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Comment by jordanpg | Hacker News Reader

And all in the service of vacuuming up tiny fractions of pennies in advertising revenue.

What a silly, fragile business model whose days are numbered.

It's amazing to consider how much revenue has been generated, predicated on completely unnecessary and (now) easily disabled browser features.

I have to imagine that like the cigarette manufacturers of yore, companies whose lifeblood is based on this kind of nonsense are kept up at night wondering where the money will come from when this house of cards collapses.

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I think Brave's business model of blocking all these harmful ads that track you is awesome. Users can then opt-in to get paid to view notification-based privacy preserving ads. Websites and publishers can make up for the loss of revenue from these ads through creators.brave.com

But does it also block ads like this comment?

From my view as a person who owns a retail brand and absolutely needs to pay for advertising to get page views and resultant conversions. The current state is pure extortion. I need to pay over three dollars for a frigging click? Almost $20 per sale in advertising fees just to get page views on HoneyGear.com from both google or amazon. I’d like to sell the products for half the current list price, but in today’s market with advertising expense, it’s impossible to lower prices.

What if it's the case that advertising (placing unwanted audio/visual solicitations in front of people) as a business model just goes away completely? And businesses have to instead find other ways to get people to buy their stuff?

I, for one, have no trouble finding things to buy via search, rankings, or research, and give not one care if I never see another advertisement for the rest of my natural life.

I do not hold to the notion that advertising, in any form, is a necessary evil of capitalism. An inevitable parasite, perhaps.

> I, for one, have no trouble finding things to buy via search, rankings, or research, and give not one care if I never see another advertisement for the rest of my natural life.

How do you think those search results, those research rankings, are generated? People pay to advertise their sites at a certain level in search results too. Just because they are not immediately obvious advertisements doesn't mean they are not in fact advertisements.

The question is not how they are generated now, the question is how they should be generated if the interests of both buyer and seller in making successful deal, and not the parasites in sucking off transaction costs and extracting rent by gatewaying access. When I'm shopping for something, search results are useful for me, but dozens of intermediaries that intervene in the process usually aren't. Actually, they often make it worse - e.g. when I am shopping for insurance, it's super-hard to find a site that gives you just straight competitive quotes, instead of collecting all your private info, reselling it to 20 other parasites, and then dumping you on a generic landing page of a provider telling you "call our 1-800 number and we'll give you best quote ever!". There's literally negative value in that - I wasted my time and got nothing. Nobody is better from the existence of these parasites - not me, not the insurer (I could call the 1-800 number before, and at least I wouldn't be pissed off like I am after dealing with the parasites).

My rule of thumb is the first couple of results are absolutely worthless. I don't even read the titles. SEO is a plague as well and should also be done away with. Right now there are no good search engines at all (I appreciate ddg but it needs another decade of polish imo).

Sorry to disappoint you my friend, but the ads and paid subscriptions are just a small fraction of their income. The real money maker is in tracking user behavior and selling that aggregated data.

If worst comes to worse, they can just track your behavior on their website alone.

I keep seeing this claim. Where to sell this data and how much for example 1 million unique visitora / month worth?

User data for a single website is probably not worth much. User data for every single website a user visits in a day? A bit more. Hence, advertising networks.

It helps determine the price of the ad they are showing.

So first you need to join an ad network. Then you could be paid more for higher revenue visitors.

That's one of unsolved mysteries for me - who exactly buys that data and why? What do they do with it that is worth paying money for? Let's say you've learned I like reading sci-fi. So what? You'll serve me more relevant ads? I have an ad blocker anyway, so you won't, and even if I did not, I haven't seen an ad relevant to my interests in ages, except on the topic sites that I already visit anyway. What are they doing with it that is worth clogging all the internet and making each website 10x of size it should be? I have a nagging suspicion it's all hype and one day advertisers will wise up and this business model dies the long deserved death.

There are companies that act as data brokers for other parties and there's also companies like Nielsen which buys media consumption data in bulk. It's not just about the ads.

It's also about the way in which to split the pie. (how much should go to this creator?)

Or consumer profiling. (It seems our product is enjoyed by men in their mid 40s who like sci-fi)

Or marketing research (it seems our product sells the most in winter).

There's plenty of ways to make use of this data. That's why it's so valuable. It's not uncommon to see 7 digit contracts for high profile news/gossip outlets, for example.

> There's plenty of ways to make use of this data. That's why it's so valuable.

That's what I keep hearing. Never heard what are those ways, specifically, and where the value worth the money comes from.

> Or consumer profiling. (It seems our product is enjoyed by men in their mid 40s who like sci-fi)

OK, let's say you learned that. Let's say now you know there's more demand for beard trimmers among mid-40 males with interest in sci-fi than among teenage females with interest in Rihanna. Now what? I still fail to see what a bunch of random (and possibly entirely spurious) correlations costs in money.

> Or marketing research (it seems our product sells the most in winter).

You don't need to track me for that. You need to track your inventory. That's basic stuff every merchant having a functioning brain is already doing.

What else is the data being sold for besides advertising?

It's still all about ad revenue though.

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