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Comment by vmoore | Hacker News Reader

> What would cause the ad-funded ecosystem to fundamentally change?

I don't have the stats, but AD blockers & tracking blockers are a real spanner in the works for AD-Tech. I imagine blocker popularity exponentially increases as each year passes, meaning at some point they will make a substantial dent in AD-supported sites who rely on income from ADs to stay online.

Google has so much data on people they can essentially read people's minds, so they are doing fine in regards to targeting people properly. They have a tight ship and it works (For now). Same for Facebook, although Apple's tracking opt-out apparently is hurting their business.

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I work in the industry and ad blockers are not a significant concern. It's a cat and mouse game for sure, but the vast vast majority of traffic is doing nothing to block ads.

I guess an immeasurable userbase's potential spend is hard to measure against total realized ad spend, but in my corner of the world traffic, users, and revenue are only increasing YoY.

While not an ad-blocker, I want to add that updates to iOS privacy defaults were very present a 1-2 years ago in the marketing tech community.

Weird, when I worked in the industry, AdBlock was a "30% revenue loss" concern. Can you detail why that's no longer the case?

Interesting, could be my particular market. I work mostly in the video space, not display. I imagine the media matters too--I'm involved with higher quality media owners.

Can you explain why YouTube ads seem so scammy and low quality? Or why I can watch two hours of Peacock and see the same car insurance commercial 10 times for the company I already use for my car insurance?

These are two examples of an unhealthy industry that, as you say, still seems content to burn money.

YouTube I am not so sure, I have a feeling it has to do with how little sway the content owners have in the ads that play on their videos. If you are a big channel you may have enough of an audience that more traditional brands would like to reach but for most I imagine you take what you can get. Though I really am not sure how YouTube does things--they are one of the "walled gardens."

The same commercial 10 times in a row is an awful experience and most media owners try to avoid it, but depending on the content it could be the only ad bidding against you as a viewer. Generally there are frequency limits in place to avoid this from happening. On more mature platforms this tends to be the case. Sometimes it can't be avoided due to glitches, poor ad tech stack integrations, or greed, the owners would rather prioritize the cash over UX.

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