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There seems to be a really strong disdain on HN for AdTech in general, which I think is misguided, and comes fundamentally from a "web consumer" mentality. I th

There seems to be a really strong disdain on HN for AdTech in general, which I think is misguided, and comes fundamentally from a "web consumer" mentality. I think that it would be valuable to reframe the question from the producers point of view: 1) I am a niche small business - how do I let people know that I exist? 2) I run a website and would like to monetize it - how can I get paid for the content that I produce? The ad-tech solution is actually quite elegant in theory - if you can show ads only to the people to whom they are relevant, then, as a small business you can let people know you exist without blowing your ad budget, and, as a content producer, the more valuable an ad-view is, the more you can charge for it. The current movement to avoid tracking is an extremely powerful centralizing force. The large platforms know a lot about you already - Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple, etc. So, in a way, "we're not going to let AdTech track users" = "we're going to make only ads on large platforms effective", which means that both content producers and advertisers will prefer them, and then people ask "where did the old internet go"? The AdTech system isn't ideal, but it would be great if the people who criticize it came up with something other than "fuck the small businesses and content producers".

rebeccaskinner 3y ago
> 1) I am a niche small business - how do I let people know that I exist? 2) I run a website and would like to monetize it - how can I get paid for the content that I produce? The thing is, this isn’t my problem. The fact that someone wants to market their business doesn’t entitle them to my attention.
- brandall10 3y ago
  If you're not paying for a product in which you see the ad, it is your problem though, no? What's in the ad space is immaterial, just that is how the product is monetized.
  - amelius 3y ago
    The freaking ad is making me pay twice. Once with my attention, and then again with my money if I buy the product (since the advertising cost is incorporated into the price).
    - JohnFen 3y ago
      And a third time with your data.
  - barbazoo 3y ago
    Problem is though that everyone is being tracked, whether they use free products that show ads based on that data or not. I don't want to be tracked like that but I have very little power here other than blocking certain domains which is never perfect.
  - pessimizer 3y ago
    If everybody pays, the ads come right back. Paying customers are more lucrative to advertisers than deadbeats.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- ryandrake 3y ago
  That's really the root of it. Unless I am actively searching for the exact something your small business offers, I don't care whether your business exists. I don't want to know about it. I don't want you to "reach" me. Your ability or inability to let me know that you exist is not my problem. My browsing to a website (or watching a TV show, or driving along a road with billboards, or filling up my gas tank) does not entitle anyone to my attention.
- brickteacup 3y ago
  > doesn’t entitle them to my attention if you're looking at someone's website then yes they are entitled to your attention. what gave you the idea that you're entitled to consume for free content that other people payed to produce and host?
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    > what gave you the idea that you're entitled to consume for free content that other people payed to produce and host? The fact that they made it available to be looked at in such a way, perhaps?
    - brickteacup 3y ago
      They didn't, though, they made it available to be looked at alongside advertisements. HN users just love twisting themselves in circles to justify their belief that they're somehow entitled to consume content from private websites without consuming the ads that support that content. (If you don't want to see ads, there's a really simple solution: don't look at websites that display them! No one's forcing you to!)
      - hightrix 3y ago
        > If you don't want to see ads, there's a really simple solution: don't look at websites that display them! And as a user, if the person hosting the website doesn't want me to look at their content without also looking at their ads, there is a simple solution: don't serve me your content until after you force me to look at your ads. You do not get to have it both ways. Either the content is available for free and you can hope that the user also views your ads, or the content is not available for free and you can force the user to view your ads.
      - psd1 3y ago
        An individualist perspective. I believe that humans are social animals, and that a view on enshittification that ignores society is useless. Media is, IMO, holistically worse now than in the mid-90s. An individual cannot undo that. The negatives are not wished away by "no one's forcing you".
- Barraketh 3y ago
  Well kinda. The business wanting to market themselves certainly isn't your problem, but the "how does the website monetize itself" is exactly your problem, or rather, it's part of the interaction between the owner of the website you're visiting and you. You could say "oh, they should just charge for their content", and some definitely do. But the ad model allows for really interesting price discrimination in terms of "who pays for the content". So, if someone buys say.. a Tesla through a website, that conversion subsidizes a million poor kids who don't have to pay anything. In some ways the ad-supported model is the most progressive way to pay content creators - the people who end up paying are the people who spend the most money online.
  - zb3 3y ago
    I'd prefer reading content written by people who are just interested in the topic and sharing their thoughts. I want genuine interaction, not commercial garbage.
Analemma_ 3y ago
> and comes a fundamentally from a "web consumer" mentality. Because literally all of us are web consumers, so we're hostile to things that are hostile to web consumers. This is like saying there's really strong disdain for leaded gasoline which comes from a "human being breathing air" mentality. > I think that it would be valuable to reframe the question from the producers point of view: 1) I am a niche small business - how do I let people know that I exist? 2) I run a website and would like to monetize it - how can I get paid for the content that I produce? I don't fucking care. This isn't my problem, and I'm really annoyed that we've build a giant world-spanning surveillance apparatus out of people trying to make it my problem.
- pxc 3y ago
  > > and comes a fundamentally from a "web consumer" mentality. > Because literally all of us are web consumers Exactly. GP might as well have written > The problem is that you're considering your own interests. I think it would be useful for you to consider my interests.
- Aerroon 3y ago
  How many videos on vine do you watch these days? How the companies, where you consume content, monetize is very much relevant to you. You have a choice though - you can choose to not watch the content and you won't get advertised to.
  - BizarroLand 3y ago
    Yes, because placing access to society inside of a walled garden is ethical.
humanistbot 3y ago
> 1) I am a niche small business - how do I let people know that I exist? 2) I run a website and would like to monetize it - how can I get paid for the content that I produce? You don't have a right to violate my privacy in exchange for this.
- Barraketh 3y ago
  I think this is a genuinely interesting point, and I wish that we as a society had a more nuanced discussion about what that right is. AdTech is largely anonymous in the same way that crypto / web3 is anonymous - it shuttles around cookies / identifiers, but largely does NOT care about any information that is actually personally identifying. If the laws were regulating storage / transmission of information that is actually personally-identifying (addresses, emails, names, etc), that would be much more reasonable in my mind.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    That would be insufficient for a number of reasons, including that even if you only collect non-PII (and don't let's get started on what "PII" actually is), if you collect enough of it and correlate it in databases (like ad companies do), then it's all personally identifying. But I think that's not the main reason it's not sufficient. The main reason, in my view, is because it's still companies spying on me, my machines, and/or my use of my machines. Even if the data is genuinely anonymous, if you don't have my informed consent then collecting it is spying and unethical. If we're going to have regulation (and it's increasingly looking like any solution will have to be), then the regulation should be about the collection of the data.
amelius 3y ago
Ads are wrong because: 1. They nudge people towards buying stuff they wouldn't otherwise buy. This causes a tremendous amount of real waste. 2. Ads are a distraction. When I'm looking up something for work, don't bother me with ads, even if *you* think they are relevant. When I'm working, I'm not looking for a new job, or new pants. 3. On a fundamental level, ads work against the free market: not the best product wins, but the product with the biggest advertising budget. And there are many more reasons ... Ads suck! And people working in ad-tech should be deeply ashamed!
- secondcoming 3y ago
  You just demonstrated how advertising works.
  - spost 3y ago
    I don't believe anyone is arguing that advertising _doesn't work_.
- charcircuit 3y ago
  >They nudge people towards buying stuff they wouldn't otherwise buy. It allows people to find things they value that they were not aware of before. >Ads are a distraction. Yes, which is why apps need to design good ad experiences to balance monetization with user satisfaction. >On a fundamental level, ads work against the free market: not the best product wins, but the product with the biggest advertising budget. If something really is the best product, why aren't they the one with the largest advertising budget?
  - whatshisface 3y ago
    >If something really is the best product, why aren't they the one with the largest advertising budget? If they are already the company with the highest revenue, why would they need to advertise... If these are the arguments in favor of ads then they really must be that bad.
    - 3y ago
skydhash 3y ago
> The AdTech system isn't ideal, but it would be great if the people who criticize it came up with something other than "fuck the small businesses and content producers". The thing is that people do hear about products and contents. Trailers are ads, products announcement are also ads. Sponsorship is ads. What people do not want is intrusive ads. It feels like someone going through my bedroom and bathroom, then talking to people about my underwear. Next, these people shout to me when I'm going to buy groceries. This is what the adtech is like nowadays. So content creators, paywall your content and add sponsorship. Small businesses, announce your product and sponsor articles on relevant forums. But stop interrupting people when they're doing nothing that's relevant to you.
- celestialcheese 3y ago
  I don't get this. I find "passive" advertising like banners, mid-roll, etc so much easier to ignore/block/ The type of advertising that's invasive for me is the "sponsored content" or paid product placements, especially in movies. It feels like every big-budget movie I see these days is littered with "ads" for some car or electronics company. There's no way to block this, and sometimes its hard to tell if something is paid or just someones honest recommendation.
imchillyb 3y ago
> The AdTech system isn't ideal, but it would be great if the people who criticize it came up with something other than "fuck the small businesses and content producers". Found the 'ad-guy...' Look. We don't need to offer a solution in order to point out how broken adtheft is. They're stealing my time, my bandwidth, my cpu resources, my gpu resources, my memory resources, and my body's own motion by forcing me to click away or click gone or click click click. Here's my solution: Take your ads and place them somewhere dark, moist, and smelly, preferably limited to your own person.
- Barraketh 3y ago
  So, out my now 15+ year career, only about 4 were in AdTech, and I've been out of that game for more than 7 years. But fair enough - happy to play 'ad-guy' for the purposes of this discussion :) I guess my main contention is that businesses really like ads. But that's usually ok - because it funds cool content! The majority of television historically was produced just to sell ads, but it still created awesome television. And if we make ads worse, well, the people who are gong to suffer are the businesses and the content creators. OR, like i mentioned above, we will just drive everyone to large platforms, which is essentially what's happening now. Another way to frame the question - GDPR came out in 2016. Do you feel like the web is getting better?
  - iamdbtoo 3y ago
    > The majority of television historically was produced just to sell ads, but it still created awesome television. That's because there was an incentive to create awesome television to lure people away from other channels to watch the ads on your channel. Part of the discussion around the writers and actors on strike right now is the streaming services believe they can make worse content cheaper using AI and still retain subscribers.
  - traverseda 3y ago
    I don't think businesses really like ads. Businesses are forced to buy ads. On Facebook if you want to reach your entire audience you need to pay them, they gate off people seeing content they're subscribed to unless you pay. Google is terrible at surfacing relevant local events. Ads are forced on small business because regular methods of discovery are intentionally nerfed.
tomjen3 3y ago
If you are a small business, sponsor a podcast relevant to the people you are targeting. I am still going to skip over you, but thats your best chance to get in front of people, and it involves zero privacy invasions.
bee_rider 3y ago
“What about small businesses” seemed like a better counter-argument during the previous round of ad tech, the kind of annoying flash pop ups that and third party JavaScript that only sometimes contained viruses. Nowadays it is a major funding keystone of the attention economy, which is spreading propaganda and conspiracy theories, destabilizing governments. Propaganda spread over Facebook helped enable the Rohingya genocide. This isn’t a little annoying thing anymore.
JohnFen 3y ago
> and comes fundamentally from a "web consumer" mentality Not for me, it doesn't, For me, it comes from an "I don't want to be spied on" mentality. If the online ad world would do everything that they currently do, but actually leave me out of it when I tell them to, I wouldn't consider them to be evil. But not only don't they do that, they put a lot of time, effort, and money into actively working around the various defenses I put up against them. > I think that it would be valuable to reframe the question from the producers point of view You're talking as if the problem is the ads themselves. It's not. It's the spying that's the problem. > The ad-tech solution is actually quite elegant in theory I don't assert that it's not elegant. I assert that it's deeply unethical unless informed consent has been obtained from the people the data is being gathered from. > then people ask "where did the old internet go"? People ask that right now, and adtech is one of the things that have killed it. > it would be great if the people who criticize it came up with something other than "fuck the small businesses and content producers". Plenty of proven alternatives are brought up all the time. Even the IAPP article here mentions the strongest one: have ads, but don't target them based on data extracted from unwilling participants. Target them based on the context in which the ads appear. Just like newspapers, magazines, TV, etc. The adtech world doesn't want to do that because they can make even more money by being bastards, instead.
- Barraketh 3y ago
  > People ask that right now, and adtech is one of the things that have killed it. I don't think this is actually true. When I think about the old internet vs new internet, a lot of it is about people running their own blogs / websites vs. platforms. And I think most of that is not really about ad-tech at all, but about the mechanisms of content and audience discovery. But the fact remains that if you want to say... publish videos of some kind, you are likely to make much more on YouTube vs uploading them to your own website, and that's at least partially because Google is able to show effective ads. > Target them based on the context in which the ads appear. Possible, but in some cases significantly less effective. As I mentioned above, ad-tech comes with some very interesting progressive effects, where the people who spend the most money are the ones who end up paying the most in aggregate for content. An interesting example is luxury goods, which are both high-value and niche. If you run say... a news site, or something else that's general purpose, you probably don't want to be showing Rolex ads to everyone. But rich people still read news, and if you could target your Rolex ads to them, that basically subsidizes everyone else.
indymike 3y ago
> There seems to be a really strong disdain on HN for AdTech in general, which I think is misguided, and comes fundamentally from a "web consumer" mentality. I think the disdain is against surveillance and invasive content. > The current movement to avoid tracking is an extremely powerful centralizing force. No, this is just removing the third party. If I'm on a Meta property seeing an ad served by Meta targeted by my data from using Meta, then there's not third party.
footy 3y ago
I have long wondered how people who work in adtech live with themselves and this was illuminating.
lastofthemojito 3y ago
> I am a niche small business - how do I let people know that I exist? Is this a serious question? You advertise. Just like people have been doing for generations. You advertise in publications or spaces that will attract people interested in your product or service. You're going to have to do more to convince me that we need individual level targeted for businesses to succeed. We're not mad if the new bakery in town advertises in the town paper or sends postcards to everyone in the zipcode. We're not mad if the new geeky t-shirt website puts ads on geeky subreddits or Facebook groups. We're not mad if your new auto detailing service comes up if I Google "auto detailing <my city>". We're mad that those ads creepily follow us around the internet, reminding us of the scale of the enormous data collection that enables such behavior. Don't tell me that bakeries or t-shirt shops or auto detailers can't thrive without targeted marketing. We've had those things for way longer than we've had targeted marketing.
- MildRant 3y ago
  > We've had those things for way longer than we've had targeted marketing. You've had way less of those things as well. I'm not defending targeted marketing but you are ignoring that there are way more bakeries and t-shirt shops now than ever. As a small business, you aren't competing against other local t-shirt shops you are competing against every t-shirt shop that can setup a webpage and put a shirt in the mail.
- akira2501 3y ago
  > You advertise in publications or spaces that will attract people interested in your product or service. Are those publications most popular products, the online versions, selling advertising in the way their print only counterparts have? Or, are they just offering you targeting through their already extant advertising setup? > Don't tell me that bakeries or t-shirt shops or auto detailers can't thrive without targeted marketing. Local advertising and national advertising are two entirely different things and the campaigns even have two entirely different purposes and metrics for measurement. One of the great forces of the internet was to allow me to do regular and successful business with niche operations that may not be local to me. It was supposed to expand upon the previously existing model. Adtech is trying to stand across this gap, which still hasn't been filled for anyone outside of a local goods retailer.
zb3 3y ago
Well actually fuck "professional content producers", there's always someone there who writes just because they want others to read, I'll just read them instead and it'd be good if the search engine let me find them instead of that SEO spam.
dahwolf 3y ago
1. Especially for a niche business, contextual ads should be great. Appear in search results as well as content pages related to your niche. Relevant by default and requires zero personal data. 2. I'm afraid it's too late. The centralization has already happened. Most people consume content from a handful of mobile apps (youtube, social networks, etc). AI will escalate this even further. Small websites outside of big tech can't really monetize content reliably, exceptions aside. Likewise, your content has to be extremely special for people wanting to pay for it.
Havoc 3y ago
>There seems to be a really strong disdain on HN for AdTech in general, The ads aren't the problem, the targetting and the granular privacy invading data collection practices it implies. It's not about "fuck small businesses" at all but rather that I'd love to scroll through some content without my 100ms pause over a specific post influencing what I see in future and thus shaping the reality I see. That's how we got to a position where the various "factions" in society are seeing so different realities that to each the other seems unreasonable and they can't understand why the others don't see their (to them) obviously correct perspective. Adtech is actively contributing towards societal splits.
whoopdedo 3y ago
> if you can show ads only to the people to whom they are relevant, Except that's not what is happening. The information brokers learned that there's no money to be made in selling to someone who already knows they want to buy that product. With the ad you're getting 90% conversion but without you're only down to 70% conversion. The real value is in convincing someone who had no interest in a product to spend money they wouldn't have otherwise. And targeting makes this happening by giving the advertisers tools to custom make campaigns that create new engagements. The role of the advertiser is not to connect potential purchasers with the products they want, but to trick unwary consumers into buying irrelevant junk. And on top of that, it doesn't help small businesses because they only spend money on small campaigns. A tiny micro-targeted set of ads always loses the auction to an algorithmic carpet bombing of manipulative clickbait. That is, they'll "win" a few impressions at first until their budget caps out and then the spam ads will fill in the rest. Which means someone in that cohort will in any period see more of the bad ads than the good ones. There is no incentive for anyone in adtech to fix this because the "solution" right now is charging more money for better ads. Consumers disliking ads and being inundated with malvertising is the system working as intended.
TheIronMark 3y ago
A lot of Internet users don't want to pay for content and don't want ads. I guess they're hoping some deity will magically pay all the content producers.
jrh3 3y ago
We tried funding the internet with banner ads and that didn't take. So early 2000s we sold our privacy to fund it. The "web consumer" mentality was built on the latter funding, which is now going away. Small business is being hurt the most (because they benefitted the most from being able to buy targeted ads with a small budget). I want my privacy private, and I'm not willing to share it. It is definitely interesting to see what AdTech can figure out next, especially for small business.
1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago
"The ad-tech solution is actually quite elegant in theory - if you can show ads to the people to whom they are relevant, then, as a small business you can let people know you exist without blowing your ad budget, and, as a content producer, the more valuable an ad-view is, the more you can charge for it." Elegant. In theory. How about in practice. What problem does this proposed "solution" solve. Once we have answer then we ask whether it is effective at solving it. Proposing "solutions" to problems where 100% of the time the solution uses a computer is easy. We're drowning in such "solutions". The question is whether they actually work. If ad tech isn't very effective then is it even a "solution".^1 It could just be a very successful marketing gimmick. The "if we regulate data collection, bad things will happen" is a lame argument used by the ad tech incumbents and ad tech startups. "You'll lose what you have." More likely, the person making the argument will lose what they have. This type of "argument" is made by self-interested parties. It's speculative and there is no evidence to support it. Fear mongering. Without regulation, these ad tech startups, if they ever begin to grow larger, will surely be acquired by the incumbents, ideally producing a massive windfall for the founders and investors. We know this because we have watched it happen over and over. It's like arguing "we need to let the next DoubleClick grow and thrive". Soon followed by "we need to stop the governemnt from blocking our merger with Google." The truth is, bad stuff is happening right now. That isn't speculation. It's fact. There's a problem. Data collection. And people are looking for a solution. Not the other way around. (A data collection "solution" looking for a problem.) Letting unfettered data collection continue is certainly not a solution to the problem of data collection. Another line of reasoning is "it's too late to regulate data collection for future generations because some data has already been collected". It's like suggesting "it's too late to regulate pollution because the environment is already polluted". Not sure I should even call this reasoning. Yet another way that people defend data collection and tracking in the face of public discontent is misdirection. "Industry/Company X is doing it, too. And they are much worse than we are." In the case of comparisons to other industries, we may have to compare the regulation, if any, to which each is subjected. HN could be "misguided" on its views of so-called "ad tech", if we accept such generalisations. But what about others, who are not "web consumers", outside HN. The OP is one example. There are others. https://digiday.com/marketing/confessions-of-an-ad-exec-most-activation-in-the-ecosystem-is-inefficient-and-profits-from-that-inefficiency/ https://digiday.com/marketing/confessions-of-an-ad-exec-most... https://www.newsmediaalliance.org/ad-tech-its-worse-than-we-thought/ https://www.newsmediaalliance.org/ad-tech-its-worse-than-we-... https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/11/technology/bad-digital-ads.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/11/technology/bad-digital-ad... https://adage.com/article/digitalnext/ad-tech-worst-thing-happened-advertising/301992 https://adage.com/article/digitalnext/ad-tech-worst-thing-ha... https://martech.org/stop-calling-ad-tech-advertising/ https://martech.org/stop-calling-ad-tech-advertising/ https://tbtech.co/business/why-billions-of-dollars-are-being-wasted-on-ineffective-advertising-and-how-to-fix-it/ https://tbtech.co/business/why-billions-of-dollars-are-being... It's funny that so-called "ad tech" companies, as intermediaries (middlemen), claim that they prioritise "users", but then they do not like it when they see "users" commenting about so-called "ad tech" on HN. But what about the folks on the other side of the transaction that "ad tech" intermediates. Perhaps there are folks besides "users" who can see problems posed by the unscrupulous middlemen performing data collection. NB. In this comment I have focused on (a) the "arguments" being made in the parent comment, and elsewhere, that defend so-called "ad tech" and (b) the viewpoints of others, namely marketers and advertisers, about so-called "ad tech". References to regulation of data collection can be assumed to also refer to regulation of data use by the collectors or any parties with which they share collected data. IMO, it's likely any regulation of data collection would also apply to data use, and this would address data collection that has already occurred before the regulation takes effect.
ssss11 3y ago
People should pay for products. Advertising should be static. There I solved it.
Barraketh 3y ago
Well, this has been a fun discussion. A salient point that I haven't mentioned but that actually plays a big role is attribution. Many advertisers run ad campaigns not to get a clickthrough to their site, but to just keep their product 'top of mind', so that next time you go buy a car you buy a BMW. So from that point of view, if you see an ad and later go and sign up for a BMW test-drive, BMW would attribute that test drive to the ad that you saw. If you can't track attribution, it becomes really hard to figure out where you should be advertising in the first place. To everyone saying "use contextual advertising" - how do you know which contexts produce better results if you can't measure performance? This is particularly relevant to mobile apps, because if you show the user an ad, they are extremely unlikely to switch contexts to go and actually click on it. If you can track users from the app to the purchasing site, then you can say "hey, I have a really valuable audience - you should pay me hella money to show them ads". This has been less GDPR and more Apple, but the result is the same - it makes ads generically less valuable. And that is why I'm fundamentally pro ad-tech. I don't have any direct monetary interest in it, but I do want the digital economy to be growing and efficient, and in an ideal world decentralized beyond the 4-5 large platforms. People spending money online is GOOD. It's good for businesses, it's good for the people (under a rational agent model at least ;)), and it's good for me as a software engineer who wants to keep getting paid silicon-valley salaries.
- iamacyborg 3y ago
  Ads aren’t less valuable, they’re now just not being over indexed by analytics products produced by advertising companies. Marketing as a function will be better off once they wean themselves off of adtech attribution models.
hakfoo 3y ago
It's not just the tracking concern. The disruption to traditional media economics is socially toxic. In the Before Times of 1993, if you're in situation #1, you call the advertisement department of the local newspaper, who is in situation #2. You pay them $250, the newspaper keeps basically all of it, and you get a quarter-page ad in the Sports section. You can go and open the paper and see the ad, and know roughly that most of the people in town read the local paper. You can also feel good that the money you spent is largely being used to support a local institution that has strong community value. Now, you go to Google/Meta/etc and set up a campaign. You pay for $250 worth of service. If you're lucky, you get some dashboards to get a vague idea where the impressions occurred. A collection of disparate webmasters get a grand total of $30 in CPM or CPC fees. Brin and Zuckerberg buy some new yachts. So advertisers aren't actually saving much, but we've dismantled the old media economy. * We're slicing same ad dollar across more and more publishers. It's cute that you can make $12 per month with AdWords on your blog, but it contributes to the death-by-a-thousand-cuts of local TV/radio/newspapers. When everyone is working on a $12-per-moonth revenue feed, all you're going to get is listicles and clickbait, or stuff designed specifically to game ad metrics (see: the 29-page slideshow article) * Visibility is terrible but in exciting new ways. The 1993 question was how "many people actually saw your ad in the Sports section?" The 2023 version is "how many of those 'people' are bots, how many of the clicks came from incentivized questionable activity, how many of these ads appeared on sites that would actually contaminate my brand?" * The middlemen have consumed a lot of margin. The fact that newsrooms are closing and media is getting more paywalled by the day suggests that the digital ad space have failed to deliver the same revenue that traditional platforms did. It's possible to do without a lot of this-- direct placement for example would pretty much work as well today as it did in 1993-- but it would require a lot of data to convince people that the big AdTechs' yottabytes of profiling don't justify the price they're charging.

rebeccaskinner 3y ago

> 1) I am a niche small business - how do I let people know that I exist? 2) I run a website and would like to monetize it - how can I get paid for the content that I produce? The thing is, this isn’t my problem. The fact that someone wants to market their business doesn’t entitle them to my attention.

brandall10 3y ago
If you're not paying for a product in which you see the ad, it is your problem though, no? What's in the ad space is immaterial, just that is how the product is monetized.
- amelius 3y ago
  The freaking ad is making me pay twice. Once with my attention, and then again with my money if I buy the product (since the advertising cost is incorporated into the price).
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    And a third time with your data.
- barbazoo 3y ago
  Problem is though that everyone is being tracked, whether they use free products that show ads based on that data or not. I don't want to be tracked like that but I have very little power here other than blocking certain domains which is never perfect.
- pessimizer 3y ago
  If everybody pays, the ads come right back. Paying customers are more lucrative to advertisers than deadbeats.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
ryandrake 3y ago
That's really the root of it. Unless I am actively searching for the exact something your small business offers, I don't care whether your business exists. I don't want to know about it. I don't want you to "reach" me. Your ability or inability to let me know that you exist is not my problem. My browsing to a website (or watching a TV show, or driving along a road with billboards, or filling up my gas tank) does not entitle anyone to my attention.
brickteacup 3y ago
> doesn’t entitle them to my attention if you're looking at someone's website then yes they are entitled to your attention. what gave you the idea that you're entitled to consume for free content that other people payed to produce and host?
- JohnFen 3y ago
  > what gave you the idea that you're entitled to consume for free content that other people payed to produce and host? The fact that they made it available to be looked at in such a way, perhaps?
  - brickteacup 3y ago
    They didn't, though, they made it available to be looked at alongside advertisements. HN users just love twisting themselves in circles to justify their belief that they're somehow entitled to consume content from private websites without consuming the ads that support that content. (If you don't want to see ads, there's a really simple solution: don't look at websites that display them! No one's forcing you to!)
    - hightrix 3y ago
      > If you don't want to see ads, there's a really simple solution: don't look at websites that display them! And as a user, if the person hosting the website doesn't want me to look at their content without also looking at their ads, there is a simple solution: don't serve me your content until after you force me to look at your ads. You do not get to have it both ways. Either the content is available for free and you can hope that the user also views your ads, or the content is not available for free and you can force the user to view your ads.
    - psd1 3y ago
      An individualist perspective. I believe that humans are social animals, and that a view on enshittification that ignores society is useless. Media is, IMO, holistically worse now than in the mid-90s. An individual cannot undo that. The negatives are not wished away by "no one's forcing you".
Barraketh 3y ago
Well kinda. The business wanting to market themselves certainly isn't your problem, but the "how does the website monetize itself" is exactly your problem, or rather, it's part of the interaction between the owner of the website you're visiting and you. You could say "oh, they should just charge for their content", and some definitely do. But the ad model allows for really interesting price discrimination in terms of "who pays for the content". So, if someone buys say.. a Tesla through a website, that conversion subsidizes a million poor kids who don't have to pay anything. In some ways the ad-supported model is the most progressive way to pay content creators - the people who end up paying are the people who spend the most money online.
- zb3 3y ago
  I'd prefer reading content written by people who are just interested in the topic and sharing their thoughts. I want genuine interaction, not commercial garbage.

Analemma_ 3y ago

> and comes a fundamentally from a "web consumer" mentality. Because literally all of us are web consumers, so we're hostile to things that are hostile to web consumers. This is like saying there's really strong disdain for leaded gasoline which comes from a "human being breathing air" mentality. > I think that it would be valuable to reframe the question from the producers point of view: 1) I am a niche small business - how do I let people know that I exist? 2) I run a website and would like to monetize it - how can I get paid for the content that I produce? I don't fucking care. This isn't my problem, and I'm really annoyed that we've build a giant world-spanning surveillance apparatus out of people trying to make it my problem.

pxc 3y ago
> > and comes a fundamentally from a "web consumer" mentality. > Because literally all of us are web consumers Exactly. GP might as well have written > The problem is that you're considering your own interests. I think it would be useful for you to consider my interests.
Aerroon 3y ago
How many videos on vine do you watch these days? How the companies, where you consume content, monetize is very much relevant to you. You have a choice though - you can choose to not watch the content and you won't get advertised to.
- BizarroLand 3y ago
  Yes, because placing access to society inside of a walled garden is ethical.

humanistbot 3y ago

> 1) I am a niche small business - how do I let people know that I exist? 2) I run a website and would like to monetize it - how can I get paid for the content that I produce? You don't have a right to violate my privacy in exchange for this.

Barraketh 3y ago
I think this is a genuinely interesting point, and I wish that we as a society had a more nuanced discussion about what that right is. AdTech is largely anonymous in the same way that crypto / web3 is anonymous - it shuttles around cookies / identifiers, but largely does NOT care about any information that is actually personally identifying. If the laws were regulating storage / transmission of information that is actually personally-identifying (addresses, emails, names, etc), that would be much more reasonable in my mind.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  That would be insufficient for a number of reasons, including that even if you only collect non-PII (and don't let's get started on what "PII" actually is), if you collect enough of it and correlate it in databases (like ad companies do), then it's all personally identifying. But I think that's not the main reason it's not sufficient. The main reason, in my view, is because it's still companies spying on me, my machines, and/or my use of my machines. Even if the data is genuinely anonymous, if you don't have my informed consent then collecting it is spying and unethical. If we're going to have regulation (and it's increasingly looking like any solution will have to be), then the regulation should be about the collection of the data.

amelius 3y ago

Ads are wrong because: 1. They nudge people towards buying stuff they wouldn't otherwise buy. This causes a tremendous amount of real waste. 2. Ads are a distraction. When I'm looking up something for work, don't bother me with ads, even if *you* think they are relevant. When I'm working, I'm not looking for a new job, or new pants. 3. On a fundamental level, ads work against the free market: not the best product wins, but the product with the biggest advertising budget. And there are many more reasons ... Ads suck! And people working in ad-tech should be deeply ashamed!

secondcoming 3y ago
You just demonstrated how advertising works.
- spost 3y ago
  I don't believe anyone is arguing that advertising _doesn't work_.
charcircuit 3y ago
>They nudge people towards buying stuff they wouldn't otherwise buy. It allows people to find things they value that they were not aware of before. >Ads are a distraction. Yes, which is why apps need to design good ad experiences to balance monetization with user satisfaction. >On a fundamental level, ads work against the free market: not the best product wins, but the product with the biggest advertising budget. If something really is the best product, why aren't they the one with the largest advertising budget?
- whatshisface 3y ago
  >If something really is the best product, why aren't they the one with the largest advertising budget? If they are already the company with the highest revenue, why would they need to advertise... If these are the arguments in favor of ads then they really must be that bad.
  - 3y ago

skydhash 3y ago

> The AdTech system isn't ideal, but it would be great if the people who criticize it came up with something other than "fuck the small businesses and content producers". The thing is that people do hear about products and contents. Trailers are ads, products announcement are also ads. Sponsorship is ads. What people do not want is intrusive ads. It feels like someone going through my bedroom and bathroom, then talking to people about my underwear. Next, these people shout to me when I'm going to buy groceries. This is what the adtech is like nowadays. So content creators, paywall your content and add sponsorship. Small businesses, announce your product and sponsor articles on relevant forums. But stop interrupting people when they're doing nothing that's relevant to you.

celestialcheese 3y ago
I don't get this. I find "passive" advertising like banners, mid-roll, etc so much easier to ignore/block/ The type of advertising that's invasive for me is the "sponsored content" or paid product placements, especially in movies. It feels like every big-budget movie I see these days is littered with "ads" for some car or electronics company. There's no way to block this, and sometimes its hard to tell if something is paid or just someones honest recommendation.

imchillyb 3y ago

> The AdTech system isn't ideal, but it would be great if the people who criticize it came up with something other than "fuck the small businesses and content producers". Found the 'ad-guy...' Look. We don't need to offer a solution in order to point out how broken adtheft is. They're stealing my time, my bandwidth, my cpu resources, my gpu resources, my memory resources, and my body's own motion by forcing me to click away or click gone or click click click. Here's my solution: Take your ads and place them somewhere dark, moist, and smelly, preferably limited to your own person.

Barraketh 3y ago
So, out my now 15+ year career, only about 4 were in AdTech, and I've been out of that game for more than 7 years. But fair enough - happy to play 'ad-guy' for the purposes of this discussion :) I guess my main contention is that businesses really like ads. But that's usually ok - because it funds cool content! The majority of television historically was produced just to sell ads, but it still created awesome television. And if we make ads worse, well, the people who are gong to suffer are the businesses and the content creators. OR, like i mentioned above, we will just drive everyone to large platforms, which is essentially what's happening now. Another way to frame the question - GDPR came out in 2016. Do you feel like the web is getting better?
- iamdbtoo 3y ago
  > The majority of television historically was produced just to sell ads, but it still created awesome television. That's because there was an incentive to create awesome television to lure people away from other channels to watch the ads on your channel. Part of the discussion around the writers and actors on strike right now is the streaming services believe they can make worse content cheaper using AI and still retain subscribers.
- traverseda 3y ago
  I don't think businesses really like ads. Businesses are forced to buy ads. On Facebook if you want to reach your entire audience you need to pay them, they gate off people seeing content they're subscribed to unless you pay. Google is terrible at surfacing relevant local events. Ads are forced on small business because regular methods of discovery are intentionally nerfed.

tomjen3 3y ago

If you are a small business, sponsor a podcast relevant to the people you are targeting. I am still going to skip over you, but thats your best chance to get in front of people, and it involves zero privacy invasions.

bee_rider 3y ago

“What about small businesses” seemed like a better counter-argument during the previous round of ad tech, the kind of annoying flash pop ups that and third party JavaScript that only sometimes contained viruses. Nowadays it is a major funding keystone of the attention economy, which is spreading propaganda and conspiracy theories, destabilizing governments. Propaganda spread over Facebook helped enable the Rohingya genocide. This isn’t a little annoying thing anymore.

JohnFen 3y ago

> and comes fundamentally from a "web consumer" mentality Not for me, it doesn't, For me, it comes from an "I don't want to be spied on" mentality. If the online ad world would do everything that they currently do, but actually leave me out of it when I tell them to, I wouldn't consider them to be evil. But not only don't they do that, they put a lot of time, effort, and money into actively working around the various defenses I put up against them. > I think that it would be valuable to reframe the question from the producers point of view You're talking as if the problem is the ads themselves. It's not. It's the spying that's the problem. > The ad-tech solution is actually quite elegant in theory I don't assert that it's not elegant. I assert that it's deeply unethical unless informed consent has been obtained from the people the data is being gathered from. > then people ask "where did the old internet go"? People ask that right now, and adtech is one of the things that have killed it. > it would be great if the people who criticize it came up with something other than "fuck the small businesses and content producers". Plenty of proven alternatives are brought up all the time. Even the IAPP article here mentions the strongest one: have ads, but don't target them based on data extracted from unwilling participants. Target them based on the context in which the ads appear. Just like newspapers, magazines, TV, etc. The adtech world doesn't want to do that because they can make even more money by being bastards, instead.

Barraketh 3y ago
> People ask that right now, and adtech is one of the things that have killed it. I don't think this is actually true. When I think about the old internet vs new internet, a lot of it is about people running their own blogs / websites vs. platforms. And I think most of that is not really about ad-tech at all, but about the mechanisms of content and audience discovery. But the fact remains that if you want to say... publish videos of some kind, you are likely to make much more on YouTube vs uploading them to your own website, and that's at least partially because Google is able to show effective ads. > Target them based on the context in which the ads appear. Possible, but in some cases significantly less effective. As I mentioned above, ad-tech comes with some very interesting progressive effects, where the people who spend the most money are the ones who end up paying the most in aggregate for content. An interesting example is luxury goods, which are both high-value and niche. If you run say... a news site, or something else that's general purpose, you probably don't want to be showing Rolex ads to everyone. But rich people still read news, and if you could target your Rolex ads to them, that basically subsidizes everyone else.

indymike 3y ago

> There seems to be a really strong disdain on HN for AdTech in general, which I think is misguided, and comes fundamentally from a "web consumer" mentality. I think the disdain is against surveillance and invasive content. > The current movement to avoid tracking is an extremely powerful centralizing force. No, this is just removing the third party. If I'm on a Meta property seeing an ad served by Meta targeted by my data from using Meta, then there's not third party.

footy 3y ago

I have long wondered how people who work in adtech live with themselves and this was illuminating.

lastofthemojito 3y ago

> I am a niche small business - how do I let people know that I exist? Is this a serious question? You advertise. Just like people have been doing for generations. You advertise in publications or spaces that will attract people interested in your product or service. You're going to have to do more to convince me that we need individual level targeted for businesses to succeed. We're not mad if the new bakery in town advertises in the town paper or sends postcards to everyone in the zipcode. We're not mad if the new geeky t-shirt website puts ads on geeky subreddits or Facebook groups. We're not mad if your new auto detailing service comes up if I Google "auto detailing <my city>". We're mad that those ads creepily follow us around the internet, reminding us of the scale of the enormous data collection that enables such behavior. Don't tell me that bakeries or t-shirt shops or auto detailers can't thrive without targeted marketing. We've had those things for way longer than we've had targeted marketing.

MildRant 3y ago
> We've had those things for way longer than we've had targeted marketing. You've had way less of those things as well. I'm not defending targeted marketing but you are ignoring that there are way more bakeries and t-shirt shops now than ever. As a small business, you aren't competing against other local t-shirt shops you are competing against every t-shirt shop that can setup a webpage and put a shirt in the mail.
akira2501 3y ago
> You advertise in publications or spaces that will attract people interested in your product or service. Are those publications most popular products, the online versions, selling advertising in the way their print only counterparts have? Or, are they just offering you targeting through their already extant advertising setup? > Don't tell me that bakeries or t-shirt shops or auto detailers can't thrive without targeted marketing. Local advertising and national advertising are two entirely different things and the campaigns even have two entirely different purposes and metrics for measurement. One of the great forces of the internet was to allow me to do regular and successful business with niche operations that may not be local to me. It was supposed to expand upon the previously existing model. Adtech is trying to stand across this gap, which still hasn't been filled for anyone outside of a local goods retailer.

zb3 3y ago

Well actually fuck "professional content producers", there's always someone there who writes just because they want others to read, I'll just read them instead and it'd be good if the search engine let me find them instead of that SEO spam.

dahwolf 3y ago

1. Especially for a niche business, contextual ads should be great. Appear in search results as well as content pages related to your niche. Relevant by default and requires zero personal data. 2. I'm afraid it's too late. The centralization has already happened. Most people consume content from a handful of mobile apps (youtube, social networks, etc). AI will escalate this even further. Small websites outside of big tech can't really monetize content reliably, exceptions aside. Likewise, your content has to be extremely special for people wanting to pay for it.

Havoc 3y ago

>There seems to be a really strong disdain on HN for AdTech in general, The ads aren't the problem, the targetting and the granular privacy invading data collection practices it implies. It's not about "fuck small businesses" at all but rather that I'd love to scroll through some content without my 100ms pause over a specific post influencing what I see in future and thus shaping the reality I see. That's how we got to a position where the various "factions" in society are seeing so different realities that to each the other seems unreasonable and they can't understand why the others don't see their (to them) obviously correct perspective. Adtech is actively contributing towards societal splits.

whoopdedo 3y ago

> if you can show ads only to the people to whom they are relevant, Except that's not what is happening. The information brokers learned that there's no money to be made in selling to someone who already knows they want to buy that product. With the ad you're getting 90% conversion but without you're only down to 70% conversion. The real value is in convincing someone who had no interest in a product to spend money they wouldn't have otherwise. And targeting makes this happening by giving the advertisers tools to custom make campaigns that create new engagements. The role of the advertiser is not to connect potential purchasers with the products they want, but to trick unwary consumers into buying irrelevant junk. And on top of that, it doesn't help small businesses because they only spend money on small campaigns. A tiny micro-targeted set of ads always loses the auction to an algorithmic carpet bombing of manipulative clickbait. That is, they'll "win" a few impressions at first until their budget caps out and then the spam ads will fill in the rest. Which means someone in that cohort will in any period see more of the bad ads than the good ones. There is no incentive for anyone in adtech to fix this because the "solution" right now is charging more money for better ads. Consumers disliking ads and being inundated with malvertising is the system working as intended.

TheIronMark 3y ago

A lot of Internet users don't want to pay for content and don't want ads. I guess they're hoping some deity will magically pay all the content producers.

jrh3 3y ago

We tried funding the internet with banner ads and that didn't take. So early 2000s we sold our privacy to fund it. The "web consumer" mentality was built on the latter funding, which is now going away. Small business is being hurt the most (because they benefitted the most from being able to buy targeted ads with a small budget). I want my privacy private, and I'm not willing to share it. It is definitely interesting to see what AdTech can figure out next, especially for small business.

1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago

"The ad-tech solution is actually quite elegant in theory - if you can show ads to the people to whom they are relevant, then, as a small business you can let people know you exist without blowing your ad budget, and, as a content producer, the more valuable an ad-view is, the more you can charge for it." Elegant. In theory. How about in practice. What problem does this proposed "solution" solve. Once we have answer then we ask whether it is effective at solving it. Proposing "solutions" to problems where 100% of the time the solution uses a computer is easy. We're drowning in such "solutions". The question is whether they actually work. If ad tech isn't very effective then is it even a "solution".^1 It could just be a very successful marketing gimmick. The "if we regulate data collection, bad things will happen" is a lame argument used by the ad tech incumbents and ad tech startups. "You'll lose what you have." More likely, the person making the argument will lose what they have. This type of "argument" is made by self-interested parties. It's speculative and there is no evidence to support it. Fear mongering. Without regulation, these ad tech startups, if they ever begin to grow larger, will surely be acquired by the incumbents, ideally producing a massive windfall for the founders and investors. We know this because we have watched it happen over and over. It's like arguing "we need to let the next DoubleClick grow and thrive". Soon followed by "we need to stop the governemnt from blocking our merger with Google." The truth is, bad stuff is happening right now. That isn't speculation. It's fact. There's a problem. Data collection. And people are looking for a solution. Not the other way around. (A data collection "solution" looking for a problem.) Letting unfettered data collection continue is certainly not a solution to the problem of data collection. Another line of reasoning is "it's too late to regulate data collection for future generations because some data has already been collected". It's like suggesting "it's too late to regulate pollution because the environment is already polluted". Not sure I should even call this reasoning. Yet another way that people defend data collection and tracking in the face of public discontent is misdirection. "Industry/Company X is doing it, too. And they are much worse than we are." In the case of comparisons to other industries, we may have to compare the regulation, if any, to which each is subjected. HN could be "misguided" on its views of so-called "ad tech", if we accept such generalisations. But what about others, who are not "web consumers", outside HN. The OP is one example. There are others. https://digiday.com/marketing/confessions-of-an-ad-exec-most-activation-in-the-ecosystem-is-inefficient-and-profits-from-that-inefficiency/ https://digiday.com/marketing/confessions-of-an-ad-exec-most... https://www.newsmediaalliance.org/ad-tech-its-worse-than-we-thought/ https://www.newsmediaalliance.org/ad-tech-its-worse-than-we-... https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/11/technology/bad-digital-ads.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/11/technology/bad-digital-ad... https://adage.com/article/digitalnext/ad-tech-worst-thing-happened-advertising/301992 https://adage.com/article/digitalnext/ad-tech-worst-thing-ha... https://martech.org/stop-calling-ad-tech-advertising/ https://martech.org/stop-calling-ad-tech-advertising/ https://tbtech.co/business/why-billions-of-dollars-are-being-wasted-on-ineffective-advertising-and-how-to-fix-it/ https://tbtech.co/business/why-billions-of-dollars-are-being... It's funny that so-called "ad tech" companies, as intermediaries (middlemen), claim that they prioritise "users", but then they do not like it when they see "users" commenting about so-called "ad tech" on HN. But what about the folks on the other side of the transaction that "ad tech" intermediates. Perhaps there are folks besides "users" who can see problems posed by the unscrupulous middlemen performing data collection. NB. In this comment I have focused on (a) the "arguments" being made in the parent comment, and elsewhere, that defend so-called "ad tech" and (b) the viewpoints of others, namely marketers and advertisers, about so-called "ad tech". References to regulation of data collection can be assumed to also refer to regulation of data use by the collectors or any parties with which they share collected data. IMO, it's likely any regulation of data collection would also apply to data use, and this would address data collection that has already occurred before the regulation takes effect.

ssss11 3y ago

People should pay for products. Advertising should be static. There I solved it.

Barraketh 3y ago

Well, this has been a fun discussion. A salient point that I haven't mentioned but that actually plays a big role is attribution. Many advertisers run ad campaigns not to get a clickthrough to their site, but to just keep their product 'top of mind', so that next time you go buy a car you buy a BMW. So from that point of view, if you see an ad and later go and sign up for a BMW test-drive, BMW would attribute that test drive to the ad that you saw. If you can't track attribution, it becomes really hard to figure out where you should be advertising in the first place. To everyone saying "use contextual advertising" - how do you know which contexts produce better results if you can't measure performance? This is particularly relevant to mobile apps, because if you show the user an ad, they are extremely unlikely to switch contexts to go and actually click on it. If you can track users from the app to the purchasing site, then you can say "hey, I have a really valuable audience - you should pay me hella money to show them ads". This has been less GDPR and more Apple, but the result is the same - it makes ads generically less valuable. And that is why I'm fundamentally pro ad-tech. I don't have any direct monetary interest in it, but I do want the digital economy to be growing and efficient, and in an ideal world decentralized beyond the 4-5 large platforms. People spending money online is GOOD. It's good for businesses, it's good for the people (under a rational agent model at least ;)), and it's good for me as a software engineer who wants to keep getting paid silicon-valley salaries.

iamacyborg 3y ago
Ads aren’t less valuable, they’re now just not being over indexed by analytics products produced by advertising companies. Marketing as a function will be better off once they wean themselves off of adtech attribution models.

hakfoo 3y ago

It's not just the tracking concern. The disruption to traditional media economics is socially toxic. In the Before Times of 1993, if you're in situation #1, you call the advertisement department of the local newspaper, who is in situation #2. You pay them $250, the newspaper keeps basically all of it, and you get a quarter-page ad in the Sports section. You can go and open the paper and see the ad, and know roughly that most of the people in town read the local paper. You can also feel good that the money you spent is largely being used to support a local institution that has strong community value. Now, you go to Google/Meta/etc and set up a campaign. You pay for $250 worth of service. If you're lucky, you get some dashboards to get a vague idea where the impressions occurred. A collection of disparate webmasters get a grand total of $30 in CPM or CPC fees. Brin and Zuckerberg buy some new yachts. So advertisers aren't actually saving much, but we've dismantled the old media economy. * We're slicing same ad dollar across more and more publishers. It's cute that you can make $12 per month with AdWords on your blog, but it contributes to the death-by-a-thousand-cuts of local TV/radio/newspapers. When everyone is working on a $12-per-moonth revenue feed, all you're going to get is listicles and clickbait, or stuff designed specifically to game ad metrics (see: the 29-page slideshow article) * Visibility is terrible but in exciting new ways. The 1993 question was how "many people actually saw your ad in the Sports section?" The 2023 version is "how many of those 'people' are bots, how many of the clicks came from incentivized questionable activity, how many of these ads appeared on sites that would actually contaminate my brand?" * The middlemen have consumed a lot of margin. The fact that newsrooms are closing and media is getting more paywalled by the day suggests that the digital ad space have failed to deliver the same revenue that traditional platforms did. It's possible to do without a lot of this-- direct placement for example would pretty much work as well today as it did in 1993-- but it would require a lot of data to convince people that the big AdTechs' yottabytes of profiling don't justify the price they're charging.