Contextual advertising works. Visit a popular website covering PC hardware .. and advertisers can pay to put ads to parts, chips, cases, etc. Visit a website that covers hiking trails and companies can purchase ads for camping gear, travel lodging, etc.
The very notion that it should be normal for an ad profile to be built around everything I do on the web is frankly dystopian and depressing.
We have several near-trillion-dollar companies that basically have no viable business model other than doubling down on targeted advertising. If third-party cookies get demonized or GDPR'd to death, they need to pivot to SOMETHING else that still fits into the same profiling paradigm.
I suspect it's not about results or innovation anymore, it's about being a moat. Only a trillion-dollar company with huge scale and scope can possibly build and maintain "high quality" profiles, so it's a great way to spread FUD against any competing, potentially actually privacy-first, ad-tech upstarts.
I'm sort of waiting for the "Emperor has no clothes" moment. We see the occasional "Brand stops advertising for 6 months and sales stay on trend" story, or the "our best conversions come from real content and relevant direct ads" story. We have the fact that ad spend grows and yet publishers starve, implying the middlemen are taking an ever-larger chunk of value out of the ecosystem in exchange for their services. It's gonna be ugly when the dots are joined.
I feel there may be a better market like roody15 has said for contextual analysis of websites and provide adverts based on that. Enhanced with Anon user traffic and buy paths. Which could slowly overtake if done well.
Also on the effectiveness: https://thecorrespondent.com/100/the-new-dot-com-bubble-is-h... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21465873
https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/10/16/facebook-lured-advert... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18234626
Then if you cross reference this with how procurement works, bullshit jobs and similar (can't find that article) starts to make some sense.
Though there may be arguments such as manipulation as to why the focus is on the advert personalisation and not the nefarious things that can come out of it. Think McCarthy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism#Blacklists
Regardless of your persuasion consider if the other side gets in and you end up on the black list.
'I don't mind adverts tracking me' vs 'I can't get a job because of X opinion'
But yeah, show someone on a blog about new GPUs an ad to buy a GPU and there’s an uptick. Turns out some of those people do want to buy GPUs.
Showing me an ad for GPUs on the YouTube page for cat videos because I visited that blog previously is weird.
Like a friend going, “so looking at these cats reminds me — do you want my friend Dave’s GPU?”
Will FLoC speed this up?
As far as I know, Firefox, Chrome, and Safari are already largely publicly committed to phasing out 3rd party cookies over the next couple years. I guess FLoC might move that deadline up a bit?
But I suspect some critics of FLoC are looking at the proposal as a compromise that we don't need to make. The thinking is, at the point where we have public statements from every single major browser, including Chrome and Edge, that 3rd party cookies are going to get phased out, why do we need to throw the advertising industry a bone? We won this particular fight, 3rd party cookies are going out the door. Now (the thinking is) we just need to make sure that counter-proposals like FLoC and FPS[0] don't reverse the gains we've made.
I'm not completely sure how to characterize Google's recent proposals, but an arguably reasonable take that I've seen online is that Google somehow got peer-pressured into making a very public commitment to remove 3rd-party cookies, that they no longer feel they can back down from that commitment, and that a lot of their recent proposals seem to be attempts to find some way to get out of that deal. First Party Sets in particular are just a very conveniently timed proposal. I suspect this take is at least a little simplistic, but if it is at all accurate then now is a very good time to increase pressure on Google, not decrease it.
So I think we might be in a situation where the onus is on people proposing compromise to prove that compromises will make a difference, because I don't take it for granted at this point that FLoC's acceptance or rejection will change anything about how 3rd party cookies are handled in the future.
If you look back at Chrome's original announcement about phasing out third-party cookies, they are explicit about replacements like FLoC being how it happens:
"After initial dialogue with the web community, we are confident that with continued iteration and feedback, privacy-preserving and open-standard mechanisms like the Privacy Sandbox can sustain a healthy, ad-supported web in a way that will render third-party cookies obsolete. Once these approaches have addressed the needs of users, publishers, and advertisers, and we have developed the tools to mitigate workarounds, we plan to phase out support for third-party cookies in Chrome. Our intention is to do this within two years." -- https://blog.chromium.org/2020/01/building-more-private-web-...
(Disclosure: I work on ads at Google, speaking only for myself)
This is nothing but another anti-competitive move from the Google monopoly.
Quick edit: you are certainly right that it will be less direct and more effort than cookies.
Neither Facebook nor Google require third party cookies to function, and I doubt FLoC would make any difference when they can already slurp up so much data that is voluntarily provided by other people without your consent (your address book, for example). Google even goes one step further by connecting your Google account directly to the browser, but there's also a reason why your Facebook login will never expire unless you force it to.
This whole thing feels like paying lip-service to privacy to keep people distracted from the reality that a cadre of 90s/00s tech giants have essentially usurped the web.
Most people on the internet use a web browser developed by a search engine company that evolved into a faceless advertising giant, after all.
How are they serving contextual ads if they don't know what you are doing on different websites if the myriad of trackers they offer to content websites do not track you by third party cookies ?
Not at all.
My browser deletes cookies from any website (by default) as soon as I close the last tab for a given open site.
If the browser itself starts tracking me, my privacy is reduced, not enhanced.
Instagram: cool! We're showing this to all your friends. BTW it costs us money to do this but don't worry, we don't charge you, we just show some ads to your friends.
You: Hey, my kitten is really popular, a lot of people are liking it.
Instagram: High five! You're popular. We ended up making a lot more money from selling ads than it cost us to show it! Thanks!
You: wait, that was my cat picture, where's my cut?
Instagram:
The web only has two business models: users pay for a service or advertisers pay for a service.
I’m all in favor of paying for services, but it turns out most people prefer ads to breaking out their wallet.
And I'm not sure that's entirely true.
My own pet theory is that - payment method and model issues aside - the largest contributor is the uncomfortable questions it makes us ask ourselves.
When you pay for something, you ask yourself if whatever you are buying is actually worth the price. And a lot (most?) of what people seem to do on the web these days is feed their dopamine as much novelty as they can, as quickly as possible.
I don't know how much value people are expecting to get out of their browsing activities. Do they even think it's actually worth the time, if they stop and think about it? Asking them to pay for it is forcing them to confront this issue.
No wonder nobody pays.
For ad-supported social media, we're all just unpaid labor and we're told that labor has no value anyway.
Of course, by selling that position, they've also convinced the end user that the service is not worth paying for. But when there's nothing the end user wants to pay for, and ad revenue drying up, social media services will have to pivot to make money elsewhere.
The end result, not surprisingly, will result in a mixed model of subscription and ad revenue supporting content that the service has, in some way, paid for. Sound familiar? Of course, the end user will still not be paid for the labor contributed, but then the less the ad revenue depends on the user-generated "free" content, the closer the value of that labor tends to zero.
Only because they're viewed. If we can get everyone to install an ad blocker, that price will plummet, and business models that aren't based on abusing users will be allowed to succeed.
If your goal is the open web of yore, that doesn’t exactly sound like a win.
It wasn't until everyone started fighting SEO-wise that you ran into the issue of fraud pages of nothing but links and sketchy ads that were the byproduct of reverse engineering Google's PageRank algorithm of the time. In fact, before SEO, there really wasn't that much of a niche for "Social Media" proper. A creator's web page and web ring were basically the social networks of the time, and arguably much less addictive or prone to scraping in the sense most back and forth was BBS/IRC/Email/Forum.
I remember the first time I overheard someone pitching SEO while eating lunch with the lunch pool from the office. If I were more the type to barge in at that time I'd have called them out as the fool they were being for corrupting a seachable index. Little was I expecting at the time that engineering indexes was the New Big Business and that the Web I knew was in the process of being obliterated and replaced with the shark infested botnet and data hoard-i-tron we have today.
Imagine a world without ubiquitous IP geolocation. One without rampant browser fingerprinting. Without everyone and their brother wanting you to subscribe for a recurring revenue stream. Without widespread collusion amongst industry actors to embed DRM circuitry or backdoors into every General Purpose piece of hardware under the sun.
It was a completely different world and tone to computing. It was your tool, and it was there to empower you; not to shovel crap through your bloody hardware whether you wanted it or not.
I couldn't get out of all these either but I keep them strictly separated in Firefox tab containers. I think it works because Facebook always suggests friends to me whom I don't know at all, and its ads have no relevance to me (only to the 1 or 2 topics I use FB for).
I really just feel that 1. Advertising is manipulative and evil in its' modern form, and 2. Targeting further multiplies its' ability to do evil.
I'm not convinced that what we receive in exchange for empowering 1 and 2 is in any way worth it.
In exchange you'll get completely opaque and abusable serverside user tracking systems and encrypted html pages.
This isn't what you want.
In a world where there is no targeted ads, companies still need to get clients and compete. The marketing budgets of companies would not miraculously go down if targeted ads ceased to exist, the money would just go to other means, and non targeted ads are a very good candidate (also they can be extremely hard to block as they can be served first party if needed)
If marketing returns drop, all other things being equal, budgets being cut is the natural consequence, because less spending will be possible before declining marginal returns result in negative net returns to further spending.
The various annoying remarketing schemes are a tiny part of advertising technology and really only exist because of the well-meaning but poorly thought-out ideas about privacy on the web.
How do you arrive at this conclusion? Authentication does not depend on third party cookies. Third party cookies are used to track visitors across multiple sites, independent of authentication to the first party site. I haven't seen suggestion elsewhere that third party cookies are about anything else.
I consider the alternative to FLoC as no FLoC. I consider the alternative to 3rd party cookies as no cookies. I can read HN just fine without 3rd party cookies. Or FLoC.
Developers, paid from advertising budgets, may be eager to comment and share their opinions on these matters but, let's be honest, they themselves are making such comments via a website (HN) that has no requirement for 3rd party cookies. What is good for the goose is good for the gander.^1
If cookies must be enabled to make a purchase or login, then I will enable cookies and accept a cookie, but only from that website and only for that purpose. However the requirement for cookies in these specific situations^2 has been taken as license for "modern" browser authors to make "cookies enabled" a default setting. This has been abused to no end.
1. I am commenting as an end user. I do not rely on the existence of online advertising to make a living.
2. It seems to me that the real problem here, the one which we should be trying to solve, is that web developers have no available solution for "shopping carts" and logins other than to use cookies. (Maybe the web was not designed for commerce.) Instead, Google is proposing a "solution" that makes business better for Google and its customers (advertisers, not end users), while making business more difficult for any company hoping to gain insight into end user browsing habits, except Google of course.
"... an anonymous web where content can be accessed without login."
It is always interesting how comenters make the jump from one company's software (e.g., Google Chrome) or website (e.g., Instagram) to "the web".
The web is more than a handful of "tech" company monopolies that rely on advertising to exist. It is a medium, not a set of commercialised content. I starting using the web before Google or Facebook existed. Before user contributed content was usurped by "tech" companies to sell online advertising services.
Today, I still get nearly 100% of content from the web without ever logging in to any website. Without Javascript, and without cookies.
If one takes comments like the parent at face value, then this should be impossible.
Walled gardens are good, at least in that there are several of them. This means the Web as seen by the average consumer is still somewhat decentralized.
First of all, I think that ads in the Internet are important, it's a driving force. Without ads there will be no Internet with lots of "free" resources, everything valuable will be paywalled which is a problem for poor people and nuisance for the rest. That's already an issue for many information websites because of abundant adblock usage and those websites are paywalling their articles.
If ad is not targeted, you'll get terrible click rate for niche ads. So your advertisement budget will cost more and some businesses just won't work, as you won't be able to attract enough customers for reasonable budget. Another issue is that advertisement budgets are paid by customers and inefficient advertisement lead to higher costs of the end product.
It's basically like TV where ads cost a lot and small players just can't afford it. And that's because those ads can't be targeted.
Because of mentioned issues, I think that targeted ads are needed for the Internet, they're making world a better place in the end.
Google clearly tries to find a balance between privacy and ads targeting. And that's a good thing. May be FLOC is not perfect, although I'm not sure if it could be implemented in a significantly better way. But just disregarding targeted ads for me sounds like a wrong solution. What should be done is regulation of advertisement platforms which should be prohibited by law to track individual users and just use anonymized information, voluntarily provided by the user agent.
And those who don't like FLOC idea, probably will be able to use browser extensions to modify its behaviour.
Citation required.
Not one Ad was required for the Internet to be useful. Hell, the WWW started as a bunch of hobbyists sharing info about what they liked. Google's killer product their search index. Not Ads.
I don't need to pay anyone for me to host something aside from the domain name, and a connection to an ISP. I just have to want to host it. The rest of the world at some point decided the Net MUST be monetized. Cookies came soon after, then JS, then all the familiar trappings of the web as a monetized medium.
Note; it becomes relevant for scaling or platforming to be able to be paid, but evven then, there are other ways to do that besides selling everyone else's privacy, comings and goings, etc.
Once you add money to something, you lose anonymity and safety from surveillance. No one would care one iota about what went on in Cyberspce if there wasn't a buck to be made.
I miss those days so horribly. Information shared and organized for it's own sake...
And yeah hosting is so cheap the cost of it is pretty irrelevant per user. Definitely not necessary for tracked ads to pay operating expenses.
However content creation might take more money. And the whole marketing, admin etc circus at most sites.
Wikipedia might just be the most valuable information resource there is with the Stackexchange network also ranking highly. The former has no ads and the latter has a negligible number. High-quality traditional media are often already pay-walled.