This is the thing the ad industry really didn't want people to discover: what if the behavioural and personalised targeting wasn't actually worth the cost?
Few pubs can afford a direct sales team facing the EU, but I think most publishers would jump at the chance to have direct revenue and pull ad exchanges in a heartbeat. Policing exchanges for malware and junk creative is a full time job publishers shouldn't have to do, but ultimately they are held accountable for whatever the exchanges pushes their way.
I'd be interested in knowing if there are other effects: if you remove targeting, does that also mean you're turning off the extreme bloat on sites? If so, I can totally believe that costing you enough users to kill the value added by the ad precision (contra the conventional wisdom of "lol I'm only marketing to people with the latest hardware anyway").
Take up knitting?
What percentage of mobile app development is paid for with ads?
What percentage of web development is paid for with ads?
How many open source projects are contributed to by developers who work at companies that rely on ads to you, pay their actual bills
How many “side projects” on this site are paid for with ads
How many projects are B2B where the other B is in ads, or relied on ads, or relies on something that relies on ads.
Sometimes I love HN but then I remember how, frankly, full of shit some people are.
We’ve built this house of cards on ads. If ads go, the industry will collapse into a shadow of itself and half of you won’t get to eat.
It’s nice to act like ads are just this evil thing devs invented but surprise surprise, they’re a form of payment because people don’t like to pay for stuff.
Remove the way people pay for stuff and suddenly this industry where you make 6 figures for jerking off to javascript frameworks doesn’t make sense.
Lots of sites sell things, which is enough reason to make those sites. Millions of sites are representing businesses (restaurant etc). No, the web isn't going away because joe shmoe can't put up ads. Its so cheap to put up a website anyway, folks do it for many reasons.
The Software industry would retract almost to the point of death relative to its current size without ads.
I don't think the parent commenter disagrees with you about spying. I think they're trying to highlight the fundamental tension of the is-ought problem at play here. Your normative claim is that it's good to limit activity which reduces consumer privacy. The positive conclusion is that to achieve this moral imperative, we'd have to either radically repurpose existing software engineers or radically reduce the industry.
Your point about spying isn't wrong. But I think history shows us that taking away (or reducing) peoples' livelihood while telling them, "well at least you're no longer a moral hazard!" isn't productive. It's too extreme. If you want to actually reduce the negative externalities caused by digital advertising, you can't realistically tell software engineers to take up knitting.
It is at the very least extremely nontrivial and not at all straightforward, even if everyone agrees it's not ideal. I'm not asking you to "cry about the deals of immoral industries" - rather as a pragmatist, I'm asking you to consider that unless we have a concrete way forward, suggesting to kill the industry is not productive.
Categorically speaking, advertising as a problem has several notable properties:
1. Reasonable people can disagree about whether it is harmful (contrast with e.g. murder),
2. Reasonable people can disagree about how harmful it is (contrast with e.g. financial fraud),
3. It enables a significant portion (perhaps the majority?) of growth in the tech sector, which itself has empowered the lion's share of economic growth in the past decade,
4. There are few opportunities even within tech which will both pay comparably and which are not either directly or indirectly funded by advertising profits. Of those opportunities, some (such as fintech) are similarly disagreeable to another subset of the population.
The state of the world we live in is such that problems with these characteristics cannot be realistically solved by reducing or taking away the livelihoods of people who enable the problems to exist. I'm not telling you to not care about the problem. I'm also not telling you it can't be fixed. But I am telling you that you can't be so cavalier about what solving the problem entails if you actually want it to change.
If you think reasonable people can't disagree with you about this topic, then fine. Forget that! Instead replace that thought with the idea that a nontrivial number of software engineers - likely the supermajority - will be materially impacted by significantly changing the amount of tracking enabled by advertising. You cannot tell them to just take up knitting anymore than you can tell people who disagree with you to just stop disagreeing with you. If only it were that easy.
The argument that you can't fight evil industries, because there are people who depend on them, will never be a convincing one.
And yes, if you think spying on everyone on the internet on a massive scale is fine, I do not consider you reasonable.
We don't have to bring down software development down along with adtech. We can shift the software engineers to doing something non-malicious. Salaries may go down a bit, as there aren't many other sources of easy money beyond ads.
There was a thriving core to the software industry that existed well before the ad-fueled web and still exists today. Plain old business websites, line-of-business internal software, desktop apps, embedded and IoT software, etc., none of these things depend on ads. If you can't see that there is plenty of things to do for software developers to do if ads are curtailed, you need to broaden your horizons.
It's that there was a thriving core decades ago that supported a fraction of the people the software industry supports today.
> Plain old business websites, line-of-business internal software, desktop apps, embedded and IoT software, etc.
All experience a monumental retraction the likes of which our economy has never experienced the moments ads go away.
No industry, let alone some niche in tech, would be unaffected if Google and their ad-revenue driven efforts dried up tomorrow morning.
If you can't see that there is plenty fewer things to do for the economy to do if ads are curtailed, you need to broaden your horizons.
Such hyperbole; computers are embedded in every aspect of daily life now.
Moreover, even if by some miracle you happened to be correct, propping up the adtech software industry does not justify its negative externalities any more than preserving tobacco jobs justifies the continued sale of cigarettes and subsequent deaths or preserving coal jobs justifies the pollutants produced and its subsequent deaths.
I don’t work with ads.
But we have B2C clients that wouldn’t exist without the ad industry, in fact how would people know we exist without the ad industry?
How many of your customers are funded by ads, or use tools funded by ads, or have customers of their own that are?
Not to mention stuff most people use, like GMail, Google Search, “free” apps
We’re part of an ecosystem, you can’t point at the shitty parts and get all uppity, you are on the same ship
In keeping with the guidelines of this website, I think it's fair to not immediately resort to personal attacks as a retaliation for a perceived slight.
As for the rest of your reply: I have not and continue to not get reliable statistical information that outlines exactly how ads help businesses. Mostly because the people that work in the ad industry just don't really seem to care about accurate numbers. If they did, it seems to me they would invest a bit more time and effort into understanding what makes a measurement accurate and how you make such a measurement.
That then neatly ties into your claim that basically every business I know wouldn't exist without advertising, which I would classify as the kind of extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence. Of which there is none.
As for the claim that I am all "uppity": If that means questioning when people do things that I see as wrong, I think that is a virtue.
It doesn’t and it isn’t.
You’re waxing poetic about simple hypocrisy.
What would you rather have people do?
By itself? No, not at all. At least not more valuable than giving the same people the same money for doing nothing.
>What would you rather have people do?
Literally anything not actively harmful.
>> Literally anything not actively harmful.
"Literally" must be the most overused word in English today, but a vague description like that is completely unproductive to any discussion and doesn't even begin to get over the subjective interpretation of "harmful".
The point of this thread is that maybe it doesn't.
I'm one of the few in the industry who actually spent time and money on regulation. I've met with Senators and major CMOs to make it happen. It's not that simple. GDPR has good intent but is poorly executed and has no measurable effect on privacy because those politicians fail to understand the market they're regulating. This is now playing out again in the recent copyright directives.
Marketing and advertising are drivers of the economy and there's nothing inherently wrong with either of them. All regulation also creates and solves problems, one of which is consolidation. Nothing inherently problematic in that either. Targeted advertising definitely needs fixing, but that's separate from privacy and there are ways to do both while also solving for other issues like fraud, political influence, mass surveillance, and more.
"Evil, harmful, just dies" are useless for discussion. I suggest dropping the immature rhetoric if you actually want to have a productive conversation and perhaps create the change you want to see.
I'm reading that you are a member of industry Lobbying to get influence on regulation of your industry. And that is somehow supposed to make me trust you more. GDPR is exactly as far reaching as it should be. The only problem with it is that people aren't following it yet to the letter, and I hope there will be some heavy fines for those breaking the law.
>Targeted advertising definitely needs fixing, but that's separate from privacy
Privacy is inherently incompatible with targeted advertising, and the industry will have to die for us to get our rights.
>"Evil, harmful, just dies" are useless for discussion. I suggest dropping the immature rhetoric if you actually want to have a productive conversation and perhaps create the change you want to see.
I'm not interested in having a "productive discussion" with you and find a compromise if you represent the targeted advertising industry. The targeted advertising industry is the political enemy. And I want it to die.
Privacy is also not incompatible, as even choosing the NYT to advertise on is still a targeted decision, and advertising will never die unless you entirely replace the economic system we have. We might get some better online ad practices but it certainly won't happen by just calling it all "evil", which is especially ironic considering what evil actually exists in the world.
Anyways, by your dismissals it's clear you are only interested in irrational tirades which is unfortunately very common when discussing adtech so I'll end it here.
Everytime an advertiser complains about the GDPR I become more confident in its rightousness.
>Privacy is also not incompatible, as even choosing the NYT to advertise on is still a targeted decision
So you want to focus targeting completely on the source, not the individual audience member? Than we are in agreement.
>dvertising will never die unless you entirely replace the economic system we have
We could also just ban it. Not that I am against changing the economic system.
Marketing spend is a proportion of GDP so it'll scale along with it, and is thus not zero-sum. As for regulation, that is needed in the industry and why we have limits on certain categories.
There is a very interesting generational rift between the pre-web companies like Microsoft and Apple and the Google/Facebook generation.
That’s just rumour, but it would help explain Google’s ephemeral approach to new products.
The NYT doesn't need returns on ad space to appease the purchasers of that space. They have the audience and some companies are more than happy to just have their name out there for one reason or another.
This isn't just a media thing. It happens at sporting events, conferences, fashion shows, etc.