11 ms·

Invasive ad targeting is bad for journalism and other high-quality publishers

206 points by ericholscher 5y ago

ericholscher 5y ago
Thought this article was relevent given the recent discussion of Techdirt: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27984215 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27984215 We talk a bit about how this process works, and why tracking ads don't work well for publishers who are valuable.
whywhywhywhy 5y ago
They choose it though, it's their decision. They tell us over and over how important their work is. Yet you go to their site the first thing you're harassed by a cookies banner, then it's the begging banner "Please give us money blah blah our work is important, honest", then the autoplay video with an ad, then if you're lucky you can read it if they don't block it because they detected an ad blocker or whatever. Yet most journos post the actually meat of the article to a Twitter thread anyway. Why try so hard and give me so many reasons to avoid your actual platform you control? All the ad tracking in the world isn't going to save your company when the generation who grew up thinking your websites are just a bunch of cookie and begging banners don't have the act of going to your site inbuilt in their habits.
- JoshTriplett 5y ago
  > Yet most journos post the actually meat of the article to a Twitter thread anyway. Why try so hard and give me so many reasons to avoid your actual platform you control? Journalists don't typically control the actual platform they publish to. The news agency does, and the news agency is the one trying to figure out how to extract the maximum amount of revenue out of a dwindling number of readers. I'd much rather hear from the journalists directly, and I'd love to see platforms treat those journalists as the ones running the show. "Patreon for good journalism" is a far more compelling value proposition than any newspaper. Could someone hurry up and kill the newspapers and provide a platform for all their good journalists, please?
  - davidfischer 5y ago
    In some ways, "Patreon for good journalism" is Substack's pitch. It has its good and bad aspects but no doubt it's a very different monetization model than the ad-driven model.
    - JoshTriplett 5y ago
      It's an improvement, but it assumes you already know who the best journalists to follow and support are, and you just need a way to support and hear from them. Curation is a useful service in itself; curation just shouldn't mean you get to extract the vast majority of the value.
    - _jal 5y ago
      Kinda. It still tend to encourage frequent posting, which weighs against long form investigative journalism - monthly or yearly subscriptions don't work well when you might work on a piece for over a year. That, combined with risk, means some of the most interesting stories out there still need patrons with long attention spans.
      - kian 5y ago
        Those patrons are often more successful Substack journalists, these days, who double as the outlet in which they publish.
  - haneefmubarak 5y ago
    I think Substack achieves the goal of Patreon for journalism and has demonstrated market demand for high quality independent writing. They even run a program that started several months ago where they offloaded risk from promising writers for a year by guaranteeing them a minimum pay in exchange for a larger cut of realized platform for the same year. AIUI several writers like Matt Yglesias et al have done well via this program and built audiences that will give them significant windfalls when their risk-mitigation contracts with Substack expire. I think the agency of the future is just some sort of partnership between several writers on the platform or other similar platforms that allows you to purchase a group subscription to several writers at a small discount. I imagine that writers who are able to sustain such high levels of revenue may also be able to hire editors etc as necessary along with taking on intern writers to write [approved!] guest posts on their streams.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- vmception 5y ago
  You forgot the “stay informed by giving us your email” banner with a guilt trip or hidden “no thanks” button, which pops up if you either scroll down too far or motion towards the back button
- izacus 5y ago
  And you didn't even touch on the nastiest of the bunch: the "GDPR" dialogs which give you a button "I allow and accept every single piece of tracking" and 600+ individual switches which have a timer of 1 sec on each switch so it would take you hours to opt out of tracking. Usually you get those over those NYT & Co. articles blasting Googles, Facebooks and others for privacy and tracking.
  - davidfischer 5y ago
    While there's still a ways to go, NYT specifically is improving here: https://open.nytimes.com/to-serve-better-ads-we-built-our-own-data-program-c5e039bf247b https://open.nytimes.com/to-serve-better-ads-we-built-our-ow...
  - perl4ever 5y ago
    Most of them seem to allow you to select minimal tracking if you click twice. Typically there's a button to allow all tracking and one that's non-committal, something like "see my settings". The second one, as you say, brings up 600 switches, but usually the "non-essential" ones are turned off and all you have to do is scroll to the bottom and click "save settings" or something like that. They are obviously making it more difficult than it has to be, and probably that causes a lot of people to allow all, but once I got the hang of it, it isn't too much trouble.
  - ajsnigrutin 5y ago
    Yep... and the "by continuing to use this page, you agree...". "reject all" should be the default option. But this was messed up horribly from the beginning. Cookies should be disabled (or deleted when closing the tab) by default at the browser side,, with a small button somewhere to enable them for that specific site, and a opup notification to enable them, if the browser detects a login.
- asdff 5y ago
  I got so angry with my local paper with their email newsletters. I'm a subscriber. I pay a whopping $9 a month. I shouldn't be emailed newsletters with ads about weird ointments or tonics or other conspiracy theory things "doctor's don't want you to know" right there in line with the major headlines. I get hosting classifieds and taking out ads, but the ads that are placed on the website and in the newsletters are straight out of tabloid rags. They wouldn't ever print ads like this in the actual paper. People would get fired if they ever did.
  - kelnos 5y ago
    Have you canceled your subscription, or at least written the editor to let them know how gross this is? If not, that's tacit approval -- or at least tolerance -- of what they're doing.
    - afarrell 5y ago
      Failing to give feedback also fails to give someone the concrete evidence they'd need in a meeting to persuade their boss to change course.
- WalterBright 5y ago
  A couple times on HN there's been an article by a person that took one of those giant b+w LCD displays, married it to small computer, fixed it so it displayed the current front page of the newspaper, and hung it on the wall. I'd love to have such a thing, though I don't want to spend the time building it. I just want to buy it. The relevance here, though, is your site has to look attractive, like a real front page of a newspaper, or nobody is going to do this for your site.
  - infogulch 5y ago
    I like that idea a lot. Make an instagram account named "Beautiful Newspapers" and post a picture of the framed homepage of some newspaper every day. Sadly I think it would be a parody account in practice. It could use an e-ink display instead. This company sells a 13.3" e-ink photo frame for €800 that might do: https://framelabs.eu/en/artframes/ https://framelabs.eu/en/artframes/ Or you could go full DIY and make them yourself for probably ~$250 with a pi zero, picture frame, and a $180 e-ink panel from alibaba: https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/E-Ink-Display-Eink-E-ink_1600063200107.html?spm=a2700.7724857.topad_classic.d_title.74865e25O4kpkA https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/E-Ink-Display-Eink-E-... Sadly, if you want to go much bigger with e-ink it'll be rather pricey like this 31" for $2.6k: https://www.visionect.com/product/place-and-play-32/ https://www.visionect.com/product/place-and-play-32/ I kinda need a new project...
    - WalterBright 5y ago
      I meant e-ink, not LCD :-)
    - rainonmoon 5y ago
      People will really go to lengths to spend hundreds of dollars on a frame for a website but still complain about paywalls that cost a few dollars to get through.
      - infogulch 5y ago
        It seems disingenuous to claim that the commitment level to get through the paywall on many of the newspaper sites we refer to is just "a few dollars" when there have been widespread and numerous reports (even on this very website) of nightmare-inducing subscription cancellation practices. But your comment misses the point entirely: An organization's home page is its face. They should at least try to make their face look attractive. Even a newspaper stand shows a nice view of above the fold through the window.
- WalterBright 5y ago
  > Please give us money What's sad about that is they're also begging for government money so they can be "free and independent". One is always beholden to the paymaster.
  - genewitch 5y ago
    That's generally advertising money...
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
  I never have any trouble reading the news. I never get harassed or blocked. I use a text-only browser. The problem with online ads and tracking arises because 1. ads are permitted on the network and 2. "tech" companies rely on them to make money. Newspapers are not driving the development of the online ads business. They may be customers, but it is "tech" companies that write the browsers and websites and a gazillion lines of Javascript (collectively, "ad tech") that make the web extremely ad-friendly, at the same time lining "tech" company pockets, while newspapers die on the vine. "Tech" companies facilitate online ads in exchange for money. They sell nothing else. They purport to offer value for "free". This is just bait to lure in ad targets. Newspapers produce journalism. They hire people to produce journalism. "Tech" companies just sit on the web as middlemen, lapping up user data and marketing their "business" to advertisers. "Tech" companies do not hire people to produce journalism. This "but look, they are using ads themselves" argument is really getting old. It does not change the message. The journalist is not equal to the media company that employs her. It's like arguing that newspapers cannot write about the newspaper business because they are a newspaper. If anything, we should be marvelling at how for the past 20 years newspapers routinely drove traffic to the web (away from print) by reporting on it ad nauseum, and how they now are reporting on privacy issues even though they themselves may benefit from using privacy-invasive "ad tech".
- cortesoft 5y ago
  This is because it is a prisoner's dilemma: quality news sites would prefer no one to track, but if everyone does, they have to in order to make any money.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago
  And below the article there's the chumbox, full of clickbait, outright scams, fake news, detailed pictures of nasty diseases, and borderline porn.
ec109685 5y ago
I'm not sure why the article segues into talking about SEO content farms. They will continue regardless of whether a publisher chooses to show personalized / invasive ads or not. My feeling that the worst ads are not ones that track you, but the generic "outbrain" ads that are pure clickbait. Stop those ads please.
- davidfischer 5y ago
  SEO content farms definitely aren't going away. In some specific cases, they aren't even that bad. However, they are enabled by the fact that with modern ad tracking you can target the same people there as on a premium site. This causes quality to decrease. Just to give an example, this[1] is how this dynamic affected Recode: > "I asked him if that meant he’d be placing ads on our fledgling site. He said yes, he’d do that for a little while. And then, after the cookies ... helped him to track our desirable audience [he'd] begin removing the ads and placing them on cheaper sites" [1]: https://www.theverge.com/2017/1/18/14304276/walt-mossberg-online-ads-bad-business https://www.theverge.com/2017/1/18/14304276/walt-mossberg-on...
  - ec109685 5y ago
    Ah, that's a good point.
Ozzie_osman 5y ago
There's kind of a swindle going on here. Before, if you were the NYT, and someone wanted to target your audience, they'd have to come to you (and honestly you'd prob get ripped off by the NYT). Now, you don't need to go to the NYT. NYT's users are tracked, you just have to set up the right targeting on one of the big ad platforms and you reach that same audience for a fraction of the cost.
- ericholscher 5y ago
  The other major player here who benefits is Facebook. They are tracking folks across the web, and serving ads based on that data. Another huge issue that isn’t touched on in this article, but is a similar vein.
- oh_sigh 5y ago
  Reach the same audience, but I imagine ads that are "vouched for" by being located on official NYT property convert far better than the same ads but on unrelated websites but targeted to NYT readers.
badkitty99 5y ago
Targeted advertising has royally destroyed the internet. Zero moral values, tracking everyone constantly under the bullshit excuse of serving ads. Been disgusted for years
aaron695 5y ago
Targeting at a high level should mean your articles are a high level. Junk sites target the average Joe doing something average. This is not a good argument. [Edit] Is this a meta article that's currently targeting us with a poorly written article?
MattGaiser 5y ago
Is there a generalised Ethical Ads?
- ericholscher 5y ago
  We hope to expand into a larger audience in the future. Because we don’t do user targeting, we have to focus to start to ensure we’re serving quality, focused ads. We have a lot of room to grow in the dev market, but hope to expand some day.
pmoriarty 5y ago
All unsolicited advertising should be banned.
- srswtf123 5y ago
  Agreed; it drives unnecessary consumption on a planet with dwindling resources
  - missedthecue 5y ago
    Isn't the planet essentially a closed system
    - jay_kyburz 5y ago
      The universe might be, but the sun is blasting the planet with plenty of radiation that we turn into food and just recently, electricity.
- Uehreka 5y ago
  This wouldn’t work. Have you never read a vampire story? The ads will trick us into inviting them into our homes.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
jefftk 5y ago
Their argument is that (a) historically, to reach people interested in cats you would advertise in publications about cats and so (b) that it is now possible to advertise to an NYT reader while they browse another site hurts the NYT. This is wrong: sites that provide general high-quality journalism do not give a strong signal about the user's interests. If I'm reading an excellent, well researched article about the origins of the fire crisis in the American West, there is no strong commercial tie-in. Highly commercial journalism is in good shape, it's local and in-depth generic reporting that's struggling. Additionally, advertisers will pay far more to advertise on a prestigious site than to advertise to the same users elsewhere. The article is worried about something that high paying advertisers aren't interested in, because they care about prestige and association, and not just which particular users see things. (Disclosure: I work on ads at Google, speaking only for myself)
- not-really-me 5y ago
  “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” ― Upton Sinclair So with the internet ad market exploding (see Google's 69% growth in ad revenue to over $50B for the QUARTER) but somehow the NYTimes, with their "prestigious site" saw ad revenue DECREASE by 8.5% (1). Perhaps someone can name a publisher that practices "highly commercial journalism" and "is in good shape" for us? Ideally there'd be 100's for a diverse ecosystem of free press. If one does not see the threat to journalism one must be well paid not to. 1: https://nytco-assets.nytimes.com/2021/05/Press-Release-3.28.2021-Final-for-Posting-34azj43cUfqqNJm4.pdf https://nytco-assets.nytimes.com/2021/05/Press-Release-3.28....
  - jamiequint 5y ago
    "It's difficult to get a man to understand something, when they don't realize they are completely ignorant about the topic, but instead of learning about it they post ad hominem attack quotes instead" ― Me
  - jefftk 5y ago
    Very little of the NYT is an example of what I was trying to talk about with "highly commercial journalism" -- that is writing about things with a strong tie to commerce. Sites like The Wirecutter or The Points Guy. The NYT is famous for high quality deep journalism, where reading their site doesn't tell you very much about the visitor, which is the category I described as "struggling". (Additionally, responses like your opening are why I included the introduction about earning to give in https://www.jefftk.com/p/why-i-work-on-ads https://www.jefftk.com/p/why-i-work-on-ads)
a3n 5y ago
My very rough and subjective measure for if a site is throwing me to the wolves: If loading ads burdens my cpu, connection, and my brain's blood vessel carrying capacity, then that site is selling me out. I pay to subscribe to the NYT. Once in awhile, like with a new laptop, I'll visit without blocking. After an indecent interval, I turn blocking back on. I never minded advertisements in print. I read them, or I didn't.
fleddr 5y ago
I think focusing just on the funding aspect alone is a mistake. A much more glaring issue stares the industry in the face: the people don't really want journalism. Meaning, they don't have the attention span for it in a world that is overloaded with information. We've been conditioned to snack size news for a long time now. And the trend is accelerating. Look at "stories", "fleets", Tiktok...all inventions for the viewer/reader to require even less effort to consume it. Extremely short form content, preferably even auto playing the next one. Further, in highly polarized times, few have the critical thinking skills to appreciate high quality journalism that questions their position or beliefs, it's much easier to see your bias confirmed. Nuance is for losers, outrage goes viral. No ethical ad will fix that.
- PicassoCTs 5y ago
  I think that is not true. People consume "complex" media, series with deep characters and huge arcs, personal and even with whole societys/communities. Journalism is just not willing to go the extra game-of-thrones mile.
  - jay_kyburz 5y ago
    I agree, I think news media is to fixated on generating blocks of text that they can dump on a page or screen somewhere and forget. I would like to see news organizations build tools that help us understand and follow some of the most complex issues in our society. If my local news paper reexamined how they stored and then presented the information they already collect day to day, I would have an essential tool learning about and keeping track of what is going on in the world around me.
  - autoexec 5y ago
    Fiction holds people's attention in ways that non-fiction isn't always able to, and that's true more for some people than for others, but works designed specifically to entertain tend to have wider appeal than works designed primarily to inform. Journalists have increasingly tried to present information as entertainment often at the expense of their own message and integrity. I'm not sure more infotainment is the solution.
rossdavidh 5y ago
So, I'm sorry, I used to have a very high opinion of the NYT, now I just don't. The consequence of their model wasn't better journalism, it was polarization-as-a-service (I didn't invent that term for them). Preaching to the choir means people in the choir very excited to sponsor you, thinking that you are reaching someone who is undecided (they're not). I agree there's a big problem, but NYT does not seem to be a good example of a solution. If ethical ads resulted in more NYT-like behavior, given our current state of nearly-violent-polarization, I can't say I'm sure it sounds like an improvement. More polarized (and polarizing) news is definitely not what we need.
- alphabetting 5y ago
  Spot on.
- aabaker99 5y ago
  I have some sincere questions. Can you elaborate on what you mean by polarization as a service? Is this unique to NYT or can the same be said of other media? Does that include social media (where people like to say polarizing echo chambers form)? Are you referring to the article's argument that ad tech promotes click bait which is polarizing? Where do you get your news?
  - rossdavidh 5y ago
    "...elaborate on...polarization as a service"? Here's an example of how they seem to filter everything through an ideological view: https://www.rosshartshorn.net/stuffrossthinksabout/nyt_opinion/ https://www.rosshartshorn.net/stuffrossthinksabout/nyt_opini... "...unique to NYT"? Not unique to them but they seem to be one of the worst cases, in part because of how far they've fallen but also they seem to be an extreme case. "include social media"? FB and Twitter definitely also have echo chambers, but they don't really pretend to be otherwise, whereas news sources should be. "Where do you get your news?" The email newsletter 1440 seems to do a decent job of curating; even if the sources they use are polarized, they are picking out the more informative ones for me so I don't have to dredge through a bunch of ideological preaching.

206 points by ericholscher 5y ago

Thought this article was relevent given the recent discussion of Techdirt: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27984215 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27984215 We talk a bit about how this process works, and why tracking ads don't work well for publishers who are valuable.

whywhywhywhy 5y ago

They choose it though, it's their decision. They tell us over and over how important their work is. Yet you go to their site the first thing you're harassed by a cookies banner, then it's the begging banner "Please give us money blah blah our work is important, honest", then the autoplay video with an ad, then if you're lucky you can read it if they don't block it because they detected an ad blocker or whatever. Yet most journos post the actually meat of the article to a Twitter thread anyway. Why try so hard and give me so many reasons to avoid your actual platform you control? All the ad tracking in the world isn't going to save your company when the generation who grew up thinking your websites are just a bunch of cookie and begging banners don't have the act of going to your site inbuilt in their habits.

JoshTriplett 5y ago
> Yet most journos post the actually meat of the article to a Twitter thread anyway. Why try so hard and give me so many reasons to avoid your actual platform you control? Journalists don't typically control the actual platform they publish to. The news agency does, and the news agency is the one trying to figure out how to extract the maximum amount of revenue out of a dwindling number of readers. I'd much rather hear from the journalists directly, and I'd love to see platforms treat those journalists as the ones running the show. "Patreon for good journalism" is a far more compelling value proposition than any newspaper. Could someone hurry up and kill the newspapers and provide a platform for all their good journalists, please?
- davidfischer 5y ago
  In some ways, "Patreon for good journalism" is Substack's pitch. It has its good and bad aspects but no doubt it's a very different monetization model than the ad-driven model.
  - JoshTriplett 5y ago
    It's an improvement, but it assumes you already know who the best journalists to follow and support are, and you just need a way to support and hear from them. Curation is a useful service in itself; curation just shouldn't mean you get to extract the vast majority of the value.
  - _jal 5y ago
    Kinda. It still tend to encourage frequent posting, which weighs against long form investigative journalism - monthly or yearly subscriptions don't work well when you might work on a piece for over a year. That, combined with risk, means some of the most interesting stories out there still need patrons with long attention spans.
    - kian 5y ago
      Those patrons are often more successful Substack journalists, these days, who double as the outlet in which they publish.
- haneefmubarak 5y ago
  I think Substack achieves the goal of Patreon for journalism and has demonstrated market demand for high quality independent writing. They even run a program that started several months ago where they offloaded risk from promising writers for a year by guaranteeing them a minimum pay in exchange for a larger cut of realized platform for the same year. AIUI several writers like Matt Yglesias et al have done well via this program and built audiences that will give them significant windfalls when their risk-mitigation contracts with Substack expire. I think the agency of the future is just some sort of partnership between several writers on the platform or other similar platforms that allows you to purchase a group subscription to several writers at a small discount. I imagine that writers who are able to sustain such high levels of revenue may also be able to hire editors etc as necessary along with taking on intern writers to write [approved!] guest posts on their streams.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
vmception 5y ago
You forgot the “stay informed by giving us your email” banner with a guilt trip or hidden “no thanks” button, which pops up if you either scroll down too far or motion towards the back button
izacus 5y ago
And you didn't even touch on the nastiest of the bunch: the "GDPR" dialogs which give you a button "I allow and accept every single piece of tracking" and 600+ individual switches which have a timer of 1 sec on each switch so it would take you hours to opt out of tracking. Usually you get those over those NYT & Co. articles blasting Googles, Facebooks and others for privacy and tracking.
- davidfischer 5y ago
  While there's still a ways to go, NYT specifically is improving here: https://open.nytimes.com/to-serve-better-ads-we-built-our-own-data-program-c5e039bf247b https://open.nytimes.com/to-serve-better-ads-we-built-our-ow...
- perl4ever 5y ago
  Most of them seem to allow you to select minimal tracking if you click twice. Typically there's a button to allow all tracking and one that's non-committal, something like "see my settings". The second one, as you say, brings up 600 switches, but usually the "non-essential" ones are turned off and all you have to do is scroll to the bottom and click "save settings" or something like that. They are obviously making it more difficult than it has to be, and probably that causes a lot of people to allow all, but once I got the hang of it, it isn't too much trouble.
- ajsnigrutin 5y ago
  Yep... and the "by continuing to use this page, you agree...". "reject all" should be the default option. But this was messed up horribly from the beginning. Cookies should be disabled (or deleted when closing the tab) by default at the browser side,, with a small button somewhere to enable them for that specific site, and a opup notification to enable them, if the browser detects a login.
asdff 5y ago
I got so angry with my local paper with their email newsletters. I'm a subscriber. I pay a whopping $9 a month. I shouldn't be emailed newsletters with ads about weird ointments or tonics or other conspiracy theory things "doctor's don't want you to know" right there in line with the major headlines. I get hosting classifieds and taking out ads, but the ads that are placed on the website and in the newsletters are straight out of tabloid rags. They wouldn't ever print ads like this in the actual paper. People would get fired if they ever did.
- kelnos 5y ago
  Have you canceled your subscription, or at least written the editor to let them know how gross this is? If not, that's tacit approval -- or at least tolerance -- of what they're doing.
  - afarrell 5y ago
    Failing to give feedback also fails to give someone the concrete evidence they'd need in a meeting to persuade their boss to change course.
WalterBright 5y ago
A couple times on HN there's been an article by a person that took one of those giant b+w LCD displays, married it to small computer, fixed it so it displayed the current front page of the newspaper, and hung it on the wall. I'd love to have such a thing, though I don't want to spend the time building it. I just want to buy it. The relevance here, though, is your site has to look attractive, like a real front page of a newspaper, or nobody is going to do this for your site.
- infogulch 5y ago
  I like that idea a lot. Make an instagram account named "Beautiful Newspapers" and post a picture of the framed homepage of some newspaper every day. Sadly I think it would be a parody account in practice. It could use an e-ink display instead. This company sells a 13.3" e-ink photo frame for €800 that might do: https://framelabs.eu/en/artframes/ https://framelabs.eu/en/artframes/ Or you could go full DIY and make them yourself for probably ~$250 with a pi zero, picture frame, and a $180 e-ink panel from alibaba: https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/E-Ink-Display-Eink-E-ink_1600063200107.html?spm=a2700.7724857.topad_classic.d_title.74865e25O4kpkA https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/E-Ink-Display-Eink-E-... Sadly, if you want to go much bigger with e-ink it'll be rather pricey like this 31" for $2.6k: https://www.visionect.com/product/place-and-play-32/ https://www.visionect.com/product/place-and-play-32/ I kinda need a new project...
  - WalterBright 5y ago
    I meant e-ink, not LCD :-)
  - rainonmoon 5y ago
    People will really go to lengths to spend hundreds of dollars on a frame for a website but still complain about paywalls that cost a few dollars to get through.
    - infogulch 5y ago
      It seems disingenuous to claim that the commitment level to get through the paywall on many of the newspaper sites we refer to is just "a few dollars" when there have been widespread and numerous reports (even on this very website) of nightmare-inducing subscription cancellation practices. But your comment misses the point entirely: An organization's home page is its face. They should at least try to make their face look attractive. Even a newspaper stand shows a nice view of above the fold through the window.
WalterBright 5y ago
> Please give us money What's sad about that is they're also begging for government money so they can be "free and independent". One is always beholden to the paymaster.
- genewitch 5y ago
  That's generally advertising money...
1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
I never have any trouble reading the news. I never get harassed or blocked. I use a text-only browser. The problem with online ads and tracking arises because 1. ads are permitted on the network and 2. "tech" companies rely on them to make money. Newspapers are not driving the development of the online ads business. They may be customers, but it is "tech" companies that write the browsers and websites and a gazillion lines of Javascript (collectively, "ad tech") that make the web extremely ad-friendly, at the same time lining "tech" company pockets, while newspapers die on the vine. "Tech" companies facilitate online ads in exchange for money. They sell nothing else. They purport to offer value for "free". This is just bait to lure in ad targets. Newspapers produce journalism. They hire people to produce journalism. "Tech" companies just sit on the web as middlemen, lapping up user data and marketing their "business" to advertisers. "Tech" companies do not hire people to produce journalism. This "but look, they are using ads themselves" argument is really getting old. It does not change the message. The journalist is not equal to the media company that employs her. It's like arguing that newspapers cannot write about the newspaper business because they are a newspaper. If anything, we should be marvelling at how for the past 20 years newspapers routinely drove traffic to the web (away from print) by reporting on it ad nauseum, and how they now are reporting on privacy issues even though they themselves may benefit from using privacy-invasive "ad tech".
cortesoft 5y ago
This is because it is a prisoner's dilemma: quality news sites would prefer no one to track, but if everyone does, they have to in order to make any money.
tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago
And below the article there's the chumbox, full of clickbait, outright scams, fake news, detailed pictures of nasty diseases, and borderline porn.

ec109685 5y ago

I'm not sure why the article segues into talking about SEO content farms. They will continue regardless of whether a publisher chooses to show personalized / invasive ads or not. My feeling that the worst ads are not ones that track you, but the generic "outbrain" ads that are pure clickbait. Stop those ads please.

davidfischer 5y ago
SEO content farms definitely aren't going away. In some specific cases, they aren't even that bad. However, they are enabled by the fact that with modern ad tracking you can target the same people there as on a premium site. This causes quality to decrease. Just to give an example, this[1] is how this dynamic affected Recode: > "I asked him if that meant he’d be placing ads on our fledgling site. He said yes, he’d do that for a little while. And then, after the cookies ... helped him to track our desirable audience [he'd] begin removing the ads and placing them on cheaper sites" [1]: https://www.theverge.com/2017/1/18/14304276/walt-mossberg-online-ads-bad-business https://www.theverge.com/2017/1/18/14304276/walt-mossberg-on...
- ec109685 5y ago
  Ah, that's a good point.

Ozzie_osman 5y ago

There's kind of a swindle going on here. Before, if you were the NYT, and someone wanted to target your audience, they'd have to come to you (and honestly you'd prob get ripped off by the NYT). Now, you don't need to go to the NYT. NYT's users are tracked, you just have to set up the right targeting on one of the big ad platforms and you reach that same audience for a fraction of the cost.

ericholscher 5y ago
The other major player here who benefits is Facebook. They are tracking folks across the web, and serving ads based on that data. Another huge issue that isn’t touched on in this article, but is a similar vein.
oh_sigh 5y ago
Reach the same audience, but I imagine ads that are "vouched for" by being located on official NYT property convert far better than the same ads but on unrelated websites but targeted to NYT readers.

badkitty99 5y ago

Targeted advertising has royally destroyed the internet. Zero moral values, tracking everyone constantly under the bullshit excuse of serving ads. Been disgusted for years

aaron695 5y ago

Targeting at a high level should mean your articles are a high level. Junk sites target the average Joe doing something average. This is not a good argument. [Edit] Is this a meta article that's currently targeting us with a poorly written article?

MattGaiser 5y ago

Is there a generalised Ethical Ads?

ericholscher 5y ago
We hope to expand into a larger audience in the future. Because we don’t do user targeting, we have to focus to start to ensure we’re serving quality, focused ads. We have a lot of room to grow in the dev market, but hope to expand some day.

pmoriarty 5y ago

All unsolicited advertising should be banned.

srswtf123 5y ago
Agreed; it drives unnecessary consumption on a planet with dwindling resources
- missedthecue 5y ago
  Isn't the planet essentially a closed system
  - jay_kyburz 5y ago
    The universe might be, but the sun is blasting the planet with plenty of radiation that we turn into food and just recently, electricity.
Uehreka 5y ago
This wouldn’t work. Have you never read a vampire story? The ads will trick us into inviting them into our homes.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

jefftk 5y ago

Their argument is that (a) historically, to reach people interested in cats you would advertise in publications about cats and so (b) that it is now possible to advertise to an NYT reader while they browse another site hurts the NYT. This is wrong: sites that provide general high-quality journalism do not give a strong signal about the user's interests. If I'm reading an excellent, well researched article about the origins of the fire crisis in the American West, there is no strong commercial tie-in. Highly commercial journalism is in good shape, it's local and in-depth generic reporting that's struggling. Additionally, advertisers will pay far more to advertise on a prestigious site than to advertise to the same users elsewhere. The article is worried about something that high paying advertisers aren't interested in, because they care about prestige and association, and not just which particular users see things. (Disclosure: I work on ads at Google, speaking only for myself)

not-really-me 5y ago
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” ― Upton Sinclair So with the internet ad market exploding (see Google's 69% growth in ad revenue to over $50B for the QUARTER) but somehow the NYTimes, with their "prestigious site" saw ad revenue DECREASE by 8.5% (1). Perhaps someone can name a publisher that practices "highly commercial journalism" and "is in good shape" for us? Ideally there'd be 100's for a diverse ecosystem of free press. If one does not see the threat to journalism one must be well paid not to. 1: https://nytco-assets.nytimes.com/2021/05/Press-Release-3.28.2021-Final-for-Posting-34azj43cUfqqNJm4.pdf https://nytco-assets.nytimes.com/2021/05/Press-Release-3.28....
- jamiequint 5y ago
  "It's difficult to get a man to understand something, when they don't realize they are completely ignorant about the topic, but instead of learning about it they post ad hominem attack quotes instead" ― Me
- jefftk 5y ago
  Very little of the NYT is an example of what I was trying to talk about with "highly commercial journalism" -- that is writing about things with a strong tie to commerce. Sites like The Wirecutter or The Points Guy. The NYT is famous for high quality deep journalism, where reading their site doesn't tell you very much about the visitor, which is the category I described as "struggling". (Additionally, responses like your opening are why I included the introduction about earning to give in https://www.jefftk.com/p/why-i-work-on-ads https://www.jefftk.com/p/why-i-work-on-ads)

a3n 5y ago

My very rough and subjective measure for if a site is throwing me to the wolves: If loading ads burdens my cpu, connection, and my brain's blood vessel carrying capacity, then that site is selling me out. I pay to subscribe to the NYT. Once in awhile, like with a new laptop, I'll visit without blocking. After an indecent interval, I turn blocking back on. I never minded advertisements in print. I read them, or I didn't.

fleddr 5y ago

I think focusing just on the funding aspect alone is a mistake. A much more glaring issue stares the industry in the face: the people don't really want journalism. Meaning, they don't have the attention span for it in a world that is overloaded with information. We've been conditioned to snack size news for a long time now. And the trend is accelerating. Look at "stories", "fleets", Tiktok...all inventions for the viewer/reader to require even less effort to consume it. Extremely short form content, preferably even auto playing the next one. Further, in highly polarized times, few have the critical thinking skills to appreciate high quality journalism that questions their position or beliefs, it's much easier to see your bias confirmed. Nuance is for losers, outrage goes viral. No ethical ad will fix that.

PicassoCTs 5y ago
I think that is not true. People consume "complex" media, series with deep characters and huge arcs, personal and even with whole societys/communities. Journalism is just not willing to go the extra game-of-thrones mile.
- jay_kyburz 5y ago
  I agree, I think news media is to fixated on generating blocks of text that they can dump on a page or screen somewhere and forget. I would like to see news organizations build tools that help us understand and follow some of the most complex issues in our society. If my local news paper reexamined how they stored and then presented the information they already collect day to day, I would have an essential tool learning about and keeping track of what is going on in the world around me.
- autoexec 5y ago
  Fiction holds people's attention in ways that non-fiction isn't always able to, and that's true more for some people than for others, but works designed specifically to entertain tend to have wider appeal than works designed primarily to inform. Journalists have increasingly tried to present information as entertainment often at the expense of their own message and integrity. I'm not sure more infotainment is the solution.

rossdavidh 5y ago

So, I'm sorry, I used to have a very high opinion of the NYT, now I just don't. The consequence of their model wasn't better journalism, it was polarization-as-a-service (I didn't invent that term for them). Preaching to the choir means people in the choir very excited to sponsor you, thinking that you are reaching someone who is undecided (they're not). I agree there's a big problem, but NYT does not seem to be a good example of a solution. If ethical ads resulted in more NYT-like behavior, given our current state of nearly-violent-polarization, I can't say I'm sure it sounds like an improvement. More polarized (and polarizing) news is definitely not what we need.

alphabetting 5y ago
Spot on.
aabaker99 5y ago
I have some sincere questions. Can you elaborate on what you mean by polarization as a service? Is this unique to NYT or can the same be said of other media? Does that include social media (where people like to say polarizing echo chambers form)? Are you referring to the article's argument that ad tech promotes click bait which is polarizing? Where do you get your news?
- rossdavidh 5y ago
  "...elaborate on...polarization as a service"? Here's an example of how they seem to filter everything through an ideological view: https://www.rosshartshorn.net/stuffrossthinksabout/nyt_opinion/ https://www.rosshartshorn.net/stuffrossthinksabout/nyt_opini... "...unique to NYT"? Not unique to them but they seem to be one of the worst cases, in part because of how far they've fallen but also they seem to be an extreme case. "include social media"? FB and Twitter definitely also have echo chambers, but they don't really pretend to be otherwise, whereas news sources should be. "Where do you get your news?" The email newsletter 1440 seems to do a decent job of curating; even if the sources they use are polarized, they are picking out the more informative ones for me so I don't have to dredge through a bunch of ideological preaching.