Hacker News Reader

Then I suppose businesses will need to adapt, as businesses have for hundreds of years, either away from relying on advertisements or going back to old-school, non-intrusive, manual ad placements that don't rely on clicks, targeting, and tracking.

Much of the adaptation will be disappearing, including a large number of sites that contribute articles that pop up here on HN. Another way would be getting more invasive, like requiring login, before the content gets displayed.

Many of the sites that are featured on HN are not even the actual source of information, which often gets linked in the comments. As for going more "invasive", it's that exact reason that ads are being attacked, so I wouldn't bet on that working out long term either. I also fail to see how logging in inherently leads to revenue, unless we're talking about a subscription service in which case it'll live or die by the quality of the content....or else no one is going to pay.

This is certainly possible - I am terrible at predicting the future! To clarify the logging in comment: site is free, but they require you to login to view content (what Medium is doing) and now you have a unique identifier that can be used track you across sites when shared locally ("login with Google" effect)

I like the second part of your answer. Indeed, if you wanted something like a way to id bad actors, you could do some scheme where the OS (or browser or even secondary service) could do some form of attestation that isn't trackable and has even stronger guarantees than some unauthenticated unique id has. If Apple and Google can make their Corona Tracking APIs untrackable by third parties, then untrackable "valid device" APIs should be possible and feasible as well.

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 coronavirus exposure notifications are only "safe" because we assume no single actor can put Bluetooth receivers every square meter, thus rotating the IDs every so often is an effective defense against potential tracking.

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.

If you read the trust tokens proposal you can see how it does not have that vulnerability: https://web.dev/trust-tokens/

> Very likely, less funding for the service hurts you as a consumer

Define "hurt".

I'd rather make a decision to pay $5/month for a service than to be the product and get spied on

In general I'm not a fan of advertising, but one of the most important things it does is level the playing field across income levels and countries. $5/month would be outrageously expensive for a very large number of people, most of whom are not on Hacker News, and any discussion of replacing advertising with a subscription model has to start from that basic fact.

You're justifying the abuse of people's privacy because they can't afford to buy out of it.

That might be legal for the moment but it is in no way moral.

I'm not justifying anything, I'm merely stating what I think is an unequivocally positive side effect of advertising-based models: they have automatic price discrimination built in. Subscription models do not have it built in—developers have to do extra work to introduce price discrimination. I think this is a demerit of subscription models, though not one that outweighs the demerits of advertising models.

> they have automatic price discrimination built in.

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.

> an unequivocally positive side effect of advertising-based models

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.

There's no reason Facebook can't charge Brazilians 5 BRL instead of 5 USD.

Sure. We're not talking about Facebook here, they'll be fine. We're talking about random sites and apps. How many apps on the Play/App Store actually implement differential pricing by region?

This cannot be an afterthought—it must be the central question all advertising skeptics must start with.

If ad companies manage to set up international ad networks that show relevant ads to the user according to their home country and interests, I wonder if all that effort and hard work couldn't have instead be spent building a platform for collecting payment internationally

Since you seem persuaded by ends justifying means, realize that better business models are impractical because online surveillance is so easy and lucrative. One of the biggest changes correlated with the rise of web toxicity was the rise of online advertising. Maybe coincidence, but I'd love to see what happens if surveillance becomes the exception not the norm.

This all presumes that the advertising business needs this level of granularity to succeed. It doesn't. Advertisers can purchase fixed display ads on reputable sites by contracting directly with the site owner. They can also sponsor content creators and provide them with an affiliate code which the viewers can use to receive a discount. These mechanisms do not expose the advertisers to fraud.

> Advertisers can purchase fixed display ads on reputable sites by contracting directly with the site owner.

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?

> 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?

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).

As I wrote in my response to rndgermandude [1], only some advertisers work this way. If you put up pictures of standing desks, people click through those ads, land on your site, and purchase desks, then it does not matter how scummy the publisher is because you can accurately measure the quality of traffic you are getting from them. On the other hand, if your ads aren't expected to lead to an online purchase (beverages, cars, political ads) this model doesn't work.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25430585

Exactly this. When I advertise, I don’t care if a million users see it. I just care that Ad Spend < CAC.

Getting the initial price is going to be hard, but over time, rates will start to become known.

> Ad fraud means that advertisers are less willing to pay to be shown on the service, so the service's funding decreases.

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.

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.

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.