14 ms·

Attribution is dying, clicks are dying

261 points by dotcoma 2y ago

crabhorse 2y ago
[dead]
pavel_lishin 2y ago
Sucks for the industry, but most things mentioned as a cause so far sounds like it's great for actual users: > Apple’s cookie changes absolutely had a big effect when they pulled back on third party cookies inside safari that took a huge hit. Anti tracking and privacy laws in California, Canada, New York, and the EU, and many of those cookie permissions and do-not-track protocols have rolled out globally. > Then there’s the massive adoption of ad blockers. We’re talking about a third to half of all Internet users using an ad blocker on one or more of their devices. And and ad blockers don’t just block ads, they block all of the tracking that we do as well. > Multi device journeys mean that tracking someone, even with fancy browser fingerprinting (illegal in many parts of the world, but still technically allowed in the US), is rendered impossible unless they log in with the same credentials on all those devices. The part about Google just giving answers, instead of linking, and social networks penalizing links is probably bad for different reasons (AI summarizing things is certainly a problem, since it somewhat disincentivizes people from, you know, actually writing about things online), but overall... I can't gather up much sympathy for this industry. If you shit in my well, you don't get to complain that bottled water is killing your industry.
- the_snooze 2y ago
  Yeah, it's hard to feel bad for adtech. Contextual advertising worked perfectly fine on print media: put sports ads in sports magazines read by sports fans. There's no need to follow individual readers around and sniff their farts to try to figure out what they had for breakfast.
  - listenallyall 2y ago
    Can't really agree here. Sports Illustrated's most frequent ads were for cigarettes, beer and cars. Even today, sports telecasts have tons of ads for insurance, finance and enterprise tech comapnies.
- gamblor956 2y ago
  If you shit in my well, you don't get to complain that bottled water is killing your industry. And you don't get to complain when they stop making their "water" free because they can no longer afford to do so, and the internet returns to the days of AOL and Compuserve.
  - worble 2y ago
    >and the internet returns to the days of AOL and Compuserve. Please don't tempt me with a good time like that
  - ncruces 2y ago
    That too. Nor do we get to complain when searching for a place on Google shows a map, but no way to go from that map to Google Maps because that'd be a tie in.
  - aziaziazi 2y ago
    Perhaps a better analogy would be advertiser stop giving you coke for free so you only have water. Water and moneyless-internet doesn’t give you dopamine but you’ll be in better shape physically and mentally to build the future. Coke and ad-financed-web create wish in your hearth but only lead you to a couch.
  - advael 2y ago
    Yes please Vastly prefer commercial enterprises that are upfront about how they make money. It would be so sweet if internet businesses charged money for things instead of creating a massive surveillance machine that is also the most advanced annoyance generator ever conceived by mankind, and slowing down every goddamn website to a crawl despite being able to fit a processor that eats anything I could get my hands on in the 90s for breakfast in my thermostat due to all the telemetry devs mindlessly cram into their frontends I want free to be a usable signal for something being not intended to directly make money from me. I would love to have my interactions with businesses announce themselves by charging me money and turning me away if I can't or won't pay, as I'm used to in meatspace. I would love anything that makes the strategy of trying to relentlessly insert itself into every genuine engagement I have with other human beings, including trying to flood channels with ads that mimic them Free can still be a good strategy for drawing business if you can entice people with, for example, a freemium product, and as this article mentions businesses will still go try to advertise in embedded ways by actually thinking about where their potential customers are, so sadly my dream of being able to avoid businesses hijacking social interactions by simply refusing to pay them so that they go fuck off to find someone who will is not very realistic, but I wish you were right, that would be amazing
candiddevmike 2y ago
I think marketers will never admit that attribution is dying. There was always some mental gymnastics around grasping for attribution: "they clicked an ad last month once and made a purchase today, that counts!". Folks have careers and budgets based around attribution working as intended. Yes, there are anecdotes about shutting off ad platform X and seeing Y revenue decline, but I highly doubt that decline == their calculated attribution amount. IMO, attribution was always a pseudoscience used to grossly inflate the cost of online ad space.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 2y ago
  Somewhat related, what percentage of people click ads? I assume it is something like 60% of people never click, 38% do when it is incredibly relevant, and 2% lizard people who click everything they see, ruining it for the rest of us.
  - layer8 2y ago
    Most clicks are probably by mistake and unintended.
    - mocamoca 2y ago
      I run statistically-sound AB tests on Meta* and can tell you that people click, click more than you think and buy more than you think from clicking on ads! The same goes for email and Whatsapp marketing. People love these messages. * We do not use their built-in ab test tools of course...
      - 9dev 2y ago
        Is it a nerd thing, then? I cannot for the life of me imagine clicking on ads, but maybe it’s just the filter bubble?
        AnimalMuppet 2y ago
        There's two kinds of things here, which I will call "push ads" and "pull ads". Push ads we hate. I don't want your random ads shoved in my face. The harder and more intrusively you shove, the more I hate it. No, I'm not going to look at it to see if I'm interested; I just want it gone. Pull ads are different. Let's say I'm on a business trip, and I get out of some meeting at 5 PM. Well, what is there to eat around here? What do I get in response to that? Ads! But in how they interact with me, it's completely different, because I actually want to eat. Or let's say I'm going on a trip, and I search for "lodging in location X". Well, some of what comes back is ads. Say it's from hotel.com. I probably wouldn't have gone to hotel.com as one of my choices for investigating lodging in X, but they're going to give me kind of a one-stop overview of what's there, so maybe I'll click on their ad link anyway, because it's actually interesting information for what I'm trying to do right then. But some random Temu junk that they insist on shoving in my face every time they can? No way. Just get it out of my life.
behnamoh 2y ago
Good riddance. Marketing was never meant to make customers better off. It was always a way for businesses to get better off by shoving useless products down peoples' throats. Creating needs was an effective strategy—"look, you didn't know you needed this before, but now you know you want this product!". But even that is not that effective anymore—look at Apple's failed V Pro product.
- golergka 2y ago
  > Creating needs was an effective strategy—"look, you didn't know you needed this before, but now you know you want this product!". That's how literally every innovation works. Do you think that fridges that save your food, home computers, smartphones, washers and dryers, garbage disposals, crocs, electric cars, e-readers, online shopping, wi-fi, and thousands of other things that make our daily lifes are useless products that have been shoved down our throats?
  - sebastiennight 2y ago
    I love how you slipped Crocs® in there amongst those civilization-changing innovations.
- Cupprum 2y ago
  Why do you think apples V Pro product failed? Maybe you were just not the audience. Once they release a customer oriented version i am looking forward to it. The way i understood the rollout for this product is to first target developers and give them time to enrich the so far empty ecosystem. Release in US, means US will have a head start to adopt this new technology professionally.
turnsout 2y ago
I wonder if this will lead to greater emphasis on targeting. If you can't prove that they clicked the ad, at least you want to be in front of the right people.
- candiddevmike 2y ago
  How do you prove you're putting the ad in front of the right people? Assuming you're talking about invasive tracking. Attribution dying means privacy efforts are working. It's getting hard to correlate person + device + eyeball + ad space.
  - mjhay 2y ago
    > How do you prove you're putting the ad in front of the right people? You can just make it up. That's worked for a really long time now. There's innumerable ways to put one's hand on the scale without it being outright fraud. It's especially easy when ad buyers (people in marketing departments) are invested in the status quo.
paulnpace 2y ago
To me what's really changed is all the screenshots. Especially with phones it is very easy to just zoom to how you want the image, then press the buttons to capture and press share. How to attribute that?
- deleted 2y ago
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- sva_ 2y ago
  I think Twitter should have a QR code in the top right of each tweet. It'd make it possible to verify a screenshot of a tweet immediately and also join the "discussion". It seems like such a no-brainer to me that I wonder if they have some good reason against it. People share tweets as screenshots all the time.
  - vundercind 2y ago
    A bunch of these sites can’t make links work reliably, QR codes wouldn’t help. Twitter especially.
    - EasyMark 2y ago
      Not to mention artifacting after it’s been copy pasted a few times
  - null0pointer 2y ago
    It’s fairly easy to search for the user and text of the tweet if you want to verify a tweet that’s still live. But much of the time the original tweet has been deleted so the QR code would be a dead end too. Maybe it would be good on a third party service to screenshot and archive tweets though.
    - jart 2y ago
      Didn't Elon kill Twitter's search feature though? He probably didn't want reporters abusing the platform to write smear pieces. Now thanks to Elon and journalists being terrible, everything gets flushed down the memory hole a week later, unless you've bookmarked it. The search feature is effectively useless now.
atak1 2y ago
Curious what folks in marketing think here. The intuition makes sense, but the marketing teams see the leading indicators. I'd expect there to be a rise in corp budget for partnerships, influencer marketing, etc.
- inetknght 2y ago
  > Curious what folks in marketing think here. Marketing folks are the reason we're here. What makes you think their thoughts here will be useful?
  - s1artibartfast 2y ago
    I think they understand the situation and insights better than anyone. The current set of incentives and technology are why we are here. If there is a good alternative, they are also the ones likely to know it.
    - RHSeeger 2y ago
      With the caveat that I _don't_ have any particular insights into the solving the problem... > I think they understand the situation and insights better than anyone. > The current set of incentives and technology are why we are here. > If there is a good alternative, they are also the ones likely to know it. This reads a lot like "lets get the drunk drivers together to figure out how to make the roads safer". I mean, sure, they may have more knowledge about the causes.. but they've also made it very clear they don't care about making things better.
      - s1artibartfast 2y ago
        Sure, they may or may not care. However, if you care, talking to them would be the best place to start. There is a big difference between seeking the knowledge where it exists, and expecting the subject matter experts to solve the problem. This is doubly true when it is something you perceive as a problem and not them.
      - 2y ago
Finnucane 2y ago
An easier way to find out how to make risotto is to look it up in Marcella Hazan's book.
- swaginator 2y ago
  I am actually working on a project where I have scraped ~400k recipes, and now am in the process of wrapping them in a little search engine. The idea is to have a little python/node script + sqlite file that you can use to search locally for recipes offline. Then all you'd need to do is write a plugin for the notes app of your choice. The worse the web becomes, and the worse the stability of internet access becomes due to climate change, I will probably be doing more archival projects like this for offline access.
  - Finnucane 2y ago
    How is that a substitute for Hazan?
  - kccqzy 2y ago
    And how do you solve curation (or even just ranking) for these 400k recipes?
    - swaginator 2y ago
      Vector search over title + tags.
immibis 2y ago
I have trouble trusting this author is really part of the ad industry when he talks about "all of the tracking that we do". The ad industry NEVER calls itself tracking, or spyware, or anything negative. But he's got data, so he must be. I agree with the premise that attribution doesn't work. But it's not dying - it's been dead for a long time (maybe always). All the points of the article have been true since the inception of the WWW and before. Corporations impose things like attribution due to their need for legibility[1]. Everything must be formulaic and calculable. Attribution is a simple concept, and nobody is checking it as long as it looks good - it's all theater, like the TSA, the story of spreadsheet bond yields[2], or the AI hype wave. Not even the free market checks it, since your competitors don't have an accurate model either. If anyone believes capitalism is efficient, here is a (or yet another) counter-example. Coming from another angle, I notice that attribution-less marketing has been winning and losing political elections for at least a decade now. Somehow, political campaigns (overt and covert) don't seem to need it. Maybe the ad industry can find out how they operate and copy their model. [1]: https://medium.com/centre-for-public-impact/the-il-logic-of-legibility-why-governments-should-stop-simplifying-complex-systems-f8822752d753 https://medium.com/centre-for-public-impact/the-il-logic-of-... [2]: https://thedailywtf.com/articles/The-Great-Excel-Spreadsheet https://thedailywtf.com/articles/The-Great-Excel-Spreadsheet
bachmeier 2y ago
> What’s Killing Clicks? > “Tell me, Rand, what killed all these clicks?” > I’m going to tell you every one of the major search, social, and content platforms has an incentive to keep you there. LinkedIn wants to keep you on LinkedIn. Twitter wants to keep you on Twitter. Let me throw out another one. People have learned that they'll regret clicking. The incentive to get as many clicks as possible and no incentive to have anything there for them once they do click, except a bunch of in-your-face ads that make it impossible to read the "content", has perhaps made us all pause before clicking.
- Dalewyn 2y ago
  If only it was just ads. No, it's also mads (malvertisements, aka malicious advertisements), several solar systems worth of cookies, and a few galaxies worth of JavaShit wasting our CPU/RAM and power. Yeah, sincerely fuck those clicks.
- nine_k 2y ago
  If only there existed a program that could do the clicking for me, then clean the resulting page from cruft I'm not interested in, and present the useful bits to me! It would be a joy to use, and should it become popular, it might kick the internet back to 1998 when Google was supremely useful. (Oh, that would ruin most of the "economy of attention" though...) /s
  - wkat4242 2y ago
    What you want is Ad Nauseam
- getoffmycase 2y ago
  I click the comments on Reddit to read the full text of the article copied and pasted instead of clicking on the actual link and dealing with the website at the other end.
  - gowld 2y ago
    RAMP: Reddit Accelerated Mobile Pages :-)
manvillej 2y ago
tragedy of your shitty website and the commons. "we need to monetize our site more" - proceeds to ruin the experience of the site, driving customers to adblocking technologies, reducing engagements because adblocking applies to all sites, more sites push more and more intrusive ads, pushing the creation and use of more adblocking technologies. rinse and repeat until the internet is literally unusable without pihole, uBlock, a good VPN, and a browser that isn't owned google or microsoft. if real life had advertisements like the internet, we'd have advertisements painted onto the wall of apartments and landlords would get mad at us we cover it up with paint and art.
- teamspirit 2y ago
  Not to be pedantic but doesn't Google technically own Microsoft's browser? I agree with you though, we've all been pushed to this point and I just wonder if there's any going back - and how? I hate to say this but it feels like the more people got on the internet, the worse it got. Not their fault, but it's akin to a really good neighborhood market. It doesn't just attract honest shoppers but pickpockets and thieves too. Now we're all stuck in a crowded and increasingly crappy market wondering what happened to our beloved neighborhood hangout.
  - fluoridation 2y ago
    If we're being pedantic, then no. Google has made the core of Edge, but doesn't own Edge itself. Just like how Epic doesn't own every game made with Unreal.
- nine_k 2y ago
  What makes me wonder is whether it is efficient. Very certainly, there are people who want to rain ads on you from every direction, even when you carry an umbrella and wear Wellington boots. But does this actually increase the sales of the products being so advertised? Is there a measurable effect? What kind of businesses see uptick in sales, and how real / scammy they are? Does it work in general, or only by hitting some especially gullible individuals, like "Nigerian spam" does? Is it a ruse to oversell ads to gullible business owners, maybe with some help of complicit marketing departments? I'd also note that not all ads are repulsive. It's mostly the obnoxiously intrusive ones that ruin it. Back in the day Google won a fortune by offering textual ads, that were unobtrusive and lightweight, so users did not jump.to block them, unlike the banner ads of the era. The minimal text ads are still there BTW, but now they seem to load heavyweight and more intrusive pieces of JS :(
kelsey98765431 2y ago
i hope all you cookie tracking scumbags fail and never succeed in recapturing the audience you seem to feel entitled to. you do not own my time, my vision, my hearing, and marketing has been one of the largest problems in our society since before i was even born. hawk your wares in the market, stop invading my home like a door to door salesman.
- Dalewyn 2y ago
  It's especially sad because I find that properly targeted and relevant advertisements are sometimes actually useful. Proper marketing like that is rarer than a snowball's chance in hell these days, of course.
  - cowboylowrez 2y ago
    agree, I first started using the internet in the 90s, and I really love the www. I've never installed an ad blocker, if there are too many ads I just close the window. Heh I'd probably have to get instructions on how to even install an ad blocker. I still don't have an ad blocker installed even when I'm limited to a few gigs a month for browsing, if a site starts draining my internet through lousy ads, in the hosts file it goes to keep x and twitter company. There are bad actors everywhere, but advertising is not an inherently evil thing, I buy advertising for my little pet projects, and its my hope that it still remains an option in the future.
shostack 2y ago
This is a topic near and dear to my heart. First, didn't realize this was Rand Fishkin writing it. He knows his stuff. He also has another linked article in there that is more prescriptive on incrementality measurement being all that matters and how to think about it at a high level and I completely agree it is all the matters. https://sparktoro.com/blog/how-to-measure-hard-to-measure-marketing-channels/ https://sparktoro.com/blog/how-to-measure-hard-to-measure-ma... That in turn links to another respected analytics leader, Avinash Kaushik: https://www.kaushik.net/avinash/marketing-analytics-attribution-is-not-incrementality/ https://www.kaushik.net/avinash/marketing-analytics-attribut... That is also a must read. The bottom line is what used to work no longer does, and marketers (and finance and leadership) need to get used to having less fidelity and availability than they were used to. It also means marketing teams who are thrashy trying a new low impact tactic every week instead of constructing experiments likely to deliver statistically significant results on incremental lift are going to be spinning their wheels and wasting dollars. And that's something to watch out for. Unfortunately, setting up proper experiments, controlling for bias, getting clean data, etc. are material challenges that require skills, scale (to get a read on bottom of funnel especially), and resources/budget. There aren't great options out there for that now if you're a smaller or mid size company that I'm aware of, though if anyone is aware of them I'd love to have them on my radar.
- nottorp 2y ago
  > He knows his stuff. Yeah, it's a good exposition of how predatory the "stuff" is :)
  - kridsdale3 2y ago
    Each one of the things listed on TA for why attribution is dying is also readable as: 1. Users don't like SEO 2. Users don't like SEO 3. Users don't like SEO 4. Users don't like SEO 5. Users have phones now 6. Phone apps are better UX than websites 7. Users don't like SEO
    - catlikesshrimp 2y ago
      >> 6. Phone apps are better UX than websites I would reword this as: It is better to carry a phone around than to carry a CPU around, which is the same as 5 There is no way I am using my phone for anything other than making a phone call when I am sitting in front of my computer. Funny fact most people didn't live: I had a friend who in the 90's carried a CPU around in the backseat of his car. He thought "smaller computers" were too expensive for what they did and his "portable" computer attracted less robbers
shironandon 2y ago
I prefer not to click anymore and instead ask AI to summarize a URL for me. The Brave Browser Leo AI is great for this.
- nyrikki 2y ago
  While not explicitly about your chosen tool chain, monetizing user data is absolutely going to happen in the LLM space. While there may be some holdouts, Wall Street is already questioning the payback and as some big players are over promising on things that they will most likely never be able to deliver on, investors will start to pressure for any revenue stream. As even subscription services breach the trust of their users, there is little leverage to hold that model today and deflect activest investors etc...
  - Eisenstein 2y ago
    It is totally possible that AI just isn't monetizable and that they can't figure out a way to suck valuable user data out of it and resell it for profit. In that case, we have another dot-com bust where all the blow-hards and made-up-business-plans go bust and we end up with some decent tech that works for people for a decade or so before someone figures out how to turn it into garbage to make a few cents.
- OptionOfT 2y ago
  I think eventually that's gonna have ads injected. Assume you're asking it to summarize a page on Pasta, and might inject an ad for Barilla. Which your adblocker will block. But in the future I see native ads, where they inject a string as part of the LLM's output.
  - Eisenstein 2y ago
    The brave browser's LLM is local. You can point it to open weights you downloaded off huggingface. How would Barilla inject an ad into that?
dash2 2y ago
It's tempting to play tiny violins for marketers who have, as a post below puts it, been "following us round smelling our farts to see what we had for breakfast". But the end of clicks is linked to a Balkanized internet where everything is on a big platform and subject to that platform's political and social filters. Is that good? Noah Smith thinks so [1], but it's not hard to think of disadvantages. [1] https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-internet-wants-to-be-fragmented https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-internet-wants-to-be-fragm...
- deleted 2y ago
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- ghusto 2y ago
  > But the end of clicks is linked to a Balkanized internet where everything is on a big platform All that's happened is the normies arrived some time ago and are now being herded into large containers, just as they always have. The small sites aren't going anywhere, and they are part of "everything". Giant corporations owning the biggest sites doesn't effect me in the same way giant corps owning the media companies in the 90s didn't effect me. It's a shame, but that's the way it has to be. The average person wants instant and poor gratification, and they will always be taken advantage of.
  - immibis 2y ago
    Giant corps owning the media companies in the 90s affected you a lot - whether you noticed it or not.
    - greenchair 2y ago
      same with the alphabet tv networks in the 1950s through cable.
      - pessimizer 2y ago
        Pre-Telecommunications Act was nothing like Post-Telecommunications Act. Things actually changed. In the early 90s, you could complain about the media being owned by just fifty companies. Now imagining that many media companies seems mythical. It was also the beginning of automated content, with the "Jack" radio format. Trivia: if there hadn't been rules against media consolidation, ABC and NBC would never have have been forced to split up.
gowld 2y ago
Why are the colors swapped in the "Allow Outlinks in Content" column?
- alexey-salmin 2y ago
  Extremely confusing. It's like this Stroop test to single out spies
elevation 2y ago
Local business owners I've talk to who have splurged with an SEO marketing firm this decade regret it almost across the board. After spending many hours adding blog posts and videography to their website to impress the google bot (but which add ~0 value to real clients) their conversions didn't improve noticeably over the simple business card website they'd had before. And the clients they do get are much more trouble than the referrals they get through satisfied clients. SEO is no longer influential over the kinds of clients you want.
- itronitron 2y ago
  I'm not sure whether it's SEO or AI that is to blame but in the past few years it seems like almost every article on the internet repeats itself in some form at least three times. Most blog posts about a topic feel like they were written as a High School English project. It's actually quite astonishing how bad the internet has become at conveying information compared to what it could be doing. So I'm tossing around an idea in my head, of implementing a search engine that computes a 'redundancy penalty' on every web page it indexed. The measure of redundancy would need to be multi-scale and consider repeated phrases, points made, and paragraphs as well, so not necessarily a simple problem. If you think this is something worth pursuing just let me know by commenting below.
  - elevation 2y ago
    Three thoughts: First, effective writing will almost always restate the main idea somehow; you'll want your algorithm to be more sophisticated than "demote content that seems to repeat itself." Second, your novel algorithm will be expensive to compute, so you'll need some other signals to filter out very low value pages before you pay to analyze others. Finally, your technique will be valuable as a ranking signal until you (or someone else) begins to use your algorithm to help steer non trivial purchasing decisions. At that point, someone will dress up their low-value (or negative value) content to appear "high value" to your algorithm and your output will be filled with spam. You can delay this effect by keeping your user-base small, so consider selling private access to institutions who want a unique view of the internet for research or intelligence purposes. Good luck!
niemandhier 2y ago
I open the page, and it prompts me to accept or decline cookies. That’s what killed the clicks for me, not the request, but the attempt of most site operators to cram stuff into my browser I might not want, and the mental fatigue that goes along with caring about those things.
karaterobot 2y ago
> The way forward is to go where your audience is being influenced. This article made me feel dirty. My condolences to anyone who has to work in advertising or SEO to support themselves or their families. I think this whole industry is a net negative to the world.
- CasperH2O 2y ago
  Bill Hicks (stand up comedian) has a nice sketch on this, "If you work in marketing or advertisement, kill yourself". Note, it's from the 90s.
- Workaccount2 2y ago
  I'm torn between advertising and the subscriptionization of everything, ownership of nothing, driven by software.
  - nottorp 2y ago
    The internet was built on non tracking (although sometimes garish) ad banners. You just need to tone down your expectations of revenue to run something on moral ish ads. For example you could fire most of the marketing and "engagement" experts since you won't need them any more if you stop spying and trying to making your users addicts.
  - Draiken 2y ago
    The reason we assume these are the only two options is the real culprit here, but we rather stick to a broken system we know instead of trying something different.
  - lovethevoid 2y ago
    What’s there to be torn by? If you don’t have access to the source, you don’t own it no matter how you pay. Subscriptions are just a way to make that more clear. Ads are a way to defer your payment through adprofiles and your purchase elsewhere (assuming functional ads and not Googles ad network obfuscation).
- deleted 2y ago
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deleted 2y ago
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southernplaces7 2y ago
The amount of sniffy disdain on HN for anything involving marketing, advertising, SEO or trying to promote a business digitally is laughable. A very large percentage of you who comment and submit here regularly work directly with or in the worst offenders for building the technology behind today's surveillance tracking ad-driven internet. The salaries so many on this site's comment threads "subtly" brag about are directly paid as the fruits of these industries, but oh, how nasty anyone is for marketing their digital wares. I completely understand disgust with the nature of the prying, spying, constantly tracking, click-baiting modern boom in churned SEO content and all that comes with it, but if you're working for the very companies largely responsible for creating that world, have a bit of humility before throwing shit on any smaller players doing what the system has pushed them into doing to pay their bills. EDIT: Also, to those of you who say you just use chatGPT or some other major AI to get your content needs settled, congratulations, you're making the content siloing by parasitic ad/digital media companies even worse. You're handing your eyeballs over to an even smaller group of would-be (or existing) megacorps that don't even at least create any of what they serve you. They snatch a copy of it from others without permission and regurgitate it for you with zero attribution and all the special filters they feel like passing it through for whatever bullshit reason takes their fancy. This will actively make the internet, for all its current flaws, even more centralized, even more controlled and generally even worse. If you thought Google search was getting shitty, just consider how internet search filtered through the prism of chatGPT and a couple others will be. No wonder those same companies are lobbying so fiercely for moat-like regulations in their favor for the sake of "safety"
- c-linkage 2y ago
  The first rule of Hacker News is: don't point out hypocrisy.
  - southernplaces7 2y ago
    I'll assume you're being sarcastic.
- renegat0x0 2y ago
  I really do not understand this comment. Even if somebody works in big tech, what is wrong with that? Where should I work? Would that change anything? Can't I criticize big tech, if I work for one? Can't I try to change big tech from inside? Next: What wrong with "criticizing small players"? I do not have to worry about their bills. This is not my business, it is theirs. They have their own business models, these are their bills. Maybe they have incorrectly positioned their business plan? Do not play victim the card here. It is right that mega corporations were created using our hands, but it was not our decision. Most people do not know what they are doing "using services", but you cannot blame people for using big tech, if there is really nothing else that matters. We may be forced to use some solutions, but it does not have to close our mouths!
colechristensen 2y ago
Advertising and SEO ruined the internet. There is barely any content left of any value that isn't on walled garden platforms, because it was too profitable for folks to turn the open Internet channels into the lowest form of spam which is what everything degraded to.
- Veuxdo 2y ago
  Or, the valuable content has decamped to the apps, because the web cannot be effectively monitized anymore.
  - colechristensen 2y ago
    People were putting content on the web long before you could make any reasonable money from it. Before a small number of people could make a large amount of money with “content” and a large amount of people could make almost nothing trying… people shared stuff because they could and built little communities out of it.
- krschacht 2y ago
  The decline of advertising's effectiveness has led to the paywalls everywhere. I much preferred the days when links took me to content that I could read.
porcoda 2y ago
I understand why advertising and marketing exists. What I wish for were people in that world who took an approach that was more respectful of users: both their privacy and experience as a user. I expect that most people (“regular” users, not tech savvy ones) use ad blockers to make the internet tolerable. Is it really that big of an ask to respect the people who you ultimately want to sell to? (Ok, that’s a dumb question: 30 years of watching the internet evolve, I think I know the answer sadly..)
- armada651 2y ago
  Marketing executives didn't respect consumers before the internet was a thing, why would they start now?
- Ferret7446 2y ago
  It's kind of the users' fault. Being "respectful" is less optimal and you get outcompeted/eliminated by those that aren't "respectful". The reason is because users indirectly/subconsciously tolerate/support those that aren't "respectful". If you want change, try convincing everyone to actively invest effort to support those that are "respectful". Good luck though, I don't think you'll get anywhere.
  - m463 2y ago
    Isn't that sort of victim blaming? This post kind of says "people are getting wise" and the solution is "make sure everything and everyone on the internet is a fake influencer" sigh.
    - Ferret7446 2y ago
      No? Because the "victims" are voluntarily choosing what businesses they patronize. No one is forcing them to choose "bad business" instead of "good business" and thus causing "good business" to go out of business. Protip: the good businesses tend to be more expensive and harder to find, and customers aren't willing to spend the extra time and money for the "good business".
Lammy 2y ago
> Then there’s the massive adoption of ad blockers. We’re talking about a third to half of all Internet users using an ad blocker on one or more of their devices. And and ad blockers don’t just block ads, they block all of the tracking that we do as well. Hell yeah. Death to all of this shit. Or, to put it in marketer terms, “Attribution is dying, clicks are dying, and here's why that's a GOOD thing!”
- Veuxdo 2y ago
  The Apps have colonized they internet partly because ad blockers don't work on them. That's a negative outcome, for one.
  - wkat4242 2y ago
    Yeah but most of these "apps" are available via the web too. And pihole is effective at blocking many ads even in android apps.
wkat4242 2y ago
> Back then, we could say: “Oh, this piece of content, this advertisement, this PR investment, this word-of-mouth effort is worthwhile because it turned into this trackable, perfectly attributable series of events in our analytics.” It doesn’t work this way anymore. Wow. I'm really happy to read this. I've been fighting marketeers with adblockers, third party cookie blockers and other methods for years but I thought it had little effect. I'm really glad that they are having a much harder time tracking us now. I thought we were being much less effective in this battle. Clearly some of the reasons he cites, like the app ecosystems trying to keep you engaged on their own app, is one thing we as privacy-conscious users didn't cause. But some like the adblockers we surely did. Also, whenever I do get an ad in an app that does interest me, I never click on our directly, I will always search for it (using a privacy shield, SearXNG). Just to make sure they don't get this attribution. I guess I'm not the only one when I read that many people here don't ever click on ads as a rule. I'm very happy to learn that their work has become a lot harder because that was what we needed to achieve. The only reason it was so easy was because we were tracked everywhere.
- jfil 2y ago
  On the Marketer side, the people who took individual effort to block ads & cookies were always too few to make an impact. I think the turning point was European legislation, and the current war on cookies (I.e. requiring clear consent for tracking). Also, the way in which Apple is fighting google by removing utm + gclid parameters in more browsing sessions, and their move to eliminate "email open tracking". What I'm saying is: I think most recent progress is due to privacy legislation & anti-monopoly enforcement that's encouraging the big platforms to fight each other. Not due to a critical mass of individuals choosing to block ads. (OK, one more pet theory: the end of ZIRP put a lot of pressure on publishers to "grow" revenue by increasing the number of ads they show. That indeed has pushed the annoyance factor above some sort of threshold...)
  - wkat4242 2y ago
    > On the Marketer side, the people who took individual effort to block ads & cookies were always too few to make an impact. Are you sure? Adblocker users are around 1/3 to half of the community these days like the article says, I've seen that figure in other places too: https://www.ghostery.com/blog/privacy-report-advertisers-and-adblockers https://www.ghostery.com/blog/privacy-report-advertisers-and... I know some local tech sites are really struggling with this because they are of course bearing the brunt of this due to their technically inclined community that is much more likely to install adblockers. One site I visit a lot recently moved to untracked ads in an attempt to sway visitors to make an adblocking exception. But they were unsuccessful due to low advertiser interest. But I think this is on desktop, not mobile. If you're focused on mobile it's probably different as only Firefox supports true adblockers there (the others are only domain based and not nearly as effective) > What I'm saying is: I think most recent progress is due to privacy legislation & anti-monopoly enforcement that's encouraging the big platforms to fight each other. Not due to a critical mass of individuals choosing to block ads. Well when I see those figures of 30-50% adblockers I can't imagine it doesn't have an impact tbh. But I'm sure Apple's third party blocking and the ad ID removal really helped too yes. Because those would have had pretty instantly near 100% adoption on those platforms.
1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago
"Multi device journeys mean that tracking someone, even with fancy browser fingerprinting (illegal in many parts of the world, but still technically allowed in the US), is rendered impossible unless they log in with the same credentials on all those devices." 1. Need to use fancy browser, and 2. Need to log in, and 3. Need to use same credentials Too many requirements. I can never get to #3 because I fail to comply with #1, let alone #1 and #2
jacknews 2y ago
lol, is this just an elaborate ad for his brand of risotto rice?
mediumsmart 2y ago
The first thing I did when the article loaded was click, which I attribute to a ginormous cookie consent banner obscuring my view of the orbituary.
rcarmo 2y ago
I logged in to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster tools this weekend for the first time in a decade because I wanted to figure out where some weird traffic peaks came from. Since I front a static site on Azure Storage through Cloudflare I have very little useful analytics (I get 1 request hitting storage for each 1000, thanks to judicious caching settings), and all my referrer data is fake - just spam for Russian and Chinese sites, so yeah, web analytics is pretty much dead. I’ve started adding UTM tags to my own outbound links just so that other people can find who is linking to them, but it all feels kludgy and broken.
- XCSme 2y ago
  If you check the demo on uxwizz.com, the attribution still seems to work okish, most users have the referrer set, or have some "ref?" query param.
- openplatypus 2y ago
  The "referrer" indeed of little value these days. Customers of our web analytics platform rely on either UTM_ or custom tracking parameters. These work well and folks are happy and claim they can finally see representative data.
TheBozzCL 2y ago
Bye tracking advertising, don’t let the door kick you on your way out. Oh, before you leave, can you take with you those billboards and gas station ads? No, I don’t need those, you can keep them.
renegat0x0 2y ago
This is exactly what I felt for some time. First thing I noticed is that YouTube does not display video description immediately. It hides it behind a user click. Some videos provide useful details there that most probably most users do not read. Like video sources. If details "were working" people would write about sponsors there, and often description is entirely blank. So that's that. Most users will not care to go to description to see links. Then I noticed that if some sources were in video description, were using URL shorteners. I hate URL shortener services. Btly, and stuff. I hate clicking on one. You do not see where you will be transported to. I watch various videos on youtube, some more controversial than others. I really prefer to see where I am going to. I was suspecting, maybe incorrectly, that sometime those links were used to hide real destination from YouTube algorithm, to not be demonetized immediately. That's the second thing. I rarely click on URL shorteners. I do not see any YouTube comments leading outside of the platform. This seems weird. I know there are a lot of bots, and a lot of bad actors. This would certainly open some flood gates. I remember though that ThioJoe created a program some time ago, a cleaning script that was receiving some traction. One person can fix video comment section, what a big corporation can't. This is a proof for me that YouTube/Google does not care about comments. Maybe there could be a way to have a comment section, where you can post links to anywhere, and your comments will not be hidden from other users (HN proves it is possible). Videos are YouTube power. They will not care about description, thumbs down, or comment section. Certainly they will not show you a way out of their ecosystem. Clicks were also always a little bit broken. There were always farms that sold upvotes, view counts. Relying on IT system to count goats is always flaky. I hope clicks will die. Maybe this will make space for personal web pages that do not try to monetize every your mouse move.
motbus3 2y ago
I agree with the lost. Unfortunately interactions on the internet is dying. I would say the internet as it is is dying. Or maybe, being transformed into something so bad that you will need to pay for an AOL portal to be able to have something useful.
atak1 2y ago
Response: https://nailitandscaleit.substack.com/p/online-attribution-is-dying-clicks https://nailitandscaleit.substack.com/p/online-attribution-i...

261 points by dotcoma 2y ago

[dead]

Sucks for the industry, but most things mentioned as a cause so far sounds like it's great for actual users: > Apple’s cookie changes absolutely had a big effect when they pulled back on third party cookies inside safari that took a huge hit. Anti tracking and privacy laws in California, Canada, New York, and the EU, and many of those cookie permissions and do-not-track protocols have rolled out globally. > Then there’s the massive adoption of ad blockers. We’re talking about a third to half of all Internet users using an ad blocker on one or more of their devices. And and ad blockers don’t just block ads, they block all of the tracking that we do as well. > Multi device journeys mean that tracking someone, even with fancy browser fingerprinting (illegal in many parts of the world, but still technically allowed in the US), is rendered impossible unless they log in with the same credentials on all those devices. The part about Google just giving answers, instead of linking, and social networks penalizing links is probably bad for different reasons (AI summarizing things is certainly a problem, since it somewhat disincentivizes people from, you know, actually writing about things online), but overall... I can't gather up much sympathy for this industry. If you shit in my well, you don't get to complain that bottled water is killing your industry.

the_snooze 2y ago
Yeah, it's hard to feel bad for adtech. Contextual advertising worked perfectly fine on print media: put sports ads in sports magazines read by sports fans. There's no need to follow individual readers around and sniff their farts to try to figure out what they had for breakfast.
- listenallyall 2y ago
  Can't really agree here. Sports Illustrated's most frequent ads were for cigarettes, beer and cars. Even today, sports telecasts have tons of ads for insurance, finance and enterprise tech comapnies.
gamblor956 2y ago
If you shit in my well, you don't get to complain that bottled water is killing your industry. And you don't get to complain when they stop making their "water" free because they can no longer afford to do so, and the internet returns to the days of AOL and Compuserve.
- worble 2y ago
  >and the internet returns to the days of AOL and Compuserve. Please don't tempt me with a good time like that
- ncruces 2y ago
  That too. Nor do we get to complain when searching for a place on Google shows a map, but no way to go from that map to Google Maps because that'd be a tie in.
- aziaziazi 2y ago
  Perhaps a better analogy would be advertiser stop giving you coke for free so you only have water. Water and moneyless-internet doesn’t give you dopamine but you’ll be in better shape physically and mentally to build the future. Coke and ad-financed-web create wish in your hearth but only lead you to a couch.
- advael 2y ago
  Yes please Vastly prefer commercial enterprises that are upfront about how they make money. It would be so sweet if internet businesses charged money for things instead of creating a massive surveillance machine that is also the most advanced annoyance generator ever conceived by mankind, and slowing down every goddamn website to a crawl despite being able to fit a processor that eats anything I could get my hands on in the 90s for breakfast in my thermostat due to all the telemetry devs mindlessly cram into their frontends I want free to be a usable signal for something being not intended to directly make money from me. I would love to have my interactions with businesses announce themselves by charging me money and turning me away if I can't or won't pay, as I'm used to in meatspace. I would love anything that makes the strategy of trying to relentlessly insert itself into every genuine engagement I have with other human beings, including trying to flood channels with ads that mimic them Free can still be a good strategy for drawing business if you can entice people with, for example, a freemium product, and as this article mentions businesses will still go try to advertise in embedded ways by actually thinking about where their potential customers are, so sadly my dream of being able to avoid businesses hijacking social interactions by simply refusing to pay them so that they go fuck off to find someone who will is not very realistic, but I wish you were right, that would be amazing

candiddevmike 2y ago

I think marketers will never admit that attribution is dying. There was always some mental gymnastics around grasping for attribution: "they clicked an ad last month once and made a purchase today, that counts!". Folks have careers and budgets based around attribution working as intended. Yes, there are anecdotes about shutting off ad platform X and seeing Y revenue decline, but I highly doubt that decline == their calculated attribution amount. IMO, attribution was always a pseudoscience used to grossly inflate the cost of online ad space.

0cf8612b2e1e 2y ago
Somewhat related, what percentage of people click ads? I assume it is something like 60% of people never click, 38% do when it is incredibly relevant, and 2% lizard people who click everything they see, ruining it for the rest of us.
- layer8 2y ago
  Most clicks are probably by mistake and unintended.
  - mocamoca 2y ago
    I run statistically-sound AB tests on Meta* and can tell you that people click, click more than you think and buy more than you think from clicking on ads! The same goes for email and Whatsapp marketing. People love these messages. * We do not use their built-in ab test tools of course...
    - 9dev 2y ago
      Is it a nerd thing, then? I cannot for the life of me imagine clicking on ads, but maybe it’s just the filter bubble?
      - AnimalMuppet 2y ago
        There's two kinds of things here, which I will call "push ads" and "pull ads". Push ads we hate. I don't want your random ads shoved in my face. The harder and more intrusively you shove, the more I hate it. No, I'm not going to look at it to see if I'm interested; I just want it gone. Pull ads are different. Let's say I'm on a business trip, and I get out of some meeting at 5 PM. Well, what is there to eat around here? What do I get in response to that? Ads! But in how they interact with me, it's completely different, because I actually want to eat. Or let's say I'm going on a trip, and I search for "lodging in location X". Well, some of what comes back is ads. Say it's from hotel.com. I probably wouldn't have gone to hotel.com as one of my choices for investigating lodging in X, but they're going to give me kind of a one-stop overview of what's there, so maybe I'll click on their ad link anyway, because it's actually interesting information for what I'm trying to do right then. But some random Temu junk that they insist on shoving in my face every time they can? No way. Just get it out of my life.

behnamoh 2y ago

Good riddance. Marketing was never meant to make customers better off. It was always a way for businesses to get better off by shoving useless products down peoples' throats. Creating needs was an effective strategy—"look, you didn't know you needed this before, but now you know you want this product!". But even that is not that effective anymore—look at Apple's failed V Pro product.

golergka 2y ago
> Creating needs was an effective strategy—"look, you didn't know you needed this before, but now you know you want this product!". That's how literally every innovation works. Do you think that fridges that save your food, home computers, smartphones, washers and dryers, garbage disposals, crocs, electric cars, e-readers, online shopping, wi-fi, and thousands of other things that make our daily lifes are useless products that have been shoved down our throats?
- sebastiennight 2y ago
  I love how you slipped Crocs® in there amongst those civilization-changing innovations.
Cupprum 2y ago
Why do you think apples V Pro product failed? Maybe you were just not the audience. Once they release a customer oriented version i am looking forward to it. The way i understood the rollout for this product is to first target developers and give them time to enrich the so far empty ecosystem. Release in US, means US will have a head start to adopt this new technology professionally.

turnsout 2y ago

I wonder if this will lead to greater emphasis on targeting. If you can't prove that they clicked the ad, at least you want to be in front of the right people.

candiddevmike 2y ago
How do you prove you're putting the ad in front of the right people? Assuming you're talking about invasive tracking. Attribution dying means privacy efforts are working. It's getting hard to correlate person + device + eyeball + ad space.
- mjhay 2y ago
  > How do you prove you're putting the ad in front of the right people? You can just make it up. That's worked for a really long time now. There's innumerable ways to put one's hand on the scale without it being outright fraud. It's especially easy when ad buyers (people in marketing departments) are invested in the status quo.

paulnpace 2y ago

To me what's really changed is all the screenshots. Especially with phones it is very easy to just zoom to how you want the image, then press the buttons to capture and press share. How to attribute that?

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
sva_ 2y ago
I think Twitter should have a QR code in the top right of each tweet. It'd make it possible to verify a screenshot of a tweet immediately and also join the "discussion". It seems like such a no-brainer to me that I wonder if they have some good reason against it. People share tweets as screenshots all the time.
- vundercind 2y ago
  A bunch of these sites can’t make links work reliably, QR codes wouldn’t help. Twitter especially.
  - EasyMark 2y ago
    Not to mention artifacting after it’s been copy pasted a few times
- null0pointer 2y ago
  It’s fairly easy to search for the user and text of the tweet if you want to verify a tweet that’s still live. But much of the time the original tweet has been deleted so the QR code would be a dead end too. Maybe it would be good on a third party service to screenshot and archive tweets though.
  - jart 2y ago
    Didn't Elon kill Twitter's search feature though? He probably didn't want reporters abusing the platform to write smear pieces. Now thanks to Elon and journalists being terrible, everything gets flushed down the memory hole a week later, unless you've bookmarked it. The search feature is effectively useless now.

atak1 2y ago

Curious what folks in marketing think here. The intuition makes sense, but the marketing teams see the leading indicators. I'd expect there to be a rise in corp budget for partnerships, influencer marketing, etc.

inetknght 2y ago
> Curious what folks in marketing think here. Marketing folks are the reason we're here. What makes you think their thoughts here will be useful?
- s1artibartfast 2y ago
  I think they understand the situation and insights better than anyone. The current set of incentives and technology are why we are here. If there is a good alternative, they are also the ones likely to know it.
  - RHSeeger 2y ago
    With the caveat that I _don't_ have any particular insights into the solving the problem... > I think they understand the situation and insights better than anyone. > The current set of incentives and technology are why we are here. > If there is a good alternative, they are also the ones likely to know it. This reads a lot like "lets get the drunk drivers together to figure out how to make the roads safer". I mean, sure, they may have more knowledge about the causes.. but they've also made it very clear they don't care about making things better.
    - s1artibartfast 2y ago
      Sure, they may or may not care. However, if you care, talking to them would be the best place to start. There is a big difference between seeking the knowledge where it exists, and expecting the subject matter experts to solve the problem. This is doubly true when it is something you perceive as a problem and not them.
    - 2y ago

Finnucane 2y ago

An easier way to find out how to make risotto is to look it up in Marcella Hazan's book.

swaginator 2y ago
I am actually working on a project where I have scraped ~400k recipes, and now am in the process of wrapping them in a little search engine. The idea is to have a little python/node script + sqlite file that you can use to search locally for recipes offline. Then all you'd need to do is write a plugin for the notes app of your choice. The worse the web becomes, and the worse the stability of internet access becomes due to climate change, I will probably be doing more archival projects like this for offline access.
- Finnucane 2y ago
  How is that a substitute for Hazan?
- kccqzy 2y ago
  And how do you solve curation (or even just ranking) for these 400k recipes?
  - swaginator 2y ago
    Vector search over title + tags.

immibis 2y ago

I have trouble trusting this author is really part of the ad industry when he talks about "all of the tracking that we do". The ad industry NEVER calls itself tracking, or spyware, or anything negative. But he's got data, so he must be. I agree with the premise that attribution doesn't work. But it's not dying - it's been dead for a long time (maybe always). All the points of the article have been true since the inception of the WWW and before. Corporations impose things like attribution due to their need for legibility[1]. Everything must be formulaic and calculable. Attribution is a simple concept, and nobody is checking it as long as it looks good - it's all theater, like the TSA, the story of spreadsheet bond yields[2], or the AI hype wave. Not even the free market checks it, since your competitors don't have an accurate model either. If anyone believes capitalism is efficient, here is a (or yet another) counter-example. Coming from another angle, I notice that attribution-less marketing has been winning and losing political elections for at least a decade now. Somehow, political campaigns (overt and covert) don't seem to need it. Maybe the ad industry can find out how they operate and copy their model. [1]: https://medium.com/centre-for-public-impact/the-il-logic-of-legibility-why-governments-should-stop-simplifying-complex-systems-f8822752d753 https://medium.com/centre-for-public-impact/the-il-logic-of-... [2]: https://thedailywtf.com/articles/The-Great-Excel-Spreadsheet https://thedailywtf.com/articles/The-Great-Excel-Spreadsheet

bachmeier 2y ago

> What’s Killing Clicks? > “Tell me, Rand, what killed all these clicks?” > I’m going to tell you every one of the major search, social, and content platforms has an incentive to keep you there. LinkedIn wants to keep you on LinkedIn. Twitter wants to keep you on Twitter. Let me throw out another one. People have learned that they'll regret clicking. The incentive to get as many clicks as possible and no incentive to have anything there for them once they do click, except a bunch of in-your-face ads that make it impossible to read the "content", has perhaps made us all pause before clicking.

Dalewyn 2y ago
If only it was just ads. No, it's also mads (malvertisements, aka malicious advertisements), several solar systems worth of cookies, and a few galaxies worth of JavaShit wasting our CPU/RAM and power. Yeah, sincerely fuck those clicks.
nine_k 2y ago
If only there existed a program that could do the clicking for me, then clean the resulting page from cruft I'm not interested in, and present the useful bits to me! It would be a joy to use, and should it become popular, it might kick the internet back to 1998 when Google was supremely useful. (Oh, that would ruin most of the "economy of attention" though...) /s
- wkat4242 2y ago
  What you want is Ad Nauseam
getoffmycase 2y ago
I click the comments on Reddit to read the full text of the article copied and pasted instead of clicking on the actual link and dealing with the website at the other end.
- gowld 2y ago
  RAMP: Reddit Accelerated Mobile Pages :-)

manvillej 2y ago

tragedy of your shitty website and the commons. "we need to monetize our site more" - proceeds to ruin the experience of the site, driving customers to adblocking technologies, reducing engagements because adblocking applies to all sites, more sites push more and more intrusive ads, pushing the creation and use of more adblocking technologies. rinse and repeat until the internet is literally unusable without pihole, uBlock, a good VPN, and a browser that isn't owned google or microsoft. if real life had advertisements like the internet, we'd have advertisements painted onto the wall of apartments and landlords would get mad at us we cover it up with paint and art.

teamspirit 2y ago
Not to be pedantic but doesn't Google technically own Microsoft's browser? I agree with you though, we've all been pushed to this point and I just wonder if there's any going back - and how? I hate to say this but it feels like the more people got on the internet, the worse it got. Not their fault, but it's akin to a really good neighborhood market. It doesn't just attract honest shoppers but pickpockets and thieves too. Now we're all stuck in a crowded and increasingly crappy market wondering what happened to our beloved neighborhood hangout.
- fluoridation 2y ago
  If we're being pedantic, then no. Google has made the core of Edge, but doesn't own Edge itself. Just like how Epic doesn't own every game made with Unreal.
nine_k 2y ago
What makes me wonder is whether it is efficient. Very certainly, there are people who want to rain ads on you from every direction, even when you carry an umbrella and wear Wellington boots. But does this actually increase the sales of the products being so advertised? Is there a measurable effect? What kind of businesses see uptick in sales, and how real / scammy they are? Does it work in general, or only by hitting some especially gullible individuals, like "Nigerian spam" does? Is it a ruse to oversell ads to gullible business owners, maybe with some help of complicit marketing departments? I'd also note that not all ads are repulsive. It's mostly the obnoxiously intrusive ones that ruin it. Back in the day Google won a fortune by offering textual ads, that were unobtrusive and lightweight, so users did not jump.to block them, unlike the banner ads of the era. The minimal text ads are still there BTW, but now they seem to load heavyweight and more intrusive pieces of JS :(

kelsey98765431 2y ago

i hope all you cookie tracking scumbags fail and never succeed in recapturing the audience you seem to feel entitled to. you do not own my time, my vision, my hearing, and marketing has been one of the largest problems in our society since before i was even born. hawk your wares in the market, stop invading my home like a door to door salesman.

Dalewyn 2y ago
It's especially sad because I find that properly targeted and relevant advertisements are sometimes actually useful. Proper marketing like that is rarer than a snowball's chance in hell these days, of course.
- cowboylowrez 2y ago
  agree, I first started using the internet in the 90s, and I really love the www. I've never installed an ad blocker, if there are too many ads I just close the window. Heh I'd probably have to get instructions on how to even install an ad blocker. I still don't have an ad blocker installed even when I'm limited to a few gigs a month for browsing, if a site starts draining my internet through lousy ads, in the hosts file it goes to keep x and twitter company. There are bad actors everywhere, but advertising is not an inherently evil thing, I buy advertising for my little pet projects, and its my hope that it still remains an option in the future.

shostack 2y ago

This is a topic near and dear to my heart. First, didn't realize this was Rand Fishkin writing it. He knows his stuff. He also has another linked article in there that is more prescriptive on incrementality measurement being all that matters and how to think about it at a high level and I completely agree it is all the matters. https://sparktoro.com/blog/how-to-measure-hard-to-measure-marketing-channels/ https://sparktoro.com/blog/how-to-measure-hard-to-measure-ma... That in turn links to another respected analytics leader, Avinash Kaushik: https://www.kaushik.net/avinash/marketing-analytics-attribution-is-not-incrementality/ https://www.kaushik.net/avinash/marketing-analytics-attribut... That is also a must read. The bottom line is what used to work no longer does, and marketers (and finance and leadership) need to get used to having less fidelity and availability than they were used to. It also means marketing teams who are thrashy trying a new low impact tactic every week instead of constructing experiments likely to deliver statistically significant results on incremental lift are going to be spinning their wheels and wasting dollars. And that's something to watch out for. Unfortunately, setting up proper experiments, controlling for bias, getting clean data, etc. are material challenges that require skills, scale (to get a read on bottom of funnel especially), and resources/budget. There aren't great options out there for that now if you're a smaller or mid size company that I'm aware of, though if anyone is aware of them I'd love to have them on my radar.

nottorp 2y ago
> He knows his stuff. Yeah, it's a good exposition of how predatory the "stuff" is :)
- kridsdale3 2y ago
  Each one of the things listed on TA for why attribution is dying is also readable as: 1. Users don't like SEO 2. Users don't like SEO 3. Users don't like SEO 4. Users don't like SEO 5. Users have phones now 6. Phone apps are better UX than websites 7. Users don't like SEO
  - catlikesshrimp 2y ago
    >> 6. Phone apps are better UX than websites I would reword this as: It is better to carry a phone around than to carry a CPU around, which is the same as 5 There is no way I am using my phone for anything other than making a phone call when I am sitting in front of my computer. Funny fact most people didn't live: I had a friend who in the 90's carried a CPU around in the backseat of his car. He thought "smaller computers" were too expensive for what they did and his "portable" computer attracted less robbers

shironandon 2y ago

I prefer not to click anymore and instead ask AI to summarize a URL for me. The Brave Browser Leo AI is great for this.

nyrikki 2y ago
While not explicitly about your chosen tool chain, monetizing user data is absolutely going to happen in the LLM space. While there may be some holdouts, Wall Street is already questioning the payback and as some big players are over promising on things that they will most likely never be able to deliver on, investors will start to pressure for any revenue stream. As even subscription services breach the trust of their users, there is little leverage to hold that model today and deflect activest investors etc...
- Eisenstein 2y ago
  It is totally possible that AI just isn't monetizable and that they can't figure out a way to suck valuable user data out of it and resell it for profit. In that case, we have another dot-com bust where all the blow-hards and made-up-business-plans go bust and we end up with some decent tech that works for people for a decade or so before someone figures out how to turn it into garbage to make a few cents.
OptionOfT 2y ago
I think eventually that's gonna have ads injected. Assume you're asking it to summarize a page on Pasta, and might inject an ad for Barilla. Which your adblocker will block. But in the future I see native ads, where they inject a string as part of the LLM's output.
- Eisenstein 2y ago
  The brave browser's LLM is local. You can point it to open weights you downloaded off huggingface. How would Barilla inject an ad into that?

dash2 2y ago

It's tempting to play tiny violins for marketers who have, as a post below puts it, been "following us round smelling our farts to see what we had for breakfast". But the end of clicks is linked to a Balkanized internet where everything is on a big platform and subject to that platform's political and social filters. Is that good? Noah Smith thinks so [1], but it's not hard to think of disadvantages. [1] https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-internet-wants-to-be-fragmented https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-internet-wants-to-be-fragm...

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ghusto 2y ago
> But the end of clicks is linked to a Balkanized internet where everything is on a big platform All that's happened is the normies arrived some time ago and are now being herded into large containers, just as they always have. The small sites aren't going anywhere, and they are part of "everything". Giant corporations owning the biggest sites doesn't effect me in the same way giant corps owning the media companies in the 90s didn't effect me. It's a shame, but that's the way it has to be. The average person wants instant and poor gratification, and they will always be taken advantage of.
- immibis 2y ago
  Giant corps owning the media companies in the 90s affected you a lot - whether you noticed it or not.
  - greenchair 2y ago
    same with the alphabet tv networks in the 1950s through cable.
    - pessimizer 2y ago
      Pre-Telecommunications Act was nothing like Post-Telecommunications Act. Things actually changed. In the early 90s, you could complain about the media being owned by just fifty companies. Now imagining that many media companies seems mythical. It was also the beginning of automated content, with the "Jack" radio format. Trivia: if there hadn't been rules against media consolidation, ABC and NBC would never have have been forced to split up.

gowld 2y ago

Why are the colors swapped in the "Allow Outlinks in Content" column?

alexey-salmin 2y ago
Extremely confusing. It's like this Stroop test to single out spies

elevation 2y ago

Local business owners I've talk to who have splurged with an SEO marketing firm this decade regret it almost across the board. After spending many hours adding blog posts and videography to their website to impress the google bot (but which add ~0 value to real clients) their conversions didn't improve noticeably over the simple business card website they'd had before. And the clients they do get are much more trouble than the referrals they get through satisfied clients. SEO is no longer influential over the kinds of clients you want.

itronitron 2y ago
I'm not sure whether it's SEO or AI that is to blame but in the past few years it seems like almost every article on the internet repeats itself in some form at least three times. Most blog posts about a topic feel like they were written as a High School English project. It's actually quite astonishing how bad the internet has become at conveying information compared to what it could be doing. So I'm tossing around an idea in my head, of implementing a search engine that computes a 'redundancy penalty' on every web page it indexed. The measure of redundancy would need to be multi-scale and consider repeated phrases, points made, and paragraphs as well, so not necessarily a simple problem. If you think this is something worth pursuing just let me know by commenting below.
- elevation 2y ago
  Three thoughts: First, effective writing will almost always restate the main idea somehow; you'll want your algorithm to be more sophisticated than "demote content that seems to repeat itself." Second, your novel algorithm will be expensive to compute, so you'll need some other signals to filter out very low value pages before you pay to analyze others. Finally, your technique will be valuable as a ranking signal until you (or someone else) begins to use your algorithm to help steer non trivial purchasing decisions. At that point, someone will dress up their low-value (or negative value) content to appear "high value" to your algorithm and your output will be filled with spam. You can delay this effect by keeping your user-base small, so consider selling private access to institutions who want a unique view of the internet for research or intelligence purposes. Good luck!

niemandhier 2y ago

I open the page, and it prompts me to accept or decline cookies. That’s what killed the clicks for me, not the request, but the attempt of most site operators to cram stuff into my browser I might not want, and the mental fatigue that goes along with caring about those things.

karaterobot 2y ago

> The way forward is to go where your audience is being influenced. This article made me feel dirty. My condolences to anyone who has to work in advertising or SEO to support themselves or their families. I think this whole industry is a net negative to the world.

CasperH2O 2y ago
Bill Hicks (stand up comedian) has a nice sketch on this, "If you work in marketing or advertisement, kill yourself". Note, it's from the 90s.
Workaccount2 2y ago
I'm torn between advertising and the subscriptionization of everything, ownership of nothing, driven by software.
- nottorp 2y ago
  The internet was built on non tracking (although sometimes garish) ad banners. You just need to tone down your expectations of revenue to run something on moral ish ads. For example you could fire most of the marketing and "engagement" experts since you won't need them any more if you stop spying and trying to making your users addicts.
- Draiken 2y ago
  The reason we assume these are the only two options is the real culprit here, but we rather stick to a broken system we know instead of trying something different.
- lovethevoid 2y ago
  What’s there to be torn by? If you don’t have access to the source, you don’t own it no matter how you pay. Subscriptions are just a way to make that more clear. Ads are a way to defer your payment through adprofiles and your purchase elsewhere (assuming functional ads and not Googles ad network obfuscation).
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southernplaces7 2y ago

The amount of sniffy disdain on HN for anything involving marketing, advertising, SEO or trying to promote a business digitally is laughable. A very large percentage of you who comment and submit here regularly work directly with or in the worst offenders for building the technology behind today's surveillance tracking ad-driven internet. The salaries so many on this site's comment threads "subtly" brag about are directly paid as the fruits of these industries, but oh, how nasty anyone is for marketing their digital wares. I completely understand disgust with the nature of the prying, spying, constantly tracking, click-baiting modern boom in churned SEO content and all that comes with it, but if you're working for the very companies largely responsible for creating that world, have a bit of humility before throwing shit on any smaller players doing what the system has pushed them into doing to pay their bills. EDIT: Also, to those of you who say you just use chatGPT or some other major AI to get your content needs settled, congratulations, you're making the content siloing by parasitic ad/digital media companies even worse. You're handing your eyeballs over to an even smaller group of would-be (or existing) megacorps that don't even at least create any of what they serve you. They snatch a copy of it from others without permission and regurgitate it for you with zero attribution and all the special filters they feel like passing it through for whatever bullshit reason takes their fancy. This will actively make the internet, for all its current flaws, even more centralized, even more controlled and generally even worse. If you thought Google search was getting shitty, just consider how internet search filtered through the prism of chatGPT and a couple others will be. No wonder those same companies are lobbying so fiercely for moat-like regulations in their favor for the sake of "safety"

c-linkage 2y ago
The first rule of Hacker News is: don't point out hypocrisy.
- southernplaces7 2y ago
  I'll assume you're being sarcastic.
renegat0x0 2y ago
I really do not understand this comment. Even if somebody works in big tech, what is wrong with that? Where should I work? Would that change anything? Can't I criticize big tech, if I work for one? Can't I try to change big tech from inside? Next: What wrong with "criticizing small players"? I do not have to worry about their bills. This is not my business, it is theirs. They have their own business models, these are their bills. Maybe they have incorrectly positioned their business plan? Do not play victim the card here. It is right that mega corporations were created using our hands, but it was not our decision. Most people do not know what they are doing "using services", but you cannot blame people for using big tech, if there is really nothing else that matters. We may be forced to use some solutions, but it does not have to close our mouths!

colechristensen 2y ago

Advertising and SEO ruined the internet. There is barely any content left of any value that isn't on walled garden platforms, because it was too profitable for folks to turn the open Internet channels into the lowest form of spam which is what everything degraded to.

Veuxdo 2y ago
Or, the valuable content has decamped to the apps, because the web cannot be effectively monitized anymore.
- colechristensen 2y ago
  People were putting content on the web long before you could make any reasonable money from it. Before a small number of people could make a large amount of money with “content” and a large amount of people could make almost nothing trying… people shared stuff because they could and built little communities out of it.
krschacht 2y ago
The decline of advertising's effectiveness has led to the paywalls everywhere. I much preferred the days when links took me to content that I could read.

porcoda 2y ago

I understand why advertising and marketing exists. What I wish for were people in that world who took an approach that was more respectful of users: both their privacy and experience as a user. I expect that most people (“regular” users, not tech savvy ones) use ad blockers to make the internet tolerable. Is it really that big of an ask to respect the people who you ultimately want to sell to? (Ok, that’s a dumb question: 30 years of watching the internet evolve, I think I know the answer sadly..)

armada651 2y ago
Marketing executives didn't respect consumers before the internet was a thing, why would they start now?
Ferret7446 2y ago
It's kind of the users' fault. Being "respectful" is less optimal and you get outcompeted/eliminated by those that aren't "respectful". The reason is because users indirectly/subconsciously tolerate/support those that aren't "respectful". If you want change, try convincing everyone to actively invest effort to support those that are "respectful". Good luck though, I don't think you'll get anywhere.
- m463 2y ago
  Isn't that sort of victim blaming? This post kind of says "people are getting wise" and the solution is "make sure everything and everyone on the internet is a fake influencer" sigh.
  - Ferret7446 2y ago
    No? Because the "victims" are voluntarily choosing what businesses they patronize. No one is forcing them to choose "bad business" instead of "good business" and thus causing "good business" to go out of business. Protip: the good businesses tend to be more expensive and harder to find, and customers aren't willing to spend the extra time and money for the "good business".

Lammy 2y ago

> Then there’s the massive adoption of ad blockers. We’re talking about a third to half of all Internet users using an ad blocker on one or more of their devices. And and ad blockers don’t just block ads, they block all of the tracking that we do as well. Hell yeah. Death to all of this shit. Or, to put it in marketer terms, “Attribution is dying, clicks are dying, and here's why that's a GOOD thing!”

Veuxdo 2y ago
The Apps have colonized they internet partly because ad blockers don't work on them. That's a negative outcome, for one.
- wkat4242 2y ago
  Yeah but most of these "apps" are available via the web too. And pihole is effective at blocking many ads even in android apps.

wkat4242 2y ago

> Back then, we could say: “Oh, this piece of content, this advertisement, this PR investment, this word-of-mouth effort is worthwhile because it turned into this trackable, perfectly attributable series of events in our analytics.” It doesn’t work this way anymore. Wow. I'm really happy to read this. I've been fighting marketeers with adblockers, third party cookie blockers and other methods for years but I thought it had little effect. I'm really glad that they are having a much harder time tracking us now. I thought we were being much less effective in this battle. Clearly some of the reasons he cites, like the app ecosystems trying to keep you engaged on their own app, is one thing we as privacy-conscious users didn't cause. But some like the adblockers we surely did. Also, whenever I do get an ad in an app that does interest me, I never click on our directly, I will always search for it (using a privacy shield, SearXNG). Just to make sure they don't get this attribution. I guess I'm not the only one when I read that many people here don't ever click on ads as a rule. I'm very happy to learn that their work has become a lot harder because that was what we needed to achieve. The only reason it was so easy was because we were tracked everywhere.

jfil 2y ago
On the Marketer side, the people who took individual effort to block ads & cookies were always too few to make an impact. I think the turning point was European legislation, and the current war on cookies (I.e. requiring clear consent for tracking). Also, the way in which Apple is fighting google by removing utm + gclid parameters in more browsing sessions, and their move to eliminate "email open tracking". What I'm saying is: I think most recent progress is due to privacy legislation & anti-monopoly enforcement that's encouraging the big platforms to fight each other. Not due to a critical mass of individuals choosing to block ads. (OK, one more pet theory: the end of ZIRP put a lot of pressure on publishers to "grow" revenue by increasing the number of ads they show. That indeed has pushed the annoyance factor above some sort of threshold...)
- wkat4242 2y ago
  > On the Marketer side, the people who took individual effort to block ads & cookies were always too few to make an impact. Are you sure? Adblocker users are around 1/3 to half of the community these days like the article says, I've seen that figure in other places too: https://www.ghostery.com/blog/privacy-report-advertisers-and-adblockers https://www.ghostery.com/blog/privacy-report-advertisers-and... I know some local tech sites are really struggling with this because they are of course bearing the brunt of this due to their technically inclined community that is much more likely to install adblockers. One site I visit a lot recently moved to untracked ads in an attempt to sway visitors to make an adblocking exception. But they were unsuccessful due to low advertiser interest. But I think this is on desktop, not mobile. If you're focused on mobile it's probably different as only Firefox supports true adblockers there (the others are only domain based and not nearly as effective) > What I'm saying is: I think most recent progress is due to privacy legislation & anti-monopoly enforcement that's encouraging the big platforms to fight each other. Not due to a critical mass of individuals choosing to block ads. Well when I see those figures of 30-50% adblockers I can't imagine it doesn't have an impact tbh. But I'm sure Apple's third party blocking and the ad ID removal really helped too yes. Because those would have had pretty instantly near 100% adoption on those platforms.

1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago

"Multi device journeys mean that tracking someone, even with fancy browser fingerprinting (illegal in many parts of the world, but still technically allowed in the US), is rendered impossible unless they log in with the same credentials on all those devices." 1. Need to use fancy browser, and 2. Need to log in, and 3. Need to use same credentials Too many requirements. I can never get to #3 because I fail to comply with #1, let alone #1 and #2

jacknews 2y ago

lol, is this just an elaborate ad for his brand of risotto rice?

mediumsmart 2y ago

The first thing I did when the article loaded was click, which I attribute to a ginormous cookie consent banner obscuring my view of the orbituary.

rcarmo 2y ago

I logged in to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster tools this weekend for the first time in a decade because I wanted to figure out where some weird traffic peaks came from. Since I front a static site on Azure Storage through Cloudflare I have very little useful analytics (I get 1 request hitting storage for each 1000, thanks to judicious caching settings), and all my referrer data is fake - just spam for Russian and Chinese sites, so yeah, web analytics is pretty much dead. I’ve started adding UTM tags to my own outbound links just so that other people can find who is linking to them, but it all feels kludgy and broken.

XCSme 2y ago
If you check the demo on uxwizz.com, the attribution still seems to work okish, most users have the referrer set, or have some "ref?" query param.
openplatypus 2y ago
The "referrer" indeed of little value these days. Customers of our web analytics platform rely on either UTM_ or custom tracking parameters. These work well and folks are happy and claim they can finally see representative data.

TheBozzCL 2y ago

Bye tracking advertising, don’t let the door kick you on your way out. Oh, before you leave, can you take with you those billboards and gas station ads? No, I don’t need those, you can keep them.

renegat0x0 2y ago

This is exactly what I felt for some time. First thing I noticed is that YouTube does not display video description immediately. It hides it behind a user click. Some videos provide useful details there that most probably most users do not read. Like video sources. If details "were working" people would write about sponsors there, and often description is entirely blank. So that's that. Most users will not care to go to description to see links. Then I noticed that if some sources were in video description, were using URL shorteners. I hate URL shortener services. Btly, and stuff. I hate clicking on one. You do not see where you will be transported to. I watch various videos on youtube, some more controversial than others. I really prefer to see where I am going to. I was suspecting, maybe incorrectly, that sometime those links were used to hide real destination from YouTube algorithm, to not be demonetized immediately. That's the second thing. I rarely click on URL shorteners. I do not see any YouTube comments leading outside of the platform. This seems weird. I know there are a lot of bots, and a lot of bad actors. This would certainly open some flood gates. I remember though that ThioJoe created a program some time ago, a cleaning script that was receiving some traction. One person can fix video comment section, what a big corporation can't. This is a proof for me that YouTube/Google does not care about comments. Maybe there could be a way to have a comment section, where you can post links to anywhere, and your comments will not be hidden from other users (HN proves it is possible). Videos are YouTube power. They will not care about description, thumbs down, or comment section. Certainly they will not show you a way out of their ecosystem. Clicks were also always a little bit broken. There were always farms that sold upvotes, view counts. Relying on IT system to count goats is always flaky. I hope clicks will die. Maybe this will make space for personal web pages that do not try to monetize every your mouse move.

motbus3 2y ago

I agree with the lost. Unfortunately interactions on the internet is dying. I would say the internet as it is is dying. Or maybe, being transformed into something so bad that you will need to pay for an AOL portal to be able to have something useful.

atak1 2y ago

Response: https://nailitandscaleit.substack.com/p/online-attribution-is-dying-clicks https://nailitandscaleit.substack.com/p/online-attribution-i...