I wish we could just ban advertising and tracking on the internet. I feel like so much crap these days has come out of it, all so that CEOs can afford an extra yacht
How did you reach this conclusion? The main problem is that it works way better than traditional marketing medium.
It's the reason Google and Facebook are so massive, why would publishers choose to pay them if it doesn't work?
Because they believe it works and it's impossible to prove otherwise?
Like on the frontend side with Facebook which thinks if I'm interested into cycling I will also be interested in cars (both are on the street, right?) or if I'm interested in some more dirty humor I also want to see more "naughty" stuff.
And also on the backend used by magazines and they mostly don't use the user profiles because it's too targeted and doesn't have enough audience. And if you make the targeting broad enough you'll have again people interested in chocolate so you target them with wine and whiskey.
Or even better on Amazon where you can buy a new TV and when you have done so it will suggest you even more TVs for the next months.
However what you're saying isn't completely wrong. I've also seen user targeting become a self-fulfilling prophecy. What happens is that it's championed by a high level executive as the panacea for improving revenue, implemented, and seen to not work. Now, as we all now, the C*O is Always Correct, so everything else around it is modified until the user-level targeting A/B test shows positive results. Usually this ends up in the product being tortured into an unusable mess.
If it could pay for network TV there's no reason it can't pay for a website.
(You could still do audience-level tracking, e.g. "Facbebook and NCIS are both for old people, so advertise cruises and geriatric health services on those properties")
- Paying for services is very visible, whereas the payment for advertising is so indirect that you do not feel like you are paying for it.
- The payments for advertising are not uniformly distributed, people with more disposable income most likely pay more of overall advertising. But subscriptions cannot make distinctions between income.
- People with disposable income are typically the most willing to pay for services. However, they are also the most interesting to advertisers. For this reason, payment in place of ads is often not an option at all, because it is not attractive to websites/services.
I think banning advertising would be good. But I think a first step towards that would be completely banning tracking. That would make advertisements less effective (and consequently less valuable) and would pose services to look for other streams of income. Plus it would solve the privacy issue of advertising.
It's a game. When a merchant signs up to an ad platform (or when the platform is in need of volume), they are given good ROI, and the merchant also plays along and treats it as "marketing expenditure". Eventually, the ROI dries up i.e the marketing has saturated and the merchant starts counting it as a cost and passes it onto the customer. I don't know if this is actually done, but it's also trivial for an ad platform to force merchants to continue ads by making them feel it's important: when they reduce their ad volume, just boost the ROI and visibility for their competitors (a competitor can be detected purely by shared ad space no need to do any separate tagging). Heck, this is probably what whatever optimization algorithm they are running will end up suggesting as it's a local minima in feature space.
And yes, instead of banning ads, which would be too wide a legal net to be feasible, banning tracking is better. However, even this is complicated. For example, N websites can have legitimate uses for N browser features. But it turns out any M of the N features can be used to uniquely identify you. Oops. What can you even do about that, legally speaking? Don't say permissions most people I know just click allow on all of them.
Except for Spotify, News subscriptions, videogame subscriptions, video streaming services, duolingo, donations, gofundmes, piracy services!, clothing and food subscriptions! etc etc
People pay $10 for a new fortnite skin. You really pretending they won't pay for content?
People were willing to pay for stuff on the internet even when you could only do so by calling someone up and reading off your credit card number and just trusting a stranger.
Meanwhile, the norm until cable television for "free" things like news was that you either paid, or you went to the library to read it for free.
Maybe people could visit libraries more again.
People of course do pay for things all the time. It’s just the social media folks found a way to make a lot more money than people would otherwise pay, through advertising. And in this situation, through illegal advertising.
The best thing we can all do is refuse to work for Meta. If good engineers did that, there would be no Meta. Problem solved. But it seems many engineers prefer it this way.
Those true leaders are the traditional examples who have shown success over the centuries, without letting any greed whatsoever become a dominant force, recognizing and moving in the opposite direction from those driven by overblown self-interest, who naturally have little else to offer. It can be really disgraceful these days but people don't seem to care any more.
That's one thing that made them average businessmen though.
Now if you're below-average I understand, but most companies' shareholders would be better off with a non-greedy CEO, who outperforms by steering away from underhanded low-class behavior instead.
Now if greed is the only thing on the table, and somebody like a CEO or decision-making executive hammers away using his only little tool with admirable perseverance long enough, it does seem to have a likelihood of bringing in money that would not have otherwise come in.
This can be leveraged too, by sometimes even greedier forces.
All you can do is laugh, those shareholders might be satisfied, but just imagine what an average person could do with that kind of resources. It would put the greedy cretins to shame on their own terms.
And if you could find an honest above-average CEO, woo hoo !
Personally I think we should start from separating good old ads(that existed before I was 15) and Internet "ads". The old ads were still somewhat heavily targeted, but less than it is now. There probably would be an agreeable line up to which level advertisement efforts can be perverted.
Some examples:
In most countries it’s illegal to ‘target minors’ and there’s restrictions on what ads can run on after school hours. Meta has always allowed age targeting down to 13 and has no time of day restrictions.
In parts of New Zealand you can’t advertise alcohol between 10PM and 9AM… unless you do it on Meta or Google.
Most countries have regulation about promoting casinos (or the inability to) unless they’re digital casinos being promoted in digital ads.
Or just look at the deepfake finance and crypto ads that run on Meta and X. Meta requires 24 strikes against an advertiser before they pull them down, if a TV network ran just one ad like that it would be a scandal.
Audit-ability is the biggest issue imo. If a TV ad runs we can all see it at the same time and know it ran. That is simply impossible with digital ads, and even when Meta releases some tools for auditing the caveat is that you still have to trust what they’re releasing. Similarly with data protection there’s no way to truly audit what they’re doing unless you install government agencies in the companies to provide oversight, and I don’t see how you could really make that work.
Better moderation of crappy AI-generated image ads that are just scamming you would be nice as well.
All we need to do is define the $thing and mandate that lawsuits can be effective.
No agency enforces that potato chips need to fill up 92% of the bag or whatever, or that McDonalds cannot show pictures of apple fritters with more apples than they actually come with (this happened).
You just incentivize a cottage industry of legal that can squeeze a profit out of suing peanut butter companies for labelling incorrectly, or advertising dishonestly and it sort of takes care of itself.
Is affiliate marketing still allowed? Are influencers allowed to take payment? Can people be a spokesperson for a company? Can newspapers run commentary about businesses? Can companies pay to be vendors at a conference?
No matter where you end up drawing the line you’re just shifting the problems somewhere else. Look at the amount of money Meta and Google make, the incentive is just too large.
...and so consumers can use services/products without having to fork over money.
People love the ad-model. Given the option to pay or use the "ad-supported" option, the ad-supported one wins 10 to 1. This means in many cases it doesn't even make sense to have a paid option, because the ad option is just so much more popular.
As bad as crypto is, with all the negative things attached to it, BAT was probably one of the smartest things to be invented. A browser token that automatically dispenses micropayments to websites you visit. Forget all the details to get snagged on, the basic premise is solid: Pay for what you use. You become the customer, not the advertisers.
Also a note about ad-blocking - it only makes the problem worse. It is not a "stick it to the man" protest. You protest things by boycotting them, or paying their competitors, not by using them without compensating them.
If we must pay for the internet, give me an option to pay to use it where I see no ads and my privacy is preserved. Let me know what that cost is and I'll decide what I want to do.
Right now, the actual pricing is obscured so we just "accept" that the internet in its current form is how it needs to be.
This will depress ad revenue as the people with the most money will be the people who pay to remove ads. This will make less sites and content viable.
Not every site needs to reach 1 billion people.
Plus Wikipedia seems to be doing ok occasionally asking for donations.
Things like "we'll hang on to the tokens of sites that don't use BAT yet for them until they join" gave negative vibes.
It all felt a little underbaked. I swing back to Brave once in a blue moon and then remember I've got at least $20's worth of BAT lost forever somewhere.
I'd love if there was another one that was totally open and just a browser extension away. But I do not think it would ever get off the ground because...
People love the ad model and hate paying for things.
While not technically a crime, it was a disgusting, unethical market manipulation move that never really got the public outrage it deserved.
Google execs’ initial support for it was also telling: leadership at Google must literally thought they would find another way to stay as profitable as they are without third-party cookies. Put another way: Google leadership didn’t understand cookies as well as someone who’s taken a single undergrad web dev class. (Or they were lying all along, and always planned to “renege” on third-party cookie deprecation.)
No one is trying to stop google from removing third party cookies. Google is just unwilling to remove them without introducing a new anticompetitive tracking tool to replace them.
That's simply not true. As I already mentioned, the CMA presented a legal challenge which you can read about online. Please review the history, as it's been going on for years now.
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/cma-to-have-key-oversight...
https://www.marketing-beat.co.uk/2024/02/06/cma-cookies-goog...
The CMA was concerned that, without regulatory oversight and scrutiny, Google’s alternatives could be developed and implemented in ways that impede competition in digital advertising markets. This would cause advertising spending to become even more concentrated on Google, harming consumers who ultimately pay for the cost of advertising. It would also undermine the ability of online publishers such as newspapers to generate revenue and continue to produce valuable content in the future.
… report on the implementation of Google’s Privacy Sandbox commitments, the regulator has said that although the tech giant is so far complying with its demands, there remain considerable areas of concerns …
…
That it must not “design, develop or use the Privacy Sandbox proposals in ways that reinforce the existing market position of its advertising products and services, including Google Ad Manager“
…
It must also address issues with specific Sandbox tools such as how its Topics API targeting alternative can harm smaller tech business, and clarify who will govern the Topics API taxonomy.As part of that same process, they have put considerable friction in place for removing third-party cookies. They've deemed that the removal of third-party cookies could give Google an unfair market advantage, and that is why they're concerned with finding an alternative solution to replace them. This has been a very slow process, and involves many discussions and debates with regulators. That has had significant influence on the design of the Topics API.
To provide a more direct example, the CMA have also put specific stalls into the deprecation process, such as the standstill period invoked last year:
> The CMA will start a formal review of Google’s plan to deprecate cookies and Chrome’s Privacy Sandbox replacements once Google triggers a 60-day standstill period, likely at the beginning of the third quarter. During this standstill, the tech giant is forbidden to put in motion any deprecation procedures on Chrome. ... If they can’t reach an agreement, the 60-day standstill period will become 120 days.
https://www.adweek.com/programmatic/the-cma-is-prepared-to-d...
To put it simply, third-party cookies would have been dead and buried long ago if this dispute were not happening. It may be possible for Google to remove third-party cookies without a replacement, but they'd have be risking a significant lawsuit and contravention of UK authority by doing so.
It seems like damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t.
source: a developer who actually did have to do this (and did it, and now didn’t have to, but it’s done)