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Ad Companies Love Google’s Ad Blocker, but Hate Apple’s Privacy Features
- soared 9y agoA bit overblown on the reaction to Apple's changes, but this article is generally true. I'd love to serve only high quality ads on high quality inventory. There is a ton of cheap, low quality impressions in the market right now. It can be difficult to /not/ buy these, and this is a step in the right direction. Right now there are 3rd party vendors that analyze sites and block sites with 3+ ads, or certain types of content, but they aren't terribly effective and often block high quality sites too. My biggest challenge is blocking sites I know are absolute garbage but they use strategies to stop me from blocking them. Fucking topix.com / topix.net is really difficult to block because they constantly create new domains (topixstars.com, topixparenthood.com, etc) so blaclisting their domain isn't even effective.
- IntronExon 9y agoAm I wrong to think that all of this is trying too little, too late? Why wouldn’t people just use an adblocker st this point? Everyone I know and care about gets them installed by me, and I’m sure that not unusual. Getting uBO is isn’t a technically challenging activity, and it works. Am I missing the obvious again?
- bcoates 9y agoGoogle is hoping that this will discourage people from going to even the minimal effort to use an adblocker. The next step will be to mildly then not-so-mildly burden effective adblockers on Chrome.
- bestnameever 9y agouBO seems to block ads well enough for me but not the tracking. I can easily see this by turning off uBO. What's a good way to block tracking within chrome?
- IntronExon 9y agouMatrix and a random user agent spoofer should do it.
- bzbarsky 9y ago> Why wouldn’t people just use an adblocker st this point? Because once Google ships their built-in adblocker in Chrome, they plan to start putting up paywalls for users that are using other adblockers (but only on the sites where Chrome itself is not blocking ads). They've made this pretty clear in their communications about the whole thing if you read them carefully.
- kodablah 9y agoCan you show me where this is pretty clear? Not completely doubting you, but I am a bit skeptical that they would get into the cat-and-mouse game of ad blocker detection.
- bzbarsky 9y agoSee the bit about "Funding Choices" at https://www.blog.google/topics/journalism-news/building-better-web-everyone/ https://www.blog.google/topics/journalism-news/building-bett... and the documentation for that at https://support.google.com/fundingchoices/answer/7362965?hl=en https://support.google.com/fundingchoices/answer/7362965?hl=... [Edit: I guess https://support.google.com/fundingchoices/answer/7074355?hl=en&ref_topic=7074184 https://support.google.com/fundingchoices/answer/7074355?hl=... is a better toplevel summary of what "Funding Choices" is about.]
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- bsears 9y agoGood on Apple for allowing tracking cookies to be blocked, i'd next like to see them implement blocking of tracking scripts. They are a nuisance to privacy as well as contributing to web bloat. I've seen sites with 20+ trackers each with their own javascript and all it takes is for one to be compromised for an XSS vector to be opened.
- negus 9y agoThat's true, but this web bloat pays the bills. It is what brings you and billions of other people great services like maps, email, translate etc for free. Web without ads would not be the same as it is now and I'm not sure whether it would seem better to you
- jedrek 9y agoIt only pays for the bills because publishers have said, "sure, put whatever tracking script you want on there, we don't care". And yet they have the power, because they have the eyeballs. Look, nobody runs 30 second commercials in a loop for an hour at prime time, because the TV stations know it would chase viewers away forever. Publishers have to draw a line in the sand and hold it. Not likely, though. It took browser makers to kill pop up ads.
- mentos 9y agoHa wow I completely forgot about the days of pop-up ads that was such an intrusive nightmare.
- alkonaut 9y agoHonestly just charge for the services or take them offline I say. I want to pay for Facebook with money. I can’t. I’d really like to see a complete attack - technical and legal - that goes even further than Apple’s on the current ad business model even if it means 90% of ad revenue disappears over night, and a similar fraction of “free” services do too.
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- fouc 9y agoA good reminder that Google's customers are actually advertisers, whereas Apple's customers are the end-user.
- qeternity 9y agoPut another way: Google's users are the product. Apple's users are the customer.
- aetherson 9y agoIs there any doubt that Apple loves their products more than their customers? This whole "you're the product" thing gets repeated over and over again with no thought or analysis. Being the product instead of the customer has plusses and minuses. Have you worked with a recruiter? You're definitely the product there: they're selling you to employers, who are their customers. I've dealt with recruiters both as the product (prospective employee) and the customer (employer). In general, I prefer to be the product, though neither is entirely comfortable. By far the more important dynamic is are you a valuable product/customer. That's what gets you treated well. The answer to that for any mass-market company is "no."
- soziawa 9y ago> You're definitely the product there: they're selling you to employers, who are their customers. I've dealt with recruiters both as the product (prospective employee) and the customer (employer). In general, I prefer to be the product, though neither is entirely comfortable. But there is a huge difference between recruiting for a factory employing 100'000 people (or in Googles case billions) or recruiting a more important person. I guess you were the latter.
- aetherson 9y agoYes, that was in fact the last paragraph of my comment.
- qeternity 9y ago
- tomc1985 9y agoWhy should we, or Apple, care about how much money these ad companies are losing?
- elefanten 9y agoWe absolutely should not. Advertising is almost pure rent-seeking; it's a horribly inefficient solution for the actual utility component it provides society. I think this is one of those situations where an inferior mechanism has won (at least in this phase of history) because it disproportionately benefits power holders and platform operators. Advertising is sanctioned manipulation and lying. It matches customers to products, but does so by focusing on lies, mind tricks and human hacks rather than desired customer outcome. It's broken at its core as a concept.
- shaki-dora 9y agoThe majority of money spend on ads ends up with content creators, who, in turn, use it to produce the information their visitors value. It is therefore not "rent seeking" under any definition of the term.
- bzbarsky 9y ago> The majority of money spend on ads ends up with content creators Do you happen to have good data on this? I've been wondering how much ends up with various middlemen (including Google) and how much ends up with content creators. To put numbers to this, according to https://www.statista.com/statistics/237974/online-advertising-spending-worldwide/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/237974/online-advertisin... about $194 billion was spent on internet advertising in 2016. Google's revenue in 2016 (not all from ads, but mostly) was ~$89 billion according to https://www.statista.com/statistics/266206/googles-annual-global-revenue/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/266206/googles-annual-gl... while Facebook's was ~$27 billion according to https://www.statista.com/statistics/277229/facebooks-annual-revenue-and-net-income/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/277229/facebooks-annual-... I did check a few other sources and https://investor.fb.com/investor-news/press-release-details/2017/facebook-Reports-Fourth-Quarter-and-Full-Year-2016-Results/default.aspx https://investor.fb.com/investor-news/press-release-details/... gives about the same $27b number for Facebook and https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000165204418000007/goog10-kq42017.htm#s8EA9B2C52778A3A42DF578DB9C94AC32 https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000165204418... lists ~$90b total revenues for Alphabet. Cross-checking the advertising number is harder; I see numbers around $70b for 2016 from the IAB, but maybe those are US-only. In any case, just the revenue for Facebook and Google is already 60% of the total ad spend if the numbers above are right. And that assumes there are no other middlemen. So I don't see how the content creators can be ending up with anything like a "majority" of the ad spend.
- brockers 9y agoI'm not a big fan of Apple, but this is one obvious side benefit to the company that writes your software being the one that sells you your hardware. User experience extend to more than just the feel of you keyboard.
- combatentropy 9y agoI like customized ads. All my life I hated advertising. It was really weird when I started my own business and started to get postcards for things related to my business and I found myself actually enjoying them. Furthermore, I don't get the aversion to tracking cookies. I just don't see a likely downside to it, though I've heard theoretical ones like what if the U.S. becomes a communist dictatorship some day. That said, my targeted ads online still haven't nailed it. Half the time they're for something I just bought. Like, I just bought a watch on Amazon, so now on Facebook I see ads for watches for three weeks. Too late. (Of course the example is fake. Nobody buys watches anymore.) Anyway, half the time they're too late, the other half they're just too off the mark. For example, I'm thinking of moving. So I research apartments in that city. So Facebook shows me ads for apartments for the city I'm still in. The best ads for me have been the ones based on AdSense -- that is, the text of the page that I'm on. I'm reading an article about how to use a hammer, and at the bottom is an ad for a hammer. No tracking cookies required, and yet a better match.
- konschubert 9y agoI wonder if all those ads that are shown too late show up in some marketing department's data analytics with really good conversion rates...
- shostack 9y agoNot if you've already converted. Those are likely wasted impressions that drag down numbers, not improve them. Often what can happen is you can have retargeting lists setup that populate automatically, but depending on how they are implemented, how frequently they are updated, etc., they may have set things up as exclusion lists properly (or even just removed people from the retargeting list). Likewise, that data may not carry over super well across devices in all cases. This stuff can be a headache to setup and maintain, particularly at scale, and I think a lot of people don't realize the complexity of what is involved when they haven't done it themselves.
- dunkelheit 9y agoOne of the arguments that ad companies employ to justify their tracking activities is that current ads are not customized enough. It goes like this: hey, do you remember the time when the ads we showed you were so obviously hilariously off the mark? We admit that this is a glaring failure on our part and we would very much like to correct it. To do it we need even more personal information from you! Only then we will be able to show you the ads that are ideally aligned to your interests and needs. I'd say this is total bullshit. The incentives are just fundamentally misaligned. Perfectly customized ads will just perfectly employ your hidden biases to trick you into buying things you don't need.
- michaeljbishop 9y agoWhy would this be surprising? Apple has no skin in the advertising game, while it's the core of Google's income.
- saagarjha 9y agoWell, they used to with iAd, but they basically axed it a while ago.
- bobbyi_settv 9y agoAdvertisers are the core of Google's income. "Ad Companies" are to a large extent their competitors.
- Wehrdo 9y agoI've always wondered how much a typical internet user generates in ad revenue. Basically, if I wanted to buy out my ads for a year, how much would it cost me? I've never seen this number, and it seems highly relevant in the the debate over ad-supported services versus paywalls.
- myroon5 9y agoAVG PrivacyFix used to have a (probably biased and inaccurate but still) neat little tool that estimated how much you were worth to FB, Google, Twitter, etc after connecting your accounts. But I can't seem to find it anymore.
- code4tee 9y agoAnother reminder that with Apple you are their customer. With Google you are their product.
- yorby 9y agoAre they talking about PRISM privacy features? (IE: because the NSA doesn't let them tap into the data)
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- FiveSquared 9y agoFinally HTG! Love the website and it is a gem. (Not sponsored)
- Jerry2 9y agoGoogle, first and foremost, is an advertising company. Their main business are ads and everything else revolves around creating products that attract users to use their services so they be monetized using their ad platform. The whole purpose being Google's "ad blocker" is to protect their advertising business. They know that ads are starting to annoy a lot of people so they're going to ban worst offenders and try to stop users from installing an actual ad blocker that blocks all ads. Apple is not an advertising company and they care about their end users and want them to buy their devices. Providing an unobtrusive and private browsing experience is what they care about.
- gozrik 9y agoDoes this popup block plan include exit popups and email capture js boxes? If so, some specialized SaaS companies like Sumo could be out of business
- andybak 9y ago"Consumers love free content, hate micro-transactions and subscriptions." It will will be interesting to see how this pans out away from LaLa Land where people work for free. Personally I wouldn't be sad if a huge chunk of the internet content industry disappeared and we returned to the halcyon days of amateur bloggers. But many people being sold on the evils of advertising aren't fully understanding the economics of the market that provides their daily fix.
- aarbor989 9y agoTo be frank, Apple blocking 3rd party cookies really doesn't make that big of an impact. The Safari market share is small enough where it really doesn't matter, and there are already cookie-less tracking solutions in place that are more reliable than cookies anyways