A stable identifier makes identifying this sort of behavior much easier.
(Disclosure: I work on ads at Google, speaking only for myself)
A lot of content, especially newspaper/magazine articles, at least here in Germany, already are paid-only, either through subscriptions or both subscriptions and alternatively microtransactions (mostly more in-depth reporting). The UK Guardian and the German taz employ voluntary payments/subscriptions with some success last I heard. US media seems to be pushing a lot more for subscriptions now ("you got free 3 articles this month")
Creators on patreon and on OnlyFans (NSFW) seem to be making good money off of subscriptions, on a smaller scale (and if they sell a product that has some demand, of course).
Relatedly the greater independence of creators from advertising would in turn mean fewer ads, which in turn means potentially more competition for the available ad space again and thus potentially higher prices.
If someone in state/country X buys something from a site in state/country Y, both X and Y may levy taxes on that transaction.
Many have thresholds for small businesses, where you don't have to collect taxes if your total business volume is below some threshold. For US states, the threshold is often of the form "more than $T total sales OR more than N sales".
With microtransactions, it is easy to exceed N sales even though you are not actually collecting much money, and then the costs of preparing and filing your quarterly sales tax reports can exceed your revenue.
Advertiser supported sites don't suffer from this problem. If someone in X visits a site in Y and Y gets payed by an advertiser for showing an ad to that person, the site does not have to worry about taxes in X, and in Y the ad revenue will just be income that gets dealt with on their income taxes.
Until we can get microtransaction-friendly cross jurisdiction sales tax reform microtransactions are going to have limited viability, at least for sites that want to operate legally.
Most content I consume is, like your comment, already shared by users without them receiving any compensation for it. It is usually someone who is not the content creator that profits from content on the internet.
I don't really think that the students are the ones being "helped" when google gets paid $90 a click on student loan refinancing queries. They end up paying that $$ in the end.
Personally, I use ads as a signal to avoid buying certain products. If the ads are too prominent and omnipresent, it's an indication for me that I would be paying quite a premium on their marketing. But that's just me.
Your channel efficiency unavoidably goes down, which increases your cost of customer acquisition because your other channels cannot pick up all of the slack.
Increasing the cost of customer acquisition is going to be bad for your business. You will either need to reduce costs (by hiring less, for example), or increase your prices.
I think people are misconstruing me here. I'm not saying Google advertising is somehow fundamentally necessary to the economy. I'm just saying that it is straight up incorrect to think that there aren't legitimate downsides to removing their ability to police fraud.
But there are also (potentially huge and beneficial) opportunity costs. We will never see alternative business models which are not viable in the existing ecosystem.
The tracking part isn't necessary for fraud detection not even for conversation tracking. It's only necessary for "personalized ads" aka spying on users.
Living in an advertising-saturated and/or privacy-deprived world is also a "cost" borne by members of society.
Because economics. I know this intimately. I have a product we manufacture and sell on Amazon along with other channels. And if I am saving $1 on a customer acquisition, I am lowering my price one dollar because that would mean I can sell more at the same profit. Because if I try to keep that extra dollar, my competition will lower their price. Basically the cost of keeping that saved dollar is more than the gain from lowering the price a dollar. That’s how competition is supposed to work.
I know my cost of goods sold and my cost of sales down to the penny and have a pretty good idea of the elasticity curve for my product: if I lower my price by $1, I would sell x more bottles. However if I lower my price by $1 right now, I would decrease in profitability unless my costs also decreased by $1. There is a point on the curve that represents the optimal price.
It would seem that fundamental microeconomics is something not taught in many schools and that’s tragic because you get statements like “who’s to say this decreased expense is going to be passed down to consumers.” Because competition is what makes this statement silly in principle.
When you use a service that is funded by advertising, the service only gets that funding because the advertisers trust that they are getting their ads in front of real users. Some advertisers are able to precisely measure the quality of their traffic, for example by seeing whether the traffic they get buys things, but most are in businesses where that's not possible (no one clicks on an ad for Coca-Cola and then places an order for Coke). Ad fraud means that advertisers are less willing to pay to be shown on the service, so the service's funding decreases.
Very likely, less funding for the service hurts you as a consumer: they are probably spending their funding in support of the site. For example, I believe that the ads here fund the moderators.
> why should you be allowed to spy on me - who never defrauded any advertisers - to fix your problem?
See my response to wil421: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25430453 I think that fix here is some thing like https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-supports-privacy-pass... or https://web.dev/trust-tokens/ that allows detecting and preventing fraud in a privacy preserving manner.
But you cannot make this my problem by saying "let me spy on you. or your shit gets more expensive, or sites have to close". That sounds too much like "an offer you cannot refuse". I will not surrender my privacy for failed business models.
The same couldn't work with the internet because essentially every ID would be known to potential bad actors, as they'd be tracking every single one of them (among other data points) and can easily defeat the rotation of those IDs based on other data points which don't change.
Define "hurt".
I'd rather make a decision to pay $5/month for a service than to be the product and get spied on
That might be legal for the moment but it is in no way moral.
How, exactly? It's entirely opaque to the user.
At a minimum, you should offer a free, ad-supported version alongside a paid, ad-free (and tracking free) experience.
Democracies are bought on advertising.
Hiding the price of the user's attention is not a positive side effect to the user. Hiding who buys the user's attention is not a positive side effect to the user. Hiding how many other people's attentions are also being sold is not a positive side effect to the user. All of these are detriments to the user.
This cannot be an afterthought—it must be the central question all advertising skeptics must start with.
But what is a fair price? That depends on the traffic, but we are positing that detection of "is this a real user" is not possible, right?
Traditionally, advertisers have gone by Nielsen style ratings for broadcast media (pay people to track what they consume, extrapolate) and circulation numbers for print media. In our hypothetical world the former would still be possible but the latter wouldn't. Unfortunately, in addition to being really inefficient, if you pay people to track what they consume you will essentially never compensate niche publications. This strongly promotes centralization.
Privacy Pass / Trust Tokens / etc seem much more promising to me?
Couldn't the price just be based on the actual payoff the advertiser gets (aka increased product sales)? The publisher is incentivized to set the maximum price that the advertiser will pay, and the advertiser is incentivized to get the most bang for their buck, so at the very least they would never pay more than what the ad brings them in terms of revenue.
Over time, this should reach an equilibrium. Niche publications may have to charge low prices at the start as they build their reputation among advertisers, but I think that's a worthwhile price to pay if it means better privacy and eliminating a problematic advertising model of CPM/CPC (where fraud is possible and tracking is required to battle it).
Getting the initial price is going to be hard, but over time, rates will start to become known.
Ok I agree that ad fraud is hurting publishers, as a secondary effect hurting consumers but the damage consumer getting in this current system is much much bigger. This is like saying you continue taking 5x damage, cause 1x damage to your publisher will effect you negative.
Ad spend as a percentage of GDP has been surprisingly constant for the past century. IOW, companies do not spend more on ads just because they can better target their potential customers, nor will they spend less if they lose that ability.
Ad fraud really isn't my problem. So why should I be mercilessly tracked by everyone just to make your job easier?