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Comment by plantain | Hacker News Reader

> But it crushed [snip] 1000s of small businesses in the process.

There's a lot of comments here suggesting this is a narrative from FB/Snap, but it really isn't. I was previously able to target adverts directly to the tiny audience of potential users of my product, and the return on those adverts was nearly 10x.

Overnight it entirely evaporated as a source of new customers and I don't know how I'd build a niche business again without it.

Advertising gets a bad rap, but I like to believe I am providing value to my customers and they wouldn't have found my product otherwise. Who was hurt?

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> Advertising gets a bad rap, but I like to believe I am providing value to my customers and they wouldn't have found my product otherwise. Who was hurt?

Probably. But if the means in which you can connect with those customers requires a surveillance apparatus that infringes on the privacy of the unconsented than perhaps the question that should be asked is does your business have a greater right to exists than the privacy of those customers (I’m guessing the reason you can’t reach them anymore is because they decided to no longer be tracked.

It's a moot-point. Switching away from AdSense isn't going to protect you from surveillance, it's just going to change the pool of customers buying your information. All your iCloud data is a few clicks away for most NSA employees, and I don't think it's a stretch to suggest that they also have root capabilities on your iPhone. No matter how you slice it, Apple isn't going to give you privacy. The data you hold near-and-dear is already in adversarial hands. The game is lost before you even put your chips on the table, that's the consequence of agreeing with TOSes for more than a decade. Nobody wants to admit it, but privacy is literally unattainable in a digital era.

What Apple sells is security. They do a fairly good job with security, and their whitepapers are almost industry-leading. Their commitment to privacy is entirely lip service though, and the volume of their marketing seems to indicate the emptiness of that promise.

What part of opt-in advertising IDs is only lip service to privacy? Seems entirely about privacy and very little about security. Similarly, iCloud Private Relay is completely privacy focused and isn't really about security at all. Both of these things provide real value to consumers and dramatically limit data collection as evidenced by reports from Facebook and many others in recent quarters.

NSA data collection isn't anywhere close to equivalent to private companies storing it. The NSA programs could be shut down if the political will existed. Private companies with all of this data have absolutely zero oversight under US law at the moment.

> is a few clicks away for most NSA employees

I'd rather have NSA employees having access to my data rather than NSA employees and employees of the hundreds/thousands of players in the digital advertising ecosystem.

I'd rather have the digital advertising ecosystem have my info and the NSA have none.

I can say no to ads through self discipline. They can't force me to give them money.

The NSA can come with guns to lock me up because the current political leaders disagree with my opinions.

It would be very hard to make sure the NSA doesn't have your info if thousands of other unscrupulous players have it and trade it.

One danger of this cancer having infected everything is that back in the day, if the NSA wanted to track people, they'd need to either exploit an existing feature that collected data (which there weren't many, and no guarantee people used them) or convince developers to include backdoors which had its own risks. Any large-scale spying required them to build & maintain infrastructure.

Nowadays, the cancer that is advertising provides a business reason as to why everything should be collecting data, so now the NSA effectively got to outsource their spying (without even any coercion!) and can just ask for the results.

> All your iCloud data is a few clicks away for most NSA employees, and I don't think it's a stretch to suggest that they also have root capabilities on your iPhone.

There is still value for most people in being able to limit personal data access from many data brokers even if that data is still potentially accessible by the NSA. It’s a spectrum and not a binary outcome.

You are right though our rights to the data we create for most services have been relinquished via the TOSs that no one is really expected to read. It’s certainly broken. However I still think there are steps one can take to resist cross linking of that data by companies; it does take a bit of effort though which isn’t realistic for most.

While I think Apple’s choice to support privacy are ultimately self serving it is still beneficial for many consumers (at least for now).

Most of the products I like, I didn't discover through ads.

I'm ok with your business failing if it can't work without ads.

The problem here is that ads are not banned, but that they are now the exclusivity of Apple.

I'll bet $5 the 'niche business' is drop shipping, and the ads are targeting customers already looking for the product who would have found it for cheaper if not for the ad.

You owe me 5$.

If you don’t mind sharing…

- What was/is your business?

- Which customers were you going after?

- What other marketing / advertising approaches did you try?

Edit: I’m guessing weather forecasting (https://skysight.io/) is the business.

Specialist subscription weather forecasting. I don't really want to make myself into a case study here - just sharing my experience that the Apple-induced small-business-advertising-pinch is very real.

Thanks for the info. No worries; I appreciate the perspective you added.

>> Most of the products I like, I didn't discover through ads.

That's what you're made to think. :)

The people who have obviously made their preferences clear that they prefer not to be profiled and tracked that way, because the possibility is still there for those who consent to tracking.

It’s merely a corporate story (from both sides) that people made informed choice about that. It’s full of BS everywhere.

Apple fighting for privacy is BS (look at China). Ads networks not affecting privacy is BS. Reducing effectiveness of ads not affecting small business is BS. Moving monopoly in ads market from one group of companies to others being good for people is BS. People understanding impact of all of that on their privacy, small businesses, cost of digital apps, etc is BS.

Both sides spend many millions of dollars to try to swing public and regulatory view of the problem.

I like this phrasing - I don't think users made an informed choice to be tracked, or an informed choice not to be.

They were victims both times of big tech power plays.

Apple does not need to be a white knight who does no wrong anywhere for me to make the informed choice that I prefer their policies in my current country at the current time, nor for me to choose not to be tracked.

I don't think anyone claimed that reducing ad targeting did not affect small businesses. What they claimed was that small businesses do not have a right to target ads against user preferences.

For the past 5-6 years, 95%+ of HN comments believe Ads are completely useless. And small business making money with ads, ( Facebook or not ) are Facebook or Social Media's narratives. Had your account not been one from 2011, you would have been labeled as shill for Social Media.

To me the problem is that the only upside to targeted advertising seems to be "discover this niche product from a small business that can only exist because it's now cheap to advertise directly to the community it serves", but the targeted ads I get are all mega brands trying to convince me that their product is better than the competition by making me laugh or shocked. Where are all the niche products I was promised?

Where are you getting ads? I have YouTube premium so I don’t see yt ads which are more mainstream iirc. But I’m Facebook newsfeed I get a ton of off non-mainstream ads. Maybe your profile is super vague so only big companies bother to pay for your eyes.

The same way that it was traditionally done - trade shows, advertising on sites and in podcasts that cater to your target audience, search ads, etc.

Operating a business with a single point of failure is never wise.

You never operated any business right?

Operating a business with a single point of failure is a risk to be considered in the risk:reward analysis. For many businesses, it is a reasonable risk that enables unique solutions.

It's important to observe that the parent didn't suggest regretting building that business even though the customer-acquisition channel evaporated. They merely said that option is no longer viable for future businesses.

> Operating a business with a single point of failure is a risk to be considered in the risk:reward analysis. For many businesses, it is a reasonable risk that enables unique solutions.

Then they didn't compute the risk correctly. A risk that some other entity could at any moment turn off your entire sales funnel which would, with nearly 100% certainty, ruin your business ought to be one no one should take. I'm not going to cry for those people that did.

Who was hurt?

Someone too lazy to buy ads directly.

If you know your audience, then you already know the places where you should advertise. Contact them directly. I've placed ads directly with dozens and dozens of web sites, podcasts, vloggers, and others. Very often they're more than happy to take your money because they get to keep all of it, instead of a tiny percentage sent back to them by Google, Facebook, etc.

Business is hard. Welcome to business.

> If you know your audience, then you already know the places where you should advertise.

And if your audience is a very odd niche, and you can't find where they congregate, go old school and make a place for them to congregate.

If you can't figure out how to market your wiener dog slide without facebook, create a weiner dog site with information about weiner dog health, pictures of weiner dogs, stories about weiner dogs, a weiner dog forum (or at least a link to a weiner dog forum you have created on reddit.) Slap your brand all over everything. Distribute other weiner dog products along with your weiner dog slide.

If you couldn't find anywhere on the internet that weiner dog owners congregate (and you really made an effort), eventually after you do this every weiner dog owner will know about you either directly or through word of mouth.

That’s way more difficult than just asking Facebook who already knows, though. You could go out of business before you manage to build that audience, if you ever would have.

I’m not saying that makes Facebook’s invasion of their users’ privacy alright (I personally haven’t pondered it enough to have a well-thought-out opinion), but I really disagree with the grandparent comment that the only businesses that suffered negatively from Apple’s move did so because they were lazy.

>That’s way more difficult than just asking Facebook who already knows, though. You could go out of business before you manage to build that audience, if you ever would have.

Cry me a river. If your business can only be sustained by a 3rd party implementing a massive, global, impossible to avoid and opt out of tracking and surveillance apparatus, I genuinely don't care if it fails. Weiner dog slides aren't that important.

That’s a valid opinion. My point was just that arguing that this change has had no effect on small businesses (except those who are run by ”lazy” people) doesn’t make much sense. But that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s wrong, of course.

That Apple’s change is wrong, I mean.

I suspect you are being disingenuous here, and you know the issue was not the nominal harm your niche business caused by advertising, but rather the perceived danger of the entire infrastructure created that made this possible for you.

This is a classic issue of technological capability vs societal interest (i.e. we can do it, but should we?), and there are rarely easy solutions. Some of the trade offs may just mean that some business models aren't as viable - this in principle seems reasonable to vast majority of people.

The good news is that if your business model has any non-superficial value there are bound to be other ways to reach people and make a go of it, if so desired.

votes suggest this came across snarky, wasn't intended. I was serious about the last part , if there is real value there almost has to be other, even better ways to reach people.

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