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I think this HN adtech paranoia is getting a little extreme lately, e.g. many of the comments from "ocdtrekkie" here ("Wow, Googlers in full force today.", "Thi

I think this HN adtech paranoia is getting a little extreme lately, e.g. many of the comments from "ocdtrekkie" here ("Wow, Googlers in full force today.", "This is a market that needs to be shut down.") I definitely share mixed feelings about these adtech companies, and tend to think these personalized, targeted surveillance ads should die. But what about just plain old contextual, relevant ads, e.g. ads for car parts on a hot rod site? There's a place for web advertising in general - it supports "free" sites in a better than any other model invented thus far. I don't think it's gonna be possible to burn the whole place down and go back to 1993. Subscriptions work for large high-value offerings like Netflix or NY Times, but average people with small sites are unlikely to be able to provide that level of value. Other alternatives like micropayments always seem to fail, because even if viewing an article costs 1-cent or 1/100 cent, it causes users to hand-wring and watch their usage carefully, deliberate about their browsing choices and eventually stop. It's a psychological thing - people loved it when AOL switched from by-the-minute billing to unlimited, even though they generally paid less under the old scheme. Suddenly they were free to just browse without thinking about it, which is also what ad-sponsored content enables on the web. There are certainly people who just create for attention / altruism alone and get no material reward - more power to them - but they'll have to keep their day jobs. In a way I'm gratified to see adblocking taking off, because the ad industry constantly misbehaves and does every sleazy desperate thing it can - from seizure-flashes and automatically-opening popup windows in the 90s, to performance-killing HTML5 garbage ads, distracting animations and creepy privacy-invading remarketing stuff today. Desperate, annoying junk that is indeed killing the web (and people's trust in advertising). I personally think a move back to classy, non-personalized ads could be the way to go, ideally static images that don't track you and don't fry your CPU & battery with 700 javsacript libraries. That may be wishful thinking too. But perhaps the ad industry can try a little harder to stem the tide of garbage and win people's trust back a bit.

enraged_camel 7y ago
>>But what about just plain old contextual, relevant ads, e.g. ads for car parts on a hot rod site? Those existed before Google/Facebook/et al were a thing. You don’t need “adtech” for them. Adtech by and large refers to the insanely complex tech infrastructure behind tracking people across the Internet and using a variety of tricks and dark-semi-dark patterns to try to get them to click ads, at the definite but not immediately obvious expense of privacy.
- QuadrupleA 7y ago
  Again I wonder whether all the tracking BS is necessary. Google, Facebook & Twitter aggregated a huge audience by giving away high-quality products, e.g. search, gmail, maps, etc. They could make a ton of money selling ad space whether it's privacy-invading or not (indeed, search ads did just that for many years by targeting the search term, not the personal details of the searcher).
  - nexuist 7y ago
    I think the problem is that the market demands growth and while basic search ads did yield insane profits, we are now approaching the end of the Internet growth period where everyone who has expendable capital is also already on these platforms. Tech companies have effectively run out of people to convert into customers and thus they have to do these crazy tracking shenanigans to try to squeeze as much out of every individual as possible.
- vonmoltke 7y ago
  I feel that what "adtech" refers to varies from person to person. It's becoming one of those charged terms where whatever online advertising techniques the user doesn't like are "adtech", while the techniques they don't mind aren't. If the infrastructure to select and distribute context-relevant ads is not "adtech", what is it?
ocdtrekkie 7y ago
See, other than the personal attack (thank you for that), we agree! Contextual, relevant ads work great! There's no reason for targeting and collecting data on users, except that it provides justification for these companies to exist. Just about anyone can provide contextual ads, you need Google or Facebook scale adtech to stalk 7 billion people on the planet. Around the announcement of Chrome's "Privacy Sandbox" effort, Google lied about the effectiveness of targeting advertising (claiming it was 52% more effective, despite independent studies settling for somewhere around a 4% difference), because it can't survive in a world where we realize it isn't necessary for ad revenue.
- QuadrupleA 7y ago
  Apologies if I made it personal, or misread comments as advocating dumping advertising altogether, sounds like we generally agree - I personally suspect Google, Facebook etc. would do fine without the privacy-invading targeting stuff - they still have hugely popular near-monopolies on which to display ads of whatever kind - Google search, Facebook pages, Twitter feeds etc. Curious to look into the true effectiveness of this personalized stuff too, even my mom seems creeped out by it. Fingers crossed there's enough backlash and adblock-boycotting that they drop it.
  - ocdtrekkie 7y ago
    I actually used to strongly crusade against ad blockers. I think advertising is an important avenue for funding free content online. Between privacy violations and the amount of malware and scams distributed via large ad platforms, I've leaned towards ad blocking now, but I'm not fundamentally against seeing ads with my content. This was a recent study on the effectiveness of personalized ads: https://www.zdnet.com/article/new-research-shows-personalized-ads-are-just-barely-more-efficient-than-dumb-ads/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/new-research-shows-personalize... (direct link is: https://weis2019.econinfosec.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/2019/05/WEIS_2019_paper_38.pdf https://weis2019.econinfosec.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/... )

enraged_camel 7y ago

>>But what about just plain old contextual, relevant ads, e.g. ads for car parts on a hot rod site? Those existed before Google/Facebook/et al were a thing. You don’t need “adtech” for them. Adtech by and large refers to the insanely complex tech infrastructure behind tracking people across the Internet and using a variety of tricks and dark-semi-dark patterns to try to get them to click ads, at the definite but not immediately obvious expense of privacy.

QuadrupleA 7y ago
Again I wonder whether all the tracking BS is necessary. Google, Facebook & Twitter aggregated a huge audience by giving away high-quality products, e.g. search, gmail, maps, etc. They could make a ton of money selling ad space whether it's privacy-invading or not (indeed, search ads did just that for many years by targeting the search term, not the personal details of the searcher).
- nexuist 7y ago
  I think the problem is that the market demands growth and while basic search ads did yield insane profits, we are now approaching the end of the Internet growth period where everyone who has expendable capital is also already on these platforms. Tech companies have effectively run out of people to convert into customers and thus they have to do these crazy tracking shenanigans to try to squeeze as much out of every individual as possible.
vonmoltke 7y ago
I feel that what "adtech" refers to varies from person to person. It's becoming one of those charged terms where whatever online advertising techniques the user doesn't like are "adtech", while the techniques they don't mind aren't. If the infrastructure to select and distribute context-relevant ads is not "adtech", what is it?

ocdtrekkie 7y ago

See, other than the personal attack (thank you for that), we agree! Contextual, relevant ads work great! There's no reason for targeting and collecting data on users, except that it provides justification for these companies to exist. Just about anyone can provide contextual ads, you need Google or Facebook scale adtech to stalk 7 billion people on the planet. Around the announcement of Chrome's "Privacy Sandbox" effort, Google lied about the effectiveness of targeting advertising (claiming it was 52% more effective, despite independent studies settling for somewhere around a 4% difference), because it can't survive in a world where we realize it isn't necessary for ad revenue.

QuadrupleA 7y ago
Apologies if I made it personal, or misread comments as advocating dumping advertising altogether, sounds like we generally agree - I personally suspect Google, Facebook etc. would do fine without the privacy-invading targeting stuff - they still have hugely popular near-monopolies on which to display ads of whatever kind - Google search, Facebook pages, Twitter feeds etc. Curious to look into the true effectiveness of this personalized stuff too, even my mom seems creeped out by it. Fingers crossed there's enough backlash and adblock-boycotting that they drop it.
- ocdtrekkie 7y ago
  I actually used to strongly crusade against ad blockers. I think advertising is an important avenue for funding free content online. Between privacy violations and the amount of malware and scams distributed via large ad platforms, I've leaned towards ad blocking now, but I'm not fundamentally against seeing ads with my content. This was a recent study on the effectiveness of personalized ads: https://www.zdnet.com/article/new-research-shows-personalized-ads-are-just-barely-more-efficient-than-dumb-ads/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/new-research-shows-personalize... (direct link is: https://weis2019.econinfosec.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/2019/05/WEIS_2019_paper_38.pdf https://weis2019.econinfosec.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/... )