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Comment by alkonaut | Hacker News Reader

The correct amount of tracking ads at least. We always paid for magazines and newspapers and saw ads despite paying. But then the transaction was between the publisher and the advertiser, and MY information wasn't sold. They were dumb ads.

If I pay for online content it's NOT for the content itself (obviously not, in the case of freemium), it's in order to not have to pay with my personal information. I want to pay with money. But if I'm shown tracking and precisely targeted ads despite paying, that feels like I'm being charged twice. So the article is right: the amount of ads, at least if you consider tracking, must be zero.

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This.

I understand ads are a necessary evil for some kind of product, and it allows some content to be freely accessible.

BUT no the step from "ads" to "personalized ads" is not worth the loss of privacy, All the CPU times, all the Brain times, all the money wasted in creating always more complex infrastructure to provide a "better" ads experience.

So I'm genuinely interested to know the other side of the tradeoff, as content creator, what is the difference between "classic ads" (i.e I'm a tech blog I have ads about tech products) and "heavily personalized ads" in term of money making.

If someone also has the number as well in term of click rate etc.

No, ads mean bad incentives, you have to please advertisers, not just your audience. It also encourages to ignore externalities.

Then it gives more power to those who already have the most of it.

It also normalizes lying, being intrusive, and manufacturing damaging social norms.

Tracking is worse, but all ads are toxic.

I was fine with ads in newspapers, in my TV news and on the sides of buses. While it always created incentives and questionable relations (E.g. do yo report the grocery chains' salmonella disaster in your news when the same chain advertises between that segment and the weather? What if they give you an angry call after the broadcast? does your news desk ever worry about what they should publish? as soon as they worry the damge is already done). I get that. But I'm not going to even hope we'll get the web to live up to higher standards than print and broadcast did for the last centuries. After all, internet media had significantly worse standards in this regard for as long as it existed. I'd be happy for it to just have normal media standards.

> We always paid for magazines and newspapers and saw ads despite paying

just because that happened doesn't mean it has to keep happening, we can do better

Ads in a paid product might be annoying, but it's not secretly charging the customer and then also selling their information.

Paying customers are also identified (logged in). So in theory you could pinpoint me even more with ads after I decided to be a paying customer.

> do better

Which is what?

> just because that happened

The subtleties matter. The ads were purchased per issue or over several issues. The publication solicited the advertisers business and not the other way around. The rates were set per publication and were equal for all potential buyers. The ads were static and approved by the publisher before being included for distribution.

Then you get doubleclick now swallowed up by google. Which reversed all of this and reversed all of the incentives as well. So now people publish crap to create automatically filled ad inventory instead of having a more or less fixed inventory which required real work to get contracted buyers for.

> > do better

> Which is what?

UBI.

UBI will do nothing with respect to advertising. In fact it would probably make it worse.

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