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Facebook and Google have completely smashed the online advertising industry. The whole reason online advertising is so difficult to profit on is because Faceboo

Facebook and Google have completely smashed the online advertising industry. The whole reason online advertising is so difficult to profit on is because Facebook and Google have sucked all the profit out of the room. The Open Web is a total shambles because of nonsense from Google and Facebook so many companies don't even have an alternative to fall back on... Now Facebook is claiming they are defending small business. What a joke. Anything which causes Facebook to make this much noise must be good.

applerite987 6y ago
Both Google and Facebook have rigged online advertising. Apple is doing GOOD!
- TechBro8615 6y ago
  Is this supposed to be a parody of a Trump tweet? It’s pretty good!
- HenryBemis 6y ago
  > Apple is doing GOOD! only on the ad/privacy/security section. On the "we con you to buy a new $1000 phone every year by manipulating the CPU/battery so instead you paying $70 for a new battery, we skin you" they did pretty bad and I will never buy another Apple device for that. On the "we force you to buy our OWN UNIQUE cables because f... the global standards and nature" they are still doing pretty bad On the "look we are installing NFC on our phones, a true innovation" when other phone makers have been for years, but still don't let you use the device freely" not so good either. On the "you can only buy (iOS) apps from us and nobody else, yeah!" I don't find that so good either. So.. .there is a saying, there are two ways to have the tallest tower. Build the tallest tower, OR make sure the competition doesn't build theirs. There is a small(?) chance to try to cripple a lot of the competition's (ad) profits by introducing these controls. I am pro-privacy and exist outside the FB and Google ecosystems. Apple is doing that good, but they ain't saints. They still got plenty way to go to sainthood. They need to fix/correct plenty of things, and some are not fixable.
  - auggierose 6y ago
    If you can get conned into a $1000 phone, that is really entirely your problem, not Apples. Cables? Really? I am sure you are not ordering on Amazon, because that is an environmental mess. NFC. Complaining about a feature you got and it seems, wanted? Jesus. Stop whining.
  - nmfisher 6y ago
    The saving grace is that it's (relatively) easy to avoid Apple's ecosystem if you don't like the way they do business (like me). Google/Facebook is much more difficult.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - ghaff 6y ago
      Facebook seems relatively easy to me as well, although I have few friends/family who are regular Facebook users at this point. Maybe if I had extended family or circle of friends who all used Facebook daily, I'd feel differently. Google I agree is harder and not using Google (including Android) makes it pretty hard not to use other tech giants like Apple and Microsoft. You can mostly avoid using one or two of the dominant firms. It's pretty hard to avoid using all of them.
      - naravara 6y ago
        > Facebook seems relatively easy to me as well, although I have few friends/family who are regular Facebook users at this point. Maybe if I had extended family or circle of friends who all used Facebook daily, I'd feel differently. Instagram and WhatsApp are how Facebook really gets its hooks in these days. They manage to avoid the stink of their parent company's brand. That said, Instagram is falling out of favor with the yutes. They're moving into TikTok now, which is just as invasive with the added bonus of Chinese state censorship added on.
  - coldtea 6y ago
    >On the "we con you to buy a new $1000 phone every year by manipulating the CPU/battery so instead you paying $70 for a new battery, we skin you" they did pretty bad and I will never buy another Apple device for that. They optimized for battery life by sacrificing some performance. That's basically what they did. The rest is BS and media circus. I had iPhones since 2008 and never felt compelled to "buy a new" every year, just because there was tiny percentage perf drop. For one, the drop in battery (and thus perf tradeoff) happens after 3 or more years of use, not after the first year. Apple is the only company that supports old phone models with new releases for as long, and the company with the best resale value. So, don't buy into the media/ambulance chasers hoopla... >On the "we force you to buy our OWN UNIQUE cables because f... the global standards and nature" they are still doing pretty bad Most people already have 2-4 cables at home. Why include new ones if they don't need them? Just to churn out more plastic? Or is it a problem that in your $600 to $1200 purchase also needs to factor in a $20 cable if you don't already have one? Environmentally speaking I'd force companies to mimick this: (a) use standard chargers and cables, (b) do not provide them in the box. People that already have several don't need them, people who don't can buy a standalone one (even third party for cheaper). The Lighting cable is not a standard (i'd force Apple to move to USB-C), but it's ubiquitous enough (it's not some obscure, per-device cable, like we had in days of yore). >On the "you can only buy (iOS) apps from us and nobody else, yeah!" I don't find that so good either. I do. I wouldn't want to be forced to use the Google store for certain apps, the Facebook store for other apps, random third party stores with shady malware apps imposed upon the less savvy users, and so on... I buy iPhones because of the integration. Go get a Librem phone for the "ultimate" open experience...
codegladiator 6y ago
And I would go ahead and blame them for low quality ads. There was a time I liked seeing ads, they would tell me new things, and be funny/creative. Now its the same stupid spammy ad on all channels because we have only two players. It's just impressions count now.
- HenryBemis 6y ago
  On PC: myriad of ways to never see an ad again. I haven't seen an ad for years (hosts + AdblockPlus + Privacy Badger + NoScript) On Android: same, NoRootFirewall: blocking either for each app, or set global rules and block *.facebook.com, most of the Google IPs, most of the analytics, etc. On Apple: good luck :) (or feel free to write a tip for others -that use apple- see.
  - reitanqild 6y ago
    > On Apple: good luck :) (or feel free to write a tip for others -that use apple- see. Lockdown Firewall. With that I can have a nice, midrange phone like my XR that blocks ads and opens the camera when I click the camera button - not 2,3 seconds later when the fun is gone. You are welcome, have a nice day. FWIW I was an Android user from HTC Hero until late last year. I cannot stand Mac, but on phones my midrange iPhone beats all the flagship Android phones I used over the years.
  - wruza 6y ago
    Adguard? I’m using it for years and rarely see ads. It is not as cool as a vpn/firewall (like they do it on android, slow, battery eating and disallows other vpn) but it solves 95% of the problem.
- bobthepanda 6y ago
  I think we have different memories of the web; YOU ARE THE ONE MILLIONTH VISITOR was plastered all over the 2000s Internet.
  - remarkEon 6y ago
headmelted 6y ago
The web used to have ads, not be ads. Now it's permeated everything to the extent that almost every click is paid for. Whether it's Facebook, Google or someone else entirely, the web's a broken pay-to-win mess and I don't see a way back to it being any reasonable definition of open while the status quo remains.
- amatecha 6y ago
  I miss the late-90's web pretty much every day :(
  - DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
    It was awful then too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlGklt4BSQ8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlGklt4BSQ8
    - tim333 6y ago
      Worse really. These days there's >10x more content and thanks to uBlock origin I see about 10x less ads.
    - JKCalhoun 6y ago
      There was however a brief moment when there were no ads. I remember it. There were also no search engines so you only found other sites by word of mouth.
      - amatecha 6y ago
        Fun memories of finding stuff to download via Archie :)
  - tpetry 6y ago
    I dont miss popups or popunders. Popup blockers had not been able to block every one, it was so annoying.
    - 6y ago
Reason077 6y ago
Apple is selling this as defending privacy, which is fair. But their motivations aren’t entirely altruistic. It also plays to their business model. By choking off in-app ad revenue, they force developers who want to monetise towards paid and freemium apps. That shifts revenue away from the ad networks (Facebook and Google) towards the app store, on which Apple can take their 15-30% share.
- danielscrubs 6y ago
  Are they choking off anything by being transparent? I kind of like to know what I put in my body, doesn’t mean that I will stop eating ice cream on sunny days.
- 420codebro 6y ago
  No one fucking cares dipshit. Fuck off back to faggotbook.
- diveanon 6y ago
  I am totally in support of this shift in business model. Paying for the service you are using in a transparent and predictable way vs deceptively having your personal information monetized should be the norm. Google and Facebook have been hiding behind an army of lawyers writing opaque TOS and lobbyists defending their user hostile monopolies.
  - s1k3s 6y ago
    This is wrong. Paying for a service does not automatically mean the service doesn't take your personal information. * You pay for Windows but Microsoft still tracks you. * You pay for iPhone & Mac but Apple still tracks you. * You pay for Android phones but they still track you. And so on.. I don't understand the shift from "usage tracking" towards "usage tracking for ads". The goal should be no tracking at all instead of "we don't track you to show ads".
    - addicted 6y ago
      It removes a huge incentive for usage tracking. But there is a huge difference between usage tracking and usage tracking for ads. Usage tracking of the kind Microsoft engages in (outside of Bing and their ad focused usage tracking that is), is largely telemetry used to change their product. Usage tracking for ads, however, is used to change your behavior both within the product and outside the product. Usage tracking for ads is significantly more damaging to humans as individuals as well as societies.
TedShiller 6y ago
There used to be millions of webpages out there, all created by individuals. Now, there's one webpage: Facebook. So if Facebook goes out of business, or if Facebook no longer wants to host it (for political or profit reasons), the entire web disappears. This is not what the web is supposed to be. It's supposed to be a WEB, not a POINT. We didn't call it the World Wide POINT.
- ghaff 6y ago
  There were about 100,000 in 1997 [1], so not millions, and many of those were company websites. I don't wholly disagree with your basic point but the reality is that the average person never had a website/blog/etc. (And the real push for individual content creation was probably more like the early 2000s with Web 2.0/Read-Write web.) It wouldn't surprise me if there were more individual presence on the web outside of Facebook/Twitter today than there was in the 90s--even if a smaller percentage of the total content. [1] https://www.pingdom.com/blog/the-web-in-1996-1997/ https://www.pingdom.com/blog/the-web-in-1996-1997/
  - naravara 6y ago
    I still maintain that Google killing Reader to make room for Buzz and Google+ is what really killed the best of the old web. Even though RSS readers only ever had purchase with a minority of internet users, they clicked with the most "influencery" people who would go on to share what they read. IMO, that sort of serendipity and discovery is what Facebook and other service try to replicate now through their algorithmic curation. They're trying to mimic the natural virality that content used to take, but it's forced and, consequently, lacks the same kind of whimsy since too many people are too good at gaming it out. It's all structured to try to sell us something. RSS readers still exist, but Reader's ubiquity and its social features are really what seemed to tie the web together into a cultural force. At least among my circle of people.
    - ghaff 6y ago
      At least among journalists/analysts/other "influencers" in that vein, I'd say that Twitter is probably what's come closest to replacing RSS. If I'm being honest, I have an RSS reader that I sometimes use but mostly I figure if there's something especially interesting out there, I'll read about it.
ramraj07 6y ago
The irony especially in Hacker news is that a good fraction of people here kinda benefit from it. Because Google and Facebook have a boundless treasure chest from this ad monopoly they can pay insane salaries and others have to keep up. Who knows how tech landscape would look like if we didn't let monopolies like these happen?
- ghaff 6y ago
  I was wondering ten years ago if online advertising was a bubble. This was sort of a big deal because of both the direct (Google, Facebook, etc.) and indirect (employees, startups snapped up at insane valuations) beneficiaries. Take that source of money away and it's not clear if you have fewer tech jobs overall. But, while there are other large tech employers who pay at the top tier in this world, I'm guessing there are a lot fewer jobs at that comp level and a lot fewer opportunities for rich startup exits if that particular money faucet were much reduced.
- AniseAbyss 6y ago
  The internet is still monetized by ads. I mean the whole technology behind advertising has gotten staggeringly complex and advanced compared to 1999 but its still just ad spending.
Daniel_Mz 6y ago
How does turning off ID tracking help the users experience? We're still going to be seeing ads, only this time they won't be relevant. How is that a good thing? Am I missing something?
- jmull 6y ago
  Read this: https://www.facebook.com/policy.php https://www.facebook.com/policy.php As you can see, personalized ads is only one of many things facebook does with your data.
- bfgoodrich 6y ago
  Ads being "relevant" seems like a misnomer these days. In a discussion once about viral diseases there was a discussion about RNA versus DNA viruses, so I searched up various viruses included HIV and Herpes, reading about how DNA viruses hide in the body. Now on Facebook my ads are 50% HIV/AIDS medications. I bought a soundbar at Best Buy, so the other 50% of the ads are bizarre Best Buy soundbars, primarily the exactly model I already bought. To make it doubly detrimental for Best Buy, I occasionally click the ad to see if the price has changed. The myth about the useful, relevant ads seems like it doesn't share a lot with reality. While my example is an anecdote, can anyone seriously saying that ads have actually been useful or relevant? When I'm not blocking them they seem to overwhelmingly be things I've already bought and services I already use. The ad industry seems to be overwhelmingly a lie that we've all bought into. The personalized ad industry seems like a grotesque abuse under a promise that it never actually delivers.
- ogre_codes 6y ago
  > How does turning off ID tracking help the users experience? That is not what is happening. Apple is making tracking opt-in and per app instead of having a global opt-out on an obscure settings page. In theory—if you want to be tracked, the option is still there. If you want one particular app to get a little more money from you using it, that is an option too. Facebook believes that most users will not opt into tracking. They are probably right, because most people think it's creepy as hell. So you tell me. What is wrong with giving people the choice up front over whether they should be tracked across apps or not?
- 6y ago
maram 6y ago
>The whole reason online advertising is so difficult to profit on is because Facebook and Google have sucked all profit out of the room. But it could also be because Facebook and Google were first to build products the mainstream users loved so much! Or maybe they were just lucky they launched at the right time. But they definitely were not there first to do this(abuse advertising), they just happened to join a game and they excelled at it. Here is a quote from How the Internet Happened “The first genuine advertisement on the World Wide Web was published by Global Network Navigator, which, in 1993, sold an ad to a Silicon Valley law firm, Heller, Ehrman, White & McAuliffe. It was text only, a glorified classified listing. Later, GNN sold the first sponsored hyperlink, pointing to a children’s catalog retailer called Hand in Hand. Clicking sent a user to the company’s rudimentary web page to learn more about Hand in Hand’s strollers and cribs.16 But those experiments were simply one-off, cash-for-placement deals. The HotWired team was attempting something more ambitious, both technically and aesthetically. Two advertising advertising and digital design firms, Modem Media and Organic, were brought on board and tasked with designing and selling something that felt closer to a magazine-style ad. Big. Colorful. Eye-catching. These would be the very first banner ads. Joe McCambley was a creative executive at Modem Media. “I remember having a big debate—and we probably argued for an hour or so—about whether or not it should even be a color ad,” McCambley says. “We knew we could make it smaller [in terms of bytes] if it were black and white. We knew there was a large percentage of people out there that only had black and white monitors anyway.” “At that time, you couldn’t actually even center a banner,” remembers Organic’s Jonathan Nelson. “Everything was flush left. You would make the banners only two or three different colors. And you couldn’t have complex graphics in them because everybody was on modems at the time. Bandwidth was extremely limited.” If a graphical ad took two minutes to download onscreen, no one would read the article, much less see the banner ad.”
parasubvert 6y ago
The open web has a well worn and growing alternative: subscriptions. This article is on Substack which has been exploding lately, not to mention Medium and other platforms... almost a Renaissance of 2006 era blogging. Unfortunately centralized unlike the RSS years but no one has figured out the economic and UX incentive model to bring decentralization back. This seems to be the architectural challenge of our time: the interop of the “read” side of the web - HTTP GET - allowed Google to build its empire. evolving the “write” side of the web - HTTP POST and data - was supposed to be the Semantic Web’s job, which it failed at in terms of adoption and comprehension if not the actual tech. We need a replacement or reinvestment.
- ticviking 6y ago
  Seems to me that a lot of this is still in basic HTTP. We have 402, and HTTPS. Couldn't we write up a set of APIs on top of HTTP that lets us send crypto or even USD?
  - parasubvert 6y ago
    Sure, that’s the easy part. The hard part is to convince payment processors to use it. There are too many economic incentives to going your own way. The incentive for a generic data interop framework with logical and cryptographic proof (which was the intent of the semantic web) would be arguably high enough that adoption would be universal (similar to HTML). Alas that too hadn’t been true, yet.
adrr 6y ago
I disagree. Online advertising has revolutionized creating successful new brands. It has leveled the playing field where companies had to rely on traditional marketing channels like tv or radio which requires lot of capital and lacks efficiency. It is now easier than ever to build a multimillion dollar brand that competes against giants like Nike,Lululemon, luxottica, samsonite, Tempur-Sealy or Gillette/Pg. Go back 20 years, consumers had limited choices on clothing/shoes, razors, diapers, glasses, and even mattresses. Because of FB and Google, we have more choice as a consumer. As an entrepreneur, it is the best time to launch a company because of targeting that google and FB offer. You can efficiently grow the business.
- ogre_codes 6y ago
  This change Apple is making doesn't get in the way of online advertising. All it does is let people opt out of tracking while using apps on their phone. This change doesn't affect tracking while web surfing or web advertising in any way. If you want Facebook knowing when you sleep, when and where you take the kids to the pool—Awesome. I don't, a lot of people don't. Having the option up front to choose if you are tracked in clear shouldn't bother anyone. That is exactly what this does. Nothing more, nothing less.
  - adrr 6y ago
    This change goes after attribution. App creators won’t be able to measure the performance of their marketing to see how many installs it is driving. This affects all startups in the consumer fintech space. Robinhood,Chime, Acorns etc have relied on digital marketing to acquire customers for a fraction of the price of traditional marketing. Average cost to acquire a financial with traditional marketing is over $1000. The cost to acquire an app install based customer is $30 to $50.
    - ogre_codes 6y ago
      They will still be able to do online advertising. It will be less precise and likely more expensive. What you are asking is that pretty much everyone sacrifice their privacy so some businesses can shave a few dollars off customer acquisition costs. I don't accept that that is an ethical or just trade-off. Advertising costs aren't resetting to pre-internet days, this is one channel. Search based advertising is still there, likewise, if you can advertise on a financial podcast or a dozen other ways.
worker767424 6y ago
How was Facebook able to do this? I remember when they weren't all that profitable around their IPO, Google was clearly the market leader. My only theory is that first mover advantage wasn't everything, and both companies know a lot about you, so they can target really well.
maedla 6y ago
Agreed. I am so tired of this company acting with impunity.

applerite987 6y ago

Both Google and Facebook have rigged online advertising. Apple is doing GOOD!

TechBro8615 6y ago
Is this supposed to be a parody of a Trump tweet? It’s pretty good!
HenryBemis 6y ago
> Apple is doing GOOD! only on the ad/privacy/security section. On the "we con you to buy a new $1000 phone every year by manipulating the CPU/battery so instead you paying $70 for a new battery, we skin you" they did pretty bad and I will never buy another Apple device for that. On the "we force you to buy our OWN UNIQUE cables because f... the global standards and nature" they are still doing pretty bad On the "look we are installing NFC on our phones, a true innovation" when other phone makers have been for years, but still don't let you use the device freely" not so good either. On the "you can only buy (iOS) apps from us and nobody else, yeah!" I don't find that so good either. So.. .there is a saying, there are two ways to have the tallest tower. Build the tallest tower, OR make sure the competition doesn't build theirs. There is a small(?) chance to try to cripple a lot of the competition's (ad) profits by introducing these controls. I am pro-privacy and exist outside the FB and Google ecosystems. Apple is doing that good, but they ain't saints. They still got plenty way to go to sainthood. They need to fix/correct plenty of things, and some are not fixable.
- auggierose 6y ago
  If you can get conned into a $1000 phone, that is really entirely your problem, not Apples. Cables? Really? I am sure you are not ordering on Amazon, because that is an environmental mess. NFC. Complaining about a feature you got and it seems, wanted? Jesus. Stop whining.
- nmfisher 6y ago
  The saving grace is that it's (relatively) easy to avoid Apple's ecosystem if you don't like the way they do business (like me). Google/Facebook is much more difficult.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - ghaff 6y ago
    Facebook seems relatively easy to me as well, although I have few friends/family who are regular Facebook users at this point. Maybe if I had extended family or circle of friends who all used Facebook daily, I'd feel differently. Google I agree is harder and not using Google (including Android) makes it pretty hard not to use other tech giants like Apple and Microsoft. You can mostly avoid using one or two of the dominant firms. It's pretty hard to avoid using all of them.
    - naravara 6y ago
      > Facebook seems relatively easy to me as well, although I have few friends/family who are regular Facebook users at this point. Maybe if I had extended family or circle of friends who all used Facebook daily, I'd feel differently. Instagram and WhatsApp are how Facebook really gets its hooks in these days. They manage to avoid the stink of their parent company's brand. That said, Instagram is falling out of favor with the yutes. They're moving into TikTok now, which is just as invasive with the added bonus of Chinese state censorship added on.
- coldtea 6y ago
  >On the "we con you to buy a new $1000 phone every year by manipulating the CPU/battery so instead you paying $70 for a new battery, we skin you" they did pretty bad and I will never buy another Apple device for that. They optimized for battery life by sacrificing some performance. That's basically what they did. The rest is BS and media circus. I had iPhones since 2008 and never felt compelled to "buy a new" every year, just because there was tiny percentage perf drop. For one, the drop in battery (and thus perf tradeoff) happens after 3 or more years of use, not after the first year. Apple is the only company that supports old phone models with new releases for as long, and the company with the best resale value. So, don't buy into the media/ambulance chasers hoopla... >On the "we force you to buy our OWN UNIQUE cables because f... the global standards and nature" they are still doing pretty bad Most people already have 2-4 cables at home. Why include new ones if they don't need them? Just to churn out more plastic? Or is it a problem that in your $600 to $1200 purchase also needs to factor in a $20 cable if you don't already have one? Environmentally speaking I'd force companies to mimick this: (a) use standard chargers and cables, (b) do not provide them in the box. People that already have several don't need them, people who don't can buy a standalone one (even third party for cheaper). The Lighting cable is not a standard (i'd force Apple to move to USB-C), but it's ubiquitous enough (it's not some obscure, per-device cable, like we had in days of yore). >On the "you can only buy (iOS) apps from us and nobody else, yeah!" I don't find that so good either. I do. I wouldn't want to be forced to use the Google store for certain apps, the Facebook store for other apps, random third party stores with shady malware apps imposed upon the less savvy users, and so on... I buy iPhones because of the integration. Go get a Librem phone for the "ultimate" open experience...

codegladiator 6y ago

And I would go ahead and blame them for low quality ads. There was a time I liked seeing ads, they would tell me new things, and be funny/creative. Now its the same stupid spammy ad on all channels because we have only two players. It's just impressions count now.

HenryBemis 6y ago
On PC: myriad of ways to never see an ad again. I haven't seen an ad for years (hosts + AdblockPlus + Privacy Badger + NoScript) On Android: same, NoRootFirewall: blocking either for each app, or set global rules and block *.facebook.com, most of the Google IPs, most of the analytics, etc. On Apple: good luck :) (or feel free to write a tip for others -that use apple- see.
- reitanqild 6y ago
  > On Apple: good luck :) (or feel free to write a tip for others -that use apple- see. Lockdown Firewall. With that I can have a nice, midrange phone like my XR that blocks ads and opens the camera when I click the camera button - not 2,3 seconds later when the fun is gone. You are welcome, have a nice day. FWIW I was an Android user from HTC Hero until late last year. I cannot stand Mac, but on phones my midrange iPhone beats all the flagship Android phones I used over the years.
- wruza 6y ago
  Adguard? I’m using it for years and rarely see ads. It is not as cool as a vpn/firewall (like they do it on android, slow, battery eating and disallows other vpn) but it solves 95% of the problem.
bobthepanda 6y ago
I think we have different memories of the web; YOU ARE THE ONE MILLIONTH VISITOR was plastered all over the 2000s Internet.
- remarkEon 6y ago

headmelted 6y ago

The web used to have ads, not be ads. Now it's permeated everything to the extent that almost every click is paid for. Whether it's Facebook, Google or someone else entirely, the web's a broken pay-to-win mess and I don't see a way back to it being any reasonable definition of open while the status quo remains.

amatecha 6y ago
I miss the late-90's web pretty much every day :(
- DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
  It was awful then too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlGklt4BSQ8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlGklt4BSQ8
  - tim333 6y ago
    Worse really. These days there's >10x more content and thanks to uBlock origin I see about 10x less ads.
  - JKCalhoun 6y ago
    There was however a brief moment when there were no ads. I remember it. There were also no search engines so you only found other sites by word of mouth.
    - amatecha 6y ago
      Fun memories of finding stuff to download via Archie :)
- tpetry 6y ago
  I dont miss popups or popunders. Popup blockers had not been able to block every one, it was so annoying.
  - 6y ago

Reason077 6y ago

Apple is selling this as defending privacy, which is fair. But their motivations aren’t entirely altruistic. It also plays to their business model. By choking off in-app ad revenue, they force developers who want to monetise towards paid and freemium apps. That shifts revenue away from the ad networks (Facebook and Google) towards the app store, on which Apple can take their 15-30% share.

danielscrubs 6y ago
Are they choking off anything by being transparent? I kind of like to know what I put in my body, doesn’t mean that I will stop eating ice cream on sunny days.
420codebro 6y ago
No one fucking cares dipshit. Fuck off back to faggotbook.
diveanon 6y ago
I am totally in support of this shift in business model. Paying for the service you are using in a transparent and predictable way vs deceptively having your personal information monetized should be the norm. Google and Facebook have been hiding behind an army of lawyers writing opaque TOS and lobbyists defending their user hostile monopolies.
- s1k3s 6y ago
  This is wrong. Paying for a service does not automatically mean the service doesn't take your personal information. * You pay for Windows but Microsoft still tracks you. * You pay for iPhone & Mac but Apple still tracks you. * You pay for Android phones but they still track you. And so on.. I don't understand the shift from "usage tracking" towards "usage tracking for ads". The goal should be no tracking at all instead of "we don't track you to show ads".
  - addicted 6y ago
    It removes a huge incentive for usage tracking. But there is a huge difference between usage tracking and usage tracking for ads. Usage tracking of the kind Microsoft engages in (outside of Bing and their ad focused usage tracking that is), is largely telemetry used to change their product. Usage tracking for ads, however, is used to change your behavior both within the product and outside the product. Usage tracking for ads is significantly more damaging to humans as individuals as well as societies.

TedShiller 6y ago

There used to be millions of webpages out there, all created by individuals. Now, there's one webpage: Facebook. So if Facebook goes out of business, or if Facebook no longer wants to host it (for political or profit reasons), the entire web disappears. This is not what the web is supposed to be. It's supposed to be a WEB, not a POINT. We didn't call it the World Wide POINT.

ghaff 6y ago
There were about 100,000 in 1997 [1], so not millions, and many of those were company websites. I don't wholly disagree with your basic point but the reality is that the average person never had a website/blog/etc. (And the real push for individual content creation was probably more like the early 2000s with Web 2.0/Read-Write web.) It wouldn't surprise me if there were more individual presence on the web outside of Facebook/Twitter today than there was in the 90s--even if a smaller percentage of the total content. [1] https://www.pingdom.com/blog/the-web-in-1996-1997/ https://www.pingdom.com/blog/the-web-in-1996-1997/
- naravara 6y ago
  I still maintain that Google killing Reader to make room for Buzz and Google+ is what really killed the best of the old web. Even though RSS readers only ever had purchase with a minority of internet users, they clicked with the most "influencery" people who would go on to share what they read. IMO, that sort of serendipity and discovery is what Facebook and other service try to replicate now through their algorithmic curation. They're trying to mimic the natural virality that content used to take, but it's forced and, consequently, lacks the same kind of whimsy since too many people are too good at gaming it out. It's all structured to try to sell us something. RSS readers still exist, but Reader's ubiquity and its social features are really what seemed to tie the web together into a cultural force. At least among my circle of people.
  - ghaff 6y ago
    At least among journalists/analysts/other "influencers" in that vein, I'd say that Twitter is probably what's come closest to replacing RSS. If I'm being honest, I have an RSS reader that I sometimes use but mostly I figure if there's something especially interesting out there, I'll read about it.

ramraj07 6y ago

The irony especially in Hacker news is that a good fraction of people here kinda benefit from it. Because Google and Facebook have a boundless treasure chest from this ad monopoly they can pay insane salaries and others have to keep up. Who knows how tech landscape would look like if we didn't let monopolies like these happen?

ghaff 6y ago
I was wondering ten years ago if online advertising was a bubble. This was sort of a big deal because of both the direct (Google, Facebook, etc.) and indirect (employees, startups snapped up at insane valuations) beneficiaries. Take that source of money away and it's not clear if you have fewer tech jobs overall. But, while there are other large tech employers who pay at the top tier in this world, I'm guessing there are a lot fewer jobs at that comp level and a lot fewer opportunities for rich startup exits if that particular money faucet were much reduced.
AniseAbyss 6y ago
The internet is still monetized by ads. I mean the whole technology behind advertising has gotten staggeringly complex and advanced compared to 1999 but its still just ad spending.

Daniel_Mz 6y ago

How does turning off ID tracking help the users experience? We're still going to be seeing ads, only this time they won't be relevant. How is that a good thing? Am I missing something?

jmull 6y ago
Read this: https://www.facebook.com/policy.php https://www.facebook.com/policy.php As you can see, personalized ads is only one of many things facebook does with your data.
bfgoodrich 6y ago
Ads being "relevant" seems like a misnomer these days. In a discussion once about viral diseases there was a discussion about RNA versus DNA viruses, so I searched up various viruses included HIV and Herpes, reading about how DNA viruses hide in the body. Now on Facebook my ads are 50% HIV/AIDS medications. I bought a soundbar at Best Buy, so the other 50% of the ads are bizarre Best Buy soundbars, primarily the exactly model I already bought. To make it doubly detrimental for Best Buy, I occasionally click the ad to see if the price has changed. The myth about the useful, relevant ads seems like it doesn't share a lot with reality. While my example is an anecdote, can anyone seriously saying that ads have actually been useful or relevant? When I'm not blocking them they seem to overwhelmingly be things I've already bought and services I already use. The ad industry seems to be overwhelmingly a lie that we've all bought into. The personalized ad industry seems like a grotesque abuse under a promise that it never actually delivers.
ogre_codes 6y ago
> How does turning off ID tracking help the users experience? That is not what is happening. Apple is making tracking opt-in and per app instead of having a global opt-out on an obscure settings page. In theory—if you want to be tracked, the option is still there. If you want one particular app to get a little more money from you using it, that is an option too. Facebook believes that most users will not opt into tracking. They are probably right, because most people think it's creepy as hell. So you tell me. What is wrong with giving people the choice up front over whether they should be tracked across apps or not?
6y ago

maram 6y ago

>The whole reason online advertising is so difficult to profit on is because Facebook and Google have sucked all profit out of the room. But it could also be because Facebook and Google were first to build products the mainstream users loved so much! Or maybe they were just lucky they launched at the right time. But they definitely were not there first to do this(abuse advertising), they just happened to join a game and they excelled at it. Here is a quote from How the Internet Happened “The first genuine advertisement on the World Wide Web was published by Global Network Navigator, which, in 1993, sold an ad to a Silicon Valley law firm, Heller, Ehrman, White & McAuliffe. It was text only, a glorified classified listing. Later, GNN sold the first sponsored hyperlink, pointing to a children’s catalog retailer called Hand in Hand. Clicking sent a user to the company’s rudimentary web page to learn more about Hand in Hand’s strollers and cribs.16 But those experiments were simply one-off, cash-for-placement deals. The HotWired team was attempting something more ambitious, both technically and aesthetically. Two advertising advertising and digital design firms, Modem Media and Organic, were brought on board and tasked with designing and selling something that felt closer to a magazine-style ad. Big. Colorful. Eye-catching. These would be the very first banner ads. Joe McCambley was a creative executive at Modem Media. “I remember having a big debate—and we probably argued for an hour or so—about whether or not it should even be a color ad,” McCambley says. “We knew we could make it smaller [in terms of bytes] if it were black and white. We knew there was a large percentage of people out there that only had black and white monitors anyway.” “At that time, you couldn’t actually even center a banner,” remembers Organic’s Jonathan Nelson. “Everything was flush left. You would make the banners only two or three different colors. And you couldn’t have complex graphics in them because everybody was on modems at the time. Bandwidth was extremely limited.” If a graphical ad took two minutes to download onscreen, no one would read the article, much less see the banner ad.”

parasubvert 6y ago

The open web has a well worn and growing alternative: subscriptions. This article is on Substack which has been exploding lately, not to mention Medium and other platforms... almost a Renaissance of 2006 era blogging. Unfortunately centralized unlike the RSS years but no one has figured out the economic and UX incentive model to bring decentralization back. This seems to be the architectural challenge of our time: the interop of the “read” side of the web - HTTP GET - allowed Google to build its empire. evolving the “write” side of the web - HTTP POST and data - was supposed to be the Semantic Web’s job, which it failed at in terms of adoption and comprehension if not the actual tech. We need a replacement or reinvestment.

ticviking 6y ago
Seems to me that a lot of this is still in basic HTTP. We have 402, and HTTPS. Couldn't we write up a set of APIs on top of HTTP that lets us send crypto or even USD?
- parasubvert 6y ago
  Sure, that’s the easy part. The hard part is to convince payment processors to use it. There are too many economic incentives to going your own way. The incentive for a generic data interop framework with logical and cryptographic proof (which was the intent of the semantic web) would be arguably high enough that adoption would be universal (similar to HTML). Alas that too hadn’t been true, yet.

adrr 6y ago

I disagree. Online advertising has revolutionized creating successful new brands. It has leveled the playing field where companies had to rely on traditional marketing channels like tv or radio which requires lot of capital and lacks efficiency. It is now easier than ever to build a multimillion dollar brand that competes against giants like Nike,Lululemon, luxottica, samsonite, Tempur-Sealy or Gillette/Pg. Go back 20 years, consumers had limited choices on clothing/shoes, razors, diapers, glasses, and even mattresses. Because of FB and Google, we have more choice as a consumer. As an entrepreneur, it is the best time to launch a company because of targeting that google and FB offer. You can efficiently grow the business.

ogre_codes 6y ago
This change Apple is making doesn't get in the way of online advertising. All it does is let people opt out of tracking while using apps on their phone. This change doesn't affect tracking while web surfing or web advertising in any way. If you want Facebook knowing when you sleep, when and where you take the kids to the pool—Awesome. I don't, a lot of people don't. Having the option up front to choose if you are tracked in clear shouldn't bother anyone. That is exactly what this does. Nothing more, nothing less.
- adrr 6y ago
  This change goes after attribution. App creators won’t be able to measure the performance of their marketing to see how many installs it is driving. This affects all startups in the consumer fintech space. Robinhood,Chime, Acorns etc have relied on digital marketing to acquire customers for a fraction of the price of traditional marketing. Average cost to acquire a financial with traditional marketing is over $1000. The cost to acquire an app install based customer is $30 to $50.
  - ogre_codes 6y ago
    They will still be able to do online advertising. It will be less precise and likely more expensive. What you are asking is that pretty much everyone sacrifice their privacy so some businesses can shave a few dollars off customer acquisition costs. I don't accept that that is an ethical or just trade-off. Advertising costs aren't resetting to pre-internet days, this is one channel. Search based advertising is still there, likewise, if you can advertise on a financial podcast or a dozen other ways.

worker767424 6y ago

How was Facebook able to do this? I remember when they weren't all that profitable around their IPO, Google was clearly the market leader. My only theory is that first mover advantage wasn't everything, and both companies know a lot about you, so they can target really well.

maedla 6y ago

Agreed. I am so tired of this company acting with impunity.