the complete ethical collapse of the US tech sector.
When I'm researching for product of a certain kind, I often get advertisements for months after I bought such a device. I still get ads for a 3D printer that I bought 3 months ago, I stopped caring then and find it frankly annoying.
It has been more then 10 years now but I've worked a couple of years in e-commerce when Google Analytics was still Urchin and ad-sense was not a big thing. You know how we needed to drive sales traffic to our sites ? By providing good and informative content and that sometimes being the smaller shop.
I've been seeing GDPR supporters saying that a lot recently. Time will show if it's true. I admit it's possible that removing ads as a revenue model could somehow allow europeans to innovate and discover a superior model but I'm not betting on it.
Thank you Europe for being the guinea pigs, you will either lead the way or hopefully prevent others from making the same mistakes.
"you will either lead the way" If a better monetization scheme that ads arises from the ashes of GDPR then I really will have no reason to be frustrated.
Fixed that for you.
GDPR is bad/onerous for the following reasons
- right to have access to the information that is being stored on you
- right to be forgotten
- right to view a web page without being shown ads
If GDPR was only asking for consent + banning the sale of information to 3rd parties it would hardly have had the chilling effect it is currently having.
- right to have access to _your_ information
- right to interrupt the service and get back _your_ information
- right to view a web page _with_ ads but without obligation to give to anyone _your_ information
It's perfectly possible to do targeted ads without collecting personal data! You just keep personal data where it belongs - on the user's computer/phone - rather than stealing it.
Keep the personal data in local storage, have the logic that chooses ads run locally, and you have targetted ads without invading anyone's privacy.
I don't know if that satisfies the GDPR - not a lawyer. But it would satisfy me.
You're still processing the data on your system, even if you're not storing it. This approach takes care of deletion rights but not processing.
(Unless you move the entire list of ad inventory to the user's computer and let it pick the ad to load?)
Unless you are unconditionally loading all possible ads into that code that runs locally, it still betrays the result of the local code's analysis when it loads the specific ad. This kind of request is already used to exfiltrate personal information. Even if it isn't explicitly sending personal encoded into the choice of ad, simply sending coarse data about someone is still an unacceptable betrayal of privacy. Small, currently insignificant pieces of data become revealing specific life details when joined with other databases.
In addition to the choice of ad, the server can also log at least a timestamp, the IP Source Address, the {TCP,UDP} Source and Destination Ports, and any other interesting features in the IP protocol headers[1]. With some effort, this is probably enough to allow the ad requests to be correlated with other sources of personal data.
> you have targetted ads without invading anyone's privacy.
No, you only made it very slightly more difficult to invade privacy. This would only result in a minor rate limit to exfiltrate personal data, and added the need for a few more INNER JOIN clauses.
[1] This may include a significant amount of identifying entropy. For example, nmap's -O uses the variations in the IP headers and protocol implementation to guess the remote host's OS (sometimes to specific versions).
Yes, it would be hugely challenging to implement, but it definitely seems possible to do something along these lines.
Add fee of lawyers (and future litigation/compliance risk damage) into EU customers' subscription fee.
EU has never done anything about them.
They just did...
Of course, this is technically possible. But apparently everyone has been sleeping during the two-year grace period.
And blanket consent like "ok to be tracked by whoever" should be illegal.
Drain the swamp!
Interesting times for ad tech, that is for sure.
One way would be to:
- store all user data client-side, stuff it in a cookie.
- Guess this user data, associate particular articles with particular data, e.g. X % chance of being male/female, probably likes cars, probably likes the colour "yellow", even if some of this data has been given to you directly by the user.
-"Clean room" ad selection. Have the ad selection algorithm run on the same server/network that serves the content and retrieve desired ads directly without exchanging any user data. Advertisers provide matrices of desirable matches of available ads to match against.
Matches won't be as precise, available data will be very limited, and if a user clears the cookie, you'll have to start from scratch again.
This way:
- you know nothing about the user, except for what could be inferred from their reading behaviour on a single site.
- even that limited data never reaches advertisers, so it can't be collated and aggregated in a pernicious way
- users are in complete control of their own data. If they clear their cookie, there's nothing left on the publisher's side.
-if you shield and rotate your ip logs, they're nothing more than addresses that requested some page at some time. None of the data is combined in an attempt to identify a user, other than possibly in a security context.
So yes, it should be possible even if it needs a more careful approach and more deliberation with regards to user privacy, but that's a main point of the legislation.
That's still a tracking cookie, not allowed under the GDPR without explicit consent.
You still make a valid point though, but my guess is it's not going to be considered pervasive tracking, where a data subject loses hold of their information, and will be considered in-line with the spirit of the GDPR, since it addresses the excesses the law set out to regulate: the wide-spread leaking and sales of profiling data.