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Also, nearly $125B was spent on internet advertising in the US in 2020, per the first estimate I found on the internet [1]. While Google and Facebook keep huge

by x0x0 6y ago

Also, nearly $125B was spent on internet advertising in the US in 2020, per the first estimate I found on the internet [1]. While Google and Facebook keep huge chunks of that, my guess is at least 40% flows through to publishers. So that's a $50B revenue stream to publishers (all sorts of web sites, including news; apps, musicians (via spotify and so forth)) that we're talking about breaking. I really don't believe people have thought through all the effects of that. Not least of which is seeing almost all (reliable) news behind a paywall. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/183523/online-advertisement-spending-in-the-us/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/183523/online-advertisem...

cortesoft 6y ago
So if suddenly all tracking stopped, advertisers would just stop spending money on advertising? That doesn't seem right... advertisers published ads before tracking was a thing, they would still do it if tracking becomes impossible.
- x0x0 6y ago
  Huge amounts of it, yes -- particularly since the anti-floc people (which, to be blunt, I'm not in love with, particularly Google just deciding to do this on their own) tend to also be in the break 3rd party cookies camp. With respect to eg brand advertising: even if you get past an inability to measure impact, once you break most of the ad infra, ad buyers simply aren't going to negotiate / buy with small sites. It's not worth their time or money. Small here is probably less than millions of uniques per day. With respect to direct response advertising, you've mostly lost the ability to track a conversion. So it becomes pointless. The advertising before extensive tracking was a different time: way way less money, way fewer ads, way less ad blindness amongst viewers, way way way fewer publishers, etc. Will some advertising persist? Absolutely. eg the branded / source trackable referral codes that podcast advertising uses. But there will be an enormous falloff in dollars pointed at publishers. And to be clear, I'm not a fan of 3rd party tracking. But we should be deliberate before we end the ad-supported internet.
  - idreyn 6y ago
    The ad infrastructure can still exist -- it would just have a restricted set of data (IP, device fingerprint, the surrounding content, and whatever info the first-party publisher voluntarily submits about you) to decide what ad to serve. Small, niche websites may do better than big news sites under this regime since you can infer more about their visitors by the fact that they chose to visit. I could see bigger sites expending a lot of energy trying to bring the tracking and inference in-house, and even federating these efforts, creating a kind of soft-paywall that requires you to "pay" by validating an email address or some other stable identity marker in exchange for temporary access to content, so they can watch what you browse and build a shared model of you that they can feed back into the ad networks. I could see the NYT continuing to manipulate and fine-tune its headlines and graphics, trying to sort its visitors into cohorts based on what appeals to them to squeeze every last cent out of a pageview. At the same time, so much content discovery and consumption happens in the belly of the beast (Facebook, Google, Youtube) that most ads will continue to be targeted based on the considerable information those websites have about you, regardless of what browsers do or what happens to third-party tracker networks.
  - Closi 6y ago
    Of course you can track ad impact and conversion - you just direct the ad to a certain url and see how many hits you get. And banning extensive user tracking doesn’t mean “ending the ad supported internet”, that’s sensationalist to the max! To suggest that ending tracking would mean that sites have to individually negotiate ads with individual websites isn’t true either - ad networks have and will always be a thing, regardless of the ability to track.
  - cortesoft 6y ago
    First, you could still track a direct response conversion by including information in the url for if they click on it. You can still even track impressions by measuring requests. Second, if this will truly cause a drop in advertising spend.... then that money will be spent somewhere else, which might boost a different industry. I don't think this would really change advertising spend, though... it would just change the type of advertising and how it is tracked/paid for. Advertisers still want to get their ads in front of people, and the amount of content to advertising demand wouldn't change. In fact, I think a change to content based advertising will help with content quality. With user based advertising, an advertiser doesn't care if the valuable person is viewing good content or not. Content creators just need to attract the valuable eyeballs, and can use as much click bait and useless content as possible to get them. With content based advertising, the advertiser will spend on quality content, because that is the only metric they have to try to reach quality users.
- roody15 6y ago
  yes it’s called contextual advertising and it’s fine. Visit a camping website and companies pay to advertise camping gear, travel , etc. Visit a video game review site companies pay to advertise new games, systems etc. The very idea that a user needs to be tracked from site to site and a profile built around his/her web activity is dystopian and depressing.
  - candiodari 6y ago
    The key, of course, is that the big successes of advertising, cannot use contextual advertising (much). On Facebook/instagram/... it just doesn't work, as there isn't much context to the posts.
feanaro 6y ago
I feel news was of better quality 15 years ago than today so I wouldn't mind going back to that state of the world. And 15 years ago pervasive tracking wasn't a thing. So yes, please, let's kill it with fire.
- Supermancho 6y ago
  > I feel news was of better quality 15 years ago than today Having been around for the last 30 years (yes, even before the 90s!) I can say that the quality of news and the NUMBER of news sources is far greater. The amount of data online has only increased and has increasingly been sourced. Imagine the world before, when the only source of news was to interview someone in person or read the copy that particular source was using in the narrative.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - feanaro 6y ago
    I've been around for the same amount of time so that's not the cause of the difference in our opinions. What might be is that I'm not talking about general availability of information, but news specifically. To me, news quality seems to have plummeted roughly at the same time as the rise of targeted ad industry, which is also the time news sources became "free" (as in the reader not paying any money for it).

by x0x0 6y ago

cortesoft 6y ago

So if suddenly all tracking stopped, advertisers would just stop spending money on advertising? That doesn't seem right... advertisers published ads before tracking was a thing, they would still do it if tracking becomes impossible.

x0x0 6y ago
Huge amounts of it, yes -- particularly since the anti-floc people (which, to be blunt, I'm not in love with, particularly Google just deciding to do this on their own) tend to also be in the break 3rd party cookies camp. With respect to eg brand advertising: even if you get past an inability to measure impact, once you break most of the ad infra, ad buyers simply aren't going to negotiate / buy with small sites. It's not worth their time or money. Small here is probably less than millions of uniques per day. With respect to direct response advertising, you've mostly lost the ability to track a conversion. So it becomes pointless. The advertising before extensive tracking was a different time: way way less money, way fewer ads, way less ad blindness amongst viewers, way way way fewer publishers, etc. Will some advertising persist? Absolutely. eg the branded / source trackable referral codes that podcast advertising uses. But there will be an enormous falloff in dollars pointed at publishers. And to be clear, I'm not a fan of 3rd party tracking. But we should be deliberate before we end the ad-supported internet.
- idreyn 6y ago
  The ad infrastructure can still exist -- it would just have a restricted set of data (IP, device fingerprint, the surrounding content, and whatever info the first-party publisher voluntarily submits about you) to decide what ad to serve. Small, niche websites may do better than big news sites under this regime since you can infer more about their visitors by the fact that they chose to visit. I could see bigger sites expending a lot of energy trying to bring the tracking and inference in-house, and even federating these efforts, creating a kind of soft-paywall that requires you to "pay" by validating an email address or some other stable identity marker in exchange for temporary access to content, so they can watch what you browse and build a shared model of you that they can feed back into the ad networks. I could see the NYT continuing to manipulate and fine-tune its headlines and graphics, trying to sort its visitors into cohorts based on what appeals to them to squeeze every last cent out of a pageview. At the same time, so much content discovery and consumption happens in the belly of the beast (Facebook, Google, Youtube) that most ads will continue to be targeted based on the considerable information those websites have about you, regardless of what browsers do or what happens to third-party tracker networks.
- Closi 6y ago
  Of course you can track ad impact and conversion - you just direct the ad to a certain url and see how many hits you get. And banning extensive user tracking doesn’t mean “ending the ad supported internet”, that’s sensationalist to the max! To suggest that ending tracking would mean that sites have to individually negotiate ads with individual websites isn’t true either - ad networks have and will always be a thing, regardless of the ability to track.
- cortesoft 6y ago
  First, you could still track a direct response conversion by including information in the url for if they click on it. You can still even track impressions by measuring requests. Second, if this will truly cause a drop in advertising spend.... then that money will be spent somewhere else, which might boost a different industry. I don't think this would really change advertising spend, though... it would just change the type of advertising and how it is tracked/paid for. Advertisers still want to get their ads in front of people, and the amount of content to advertising demand wouldn't change. In fact, I think a change to content based advertising will help with content quality. With user based advertising, an advertiser doesn't care if the valuable person is viewing good content or not. Content creators just need to attract the valuable eyeballs, and can use as much click bait and useless content as possible to get them. With content based advertising, the advertiser will spend on quality content, because that is the only metric they have to try to reach quality users.
roody15 6y ago
yes it’s called contextual advertising and it’s fine. Visit a camping website and companies pay to advertise camping gear, travel , etc. Visit a video game review site companies pay to advertise new games, systems etc. The very idea that a user needs to be tracked from site to site and a profile built around his/her web activity is dystopian and depressing.
- candiodari 6y ago
  The key, of course, is that the big successes of advertising, cannot use contextual advertising (much). On Facebook/instagram/... it just doesn't work, as there isn't much context to the posts.

feanaro 6y ago

I feel news was of better quality 15 years ago than today so I wouldn't mind going back to that state of the world. And 15 years ago pervasive tracking wasn't a thing. So yes, please, let's kill it with fire.

Supermancho 6y ago
> I feel news was of better quality 15 years ago than today Having been around for the last 30 years (yes, even before the 90s!) I can say that the quality of news and the NUMBER of news sources is far greater. The amount of data online has only increased and has increasingly been sourced. Imagine the world before, when the only source of news was to interview someone in person or read the copy that particular source was using in the narrative.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- feanaro 6y ago
  I've been around for the same amount of time so that's not the cause of the difference in our opinions. What might be is that I'm not talking about general availability of information, but news specifically. To me, news quality seems to have plummeted roughly at the same time as the rise of targeted ad industry, which is also the time news sources became "free" (as in the reader not paying any money for it).