Except without advertising half of the internet collapses. And to anyone suggesting that a paid model will just surface, I don't really want to live in a world where only the rich have access to tools as useful as Maps, Translate or Youtube.
You can still run ads without knowing anything about the user. They will be less targeted and less profitable, but you can still use them.
Specifically, about half as profitable: https://www.blog.google/products/ads/next-steps-transparency...
"Based on an analysis of a randomly selected fraction of traffic on each of the 500 largest Google Ad Manager publishers globally over the last three months, we evaluated how the presence of a cookie affected programmatic revenue. Traffic for which there was no cookie present yielded an average of 52 percent less revenue for the publisher than traffic for which there was a cookie present."
(Disclosure: I work for Google on ads, speaking only for myself)
If the default for everyone was to not target users, the actual revenue value would probably be a wash, because ad targeting is useless.
If everyone didn't have user tracking, the metrics on the effectiveness of stalking everyone would be very different.
This seems like a net win to me.
Source? Last I heard, targeted advertising isn’t more profitable.
This is a lie adtech industry tries to spread, but it was never true. Among a top couple of million of websites almost none are funded through adtech, as it doesn't pay much to websites at all. Adtech first and foremost is about making money for advertising companies, on all websites it can convince to join in aggregate, and for a couple of big platforms, but definitely not about supporting websites.
For example, it’d end domain squatting. (EDIT: Guess not!)
Is that a bad thing ??
There are a lot of good aguments that the bad brought by the internet out weighs the good.
I also don't think all the nice tools you described would go away. People would still provide these services for free, although it would be different people than today.
And I stated this in a separate child content, but the internet has proven repeatedly that services can be provided ad-free. No ads anywhere. They're either supported by donations, a subset of users who pay for advanced features, or run by volunteers on their own dime.
Listing three Google properties supposedly without competitors (which they do) does not prove that it's impossible (in fact, the hundreds and thousands of other web properties actually prove that ad-unsupported services can and do thrive).
EDIT: Reworded a few poorly phrased sentences.
A service that gives me the same results as any other customer. If I want my results to be bubbled may it be by tags I choose such as "Programmer" bubble or "Medical Professional" and maybe even Public Libraries and schools could pay for access to such engines. If I remember correctly many schools pay for curated search engines as it is.
I would also pay money for a solid social network and / or IM service. If I dont see certain people on it even better. My favorite thing about the internet is meeting new people anyway.
Furthermore, we all enjoy our accurate and free traffic predictions every day, but you do realize that it wouldn't be possible without user data, right?
This ignores revenue from iOS users, and the cost savings from shutting down their ads and tracking businesses.
They proposed an option for allowing ads without them being a privacy nightmare.
Apple's plan is a complete departure from current setups. https://webkit.org/blog/8943/privacy-preserving-ad-click-att...
I don't really know if its viable, but its something.
The only thing Google is doing by proposing this is to attempt to remove or lower the impact on them.
Considering this in the beginning:
>Recently, some other browsers have attempted to address this problem, but without an agreed upon set of standards, attempts to improve user privacy are having unintended consequences.
Non-personalized ads won't be lucrative enough to fund the web. Let's stop this equivocation. When people say that preventing tracking will kill advertising, they mean that it'll kill personalized advertising. When you respond to these concerns by pointing out that non-personalized advertising would still be possible, you're using this one word, "advertising", to refer to a different concept. Word games make for bad arguments.
You don't need to sniff my metaphorical underwear to serve me advertisements, and the definition of advertisement surely doesn't depend upon harvesting user data.
Quoting my own post, which you either didn't read or didn't understand: when people say that preventing tracking will kill advertising, they mean that it'll kill personalized advertising.
> You don't need to sniff my metaphorical underwear to serve me advertisement
Without personalization, ads aren't profitable enough to fund free-to-use web services.
> definition of advertisement
Nobody is talking about the definition of advertisement.
>Without personalization, ads aren't profitable enough to fund free-to-use web services.
I'll take a citation with that, please.
Non-personalized ads make about half as much money: https://www.blog.google/products/ads/next-steps-transparency... Whether this is enough to fund the web is debatable.
(Disclosure: I work for Google on ads, speaking only for myself)
Come on man. Are you saying the web wouldn't exist if ads had just happened to be 50% as profitable?
Yes they will. They will be plenty lucrative. Banner ads work fine.
Non-personalized ads funded TV and radio for decades.
The idea that "half the internet would collapse" doesn't seem to be backed by historical precedence.
Content targeting worked for a century just fine.
It will still get done, even without ads. The internet has, oddly enough, been the one to prove that to be the rule, not the exception.
Maps isn't fully free; they charge exorbitantly for the API. The freemium model works for e.g. Dropbox and Vimeo without needing to show ads.
It has (had?) 80% market share in car navigation systems, and makes money by charging car manufacturers for its product:
https://venturebeat.com/2015/08/03/why-3-car-giants-just-bou...
Apple maps is similar: you pay for the phone, and map updates are free. Android could be the same (if google charged for the OS).
My instance is completely ad-free, I might add.