6 ms·

GDPR will have some negative effects, but why is lowering online ad revenue (if that is what will happen) one of them? What I mean is, why is that a negative ef

by tpm 8y ago

GDPR will have some negative effects, but why is lowering online ad revenue (if that is what will happen) one of them? What I mean is, why is that a negative effect for the whole society, not an industry? Stopping a war has the negative effect of having to manufacture less war supplies, but the overall effect tends to be positive.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
downandout 8y ago
GDPR will have some negative effects, but why is lowering online ad revenue (if that is what will happen) one of them? It's simple math. The ad industry has gotten so large because complex ad targeting tools made it possible to deploy ad campaigns profitably. With those tools extremely watered down due to GDPR, most ads that were profitable on May 24th are not profitable today. Most companies will not sustain these losses for long, and will simply shift their ad spend to other markets where they can still make a profit. Some brand advertisers might stick around in the EU market - Coke, Pepsi, maybe Apple, etc. But with most everyone else out of the picture, the market will shrink. It will likely never again be the size that it was on May 24th.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- jeena 8y ago
  scratching my head - that sounds to me like a positive thing. If a industry has gotten big by doing something bad (misusing private data or using slaves as workers) and a law comes along and forbids that practice than I can't see how this is something negative for the sociaty overall.
  - downandout 8y ago
    You're comparing a retargeting pixel to slavery? That is the kind of mentality that brought us GDPR.
    - jeena 8y ago
      https://wikidiff.com/comparison/analogy https://wikidiff.com/comparison/analogy
      - downandout 8y ago
        You used the slavery reference for a reason - because you consider those two things to be in the same ballpark. There are millions of other references you could have chosen. So yes, my use of the term “compare” was accurate.
        jeena 8y ago
        No I didn't, I used it because I was looking for another bad thing for my analogy and slavery was the first bad thing which came into my mind this time. There are always millions of other and better references one could take for an analogy. But let's look at one of the examples on the wikidiff: > "hardware is to software as a television set is to the shows that appear on it" Would you say that in this analogy the author compares "hardware" to "a television" and "software" to "shows that appear on a television"?
        downandout 8y ago
        I know what an analogy is. I also know that you chose the slavery reference specifically because you wanted to equate - or compare, if you like - the two things.
        jeena 8y ago
        I just told you that I didn't chose it to compare but to insert into my analogy, you still keep comming back with telling me that you know what I wanted to do. I'm not sure how to respond to that.
    - TheForumTroll 8y ago
      No, reading-comprehension like yours is. People read the law like you read his comment. The fines are the biggest new thing. The laws are mostly from the late 90's.
- Jare 8y ago
  > will simply shift their ad spend to other markets That's totally fine, and nothing of tangible value will be lost to society. Some valuable innovations have happened thanks to $$ being fueled into the tech sector via adtech and privacy invasion, and those will suffer, but that's a trade me and many others are happy to make. The "value add" of privacy invasion is purely an arms race.
- joejerryronnie 8y ago
  It's simple math. The ad industry has gotten so large because complex ad targeting tools made it possible to deploy ad campaigns profitably. I don't think anyone really knows this for sure. Of course, Ad Tech companies will come up with some type of "metrics" to show how profitable their particular targeted ads are compared to everyone else. But I think much of the recent technical advances in ad tech are driven more from an arms race mentality - i.e. as an advertiser I feel pressured into using the latest ad targeting tech, not because it is more effective, but because my competitors are using it and I don't want to be left behind (kind of like the VC FOMO herd mentality). Edit: Perhaps you meant profitable for the Ad Tech companies themselves and not the actual product companies purchasing the ads. In this case, I believe your statement is valid (again, not because of the effectiveness of the tech but because of FOMO).
dahdum 8y ago
Short term the publishers relying on that revenue will take a beating, so there should be a contraction in staff / content. It’ll work itself out in the end, some think it will increase overall quality by forcing lower quality news publishers out of the market.
- downandout 8y ago
  How exactly will higher quality news publishers pay for their existence? Most people are conditioned to not pay for it. So where does the money come from?
  - dahdum 8y ago
    The idea is that small publishers go out of business and further media consolidation occurs. Those remaining can force personalized ad compliance by virtue of their reputation and limited choices left.
    - erichocean 8y ago
      > The idea is that small publishers go out of business and further media consolidation occurs. Those remaining can force personalized ad compliance by virtue of their reputation and limited choices left. This is by far the most likely result. Why run an ecommerce store when you can rely on Amazon or eBay to shoulder the costs and risk? GDPR will cause further consolidation, and ironically the companies people are forced to use will have everyone opt-out of the GDPR law by spamming them constantly with "opt-in" links until they click the "stop spamming me" button and the situation is exactly the same as it was yesterday, but with less competition. Unintended consequences indeed.
    - taysic 8y ago
      > Those remaining can force personalized ad compliance by virtue of their reputation Hm? I don't see this happening. Under GDPR you have to offer the same service 'without detriment' if the user does not want personalized ads. Most people would pick this option as long as it is clear to do so. I don't think reputation makes much of a difference. As far as I can tell, they could become paid subscriptions more likely.
cromwellian 8y ago
This is the kind of hyperbolic metaphor that's part of the problem. Is online ad spending a net negative for all of society, or a net positive? It allowed millions of web sites to fund themselves and publish content for free, which enabled millions of other people, many of whom don't have a lot of money to pay for content, to access it. Many of those people would never respond to the ads, so in effect, they were subsidized by those who would respond to the ads. I grew up poor myself in Baltimore city, I could never had afforded to pay for any online content. My parents couldn't even afford cable. We watched broadcast television only. I got all my books from public libraries or used book stores. If most of the services that exist today were behind paywalls and I were still poor, that content would be off limits to me. On the flip side, advertising used to be incredibly wasteful for small businesses. If you're a local dress shop, bakery, or piano teacher, it was much harder for you to "target" people who were highly likely to use your services. Instead, you had to place much more generic ads in many different channels like signage, local newspaper classifieds, the yellow book, circulars, direct mail, and so on. The more precise web based advertising is a revolution for smaller businesses to limit their costs, track campaigns, iterate and test what works, and reach customers cheaper and faster. Is your local bakery saving money and bringing in more local business, evil? Way too much of the rhetoric on HN lately IS literally drinking the cool aid. It's people taking theoretical damage scenarios and way over-inflating them into actual harm. It's worse than the anti-vaxxers who inflate minute risks, or the anti-GMO crowd, who bridge a sledgehammer when a scalpel is needed. The downside of making ad spending less efficient, or erecting pay walls, is going to be greater centralization of the web. Because if you need to do untargeted advertising, than the greatest efficiency comes from reaching the most number of eyeballs. If you need to get paywall subscribers, most small brands won't be able to convince people to pay $10/mo for subscribers, so this will force small publishers into the arms of large consolidators who sell subscriptions, and then dole out pennies, just like the record industry did to musicians. So those wishing for the destruction of the ad supported web as it exists today are really, in effect, creating the unintended consequence of even bigger publishing oligarchies tomorrow, while the little guy is squeezed out by lower margins and higher costs. These regulations aren't really going to punish Google, Facebook, or the other large players very much. They'll survive. It's the mid-sized and smaller companies who will face the greater challenges.
bostik 8y ago
> why is lowering online ad revenue [a negative effect]? It may not do that in the long term. Total spend for online advertising is probably a relatively stable figure. In the short term it will likely have, at least from where I stand, a net positive effect. Now that industrial-grade stalking is finally illegal, companies whose sole business model was based on it will suffer. Possibly collapse. Well boohoo, cry me a river. If and when large enough portion of the target market may no longer be stalked, the advertisers will have to come up with new (or rediscover old), non-intrusive ways to target their audience. The value of intent- and context-based audience segmentation might just go up again. But how do you know which ads, and on which sites, ended up working the best? How about generating per-impression [bonus] codes? You don't need to stalk your potential customers if they willingly submit opaque and non-trackable information that allows you to trace the ad campaigns. GDPR does allow incentivisation, after all.

by tpm 8y ago

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

downandout 8y ago

GDPR will have some negative effects, but why is lowering online ad revenue (if that is what will happen) one of them? It's simple math. The ad industry has gotten so large because complex ad targeting tools made it possible to deploy ad campaigns profitably. With those tools extremely watered down due to GDPR, most ads that were profitable on May 24th are not profitable today. Most companies will not sustain these losses for long, and will simply shift their ad spend to other markets where they can still make a profit. Some brand advertisers might stick around in the EU market - Coke, Pepsi, maybe Apple, etc. But with most everyone else out of the picture, the market will shrink. It will likely never again be the size that it was on May 24th.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
jeena 8y ago
scratching my head - that sounds to me like a positive thing. If a industry has gotten big by doing something bad (misusing private data or using slaves as workers) and a law comes along and forbids that practice than I can't see how this is something negative for the sociaty overall.
- downandout 8y ago
  You're comparing a retargeting pixel to slavery? That is the kind of mentality that brought us GDPR.
  - jeena 8y ago
    https://wikidiff.com/comparison/analogy https://wikidiff.com/comparison/analogy
    - downandout 8y ago
      You used the slavery reference for a reason - because you consider those two things to be in the same ballpark. There are millions of other references you could have chosen. So yes, my use of the term “compare” was accurate.
      - jeena 8y ago
        No I didn't, I used it because I was looking for another bad thing for my analogy and slavery was the first bad thing which came into my mind this time. There are always millions of other and better references one could take for an analogy. But let's look at one of the examples on the wikidiff: > "hardware is to software as a television set is to the shows that appear on it" Would you say that in this analogy the author compares "hardware" to "a television" and "software" to "shows that appear on a television"?
        downandout 8y ago
        I know what an analogy is. I also know that you chose the slavery reference specifically because you wanted to equate - or compare, if you like - the two things.
        jeena 8y ago
        I just told you that I didn't chose it to compare but to insert into my analogy, you still keep comming back with telling me that you know what I wanted to do. I'm not sure how to respond to that.
  - TheForumTroll 8y ago
    No, reading-comprehension like yours is. People read the law like you read his comment. The fines are the biggest new thing. The laws are mostly from the late 90's.
Jare 8y ago
> will simply shift their ad spend to other markets That's totally fine, and nothing of tangible value will be lost to society. Some valuable innovations have happened thanks to $$ being fueled into the tech sector via adtech and privacy invasion, and those will suffer, but that's a trade me and many others are happy to make. The "value add" of privacy invasion is purely an arms race.
joejerryronnie 8y ago
It's simple math. The ad industry has gotten so large because complex ad targeting tools made it possible to deploy ad campaigns profitably. I don't think anyone really knows this for sure. Of course, Ad Tech companies will come up with some type of "metrics" to show how profitable their particular targeted ads are compared to everyone else. But I think much of the recent technical advances in ad tech are driven more from an arms race mentality - i.e. as an advertiser I feel pressured into using the latest ad targeting tech, not because it is more effective, but because my competitors are using it and I don't want to be left behind (kind of like the VC FOMO herd mentality). Edit: Perhaps you meant profitable for the Ad Tech companies themselves and not the actual product companies purchasing the ads. In this case, I believe your statement is valid (again, not because of the effectiveness of the tech but because of FOMO).

dahdum 8y ago

Short term the publishers relying on that revenue will take a beating, so there should be a contraction in staff / content. It’ll work itself out in the end, some think it will increase overall quality by forcing lower quality news publishers out of the market.

downandout 8y ago
How exactly will higher quality news publishers pay for their existence? Most people are conditioned to not pay for it. So where does the money come from?
- dahdum 8y ago
  The idea is that small publishers go out of business and further media consolidation occurs. Those remaining can force personalized ad compliance by virtue of their reputation and limited choices left.
  - erichocean 8y ago
    > The idea is that small publishers go out of business and further media consolidation occurs. Those remaining can force personalized ad compliance by virtue of their reputation and limited choices left. This is by far the most likely result. Why run an ecommerce store when you can rely on Amazon or eBay to shoulder the costs and risk? GDPR will cause further consolidation, and ironically the companies people are forced to use will have everyone opt-out of the GDPR law by spamming them constantly with "opt-in" links until they click the "stop spamming me" button and the situation is exactly the same as it was yesterday, but with less competition. Unintended consequences indeed.
  - taysic 8y ago
    > Those remaining can force personalized ad compliance by virtue of their reputation Hm? I don't see this happening. Under GDPR you have to offer the same service 'without detriment' if the user does not want personalized ads. Most people would pick this option as long as it is clear to do so. I don't think reputation makes much of a difference. As far as I can tell, they could become paid subscriptions more likely.

cromwellian 8y ago

This is the kind of hyperbolic metaphor that's part of the problem. Is online ad spending a net negative for all of society, or a net positive? It allowed millions of web sites to fund themselves and publish content for free, which enabled millions of other people, many of whom don't have a lot of money to pay for content, to access it. Many of those people would never respond to the ads, so in effect, they were subsidized by those who would respond to the ads. I grew up poor myself in Baltimore city, I could never had afforded to pay for any online content. My parents couldn't even afford cable. We watched broadcast television only. I got all my books from public libraries or used book stores. If most of the services that exist today were behind paywalls and I were still poor, that content would be off limits to me. On the flip side, advertising used to be incredibly wasteful for small businesses. If you're a local dress shop, bakery, or piano teacher, it was much harder for you to "target" people who were highly likely to use your services. Instead, you had to place much more generic ads in many different channels like signage, local newspaper classifieds, the yellow book, circulars, direct mail, and so on. The more precise web based advertising is a revolution for smaller businesses to limit their costs, track campaigns, iterate and test what works, and reach customers cheaper and faster. Is your local bakery saving money and bringing in more local business, evil? Way too much of the rhetoric on HN lately IS literally drinking the cool aid. It's people taking theoretical damage scenarios and way over-inflating them into actual harm. It's worse than the anti-vaxxers who inflate minute risks, or the anti-GMO crowd, who bridge a sledgehammer when a scalpel is needed. The downside of making ad spending less efficient, or erecting pay walls, is going to be greater centralization of the web. Because if you need to do untargeted advertising, than the greatest efficiency comes from reaching the most number of eyeballs. If you need to get paywall subscribers, most small brands won't be able to convince people to pay $10/mo for subscribers, so this will force small publishers into the arms of large consolidators who sell subscriptions, and then dole out pennies, just like the record industry did to musicians. So those wishing for the destruction of the ad supported web as it exists today are really, in effect, creating the unintended consequence of even bigger publishing oligarchies tomorrow, while the little guy is squeezed out by lower margins and higher costs. These regulations aren't really going to punish Google, Facebook, or the other large players very much. They'll survive. It's the mid-sized and smaller companies who will face the greater challenges.

bostik 8y ago

> why is lowering online ad revenue [a negative effect]? It may not do that in the long term. Total spend for online advertising is probably a relatively stable figure. In the short term it will likely have, at least from where I stand, a net positive effect. Now that industrial-grade stalking is finally illegal, companies whose sole business model was based on it will suffer. Possibly collapse. Well boohoo, cry me a river. If and when large enough portion of the target market may no longer be stalked, the advertisers will have to come up with new (or rediscover old), non-intrusive ways to target their audience. The value of intent- and context-based audience segmentation might just go up again. But how do you know which ads, and on which sites, ended up working the best? How about generating per-impression [bonus] codes? You don't need to stalk your potential customers if they willingly submit opaque and non-trackable information that allows you to trace the ad campaigns. GDPR does allow incentivisation, after all.