6 ms·

Do newspapers need to know what websites every subscriber visits in order to put ads in the paper? The idea that privacy needs to be conceded in order for a he

• gridlockd 6y ago
  Not sure about "healthy", but un-targeted advertising is a total waste of money, unless you're some big generic brand. High-value advertising revenue generally comes from very specific brands targeting very specific users. Of course you can do certain kinds of targeted advertising without user profiles, but I don't see how that would work on Facebook.
  • criddell 6y ago
    On Facebook, information that users voluntarily and explicitly provide is fair game for targeting IMHO. The rest should come from the content of the page.
    • dhimes 6y ago
      If by "explicitly" you subsume "knowingly" then I agree.
      • criddell 6y ago
        I prefer explicitly. Facebook has a pretty good idea where I am by looking at the data associated with my connection. I know they have that, but if I don't want them to use that for advertising, they shouldn't.
  • Nextgrid 6y ago
    In this case how does real-world advertising in magazines, public transport, TV, etc manages to have such a high price despite the targeting capabilities being orders of magnitude lower than online? Maybe the problem with online ads isn't the targeting or lack thereof but that the well has been poisoned by allowing even the worst possible scum and the users reached their breaking point and learned to ignore them, while the higher quality in real-world advertising is enough to even keep people paying for advertising (in the form of buying magazines)?
    • gridlockd 6y ago
      > In this case how does real-world advertising in magazines, public transport, TV, etc manages to have such a high price despite the targeting capabilities being orders of magnitude lower than online? Some companies are willing to pay that much more for the prestige of showing up in the "real world", just like some brands might maintain unprofitable flagship stores. Another reason is "because they have to charge that much". Which means that if fewer companies are willing to pay that much, more classic media outlets go out of business, as they can not lower prices further. Lastly, you can't accurately measure how inefficient these forms of advertising are, whereas online advertising makes it easy to see whether ads are a net loss or not.
      • Nextgrid 6y ago
        > Some companies are willing to pay that much more for the prestige of showing up in the "real world" Doesn't that show a problem with online advertising if it's considered so bad that companies are willing to pay huge premiums to show up somewhere else instead?
  • alexchamberlain 6y ago
    Does it not depend on context? For example, you don’t need to know anything about the user of a recipe website to know they are hungry and once they pick a recipe, some basic notion of what they are looking for. On top of that, extremely course information can be gathered without tracking users. For example, you can probably get a country level location and maybe even language from the request the browser sends.
    • gridlockd 6y ago
      You don't need to know anything about a person to know that, at some point, they'll be hungry. So, if you're some company that happens to sell food nationally, you can just throw your ad at anybody. That's what I mean by "big generic brand". However, if you sell, say, artisanal hot sauce, you'd pay more to target an affluent person that likes spicy food, rather than some random person that may be just be googling how to make macaroni and cheese.
    • dialtone 6y ago
      I can buy ads generically on a site, but what happens after the user clicks on the ad or just views the ad and then buys the product? How do you keep track of this when you can't measure the effect? The only way is to measure some form of before/after analysis of your conversions with or without the marketing campaigns... Too much noise to be able to do that on the web.
• kspacewalk2 6y ago
  Sure. As long as the flip side of that argument is equally appreciated - ad revenue pays for the apps, so less revenue will necessarily lead to fewer "free" apps and/or fewer "free" features and/or worse quality. It's a rational response of the intermediary (i.e. app makers) to the customers (i.e. advertisers) having less access to the product (i.e. us).
  • daralthus 6y ago
    free != quality ads == worse quality
  • trasz 6y ago
    Ad-funded apps are usually garbage. Prime example is the Facebook app, or Messenger.
  • baddox 6y ago
    > less revenue will necessarily lead to fewer "free" apps and/or fewer "free" features and/or worse quality I agree with "fewer" and strongly disagree with "worse quality."
    • kspacewalk2 6y ago
      What's the incentive to spend money to constantly improve, fix bugs and update the features on every OS release? If you consider the entire development lifecycle, quality costs developer money every bit just as much as new features.
  • IggleSniggle 6y ago
    Is it wrong that I’ve consistently had better experiences with paid apps than advertising supported apps? Perhaps it has something to do with the alignment of incentives. Anyway, I don’t begrudge anyone who has worked in the ad business, but I do wonder if folks might be happier optimizing for something of real lasting value in comparison to the gambling business.
  • amluto 6y ago
    Newspapers had plenty of ad revenue before tracking. Apps could be monetized by ads that are targeted based on the in-app content only.
• an_opabinia 6y ago
  > The idea that privacy needs to be conceded in order for a healthy ad market to exist is false. You can't in practice verify that clicks or impressions are real, as opposed to initiated by bots, without correlating them with real human behavior. If you have an idea for how to verify a click or impression was real without also gathering some kind of data, go make ten billion dollars selling that technology.
  • ric2b 6y ago
    > You can't in practice verify that clicks or impressions are real, as opposed to initiated by bots, without correlating them with real human behavior. Track purchases coming from ads?
  • jkubicek 6y ago
    That's why you don't pay per click or impression. The newspaper/magazine model has worked fine for 100 years. I fully understand why advertising companies would be opposed to this, it's in direct opposition to their value prop. As a consumer, though, I don't want anyone who is not the entity I'm interacting with to know anything about me.
    • dialtone 6y ago
      There is a reason why the news paper industry moved in the direction that they did. Or do you think they were forced to move this way? Measurement on the web can be more precise and allows to understand the impact of revenue, it's also vastly more distributed than magazines and TV channels of which there's only thousands or so for each while there are literally millions of websites. There's too much noise and fraud on the web to be able to make marketing decisions with little tracking. The W3C is working with Google on establishing what it would take to accomplish this stuff without sharing data, this isn't the approach apple took with its platform in plain disregard for all the apps that run on it, but than again at this point this shouldn't surprise anyone.
      • criddell 6y ago
        > There's too much noise and fraud on the web to be able to make marketing decisions with little tracking. I think you give too little credit to the intelligence of ad buyers. They can figure out if a web ad is working the same way they can figure out if a billboard ad is working.