Comment by titzer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by titzer | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

After all this time watchin me, everything I ever asked it, all the ads I never clicked on, all the videos it watched me watch, all my emails it read, heck even after I worked for the dang company for nearly ten years, Google does not understand a very basic, essential thing about me. I hate advertising, damn it! I am sick of looking at it, I am sick of it looking at me. I am sick of hearing about how advertising is necessary to support a $130 billion in revenue and a trillion dollar valuation and some of the world's richest people. It's a lie. I'm sick of hearing about how I don't really hate advertising, I just want to see better ads. It's horseshit. I want to stop being bothered. I wanna stop being followed around. I wanna stop being monetized. We could have a smaller, more useful web that better benefited humanity, we could make education free or nearly free, we could actually have a chance to realize the dream of the original pioneers of the internet, if we weren't so obsessed with making it into the world's largest commercial marketplace, the world's biggest casino and TV show, and Google wasn't intent on extracting its ludicrous "fair share". If access to the internet is a human right, then its gateways can't be commercial entities, let alone ones hell-bent on growth. It is fundamentally incompatible.

They understand that you are part of the cohort that doesn't want to be monetized. Which is the reason they don't change it for you, because the efforts required to remove this cohort from tracking and still serve useful search results are a lot higher than what they think people would pay for.

But let's surprise them. I personally would be willing to pay up to 10k per decade of my remaining life expectancy to opt out completely. Upfront payment, right now. A package deal including Amazon would be even better, maybe for 50% more?

I think at one point people need to put a price point to their privacy, otherwise nothing changes. The market has no incentive for this change right now. And yes, that would mean that privacy is a luxury for people who can afford it, which is not what I would like to see, especially since I remember the times when you had privacy by default when going online. But I can't imagine how it can become a fundamental right under the current market conditions.

That's nowhere near enough. Sorry. You do want to see ads, you just don't realise it.

Google did actually run this experiment. They aren't stupid and lots of people say they'd rather pay money directly rather than see ads. Because of Google's place in the ecosystem they can actually implement that.

So they did. It eventually became Google Contributor and never really launched properly. The early version of Contributor was a lot more pure than what eventually launched. It let you set a budget and compete against yourself in the ad auction, so publishers were getting the same amount of money for their content as before. I tried it out when I worked there. You could set a fake budget and Google would pay for you to see empty boxes or pictures from your own photo albums instead of ads. A few things became apparent.

One is Google doesn't serve all or even most of the ads on the internet. So I still saw a lot of ads. This made the experience feel pretty pointless.

Another is that this model is completely infeasible. The internet economy is huge. Just a week or so of browsing rapidly blew my test budget of a few hundred dollars. To see no ads on the internet served by Google I would have needed to pay a large multiple of what I paid monthly for TV, mobile and Internet connectivity.

You say you'd be willing to pay $10k per decade? Forget it. If you're a heavy internet user that'd buy you less than a month, not a decade.

Finally, this didn't opt you out of search ads. That's because Google has strong experimental evidence that ads on search are good for users. One of the longest running A/B tests the firm ever did was selecting 1% of users and disabling search ads for them. What they found was a long term trend where those users simply used Google less than normal. Without ads the results were less useful so they did the obvious and searched less. Why would Google let you pay to make their product less useful for you?

Good points, actually very interesting, especially the budget part.

But I wasn't talking about just the ads, I was talking about the tracking to optimize those ads. I don't care about the ads. Show me ads, I ignore them anyway. I just don't want to be tracked to build out my personality profile for the rest of my life, because I don't know who will get access to that data and what it might be used for. Show ads based on my search term, not based on my browser, email and location history. They will have the same effect as the optimized ones: none.

Just keep in mind, the cohort I was talking about, was the one that will not be monetized. It is the cohort that still sees ads, but will never convert. So I'm not sure why I would buy my own ad space for an amount of money that is based on the usual conversion rate, when my conversion or click rate for my sample of n=1 is zero all the time. My profile correlates to zero spending, it is not worth the average ad price.

Google Contributor kind of proves my point about the efforts required being too costly. It was easier to inject a person as a buyer for their own profile into the merchandising system, than to rework all the tracking tools and the analytics that runs on it to stop tracking that specific person. So yes, my $10k is still not enough.

> Why would Google let you pay to make their product less useful for you?

Because I value privacy as a principle more than a slightly less useful product, and I would pay for it. But apparently I can't afford it.

Many ads are brand ads. You don't have to click for the advertiser to get what they want, just see their ad at all. Even for click-based ads, well, most people claim they never click on ads. But, they're wrong. Again, Google has lots of data on this. You will never be allowed to opt out of ads if you aren't paying your way, because lots of people would do it and that would render the internet economically unviable (of course no such ad network would survive for more than 5 minutes).

It was easier to inject a person as a buyer for their own profile into the merchandising system, than to rework all the tracking tools and the analytics that runs on it to stop tracking that specific person.

No, they did it that way because otherwise it'd have reduced publisher earnings who would then have gone to other ad networks with no Contributor programme. How do you set the price of not seeing an ad otherwise? The price of seeing it is set by auction. It had nothing to do with tracking which can be disabled by anyone here:

https://support.google.com/ads/answer/2662922?hl=en-GB

and here

https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout

Tracking isn't actually the big hammer people imagine it is. That's a fiction invented by journalists. It helps a bit but only really basic stuff like "show German people ads in German" or remarketing (show people ads for products they were looking at buying very recently). That's why it's OK to opt out. You become worth a bit less and you'll see more irritating ads as a result, but very few use this option.

Because I value privacy as a principle more than a slightly less useful product, and I would pay for it. But apparently I can't afford it.

Go disable ad tracking then. The options have been there for many years.

I think there is more to privacy than just disabling personalized ads, which is the reason I'm not bothered by them. I'm more concerned about personalized search results and filter bubbles. But I also think it is totally fine that the system works for you and you get value out of it.

Best thing I've read this year. Couldn't agree more.

You don't need Google. The Internet is fairly decentralized. You can build your small web even today and just block Google via robots.txt, never use it yourself, and link via webrings.

The Internet is very good at overlay networks. Search engines aren't even required. If you want Google's features then they ask that you pay their price. But if you don't want to play with the rest of us, you can host on your own, you can choose to browse via a free web directory you and others like you maintain, and all that.

It's all there for the taking. It's just that the rest of us derive utility from being part of the network that's growing.

Unfortunately their price is excessive and their income mostly comes from rent-seeking the contribution they make to the value of the internet is negligible and they leverage their position to take an outsized chunk out of income streams.

Google is a literal barrier to entry when it comes to running a web based business - if you can't secure traffic you die and traffic breeds more traffic so it's price is highly inelastic. It's (essentially) the same issue as market driven healthcare if you are dying then prolonging your life (generally) has infinite value and the market price for treatment becomes as much cash as you can get your hands on.

That's only if you want access to all the people who find Google useful. The guy I'm responding to wants a smaller web that doesn't grow. You can do that without drinking from the Google firehouse.

No one is taking the ability to make a smaller web away from anyone. But that's the nature of the small web, it's small. And maybe your business can't sustain itself on small. That's just incompatibility of what you want and physical reality.

You know what people say on this website about blocking ads, right? "Your business model is not my problem". It's true.

I get what you're saying and I sympathize. It just isn't compatible with the other guy's view. In a "smaller web" your business wouldn't even exist.

YaCy certainly comes to mind when considering decentralized web search. Google has a strong control of the pipe of people sending it queries. Though, there are certainly other methods.

https://yacy.net/index.html

>Google does not understand a very basic, essential thing about me. I hate advertising, damn it!

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

I just want to point out it's not necessarily that we want those things, it's that those who are in control push for it, and they do it because the way our society is structured rewards them for it

Reply on news.ycombinator.com