10 ms·

Until sites can monetize content in other ways, they will have to be ad-supported, which to be useful to advertisers, involve tracking. People are simply not w

by gav 7y ago

Until sites can monetize content in other ways, they will have to be ad-supported, which to be useful to advertisers, involve tracking. People are simply not willing to pay: https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1219911533070897153 https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1219911533070897153

rzmnzm 7y ago
Isn't nytimes behind a paywall already?
dmitriid 7y ago
For thousands of years people were able to advertise and sell stuff without tracking.
- ramraj07 7y ago
  That's because they couldn't track then. You could just put an ad in the paper and hope your demographic sees it
  - rzzzt 7y ago
    That feels recursive. They didn't track because they couldn't, but now they do because they can?
    - sbmthakur 7y ago
      Humans have always been experimental and some of us have never hesitated to use shady practices to increase profits. For instance, back in the day empires tried their best to restrict foreign products in their territory, no matter how much inferior their own products were.
  - philwelch 7y ago
    And if tracking was regulated or blocked, they wouldn't be able to do it anymore.
- sbmthakur 7y ago
  Well, we didn't have the World Wide Web for most of that time.
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  It's closer to 150 years. Media advertising really started about 1850-1860, when there were mass-market goods produced that required advertising to create a market. Yes, there were earlier ads, largely of the classified variety, selling one-offs (often real estate). You didn't have advertising without mass production, mass literacy, and mass media. Hamilton Holt wrote in 1909 of the effects of advertising on his industry in Commercialism and Journalism, a short, easy, but highly informative read: https://archive.org/details/commercialismjou00holtuoft https://archive.org/details/commercialismjou00holtuoft
  - dmitriid 7y ago
    Advertisment existed for a way longer before any printed media. We know of advertisement in Ancient Egypt and Ancient China, in Rome and Greece. Even if we only take the age of the printing press in Europe, it's still over 500 years of advertisement without tracking. Even if we only take the age of mass-produced media, it's almost 200 years without tracking.
    - dredmorbius 7y ago
      The culture of mass advertising didn't exist: Yes, there were earlier ads, largely of the classified variety, selling one-offs (often real estate). People were not literate. Printing and publishing were expensive. There were very few mass products. Wikipedia: "The history of advertising can be traced to ancient civilizations. It became a major force in capitalist economies in the mid-19th century, based primarily on newspapers and magazines." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_advertising https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_advertising The point is scale and pervasiveness. Barkers, criers, the odd promotional papyrus or clay tablet, a shop signboard, are not the mass advertising of the latter 19th, 20th, and early 21st centuries. Mass advertising, such as it might be thought to exist, was largely propagandistic, in that word's original sense.
remarkEon 7y ago
I don't buy this. These kinds of sites are already behind a paywall for most of the content you'd want to see, as Graham notes. I do not understand why sites like the New York Times, which generate massive amounts of traffic as far as I know, cannot use other real estate on their websites to serve static ads with zero nefarious tracking enabled. The model already exists for their physical product. I fail to see why we can't have a version of the Internet that ports over that previously successful system. I don't work in Internet ads; I work in hardware. So maybe someone here can help me understand why what I would otherwise assume to be a simple implementation is viewed as impossible. I'm obviously missing something.
- riffraff 7y ago
  I suppose the explanation is that classic ads are ineffective, and tracking-enabled ones can be better. If you didn't use them you'd have to explain to your shareholders why you decided to leave money on the table.
  - fock 7y ago
    https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/06/a-dangerous-question-does-internet-advertising-work-at-all/372704/ https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/06/a-dange... I suppose the explanation is that classic ads can be easily served by a multitude of agents and there will be no billion-dollar business. Nowadays, invested vendors have created a smokescreen so thick, noone ackknowledges that most of their ads are having 0 effect...
  - remarkEon 7y ago
    I think I get that "classic" ads are ineffective relative to installing a surveillance apparatus that has designs on influencing your behavior. So, perhaps you're right that it's investors that are causing this, who are demanding higher returns every quarter.
- SifJar 7y ago
  I also don't work in Internet ads, but my assumption would be that advertisers are unwilling to pay for a static ad to be displayed to e.g. 100k users when they could instead pay for ad that uses tracking to display only to the 500 users that might actually be interested. And from NYT (or other publisher) perspective, 20 of the later is presumably more lucrative than 1 of the former
matheusmoreira 7y ago
Availability of alternative business models doesn't matter. They'll just make advertisers pay even more money to reach an audience with disposable income and willingness to spend it. The fact is some executive is always going to show up and say "think of all the money we could be making if we just served ads and sold our user data in addition to our current business model!" The answer is to make ads unprofitable. When someone pays for advertising, they must get no return on their investment. Only then will ads disappear from the web. In order to achieve this, all ads must be blocked automatically and by default, no exceptions must be made, and the blocker software must be pre-installed for all users.
- clarry 7y ago
  > The answer is to make ads unprofitable. https://adnauseam.io/ https://adnauseam.io/
  - pier25 7y ago
    AdNauseam must be pretty effective. Google not only banned it from the web store but also made it difficult for regular users to install it on Chrome. https://adnauseam.io/free-adnauseam.html https://adnauseam.io/free-adnauseam.html https://github.com/dhowe/AdNauseam/wiki/Install-AdNauseam-on-Chrome-Without-Google's-Permission https://github.com/dhowe/AdNauseam/wiki/Install-AdNauseam-on...
    - lapnitnelav 7y ago
      It is but mostly because it decreases the trust in the ecosystem. This being said, the current W3C Advertising API draft proposal on serving ads is possibly inspired by it.
      - matheusmoreira 7y ago
        > W3C Advertising API What is this?
        7y ago
riffraff 7y ago
LWN's solution of "subscribers can share content" looks like a perfect counter to this. But I guess it's not a perfect solution or more publications might have adopted it.
- tomatocracy 7y ago
  Many newspapers with paywalls also do this.
raverbashing 7y ago
You can present ads without serving thousands of cookies and tracking every movement of every customer, no problem. Magazines and newspapers did that for the 20th century, no problem. Advertisers are overpaying for a more "targeted audience" but I suspect in the end the point is moot. Simple case: ads that retarget you to something you googled previously (but they don't know you just bought it or gave up on buying it)
mns 7y ago
Yeah, but this ad cancer has spread everywhere. My Samsung TV just yesterday started showing ads for chocolate in the home hub, the TV that I bought full price, not subsidised, no nothing, started showing ads in my living room for chocolate. I saw threads on reddit about this some time ago this, but never experienced it,. Now, happening to me, it felt so weird and wrong, like my home was being invaded by a big Mondelez brand that I would never in my life buy.
- mnw21cam 7y ago
  Return it to the shop you bought it from as not fit for purpose? Hopefully if enough people did this, the manufacturers would get the message.
test1235 7y ago
Sites would love to find other ways to monetize their content, then they can add that revenue to that generated by their ads.
mrr54 7y ago
Newspaper ads don't have tracking. TV ads don't have tracking. Why should web ads? They don't have a right to a business model. I do have a right to privacy. If they can't come up with a viable business model that respects privacy, they don't deserve to exist. It's like when people claim Google can't afford decent tech support. If that's the case then Google shouldn't exist.

by gav 7y ago

rzmnzm 7y ago

Isn't nytimes behind a paywall already?

dmitriid 7y ago

For thousands of years people were able to advertise and sell stuff without tracking.

ramraj07 7y ago
That's because they couldn't track then. You could just put an ad in the paper and hope your demographic sees it
- rzzzt 7y ago
  That feels recursive. They didn't track because they couldn't, but now they do because they can?
  - sbmthakur 7y ago
    Humans have always been experimental and some of us have never hesitated to use shady practices to increase profits. For instance, back in the day empires tried their best to restrict foreign products in their territory, no matter how much inferior their own products were.
- philwelch 7y ago
  And if tracking was regulated or blocked, they wouldn't be able to do it anymore.
sbmthakur 7y ago
Well, we didn't have the World Wide Web for most of that time.
dredmorbius 7y ago
It's closer to 150 years. Media advertising really started about 1850-1860, when there were mass-market goods produced that required advertising to create a market. Yes, there were earlier ads, largely of the classified variety, selling one-offs (often real estate). You didn't have advertising without mass production, mass literacy, and mass media. Hamilton Holt wrote in 1909 of the effects of advertising on his industry in Commercialism and Journalism, a short, easy, but highly informative read: https://archive.org/details/commercialismjou00holtuoft https://archive.org/details/commercialismjou00holtuoft
- dmitriid 7y ago
  Advertisment existed for a way longer before any printed media. We know of advertisement in Ancient Egypt and Ancient China, in Rome and Greece. Even if we only take the age of the printing press in Europe, it's still over 500 years of advertisement without tracking. Even if we only take the age of mass-produced media, it's almost 200 years without tracking.
  - dredmorbius 7y ago
    The culture of mass advertising didn't exist: Yes, there were earlier ads, largely of the classified variety, selling one-offs (often real estate). People were not literate. Printing and publishing were expensive. There were very few mass products. Wikipedia: "The history of advertising can be traced to ancient civilizations. It became a major force in capitalist economies in the mid-19th century, based primarily on newspapers and magazines." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_advertising https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_advertising The point is scale and pervasiveness. Barkers, criers, the odd promotional papyrus or clay tablet, a shop signboard, are not the mass advertising of the latter 19th, 20th, and early 21st centuries. Mass advertising, such as it might be thought to exist, was largely propagandistic, in that word's original sense.

remarkEon 7y ago

I don't buy this. These kinds of sites are already behind a paywall for most of the content you'd want to see, as Graham notes. I do not understand why sites like the New York Times, which generate massive amounts of traffic as far as I know, cannot use other real estate on their websites to serve static ads with zero nefarious tracking enabled. The model already exists for their physical product. I fail to see why we can't have a version of the Internet that ports over that previously successful system. I don't work in Internet ads; I work in hardware. So maybe someone here can help me understand why what I would otherwise assume to be a simple implementation is viewed as impossible. I'm obviously missing something.

riffraff 7y ago
I suppose the explanation is that classic ads are ineffective, and tracking-enabled ones can be better. If you didn't use them you'd have to explain to your shareholders why you decided to leave money on the table.
- fock 7y ago
  https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/06/a-dangerous-question-does-internet-advertising-work-at-all/372704/ https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/06/a-dange... I suppose the explanation is that classic ads can be easily served by a multitude of agents and there will be no billion-dollar business. Nowadays, invested vendors have created a smokescreen so thick, noone ackknowledges that most of their ads are having 0 effect...
- remarkEon 7y ago
  I think I get that "classic" ads are ineffective relative to installing a surveillance apparatus that has designs on influencing your behavior. So, perhaps you're right that it's investors that are causing this, who are demanding higher returns every quarter.
SifJar 7y ago
I also don't work in Internet ads, but my assumption would be that advertisers are unwilling to pay for a static ad to be displayed to e.g. 100k users when they could instead pay for ad that uses tracking to display only to the 500 users that might actually be interested. And from NYT (or other publisher) perspective, 20 of the later is presumably more lucrative than 1 of the former

matheusmoreira 7y ago

Availability of alternative business models doesn't matter. They'll just make advertisers pay even more money to reach an audience with disposable income and willingness to spend it. The fact is some executive is always going to show up and say "think of all the money we could be making if we just served ads and sold our user data in addition to our current business model!" The answer is to make ads unprofitable. When someone pays for advertising, they must get no return on their investment. Only then will ads disappear from the web. In order to achieve this, all ads must be blocked automatically and by default, no exceptions must be made, and the blocker software must be pre-installed for all users.

clarry 7y ago
> The answer is to make ads unprofitable. https://adnauseam.io/ https://adnauseam.io/
- pier25 7y ago
  AdNauseam must be pretty effective. Google not only banned it from the web store but also made it difficult for regular users to install it on Chrome. https://adnauseam.io/free-adnauseam.html https://adnauseam.io/free-adnauseam.html https://github.com/dhowe/AdNauseam/wiki/Install-AdNauseam-on-Chrome-Without-Google's-Permission https://github.com/dhowe/AdNauseam/wiki/Install-AdNauseam-on...
  - lapnitnelav 7y ago
    It is but mostly because it decreases the trust in the ecosystem. This being said, the current W3C Advertising API draft proposal on serving ads is possibly inspired by it.
    - matheusmoreira 7y ago
      > W3C Advertising API What is this?
      - 7y ago

riffraff 7y ago

LWN's solution of "subscribers can share content" looks like a perfect counter to this. But I guess it's not a perfect solution or more publications might have adopted it.

tomatocracy 7y ago
Many newspapers with paywalls also do this.

raverbashing 7y ago

You can present ads without serving thousands of cookies and tracking every movement of every customer, no problem. Magazines and newspapers did that for the 20th century, no problem. Advertisers are overpaying for a more "targeted audience" but I suspect in the end the point is moot. Simple case: ads that retarget you to something you googled previously (but they don't know you just bought it or gave up on buying it)

mns 7y ago

Yeah, but this ad cancer has spread everywhere. My Samsung TV just yesterday started showing ads for chocolate in the home hub, the TV that I bought full price, not subsidised, no nothing, started showing ads in my living room for chocolate. I saw threads on reddit about this some time ago this, but never experienced it,. Now, happening to me, it felt so weird and wrong, like my home was being invaded by a big Mondelez brand that I would never in my life buy.

mnw21cam 7y ago
Return it to the shop you bought it from as not fit for purpose? Hopefully if enough people did this, the manufacturers would get the message.

test1235 7y ago

Sites would love to find other ways to monetize their content, then they can add that revenue to that generated by their ads.

mrr54 7y ago

Newspaper ads don't have tracking. TV ads don't have tracking. Why should web ads? They don't have a right to a business model. I do have a right to privacy. If they can't come up with a viable business model that respects privacy, they don't deserve to exist. It's like when people claim Google can't afford decent tech support. If that's the case then Google shouldn't exist.