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Advertising was around for thousands of years before tracking. The fear is that they won't make as much money and will have to go back to how they did it before
by throwaway189262 6y ago
Advertising was around for thousands of years before tracking. The fear is that they won't make as much money and will have to go back to how they did it before all the privacy invasion. Very sad indeed.
It's easy really, you just put ads on sites visited by your target market. That's how advertising was always done before Gattica style snooping was involved.
Individually targeted advertising needs to be illegal. It's bad for society.
- 1propionyl 6y agoIt's not unreasonable to think that a lot of current digital ad spend is 1) an arms race for slices of a pre-existing attention pie that also resembles a protection racket, 2) a huge waste of money. There have been a couple of natural experiments showing #2 where entire digital ad spends were slashed at once with little to no impact. As for #1, look at where a massive chunk of Google's revenue comes from: companies trying to squat their own name and similar keywords to prevent some competitor's product from showing up next to their own.
- yazaddaruvala 6y agoTargeted advertising through tracking is only good for “aggregators” that want infinite eye balls. Any platforms that create content already have well targeted ads without tracking. e.g. HBO Even on content aggregators, that target niche audiences like HN have well targeted ads without tracking. Jobs and of course Ycombinator listed everywhere. Killing tracking kills the mega content aggregator industry (front page of Reddit, maybe Facebook feed, etc) but this is likely a good thing.