New York Times phasing out all 3rd-party advertising data

Kudos to NYT for trying to stop this madness. It’s gone way too far

Now, I have a pretty fast CPU—a 4790K—and it wasn't that long ago that most computers had less than 200 MB of RAM total. And, you could read on those computers just fine.

On the other hand, if I repeat the same test with my Slack tab, I get 30% of CPU and 400 MB of RAM. Slack doesn't have ads, and IM clients are another thing that worked just fine 20 years ago.

I guess my point is, the web is bloated, and I'm not sure why we're harping on The Times.

As one of the VP of products where I currently work will say when someone suggests removing this ad or that ad, "Sure. No sweat. OK - now tell me who I should fire."

I checked BBC and CNN, and it seems like they don't have such links (anymore?). Do I remember this incorrectly, or is my browser maybe blocking Outbrain?

Of course, I am not talking about the JS or cookies specifically, but rather the links bought by advert companies that link to scams for cryptocurrencies, binary trading, "health" products and the like. They often have JS exploits. But my main point is I clearly remember the website real estate to be merged between site wide adverts and external scammy adverts.

A few years ago, this was actually on of the main reasons I didn't read websites of otherwise traditional media companies. Or maybe they have taken steps to stop using Outbrain et al.?

As an aside, it matters a great deal in which ordering you place your benefits. Which advantage you 'lead' with can make a great deal of difference between an effective and ineffective pitch, even if all you have done is swap them around in a sentence.

Compare Oatly's [vegan] oat milk which basically uses "Better at frothing than regular milk... and it saves the environment" vs "This milk saves the environment... and it is better at frothing than regular milk." These will read the same to you in the medium of Hacker News but they are markedly different in efficacy.

If third-party cookies and device fingerprinting are blocked, then how can you track users who saw an ad twice, before deciding to buy?

You can’t with much certainty, unless they’re using Chrome, and you’re Google.

For the NYT who can rely on “brand” (as opposed to “performance”) advertising this isn’t a big deal. They can charge a lot just to show the image on their site. They have strong enough prestige that many advertisers will not require a third-party arbiter of tracking or impressions.

But I worry that the direction of change will favor Google as an advertising behemoth, and extend their influence over the web and publishing.

If fingerprinting wasn’t an issue (either because the industry was honest or we had effective laws to punish offenders) then I’d say that’s a great idea and could even be implemented in browsers as an “Accept-Advertising” header (just like the headers we already have for language and encoding).

I don't see in the article any mention of how they will collect data. While some will definitely come from users, I suspect they will build profiles based on what a user reads.

Sounds like a wildly successful website from 2004.

The most profitable ad categories are in things like insurance and legal. Who would opt in to those?

The point is, I'm not really convinced that tracking is necessary in order to produce more relevant ads. I guess it's kinda necessary in order to track how many views an ad gets, but there's gotta be a better way to do that, and it doesn't need to collect any data other than "viewed++" or maybe a bit more to prevent gaming the system.

If not, presumably the "large team specifically to support this year of a dozen people" that NYT assembled has built a system to infer those things about you.

This is NYT trying to stay competitive in light of CCPA (which state will adopt it next? my guesses are NY, OR, MA, or WA) and GDPR. First-party audience segmentation is now all but required for larger publishers.

From the article:

> Those segments are broken up into 6 categories: age (age ranges, generation), income (HHI, investable assets, etc.), business (level, industry, retirement, etc.), demo (gender, education, marital status, etc.) and interest (fashion, etc.)

In Google settings I can choose my interests.

Of course Google knows better than me and would always completely disregard it, showing me ads for dating sites (most seemed unusually scammy) for 10 years after I married instead of showing ads for stuff I might need or be tempted to buy anyway:

- car parts (unless I have recently bought everything I need like today)

- computer/tech conferences

- family holidays, toys etc

Since Google only hires the best and brightest and let them work freely under the most inspiring conditions this must be a really great idea.

For those who don't catch it: this is soaked in sarcasm.

Edits: a bunch.

Let me also add that while Google ads often has great ROI[0 ] you should keep an eye on them. Google has annoyed me for ten years but I'm close to claiming they must have scammed a bunch of dating sites (or maybe just one company with a lot of fronts?)

[0]: although possibly less than before according to friends who used them to bootstrap a nice company.

I've wondered this for years, but I think I know why they don't do this.

If they asked me what ads I'd be interested in seeing, and were to abide by my exact parameters, that would limit how many ads they can show me and hence how much money they can make.

Instead, they spend billions to make guesses on what to show me, not just to show me what I want to see, but to make guesses on what I don't know that I want to see, opening up the door to showing me many more ads and make more money. That and they know that even ads for things I'm not interested in at the moment can persuade me to buy in the future.

Of course, I'm not saying that any of their methods are actually very effective. Whenever I've turned uBlock Origin off, or saw ads on Hulu, I don't remember ever seeing something that's even remotely interesting to me or got me to engage. Like a lot of things such as "AI", I believe that modern advertising is a lot of overvalued bunk that mostly has value on the perception that it's necessary. It survives because people in charge don't actually understand the technicalities behind advertising, except that its use seems necessary and correlates with continued cash flow.

This would assume that the goal is to show you what you want to see, rather than to show you what advertisers want you to see based on what they think you need to see and might respond positively to.

I think you misunderstand who the customer is here. What you want is irrelevant. It's what they can get you to pay for.

If you knew what you wanted, you could just type that into a search box. Clearly, the NYT display ads have other purposes. Looking at the home page now, the ones I see are to spark feelings of need and suggest a solution at the same time. Skipping right over the part where I think about needing something and figure out the best way to solve that need.

That said, removing 3rd party data is a big deal, because 3rd party data is consistently one of the worst offenders but also one of the simpler ways to make your advertising slots more valuable.

At face value, it means:

1. They are not buying/using data gathered about you from elsewhere by other companies and other websites.

2. They are still directly analyzing data they gather about you from sites owned by NYT.

3. They could still use data gathered from sites affiliated with NYT using NYT trackers, if that's something NYT does. No idea if NYT does it.

Even if that weren't true interests change and you'd never update a profile like that, and the most profitable things to advertise for you'd never put on it in the first place even if you remembered.

Even if that weren't true, the people that would would make the most money would be the people who got to you before you got around to updating it.

As context: I'm 32 years old now. I've been advertising online since I was 15.

I could be wrong here, but I think it's because marketing folks believe that they know you better than you know yourself. That certainly seems the case with salespeople, whose role is to pitch something that may not be desired right away.

Personally, my interest fluctuates quite a lot and is probably closer to the current article than a median projection. When I want to buy a new thing, that interest is only valid for the time until the purchase decision.

It's just an observation and probably naive. But it seems like content-based ads could be quite efficient while requiring much less privacy-invading tracking.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_retargeting

I know some of the people who are the target. People who would buy 3 lifetime supplies of coffee because of a 20% sale. People who can't pass something framed as an exceptional offer. And of course, they are in debts.

Fuck advertisement. It is preying on vulnerable people, it is making markets less efficient (by distorting information and urging consumers to not act rationally). Forbid this scam. Fund internet service in a saner way.

Unfortunately for every person in marketing who like Seth Godin cares even a little about things like privacy and consent, the marketing industry is full of thousands of people who would rather ram all kinds of ads as quickly and frequently as possible in front of every unwilling eyeball possible to try to brainwash as many impressionable people as possible into believing they need all kinds of things that they had no interest in previously. It’s a numbers game. They don’t just want to sell people things they want or need or would benefit from. They don’t even want to simply introduce people to unexpected solutions for problems they actually have. They want to do those things but they also want to exploit every psychological weakness possible to introduce new wants and new needs and new problems and insecurities into the consciousness of their targets because one can’t maximize sales without psychologically manipulating more people into thinking they want or need things they don’t.

Ads are primarily exploiting impressionable insecure people with poor impulse control.

Being able to hoover up information that is more up to date than when you last filled out the survey means they could potentially be more accurate. i.e. You're shopping for some type of product, your search history and browser history indicates this, but is outside the realm of what you filled out in the survey. Being able to direct some ads that fit your current needs could be lucrative.

I'm not an advertiser, but this is just my small bit of thought on it. Perhaps others are able to confirm or deny this is what's happening.

No, they are trying to guess which add will produce the best return in terms of advertiser-sought behavioral changes if shown to you. That probably has some overlap with ads you are interested in, but it's not the same thing.

> Did they ever think to just ask me?

The ads that it is generally most valuable to show are the ones that the target wouldn't expect to have interest in. Advertising largely exists to create desire; if you ask people what advertising they'd like to see they will identify the advertising that would do the least to change their behavior from what it would be without the ads, which defeats the point. Untargeted ads would probably be more effective.

Another note, Facebook and Google are both some of the largest companies in the world because of their advertising technology. We created them with our clicks.

How much more would you be willing to pay to go entirely ad-free?

From the NYT annual report [1], it appears that they made ~$1B in subscription revenue and $0.5B in advertising revenue last year. If you're willing to pay >50% more (if you can afford more, you're probably more valuable as an advertising target), NYT is probably interested.

[1] https://s1.q4cdn.com/156149269/files/doc_financials/annual/2...

https://imgur.com/8oqmgIG

Can you show me? Perhaps this is an EU vs US edition thing. I'm EU.

I was about to say that the reason there's no ad free option is that advertising so dominates subscriber fees, the correct way to look at this is that they are selling audiences to other large corporations rather than in some sense serving their readers. However, their 2020 financial report shows that subscriber revenues have recently eclipsed their advertising revenue starting in 2015.

https://www.nytimes.com/projects/2020-report/index.html

The subscriber revenue was about a third larger than the ad revenue then. This is kind of an interesting difference. If the advertising revenue keeps dwindling, the editorial line will become more responsive to their subscribers rather than their advertisers. Of course, the subscriber base is going to be mainly middle to upper class and college educated, and those people believe many of the same things the corporations believe. However, I would hope that this would make the NYT marginally more populist and pro-worker and less oriented towards invading other countries which they currently nearly always support uncritically. I don't think there's any hope for them going further than that, but prying the cold dead fingers of the business community off the editorial line of the nation's paper of record would open a crack in the door.

"We are the NY Times. If you want to advertise on our site you have to pay a premium."

"But we want to target ..."

"We are the NY Times. We have half a billion ARR. Take it or leave it."

That used to be how ads worked, and I think it is a better model - for both sides in many cases.

https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/20/dont-be-creepy/

I think they have just concluded that the story being told that sites must engage in creepy third party ad behavior is false and that they can just handle in house.

Overall I think this is probably better.

https://myaccount.nytimes.com/seg/subscription

Also - the reason they do that is so they can offer you a radical discount that isn't "published" to keep you from canceling. I did this a few weeks ago and saved more than 50%.

That pattern is something I'd expect from Sirius XM or Lifetime Fitness, and the fact that they did it too was a little surprising.

I had to call and pitch a fit to get them to at least stop sending papers (to my old address, I don't live in the USA any more) and give me a prorated refund. They were completely shady and untrustworthy, I'll never do business with them again.

Someone else here said this can save you money this way, but the salesman I got came back at me with an offer to stay for the same price I was already paying.

Between them not complying with CA law (I'm a resident of CA) and them showing me ads when I pay them, I decided to end my subscription for good.

https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/04/californias-new-online-can...

The process is usually painless, since the card issuer has a financial incentive to screw over the vendor. Some credit card companies will even block charges from a company moving forward.

One of the credit reporting agencies (Experian?) started charging one of my cards without permission. I don’t know how they even got the number, so I did this.

The credit card company operator said a double digit percentage of the call center load was blocking that particular credit agency, and did it with no further questions. I have no idea why they weren’t kicked off the processing network for elevated fraud rates.

They did win though, I ended up subscribed for a few months more than I wanted to.

Publishers who want to fortify their businesses have a couple things they need to do right now:

* Build their own data moats in the face of platforms like Facebook and Google leveraging their own

* Tie audience data to logged-in users, and ensure users are constantly logged-in as much as possible. If a user is logged-in, cookies are irrelevant.

* Reduce risk from privacy and data legislation. Data is now just as much (if not more so) a liability as an asset

* Strengthen their direct and PMP revenue with exclusive inventory/targeting/quality

* Reduce reliance on other vendors and platform data

* Reduce reliance on ad revenue (more on that below)

* Grow their brand to associate their inventory with the notion of "quality" and help the subscription business

So what we have is a publisher with a subscription product that is checking all of these boxes. They are positioned from the brand standpoint already, clearly have a valuable audience, and the value of their 1st party data will grow over time. Buyers who want quality inventory will need to go for direct deals or PMPs, or whatever self-serve tool they may roll out at some point if they feel they are at that point.

Further, if they can improve the quality or nature of ads served, they can actually drive higher revenue from fewer impressions. And at a certain point, you can conduct tests and research into whether that sufficiently improves the UX so as to drive incremental subscription revenue growth (which is likely considered more desirable) over what those extra impressions could have delivered. That improves the health of their subscription business and overall business long-term by better aligning their efforts with the interests of their paying subscribers, which is a win for them.

If anyone wants to talk shop some more about this, feel free to ping me (see profile) as I've dealt with this sort of scenario in a professional capacity and could go on for days about this.

What about fingerprinting? Does CCPA/GDPR cover that?

NYT is the party segmenting their users and allowing segments to be targeted.

You can't buy segments or even use them anywhere else so there's no 3rd-party access.

This also likely dovetails with a bet around improved UX leading to subscription growth, which is a much healthier business model for them that better aligns them with their readers.

I see other publishers looking to go this route in the future if they can pull it off. Particularly privacy-focused ones that have mechanisms for aggregating 1st party data and turning it into valuable targeting segments.

Why do we need to ban it? I care about my privacy. I would like clear disclosures and easy opt outs. But I don't need it banned for everyone else.

https://bostik.iki.fi/aivoituksia/random/no-stalking.html

ß: what do you call an ecosystem formed entirely of parasites?

[1] https://digiday.com/media/gumgumtest-new-york-times-gdpr-cut...

NYT will still be indirectly sending data to 3rd parties, via user-targeted ad placements.

Its talked about as "selling data", but its important to understand how that works, because its inherent to the value proposition of digital advertising. Its not "we have X data, do you want to buy it for $Y?". Its not about exporting CSVs or connecting data warehouses. Its "We have X data, do you want to buy inventory for that audience?". So the only way that a publisher can really sell ads without "selling data" is to do it on a non-targeted basis, so either through programmatic, non-direct, or through non-targeted direct campaigns. In isolation, a publisher who is selling non-targeted direct campaigns is not going to do well. Its just not a competitive offering to advertisers, unless the site's entire audience falls in a certain demographic--in which case, advertisers will just mark those users as having that characteristic, so in the end its still "selling data".

One way to look at the value of selling first party data is to look at the gap between programmatic and direct sold inventory. Direct campaigns in the US typically go for $10-50 CPMs (highly dependent on the audience, context, and units). Programmatic averages closer to $1-2. So having first party data _and scale_ can get you a 10-20X over not having data (and scale).

I'm not sure we're entitled to that right as a user. The NYT is providing us content in exchange for analytics on how we use their site or respond to their advertising. As a user we're free to not buy what they're selling.

They would need to be guaranteed sufficiently many people who are willing to sufficiently enough to offset all advertising revenue. Unfortunately, time and time again, people prefer free over paying for quality.