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Every privacy-focused push by Apple – or anyone, really – forces publishers to find less invasive methods for engaging with their audience, without having to re

Every privacy-focused push by Apple – or anyone, really – forces publishers to find less invasive methods for engaging with their audience, without having to rely on skewed data and grotesque tracking. How could that be bad for journalism? We got rid of blinking text and popup ads for a reason, and this is just the next step.

layble 5y ago
Exactly the opposite actually.
- midasuni 5y ago
  Please elaborate
  - throwaway3699 5y ago
    It forces publishers into closed gardens. I am willing to bet Apple's work here will have the same effect that advertising did on RSS, which is that newsletters will turn into truncated notifications designed to bring you to a website where they can get the business metrics they "think" they need. I actually think there is a nice middle ground for something like a basic view counter, and some open rate data to be available in an aggregated, anonymous way.
Barrin92 5y ago
because one possible consequence of this is that it forces people to move towards closed platforms like Apple's own if they want to effectively advertise and that includes forking over substantial amount of money to those platforms. Which is of course the economic incentive that a company like Apple has to introduce these measures, it creates an asymmetry where Apple has all kinds of user information, but competitors don't. And if you want to see the effect that declining ad revenue has on journalism you can just look at the decline of local journalism across the US as revenue shifted from advertisers to digital platforms.
- kergonath 5y ago
  > it creates an asymmetry where Apple has all kinds of user information, but competitors don't That is true only if Apple competes with them, which is not the case at all.
  - Barrin92 5y ago
    But they do? Apple is literally in the news business, the services business (many of which rely on ad revenue to compete with Apple's own services), increasingly in the ad business itself (revenue is expected to rise to 11 billion in 2025, growing quickly)[1], and as I just laid out in the post above, has a huge interest in just laying waste to independent revenue streams outside of their own channels, in the exact same way digital platforms overall benefited from laying waste to the small and mid-sized ad-industry. [1]https://9to5mac.com/2019/11/15/apple-ad-revenue/ https://9to5mac.com/2019/11/15/apple-ad-revenue/
    - kergonath 5y ago
      > Apple is literally in the news business, the services business (many of which rely on ad revenue to compete with Apple's own services) They are a news aggregator and distributor, they are a customer of media and news agencies. Or a parasite, depending on point of view. Still not a competitor. They also still don’t compete with ad brokers and don’t do any targeted advertising. > increasingly in the ad business itself (revenue is expected to rise to 11 billion in 2025, growing quickly) These ads are in the Stores and keyword-based. Which is distasteful, but not quite the same level. Again, they don’t distribute ads, and are not in the market for targeted advertising. They don’t compete with ad networks, and if they weren’t doing that there would just be no ads on the store. Like it was not that long ago. > in the exact same way digital platforms overall benefited from laying waste to the small and mid-sized ad-industry. If the mid-sized ad industry does not rely on tracking, blocking invisible pixels in newsletter won’t affect it. If it does rely on tracking, then it can’t die soon enough.
      - jsnell 5y ago
jldugger 5y ago
> How could that be bad for journalism? I don't know about journalism per se, but for journalists, they presumably arrived at the status quo as the profit maximizing option, and removing it will, to varying degrees, impoverish them.
- FabHK 5y ago
  That is a sensible first hypothesis, but it rests on many assumptions, in particular that the market doesn't have any prisoner-dilemma/tragedy of the commons aspects to it. It is quite conceivable, for example, that every single journalist is better off if they make click-bait listicles instead of investigative journalism, but the profession as a whole suffers.
- machello13 5y ago
  Seems like an argument against making any kind of change to any industry.
  - jldugger 5y ago
    You're not wrong; it's not like industry constantly lobbies against regulation because they'd be _more profitable_. Maybe it's called for and in the consumer's best interest, but let's not pretend Apple is doing this for industry's bottom line.
rodgerd 5y ago
> “This is another sign that Apple’s war against targeted advertising isn’t just about screwing Facebook,” Joshua Benton wrote in Nieman Lab. “They’re also coming for your Substack.” I mean good? Like you, I struggle to see the downside of this, really. Probably the only risk in the bigger picture is the degree to which wealthy billionaires fund free lies such as Brietbart or the Murdoch papaers, while actual research and journalism is pay-for. But the wealthy billionaires are doing that anyway, so it's hard to see much change.

layble 5y ago

Exactly the opposite actually.

midasuni 5y ago
Please elaborate
- throwaway3699 5y ago
  It forces publishers into closed gardens. I am willing to bet Apple's work here will have the same effect that advertising did on RSS, which is that newsletters will turn into truncated notifications designed to bring you to a website where they can get the business metrics they "think" they need. I actually think there is a nice middle ground for something like a basic view counter, and some open rate data to be available in an aggregated, anonymous way.

Barrin92 5y ago

because one possible consequence of this is that it forces people to move towards closed platforms like Apple's own if they want to effectively advertise and that includes forking over substantial amount of money to those platforms. Which is of course the economic incentive that a company like Apple has to introduce these measures, it creates an asymmetry where Apple has all kinds of user information, but competitors don't. And if you want to see the effect that declining ad revenue has on journalism you can just look at the decline of local journalism across the US as revenue shifted from advertisers to digital platforms.

kergonath 5y ago
> it creates an asymmetry where Apple has all kinds of user information, but competitors don't That is true only if Apple competes with them, which is not the case at all.
- Barrin92 5y ago
  But they do? Apple is literally in the news business, the services business (many of which rely on ad revenue to compete with Apple's own services), increasingly in the ad business itself (revenue is expected to rise to 11 billion in 2025, growing quickly)[1], and as I just laid out in the post above, has a huge interest in just laying waste to independent revenue streams outside of their own channels, in the exact same way digital platforms overall benefited from laying waste to the small and mid-sized ad-industry. [1]https://9to5mac.com/2019/11/15/apple-ad-revenue/ https://9to5mac.com/2019/11/15/apple-ad-revenue/
  - kergonath 5y ago
    > Apple is literally in the news business, the services business (many of which rely on ad revenue to compete with Apple's own services) They are a news aggregator and distributor, they are a customer of media and news agencies. Or a parasite, depending on point of view. Still not a competitor. They also still don’t compete with ad brokers and don’t do any targeted advertising. > increasingly in the ad business itself (revenue is expected to rise to 11 billion in 2025, growing quickly) These ads are in the Stores and keyword-based. Which is distasteful, but not quite the same level. Again, they don’t distribute ads, and are not in the market for targeted advertising. They don’t compete with ad networks, and if they weren’t doing that there would just be no ads on the store. Like it was not that long ago. > in the exact same way digital platforms overall benefited from laying waste to the small and mid-sized ad-industry. If the mid-sized ad industry does not rely on tracking, blocking invisible pixels in newsletter won’t affect it. If it does rely on tracking, then it can’t die soon enough.
    - jsnell 5y ago

jldugger 5y ago

> How could that be bad for journalism? I don't know about journalism per se, but for journalists, they presumably arrived at the status quo as the profit maximizing option, and removing it will, to varying degrees, impoverish them.

FabHK 5y ago
That is a sensible first hypothesis, but it rests on many assumptions, in particular that the market doesn't have any prisoner-dilemma/tragedy of the commons aspects to it. It is quite conceivable, for example, that every single journalist is better off if they make click-bait listicles instead of investigative journalism, but the profession as a whole suffers.
machello13 5y ago
Seems like an argument against making any kind of change to any industry.
- jldugger 5y ago
  You're not wrong; it's not like industry constantly lobbies against regulation because they'd be _more profitable_. Maybe it's called for and in the consumer's best interest, but let's not pretend Apple is doing this for industry's bottom line.

rodgerd 5y ago

> “This is another sign that Apple’s war against targeted advertising isn’t just about screwing Facebook,” Joshua Benton wrote in Nieman Lab. “They’re also coming for your Substack.” I mean good? Like you, I struggle to see the downside of this, really. Probably the only risk in the bigger picture is the degree to which wealthy billionaires fund free lies such as Brietbart or the Murdoch papaers, while actual research and journalism is pay-for. But the wealthy billionaires are doing that anyway, so it's hard to see much change.