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Comment by confounded | Hacker News Reader

It will likely lead to centralization.

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.

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Maybe I’m older and from a different time, but conventional advertising was simply based on the topics at hand. Selling camping gear? Advertise in a camping magazine or the travel outdoors section of the newspaper.

These are all completely worthwhile ways to advertise that generated results for decades. This recent change to picking a group of people as opposed to a selection of content providers is very new and many would argue this was pushed heavily by the fact that these companies like Google Facebook and others were able to wedge themselves between the content producers and the content.

I’m not sure we ever truly definitively proved it was worthless to target content subject matter as opposed to personal data.

Sure, they were done, but not nearly as effective - hence all the effort to gather data for targeted ads.

If you want completely integrated ads you'll need about twice as many to get the same revenue. And I'm not even sure what's so terrible about targeted ads in the first place (leaving aside how the data is handled which varies enormously).

That is outmoded. Free services begot personal data (i.e. behavioral surplus) that could be put into algorithms that allows marketing and advertisement firms to bet on our futures. This is truly valuable. Even if the marketing is only 1% more effective, it represents millions in revenue.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveillance_capitalism

Zuboff's book is great.

While we fill unsold slots with adsense, we make far more revenue with directly sold ads. Either the big ones like Sony everywhere, or smaller merchants and producers targeting specific products (for example: show the ad for this lens on all articles about it, as well as articles about cameras it connects with)

It partly depends on how small your target group is. If you want to reach "People who travel" then targeting the travel page of the NYT should work nicely. But to play devil's advocate, what if you want to reach the 300 oncologists who prescribe your competitor's drug for Specific Rare Cancer and not your drug? Advertising in the cancer journals might be too expensive for your niche brand and you might want to run different messages to different groups within the 300.

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