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Comment by samwillis | Hacker News Reader

The online advertising party is over. It’s going to hit all advertising platforms badly.

Facebook has been hit particularly hard by the iOS changes, but that’s not the cause. If Apple hadn’t made that change themselves, government regulations would have been brought in that implemented it.

I also don’t believe the increase in AI is a solution to the regulations around tracking.

Advertising online is increasingly a black box, you put money in one side and the algorithm sends you traffic. The control and insight that used to be there is gone. I don’t believe advertisers will continue to trust this AI based future, I certainly don’t (have run an e-commerce store for 10 years).

I don’t want “deep tracking” and profile building. I just want manual controls and visible conversion tracking. But we are never getting that back.

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Yet both Netflix and Disney+ are introducing cheaper ad-supported tiers. Consumers want cheaper services, at the cost of advertising.

Hacker News lives in a bubble of users that understand and value privacy, knows about browsers such as Brave, etc. The rest of the world just wants their influencer content.

If an average Netflix viewer watches Netflix 70 hours per month - they will spend 6 of those hours watching ads - to save $3. It's a sucker's deal. Sure, some extreme savers will be so blinded by the promise of CHEAPER that they will probably go for it.

The ad breaks are eye breaks and bathroom breaks. The health benefits are extremely valuable.

Even further, consumers are content with being "the product".

I think you are confused by what Apple did with ATT.

Apple did not do anything to really prevent "deep tracking" and profile building.

In fact, the single primary casualty of their changes is the exact thing that you say you do want: visible conversion tracking.

>I don’t believe advertisers will continue to trust this AI based future, I certainly don’t (have run an e-commerce store for 10 years).

How do you advertise your e-commerce store?

> believe advertisers will continue to trust this AI based future, I certainly don’t

Why not? If ROI remains high, why would I care ?

GDPR already tightly regulates the use of AI for automated decision marking affecting consumers, and other regulators aren't too happy about the directions taken by either AI companies or advertisers.

So there's a very, very big "if" on future ROI.

Indeed its pretty infuriating to see how fast you can burn cash, get meager results with no real understanding or knobs to tweak to try and help yourself out.

Is it entirely fraudulent? Are your ads showing up on a site that specifically tries to game the ad placement system? Who knows! Probably though, because the few times I've seen it tried the results were abysmal at best.

The only way profile building will survive is personalized recommendations from friends. Suggestions from people I know and trust would recover a lot of the current trust erosion: "your friends X and Y both have eaten here a few times" is a much stronger recommendation than "we think you'll like this based on trust us."

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