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I hate ads as much as everybody else, and this reads to me like "given the choice only 9% of people would pay for their meal", should we forbid charging for foo

I hate ads as much as everybody else, and this reads to me like "given the choice only 9% of people would pay for their meal", should we forbid charging for food then? Probably not. As sad as the current ads-powered internet is becoming I haven't seen any promising viable alternative, and sure non-tracking-based ads is not the same thing as having no ads, but it significantly moves the needle in that same direction in terms on revenue.

alkonaut 6y ago
A meal paid for by money is a transaction where both parties understand what’s being exchanged. Not paying for it criminal. A viable alternative: show non tracking ads and see if it keeps the lights on, otherwise shut down?
- fabiospampinato 6y ago
  > A viable alternative: show non tracking ads and see if it keeps the lights on, otherwise shut down? I'm not sure that'd be viable in general, like what would the economic impact globally if all websites that barely can manage to keep the lights on today because of effective ads just disappeared? Maybe the impact could be even positive, like by disallowing politically very-targeted ads, among all other kinds of targeted ads, maybe we can prevent idiots from being elected, but if I had to guess I'd say I wouldn't like to see those websites disappear. Like imagine if YouTube disappeared because it can't make enough money to host all that staggering amount of content.
  - ianhorn 6y ago
    I wouldn't miss it. If they can find a viable non-tracking business model, I'd imagine most would. People used to pay for newspapers so there's pretty good precedent.
    - dantheman 6y ago
      If you don't miss it, then why bother forcing them to do this? Just don't visit their site?
    - fabiospampinato 6y ago
      I have friends who a few years ago switched away from WhatsApp because it was charging 1 buck per year, and for that amount of money they gave you instant global unlimited text messaging, and those same people would have happily paid 10x that for a one-time meal. I think you are grossly overestimating how much the average person is willing to pay for a digital service. And I don't think newspapers are a good precedent giving how nobody buys newspapers anymore, compared to pre-internet levels at least.
mytherin 6y ago
That metaphor falls apart on multiple levels. Paying for a meal is a transaction that both parties explicitly agree to. Tracking in its current state is mostly done without the consumers awareness/consent. Tracking is also not required for advertising, it only (supposedly) increases the effectiveness of it at the expense of the user. A more apt metaphor would be "restaurants are using cheap toxic chemicals to increase their revenue".
- fabiospampinato 6y ago
  I agree with you on the non-transactional nature of advertisement, as far as viewers are concerned, the metaphor is perhaps only effect at illustrating how given the choice most people would prefer to have free stuff at the cost of everything else (e.g. free meals or free content and services). Tracking is not strictly necessary for having ads, but for having _effective_ ads I would argue at least in some cases it makes all the difference. For example I don't care one bit about cosmetics, if a cosmetics company advertises to me it's going to waste its money, and if the company has an increased chance of wasting its money than the ad space is worth less, meaning the website owner gets paid less, meaning that eventually after some threshold is reached offering the content or services via the ads model becomes unsustainable.
  - mytherin 6y ago
    Advertising has been effectively done without tracking for decades. The trick is to do filtering at the content level, rather than at the consumer level. Odds are if you don't care about cosmetics, you won't watch videos about cosmetics or visit websites talking about cosmetics. Co-locating advertisements with relevant content performs this filtering in an effective manner without requiring users to be tracked. Perhaps tracking users is more effective, perhaps it is not. Regardless, boundaries need to be set to enforce ethical behaviour if the unethical behavior is more profitable. If that means certain companies or business models won't survive: so be it. There is always a trade-off to be made between ethics and business. After all, the exact same arguments could be made against outlawing child labor or any of the past atrocities businesses committed in the name of profit. Businesses that cannot survive ethically will die to make room for businesses that can.
parsimo2010 6y ago
It is possible to show content based ads rather than ads based on your tracking. It is perfectly reasonable for a website about motorcycles to show ads for motorcycle products, and this could be done without tracking the user. I don't want that one piece of furniture I (or my SO using my computer) looked at on Wayfair to follow me to the motorcycle website. I definitely don't need an ad empire following all of my activity on the internet and knowing that I'm a 35 year old man that wants to buy a motorcycle, needs a plumber, wears size 32 pants, and looks at green couches among all the other data they are collecting.
- fabiospampinato 6y ago
  Sure but that doesn't work for everything, should Rockstar Games pay 100x what it currently pays for advertisement for advertising GTA DLCs or whatever to people who don't care about gaming? Should perhaps websites like YouTube not exist because people don't want to pay for stuff and the business is not sustainable via non-targeted advertisements (if that's the case)?
  - parsimo2010 6y ago
    Yes it does work for everything- a website can label its content with keywords and advertisers can choose to advertise on sites with specific types of content. So IGN signs up for an ad network and says that their content is about "video games." Then Rockstar says to the ad network, "run my ads on sites about video games." A person reading IGN is clearly interested in video games and we don't have to do any tracking to figure that out. They could even go so far as to show Playstation ads on articles about Playstation games and Xbox ads on articles about Xbox games. The ad can be targeted by the content a person is looking at, not where they've been in the past. If anything, a video game ad on a video game website is more effective than showing me a cosmetics ad on a video game website. So companies can still have effective ads on relevant sites, ad networks can still facilitate the in-between, and users don't have to be tracked. Advertisers already use Google AdWords to show ads to people searching for specific keywords, this is just an extension to show ads to websites with specific keywords. Websites are already working with keywords for SEO, it's not even extra work for them.

alkonaut 6y ago

A meal paid for by money is a transaction where both parties understand what’s being exchanged. Not paying for it criminal. A viable alternative: show non tracking ads and see if it keeps the lights on, otherwise shut down?

fabiospampinato 6y ago
> A viable alternative: show non tracking ads and see if it keeps the lights on, otherwise shut down? I'm not sure that'd be viable in general, like what would the economic impact globally if all websites that barely can manage to keep the lights on today because of effective ads just disappeared? Maybe the impact could be even positive, like by disallowing politically very-targeted ads, among all other kinds of targeted ads, maybe we can prevent idiots from being elected, but if I had to guess I'd say I wouldn't like to see those websites disappear. Like imagine if YouTube disappeared because it can't make enough money to host all that staggering amount of content.
- ianhorn 6y ago
  I wouldn't miss it. If they can find a viable non-tracking business model, I'd imagine most would. People used to pay for newspapers so there's pretty good precedent.
  - dantheman 6y ago
    If you don't miss it, then why bother forcing them to do this? Just don't visit their site?
  - fabiospampinato 6y ago
    I have friends who a few years ago switched away from WhatsApp because it was charging 1 buck per year, and for that amount of money they gave you instant global unlimited text messaging, and those same people would have happily paid 10x that for a one-time meal. I think you are grossly overestimating how much the average person is willing to pay for a digital service. And I don't think newspapers are a good precedent giving how nobody buys newspapers anymore, compared to pre-internet levels at least.

mytherin 6y ago

That metaphor falls apart on multiple levels. Paying for a meal is a transaction that both parties explicitly agree to. Tracking in its current state is mostly done without the consumers awareness/consent. Tracking is also not required for advertising, it only (supposedly) increases the effectiveness of it at the expense of the user. A more apt metaphor would be "restaurants are using cheap toxic chemicals to increase their revenue".

fabiospampinato 6y ago
I agree with you on the non-transactional nature of advertisement, as far as viewers are concerned, the metaphor is perhaps only effect at illustrating how given the choice most people would prefer to have free stuff at the cost of everything else (e.g. free meals or free content and services). Tracking is not strictly necessary for having ads, but for having _effective_ ads I would argue at least in some cases it makes all the difference. For example I don't care one bit about cosmetics, if a cosmetics company advertises to me it's going to waste its money, and if the company has an increased chance of wasting its money than the ad space is worth less, meaning the website owner gets paid less, meaning that eventually after some threshold is reached offering the content or services via the ads model becomes unsustainable.
- mytherin 6y ago
  Advertising has been effectively done without tracking for decades. The trick is to do filtering at the content level, rather than at the consumer level. Odds are if you don't care about cosmetics, you won't watch videos about cosmetics or visit websites talking about cosmetics. Co-locating advertisements with relevant content performs this filtering in an effective manner without requiring users to be tracked. Perhaps tracking users is more effective, perhaps it is not. Regardless, boundaries need to be set to enforce ethical behaviour if the unethical behavior is more profitable. If that means certain companies or business models won't survive: so be it. There is always a trade-off to be made between ethics and business. After all, the exact same arguments could be made against outlawing child labor or any of the past atrocities businesses committed in the name of profit. Businesses that cannot survive ethically will die to make room for businesses that can.

parsimo2010 6y ago

It is possible to show content based ads rather than ads based on your tracking. It is perfectly reasonable for a website about motorcycles to show ads for motorcycle products, and this could be done without tracking the user. I don't want that one piece of furniture I (or my SO using my computer) looked at on Wayfair to follow me to the motorcycle website. I definitely don't need an ad empire following all of my activity on the internet and knowing that I'm a 35 year old man that wants to buy a motorcycle, needs a plumber, wears size 32 pants, and looks at green couches among all the other data they are collecting.

fabiospampinato 6y ago
Sure but that doesn't work for everything, should Rockstar Games pay 100x what it currently pays for advertisement for advertising GTA DLCs or whatever to people who don't care about gaming? Should perhaps websites like YouTube not exist because people don't want to pay for stuff and the business is not sustainable via non-targeted advertisements (if that's the case)?
- parsimo2010 6y ago
  Yes it does work for everything- a website can label its content with keywords and advertisers can choose to advertise on sites with specific types of content. So IGN signs up for an ad network and says that their content is about "video games." Then Rockstar says to the ad network, "run my ads on sites about video games." A person reading IGN is clearly interested in video games and we don't have to do any tracking to figure that out. They could even go so far as to show Playstation ads on articles about Playstation games and Xbox ads on articles about Xbox games. The ad can be targeted by the content a person is looking at, not where they've been in the past. If anything, a video game ad on a video game website is more effective than showing me a cosmetics ad on a video game website. So companies can still have effective ads on relevant sites, ad networks can still facilitate the in-between, and users don't have to be tracked. Advertisers already use Google AdWords to show ads to people searching for specific keywords, this is just an extension to show ads to websites with specific keywords. Websites are already working with keywords for SEO, it's not even extra work for them.