Small businesses are willing to give more money per ad campaign if they know they’ll get clickthru on a specific target market. These same small businesses don’t have the money to run long ad campaigns which would result in less clicks.

Seriously though, what newspaper(s) would you honestly be willing to spend ad dollars with (and for what products) thinking that this would be a good investment? Geritol? Now, if your suggestion is buying newspaper ads would then get ads in their digital versions as well, then maybe. However, seems to me that most viewers of news sites are from link aggregators more than just readers of a website. Not sure how that would affect ad placement.

I strongly suspect that might be the case. I also believe that social networks could - in theory - create effective advertising possibilities without the need to target user properties.

Take my experience with Instagram. When I am looking at mostly typography related posts, it tends to work well if they show me paid ads for interesting fonts. But when they show these to me, when I am looking at gardening content, I tend to be irritated and ignore them.

I know - I am talking anecdata here - but maybe there could be a way to not target users, but target topics and hit the users that move through these topics (so to speak).

One problem, though, I see with this approach is when you want to create a longing in somebody who never before had the idea that he/she would like to have a cool new font (to stay with my example). Or the next "hot" stuff from some global brand (or what they believe that i should want to feel cool).

But as said - I can't find the studies I seem to remember right now on the effectiveness of context based advertising compared to personalized advertising. So I am not sure if this was just my imagination.

The vast majority of people love ad supported services. They prefer free/low cost to expensive and express this preference regularly. They don't think advertising is evil, and in fact many people voluntarily wear adverts on their own clothes.

Online advertising pays for a massive amount of stuff. If it dies, then the outcome is not "everything stays the same but somehow better". The outcome is that a lot of services we take for granted go away and either don't come back at all, or come back far worse because their market is now much smaller and only rich people pay for it.

To put this in perspective, when I worked at Google they had a prototype internal service that let you "buy" your way out of seeing ads by bidding against yourself in the auction. The idea was to allow people to pay for an ad-free internet, but without making users freeloaders on the services they used (that's ad blocking and exists already). I thought, what a great idea. I'll sign up. Result: to get rid of a just a fraction of all the ads I was seeing online (my guess, ~20% of ads I saw were served by Google) would have costed $200-$300 per month.

After seeing the scale at which advertisers were subsidizing my online experience, I lost interest, as did everyone else. Paying 4x as much as my entire normal internet bill just to see fewer ads, not even get ridding of all of them, just wasn't worth it.

The reality is that the public aren't demanding restrictions on online advertising. They don't care. They like free stuff and they've got nothing against advertisers. This is a war being waged for political and commercial reasons, dressed up as consumer protection, and if/when it actually starts to bite in visible ways, a whole lot of people are going to be mighty shocked at how upset the public will get.

This eliminates all the redundant transportation, housing, waste (food, cloths, electronics, equipment)

And the only way to provide is that through tracking (both history and intent).

It only harms Facebook because their business only works if users are deceived into being tracked when they don’t want to be.

If users wanted to be tracked, they would opt-in.

That isn’t about Apple destroying anyone. It’s about Facebook building a business on a deceptive practice.

> They could have done tons of features to benefit users, but they implement those which damage competitors.

Why does Facebook rely on unethical and shady business practices that harm users? Facebook is harming itself. And how is Facebook, in any meaningful way, a competitor to Apple? Apple's ad's business is PEANUTS.

Also, it would seem self evident that Apple’s ability to influence Facebook comes from having a novel product, that people like to use compared to the alternatives.

Google and Apple if they worked together to manipulate the market, that’s grounds for fines etc.

Kicking apps off their app stores would not qualify and should not qualify.

I mean, I quit with a lot of unvested stock because it wasn’t obvious to me that I was making people net happier by my work, which is a way that I want to feel about my work.

But I think that the number of people on this site who organize their careers around pure altruism is small enough that I’ll probably live through those people throwing rocks because I’m arguing that this subject is nuanced and complicated.

I think I said that Boz and I have disagreed plenty over the years. But if he’s going to get burned at the stake in a public forum because he’s had to make very, very difficult decisions and didn’t always make the right ones, we’ll tie me to the same post because I’ve badly fucked up on much simpler decisions.

The only character reference I can hope for, or frankly would want, is that I’m pretty good at my job in spite of my personal issues.

I wasn’t trying to spin up a big contentious thread, I was trying to inject some first hand knowledge of how this stuff works so that people can make informed judgements about it.

If having worked at FB half a decade ago and thinking Boz is a pretty stand up guy in person makes me a pariah?

Then I guess it’s a beautiful day for an auto de fay.

Before someone posts a “whataboutism”, I don’t know what happens on the extreme nonsensical left. I mostly read tech news, WSJ and “The Hill”.

This isn’t meant to beat up on conservatives. But let’s see what’s happen in 2020.

Fox News was the go to place for conservatives. Then they fairly called election results and their news articles called the accusations of the election being stolen “unfounded” and then people started leaving Fox News for News Max.

RedState purged all of their never Trump journalists who clearly had their conservative bona fides because they were losing readers. Anytime that RedState does still occasionally admit the election wasn’t stolen, people threaten to cancel their subscriptions.

Trump of course is the poster boy for the extremists. But when he started touting the benefits of the Covid vaccine and boosters, he is boo’d and cancelled by the extreme right and they say he is kissing up to the establishment.

The Wall Street Journal has always been center right. But because it didn’t tote the “populist agenda” or the “election was stolen”, the conservatives are abandoning it too.

Once the censorship cat is out of the bag IMHO there a lot more ways for that to go wrong than to go well.