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Apple’s Ad-Targeting Crackdown Shakes Up Ad Market
- asasidh 7y agoApple is draining the swamp
- umeshunni 7y agoSo, just like Trump.
- grumblez 7y agoBreaking News: Advertisers concerned feature is working as advertised.
- manigandham 7y agoAdvertisers don't care and have never worried about this. It's the adtech supply chain, and the publishers who get paid that worry about the revenue and targeting.
- jefftk 7y agoDepends on the advertiser! Big brand who mostly wants to reach everyone in a geographic area? Targeting doesn't matter. Retailer that wants to bring someone back in to complete a purchase? Without targeting they won't buy ads at all. (Disclosure: I work on ads at Google)
- dannyw 7y agoYou suggest this as if the majority of ad spending comes from small businesses trying to retarget their customers; when the vast, vast majority of ad spending comes from big brands; and your mom and pop business isn't running a sophisticated ad targeting campaign. Adtech is for the establishment.
- Wowfunhappy 7y agoHow has this been so effective, when Panopticlick still says my Safari browser has "a nearly-unique fingerprint"? (And based on what I've read from other users's experience, this is normal.)
- nielsbot 7y agoI'd love to know this too--maybe fingerprinting isn't yet being used most places? Or maybe fingerprinting isn't that useful without additional cookie tracking?
- imposterr 7y agoFrom what I understand, a lot of the ad networks still work off cookies, they haven't moved to using fingerprinting yet. I think as browsers implement more anti-tracking features they may start to though.
- harikb 7y agoThey say "nearly-unique" - I get an odds of '1 in 50,000'. Granted, that may be enough combined with IP or some other factor as a transient/session cookie. However the hash might change as soon as a plugin or some dependency is updated.
- Wowfunhappy 7y agoCombine my Canvas fingerprint (which a plugin update won't change) with my rough location (based on IP address), and I have to imagine you'd get very, very close to identifying me.
- gruez 7y agoCanvas fingerprints are probably the same between other iphones of the same model and ios version. So unless you use a rare model and/or rare ios version, there's probably at least a few dozen people with the same fingerprint/ip range combination as you.
- jedberg 7y agoI was talking to my friend about this the other day. He's an executive at an ad company (not Google). He had an interesting take on this: Yes, it is in fact working and breaks targeting and retargeting. But what is the outcome of that? The CPMs (how much the website makes) are 10x higher for re/targeted ads. So as they stop working, do you think the website will cut their revenue? No, they'll either put up a paywall, or put 10x more ads on their page. And those ads will frustrate you even more, because they aren't targeted to you. And in the meantime, Google and Facebook will still know everything about you. It's just the smaller websites who suffer by not getting ad revenue. And they weren't even getting your personal data in the first place. I still side with Apple on this one, but he has a good point. Overall what they are doing will probably just make things worse for everyone that isn't Apple, Google, and Facebook.
- manigandham 7y agoThe problem is they had a great solution with advertiser ID which is already used in apps. Expose that to websites and they would get a good compromise for both sides.
- Wowfunhappy 7y ago> No, they'll either put up a paywall. Personally, I think I'm fine with that, provided the paywalls get cheaper—right now, they're all very clearly more expensive than what you'd make in ad revenue. Of the two options, paying content creators for what they produce seems much more "healthy" for society. > or put 10x more ads on their page. If the site becomes impossible to browse, I will leave. > And those ads will frustrate you even more, because they aren't targeted to you. I don't find targeted ads any less annoying than untargetted ones.
- Zanni 7y agoI like targeted ads, but I want them targeted to the content I'm consuming, not me personally. If I'm reading a blog or article on rock climbing, then, yeah, show me ads for all the gear. I'm interested. But don't show me an ad for an Instant Pot because I googled it last week. That's creepy.
- Someone 7y agoDoes this cover iOS apps, too? If so, that could mean fewer iOS apps will get written. If not, is that only on technical grounds (it may be easier to hide what data apps send out) or (also) because it is good for Apple if one has to write an iOS apps to better track users?
- jsonne 7y agoI don't think it does and, as an advertiser, people mostly exclude apps from a lot of display/video campaigns at the moment but it's being touted as the next big opportunity because of moves like this.
- RandallBrown 7y agoiOS apps have an advertising identifier that can be reset by the user. There are of course other ways to fingerprint the devices, but they will get your app removed from the App Store if you're using them for advertising. (If you're caught of course.)
- surround 7y agoApple is “cracking down” on ad targeting, while simultaneously helping iOS apps track and target users through a unique advertising ID.
- RandallBrown 7y agoIt keeps the advertisers happy while still allowing users to opt out of tracking.
- surround 7y agoSafari “opts out” of (blocks) tracking by default iirc. But users have to explicitly choose to opt out of iOS tracking. Most people don’t even know about the tracking ID. Edit: Apple ought to prioritize the privacy of users over “keeping advertisers happy.”
- manigandham 7y agoOverall this doesn't make much of a long-term difference. Ad serving will shift to first-party with DNS or entire reverse proxies and is already in progress. Apple has made some solid improvements but should now focus on not letting Safari become the next IE. The real impact changing the adtech industry is new regulations around data and privacy. That will change everything in a few months.
- inetknght 7y agoGood. If the ads are served from the first party domain that should make it a hell of a lot easier to attribute mal-action to that specific first party instead of offloading blame elsewhere.
- manigandham 7y agoDomains have nothing to do with the businesses and vendors behind them. The vast majority of publishers don't have the resources to run their own adtech infrastructure. 1st-party serving won't change anything with regards to chain of custody in ad content but the new regulations should at least make the chain shorter and more restricted in abilities.
- zchrykng 7y agoIf the malware comes from a domain they own, it is their fault. If they can't be bothered to handle their own ads or pick a better ad vendor, they can pay up for the damage they served up to my computer.
- manigandham 7y agoThat's not how any of it works, as I just explained. Continue to use your adblocker or avoid sites that run ads.
- inetknght 7y ago> Domains have nothing to do with the businesses and vendors behind them. TLS certificate says different. If malware comes from a TLS signed domain, then the owner of that domain is at-fault. Getting reparations from that domain is of course a different matter. But this should simplify the blame game. > The vast majority of publishers don't have the resources to run their own adtech infrastructure. I strongly disagree. Where there's a will, there's a way. And Google has the will.
- dxemy 7y agoYou can read the article for free if you make up an email. It does not ask for confirmation.
- mffnbs 7y agoI was enjoying the irony of reading the article on safari only to have it cut off so they can ask me for my personal information to track me.
- manigandham 7y agoIt's a paywalled site. They're not tracking you other than to ask you to pay for the content. This will only become more common as sites shift from ad revenue to subscriptions.
- Nextgrid 7y agoI’m not too sure about that. There’s no guarantee they won’t both get your payment and then track you (with confirmed personal details you provided during payment).
- JumpCrisscross 7y ago> The cost of reaching Safari users has fallen over 60% in the past two years, according to data from ad tech firm Rubicon Project. Meanwhile ad prices on Google’s Chrome browser have risen slightly. This is a great metric for privacy.
- turdnagel 7y agoI’m confused by this. If Safari users are harder to target, and demand for targeting Safari users hasn’t changed, shouldn’t the price go up?
- manigandham 7y agoThe demand for highly-targeted users is what drives up prices. Since Safari users all look the same now and can't be highly targeted, they have lost that high-end demand and prices have fallen to generic display rates.
- Ericson2314 7y agoThanks for the explanation. The supply has become crappier while demand stayed the same.
- echelon 7y agoDemand has decreased. The curve of constant demand with decreased supply pushes the price higher.
- manigandham 7y agoSupply and demand have stayed the same in quantity, but the quality of both has dropped severely. It's the same equilibrium but at a much lower price point.
- dmitrygr 7y agoI would disagree. "People who can afford Apple gadgets" is a desirable high-income audience. I wouldn't be surprised if it was broken out as a special category for purchase by FB and GOOG soon.
- _bxg1 7y agoLet us not forget that Apple isn't doing this out of altruism, but 50% because it hurts their competitors and 50% because it makes their users happy. That said, being 50% motivated by making their users happy is more than can be said about Google or Facebook. Edit: To be clear, I am an Apple customer and it's mainly on privacy grounds. I just like to keep realistic expectations about their present and future behavior, instead of buying into Tim Cook's rhetoric of idealism.
- chrisseaton 7y ago> Apple isn't doing this out of altruism Of course not - who said they were?
- _bxg1 7y agoThese days they try hard to sell themselves as "the good guys of tech". Tim Cook grand-stands about privacy rights, etc. It's easy to forget that it's all just business, so it's good to be reminded.
- hyperbovine 7y agoAgree -- total red herring. And I'm much happier that Apple has a financial incentive to keep this up. "Corporate altruism" has a tendency to go poof! the instant it conflicts with the bottom line.
- jvzr 7y agoOne can make the argument that Google's "do no evil" was pure altruism. And indeed, it did go poof! the instant it conflicted with their bottom line. Astute comment, parent.
- savanaly 7y agoNothing wrong with that. "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest." - Adam Smith
- 7y ago
- tartoran 7y agoIs this Apple's subtle revenge for Google's Android ripping off the early Iphone?
- threeseed 7y agoMore likely that Apple employees simply hate their data being shared with every advertiser like the rest of us do.
- vassilyk 7y agoRelated. The next big change for privacy and ad targeting is the removal of the IDFA by Apple and the GAID by Google. Removal or aggressive randomization, but there is no way those IDs remain as persistent as currently. It's a matter of months, maybe a couple of years. When this happens, what is happening with Safari now will look like a minor issue.
- zie 7y agoYou can set the IDFA on iOS to all 0's in Settings. See: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT205223 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT205223 under "Opt Out of Targeted Advertising" (at the end).
- vassilyk 7y agoYes indeed. And reset your GAID when you want and know how to do it. But my point is that such a behavior will be forced by the OS rather than offered as a choice. It's what is happening with Safari (and the other browsers). First, knowledgeable users are empowered to make a decision, then, that decision is rolled out automatically to the masses. E.g., https.
- echelon 7y agoI'd like to see a p2p mesh network where articles stripped of ads are upvoted, annotated, and shared. Something like outline, but truly distributed. The markup doesn't allow for embedded javascript or cookies. If it were to get popular, a microtransaction system could be built on top to pay the authors. In fact, payment could serve as one kind of ranking heuristic. Store articles in a blockchain and garbage collect them from your node when they're no longer being actively read. Content will of course always be available as long as some node has the full history. This has the added benefit of making future updates or redaction without explicit change logs impossible. You could even distribute comments the same way. All participants have keys, everything gets signed, natural interest graphs form... This type of application of bkockchain tech seems more immediately useful than currency and brings us back into alignment with the old web paradigm. Distributed, experimental, hobbyist, not commercial.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- buboard 7y agothere are plenty of systems to do that nowadays. it's a legal problem though, not a technological one. accounting and taxing those transactions is impossible under current laws
- jpadkins 7y agoin your system, who would write the articles?
- pat2man 7y agoSo https://steemit.com https://steemit.com?
- BlueTemplar 7y agoIs a "garbage collected blockchain" even possible? There are retroactively modifiable ones, like git, but each git repository is its own world, so the trust issues are quite different...
- buboard 7y agoIs apple offering an alternative for blogs to make money or should they have cake instead? Brave browser does it better than apple. I can already see webmasters sending users to download brave instead of safari Apple doesn't care about the web (why should they?). Their iAds thing went nowhere. (please enlighten me if apple is offering an alternative. i d love to use it)
- kitsunesoba 7y agoI would not hesitate to find a paid alternative to a free site/service that tries to control my choice of browser. The moment you try to push me into changing my up to date setup is the moment you’ve lost me as a user forever.
- criddell 7y agoThere's another way to think about this. Privacy is a human right. If your business model is built on violating human rights at scale then I'm not going to have a lot of sympathy for you if technology kills your business. The lesson from Apple is build something great, something that people love, and they will pay you for it.
- buboard 7y agoAgreed about privacy. So how is apple helping websites get paid?
- ridiculous_fish 7y agoSee Privacy Preserving Ad Click Attribution For the Web: https://webkit.org/blog/8943/privacy-preserving-ad-click-attribution-for-the-web/ https://webkit.org/blog/8943/privacy-preserving-ad-click-att...
- buboard 7y agolooks good. i d love to see them building an ad exchange on top of it
- dang 7y agoSimilar to the other day (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21725985 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21725985), we asked The Information to unlock this article for HN readers and they agreed. Thanks! (Submitted URL was https://www.theinformation.com/articles/apples-ad-targeting-crackdown-shakes-up-ad-market https://www.theinformation.com/articles/apples-ad-targeting-...)
- kevindong 7y ago> A Criteo spokeswoman said that by making the ad-blocking feature automatic in Safari, Apple “does not truly promote choice for the users of its browser.” That's an... interesting take on the situation.
- iscrewyou 7y agoSolution would be pop ups asking for each choice on the device....kind of like the way ad agencies like it.
- saagarjha 7y agoApple doesn't promote choice, but it's not because Intelligent Tracking Prevention is on by default. (Also, it's not an "ad-blocking" feature…)
- Ididntdothis 7y agoWhenever I hear a lobbyist or business person talk about “choice” or “freedom” it’s usually bad for people....
- artyomavanesov 7y agoPeople don't use browsers to look at ads. So from a user standpoint ads shouldn't be there in the first place.
- ddlatham 7y ago
- starchild_3001 7y agoSeeing more relevant ads => good Getting your data sold to a data broker => bad free web sites & internet => good having to pay for quality content => bad (gee, who pays for NYT or WP after they're put behind a paywall?) Getting the best ads possible without any human involvement => good discovering the best products & services => good microtargeting => bad getting manipulated through political ads => bad Look, ads ecosystem is the sponsor of free internet. Internet behind a paywall is very low utility. If anything, today's big ad tech are great democratizers & sponsors of the free web. That is, only if they can do the "good" and avoid the "bad". Disclaimer: I work for an adtech company.
- visarga 7y ago> Look, ads ecosystem is the sponsor of free internet. They are the sponsors of the shitty part of internet. They usually lead to the creation of crap articles and websites that use SEO to grab and resell traffic. I think that even without ad revenue enough people are willing to put quality content online that we don't need to fear. There are more reasons that making ad money to create content.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- kccqzy 7y ago> For instance, a publisher can track what people do on their own site—just not on other sites. So they can sell targeted ads based on the information they have. This is what I believe is fair. Unfortunately we are seeing the difference between first-party cookies and third-party cookies gradually vanish. Publishers are already encouraged by ad tech companies to set up CNAME records so that a subdomain on a publisher site points to an ad-tech company domain.
- dangoldin 7y agoThat may help the one adtech company but they still wouldn't be able to "sync" (https://www.adpushup.com/blog/cookie-syncing/ https://www.adpushup.com/blog/cookie-syncing/) their cookies with other companies in the supply chain.
- snowwrestler 7y ago> Only about 9% of Safari users on an iPhone allow outside companies to track where they go on the web > In comparison, 79% of people who use Google’s Chrome browser allow advertisers to track their browsing habits on mobile devices through cookies. Something to keep in mind the next time you see someone from Google complaining about how Apple won’t allow Google Chrome to run natively on the iPhone.
- surround 7y agoApple won’t let Firefox run either.
- dxf 7y agoI'm not sure what you mean by "run"? I use Firefox as my browser on my iPhone.
- lifthrasiir 7y agoiOS Firefox uses Webkit, not Gecko as intended. It does link to your Firefox accounts and so on but otherwise it is much harder to distinguish against other iOS browsers.
- fuu_dev 7y agoChrome, Firefox and similar on iOS are just skins on top of Safari. This is only true on iOS not on MacOS.
- danaris 7y agoApple will let whatever browsers want to run on iOS. Chrome is, in fact, on there. They just won't let them using any rendering engine but WebKit—and this restriction long predates Google's current level of draconian dominance in that sphere. I don't believe the tracking settings are tied to the rendering engine, so I would be surprised if Chrome on iOS has settings that different to Chrome on macOS in that regard.
- 7y ago
- faizanbhat 7y agoAs someone who worked in ad tech for half a decade, I fail to understand the fuss about cookie based targeting. We're speaking of databases mapping data to random numbers stored in a file that can easily be deleted. The real issue is ad targeting by a handful of large companies that have personally identifiable information. It's not like cookie based targeting is very effective either. It's very difficult to get cookie based ad targeting right – you have to make significant investments into product, technical integrations and data buys. Given the fact that the cookies to which you are tying these investments can vanish at any time (and a large % do so regularly), it rarely makes business sense to make the right sort of investments. Instead most companies do the bare minimum and try to make a guess that is slightly better than a coin flip. I actually remember seeing a deck from a data company boasting how their gender data was ~ 60% accurate. Why are we worried about this? Contextual targeting is far more effective. As an example, targeting an ad on Elle.com is more than 60% likely to reach women than an ad targeted based on cookie data. Genuinely curious so would appreciate calm, non-aggressive responses. I'm wondering whether this is due to a generally poor understanding of cookie targeting effectiveness or if I'm missing something.
- AznHisoka 7y agoWhat if I want to target women who recently bought Chanel perfume? How would I go about doing that unless I do cookie targeting?
- briandear 7y agoIf those women gave you permission to contact them, that’s how. If someone bought Chanel, you don’t have a right to that information unless they explicitly gave you that right.
- mertd 7y agoWhat about the retailer that sold the perfume? They'll usually auto sign up the customer to their product emails and/or adapt their landing page to customer's interests (like Amazon).
- quotemstr 7y agoPeople are going to unpleasantly surprised by the way the internet changes after tracking for personalized advertising stops working. Already, I see tons of complains about paywalled news sites, micropayments everywhere, and the death of the "old internet". Just imagine how much worse it'll be when only two or three giant social media companies can make money with advertising (since they can rely on first-party data) and everyone else is relegated to a high-friction ghetto. If you're sad about the death of the "old internet", look out, because you haven't seen anything yet. As for tracking: the current "privacy" push looks like a moral panic to me. I've yet to see any actual personal harm come to anyone as a result of cookie-based tracking. I have, on the other hand, seen billions of people benefit from the monetarily-free services that personalized ads enable. Whipping up an anti-cookie hysteria is making the internet worse for everyone but the big established giant companies.
- yoasif_ 7y agoIt will likely make fake news less profitable, since I would bet that a lot of value in advertising on those sites is driven by the audience, not the type of content being posted. I think that would be a nice return to the "old internet". Also, it isn't clear to me that the larger sites you talk about would not recoup more value from their audiences and thus need to paywall less.
- pferde 7y agoI've yet to see any harm from that lion hiding in tall grass over there, stop panicking and get back to grazing. I have yet to see any harm from eating badly and not excercising for this young person, stop panicking and let them enjoy their double-upsized extra-bacon Monsterbuger.
- quotemstr 7y agoIs there supposed to be an argument in there?
- Razengan 7y agoSometimes I wonder if the entire ads racket isn't a case of the emperor with no clothes. Has anyone here actually had a meaningful increase in users and revenue by using targeted-ad services, that they couldn't achieve by more organic methods (e.g. posting on places like Reddit, word of mouth)?
- 1propionyl 7y agoThe real goal for the big players using these services isn't actually increasing their own users and revenue. They have better ways to do that. Rather, the goal is to lock everyone else out from even possibly doing so. For example: AdWords isn't about reaching new audiences, it's about staking a claim on an audience in perpetuity (as long as your budget allows). This is completely apparent from the pricing model. Google's brilliance is that via the ubiquity of their search platform, they have effectively managed to leverage a property tax on attentional real estate. If you don't pay, someone else will move in and hopefully develop the attentional property further, raising the value Google can charge you for it until you're priced out and someone else comes along to hold onto it.
- Joe-Z 7y agoThat's like the 1000th ad-targeting article I've read, but the first time to hear this perspective. Absolutely fascinating, thank you! Here's one question though: If you're the established player in one field and don't really need the online ads other than for staking a claim, would it really influence your sales that much if a competitor takes over that space? Probably just a downturn in number of sales to new customers? (Who presumably haven't heard about the other players in the field and just go with the one that's shown to them in online search results?) Okay, that's more than one question, but maybe you'd like to elaborate a bit.
- simonh 7y agoI very much doubt the small bump in sales of Coke after a major ad campaign actually pays for the campaign. That's not the point. Lets suppose CocaCola stopped advertising completely. No TV adds, no product placement, no billboards, nothing, but Pepsi and the other soft drinks companies kept up their rate of advertising or even increased it to fill the gap. The only time anyone ever saw the name Coke would be when they saw it on a shelf. It might take a while, but the outcome would be inevitable.
- reilly3000 7y agoAll of that cookie blocking makes for smaller, and sometimes fewer requests. In total that represents a non-zero effect on battery life (and bandwidth) that Apple gets to use to bolster their battery benchmarks.
- alwillis 7y agoBreaking: more updates to ITP, including the ability to block all 3rd party cookies— https://webkit.org/blog/9661/preventing-tracking-prevention-tracking/ https://webkit.org/blog/9661/preventing-tracking-prevention-...