Who Do Online Advertisers Think You Are?
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
It seems companies are reluctant to do this though, I guess they think that having advertising available across all demographics is more important than some subscription revenue.
This is something I've been grappling with a lot. I use Adblock Plus and Ghostery and set Firefox to delete almost all cookies on exit. For that small effort, I enjoy a beautifully snappy, ad-free, privacy-respecting web.
With the sole exception of Hulu, no website I've used has denied me its functionality because I block ads. Facebook, Twitter, Google, Stack Exchange, the New York Times and many other ad-supported sites happily give me their content and functionality even though the ads aren't loading.
I feel no ethical obligation to a publisher or service provider to view their ads. Some will disagree, but I insist. It's my strongly held belief that it is always okay to say no to a salesperson, and blocking ads is simply saying no to a large class of potential salespeople in advance.
But there are other stakeholders than just, say, me and Google Inc. Suppose enough people blocked ads that Google was losing money, and had to become a paid service: $5/month to use the search engine, another $5/month for Gmail. Like most of HN, I could easily afford to pay that. Not everyone could. And for a lot of the working poor, they'd have a tough decision to make, and might have to give up access to a couple of great tools for knowledge and communication that, right now, we take it for granted everyone can use.
Conversely, I wonder if there isn't also a sort of elitism going on in terms of who blocks ads. I can't find good stats for all ad blockers on all platforms, but out of over 450 million Firefox users[1], 15 million use the Adblock Plus extension[2]. I'm not sure whether that is a high or low number. It's certainly significant, but it makes you wonder why the other 96% of Firefox users aren't blocking ads. I know there are people who actually like ads and find them helpful, and there are more who would consider blocking ads unethical, maybe even tantamount to stealing (though I disagree). But I wonder if a larger cohort aren't simply unaware how extensively advertisers track them, and that they can stop it with a free addon.
Weirdly, I feel as though there is probably inequality built into the use of ad blockers, where my use of Google services and the like is being subsidized by those with less technological savvy (and possibly, in many cases, lower economic class). But if someone ran a successful education campaign to spread knowledge of ad blockers, for equality's sake, then free services would shutter or turn to paid, and economic inequality would increase.
It's a conundrum I don't know how to resolve. I don't really have a conclusion yet — I'm just dumping my internal conflict here for discussion's sake.
[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/press/ataglance/ under "Fast Facts"
[2] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/adblock-plus/
Speed the day. There's lots of stuff on the internet that is no better than junk mail and just as annoying.
Also, Bluekai, who is highlighted here, has some of the worst data on me of any of the providers - Google is the most accurate (not shocking given the number of Google services I use). Bluekai has me listed as 60-64 - and I'm old but not that old.
Finally, I think the article combines two ideas that are really very different things: RTB and then behavioral profiles. Now the two are connected and inter-related, but there is nothing that says an RTB-based ad has to be targeted using behavioral information (as opposed to content-based targeting for example). And there's nothing to say that a company can't target using behavioral data but not do it using RTB technology - you could come up with a behaviorally targeted list and just execute it through direct buys.
Isn't that complaining about ads being intrusive, then complaining about not getting ads because of targeting?
It's not like Orbitz charge mac users more money by upping the prices only for them.
It's funny because I did a ton of consumer search at Nokia and spend hours and hours listening to people talk about advertising on mobile and irrelevancy was one of the biggest problems. Better targeting saves advertisers money and should piss users off less.
Having complete strangers scrutinize, classify, parcel, and sell my life to those wanting to sell me things I don't need is not terribly useful from my perspective.
I don't begrudge any publisher their source of income, but I am not a commodity.
I object to having the details of my life collected and monetized by strangers for other strangers. My vacation plans are no one's business; my political bent is my own concern; my shoe size is between me and my podiatrist; and I must absolutely insist that it stays that way.
Isn't that an implementation of "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need" social justice ideal? I thought NYT was a little left-leaning and their authors would like that.
The idea that buyers should be treated equally, like anonymous entities and their circumstances should have no bearing on price, is something taken straight out of John Locke's thought experiments.[1]
[1] I have no idea how to link within Google Books so just search this one for "anchor" http://books.google.com/books?id=WYXB2hV1AE4C
It makes little sense to me to speak about advertisement in Marxist terms. The goal is to make money for corporations, hardly a social justice-oriented endeavor.
At any rate, different pricing for serving ads to different people is the antithesis of treating everyone equally. I recognize this but hardly find it noteworthy. At the extreme, the "everyone gets the same ads" mentality causes me to be subjected to ads for diapers and dresses. Comparatively, the ads I currently get are downright fascinating.
I'm not an expert on either, but it seems like "the left" is all about equality (in the strict sense), whereas socialism is more about equity?
From where I'm sitting real-time bidding ("RTB") does indeed seem to be the future of display advertising. Personally I don't see this as a bad thing as the more relevant you can make ads, the more useful they are to the user, the more advertisers will bid and the more publishers (websites) will earn.
As much as on sites like this there are those who speak of the evils of advertising, the fact is that advertising is the only way the vast majority of the Internet can exist.
The article notes:
> In June, Facebook announced that it would introduce a new service called Facebook Exchange, which will enable advertisers to send promotions for Spanish hotels, say, to Facebook users who have searched for trips to Spain.
For the record, Google still maintains a strict separation between search and display.
This quote is bizarre:
> Real-time bidding also makes the online marketplace less of an even playing field,
The New York Times is suddenly concerned with being egalitarian? Really? Also:
> ... based on a hidden auction system that we’re unable to alter or control.
www.google.com/ads/preferences/
Click "Opt out".
(Side note: where is the Facebook equivalent?)
Another point:
> This is bad news for magazines and newspapers: once advertisers were able to track and reach specific consumers, they became less interested in where their ads appeared and more interested in who, specifically, was seeing them.
Online advertising has the merit of being completely measurable in that you can determine to a fraction of a cent how much you spent on impressions, how many of those impressions resulted in a click (resulting in an effective CPC) and how many of those became customers (effective CPA).
Traditional media is suffering because probably since it's existed--and anyone who has bought radio, TV or print advertising should be aware of this--is that the audience numbers are basically a lie. So yes, it's bad news for that lie to be exposed for those perpetuating the lie I guess.
> For example, by knowing discrete and apparently unconnected facts about you — your shirt color, gait, driving habits and the e-mail font you use — companies could, using algorithms that sort the profiles of hundreds of thousands of people like you, accurately predict what kind of porn you surf.
Say what now? An important point:
> ... none of these classifications was accurate, although Tawakol noted that they would become more precise the more I browsed the Web while allowing BlueKai cookies on my computer.
The underlying point here is that advertisers aren't interested in you, the individual, they're interested in you as part of an audience. Note:
> And BlueKai says that its advertising partners can’t identify by name the consumers they’re tracking, and they generally don’t want to.
> But it was a place where people could define themselves and be surprised by experiences in the future that didn’t reflect preferences they expressed in the past.
Really? We're going to wax lyrical about TV advertising in the 1960s now?
This is a bit of an overstatement, I think. There is certainly some good ad-supported stuff, and maybe it's the "vast majority of the Internet" if counted by sheer volume, but if weighted by information quality, I would put it closer to maybe half of the Internet. For my own browsing, probably more like 20-30% of the sites I visit regularly are supported by ad revenue, but I'll admit that's probably low. The rest are not there primarily to make direct revenue through selling ad space, though they might be connected to a profit motive in some other way.
Some in that category: Wikipedia, HN, a whole bunch of *.edu stuff, tumblr, technical blogs run by companies (MSDN Blogs, Googlers' blogs, lots of startups' blogs), Amazon, websites run by think-tanks like Cato or Hoover, arXiv. In fact I think the only ad-supported sites I visit regularly are newspaper websites, Facebook, StackExchange, and Google's properties.
Google's blogs are obviously ads for its products, but you go there knowing this, yet still want to read the content anyways. When you go to NYTimes to read about world news and get shown an ad for a blender, that's entirely different.
I mean, if we are going that far, every article published where the author was compensated mostly in ego (which is to say, nearly everything written) is ad-supported.
Note to google: everyone who doesn't work at google giggles a little every time you say, in all seriousness, that ads are useful to the consumer, outside of supporting services they like.
I personally don't buy google ads because I think they are overpriced; google does too good of a job advertising their ad service. But I certainly acknowledge that they have made ads much more efficient, for people buying and selling ads.
But, really? I think for the consumer? irrelevant ads are probably healthier than relevant ads. Being subject to your vendor's reality distortion field is not in your best interest. As much as possible, you want your filter bubble to exclude media created by your vendor.
(The really interesting case, I think, where you can argue that I am wrong is cisco and microsoft. Both publish some really excellent technical books; I mean, to the point where the excellent technical books become a rational reason for buying cisco kit- Probably the closest one can come to the advertising being good for the consumer. Of course, the books aren't free, and the premium for cisco kit is... substantial.)
I think this paradigm will collapse as we become globalised. My question is when and what will replace it.
4-6 yrs old Make 20-29 Rent Am female
Funny, yes. Accurate? Not a chance in hell.