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Comment by downandout | Hacker News Reader

If there ever was an ad budget, it'll go elsewhere (native advertising, direct sponsoring, whatever).

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.

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If your business model depends on systematically violating people's right privacy, then it needs to die ASAP.

Some ad-dependent leeches will die off, good riddance. Let others take their place, with a privacy-friendly model.

I love this approach pushing every advertiser and publisher into spit bucket.

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.

If I'm completely honest, I wish the marketing and advertising industries would simply die off completely. I don't need businesses to tell me what I "need" to buy, in order to feel fulfilled.

>"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.

>>"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.

Only for "niche blogs" that are relied on to generate ad revenue.

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.

> GDPR will wipe out many niche blogs

To the contrary, niche blogs can place content-based banner ads for their audience without targetted advertising because they're much more focussed.

I'm sorry to have myself made not very clear then.

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.

That's how brand marketing works, and maybe those ad budgets aren't going to budge much, but the great swaths of performance marketing budgets are going to get a big haircut.

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

In victorian era, asbestos was used as a gods gift. Like plastic today, blooming bussiness. When they figured out that it hurts people, they forbid it. And? What's your point? Business will transform and something else will bring money. This was happening trough whole human history, nothing special.

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.

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