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Comment by rale00 | Hacker News Reader

> Didn't people make money off internet advertising before the modern surveillance-marketing complex? What happened to it?

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.

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> 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.

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.

For me, absolutely.

Back in May I was looking for a new apartment. Via what’s app I requested the agent ask the landlord to put window restricters on the windows as they do not have window grills.

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.

> 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.

Given the massive revenues that advertising generates, how could you think this judgement (which I'm sure accurately reflects how _you_ feel) applies universally?

There's an old saying in marketing that half of your advertising money is wasted, you just don't know which half.

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.

> No one wants to spend money showing ads to bots

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.”

Auditing of TV and newspaper ads is done largely on the receiving side, not the sending side - companies monitor what's actually shown in the stations broadcast and papers sent to real people, they pay people to install monitoring devices to see what they watch, and they contact people to find out what they're reading. The internet equivalent isn't really possible on iOS without doing some kind of Facebook-esque end-run around Apple's walled garden and paying people to install non-Apple-approved monitoring apps - and even that would probably only work for really massive, broad advertising campaigns.

I don't know about the US but at least here in northern Europe on the broadcasting side this used to be true. Now the monitoring of what people are watching is done through the setup boxes as well as the web streams. When it comes to what commercials being broadcast it's usually done through logging in the software that handles the playlist (for linear tv) and then reported back to the advertisers. The advertisers probably have different systems in place to verify it as well however.

There is less money in that advertising because the invasive advertising exists. If browsers ensured it didn’t exist, money would return for static/untargeted/context-based advertising again.

If I am reading Daring Fireball - list ad price $6500 a week for an ad at the beginning of the week and a thank you at the end of the week - doesn’t that automatically tell you something about me?

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