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So what is going to happen when Apple succeeds in making it impossible to make any money off advertisements shown to iOS users on the web? I'm currently imagin
by rale00 7y ago
So what is going to happen when Apple succeeds in making it impossible to make any money off advertisements shown to iOS users on the web?
I'm currently imagining a future where publishers start to just redirect iOS traffic to install their app, where they can actually make money. Good news for the walled garden, I guess?
- andykx 7y agoIt is not impossible to advertise without tracking users.
- peanutz454 7y agoFor some reason people just have an aversion to paying for stuff they use. Facebook's revenue per user is less than 7$, I don't use facebook, but do not mind paying that little for something I use instead of getting tracked wherever I go. Similarly Google's service that I use like gmail and photos are easily worth about 7$ per month. I would pay if they said they will stop tracking me. I don't know about youtube.
- cameronbrown 7y agoYouTube being the only one you've listed that has a premium option. The problem is people will say they'll pay but as soon as the option comes up, they don't.
- therealx 7y agoSure, but YouTube doesn't stop tracking you when you pay.
- tialaramex 7y agoBut what does that mean? YouTube keeps a history list, which I download and periodically reset. If it didn't I would need to add some sort of Firefox add-on that remembered which videos I'd seen. What else are they "tracking"? Does YouTube have tracking on other sites (like Facebook, Twitter etc)? I haven't seen anything like that. You can switch the history off, I presume that would work even without Premium, but it never occurred to me to even try it since I definitely want history.
- fapjacks 7y agoWell, for starters, now they're tracking that you are willing to pay a ransom. That's the same kind of knowledge value as spammers get when a user clicks the "unsubscribe" link in one of their emails.
- auslander 7y agoI found the best method against spam is to disable download of remote images in email client. Having no viewing confirmation, spam slowly stops.
- auslander 7y ago> You can switch the history off And trust Google, Ad company, to erase it in its backend?
- ferzul 7y agoif youtube isn't tracking me in malicious way, why would I pay them to stop them from tracking me? but the error here is conflating a tool with a legal person. Google will track me no matter how much I pay them for any of their services, including YouTube. the situation at the moment is that no-one believes that a corporation who offers a free service is going to not track you because you pay for the premium version. so (a) I'm not going to pay Google or Facebook to get the premium version since it is not going to be untracked and (b) Google and Facebook aren't going to detrack their premium services since no-one believes that's going to happen anyway - the value add is removing ads/playing with the screen off/etc not the absence of tracking. the best you can do is pay a third party to offer you some service Google or Facebook offers for free, thereby reducing your exposure. for instance, Google surely knows the content of many emails sent to me, but not all of them, since I pay for email from another provider; or I'm strongly considering paying for a substitute for Google docs, except that I don't like unpredictable monthly USD payments.
- cameronbrown 7y agoDisclaimer: Opinions are my own etc.. I personally think a better way to sell YouTube Premium wouldn't be to focus on just the ads, yes that should be a part of it, but consumers have shown they want certain things in particular (via Patreon): 1. A way to support their favourite creators (adblock whitelisting proves people care more about creators than the downsides of ads - I do for sure) 2. A way to get exclusive content in return, or maybe just a shoutout. Super Chat is one of the best things YouTube has ever done in this regard. It's amazing how much money flows through to creators when they do live-streams & premiere events. A lesson can be learned from Steam's fight with piracy wrt ad-free versions. You've either got to: 1. Make it an easier sell to purchase YouTube Premium than to get AdBlock (not-likely) 2. Make a significant value-add for the premium offering "be a better service than piracy". The problem is that YouTube's not been doing too well with option two, and they're simultaneously making their advertising products a worse sell for business customers. I'm very interested to see how they adapt to the changing market though.
- TeMPOraL 7y agoWhy would they if they can still not pay and get ads, which hurt less short-term (spending money can feel like losing hit points), and can be ignored either through effort or an ad blocker? Ten times more so if you still are going to show them ads. You want people to pay, make them pay. If you worry about ad-driven competitors, then maybe this should serve as a good argument to advocate instituting regulations against funding services with ads.
- flyinglizard 7y agoThe problem is that by doing that, you’re skimming the top percentile of your user base with the most purchasing power. You’re much less attractive to advertisers then.
- rahimnathwani 7y agoThe same argument could be made arguing against the launch of YouTube Premium.
- flyinglizard 7y agoYouTube has essentially monopolized video (especially being that Netflix has no adverts). YouTube knows that from that position, it’s competing only with adblockers.
- wbl 7y agoNotice how the NY Times has subscriptions.
- makomk 7y agoWhich makes the New York Times very attractive to advertisers since they show adverts to their subscribers, meaning that they offer a pre-selected audience of people with higher purchasing power.
- downandout 7y agoGoogle makes $21 on average per US user per month [1], almost all of which comes from advertising. Would you pay $21/mo for your Google services? [1] https://mondaynote.com/the-arpus-of-the-big-four-dwarf-everybody-else-e5b02a579ed3 https://mondaynote.com/the-arpus-of-the-big-four-dwarf-every...
- danielscrubs 7y agoI’ve bought zero products via google ads, except the case when I search for a company name and their official homepage is the top sponsored result. Which is insane. And yet, my eyeballs looking at text with less text than a tweet is worth 21 USD. It feels like Google disrupted, but it’s far away from being optimal for companies.
- ferzul 7y agowell, I don't see Google ads so I don't know what the content is, but no-one knows that I bought a coke after seeing an ad for a coke at the train station. but it still works. the effectiveness of advertising is an empirical question.
- Someone 7y ago$21 per user per month, on average, doesn’t imply $21 on you, every single month. Other users react differently to that advertiser and/or you may click once every few years to bring in $1,000 advertising revenue for them on a very high-margin item.
- joosters 7y agoJust because you've not bought something by clicking on an ad doesn't mean that the advertising has changed your purchasing habits. ...unless you are magically immune from advertising?
- danielscrubs 7y agoI saw a coke sign three hours ago outside. I’ve been surfing the net for one hour and don’t remember a single ad. I don’t use adblockers. I’m not saying ads don’t work. I’m saying Google Ads are ready to in turn be disrupted. Especially with bots running amok...
- golemiprague 7y agoyou can buy a g-suite user for 9$, then they don't track you
- davedx 7y agoTell that to Spotify, Netflix, Apple, all the other thousands of subscriptions based businesses. People are maybe less willing to pay for something they’ve been using for free (with ads) for years.
- rpastuszak 7y agoContextual targeting is fairly kosher and can be genuinely useful. Let's hope changes like these make the current approach less feasible, cost-wise.
- ARandomerDude 7y agoYes. The walled garden of AAPL. Spend money in an app, Apple gets a cut. As it is, Google and Facebook get the revenue instead.
- sesellis 7y agoAs an end user I’d rather have it be this way though. At least under this model I can download apps and vote with my wallet.
- cromwellian 7y agoAnd if every website becomes an app because that's the only way to make money, the distributed, decentralize web dies in favor of one giant app store. Is that what you want? Most of human culture behind app based paywalls? No more archive.org content to preserve. Micropayments everywhere? Can you imagine the cognitive burden of continuously, always, purchasing stuff? Of the effect on the have-nots for whom deciding to pay money for commodity content vs immediate needs is a much more important decision?
- saagarjha 7y agoApple gets no money from in-app advertisements.
- ARandomerDude 7y agoI didn't say they did. I was talking about users making in-app purchases vs no user purchase and Google/FB relying on advertising.
- nyolfen 7y agoperhaps they can just use advertising that doesn't involve tracking
- Analemma_ 7y agoI’m way past the point of caring. Five years ago maybe I’d have been bothered, but targeted advertisement installs spyware on my computer, destroys its performance, and builds a profile on me that is begging to be exploited by hackers and/or the government. May it rot in pieces and to hell with the consequences, and if advertisers are unhappy that I’ve taken such an extreme position, they should examine how their behavior drove me to this point.
- dbuder 7y agoFrom my experience, the people making these decisions are incapable of examining their behavior. When many news websites tried to go paywall a few years ago I spoke to someone who worked at one of them and I tried to be diplomatic but eventually said, why do you need 26 pieces of malware to display less than a thousand words and why is the the size of any given page bigger than a Windows 3.1 install? I didn't even get a coherent response, it was basically, oh these guys in a meeting said we need to and we wanted the money so we happily signed up.
- geofft 7y agoDidn't people make money off internet advertising before the modern surveillance-marketing complex? What happened to it? I mean, maybe the answer is that those ads were only profitable because of the novelty factor and now that we have metrics we know they don't work, or at least don't work anywhere close to how much they cost. But I do miss things like the webcomics running their own ad network, Google's textual ads based solely on the search query, even the text ads on Read The Docs from a few years ago, etc. Also I assume / hope that iOS ads aren't tracking people either; third-party cookies simply have no equivalent in the iOS app sandbox design. (And in-app ads tend to be abysmally targeted in my experience, at best "You're playing a mobile game? Try this other mobile game with even more in-app purchases!") So why wouldn't similarly untargeted web ads work too?
- kibwen 7y ago> Didn't people make money off internet advertising before the modern surveillance-marketing complex? What happened to it? And to take the exercise one step further: "Didn't people make the internet worth being on before it was feasible to make money off of it? What happened to that?"
- GrifMD 7y agoThere is a resettable device id (IDFA) that in-app (but not Safari based) ads can use for identification, but it doesn't seem to be as heavily utilized as cookie-ids in browsers.
- rale00 7y ago> Didn't people make money off internet advertising before the modern surveillance-marketing complex? What happened to it? Non-contextual advertising still exists, but it's perceived as less effective, so there's a lot less money in it. I don't know if that perception is correct, but I do remember back when a common complaint from people was that the ads they saw weren't relevant to them. It's also not just targeted advertising that will be affected. Without any sort of user tracking, it will be even harder to prevent fraud. No one wants to spend money showing ads to bots. > Also I assume / hope that iOS ads aren't tracking people either; third-party cookies simply have no equivalent in the iOS app sandbox design. You might want to look into the Apple Advertising Identifier.
- downandout 7y agoI came here to say exactly this. Most profits for online ventures come from retargeted ads, and most businesses lose money on cold audiences just so that they can build retargeting audiences. As a result, when tracking dies, so does most online ad spend. I am really curious what the web itself (outside of apps) will look like in a world where the quality of content and services implodes because of the inability of publishers to generate revenue to pay for it. You may have your privacy, but you may also not have much left to do on the web. This is definitely a “be careful what you wish for” scenario.
- nitrogen 7y agoQuality should increase dramatically because the SEO spam networks will not have ads to make money, and the remaining sites will either have a solid subscription base or be from people sharing for the love of sharing.
- kibwen 7y agoNot to suggest offense, but I wonder how old you are? I may not quite be a greybeard just yet, but I remember being enraptured by the content on the internet long before it was caught in the stranglehold of advertisers. Big-budget affairs would be more scarce, but there would be no dearth of content.
- downandout 7y agoI am old enough to have seen the Internet emerge. You were enraptured by content and services provided by companies that lost billions of dollars, courtesy of investors, during the dot com era. Those investors provided that capital in large part because they knew how lucrative it could be if online advertising became as efficient and effective as it is today. You will not see that kind of subsidy in the post-ad world.
- saagarjha 7y ago> You were enraptured by content and services provided by companies that lost billions of dollars, courtesy of investors, during the dot com era. What about the independent blogs?
- Waterluvian 7y agoSuch a high dependency on tracking is, if anything, advertisers being complacent, sloppy, or generally bad at their job. You absolutely don't need all these data to advertise to people.
- peteretep 7y ago> So what is going to happen when Apple succeeds in making it impossible to make any money off advertisements shown to iOS users on the web? Then they start offering micropayments, and iOS users are such a gigantic market, who Apple already micro-charge for Apps, and who’ll pay good money, that every publisher jumps on board immediately.
- Gustomaximus 7y agoIs there no money in roadside billboards? They are not highly targeted. Removing tracking will take some profitability off ads but eyeballs are always going to be valuable.
- denkmoon 7y agoAdTech bubble collapses, thousands of unviable businesses collapse, and the internet becomes a better place. A man can dream.
- qroshan 7y agoMost of HN don't understand that the Advertising ecosystem is what is feeding the tech boom and their livelihood. Just like housing it is an entire ecosystem now with many people's jobs and livelihood is based on. Hit that ecosystem and you get a recession. However it doesn't stop at the recession. Most VCs are funding hundreds and thousands of startups with the hope that one of them is going to get sold to Google or Facebook or Amazon or any of the Advertising Cash Cow business. Dry that tap and you'll have VCs pulling money from Tech. Now, there is glut of Programmer supply and a severe lack of investments. Not dissimilar to 2008.
- beagle3 7y agoThat's usually called "the broken window fallacy". A kid goes out and breaks random windows in people's home; as a result, a lot of economic activity ensues - the glass producers, the people who produce glass cutters and specialized tools, the people who install windows, the cleaners who specialize in cleaning broken glass, etc ... The ad industry is breaking everyone's windows. It does indeed produce a lot of economic activity; But it is more likely than not "misallocation and waste of funds" when looked at in a broader context.
- qroshan 7y agoBroken Windows is actually not a fallacy (classic Keynsian vs Hayek argument) If past decade has proven anything. Keynsian economic policies worked (printing money forcing people to spend) while a Austrian Austerity would have been disastrous. Again, HN will not understand the side effects of destroying a major ecosystem. They all think they are much smarter and can stand on their own and VC money has no effect on their livelihood and it's their superior linux skills that keep them making tons of money
- beagle3 7y agoThe past decade has proven that central banks can keep a system afloat for a decade. It remains to be seen if it proves anything else.
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- IfOnlyYouKnew 7y agoI believe Apple is doing a better job allowing monetization to continue than Google is. They are working on ways to do anonymized personalisation/attribution/etc. The current Safari Technology Preview has someting called Ad Click Attribution API, for example.
- briandear 7y agoAds without allowing tracking networks. You know, like print ads. And sites already annoy you to download their godforesaken apps. See Yelp, Reddit and Quora.
- ferzul 7y agoI don't know whether or when God forsook any particular mobile app, but I do know it the preposition "for" used as a verbal prefix with a negative implication, not the word and prefix "fore" meaning in front.
- scarface74 7y agoThe same thing that happens as more people install ad blockers.
- rpastuszak 7y ago> I'm currently imagining a future where publishers start to just redirect iOS traffic to install their app, where they can actually make money. Good news for the walled garden, I guess? Some might? The situation has been getting worse for the past 1-2 years, so this is just another nail in the coffin. There are different strategies here: subscriptions, micropayments, premium/free content split, <stick anything that Guardian tried to do here...> Less creepy, and genuinely useful forms of targeting exist (e.g. contextual targeting). There's just not enough momentum in the AdTech industry to shift. These could work just fine. In other words, what WebKit is trying to achieve is good news for us. Publishers so far seem to have given up on the higher CPMs coming from non-targeted ad calls on Safari. Additionally, they would be more than happy to skip ads completely if a different, stable source of revenue existed. There's a bunch of startups dealing with monetising publisher content without ads (Scroll, Blendle, etc...).