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>>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. Yo
by 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 agoAgain 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 agoI 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 agoI 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?