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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 effe

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

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