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Comment by iliketosleep | Hacker News Reader

It's going to be interesting to see where this ends up. Ads are inevitable, and in some ways beneficial to both content providers and consumers (i.e. revenue can be earned from users without any direct payment). But are invasive forms of tracking such as 3rd party cookies really that necessary? Could websites survive using only contextual advertising without the excessive tracking?

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The ads that I find most useful are the ones which mimic olde newspaper/magazine ads by simply showing things relevant to their general readership.

The advertisers don't need to know a thing about me, they just need to know the general demographics and interests of the publication.

For example, the ads on this blog[1] are far more relevant and less invasive/annoying than anything that Google ever showed me before I started aggressively blocking ad networks. I assume that it is because the blog knows what I am interested in better than Google does, simply because I voluntarily go to their website and read their content.

[1]: https://hackaday.com/

Consider this though, would those marketing schmucks invest that much money into dystopian tracking on the web if they didn't have the data to back it up?

The problem is in the user. They do this because we let them. Spread the adblock around your non-technical peers whenever you can.

I think this phenomenon has also a lot to do with self marketing of ad agencies. To stand out against the numerous competitors, they want to provide as much information as possible to their clients about potential customers, target groups, etc.

I agree that we should block those even harder. The bad side is that whitelisting sites doesn't work well and well behaved actors are punished too. Especially those, since they do not employ measures against blocking in the first place. That does cost those sites that you actually do want to support.

So the current situation is that bad actors ruin it for everyone.

Are you sure hackaday isn’t using third party ad networks?

Nope - but I see the same sort of ads on every machine including public ones, they don't follow me, and they aren't annoying.

So if they do use an ad network, it seems like one that can connect me with products that I'm interested in without being intrusive.

I guess that I have no assurances that they aren't collecting my information and not using it, but down that road lies madness.

The problem for e.g. Facebook, Reddit and other link aggregation sites is that they have a very non-specific audience - which is fine for e.g. Coca Cola that want everyone to see their ads, but impractical for small advertisers that want to target a specific niche.

The promise of the ad networks is that they'll find the niche sites for the advertisers who then don't have to find suitable places to advertise on and buy ad space in a bunch of different places - less administration needed.

I don't think that this adds enough value to be worth eroding the privacy of all web users, but apparently it is according to the people who make the decisions. ️:shrug:

(Apparently HN strips away emoji from comments, didn't know that.)

I don't agree ads are beneficial for users (or "consumers" as you put it). They could be, but you pay with your focus/time. I'd rather pay for the content then, or get a free (demo) version (I regard a RSS feed as such). Tracking, however, is on the long term never beneficial for the users. It is a behemoth of a privacy nightmare. This article is about ad trackers.

> I'd rather pay for the content then

People like you are a minority. Most people expect Internet content to be free.

Because there is a lot of paid pulp content. Demo versions of qualitative, paid content will sell itself provided the stack is user-friendly enough. Just like people pay for Netflix. Also, if you price yourself conform US or EU salary don't expect poor countries to buy your product.

It's something a person would say with a salary depending on ads. Who likes tracking and popups? TV programming butchered? Endless garbage in the mail? Come on.

I think it's the opposite. We're in a bubble here. It's easy enough for a software engineer to say they'd pay for the content that's on the web when we have the disposable income to do so without even breaking stride.

If you ask the average person whether they'd prefer to pay for web content or cop ads and trackers, they'd probably tell you to shove your subscription service or whatever alternative you can come up with up your ass.

The problem with paying for content for people outside of that bubble is that the prices are way too high. Consider how much money an average visitor earns a site through ads. In relation, paying 5USD a month for an ad-free subscription to that same content seems ridiculous. I'd wager that's even more money than a newspaper subscription sans the printing costs.

Does an average visitor earn a site 5 USD per month? That sounds way too high. 5 cents, maybe, if they're a regular visitors. If sites asked users to pay what they earn off advertising to them on average, prices would be very low. Unfortunately, there's nothing stopping sites from asking for money and still advertising.

In the same way that nobody likes taxes, traffic stops, or insurance salesmen, but almost anyone sees their necessity, things can be beneficial without being enjoyable.

I don't see the necessity of insurance salesmen. It's a particular way the industry decided to organize itself, but it isn't prima facie necessary for insurance - the valuable part - to function.

As for taxes and traffic stops, these help me and people around me. Advertising is made to hurt me, to rob me of my money by subtly manipulating my consumption choices. It's a malicious act.

While some advertisements may be dishonest, I don't feel that that can be said of advertising. Advertising is absolutely designed to part you of your money, but that isn't necessarily bad for you.

If I see an advertisement for a good or service which I purchase because of the ad and which subsequently benefits my life, yes the advertiser has profited, but so have I.

If I make a product which benefits humanity (say something that's a better quality, more environmentally friendly alternative to a popular product) is it not more selfish not not advertise and spread the word?

> While some advertisements may be dishonest, I don't feel that that can be said of advertising.

I believe that it's not some, but upwards of 90% of advertisements that are manipulative and dishonest, and that's before talking about methods of delivery. Therefore, I feel justified in accusing the whole industry.

I've expanded on the topic at length here: http://jacek.zlydach.pl/blog/2019-07-31-ads-as-cancer.html.

> If I see an advertisement for a good or service which I purchase because of the ad and which subsequently benefits my life, yes the advertiser has profited, but so have I.

That's arguably a rare case. Of most product categories that are advertised you're already aware of, the goal of the advertising is to make you choose one option over other for reasons other than the value you'll get for your money.

> If I make a product which benefits humanity (say something that's a better quality, more environmentally friendly alternative to a popular product) is it not more selfish not not advertise and spread the word?

The word about that product being on the market should be spread, and it could be without getting into all the negative aspects of advertising iff everyone's attention wasn't already saturated by all the other companies advertising indiscriminately. When everyone's shouting through the megaphone at each other, you have to pick a megaphone too just to have a chance of being heard. What I'm arguing is to take everyone's megaphones away, so that we could all talk to each other.

> Advertising is made to hurt me, to rob me of my money by subtly manipulating my consumption choices. It's a malicious act.

And your focus/time. The image I have of Las Vegas drives me insane. I find it peculiar such attention thievery is even legal, or deemed safe.

I don't really see the necessity of taxes, to be honest and can easily imagine a world where everything taxes are used for are paid directly by citizens that see a benefit in spending it on that particular endeavor. Just having a say in what your taxes are allowed to be spend on would go a long way to prevent taxes from being wasted.

> something a person would say with a salary depending on ads

I think the vast majority of employed users on HN are to a greater or lesser degree dependant on ads. Mostly indirectly I'd guess, and with varying independent levels of cognitive dissonance and awareness of their dependence. With a little bit of thought about how their organisation actually works they can see their place in it and the impact on the wider world.

For example "I make web apps for a widget maker, we don't have ads on our websites and I'm not dependant on ads for my wage". Ask the CEO of the widget company and they will tell you that with less advertising fewer would buy their widget and they would have to fire the developer.

I make money through patreon, patreon mainly advertises itself through their users advertising their own patreon pages on their own content, which is far different than what you mentioned above. patreon itself doesn't advertise at all.

All widespread forms of online payment require proof of identity and hence take away all anonymity and all privacy.

Even after many years of debates and experiments, there is still no practical way to do anonymous micropayments. And I doubt there ever will be, because governments will always want to regulate payments.

So direct payment for content will very likely end up being yet another stronghold of all-powerful gatekeepers, just like the app stores.

Good point. Not at all a fan of cryptocurrencies but would a cryptocurrency like Montero be of help here?

Only if you believe that governments would ever let businesses receive hundreds of billions per year without any proof of who or where the payer was.

In my view, these schemes will only be tolerated as long as they are tiny enough to fly under the radar.

They regulate bitcoin, but don't take all anonymity.

I think there's only a tiny number of bitcoin payments on any given day.

>there is still no practical way to do anonymous micropayments

Accumulate and pay in bulk.

YouTube Red (when it was Red) did exactly this with individual videos. And it worked. Red views were (are) worth around 100 (or more) traditional ad views.

I always like to compare the 'advertising' that we see on the net vs the ones we see in a store. In the first instance, the website can and does monetise you, whereas in a store it's just that: a suggestion. In a store, the advertiser might have paid for a placement, but an individual's metrics are not harvested. So, the real dysfunction is that advertisers aren't paying a website up front for 'space'.

I will always applaud the termination of the tracking advertising that we have online.

I think there final straw that breaks the advertising model is when browsers finally disallow/ discourage cross site communications. ie, even an image hosted on a different domain will be treated the same way mixed http/https is currently treated.

Google, of course will no doubt vehemently oppose such moves. On the flip side, I like how HN keeps blatant advertising away, except for the odd YC announcements: it just shows how sites with something tangible don't need to resort to subversive ads.

This isn’t as true these days as it used to be. Many stores use WiFi hotspots and Bluetooth beacons (and computer vision on security cameras) to track customers in their stores to build advertising and placement strategies. Target’s particularly fond of this approach.

Indeed. It's not that physical space advertisers are somehow morally superior to on-line ad networks; it's that until recently, they couldn't afford the level of tracking that was possible on-line. With cheap computer vision and advertising technologies like iBeacon support[0] being included in smartphones by default, and with services for processing this data being available on the market, physical space advertisers can now afford to be just as slimy as their on-line counterparts.

[0] - which didn't start as advertising technology, but ended up being used this way.

Yes they can. Online advertising is on the rise. Businesses have been spending the same % in advertising for a century. If it is not possible to use trackers, businesses will keep spending the same, and advertisers should be paying out the same to publishers.

The bigger question for me is why publisher payouts keep dropping even while online advertising spend is skyrocketing.

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Rachel_Soloveichik/publ...

https://ark-invest.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/internet-a...

Because Google and Facebook take the majority of that money, leaving the rest of the publishers less and less of that pie.

Which is why they need more competitors, and being unable to use their trackers means smaller competitors can get a chance.

Alternatively, we need to corner the market into a kill box by letting it depend on a few large players, and then start shooting at it with regulations, technology and cultural shifts.

Personally, I do not want a healthy competition in adtech breeding further innovation. That's like wanting a healthy competition in bacteria breeding super germs. I want the adtech market to die.

How could ads benefit users? Obviously, if the revenue that content creators receive from ads came directly from the consumers, the middle (ad) man would be cut out and all others would benefit.

The same way that reading HN can benefit users. A lot of the posted blog articles are covert advertising anyway. Ads do not benefit the user directly, they benefit the business, which expands and improves its products, which itself benefits the user. Advertising is indispensable for business growth, and are never going to go away, they 'll just change format

> A lot of the posted blog articles are covert advertising anyway.

And a lot of them aren't, and a big reason why people read HN or /r/$someNiche instead of an industry news site is because community link aggregators do a good job at weeding out the advertising.

> Ads do not benefit the user directly, they benefit the business, which expands and improves its products, which itself benefits the user.

I'd be careful, because this line of argument can justify anything a business does to make more money, because "they'll expand and improve its products". In reality, the "improvement" of a product is measured by its profitability, so if you let a business play unfairly and abusively, they'll only do more of that.

The media is financed by ads to the tune of around 50%.

That business is sort of necessary for democracy, as decision-making requires information to close the feedback loop.

Therefore, I wouldn't quite so readily cheer the downfall of the industry with nothing more than the typical "be better and you'll find more paying customers" advice.

> The media is financed by ads to the tune of around 50%.

That's because it's the easiest and most profitable business model available. Kill it off, and media will shift to a different model. Advertising isn't necessary for media to exist, and it's not like people want media to exist because of ads.

> That business is sort of necessary for democracy, as decision-making requires information to close the feedback loop.

Sort of, kind of. Some news reporting is the part that's necessary for democracy. Not the entirety of what news sites serve today, and definitely not the larger media industry.

News reporting is already pretty much as low as it can get, thanks to advertising-based business model. Facts and reasoned opinions matter little; fake news and outrage-inducing reporting generates more page views, leading to more ad impressions, and thus more money for the news organization.

>> Kill it off, and media will shift to a different model

The alternative model is to make users pay. Imagine all news sites hiding behind paywalls. Advertising is not only easiest and more profitable, it is also most convenient for the end users.

> Imagine all news sites hiding behind paywalls.

I imagine this and I think we'd end up with a much saner world, but that's a separate topic.

One twist to that business model I can imagine that - I feel - would allow private news sites to exist while not burdening people and making the state actually pay for its democracy protection service is: allow everyone to deduct money they spend on news subscriptions from their taxes. This way, the free market for independent news services still works, but now the state is funding it - as it should, since timely news is a public good.

> it is also most convenient for the end users

That's because true costs are distributed and hidden; that doesn't mean they aren't there.

Another alternative is patreon. Remove all ads on your site other than ones to your crowdfunding page. Users are happy, the site makes money in proportion to it's quality.

There used to be a time where ads weren’t synonym with endless privacy breaches though. Lots of content nowadays is niche, and as such can get well working advertising without much tracking.

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