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Comment by csmattryder | Hacker News Reader

It's cool to conciously see the death of an industry and watch as marketing firms fail to migrate away from traditional ads.

You can whinge and whine, but progress stops for nobody.

It's also great to see Apple building this into iOS, definitely a highlight of WWDC, for me. I often see the location indicator come on and wonder what else I'm not seeing.

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There seem to be two conflicting lines of thought about the future of advertising.

1) Companies are learning that non-online advertising is not very worthwhile and so are reducing the resources allocated to, say, network TV ads. This has already happened to a large extent to print and radio advertising. This suggests that the future of online advertising is bright.

2) Companies are learning that online advertising is not very worthwhile. They are learning that clicks are a bad metric, that online ads target people poorly, and that customers dislike online ads. This suggests that the future of online advertising is dim.

I'm curious as to what people make of these two positions. Are companies just going to spend less on ads in general?

3) Companies are learning that Ads that don't appear to be Ads, which also happen to reinforce customers' existing belief system, is a great way to lower their emotional guard and inject a positive product injection. The future of Native Advertising [1] is bright. So many examples already... [2]

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

[2] https://old.reddit.com/r/HailCorporate/top/?sort=top&t=year

Add to that all kinds of affiliate marketing being passed off as legitimate recommendations.

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User targeted advertising maybe moves the needle 4%. The reason people believe it's so key is that adtech companies need businesses to believe it's vital since they're the only companies with enough user data to do it. That 4% figure came from an independent study, I believe a Google-backed study claimed it had a 50% impact.

Remove that and smaller ad companies can sell ads based on the content they're displayed next to. A reasonable "targeting" method which doesn't require tracking users at all. Sites could partner directly with advertisers for similar effectiveness at a drastically lower price.

>Are companies just going to spend less on ads in general?

That's unlikely. Spending on advertising doesn't appear to change much as a share of GDP:

https://www.galbithink.org/ad-spending.htm

Probably spend differently. Because both of your points are kind of true: the future is online, but money spent up to now hasn't necessarily got results. Pure wild speculation, but I suspect that some of the metrics that drove advertising AND content onto the big beasts of the current Internet were gamed or fraudulent - it will be interesting to see if any big scandals happen.

I sure hope so! But in all seriousness I don't think those two points conflict per se; they both say, "...advertising is not very worthwhile..." which kind of nails what's going on. The ground under our feet has changed. The audience by-and-large is fragmented, jaded, fickle, fed up, and has no money.

Fed up for the last 5 years hearing about scandal after scandal, outrage after outrage...

Fragmented for about the last 5-10 years, ever since we figured out the "long tail" and how to cater to everybody's unique interests. There is no longer anything approximating a place where everybody goes/is; hence there's not even a consensus anymore about what reality is, which is a related & tangential issue.

Has no money, well that's more of a continuum... either you do or you don't, but every year a larger number of people don't, and are too broke to be in the market for whatever product.

Jaded with advertising in general ever since probably the Boomers were in their 20s, and moreso when Gen X were teenagers.

Jaded with online advertising ever since the 90s when it became clear ads were going to follow us into what everybody thought was going to be a new online world.

Fickle since the dawn of time.

this has always been the problem with advertising.

the old chestnut goes, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half”.

Progress ? There's money to be made and this looks like posturing and story telling to justify tapping in to another revenue stream on their platform.

This is merely a “strategy credit”. Apple makes almost all of its money by people giving them money directly and them giving you stuff. They can afford to be privacy focused.

If you’re okay with cheap, unpolished products where you are constantly being tracked and getting advertised to, buy a Google product. If you want products where you give the company money and they give you stuff - buy Apple.

>Apple makes almost all of its money by people giving them money directly and them giving you stuff.

The story used to be "they are making money on hardware", then when that peaked it became "they are making money on services", once they peak in that market it's going to be "they are monitizing the content delivered through the ecosystem to provide a curated and safe experience" - it's all about showing growth an keeping stock prices.

They have been making money off of curated content that you use with their hardware since 2003 when they introduced the iTunes Music Store. I’m still using my same Apple ID to purchase content from Apple that I used 17 years ago.

But that still doesn’t change the equation.

I give Apple money == they give me stuff.

> The story used to be "they are making money on hardware", then when that peaked it became "they are making money on services",

The story is still that they're making money on hardware; over 80% of their revenue (and potentially more of their profits; profit margin on the music stuff in particular can't be great).

77% but close enough.

https://i0.wp.com/laptopcapri.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05...

Ah, was looking at data for a different quarter. Probably varies during the year, though; I assume hardware share peaks in Q4.

cheap, unpolished products where you are constantly being tracked and getting advertised to

This is a bit of an old meme, it reminds me of the PC vs Mac wars back in the pre-Jobs-return era. Or Ford vs Chevy. It's really impressive how strongly companies have convinces us to associate our identities with their brands.

Android is still a mess of an ecosystem where most OEMs bundle their own crapware, most don’t provide updates for more than a couple of years if at all.

I had the displeasure of using Google Search without an ad block for the first time in awhile. God it’s awful. Not to mention AMP pages being the default for many popular new sites when linking from Google on mobile.

GoogleTV/Android TV/Chromecast are all worse than Apple TV and Roku

Give me Office 365 over GSuite any day on either mobile or desktop.

No one had to convince me about Google’d brands. Google’s entire reason for existing is an advertising operation. 90% of their profit comes from advertising.

And along come lineage and f-droid, saving you from whatever google are the chinese try to throw at you.

If you want products where you give the company money and they give you stuff - buy Apple.

The "stuff" tends to come with artificial limitations so that in order to use it effectively I have to give Apple even more money.

Which product comes with “artificial limitations” that force you to give Apple more money?

For iPhones, Lightning rather than USB-C, no headphone jacks, and inability to use software outside of the app store. For Macs, lack of post-purchase expandability, and it's getting gradually more difficult to run non-store software.

Yes, you can come up with arguments why these things are actually good for users. But coincidentally the workarounds always end up with more revenue for Apple: AirPods, 30% commission on apps, inflated BTO upgrade prices...

> and inability to use software outside of the app store

Google wants browsers to be like OSes, because they can't directly compete with desktop OSes. This concept is incompatible with security and privacy, so Google's interests are more harmful (they fund Mozilla).

Granular permissions don't solve the privacy issue, because denying them contributes to fingerprinting. Also, JIT compilers violate W^X.

- you can buy extra lightning cables from anywhere at about the same price as usb c cables.

- most modern high end cell phones aren’t coming with headphone jacks anymore. All iPhones come with a headphones

- most high end laptops also don’t have internal expandability anymore.

-you also don’t have to buy AirPods. You can buy any Bluetooth headphones

- Google also charges the same 30% for apps.

- the default is allow signed apps. Not apps from the store.

- but then you have lightning cables and usb c cables. Yet another connector that's incompatible with everything else!

- [citation needed]. High end android phones with headphone do exist, so you definitely have the choice to support those vendors.

- most

- bluetooth

- f-droid, saving the day yet again.

- the default. You can just enable that without having to do anything shady at all.

By making it harder to monetize ads? Ok.

By replacing competitors with their own "tracking free" ad tech

Which by definition makes it harder to monetize ads.

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