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Ad tech is absolutely inherently bad, and it is not a fixable problem. Just off the top of my head, there are multiple unsolvable problems with the market. The

Ad tech is absolutely inherently bad, and it is not a fixable problem. Just off the top of my head, there are multiple unsolvable problems with the market. There are principal-agent problems between ad brokers and both buyers and sellers [0],[1] and attribution is nearly impossible [2] - which leads to increasingly invasive surveillance tools being deployed. Then there's the issue of asymmetric information: most consumers have no idea what information is being collected about them, or even by whom. Just outside the market, there is also the "clicks and attention == revenue" externality that is extremely costly to society. Every single ad tech company is either exploiting these problems in the market to generate outsized profits, or selling increasingly invasive surveillance technology to try to "solve" them. The problem isn't any individual bad actor's behavior - it's the entire structure of the digital advertising market. There is no solution, because even assuming everyone is acting in good faith and in their best interests you'll see the exact same devolution to "What if we just find ways watch everything everyone does and track everything they do on and off their computers all the time? That's both profitable and clears up a lot of the market failures. Let's do that!" [0] https://www.warren.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Letter%20to%20CFTC%20re%20Google%20Project%20Bernanke%20(Warren).pdf https://www.warren.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Letter%20to%20CF... (PDF) [1] https://checkmyads.org/branded/ https://checkmyads.org/branded/ [2] https://instapage.com/blog/personalized-advertising-and-attribution https://instapage.com/blog/personalized-advertising-and-attr...

civilized 5y ago
Those are all good points. You certainly seem more informed about it than me. Some of these points seem to apply to traditional advertising as well, although arguably traditional advertising isn't great either. Attribution is an eternal ad industry problem. Principal-agent issues exist too, but might be worse now, with the layers of tech abstraction that only the "agents" understand and manipulate. OTOH attribution is easy for agents to manipulate even in low-tech contexts. The relentless digital surveillance is new, and yeah, pretty awful, and hopefully we see it getting shut down by moves in consumer tech, e.g. that privacy thing Apple did that pissed FB off (I don't recall exactly what it was). I think the basic idea behind Google AdWords is pretty neat, although now they're trying to extract maximum value by clogging pages with ads and reducing the distinction between ads and organic search results.

civilized 5y ago

Those are all good points. You certainly seem more informed about it than me. Some of these points seem to apply to traditional advertising as well, although arguably traditional advertising isn't great either. Attribution is an eternal ad industry problem. Principal-agent issues exist too, but might be worse now, with the layers of tech abstraction that only the "agents" understand and manipulate. OTOH attribution is easy for agents to manipulate even in low-tech contexts. The relentless digital surveillance is new, and yeah, pretty awful, and hopefully we see it getting shut down by moves in consumer tech, e.g. that privacy thing Apple did that pissed FB off (I don't recall exactly what it was). I think the basic idea behind Google AdWords is pretty neat, although now they're trying to extract maximum value by clogging pages with ads and reducing the distinction between ads and organic search results.