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Comment by jkubicek | Hacker News Reader

That's why you don't pay per click or impression. The newspaper/magazine model has worked fine for 100 years.

I fully understand why advertising companies would be opposed to this, it's in direct opposition to their value prop. As a consumer, though, I don't want anyone who is not the entity I'm interacting with to know anything about me.

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There is a reason why the news paper industry moved in the direction that they did. Or do you think they were forced to move this way? Measurement on the web can be more precise and allows to understand the impact of revenue, it's also vastly more distributed than magazines and TV channels of which there's only thousands or so for each while there are literally millions of websites. There's too much noise and fraud on the web to be able to make marketing decisions with little tracking. The W3C is working with Google on establishing what it would take to accomplish this stuff without sharing data, this isn't the approach apple took with its platform in plain disregard for all the apps that run on it, but than again at this point this shouldn't surprise anyone.

> There's too much noise and fraud on the web to be able to make marketing decisions with little tracking.

I think you give too little credit to the intelligence of ad buyers. They can figure out if a web ad is working the same way they can figure out if a billboard ad is working.

I've been working with tens of thousands of them for 15 years. To name one area: last click attribution being the primary way people measure web performance is a prime sign that they are at least confused with how performance works. Advertising measured with last click tends to focus towards people that have visited your site less than 4 hours earlier, hardly something that is incremental to the sales of a business, and basically all research and experiments that you can run point to this, but it doesn't change the fact ad buyers all believe last click is the one true way. And to show that it's not just me saying this: https://research.netflix.com/business-area/marketing-and-gro... .

I understand that they want more information, but they don't need it. Ask your clients how they evaluate the performance of offline ads. Those same analytical techniques work online as well.

I think super-precise attribution would actually kill the advertising industry. The uncertainty is what allows ad-buyers to purchase spots well below their value. The uncertainty is what leads to money being spread around and supporting the most things.

It's a little like insurance. If insurance companies could precisely target rates, you would end up paying basically exactly what your health care costs are and maybe a little more. Insurance works because of uncertainty and large pools of customers.

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