I've never been convinced that it even adds that much value for advertisers, but they must think otherwise and I guess the sheer amount of money and effort that is put into targeted advertising shows otherwise.
It does, particularly for small businesses. I own a small ecommerce company, and there's just no way I could profitably advertise in the way you're describing. Current digital advertising is far superior on multiple levels: - Scale: I started with a few bucks a day and can run very small tests. Neither possible with the kind of ads you're describing. - Targeting: The current digital advertising is simply much better at targeting, which means my returns are much higher because a much higher percent of people who click on it convert. As a point of comparison, I've done newsletters (and very targeted ones - I run a dog treat company, so there are some good magazines/newsletters for my audience) and they're much worse than Meta ads. - Feedback: At this point, I just won't do anything if I can't track the results. If you're investing in TV/radio/magazines, you're just guessing what works and burning a bunch of money on the stuff that doesn't.
Though that there is a benefit to businesses, however small, does not make me inclined to be happy that I am stalked throughout my personal life online by a great many advertising firms, and information about me gleaned from that stalking bought and sold between them, in order for those businesses to experience said benefit.
If it were banned globally, the “but how do I run my business otherwise?” question is a problem for the businesses, not me.
The “most people don't mind, you are just being contrary” argument that I've seen once or twice is bunkum. If that were the case it would not be so often be made such a faf to opt-opt.
One thing where I feel current privacy laws are a little off, is disallowing blocking for people who don't opt in. I've quite happy to be given a choice of “let this list of hundreds of third parties track you, or go away” (in case you haven't guessed, I'll go away) as long as no tracking is initiated between my arrival and going away without opting-in.
My concern is that all this profile data is being slurped up by people who can really do harm: governments and their TLAs. People don't get sent to re-education camps (or worse) by companies trying to sell dog treats.
> People don't get sent to re-education camps (or worse) by companies trying to sell dog treats.
No, but they might by state agencies that gain access to the data (by fair means, at least as defined by their laws, or foul) to use as part of a larger profile.
My personal concern isn't state entities. Maybe this is some of my old-fashioned-ness speaking out but the idea of being followed around is just icky much like being followed home from the pub of an evening, or otherwise tracked in the real world, would be.
Of course, there are people for whom state agencies are a concern, and not just state agencies but various negative activist groups and other undesirables: I know a few people who don't want parts of their personal lives (gender status, abortion, the fact they consider themselves atheist, etc.) tracked because in the wrong hands it could, even in 2023, lead them and/or their loved ones to come to harm. They don't want an advertising company holding information about them because this is just one hack away from a lot of other groups having the information, and while it is highly unlikely that they are tracking such information they likely have something that could help derive it (location data being the most obvious factor there, and advertiser love to track that).
All of that went into databases that were bought and sold, matched and merged with each other, for purposes of lead generation and target marketing.
What Meta and Google are doing is nothing new, they just have much better collection and segmentation than was ever possible, and it's much more covert than what was ever possible.
The new part is making it nonoptional.
You never had to enter a contest or send in a warranty card, after all.
> What Meta and Google are doing
It isn't just Meta and Google. It is a great many companies large and small.
> is nothing new
Even if I accepted the equivalence, the industry having done a smaller version of this surveillance in the past doesn't make it right. My friend traded a bit of weed in the 90s, that would be no reason for us to take an “it is what it is” attitude if he traded a ton of crack today!
> I don't particularly care if advertisers build a profile of me for the purpose of advertising. [But I do care about not seeing ads in the first place, so] I use ad blockers and I rarely if ever see ads when doing anything online.
Still, I definitely the side of wanting to restrict it more in order to protect folks, and I think it's very much a worthy debate to have.
In your case, instead of targeting advertising at users that scroll past cat videos and choose to watch dog videos, you could target advertising to users in a dog owners FB group.
And even better (for the consumer), a higher percentage of people who _see_ the ad are likely to actually be interested in the topic.
This compared to the annoying ShaneCo ads that have been plauging radio stations for years.
Which inadvertently means the consumer is forced to see less ads, since each ad is capable of generating more revenue and therefore there doesn't need to be as many of them.
So, you've sacrificed some privacy, and in exchange you get less ads and better targeted ads. Was this a good trade-off for the consumer? I don't know. It probably doesn't make a big difference to our lives one way or the other.
On the corner of State St and 7200 South. Open Monday through Fridays til 8, Saturdays til 5. Closed Sundays.
Maybe so, but I personally don't think that's worth abusing the public with tracking.
While there might be anecdotes to support such a claim, the numbers tell a different story. Any reduction in friction is bound to benefit the businesses with the largest footprint, as they can leverage economies of scale and recursive synergies.
I think it's more nuanced than that - it's not that the current situation overall is better, it's that the state of advertising is better. On the other side of things, the ability of large corporations to achieve greater economies of scale is decidedly worse for small businesses, to your point. The fact that targeted advertising is there helps to offset that a bit.
That's a pretty big difference in our viewpoints and while HN currently tends towards yours, I have no doubt that my objectives lead to a better world for consumers (and actually, non-consumers as well) than yours.
This is an interesting phenomenon no matter what the topic is - I experience it too. It's human nature to feel counter culture. I believe HN is pretty strongly pro-capitalism for reasons that are obvious due to the nature of the site.
I don't think small business owners are innately more deserving of money. They still make money off the backs of others, just at smaller scales. Competition is important to make capitalism less sociopathic but small business owners aren't meaningfully competing with Amazon.
Also to be clear, I think all advertising is unethical. It's a spectrum for sure though.
It is nice that people can start these incredibly niche businesses, but we have to weigh that against the fact they we’ve built a massive surveillance apparatus and also the misinformation ecosystem that grew out of Facebook is screwing up politics around the world.
But ya know, dog treats, I guess it is a hard choice.
I'm also concerned about the misinformation ecosystem, but why is the surveillance apparatus a primary cause? I'd say the primary causes are a lack of content moderation and the incentives that the platform creates by putting likes as the main way that ideas spread.
I don't care what content you're looking at. I care who are you. Specifically, I care whether you're a person who owns a dog and spends money on high-quality/luxury dog goods. Whether you're looking at something related to dogs or a post by someone in your family about a wedding last weekend doesn't matter.
Displaying my ad next to dog-related content would be much, much worse from a targeting perspective. Instead of targeting the people who are likely to buy my product, it'd end up targeting people watching dog videos. The set of people who watch dog videos is much broader than my target audience - my mom watches dog videos sometimes, and she's a cat person!
Thing is, that is non of your god damned business.
You can show your ads next to dog videos or whatever other content you like. You don't get to spy on me just because you think you'll learn better ways to try to manipulate me.
If targeted advertising were really about helping get the information to interested people who want that information, then content based advertising would accomplish that.
I think you have it backwards. You don't care who someone is. Rather, you care about "people most likely to buy my product," and much, much more about people who actually buy your product. Their name, family history, life story and other information is irrelevant.
Having the money to pay and the will to buy are the only important things.
As such, which was alluded to by others, instead of spying on/tracking people to hazard a guess (perhaps even a good guess, but not necessarily) what they're likely to purchase, let's just ask them up front to list the things they are interested in, with the ability to modify such a list whenever they like.
And make that list opt-in, of course.
Then use the database of those lists to target ads. People see ads for stuff they're interested in, those who aren't interested don't see them. Which is a win-win for consumers and advertisers. Consumers only see relevant ads and advertisers know their ad impressions are among folks who are actually interested.
Sure, there are lots of reasons to argue against a voluntary database like that, not least of which ad-supported sites would suffer.
But if you (like me) don't earn a living via ad-tech, even such a flawed idea seems like paradise compared to the current levels of spying/tracking which would make a Stasi[0] wet dream look decidedly soft-core.
Pound for pound, people prefer ads that are relevant to ads that are irrelevant.
What they are annoyed by is the volume (in multiple senses) of the ads. That's it.
They just take it out on other things.
Yes. I'm saying it's a low bar because people don't know themselves.
What is the actual consequence of this "lost privacy"? What would be tangibly different in your life right now if you hadn't "lost" it?
My answer - nothing whatsoever, no harm comes to me at all from some statistical algorithm calculating what ads I might want to see, and in fact I've bought several cool products off Instagram that I didn't know about otherwise. This is a completely illusory harm that has been made up by what is essentially a cabal of professional agitators and propagandists.
I maintain that it doesn't matter. Harm isn't necessary to reasonably object to being spied on. Just wanting to not be under surveillance is more than sufficient.
What harm would come to people simply registered as Jewish in Germany prior to WW2?
The philosophy that mass advertising is a malaise that hurts more than helps. That humans inherently can't be trusted with data. No matter how benevolent the cause may seem, that data is not going to be safely leveraged in the interest of the people that data represents.
Take Cambridge analytica scandal for example. People thought they could trust Facebook with their opinions. It turns out that data was being farmed and sent to a political aggravator who is being paid by the Republican party. Some could say it is one of the things that turned the election of 2016 to Trump. Zuckerberg had no problem with this.
This is the kind of philosophy I'm talking about. Getting rid of this kind of garbage.
This is just patently false. There is no evidence for this whatsoever.
Also CA wasn't really Facebook's fault. A third party broke FB's TOS and committed perjury once FB caught them. Both parties have FAR more sophisticated ad targeting companies.
The problem is that it isn't "just a few" dollars.
There are several multi-billion-dollar companies that have been founded on exactly that.
When there's that much money to be made, there's almost no way to stop it. Human history is rife with examples of greed run amok.
Targeted advertising does allow 'the little guy' to reach their expected audience a bit better.
The comment was:
> I would be so happy if can go back to a world where advertising happens purely based on the content like we've had for ages in TV/radio/magazines. The amount of privacy we've globally lost just for a few advertising dollars is atrocious.
> […]
The one you are talking about meanwhile, is a different comment. A sibling comment which was also in response to the few dollars thing.
Microtargeting is a sickening trend enabled by adtech, but the fact it works much better than traditional ad campaigns is a reason advertisers would never want to go back.
And then there's the data broker market, which on its own is worth billions of dollars. This is an entire adjacent industry symbiotic with adtech. None of this is going away anytime soon.
Unless we make it illegal. Then it'll be restricted to shady enterprises for whom the legal risk doesn't matter.
The chances of this ever changing are practically zero.
Seriously, WTF? I wish FB didn't even allow ads to be so broadly scoped. There is approximately NOTHING that is legitimately going to be of interest to everybody in that group. It's bad for the advertiser, bad for the user, and probably bad for Facebook to even have that.
No, I say figure out that I'm a libertarian atheist with strong interests in open source software, bicycles, guns, and electronics test equipment, and show me ads for those things first and foremost. Target the hell out of me, please.
There's no way for you to say "you can use my data but only the way I like it" unless you sign some explicit agreement. When you give up your data, you also consent to be placed into whatever bin they want you to be placed in. They don't care about whether you get to see exactly the ads that you want to see, as long as they believe their cost to benefit ratio is right.
This is why you should want your data to belong to you, so that you could make an informed decision about what kind of content you see.
I don't, because ads are 10% informing me of the existence of products I might be interested in, and 90% psychological manipulation trying to induce me to buy stuff whether it's in my best interest or not. If the advertiser knows more about me, that can increase the effectiveness of their manipulation.
I say figure out that I'm a libertarian atheist with strong interests in open source software, bicycles, guns, and electronics test equipment, and show me ads for those things first and foremost. Target the hell out of me, please.
It seems like a win-win solution would be for browsers to send an optional user-controlled header describing your interests. Sort of like Google's topics API, but entirely under your control rather than mined from your browser history.
And secondly, if you do B2B advertising then your MO is cold contacting businesses, email campaigns, social media, trade shows, etc. Why do you need behavioral data of your users to advertise to them? And how would you even know they represent a business from just their behavior?
I believe that we have the choice between targeted advertising and an internet dominated by 3 or 4 websites (though some argue we're already there). I don't believe that most people would pay to get through paywalls, and so they would simply get their news and media from less reputable sources which spam misinformation on facebook to farm clicks
Searching for a niche topic on an internet with advertising: 1000000 results of SEO spam, senseless AI generated articles, 10 minute ad-filled youtube videos, posted by people who have no intent to actually provide high quality information but just see internet users as hoards of mindless meat to show advertisements to
Which kind of internet would you rather have?
I get it, it involves a lot of manual labor and it messy and it’s easier to just slap some js code and forget about it.
And nothing of value would be lost.
There was a time, not all that long ago, that targeted ads were simply impossible to do. And yet, ad-supported media existed nonetheless.
And there was a time when the vast majority of what you saw on the web wasn't ad-supported or behind a paywall. So clearly that model also works.
You could run non targeted adds by sponsoring sites that are close to your business.
You could have a mix of premium and free content.
You could figure out other ways to connect with potential customers.
Targeted ads are not the be all and end all of web monetisation.
The Web would look different without targeted ads, but not everything will be behind a paywall.
Turns out, we do. Brave's BAT is a great model, regardless of what you think of Brave Inc.