3 ms·

Ok, given the ads hate on HN this will be a pretty unpopular opinion here but... RTB is a good thing. It ensures that Google and FB don't become even more monop

Ok, given the ads hate on HN this will be a pretty unpopular opinion here but... RTB is a good thing. It ensures that Google and FB don't become even more monopolies. Open ad exchanges ensure better efficiency of offer and demand and a somewhat middle ground between publishers and advertisers. In theory, it also ensures an alignment of incentives: higher quality ads (because advertisers want ads that perform better whereas publishers don't care as much on average, as long as they get paid)... Which of course comes at a privacy cost. Remove or erode RTB (as it has been the case over the years with FB closing its ad exchange, Youtube not even offering an exchange etc) and you'll see the nightmarish closed web we all dread: all the long tail of websites won't be able to monetize anymore, and everyone will be at the mercy of Google and FB for any content to be published (AMP etc.). I'm sure Google and FB lawyers are super happy about GDPR: EU is helping them entrench their monopolies. I guess what I'm trying to say is that in the current state of things, you cannot complain about "ads are evil and don't work", "Google and FB are monopolies" and "I want privacy" at the same time. The three are linked. If you push for privacy, you'll hurt open web (because you'll consolidate advertising to Google and Facebook which are on the publishers side so have less incentives to make ads work because they fully control inventory). Patreon, Brave BAT and crypto etc. are good ideas to change the fundamental economics of the web. But in the status quo, we cannot have everything: privacy AND free services like Google and Facebook AND these companies not being monopolies interested in data collection. [Disclosure: I've built a lot of ads targeting models in the past for a living]

Mirioron 7y ago
>I'm sure Google and FB lawyers are super happy about GDPR: EU is helping them entrench their monopolies. We saw some information about this rather soon after GDPR went into effect.[0] I wonder if there's some more recent data like this. [0] https://whotracks.me/blog/gdpr-what-happened.html https://whotracks.me/blog/gdpr-what-happened.html
zrk 7y ago
I also had something to do with the RTB ecosystem. You have a point, but I was also impressed at how low the standards were, how cheaply you could target an immense amount of people, and how nothing is enforced. A total nobody could easily spend O($1000) and serve malware to millions of people, served out of his own ad server. If he was going through a DSP there would be some sort of approval of ads but no enforcement that the same ad was the one actually being served. This was when Flash was still around and unsandboxed on most browsers and buggy as hell. Oh, and the industry-standard self-hosted ad server was a PHP thing which carried a backdoor for months/years before anyone noticed. Someone just replaced the tarball on the developer's site and went unnoticed. And the people selling data... do most people know that this is possible: you buy a car, offline, at company X. They have your phone number. You visit website Y, type your phone number. You visit site Z, they can buy your phone number from website Y, and match that to your phone from the car company which sold your data to third-party W, and know for a fact which car you bought. No profiling, statistics, guessing, inference. They have the actual data. Costs O($0.25). This was years ago, frankly I doubt things improved and I doubt they are as cash-rich now.
- tjoff 7y ago
  > This was years ago, frankly I doubt things improved It has improved immensely wherever GDPR is in place.
luckylion 7y ago
> But in the status quo, we cannot have everything: privacy AND free services like Google and Facebook AND these companies not being monopolies interested in data collection. Great. Fuck free services, let me pay for the service and retain my privacy.
kenhwang 7y ago
I agree that RTB probably is healthier for the advertising ecosystem, but given how rampant privacy abuses are, blasting out a users private information to every bidder in the auction seems like a tough sell.

Mirioron 7y ago

>I'm sure Google and FB lawyers are super happy about GDPR: EU is helping them entrench their monopolies. We saw some information about this rather soon after GDPR went into effect.[0] I wonder if there's some more recent data like this. [0] https://whotracks.me/blog/gdpr-what-happened.html https://whotracks.me/blog/gdpr-what-happened.html

zrk 7y ago

I also had something to do with the RTB ecosystem. You have a point, but I was also impressed at how low the standards were, how cheaply you could target an immense amount of people, and how nothing is enforced. A total nobody could easily spend O($1000) and serve malware to millions of people, served out of his own ad server. If he was going through a DSP there would be some sort of approval of ads but no enforcement that the same ad was the one actually being served. This was when Flash was still around and unsandboxed on most browsers and buggy as hell. Oh, and the industry-standard self-hosted ad server was a PHP thing which carried a backdoor for months/years before anyone noticed. Someone just replaced the tarball on the developer's site and went unnoticed. And the people selling data... do most people know that this is possible: you buy a car, offline, at company X. They have your phone number. You visit website Y, type your phone number. You visit site Z, they can buy your phone number from website Y, and match that to your phone from the car company which sold your data to third-party W, and know for a fact which car you bought. No profiling, statistics, guessing, inference. They have the actual data. Costs O($0.25). This was years ago, frankly I doubt things improved and I doubt they are as cash-rich now.

tjoff 7y ago
> This was years ago, frankly I doubt things improved It has improved immensely wherever GDPR is in place.

luckylion 7y ago

> But in the status quo, we cannot have everything: privacy AND free services like Google and Facebook AND these companies not being monopolies interested in data collection. Great. Fuck free services, let me pay for the service and retain my privacy.

kenhwang 7y ago

I agree that RTB probably is healthier for the advertising ecosystem, but given how rampant privacy abuses are, blasting out a users private information to every bidder in the auction seems like a tough sell.