I'm currently imagining a future where publishers start to just redirect iOS traffic to install their app, where they can actually make money. Good news for the walled garden, I guess?
I mean, maybe the answer is that those ads were only profitable because of the novelty factor and now that we have metrics we know they don't work, or at least don't work anywhere close to how much they cost. But I do miss things like the webcomics running their own ad network, Google's textual ads based solely on the search query, even the text ads on Read The Docs from a few years ago, etc.
Also I assume / hope that iOS ads aren't tracking people either; third-party cookies simply have no equivalent in the iOS app sandbox design. (And in-app ads tend to be abysmally targeted in my experience, at best "You're playing a mobile game? Try this other mobile game with even more in-app purchases!") So why wouldn't similarly untargeted web ads work too?
Basically the print magazine model.
But as businesses wanted to advertise to larger populations (we want to do a $10million ad spend, how many little phpforums are we going to have to reach out to before spending all this money?) and websites grew larger audiences (how many companies are we going to have to reach out to before we start making a profit?) the overhead was too high.
The model now is, any company can fork over whatever budget they have to an ad network, and websites can serve as many ads as they want and everyone gets the reduced overhead of just dealing with the middle man.
So that's what I think happened.
And also TV, as it is still today. Oh, and every other form of advertising basically. If advertising without invading user privacy is so bad (as the perpetrators are rationalizing it), how come all other forms of advertising are still a billion (trillion?) dollar business worldwide? Just makes one wonder.
You're lucky to get a fraction of that now. Advertisers get a much lower cost through AdSense and a ton of metrics.
You forget to factor in the time you spent to build the e-mail list, write a nice e-mail and send it, and repeat that every once in a while when people cancel. And you have to track payments, see if someone's credit cards runs out so they fail to renew the subscription, etc.
And let's not forget the fact that there was almost no competition - for businesses who didn't want to spend the time to research the Internet, the decision was most likely between advertising on your website or not advertising online at all.
BTW, you can still do that. I still go out, research and get people to advertise directly. I split the ad space on my website into premium and "regular" sections depending on page traffic and actual place on the page (header, footer, etc.). Premium has banners manually checked and contracted, hosted on the same domain as the rest of website's content, so no ad blocking and content very relevant to the website. The rest of space is filled with Google Ads. Premium banners earn about 5x more than Google Ads, but require that I maintain it. Google Ads just run without me having to do anything.
Non-contextual advertising still exists, but it's perceived as less effective, so there's a lot less money in it. I don't know if that perception is correct, but I do remember back when a common complaint from people was that the ads they saw weren't relevant to them.
It's also not just targeted advertising that will be affected. Without any sort of user tracking, it will be even harder to prevent fraud. No one wants to spend money showing ads to bots.
> Also I assume / hope that iOS ads aren't tracking people either; third-party cookies simply have no equivalent in the iOS app sandbox design.
You might want to look into the Apple Advertising Identifier.
As far as I’m aware, the current state of advertising is people either being too creeped out by ad suggestions to buy anything or still feeling like they’re getting bad recommendations.
I never googled it searched or said anything in Facebook. Since the day after I requested this from the agent. I’ve had window restricters and grills show up in Facebook advertising.
I find it creepy that what’s app is meant to be private and encrypted when clearly it’s not.
Given the massive revenues that advertising generates, how could you think this judgement (which I'm sure accurately reflects how _you_ feel) applies universally?
It's entirely possible for most people to find advertising either useless or creepy and for significant amounts of advertising revenue to nonetheless exist. And even if ads work some small fraction of the time, they can still be genuinely profitable for the advertisers.
Bots can watch TV, somehow TV ads work. Newspapers have audited circulation, it wouldn’t be that hard to have a website visit audit company to verify “circulation.”
And to take the exercise one step further: "Didn't people make the internet worth being on before it was feasible to make money off of it? What happened to that?"
Why not just flip the model from eyeballs and clicks to actual ad effectiveness? Newspaper car ads have this down to a science. They don’t count “clicks” of their newspaper ad — they see how many customers come in asking about a car in the ad.
If I have an airplane website and someone wants to advertise to people who like airplanes. I can suggest a price of $1000 and if the advertiser wants to spend the money, they do. I might charge $1000 because I have a lot of visitors or just because I want to. That’s the price I set for whatever reason I set it. If an advertiser doesn’t want to spend that, they can choose not to. If they want to measure effectiveness, they can do it by offering viewers of that ad a discount code or something. When the code is used, they know they got that customer from my ad. Once they’ve validated that their ad “works” and the acquisition cost works, then they’ll keep paying my rate — no bot influence at all. No real chance of fraud because there wouldn’t be any money in it. Publishers would actually have an incentive to sell your product because they want to justify their ad rates. No need for tracking either.
Advertising works and it can be both more effective and privacy-respecting. Ad-tech has turned vast swaths of the Internet into a cesspool. It doesn’t have to be like that.
If you are a publisher and have actual content humans care about, ditch the ad networks and start selling your pixels directly to relevant advertisers.
The problem is that the incentives for fraudsters and publishers are aligned under the current model: more clicks equals more money, the actual advertiser who is selling something gets to pay that fraud tax. Perhaps advertisers should start seeking out relevant content and offering to buy space directly, refusing to deal with “networks.” Their acquisition costs would go down, that’s for sure. Harder to scale, but so what, you have a higher yield effort for a lot less money.
Good luck with direct ad sales, unless you are a large company with a large ad sales team and correspondingly large budget.
Yeah, the old web was in many ways better than the new web so I'd gladly lose ads and go back to the old web in the process.
A man can dream.
You want people to pay, make them pay. If you worry about ad-driven competitors, then maybe this should serve as a good argument to advocate instituting regulations against funding services with ads.
What else are they "tracking"? Does YouTube have tracking on other sites (like Facebook, Twitter etc)? I haven't seen anything like that.
You can switch the history off, I presume that would work even without Premium, but it never occurred to me to even try it since I definitely want history.
but the error here is conflating a tool with a legal person. Google will track me no matter how much I pay them for any of their services, including YouTube.
the situation at the moment is that no-one believes that a corporation who offers a free service is going to not track you because you pay for the premium version. so (a) I'm not going to pay Google or Facebook to get the premium version since it is not going to be untracked and (b) Google and Facebook aren't going to detrack their premium services since no-one believes that's going to happen anyway - the value add is removing ads/playing with the screen off/etc not the absence of tracking.
the best you can do is pay a third party to offer you some service Google or Facebook offers for free, thereby reducing your exposure. for instance, Google surely knows the content of many emails sent to me, but not all of them, since I pay for email from another provider; or I'm strongly considering paying for a substitute for Google docs, except that I don't like unpredictable monthly USD payments.
I personally think a better way to sell YouTube Premium wouldn't be to focus on just the ads, yes that should be a part of it, but consumers have shown they want certain things in particular (via Patreon):
1. A way to support their favourite creators (adblock whitelisting proves people care more about creators than the downsides of ads - I do for sure)
2. A way to get exclusive content in return, or maybe just a shoutout.
Super Chat is one of the best things YouTube has ever done in this regard. It's amazing how much money flows through to creators when they do live-streams & premiere events.
A lesson can be learned from Steam's fight with piracy wrt ad-free versions. You've either got to:
1. Make it an easier sell to purchase YouTube Premium than to get AdBlock (not-likely)
2. Make a significant value-add for the premium offering "be a better service than piracy".
The problem is that YouTube's not been doing too well with option two, and they're simultaneously making their advertising products a worse sell for business customers.
I'm very interested to see how they adapt to the changing market though.
And trust Google, Ad company, to erase it in its backend?
People are maybe less willing to pay for something they’ve been using for free (with ads) for years.
[1] https://mondaynote.com/the-arpus-of-the-big-four-dwarf-every...
And yet, my eyeballs looking at text with less text than a tweet is worth 21 USD. It feels like Google disrupted, but it’s far away from being optimal for companies.
...unless you are magically immune from advertising?
I’m not saying ads don’t work. I’m saying Google Ads are ready to in turn be disrupted.
Especially with bots running amok...
Other users react differently to that advertiser and/or you may click once every few years to bring in $1,000 advertising revenue for them on a very high-margin item.
They are working on ways to do anonymized personalisation/attribution/etc. The current Safari Technology Preview has someting called Ad Click Attribution API, for example.
Then they start offering micropayments, and iOS users are such a gigantic market, who Apple already micro-charge for Apps, and who’ll pay good money, that every publisher jumps on board immediately.
Removing tracking will take some profitability off ads but eyeballs are always going to be valuable.
Some might? The situation has been getting worse for the past 1-2 years, so this is just another nail in the coffin. There are different strategies here: subscriptions, micropayments, premium/free content split, <stick anything that Guardian tried to do here...>
Less creepy, and genuinely useful forms of targeting exist (e.g. contextual targeting). There's just not enough momentum in the AdTech industry to shift. These could work just fine.
In other words, what WebKit is trying to achieve is good news for us.
Publishers so far seem to have given up on the higher CPMs coming from non-targeted ad calls on Safari. Additionally, they would be more than happy to skip ads completely if a different, stable source of revenue existed. There's a bunch of startups dealing with monetising publisher content without ads (Scroll, Blendle, etc...).
Is that what you want? Most of human culture behind app based paywalls? No more archive.org content to preserve. Micropayments everywhere?
Can you imagine the cognitive burden of continuously, always, purchasing stuff? Of the effect on the have-nots for whom deciding to pay money for commodity content vs immediate needs is a much more important decision?
Hit that ecosystem and you get a recession. However it doesn't stop at the recession. Most VCs are funding hundreds and thousands of startups with the hope that one of them is going to get sold to Google or Facebook or Amazon or any of the Advertising Cash Cow business. Dry that tap and you'll have VCs pulling money from Tech.
Now, there is glut of Programmer supply and a severe lack of investments. Not dissimilar to 2008.
A kid goes out and breaks random windows in people's home; as a result, a lot of economic activity ensues - the glass producers, the people who produce glass cutters and specialized tools, the people who install windows, the cleaners who specialize in cleaning broken glass, etc ...
The ad industry is breaking everyone's windows. It does indeed produce a lot of economic activity; But it is more likely than not "misallocation and waste of funds" when looked at in a broader context.
Again, HN will not understand the side effects of destroying a major ecosystem. They all think they are much smarter and can stand on their own and VC money has no effect on their livelihood and it's their superior linux skills that keep them making tons of money
That would cost a few pennies in engineering skill and we might even find cures to things that might kill us or our loved ones.
But no, we’re throwing these opportunities away trying to be the next overvalued IRC skin.
I am really curious what the web itself (outside of apps) will look like in a world where the quality of content and services implodes because of the inability of publishers to generate revenue to pay for it. You may have your privacy, but you may also not have much left to do on the web. This is definitely a “be careful what you wish for” scenario.
Noone begged those companies to try to turn the Internet into a profit center, or to chew up enormous bandwidth and energy costs after being sold a foolish dream about targeting adverts.
The quality of the content was already being shared by millions of talented and thoughtful people. Because that's where the talent arises. Then your investors did for the internet what the music business did for music.
Oh, but that wasn't enough. After the ads, collecting and selling personal data to anyone came along. Regardless of millions of voices saying stop. Now the stream was not just full of trash, but flowed with multiple toxins.
A pox on all of them. I'd like to see all commercial interests limited to a very short list of TLDs. Then let's watch and see the mass migration. Let's call it 'choice'.
What about the independent blogs?
It’s everyone else who makes click bait ad spam that will suffer; and frankly, why should we care?
Gmail isn’t going to disappear.
Kotaku or TechCrunch might... or maybe some of those spam cooking sites. ...but, seriously? The whole internet exist because of personalised tracking > big marketing spend?
Come on.
You’re vastly overstating the case here: yes, there would be some impact, no it wouldn’t really make a big difference at this point.
Maybe if you go back in time, it would, but you can’t, so it’s a mute point.
What’s important is where we want to go from here, and personalised ad tracking driving content farms of fake cooking videos isn’t really the ideal “endstate” for the internet imo.
...even if some spammy companies I don’t like end up going out of business, along with some companies I do like.
You're joking about the "quality content" part, right?
What would fail is the likes of the fashion industry, such as Instagram influencers peddling Nike sneakers and cosmetics.