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> 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 th

> 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.

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.