The same way publications made money for two centuries without tracking and “personalization”, by displaying advertising relevant to the content and the publication’s target audience.
People like ads.
You know "brand Twitter" and how people like talking about the cheeky thing that Burger King said? That's an ad.
The Super Bowl? People watch for the ads.
Magazines: people collect pretty ad series, like the old Absolute Vodka ones.
Podcasts? We all loved saying "mail kimp" like idiots for a couple months because of a popular ad.
People like ads! …Except on the web.
No one has ever liked a banner ad. Search ads people sometimes like, but no one has ever liked a banner ad. So, they kept adding more banner ads to try to make it up in volume and then they added a shit ton of tracking because they could, but guess what, banner ads still suck and no one likes them.
So, maybe stop trying to make fetch happen? If banner ads haven't been successful for 20 years, maybe they aren't going to suddenly become successful and it's time to stop trying.
Agree. And I guess they have reason to be happy for now.
> The shareholders of companies spending ad money do not care about metrics, they care about revenue.
Agree. And they have reason to be sceptical: a lot of Facebooks growth in ad sales seems to have come from companies who suddenly had to pay to reach their fan base.
> People who buy those ads care about metrics, but while they cannot see inside the FB machine and need to trust them somewhat regarding views and reach they have absolute visibility on the results of that ad spend and where those visitors are coming from.
Another explanation: pay per view ads are massively overvalued but for some reason or another management isn't aware of it or doesn't care yet.
Also there are companies that will track your FB ads and tell you if FB is lying.
Also classifieds were a major source of revenue for many publications and it was destroyed by listing sites like Craigslist. Nobody talks about it but that was the first big blow to the old model.
Ad-only publications were always very low quality.
https://www.journalism.org/2014/03/26/revenue-sources-a-heav...
[Disclosure: I've built a lot of these models in the past]
Do you think it's not repeatable?
...that's like saying "high standards of medicine are bad except for hygiene-minded users." The fact that the user has other concerns in their life doesn't change the fact that it's still bad for them.
But I can verify that I think Google gets my interests wrong more than 9 out of 10 times to the point of repeatingly insulting me and my family, and they are supposed to be very smart so I guess they to have equally smart models.
If they had just stuck to something relevant to the pages I visit they'd probably hit more than 50% of the time. If I visit a video about fixing stuff I might be interested in tools, paint or parts. If I visit a local news source around lunch I'd probably enjoy ideas for dinner from local shops.
That said I probably wouldn't buy much more but at least they wouldn't insult me and my family.
But in the absence of data, I'm leaning towards trusting that a market-leading company incentivized and dedicated to optimizing targeting models has a stronger research on targeting the majority of users than vague internet claims of bad targeting. But what do I know.
Realistically, I wouldn't expect targeting more granular than a zip code. But that's still pretty decent as far as advertisement targeting goes. Definitely better than broadcast radio, as one example.
Now the game has been turned. Advertisers don't need to target sports illustrated to sell gatorade. They can see you checked into LA Fitness and most of the people who checked into this particular LA fitness also happened to spend 30s longer looking at a tester gatorade ad, so there is a slim possibility that you too will look at a gatorade ad for 30s and maybe subliminally engage with it next time you are presented with a gatorade in a cooler at the grocery store. The classic is you looking at a product on amazon and seeing it appear all over the web. It only gets more insidious the deeper your digital footprint goes, the more data they have on you, the more correlations they are free to make which would have been impossible back when advertisers were catering to audiences, not individuals. Sprinkle in exploiting modern psychology for profit, and it's disturbing.
The clearest example of this is the collapse of local news.
I can imagine say, readers of Golf Digest are probably interested in golf. That's about the extent of the research that can be done by a traditional magazine. But there's an entire ad industry (for better or worse) to minimize 'wasted' impressions, and there's a large chasm between "male 25-35" and "specifically John Doe who looked at #9 clubs yesterday but hesitated to buy them, maybe we can win him over". Clearly the later example is prohibited in the spirit of the GDPR, but it's broad enough that it kills the former as well (and puts the extent of information available to the industry back to "golf digest readers play golf").
Not that I am particularly sympathetic to advertising agencies and the machinations of what online ad-tech has become, but I am sensitive to legislation that puts entire industries (I.e. real people's jobs) under a coal fire of "maybe we as a company literally have no viable path forward".
You really don't have to play devil's advocate, one of them is illegal.
If a company has no viable way forward, and has to resort to what the rest of us deemed illegal, it should stop existing. Not all companies should survive at any cost, that's not utilitiatian or desirable.
I'm going to be purposefully obtuse and set up a contrived hypothetical, but to me it's really more like: you came to my store today, but I saw you at the golf shop yesterday. Maybe I watched you closely to learn exactly what you were thinking about buying. I happen to also sell golf things and maybe I want to peddle them to you. So I really go all in on my sales pitch and single you out while you're shopping. That's legal in meatspace. What makes "the same thing, but do it on a computer" illegal and unethical? I think it's a real important question for legislators to answer. Is it the scale? The fact that it can be automated? That we're really not actually comfortable with the meatspace example but didn't have a good way to ban it before?
Just food for thought. I'm mostly neutral on the GDPR, I appreciate the intention but I think we as a society need to define consistent expectations about privacy.
If creepy shopkeepers following you round was a thing I suspect it would be illegal already.
You could even hire someone to wander around your competing stores and take lots of notes about the people they saw. "Red shirt guy shopping around for slim fit pants". Unlikely scenario, but legal to do and to use that information.
My whole thing is - what makes the scenarios different enough that one is prohibited and one is allowed? Certainly if we told folks they must forget their observations about others upon request, that would face some baseline rebuttal about their own autonomy.
Imagine almost every store in your city installed something facial recognition (a la Amazon Go). This system, given to owners literally for free, was created by one company - Google - and allowed them to automatically see what products most people were looking at, what time they were doing so, and their demographic. As payment, Google also gets this data and is able to use it for their means.
Note: i'm just making this analogy. Google Analytics (probably) isn't being used for ad targeting.
What actually happens is that your behavior (in store or not) is permanently observed all the time and ads are served whether you want it or not.
Imagine if in all shops, always you'd get jumped on by attendant trying to sell you things. And sometimes shop attendant would appear out of the blue.
What you're describing you can have today - just convince user to make account in your shop and give you permission to send offers. You can chase him any time you want.
As opposed to the half of them where it currently happens?
Good that you're sensitive, but some jobs simply deserve to die. It happened in the past; behind leaded gasoline, or CFCs, or poisons sold as miracle drugs, were real people with real jobs. Advertising as an industry proved itself to have cancerous nature and grew to do incredible damage to people; it deserves to be burned down to the ground.