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Comment by gruez | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure what this blog is complaining about.

>Problem one: Over-rating search, social, and app store ads

Isn't this a problem with today's ad attribution system? The author doesn't try to argue how the new system makes it worse.

>Problem two: Incentives for extra tracking

Same as above. It sounds like he's against attribution in general, which is an okay position to have, but I'd rather he say this upfront and more directly rather than spending 1k+ words on what essentially can be boiled down to "I hate Attribution Level 1 because it's attribution, and attribution is bad in general", and implying the issues he has are issues with Attribution Level 1 specifically.

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The issue is that problem one is real, but not in a way that's beneficial to other advertising products.

Search, social and app store ads are over rated in that a lot of brands should probably decrease their investment, but things like programmatic display ads are absolutely not under rated. The correct number of dollars that should be spent on those placements is close to zero.

Agreed, this can't be worse than what it's replacing. Still, the author has some interesting points I hadn't considered before.

I guess from the advertiser's perspective this standard could be a concern, because the loss of cookie-based tracking might make it harder for them to develop alternative attribution tracking methods that don't have the same data quality problems.

> Agreed, this can't be worse than what it's replacing.

The mistake is assuming this replaces anything instead of becoming just one more piece of the tracking puzzle.

Even if it did "replace" cookies or whatever, it's strictly worse than "before" because it's giving advertising a front seat in the browser. My browser should be doing precisely nothing to help you attribute your ad impressions or whatever. But now Mozilla et al have to waste their time maintaining and augmenting this opaque piece of mathematical faff.

This is a debate I've seen many times now on HN. I sympathize with what you're saying, but the flip side is that many users seem to prefer a free ad-supported funding model over a paid, ad-free model. If a site is going to be serving me ads anyway, then all else being equal I'd rather them make as much money off each impression as possible to incentivize them to keep providing me with free services. The privacy and resource cost of a user's browser sending anonymized attribution statistics is very minimal.

Do you want to click through and spend money on the ads?

If not you aren't really working towards them paying a lot for ads, right?

>Do you want to click through and spend money on the ads?

Nobody "wants" ads, but they do want the free content they get today, which are funded by ads.

Nobody asked for free content. It was pushed on us so they could track us. Before the Internet, you normally paid for what you consumed (at least, more than now. And before that even more).

Newspapers, network tv, etc has been subsidized by ads for 100 years+

And for the most part of this time period they weren't free.

Maybe? Depends on what the ads are for. Obviously I'm not going to buy something I don't actually want just to support the site I'm on, but I have no particular objection to buying something I discovered through an ad if it's something I would buy anyway if I discovered it organically.

> many users seem to prefer a free ad-supported funding model over a paid, ad-free model.

You don't need pervasive and invasive tracking and wholesale trading of your data to display advertising.

Correct. The whole point of this proposal (and other related ones like FloC/the topics API) is to get rid of the former while preserving the effectiveness of the latter.

> Agreed, this can't be worse than what it's replacing.

Why can't it?

Because as GP alluded to, the thing it's replacing (cookies) already does exactly the same thing but isn't anonymized.

> the thing it's replacing (cookies) already does exactly the same thing but isn't anonymized.

No idea what it's replacing. Cookies is a red herring. Tracking involves more than just cookies.

It’s not replacing cookies, though.

It’s adding an additional feature that provides information to advertisers that they currently use cookies as one part of, with different considerations.

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