Adtech is built on a privacy fault line
iapp.org
iapp.org
The ad-tech solution is actually quite elegant in theory - if you can show ads only to the people to whom they are relevant, then, as a small business you can let people know you exist without blowing your ad budget, and, as a content producer, the more valuable an ad-view is, the more you can charge for it.
The current movement to avoid tracking is an extremely powerful centralizing force. The large platforms know a lot about you already - Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple, etc. So, in a way, "we're not going to let AdTech track users" = "we're going to make only ads on large platforms effective", which means that both content producers and advertisers will prefer them, and then people ask "where did the old internet go"?
The AdTech system isn't ideal, but it would be great if the people who criticize it came up with something other than "fuck the small businesses and content producers".
The thing is, this isn’t my problem. The fact that someone wants to market their business doesn’t entitle them to my attention.
My browsing to a website (or watching a TV show, or driving along a road with billboards, or filling up my gas tank) does not entitle anyone to my attention.
if you're looking at someone's website then yes they are entitled to your attention. what gave you the idea that you're entitled to consume for free content that other people payed to produce and host?
The fact that they made it available to be looked at in such a way, perhaps?
HN users just love twisting themselves in circles to justify their belief that they're somehow entitled to consume content from private websites without consuming the ads that support that content. (If you don't want to see ads, there's a really simple solution: don't look at websites that display them! No one's forcing you to!)
And as a user, if the person hosting the website doesn't want me to look at their content without also looking at their ads, there is a simple solution: don't serve me your content until after you force me to look at your ads.
You do not get to have it both ways. Either the content is available for free and you can hope that the user also views your ads, or the content is not available for free and you can force the user to view your ads.
I believe that humans are social animals, and that a view on enshittification that ignores society is useless. Media is, IMO, holistically worse now than in the mid-90s. An individual cannot undo that. The negatives are not wished away by "no one's forcing you".
The fact that their HTTP server replied 200 OK. If they want to put up a paywall or use a different protocol they're totally free to do so, but permission was inherently granted by the act of serving the content.
Acting like anyone who views a webpage has any obligations regarding how they render or reproduce it is like putting a barbecue on the side of the road with a free sign on it after hiding a bill inside, then getting mad when you don't get paid. Trying to tack on riders that fundamentally alter the mechanics of the underlying protocol is fundamentally invalid.
The reason very few actually take that route is because they want to have their cake and eat it too: the openness of www/http but the monetizability of AOL-esque pseudointernet schemes. If a publisher wants to fuck off to corponet with blackjack, hookers, DRM and WEI they're more than free to do so, but traffic may not follow them. Mine certainly won't.
to play the devil's advocate, this is why google proposed the WEI (https://github.com/RupertBenWiser/Web-Environment-Integrity/...). Be careful what you wish for...
I also use adblock, but I'm honest with myself - ads suck, and I'm a dick who doesn't care about most content creators. If they ask for money (e.g. on Substack), I pay them or stop reading them. If they use ads I block them cause I don't care. Kinda like speeding on a highway - probably not a right thing to do, oh well if they catch me I'll pay a fine... no need to invent some bogus defense about how speed limits are wrong.
You could say "oh, they should just charge for their content", and some definitely do. But the ad model allows for really interesting price discrimination in terms of "who pays for the content". So, if someone buys say.. a Tesla through a website, that conversion subsidizes a million poor kids who don't have to pay anything. In some ways the ad-supported model is the most progressive way to pay content creators - the people who end up paying are the people who spend the most money online.
Because literally all of us are web consumers, so we're hostile to things that are hostile to web consumers. This is like saying there's really strong disdain for leaded gasoline which comes from a "human being breathing air" mentality.
> I think that it would be valuable to reframe the question from the producers point of view: 1) I am a niche small business - how do I let people know that I exist? 2) I run a website and would like to monetize it - how can I get paid for the content that I produce?
I don't fucking care. This isn't my problem, and I'm really annoyed that we've build a giant world-spanning surveillance apparatus out of people trying to make it my problem.
> Because literally all of us are web consumers
Exactly. GP might as well have written
> The problem is that you're considering your own interests. I think it would be useful for you to consider my interests.
How the companies, where you consume content, monetize is very much relevant to you. You have a choice though - you can choose to not watch the content and you won't get advertised to.
You don't have a right to violate my privacy in exchange for this.
But I think that's not the main reason it's not sufficient. The main reason, in my view, is because it's still companies spying on me, my machines, and/or my use of my machines. Even if the data is genuinely anonymous, if you don't have my informed consent then collecting it is spying and unethical.
If we're going to have regulation (and it's increasingly looking like any solution will have to be), then the regulation should be about the collection of the data.
1. They nudge people towards buying stuff they wouldn't otherwise buy. This causes a tremendous amount of real waste.
2. Ads are a distraction. When I'm looking up something for work, don't bother me with ads, even if *you* think they are relevant. When I'm working, I'm not looking for a new job, or new pants.
3. On a fundamental level, ads work against the free market: not the best product wins, but the product with the biggest advertising budget.
And there are many more reasons ... Ads suck! And people working in ad-tech should be deeply ashamed!
It allows people to find things they value that they were not aware of before.
>Ads are a distraction.
Yes, which is why apps need to design good ad experiences to balance monetization with user satisfaction.
>On a fundamental level, ads work against the free market: not the best product wins, but the product with the biggest advertising budget.
If something really is the best product, why aren't they the one with the largest advertising budget?
If they are already the company with the highest revenue, why would they need to advertise...
If these are the arguments in favor of ads then they really must be that bad.
Because their potential customers may not be familiar with them. If a competitor makes themselves known they may just go with the competitor despite a better option, that they don't know about existing.
There are better ways for that. For instance I look it up in the yellow pages. Or I find someone in some store to talk to.
This happens when *I* want to look for something, not when *you* want to sell something.
> Yes, which is why apps need to design good ad experiences to balance monetization with user satisfaction.
So far, it has been a complete disaster. And there is no sign of it getting any better. The incentives are wrong to begin with.
> If something really is the best product, why talent they the one with the largest advertising budget?
What does this even mean? Typo? Are you suggesting that the company with the biggest ad budget also makes the best products by definition, somehow?
Not all consumers are aware of what is out there, nor do they actively make an effort to learn what is out there.
>What does this even mean? Typo?
yes
>Are you suggesting that the company with the biggest ad budget also makes the best products by definition, somehow?
No, I am suggesting that a company that makes a purely superior product can always outbid their competitors in advertising.
Ah, that's how we know that Oracle is better than Postgres!
Do you seriously believe this to be true? I'm willing to have my mind blown, if you can explain this point adequately.
Yes, I hate ads too but that said... The Yellow Pages are geared towards services rather than new unknown products. Also, asking a store clerk or flipping through Yellow pages doesn't work when the customer doesn't even know the existence of a new product to ask about.
Anybody in any hobby (woodworking, sewing, car engine modifications, etc) that uses tools and gadgets will get their first exposure to the existence of a potentially helpful product via advertisements. Sure, some awareness comes via word-of-mouth... but the people passing that info to you -- got their awareness from ads. Or maybe a trade show demonstration (which is also a form of advertisement.)
Of course, I've gotten bad and unnecessary tools because of ads. But I also got some genuinely useful and time-saving tools too.
Even though a few ads helped make my life better, I will admit that 99% of ads are not relevant to me and just obnoxious noise. I just saw a Wood Whisperer video on Youtube yesterday and the pre-roll ad was "Estee Lauder cosmetics for women". Given that 95% of the demographic watching woodworking channels are men, it seems like Google/Youtube is wasting Estee Lauder's ad spending -- all while irritating viewers like me. A lose-lose situation.
Every ad needs to be sold to a pair of eyes and those relevant, novel, and interesting prdocuts that would actually be useful to you have a much smaller budget and just are not that common. And so you get to watch liberty mutual and geico commercials, for the 55th time instead.
Stores are limited by the amount of shelf space they have and employees will lead you towards certain products they have an incentive to sell.
1) keep you coming back 2) navigate highly localized politics
The only good ad experience is contextual. There does not exist an experience that is enhanced by ads unrelated to the content being viewed.
If I want to search for a product and an adtech company wants to show me related products, great. If I want to watch a music video, but first have to watch a political ad or an ad for any product, get lost.
Plus we now pay an additional tax on top of it to Google et al.
Plus we pay with our attention, and with our data (as someone else already noted).
On top of this all, the near-monopoly of Google is forcing prices for ads up, and there is a vicious cycle where companies need to buy increasingly expensive ads to outcompete each other (or, to stay relevant). Which, of course, the consumer ultimately pays for.
Based on my rudimentary knowledge of microeconomics, it depends on how much they charge.
But bringing economics into it, it does seem strange that the internet is probably the only industry where this form of exchange (ads, producers, consumers) exists.
In any other industry, the producer pays money to ads, the ads get me to the place and I pay the producer.
how is this not what ads on the internet work?
The thing is that people do hear about products and contents. Trailers are ads, products announcement are also ads. Sponsorship is ads. What people do not want is intrusive ads. It feels like someone going through my bedroom and bathroom, then talking to people about my underwear. Next, these people shout to me when I'm going to buy groceries. This is what the adtech is like nowadays.
So content creators, paywall your content and add sponsorship. Small businesses, announce your product and sponsor articles on relevant forums. But stop interrupting people when they're doing nothing that's relevant to you.
The type of advertising that's invasive for me is the "sponsored content" or paid product placements, especially in movies. It feels like every big-budget movie I see these days is littered with "ads" for some car or electronics company. There's no way to block this, and sometimes its hard to tell if something is paid or just someones honest recommendation.
Found the 'ad-guy...'
Look. We don't need to offer a solution in order to point out how broken adtheft is. They're stealing my time, my bandwidth, my cpu resources, my gpu resources, my memory resources, and my body's own motion by forcing me to click away or click gone or click click click.
Here's my solution: Take your ads and place them somewhere dark, moist, and smelly, preferably limited to your own person.
I guess my main contention is that businesses really like ads. But that's usually ok - because it funds cool content! The majority of television historically was produced just to sell ads, but it still created awesome television. And if we make ads worse, well, the people who are gong to suffer are the businesses and the content creators. OR, like i mentioned above, we will just drive everyone to large platforms, which is essentially what's happening now.
Another way to frame the question - GDPR came out in 2016. Do you feel like the web is getting better?
That's because there was an incentive to create awesome television to lure people away from other channels to watch the ads on your channel. Part of the discussion around the writers and actors on strike right now is the streaming services believe they can make worse content cheaper using AI and still retain subscribers.
Ads are forced on small business because regular methods of discovery are intentionally nerfed.
Yeah, it's a private business, if you want to use them to reach people you need to pay. What exactly is wrong with that?
> regular methods of discovery
What are these "regular methods of discovery"? Do you think that small businesses didn't advertise before Facebook/Google/etc came along?
Being in the yellow pages.
Putting a flyer on a community board or telephone pole. My city has special poles just for flyers.
Word of mouth.
Newspaper ads.
---
Sure, some of those are advertising but they're not intrusive or unethical. There aren't as many options for ethically advertising online but that's very intentional, with companies doing the digital equivalent of limiting word of mouth and tearing down flyers.
Even though the search engine is ad-funded (I don't know any free search engine) and can be more or less intrusive (IE. Duckduckgo is not)
Which channels have been intentionally nerfed?
In Europe, yes. User hostile ad-tech is forced to opt-out of those markets.
Usual problem with laws who enforces them.
Phone browsing is a nightmare these days.
Yes, because the RTB ecosystem is being dismantled as a direct result.
Nowadays it is a major funding keystone of the attention economy, which is spreading propaganda and conspiracy theories, destabilizing governments. Propaganda spread over Facebook helped enable the Rohingya genocide. This isn’t a little annoying thing anymore.
Not for me, it doesn't, For me, it comes from an "I don't want to be spied on" mentality.
If the online ad world would do everything that they currently do, but actually leave me out of it when I tell them to, I wouldn't consider them to be evil. But not only don't they do that, they put a lot of time, effort, and money into actively working around the various defenses I put up against them.
> I think that it would be valuable to reframe the question from the producers point of view
You're talking as if the problem is the ads themselves. It's not. It's the spying that's the problem.
> The ad-tech solution is actually quite elegant in theory
I don't assert that it's not elegant. I assert that it's deeply unethical unless informed consent has been obtained from the people the data is being gathered from.
> then people ask "where did the old internet go"?
People ask that right now, and adtech is one of the things that have killed it.
> it would be great if the people who criticize it came up with something other than "fuck the small businesses and content producers".
Plenty of proven alternatives are brought up all the time. Even the IAPP article here mentions the strongest one: have ads, but don't target them based on data extracted from unwilling participants. Target them based on the context in which the ads appear.
Just like newspapers, magazines, TV, etc.
The adtech world doesn't want to do that because they can make even more money by being bastards, instead.
I don't think this is actually true. When I think about the old internet vs new internet, a lot of it is about people running their own blogs / websites vs. platforms. And I think most of that is not really about ad-tech at all, but about the mechanisms of content and audience discovery. But the fact remains that if you want to say... publish videos of some kind, you are likely to make much more on YouTube vs uploading them to your own website, and that's at least partially because Google is able to show effective ads.
> Target them based on the context in which the ads appear.
Possible, but in some cases significantly less effective. As I mentioned above, ad-tech comes with some very interesting progressive effects, where the people who spend the most money are the ones who end up paying the most in aggregate for content. An interesting example is luxury goods, which are both high-value and niche. If you run say... a news site, or something else that's general purpose, you probably don't want to be showing Rolex ads to everyone. But rich people still read news, and if you could target your Rolex ads to them, that basically subsidizes everyone else.
Yes, but you're only talking about people who are intending to make money here. There's a much larger world out there than that.
> but in some cases significantly less effective
True, but so what? At least doing it that way isn't abusive, and it would eliminate quite a lot of the anger people have about online advertising.
It's very disturbing when the response to "stop being abusive" is "but then we'll make less money."
I think the disdain is against surveillance and invasive content.
> The current movement to avoid tracking is an extremely powerful centralizing force.
No, this is just removing the third party. If I'm on a Meta property seeing an ad served by Meta targeted by my data from using Meta, then there's not third party.
Is this a serious question? You advertise. Just like people have been doing for generations. You advertise in publications or spaces that will attract people interested in your product or service. You're going to have to do more to convince me that we need individual level targeted for businesses to succeed.
We're not mad if the new bakery in town advertises in the town paper or sends postcards to everyone in the zipcode. We're not mad if the new geeky t-shirt website puts ads on geeky subreddits or Facebook groups. We're not mad if your new auto detailing service comes up if I Google "auto detailing <my city>". We're mad that those ads creepily follow us around the internet, reminding us of the scale of the enormous data collection that enables such behavior.
Don't tell me that bakeries or t-shirt shops or auto detailers can't thrive without targeted marketing. We've had those things for way longer than we've had targeted marketing.
You've had way less of those things as well. I'm not defending targeted marketing but you are ignoring that there are way more bakeries and t-shirt shops now than ever. As a small business, you aren't competing against other local t-shirt shops you are competing against every t-shirt shop that can setup a webpage and put a shirt in the mail.
Are those publications most popular products, the online versions, selling advertising in the way their print only counterparts have? Or, are they just offering you targeting through their already extant advertising setup?
> Don't tell me that bakeries or t-shirt shops or auto detailers can't thrive without targeted marketing.
Local advertising and national advertising are two entirely different things and the campaigns even have two entirely different purposes and metrics for measurement.
One of the great forces of the internet was to allow me to do regular and successful business with niche operations that may not be local to me. It was supposed to expand upon the previously existing model. Adtech is trying to stand across this gap, which still hasn't been filled for anyone outside of a local goods retailer.
I literally own a bakery and I would be mad at myself if I wasted that much paper.
I also don't even know if this town has a printed paper I could still advertise in. Maybe? But I'm unlikely to spend our extremely limited advertising budget there.
I also don't want to use invasively targeted online ads. I'd be totally satisfied for keyword based ads - like if someone goes on Maps and searches for "bakery", "coffee" etc. I think that's the best middle ground in the modern era.
I don't care if someone has a history of following baking related Facebook pages, searches for bakeries every day or for the first time ever. I understand that would make our ads more efficient but I'm willing to accept in exchange for respecting people's privacy. Unfortunately, I don't think there's any way for me to make that happen - if I pay to advertise on Google Ads, which unfortunately is the best choice for us, then I have to let Google invade everyone's privacy. There's no setting that I am can find to disable targeted advertising for my campaign.
You wouldn't be popping up in the middle of someone's read of an article on fly fishing because someone else in that person's household searched for muffin recipes a week ago.
2. I'm afraid it's too late. The centralization has already happened. Most people consume content from a handful of mobile apps (youtube, social networks, etc). AI will escalate this even further. Small websites outside of big tech can't really monetize content reliably, exceptions aside. Likewise, your content has to be extremely special for people wanting to pay for it.
The ads aren't the problem, the targetting and the granular privacy invading data collection practices it implies.
It's not about "fuck small businesses" at all but rather that I'd love to scroll through some content without my 100ms pause over a specific post influencing what I see in future and thus shaping the reality I see.
That's how we got to a position where the various "factions" in society are seeing so different realities that to each the other seems unreasonable and they can't understand why the others don't see their (to them) obviously correct perspective. Adtech is actively contributing towards societal splits.
Except that's not what is happening. The information brokers learned that there's no money to be made in selling to someone who already knows they want to buy that product. With the ad you're getting 90% conversion but without you're only down to 70% conversion.
The real value is in convincing someone who had no interest in a product to spend money they wouldn't have otherwise. And targeting makes this happening by giving the advertisers tools to custom make campaigns that create new engagements. The role of the advertiser is not to connect potential purchasers with the products they want, but to trick unwary consumers into buying irrelevant junk.
And on top of that, it doesn't help small businesses because they only spend money on small campaigns. A tiny micro-targeted set of ads always loses the auction to an algorithmic carpet bombing of manipulative clickbait. That is, they'll "win" a few impressions at first until their budget caps out and then the spam ads will fill in the rest. Which means someone in that cohort will in any period see more of the bad ads than the good ones.
There is no incentive for anyone in adtech to fix this because the "solution" right now is charging more money for better ads. Consumers disliking ads and being inundated with malvertising is the system working as intended.
Small business is being hurt the most (because they benefitted the most from being able to buy targeted ads with a small budget).
I want my privacy private, and I'm not willing to share it. It is definitely interesting to see what AdTech can figure out next, especially for small business.
Elegant. In theory. How about in practice.
What problem does this proposed "solution" solve. Once we have answer then we ask whether it is effective at solving it. Proposing "solutions" to problems where 100% of the time the solution uses a computer is easy. We're drowning in such "solutions". The question is whether they actually work.
If ad tech isn't very effective then is it even a "solution".^1 It could just be a very successful marketing gimmick.
The "if we regulate data collection, bad things will happen" is a lame argument used by the ad tech incumbents and ad tech startups. "You'll lose what you have." More likely, the person making the argument will lose what they have. This type of "argument" is made by self-interested parties. It's speculative and there is no evidence to support it. Fear mongering. Without regulation, these ad tech startups, if they ever begin to grow larger, will surely be acquired by the incumbents, ideally producing a massive windfall for the founders and investors. We know this because we have watched it happen over and over. It's like arguing "we need to let the next DoubleClick grow and thrive". Soon followed by "we need to stop the governemnt from blocking our merger with Google." The truth is, bad stuff is happening right now. That isn't speculation. It's fact.
There's a problem. Data collection. And people are looking for a solution. Not the other way around. (A data collection "solution" looking for a problem.) Letting unfettered data collection continue is certainly not a solution to the problem of data collection.
Another line of reasoning is "it's too late to regulate data collection for future generations because some data has already been collected". It's like suggesting "it's too late to regulate pollution because the environment is already polluted". Not sure I should even call this reasoning.
Yet another way that people defend data collection and tracking in the face of public discontent is misdirection. "Industry/Company X is doing it, too. And they are much worse than we are." In the case of comparisons to other industries, we may have to compare the regulation, if any, to which each is subjected.
HN could be "misguided" on its views of so-called "ad tech", if we accept such generalisations. But what about others, who are not "web consumers", outside HN. The OP is one example. There are others.
https://digiday.com/marketing/confessions-of-an-ad-exec-most...
https://www.newsmediaalliance.org/ad-tech-its-worse-than-we-...
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/11/technology/bad-digital-ad...
https://adage.com/article/digitalnext/ad-tech-worst-thing-ha...
https://martech.org/stop-calling-ad-tech-advertising/
https://tbtech.co/business/why-billions-of-dollars-are-being...
It's funny that so-called "ad tech" companies, as intermediaries (middlemen), claim that they prioritise "users", but then they do not like it when they see "users" commenting about so-called "ad tech" on HN. But what about the folks on the other side of the transaction that "ad tech" intermediates. Perhaps there are folks besides "users" who can see problems posed by the unscrupulous middlemen performing data collection.
NB. In this comment I have focused on (a) the "arguments" being made in the parent comment, and elsewhere, that defend so-called "ad tech" and (b) the viewpoints of others, namely marketers and advertisers, about so-called "ad tech". References to regulation of data collection can be assumed to also refer to regulation of data use by the collectors or any parties with which they share collected data. IMO, it's likely any regulation of data collection would also apply to data use, and this would address data collection that has already occurred before the regulation takes effect.
1) Data leaks by companies that collect and store true PII - this is your Equifaxes of the world, and they didn't collect that data using cookies. 2) People are generally creeped out by the idea of their movements across the web being tracked.
And so, even though no ad-tech company has ever really had a data leak, and although the tracking across the web has never really resulted in any negative outcomes, people are using (2) to try and kill ad-tech for often disingenuous reasons.
This is particularly relevant to mobile apps, because if you show the user an ad, they are extremely unlikely to switch contexts to go and actually click on it. If you can track users from the app to the purchasing site, then you can say "hey, I have a really valuable audience - you should pay me hella money to show them ads". This has been less GDPR and more Apple, but the result is the same - it makes ads generically less valuable.
And that is why I'm fundamentally pro ad-tech. I don't have any direct monetary interest in it, but I do want the digital economy to be growing and efficient, and in an ideal world decentralized beyond the 4-5 large platforms. People spending money online is GOOD. It's good for businesses, it's good for the people (under a rational agent model at least ;)), and it's good for me as a software engineer who wants to keep getting paid silicon-valley salaries.
Marketing as a function will be better off once they wean themselves off of adtech attribution models.
In the Before Times of 1993, if you're in situation #1, you call the advertisement department of the local newspaper, who is in situation #2. You pay them $250, the newspaper keeps basically all of it, and you get a quarter-page ad in the Sports section. You can go and open the paper and see the ad, and know roughly that most of the people in town read the local paper. You can also feel good that the money you spent is largely being used to support a local institution that has strong community value.
Now, you go to Google/Meta/etc and set up a campaign. You pay for $250 worth of service. If you're lucky, you get some dashboards to get a vague idea where the impressions occurred. A collection of disparate webmasters get a grand total of $30 in CPM or CPC fees. Brin and Zuckerberg buy some new yachts.
So advertisers aren't actually saving much, but we've dismantled the old media economy.
* We're slicing same ad dollar across more and more publishers. It's cute that you can make $12 per month with AdWords on your blog, but it contributes to the death-by-a-thousand-cuts of local TV/radio/newspapers. When everyone is working on a $12-per-moonth revenue feed, all you're going to get is listicles and clickbait, or stuff designed specifically to game ad metrics (see: the 29-page slideshow article)
* Visibility is terrible but in exciting new ways. The 1993 question was how "many people actually saw your ad in the Sports section?" The 2023 version is "how many of those 'people' are bots, how many of the clicks came from incentivized questionable activity, how many of these ads appeared on sites that would actually contaminate my brand?"
* The middlemen have consumed a lot of margin. The fact that newsrooms are closing and media is getting more paywalled by the day suggests that the digital ad space have failed to deliver the same revenue that traditional platforms did.
It's possible to do without a lot of this-- direct placement for example would pretty much work as well today as it did in 1993-- but it would require a lot of data to convince people that the big AdTechs' yottabytes of profiling don't justify the price they're charging.
While I block a lot of internet stalkers via PiHole at home and so forth I'm sure a lot about me and my activity gets through to the data hoarders. So then why has a lot of my recent advertising on Facebook in recent days been for feminine health products? For example: why would I, a middle-aged, long single (with no particular plans to change that state), child-less man, be interesting in a device that claims to help reduce period cramps?
Most of the other advertising I see ATM is wall-to-wall Temu. Even if I would ever have ordered something from them I likely won't now as they've successfully got in my nerves.
The only advertising that has worked on me in recent memory is a sponsored segment in a podcast (an event relevant to the subject matter of that podcast that I may book into), and getting that advert in front of me didn't involve tracking my movements wherever I go online & in the real world.
The companies you are interested in - well, they already reach your wallet just fine without banner ads.
What gets me is what happens when you try to get a hotel, a plane ticket, a rental car, an emergency plumber, a tow truck or a ride somewhere.
And then
> While I block a lot of internet stalkers via PiHole at home
People who don't buy things after clicking on ads, who block all the ads they see, who are completely immune and hate ads, are not really qualified to talk about whether they work or not.
Not only is this pure anecdote, and the billions spent on advertising every year as a glaring counterpoint to your comment, but you are obviously biased against the concept.
This whole site is rabidly anti-advertising. Like we should all still be using terminal BBS and VIM because they are "better." These posts are so tiring.
Well, to be fair...tabs ARE objectively better than spaces for tabulating a coherent hierarchy.
...and terminal BBS and vim are better.
It takes two to make an argument, and I think both those viewpoints are wrong!
Tabs for indentation, spaces for alignment.
(actually, I have an idea for dynamic tabs which might do both jobs better that I need to throw a demo of together to try to convince code editors that it is worth implementing)
1. That I block things everyehere. “PiHole at home” does not cover all my browsing, far from it.
2. That “PiHole at home” blocks everything at home. Again, far from it. Many wish it were that effective.
3. That “PiHole at home” blocks all the data tracked by the likes of Facebook in-app. It is massively ineffective against that, and a few other techniques.
4. That I am, in fact, anti-advert. I'm anti being stalked around most of my life which does not have to be the same thing. Unfortunately blocking the latter also blocks the former because currently they are the same thing, or at least very closely overlapped. I don't use sponsor-block, because the segments that it blocks are not based on stalking but are often relevant to the information being consumed (not always of course: if I'm watching a summary or an IP related legal case the relevance of, for instance, a tank based casual game is at best dubious). I'm also anti-other-irritating patterns (auto-playing audio, auto-playing video, eating CPU and draining my battery when mobile, etc.) which are also endemic to advertising and like the tracking they do not need to be.
5. That companies paying billions for advertising means that the stalking works (as the old joke says: “Eat shit, 136×10¹⁵ flies can't all be wrong!”. The adtech industry is grossly disingenuous in both directions: to us when they tell us they value our privacy and to their customers when they make exaggerated claims about how effective their huge personal data dataset is as getting extra sales for any arbitrary products/services, compared to just advertising in places relevant to the product/service (or just carpet bombing our senses, the method apparently being employed by Temu ATM). The companies paying into this have little choice because the vast majority of adtech is doing exactly the same things and making pretty much the same claims. Everyone in adtech does it because if they didn't they'd lose sales to those who do and convince ad-space buyers that it makes a significant difference.
> are not really qualified to talk about whether they work or not
Some might question whether a person making five incorrect sweeping assumptions in three sentences, is really qualified to talk about whatever it is that they are talking about :)
Adtech is still very lucrative even with a few of us blockers
Honestly not sure if I would feel better if it was some heuristic blocking a true realization of their actions or just classifying them as evil lol
Thanks for sharing your anecdote, but the same "fantastic and diverse" people you worked with could still be doing morally and ethically questionable things to get their paychecks.
>The actual 'tech' part of Adtech is actually really interesting and also challenging.
Atomic bombs are also "interesting and challenging" to make, that doesn't mean that using them is a good thing.
Fixed number of ad slots per month, fixed price per slot, and advertised on a network of high traffic blogs (also fixed with an upper bound in terms of # of blogs allowed on the network). No tracking besides impressions served and maybe # of clicks. The blogs split a pool of half the revenue.
I think it could be a win-win for the network and the business if executed right. Trying to focus on specific domains: web, ML/AI and hardware/electronics engineering only. I’m currently looking for blogs to join the company which is the difficult part. The next difficult part will be reaching out to companies.
Are low-traffic blogs welcome to join? Or are you mainly looking for blogs with big readership?
Also, are other kinds of sites welcome to join? For example PeerTube instances? (Server similar to YouTube but open source, self hosted and uses peer to peer tech to stream videos.)
Ad value may not be tied to the extraction of personal data, but it's unambiguously tied to the use of it. Obviously more targeted ads perform better.
> Without major changes to its operating model, each day the targeted advertising infrastructure is inching closer to collapse. Those who build and maintain the adtech metropolis now face a decision: shore up defenses around their strategic interests with slight tweaks and creative legal theories, buying themselves as much time as possible, or rebuild before the crash.
If the goal is to remove advertising, then it may be better to set up mechanisms for consumers to share information with sellers, rather than play whack-a-mole with adtech.
This is already happening with Whole Foods / Amazon, REI, and other loyalty programs.
I'd be thrilled with this, as long as I can choose zero brands, and companies will refrain from collecting data about me.
Telemetry in software is never worth it in my opinion. The only part that is useful is crash detection and logging. But if the goal is to decide what is important or no, the data just become self reinforcing. You have all those feature request boards and items with multiple votes on it and the company never act on them (Looking at you, Spotify), so what is the usefulness on the telemetry then?
Do we honestly know if that's true in any meaningful way? It also depends on what you mean by targeted. If it's advertising power tools to someone who's clearly searching things related to DIY, sure, make sense. If we mean: "Push this product to men between 30 and 40, who works in construction and have 2 kids" then I'd love to see an A/B test that suggested that a broader campaign isn't cheaper and equally effective. You're cutting of a lot of potential customers when you're targeting is to narrow and I don't think that's accounted for in general.
See, for example: https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/1963405.1963431
There was a point in an episode of the podcast You're Wrong About where one of the hosts made a comment about how much you can learn about people just by observing what kinds of things we don't require evidence to believe.
I think that the effectiveness of tracking-based advertising might be one of those things. It seems to be tied to an assumption that, where data is concerned, bigger is always better. Ironically, statisticians and philosophers of science have already known that this isn't actually true for about a century now.
That they know the whole thing is a big lie, and contextual ads definitely work better, but they are either stupid or corrupt and forcing this concept down everyone's throats?
But is it? Maybe? It could also be the case that our thirty year old is perfectly content with Spotify and has no interest in records, or it could be that he has been going to the same local shop for the last decade and can't be tempted away. And it could also be that our 18 year old actually loves the 1975 and thinks records are a vibe but isn't connected to her local music scene and is would love a way to browse and buy records that doesn't involve the social anxiety of going to in IRL store where she feels like an outsider. But you can't really capture this kind of data which is why we still get ads like "bought a vacuum -> you must be a vacuum enthusiast."
The people running the ads are measuring the results in different ways. Whether or not they see measurable increases attributed to their ad spend is what keeps them coming back, or not.
Auction houses are inextricably linked to the results they are driving. It's most of the reason they get most of their business.
This is why companies like Google and Facebook control so much of the ad market. Not just because they are popular publishers, but because they have some of the most sophisticated ad delivery and measurement platforms.
I can transfer an ad click ID through to a sale and into my CRM, showing a 100% direct attribution. This attribution determines my likelihood to choose an "auction house" in the future.
It's kind of crazy the level of disrespect and outright dismissal the HN community gives to the ad world.
These ad networks own the market because they're the only suppliers of digital ad space with enough billboards to meet the massive demand; that's no small feat. And yes, they do have very far reaching tendrils to determine attribution which is also technically impressive but that's also not without a sea of muddy data especially when it comes to VTA.
Google and Meta aren't magic and you're giving them far far too much credit for what are really your own (or the agency you paid) successful ad campaigns because you did all the work.
You're completely clueless, just stop talking.
First, the "ad network" in this case and the "publisher" are the same thing. Second, nearly all of effective modern performance ad buys on the major publishers (Meta/Google) outsource most of the targeting to the publishers via tools like lookalike audiences (Meta) or dynamic search ads (Google), all of which are powered by user data. In fact, the publisher's loss of performance data via IDFA was the entire reason why losing IDFA was so bad for Meta. It wasn't that the buyers couldn't close the loop on who was converting (they could), it was that the publisher couldn't close the loop on who was converting (super important for targeting). The idea that buyers drive conversion and the publishers have not much to do with is wrong. It's blatantly obvious you have no direct experience in this area, and no idea what you're talking about.
Sources:
- Spent over $100m on performance ads
- Started and ran an ad attribution company
- Ran the team that built the Reddit ads platform and know how hard it is to make a performance ads platform work as well as Meta or Google (basically impossible)
(p.s. Citing 12 year old research on advertising makes you look clueless, most of ad targeting barely existed then and the performance was absolute shit compared to modern ad platforms)
Do you think no one has done this?
My thinking is that any positive results they've seen from targeted ads are just a result of them running any time of advertising campaign and not specifically a targeted one.
The targeted ads might also have been proved to be more effective, in at least some cases, for some companies, but are they significantly better, like 20, 50 or 100%? They might be 5% better, but is that enough to justify the amount of data collection?
Now this is a nuanced take I am here for. I think if we put a value on personal data, much like a carbon tax, personalized ads would instantly become less profitable than contextual. In a heartbeat.
No, the increase in efficiency is not worth the data collected.
However with improvements in machine learning, behavioral ads will get even better (this is happening as I write this). And that value comparison may flip yet again.
Another factor to consider is location. Very few services/products that are advertised globally will be available where you actually are.
Let's assume most of high-quality ad-spaces are available for "broader campaigns". Once each small business broadcasts ads here, they will compete for space. Price of space-unit goes up.
Then some ad-space-seller opens Pandora's box: "hey I can allow you to narrow the audience by location targeting. Each unit is more expensive but conversion rate is higher so you will end up with a better margin overall"
If that's true at all, it depends on the targeting. Consider the classic "I bought a toilet seat, so now Amazon gives me loads of suggestions to buy more of them". I remain convinced that lots of ads are poorly or incorrectly targeted with the results that the additional information didn't actually help them and may have even hurt them.
There are certainly poorly targeted ads. Not sure what that has to do with the technology, though.
Some ad tech may be responsible for the bad targeting, depending on your vendor. But there is also ad tech that has scary capabilities that rarely misses.
of course there is. Because there was. It existed. Eventually we got banner ads. It just got worse after that. People ran their own servers, so did companies. They paid to have their own content online for whatever reason they wished. And often you would get cut off, "so and so's website can only serve 200 requests a day, come back tomorrow." My server runs ad free for no other reason than I want it there with some of my content. Ads enabled a bigger internet and "content creators" who work full time growing the internet. The internet was just fine without these professional content creators.
I pay my ISP bill. Everyone else can take their problems with my "free" internet to them.
Nonsense. Of course there is. It may not include Google, IG, YouTube, etc., true, but that's very far from the entire internet.
And, notably, I pay money to YouTube.
IAPP is not HN. The organisation predates this forum. It is not comprised of consumer privacy activists or anyone with "disdain for AdTech". Quite the opposite. It's focused on corporate compliance.
People outside of HN are quite capable of seeing through bogus arguments put forth by so-called "tech" companies and their service providers. The later a group that sees licentious, surreptitous data collection as a "business model".
I occasionally click on AdWords ads, or look up a company I see on an ad in the subway station, or follow up on Internet ads that I know are contextually targeted. But I generally have no idea how AdSense ads came to me.
Amusingly, since I started making an effort to improve my Spanish last year, my partner's started getting a lot of ads in a language she doesn't speak inserted into her English-language podcast episodes.
When online marketing blew up, marketers were lured in by the belief that they were getting all those previously untrackable impressions. They still aren't, but there is a big segment they can now track. At that point, I feel it became an optimization problem where they cant escape the local optimum. They can't even imagine not having the not-entirely-valid data.
FWIW, I feel that non targeted ads make so much more sense. If I'm reading a tech blog, I actually may want ads from a tech service. I don't need my wife's browsing habits to show me dresses.
Considering I spend most weekends hiking/backpacking, I golf somewhat regularly with my friends, and I'm expecting a baby in a few months, it's pretty accurate.
I have bought several things from these ads in the past and will probably continue to do so.
In theory it makes it cheaper for the advertiser as they can target individuals on cheaper sites.
In practice what it’s done is absolutely decimate quality publishers and lead everyone into clickbait.
It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.
It would not be hard to extrapolate ads that might be interesting for a person who has graduated with a CS degree 10+ years ago (cool gadgets anyone? AI services?) but the ads I see are attrocious. It can only make any sense if Facebook isn't even trying, which only makes sense if they don't want anybody to know how little value they add.
Its the same with Googles topics - if you want to show me ads for things that might be relevant for me, then _let me choose those_. But it is almost as if the thought can't even cross their minds.
Big Tech's algorithms have long been tapping into illegal surveillance of an unprecedented kind - besides the cliques of insiders who misuse this for stalking and harassment of children, human rights defenders, activists, minorities and everyone else.
Don't expect them to be honest about their surveillance.
Boy, I sure hope so. Adtech is a horrible, abusive industry that deserves to be buried and forgotten.
On LinkedIn I follow a few of these people, people I know from working in e-commerce years ago. They have no glue about what's happening. They see the thing they've worked on for 15 years fall apart, but won't accept any of the blame. They blame Apple, the EU, anyone but themselves. They don't see any of the damage that they caused. The internet and it's users is something to extract value from, not something that holds any value on it's own in their minds.
It's time that the online ad business get a reset. Ads will still be important, but the way they are managed and implemented needs to be adjusted.
Governments purchasing 3rd party collected data isn't illegal whereas the government obtaining the collected data themselves would be illegal.
When in the 21st century hasn't this been true?
The internet is a commodity you pay for from an ISP. They control your traffic and log it to whatever extent they desire. Site operators choose to allow or deny visitors based on arbitrary things; membership, adblock, browser choice, etc. If you don't provide enough value to the site operator (or alternatively, cost too much to host) then advertisement becomes inevitable. Even your browser was monetized and weaponized since Microsoft realized they could pack-in web clients. Now everyone is being abused by some corporate benefactor.
The online ad business is a reflection of how every first world government has let FAANG roll all over them and consequentially exploit their citizens. The only way we "reset" the ad industry is by bullwhipping Big Tech until they recognize your freedom as a computer owner.
You’ve just described most of the marketing folks I’ve worked with for the last decade.