Facebook users said no to tracking, and now advertisers are panicking
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Not only do you get manipulated in buying stuff you didn't ask for (ads in general). You're also getting spoonfed content that tries to make you as vulnerable as possible to this manipulation. Up to a point that this is downright threatening democracy and our way of life.
I guess you could call this a form of censorship. Content gets suppressed, simply because it doesn't generate enough ad revenue. It's this type of censorship on "social" media that I consider much more harmful than the type that usually gets most of our attention.
My response to that is "I prefer random ads, because relevant ads are an indication that I'm being spied on". My objection to ads isn't the ads themselves -- I'm going to ignore those no matter what -- it's all the spying the ads bring with them.
Why or why not?
If desktop and mobile advertising didn't have a material impact, why would profit-maximizing companies do it?
If profit-maximizing companies are interested in this type of advertising, what is it about Facebook and Google that captures almost all their spend?
Well, marketing has some famous stories where seemingly counterintuitive things resulted in more buys, eg. Actimel (not sure whether it is called the same in the US as well, but this fruity milk drink with some added vitamins) was having trouble selling at their original price, but increasing the price and thus making it appear a more luxury item did the think for them. There are many small “hacks” in the human brain that are actively exploited by marketing so while I would not say that we are not responsible for our financing, we are at the very least heavily manipulated when shopping - and also, some people are easier to manipulate than others.
I froze up the first time someone said this to me. Of course I prefer random ads, cause this way they're less likely to push the right buttons on my vulnerable monkey-ass brain. Do people think tailored ads are good for them instead of consumerism triggers? Messed up worldview.
I also have no problem with companies tracking for the purpose of seeing which ads work.
I do *not* like the retargeting ads--if I didn't buy the item there's a reason! Either I didn't want it or I'm waiting for a better price, neither of which you're going to solve unless you're telling me about a sale on an item.
And the biggie is how intrusive they get. I'd like to see a system where the browser sends an acceptable-ad policy, a site can either comply or refuse to serve the page.
In your world, that person misses out on the pleasures of california wine
That doesn't get away from the basic fact that all advertising is an attempt at manipulation. The advertiser is trying to encourage a transaction when there wouldn't otherwise have been one. It would be pointless if this wasn't the case.
If you don't want to be manipulated at all (my preference) then it's better not to see targeted adverts.
Maybe it's that some advertisers create the problem they're solving (e.g. body image issues, etc)? Or that it's used for commercial ends? Or that the best product recommendations typically come from friends and family so why bother having ads anyways?
Having bought some products I discovered from ads myself, I can't help but think that I have benefited from the arrangement in a similar way that both parties benefit in economic exchanges. Obviously I'd rather have had my friend tell me but that might have taken... who knows how long.
Yes, assuming 0% force is involved and both agents are 100% rational. Just like spherical cow, the real world is not that simple.
Or, let's say they decided to just do it on their own/have a friend do it...until they see one of my images and go "wow."
The second may be spending money when they wouldn't, but that's pretty rare. If they do it's because they decided it was worth it. The others are just being shown another option that they might not have known existed, meaning they're more informed about where they're going to spend their money.
I don't see who is getting hurt in this scenario. I get work that I need to survive and they're getting photos that they're excited about.
Also, all three of those are worthless for photographers. We're not like a plumber where as long as the job is done right and priced well you're good. Our style is why you're hiring us, so an ad showing one of my images makes a lot of sense.
I'd say most people don't even realize they may or may not be triggered, they simply don't want to suffer through a completely irrelevant ad.
That being said I dislike tracking not because I might get manipulated - I also prefer relevant ads. I dislike the fact that they can better target vulnerable groups - like depressed people with addictive personalities and gaming - this is the majority of app stores profit, I would bet it's a huge ad% as well - mobile gaming is basically milking people with low impulse control and nothing better to do with their time. It's just like those scamming telemarketing scum targeting old people
I'm not completely against marketing. I pretty often buy things advertised in podcasts, stuff that obviously paid for product placement in specific places. But those are ads that fit the medium, usually they're very related to the topic at hand. This is not at all the case with all random bullshit that shows up on Facebook and YouTube. Those are most often than not ads full of toxic subtleties like unreasonable standards of living, body image and success.
If you didn’t have ads, your dentist would have told you about electric toothbrushes.
I agree with you that learning about new products can be a genuinely good thing. I don't think ads are the best way to deliver this information, though.
My wife joined a Facebook group dedicated to house cleaning, and the products the ladies have recommended (Bar Keeper's Friend, Scrub Daddy, Bissell SpotClean) have all been fantastic.
The paid ads on her Facebook are either scams, AliExpress crap sold at full price, or established brands we already know (Amazon, Big W.)
It is more push pull thing. - pull request for relavant ads, when I actively searching for something (and a search engine would be better). - push request for ads that is random. If I see something I like I'll click it.
The answer is, "advertisers, open up to all of us exactly how it all works. Tell me honestly and truthfully what it is you would like to track and what you would like to know about me, and how you intend to use it and from that I will decide what to tell you."
If I had random ads as you say (truly random), I don't want/or need to see tampon ads in my feed as a male. Which is what you might end up with. Conversely, if I just purchased a new 4WD, I don't need to see ads for a new Sedan.
If I'm going to see ads I may as well see ones that are somewhat relevant right? Advertisements are truly that, consumerism triggers and the only way to stop that is to stop ads altogether.
Happy to discuss my thoughts, but that's my line of thought.
The ads themselves aren't a problem from what I've seen, rather it is the incessant stream of memes and emotive content that keeps you scrolling through the feed.
But content is another story altogether.
Absolutely. I've seen entire websites completely reinvent themselves because someone complained to Google about some "offensive" page and got their ads pulled. Stuff I used to like got deleted because of advertisers.
If this "sanitized advertiser friendly web" is the future, I'd rather not have a web at all.
Some things are worth more than money.
You don't even need your "but" (so hold on to it), because this is a classic false dichotomy anyway. Targeting does not require spying nor does spying tend to improve targeting. Basic immediate context (what you're doing, not who you are) works better for both advertisers and willing consumers than personally invasive intrusion does.
You should rather ask whether they prefer relevant ads that put them at risk by aggregating everything about their lives into databases that regularly get breached or relevant ads that don't put them at risk. They can get relevant ads either way. They've just been sold a bill of goods on the need for personal invasion to do it.
But not Facebook. That ship has sailed. I can't and won't trust them.
Region, sure, that makes sense for a local business. But targeting gender or age is discrimination.
You can always find an example of a product that is easier to sell to a specific niche group of people. That doesn’t give the advertiser the right to know that fact about everyone. For the specific case of bras - how would you sell bras for women with large breasts if you don’t know who has large breasts? Do you think that slight inconvenience on behalf of the advertiser should give them the right to keep a database of everyone’s cup size?
Breasts tend to sag with age. As natural elasticity declines, a woman may require additional support.
At least that way, if done right, you won't be simply invisible to half of the internet users.
How are you quantifying this?
The issue is allowing any old engagement.
I’d like to see the hacker news system scaled.
Some things that could make moderators actions go further to keep the cost down:
- outrage detection: before you hit post, you’re warned that your possibly inflammatory post will be flagged for moderation.
-timeouts: if a moderator finds outrage or outrage bait in a post, the poster gets a seven day timeout (cannot log on). ANYONE who replied to or liked the offending post gets a one day timeout.
As far as incentives to lurk, I see quite the opposite. I don't comment on reddit unless I have something funny to say because outrage, point scoring and comedy is what rises to the top rather than reasoned argument.
The only ads I specifically don't like are the ones Youtube have randomly showed my wife and I. It's only happened twice to each of us, but they were a bit adult themed. Having a child in the house, I was pretty peeved.
Don’t get me wrong, I prefer it this way. But you’d think they’d be better at it by now.
I was okay with the targeted ads in the sidebar, when that's all it was. I opted not to block ads on facebook with adblock plus. I learned of all sorts of products that I probably never would have heard of had I been getting random ads, or ads intended to appeal to a wide audience. I never felt manipulated.
The tweaking of the news feed feels wrong though even without ads. Maybe it was an inevitable result of the quest for profits, but if I could go back to targeted ads the way they used to be, I would do it in a heartbeat.
The reality is that I've been fed targeted ads all my life, but the targeting wasn't was optimized. Automotive magazines are more likely to have ads for spark plugs than hair products. A cooking website is more likely to have ads for spatulas than tractors. At least, that's how it used to be. With ads fed from Google, ads are likely to be related to what I've recently searched for with their search engine. The result is often comical: I no longer see ads relevant to what I'm interested in at the time, but to what I was interested in 30 minutes ago. I'm not clicking any of those ads; I've already moved on.
Why is it that the only the first page of search results in a search engine "matter". (Some search engines are now showing a total of 5 (!) results. Brave's new search engine does not even have a page 2!)
Why is it that an "app store" has limited search discoverability but instead provides "Top 10" or "Top 20" lists. And more recently, "recommended apps".
Why is it that a video hosting service has "recomendations" enabled by default, recommended videos show up in search results and the top "recommended videos" always have the highest view counts.
"Tech" has no viable "business model" except advertising. (Time will tell if this "model" is actually sustainable.) This is because they are nothing more than middlemen. They do not produce content and offer nothing of value that they in fact own. Whatever they offer can be obtained directly from its true owners, provided there is motivation (e.g., avoiding payment to a middleman). If "tech" did have something of value they own, it stands to reason they would charge for it. This would provide others with the motivation to cut out the middleman. Hence, "tech" cannot charge "users" money for middleman services.
If we want top-grade products to remain available without a direct monetary transaction (i.e "free"), it seems we must give something that the product providers can turn into monetary value indirectly somehow. Yet it seems we are actively against any such options: We block ads guilt-free, we rally against any attempt at collecting valuable personal information even anonymously, we consider crypto mining in the background (which is basically paying via your electricity bill) borderline malware.
I am part of this "we", and yet I ask myself, what am I willing to give as indirect payment? What other options are there?
I suspect the vast majority of us in HN would have no problem paying for most of these services but I’m not sure how I feel about us making those choices on behalf of those that can’t.
It’s free. If you find it useful and can afford it please donate. If not it’s still free.
Seems to work out excellent for them.
This can work for something like an encyclopedia or for moderating an online community.
It's not a silver bullet.
At the market there is one way to buy, I don't get to ask for alternatives to paying upfront. This (for lack of a better term) entitlement really puzzles me. In the physical world, if I don't like the terms, I leave and don't do business. But on the internet, when people don't like the terms they flout the rules and consume anyway.
edit: I think it would be ideal to have multiple options, I would rather pay directly myself than paying by watching ads. I just have a problem with justifying refusing to pay in the way the business wants, yet still consuming their content.
Curious example, since this was the case for most of the history of journalism.
But you’re right that it’s not so clear. Maybe a more straightforward example is broadcast TV: ABC, NBC and the like. Free at delivery, paid for by ads.
Or, as continuational said, you will have to pay for it.
They also track and profile you across the web. Even if you have no account with them, you still get assigned an advertising ID. Everywhere you see a "Share on Facebook" button? Yeah, that button tracks you even if you never click it, and that's just one of zillions of sneaky ways you're still tracked and profiled by the modern advertising industry.
Also, Firefox + Unblock.
I could go on and yet I think some points start to emerge. I'm OK with ads, I don't like the pervasive tracking. I'm OK with ads, I don't like them interrupting the functionality. I actually even like ads when I have some control over them, not them controlling me. Give me more options to choose which types of ads I want to see (not only don't want to see), don't track me to try to guess/manipulate which ones I want to see.
Lastly, I think in physical real estate, there are laws about who can advertise, where, and when, and I think in digital real estate, there don't seem to be those regulations and advertisements and ad-tracking creep more and more. While advertisements seem to be one of the best ways to grow income (i.e., more people viewing/more accurate audience = higher ad price), I think an ad does have a ceiling price and then once it hits it, companies start to make more ads, more intrusive ones, and more tracking ones.
I think more than anything, I want more agency over the process, and right now, my options for agency are often do nothing, avoid the site completely, constantly click on ads to say "I don't want to see ads like this" and end up seeing more ads tangentially like it, install an ad-blocker, or one of many other almost guerrilla-like tactics to gain some semblance of agency.
I do think that value is there though. Some of our best marketing for AutoTempest has been through youtube sponsorships where we find creators and videos relating to cars and car buying, and work with with the creator to include a pitch for our service in exchange for (usually) a flat fee. It's dead simple for both sides, and as long as what you're advertising is legitimately useful and you're transparent about the relationship, the response from viewers tends to be very positive. I suppose it could be trickier if your product had a very niche audience, but I would think these days there are corners of the web targeting every niche, so you just need to find where your potential customers hang out, and go there, rather than trying to target them wherever they might be.
I remember the internet in the HoTMaiL era, all of the adds where mainly about casinos, porn and such, and very rarely interested to me.
I personally think that if tracking is done with good intentions, it shouldn't be an issue. At least from my point of view.
I rather see totally relevant ads than have again "casino/poker/porn" ads.
I don't agree about the good intentions. The tracking is a means to an end. People are tracked to measure engagement and to target ads, both of which have the purpose of increasing the value of the advertising to the benefit of the ad networks. They don't care if you get relevant ads. They care that they can charge more for your eyeballs because they can classify you as "male, 19-29, in USA, interested in technology, art, exercise" and sell you as part of a package to companies wanting to target that market.
They need to track so that they can "prove" they did what they sold.
The challenge with having access to that much information is that it can be very powerful and a very lopsided/asymmetric power. I remember when Facebook had Open Graph Search-when any user on the platform could perform complex searches of their friends, friends of friends, and more. It was so powerful at times it freaked me out how powerful it was. I could search for friends of friends who are women who live in San Francisco who speak Spanish who are single and who like Dave Matthews and it would give me a list. Facebook shut it down a few years ago, but I imagine something similar still exists on the advertising side of things (side note, there was someone a few years ago that used the advertiser tools to send ads specifically to his one friend as a prank). So for me, why should some groups have access to this information and others not? Who gets to control who has so much info?
Again, the info itself is not necessarily the problem I see, it's the asymmetry and how those people use the asymmetric info they have on me, which can be to powerfully help me or hurt me or maybe even ignore me.
If I had to compromise, I would agree that more agency and less intrusive ads and tracking are a start.
[0]: https://99percentinvisible.org/article/clean-city-law-secret...
[1]: https://coil.com/
Private spaces like inside shopping malls is fine for me.
I like the idea that inside a private building is opt-in/consent, whereas outside of it is not.
> There's not that much physical world advertising in my part of Europe (e.g. almost no road side banners at all), but I still despise how we've sold bus stops and metro walls to the highest bidder
I lived in Germany for a few months and was shocked to see advertisements for cigarettes on the sides of the local buses. I suppose this will be changing in 2022, so a good first step [0].
[0]: https://www.thelocal.de/20200918/germany-set-to-ban-cigarett...
Reminds me of how one day, I think in SF, I was trying to go around without reading things and just realized there are so many things shouting at me with words, especially billboards and other forms of public advertising. I would love to even have a city here in the US experiment with something like this.
> I would gladly raise my taxes to eradicate public advertising permanently
I would, too, especially as a consumer, and yet, as a producer, I wonder how annoyed I would be without ads. Maybe there's a balance, and I believe needs to be have more consumer voice, and less producer voice.
> Naturally, how this could be implemented is far beyond me, as are the economics behind advertising, so I suppose I'm doing little more than wistful thinking.
Lol, me too. I guess it comes down to how much does advertising actually work and if advertising disappeared, what downstream impacts would it have on the economy (and would those be "bad")?
I think part of the reason I'd like to go into public office is to run these experiments and also I feel sad that more public offices don't seem to run that many experiments :-)
I'm in the exact same position, I'd love to see a large-scale experiment to determine the economic and psychological impact of removing public advertising, or at least reducing it to a more "comfortable" level, whatever that may be. The Canadian government experimented a bit with universal basic income in the 70s, and more again recently with COVID, so perhaps they'd be willing to give this a shot as well.
> I would, too, especially as a consumer, and yet, as a producer, I wonder how annoyed I would be without ads. Maybe there's a balance, and I believe needs to be have more consumer voice, and less producer voice.
Another concern/shortcoming I forgot to address above is what companies will do to get their products out there; will advertising take a more subtle, perverse tone if they're not allowed billboards and banner ads? Perhaps a middle-ground will stop a more covert extreme from appearing. Perhaps I'm falling for the middle ground fallacy.
Now that Near Field Comm has arrived and active invasive advertising soon is likely follow us everywhere we go, it's time we consumers reasserted ourselves and took back control of our eyeballs.
Not on the scale of the internet and you give some good examples that are egregious. a lot of it is just 'adtech' bs, but it's there.
and the traditional in-store transaction data marketplace is huge. Companies have been tracking you and your purchases around forever.
passive bluetooth IDs track you in store - though didn't iOS mitigate that by changing them frequently? idk maybe not.
There are some 'eye tracking' billboard tech but it's kind of dumb imho. The simpler is just trying to estimate impressions.
though maybe that's more digital ads than not. but collecting, selling, aggregating consumer data, combining it with purchase data, and using that for direct marketing ha been around for ages.
"Oh, that's where it is. I couldn't find the product because the ad was in the way." Grocery store standalone displays partially blocking aisles and shelves are a pain during busy periods. You get cart jams.
Not that long ago someone posted this beautiful Banksy quote about it on HN:
> “People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you. You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity. Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head. You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.” - Banksy
I’ll damn well block all shitty ads on every site.
You’re a newspaper site and want to block me for using an ad blocker? Feel free, I’ll leave your site.
You’re an advertiser who refuses to bid on ad space as too many people block the ads anyway? Please stop bidding then.
But don’t pretend that by offering your site for free and me using it for free somehow requires me to see shitty ads.
If you want my money, ask for it. If your content is worth it I’ll pay for it.
One of my personal favorites: movie theatres.
You pay, a handsome amount of money, to see a movie, once, and if you happen to have the weird idea of not be just late enough to the movie, you get the wonderful, once in a lifetime opportunity… to get ads shoved in your face. Ads for food, ads for random stuff, and ads for other movies.
The best of both worlds, really.
Used to drive me crazy. Now I simply don’t go anymore.
Honestly I don't mind the pre-movie trailers. I like movies and they give me time to go pee and stuff.
* Relevant. You know I’m interested in movies, since I’m at one, so you don’t have to spy on me to do it. Some theaters might be spying on me, I dunno, but they don’t have to in principle.
* Not directly interfering with my original purpose. The movie hasn’t started yet. The only thing you might be showing me before the movie is, maybe, cartoon shorts? I guess that would be more fun than ads, but the ads aren’t going to give me malware or pretend to be from the FBI when they’re not, so it’s not as bad as internet ads.
* If the theater starts advertising scams, they have a brick-and-mortar address, they’re in the same legal jurisdiction as the visitors, and everyone sees the same ads, so suing them should be an option. Everybody who visited the movie saw the same set of ads, so if it’s a scam, there’s plenty of witnesses.
They got converted to pre-views pretty early on though because at the end of the movie people didn't stick around to watch them.
That’s something else that drives me crazy with both YouTube & Twitter. The number of scams that run in their ads.
Some falsely referring to some local celebrity only to sell some dodgy pseudo-financial product. Others selling medical products that would be heavily regulated if they did anything close to what they promise, sometimes vaguely citing "medical research" and "new discoveries".
Almost as if they didn’t review them before letting them go live!
But we never hear a word about that, no.
Governments try to have all our online chats preemptively monitored to chase after pedophiles[1] (and then it’ll be terrorists, and heck, after that, why not copyright infringements while they’re at it? ie Hadopi)…
The news and our Dear Leaders keep ranting about Facebook, Google and Twitter because of how they are used to spread disinformation to further some political goals…
They also all keeps bashing Facebook & Google for supposedly causing the ruin of the news media (all of which then rants on about it whenever given a chance, mostly spouting nonsense, even those I like).
But big, supposedly (and probably wrongly) trusted platforms spreading scams at scale all over the world? That’s apparently not worth any widespread effort, fine or headline.
Sorry for the rant. As I said; drives me crazy.
[1]: https://european-pirateparty.eu/parliament-approves-chatcont...
If that bullshit worked you could just throw yourself in the sea for free rather than paying some pillock on Facebook. No better connection to earth than that!
Pretty much the reason I scorned every single "smart tv"
LG ads: https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2021/3/10/22323790/lg-oled-tv-...
Samsung connecting to open WiFi: https://forum.developer.samsung.com/t/if-you-choose-to-not-c...
Samsung TV ads (you’ll find more sources, but adweek seemed a pretty ironic choice): https://www.adweek.com/convergent-tv/samsung-ads-debuts-thre...
Samsung, LG, Sony & others spying on what you watch: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/23/smarter-living/how-to-sto...
Quite a lot to avoid ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Or maybe skip straight to an LED projector, I hear those are nice.
Just glancing at Amazon, I see a 65-inch 4k digital signage display for under $1200 USD.
I wonder what would happen if you limited their bandwidth to a couple of kbps. Just enough to get the pings across but make any ad download excruciatingly slow. Or write some kind of DPI rule that drops packets to the internet above a certain size.
That's why I think experimenting with more advanced sabotage will pay off in the long run.
But there’s also, before those, ~20 minutes of "regular" ads. Ads for M&Ms. Ads for cars. Ads for some pseudo-luxury perfumes. Ads, ads, ads… even ads for the company that places the ads in movie theatres!
Now when I moved to Canada: no numbered seats, and 20 (yeah, TWENTY) minutes of ads + trailers. WTF is wrong with you people? I just don't go anymore
Either you get a random seat, perhaps apart from your party, perhaps miss a bit of the movie (although unlikely), and get not to watch ads.
Or you arrive on time, perhaps slightly early, get to pick where you sit, together, and get a shit ton of ads shoved down your eyes and ears for nearly half an tour, in full IMAX & DolbyVision 20.8.
Edit: Oh, and you don’t know at what time the movie actually ends, because they tell you when the ads start, and how long the movie lasts. But you have to factor in the very important ad time.
But buying a DVD to then be pestered with unskipable dire warnings for life and limb if I dare to pirate this DVD was really a bit rich.
Hello! I actually paid for this product. I'm really in the wrong target group for this shit. And moreover:
I think I'll pirate the next movie so that I'm not forced to endure such gunk.
"All institutions & organizations must shut the hell up. To all egregores: you do not speak unless spoken to, and I will NEVER speak to you. I do not want to hear 'thank you' from a corporation. I am a divine being : you are a construct. You have no right to speak in my holy tongue."
The business models that would become viable in that reality would be a better equilibrium and the incentives would be better aligned between software companies and their users.
Highly targeted advertising disproportionately benefits the little guy. I say this as a little guy, running a small dog treat e-commerce company. Almost all of my new customer acquisition is by way of Facebook ads.
If you get rid of Facebook ads and go back to the non-targeted, TV commercial and newspaper type ads, my company might not survive. Purina, though? They'd be fine. They can afford to spend enormous amounts, and they've got a range of products that means their potential customer base is much bigger than mine.
Your local vet can affordably reach pet owners in their area with targeted advertising. If it goes away, that will hurt them and greatly benefit VCA (huge, nationwide chain of vet hospitals).
You're right in the sense that my business model would become inviable, but the result is that you're going to concentrate power even more heavily among the largest corporations. Is that really a good thing?
That being said, if you are concerned about monopolies, there are better ways to fight them. Unfortunately they have been neglected in the last few decades. Perhaps channeling your money/influence towards that instead of ads would be better for everyone.
The world prior to 20 years ago was a very different one in terms of the scale and reach companies could achieve. Pretending as though the situation now is comparable is just naive on your part.
And honestly, the drama of calling it a cancer is just silly and dramatic. If you think this is all so terrible, go live in a commune instead of posting on a message board that is run by an organization that is deeply connected to big tech and all the things you're complaining about. I guess you probably can't see that connection all the way up there on your high horse, though.
Doesn’t mean that Facebook isn’t a cancer on society, enabling a skyrocketing in polarization, setting groups up against each other against their best interests, giving megaphones to the most vile humans turds imaginable etc.
The nice and civil “Mount Pleasant baseball league” Facebook page that your ads run on and that make your business profitable are at best an unintended side effect of that.
Nobody said you should stop in this instant. I was criticizing how your approach to fighting your competitors inadvertently does a lot of damage to people that don't know any better.
>And honestly, the drama of calling it a cancer is just silly and dramatic. If you think this is all so terrible, go live in a commune instead of posting on a message board that is run by an organization that is deeply connected to big tech and all the things you're complaining about. I guess you probably can't see that connection all the way up there on your high horse, though.
This argument is basically the "yet you live in a society, curious" meme[0]. I work also work in tech(as an industrial automation contractor to be precise) so I enjoy the technical aspect of the conversations here. That being said I set a goal 5 years ago to not give SV gigacorps a single cent either directly or indirectly. It helps me keep a clean conscience in arguments like this.
Make no mistake I'm no leftie. I just find the direction the online world is heading deeply concerning. Social cooling[1] and all that. The fact that your means of making money is caught in this crossfire is not what I'm aiming for.
I think on net the problems targeting creates are worse than the small business benefits, but that’s an easy position for me to hold because I don’t run a small business.
I also think in a world where advertising models are not really viable for supporting software companies (or media) - you get better models that have a better outcome for the group. Things like Substack.
I’d imagine in that world there’s still room for your company to succeed, but the model is probably different. Maybe niche community sites where people review high quality dog food? Someone from your company could be part of those communities in a genuine way. There’d still be advantages for little companies - it’s just hard for people to model what that kind of world would look like.
So I both agree with you that targeted advertising today helps the little guy, but I disagree that a world where that model isn’t viable is one where the little guy can’t exist.
Comments like the sister reply to mine don’t help because they make it seem like I don’t care about the trade offs - I do, I just think they’d be different and the costs today are pretty bad.
Facebook doesn’t give a rats ass about equity. If they did they’d copy a model like Apple’s App Store: as developer you pick a price tier for your app or subscription. That same tier translates into for example €2,99 per month in Europe, but the equivalent of €0,25 in less privileged markets. So the luckier people of the world subsidize the less fortunate, as it should be.
As a side point, many labour-of-love websites start to monetise to sustain the hosting costs. But some of the best blogs I read are flat HTML. The running costs of such websites must be negligible for all but the most heavily trafficked blogs. When my blog got hit by hundreds of views per second over the course of a few hours via reddit, Apache on a Core 2 Duo barely broke a sweat because it was flat HTML. With modern CSS websites can look fantastic with minimal assets and bandwidth. I'm happy to pay €20/month for such a server myself, and donate my content to whoever wishes to read it.
Often it does, but Google pushes youtube videos to the top of the search results. The same Google that earns money from ads shown along those videos of course.
Do we have any proof that regular, old non-tracking ads could not sustain a top website? I’ve heard stories that websites can actually earn more by excluding all the ad tech middlemen from the equation.
For the sake of argument, lets assume FaceBook is a top-grade product that people currently don't pay for with money. It exists because advertisers pay FB. The targeting of ads to individual users allegedly results in a high CTR or whatever. Without targeting, FaceBook can still sell ads but they will be less targeted, and presumably have a lower CTR. That means they will be less valuable than other forms of ads and the ad spend will be adjusted accordingly. That seems bad for our "free" service. OTOH if we stop targeting in all areas, there will be no medium that is "better" to put ads and so the spend will likely move in proportion to where peoples eyeballs and ears are, as things used to be. That might actually result in more ad spending in areas like radio, TV, and any other medium that never gained the ability to target specific people.
Maybe that's a good thing for us consumers.
Internet advertising will become the home ground of big companies, which don't mind spending tons of cash for widest possible audience reach. Small business will be effectively cut out of online ads, except search engines with their keywords targeting.
The average HNer has absolutely no clue the economic impact derived from invasive privacy tracking and the not-so-secretive data industry. It's absolutely massive across finance, consumer-facing-anything, insurance, and government.
One particularly good journalist covering the topic is Joseph Cox [1]. Follow his work and you'll start to get a tiny sense of how massive we're talking.
I don't want anything that's advertising supported. Anything. There is no media I want to consume so badly that I'll tolerate ads to watch it. There's no product so interesting I'll view ads to use it. No website contains information I need that badly.
People keep saying that without ads we'll have to pay for things. Fine. Sure. Set up a Patreon. I give money on Github to a few projects I rely on to make sure their maintainers don't get day jobs. I couldn't afford to pay a programmer's salary, but I can afford to pay a small percentage of one.
I think the problem has actually been the donation button itself. You want $1 a month out of me that's a pretty easy sell. You want me to sign up for your website and give you my credit card information and you're SOL. I tried to donate to VoiceMeeter a few months back because it's so good. They only accept $20 donations, no more no less, and their payment system wasn't working.
Just, like, get a Venmo.
Something that I can put money into, set rules for, and over a period of time dispense cents/fractions of a bitcoin/whatever as per rules.
The rules - and default rules in particular! - would be important.
Maybe you like the author so much you donate on the regular just anyway.
Maybe a plugin in my browser can see when I visit a site and automatically donate. If I don't visit the site, it doesn't pay.
Maybe you donate 0.1 of a cent to ANY website that has no ads or doesn't trigger your adblocker. $1 buys you 1000 such visits.
Then a RSS-like "Donation" button would be meaningful for longer term income, without all the hassle of Patreon etc.
OTOH, I worry that sites would then start watching such transactions and try setting floor limits for how much you need to donate before they serve you.
Any ruleset will inspire gaming that ruleset.
I'd like it without a Corporation-In-The-Middle between me and the recipients but I will have to check this out.
Thanks!
Does this change if nobody is allowed to do surveillance? I.e. if privacy-respecting ads are not competing with more intrusive ads, does the price change?
I think discussing options is a waste of time if we don't have any data to base our decisions on.
Of course, that would mean techies stepping up and doing this for their families and tribes...
Many of us seem to be preoccupied with chasing the advertising dollar which exploits those same people.
I think going back to content based advertising will greatly improve the quality of content on the internet.
The way it works now, the most valuable content is the cheapest content that can get valuable eyes to look at it, which leads to clickbait and low effort content.
If advertisers can only make ad decisions based on the content, quality content will be more valuable.
If someone really wants or needs something, they'll find a way to pay for it (directly or indirectly) if access cannot be had any other way. Everything else is "nice to have" until the cost or friction gets a little higher than zero.
The fact that people are increasingly unwilling to "pay for" things like FB seems to suggest these services are not actually _that_ vital despite their high usage figures.
1. I want more honesty and transparency in products and services. I'm tired of being sold something to "Connect with friends and the world around you" that are actually just a front to collect as much information about me as possible to for advertisers.
I'm not even opposed to targeted ads, but at this point have to assume that if a product is capable of collecting ever bit of data it can and selling it, it will. Even privacy policies and user agreements are meaningless because they all contain text of the effect that the provider can change the terms at any time.
I just want companies to be honest about what they are actually doing and what the cost to me really is.
2. I want ads to back the hell off.
I don't mean they need to go away entirely. There are times when I _want_ to learn about different products and find new things to solve problems I have.
But I'm tired of them them pushing to get as in my face as possible, of them beating me over the head with problems I don't have, and of them trying to manipulate me into giving them money instead of helping me find things that will actually help me.
It's as if product discovery isn't profitable; like companies are afraid to be honest about their products. So instead of making better products, they entire market just makes different colored cheap boxes with nothing inside and uses ads to manipulate as many people into buying them before they figure it out.
I block ads guilt free because at this point I honestly don't feel like I can trust any company that participates in this racket.
Personally though, I'm might just be willing to give up on products that depend on ad revenue. While I admit I do use some services based on ad-tech, I'm pretty quick to leave any site that complains about my ad-blocker and don't really feel like I'm missing anything. I could probably be convinced to leave most these other services behind if they started making a worse experience of it.
The system we have now is micropayments. Personal data has economic value and we pay with that.
The engineering problem is to figure out how to make the payment system less indirect so that companies can't rent seek by extracting more data (payments) for the same service.
Fine, Facebook knows which hobbies I'm looking at on Instagram and has incredible ads and suggested posts. Ok that's fine. But random 3rd party I don't know getting that data... No thanks.
Fantasy world. These products do not exist, as far as I'm aware. The reality is trash products. I couldn't care less if all that trash just vanishes from the internet.
The earliest iterations of banner ads weren’t that bad. They were basically print ads with some low-key animations added at worst, and many weren’t even graphical.
But then arose an arms race to create the most attention-grabbing, obnoxious ads possible, and ad supported pages quickly became neon disco raves that sucked up CPU cycles and sometimes even hijacked users’ browsers. This was the first tipping point.
And then ads became ever more invasive, fingerprinting users in any way possible. This was the second tipping point.
Had web ads stayed lightly-enhanced, unscripted print ads, I doubt anybody would care to install an ad blocker, but here we are today where doing so is practically essential not just from a privacy standpoint, but also from a security standpoint (since ads can exploit 0days).
So the industry largely brought this upon itself, at least in my eyes.
Prisoner's dilemma problems are hard to solve.
Examine the toxic business models, then defang them.
Google is now blocking ads for all Chrome users for sites that have shown ads that are considered bad. Of course there's a bunch of companies doing rules lawyering to squeak by and they haven't been adding new bad experiences like they should. It does seem like something an online petition would help with though, as the non-CMA members of the coalition would then have more data to throw around about how users view these annoying ad experiences.
I personally tend to think your framing is letting the publishers sneak a bit out of frame, though. Publisher in this context refers to an entity that has a site or app that attracts eyeballs into which ads may be emitted.
Once upon a time, as you're mentioning, sites had only a few rectangles and skyscrapers that they had to sell themselves. By and large any site capable of bringing in real money had to hire ad sales folks to sell those slots (yes, to real ad agencies!). Some others would join consortiums to split the cost of ad sales folks, etc.
Those publishers needed to hire programmers in addition to those ad sales folks to develop targeting tools in order to make better pitches to the ad agencies. This was similar to how "old media" (newspapers, radio, and television companies) used to do it: you had to create spaces for ads (commercial==ad slot), go out and find people who wanted to buy those slots, and then rent them your ad space (and, of course, the eyeballs associated them).
All of that costs effort and money... plus ad agencies are also expensive so only "reputable" brands had ad budgets that could move the needle. This meant the publisher's content had to be something a reputable company would want to be associated with. That's even more costs for the publisher; i.e. not just hiring programmers and sales folks, but editors and actual journalists, etc.
Your incentive in this game is to produce content which can attract reputable merchants by having an audience that those deep pocketed merchants want to reach. Or, otherwise, to become so popular and well read that the advertisers would naturally want to pay you.
---
So, what changed?
Even with ace ad sales folks most publishers couldn't actually sell all of their available slots (side note: anyone seen a real house ad in the last few years!)
Enter... "Remnant advertising." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remnant_advertising)
What if a company offered to pay you for all of your unused slots?
You're not going to get a huge contract like a run-of-site takeover campaign, and in fact you no longer have any relationship with the advertiser at all, just with the remnant ad broker.
But they will toss you a few pennies every time you can scrounge together 1000 eyeballs. Kind of like pull tabs or collecting aluminum cans, it's now a volume game.
But, consider what became of the incentives for the publisher: you no longer have to get great or respectable content or become super popular so "respectable" merchants will pay you... you can just focus on the numerator now: eyeballs == money.
In fact, with that incentive system you might start shoving modal dialogs and interstitials and just plain adding ad slots everywhere! If you can sell the same eyeball a dozen times instead of once that's even more money! So... ad slots took over the web, and you suddenly had to scroll a lot more.
Note that I haven't once talked about the content of the advertisements themselves just how inexorably the dynamics of this market lead to more obnoxious webpages and apps into which those ads (good or bad) would appear.
--- What about the remnant merchants? Well, they hired sales people and programmers. And then they consolidated, and merged, and consolidated some more.
And they'd built software to schedule campaigns and produce the targeting reports for publishers and ad agencies to do remnant! Plus ad agencies preferred not having to deal with 1,000 websites if they could just work with a few brokers.
The BMWs, PepsiCo's, Unilevers were all still hiring ad agencies to design campaigns; but now everyone worked with the ad brokers.
But for the publishers,not only do you not hire programmers and ad sales folks, you don't really need editors or to pay your "journalists" much... You might even just pay your "content creators" based on how many eyeballs their arti^h^h^h^hlist-icle brings in. The publishers could become brokers of eyeballs too!
If you're keeping score we're now in the rapid descent phase... tragically you've no longer got a newspaper or an essayist or a journalist or whatever... just a bunch of dealers trying to sell eyeballs.
Of course kutsunesoba's right that the advertisers (folks with ads looking for eyeballs) were also complicit, though. They quickly realized they were competing with 10 other ads appearing on the same and this meant almost instant neon-disco-ball obnoxious ads!
But, from my perspective, in addition to the scuzzy advertisers, and those scummy ad brokers, all this time swimming right alongside them were the publishers.
And this whole article is about one of them (being upset with Apple).
Don't want.
And cryptominers are not borderline malware. They are malware full stop.
If you are depressed, just don't be?
Is Facebook a "higher-grade" social networking product than other free ones that exist without the same monetization of personal data, or than other free ones that could exist without the same monetization of personal data if such monetization of personal data was considered unacceptable? I don't doubt that Facebook delivers more value to shareholders than if they were not able to monetize personal data to the same extent, but I see no reason to believe that they or their competitors would be less of a "top-grade product."
I would like to see us move to direct payments. If direct payments were the norm, the web would be less polluted with UX anti-patterns and other crap.
There's nothing particularly extreme about this idea. We pay for all our products and services in the physical world. We pay for streaming music and video. Heck, even in social networking, people pay/paid to use WhatsApp, iMessage and BBM, which are/were two of the largest messaging platforms (BBM and WhatsApp had monthly fees and iMessage is paid for with device purchases).
If your social media platform cannot convince people to pay, say, $1.99/month, perhaps it just isn't enriching the lives of your end users, and thus shouldn't exist. A lot of people (particularly those focused on growth hacking) would say this is a flaw of direct payments, but I view it as a feature.
For me, I pay for email and web hosting. The only big thing I rely on is news, I believe. And Internet search.
Youtube is mostly useless except when I'm trying to repair stuff at home. Almost everything else falls into the category of "entertainment", for which there are plenty of alternatives that don't involve ads. If there is one thing there is no shortage of in this country, it's entertainment.
Most of the (non-news) articles I read online really don't add much to my life, and there were plenty of choices pre-Internet (e.g. magazine subscriptions).
I'm happy to get ad-subsidized stuff like they did in the old days (news + magazines) because although it was annoying, it was not invasive.
So apart from Internet search, I'm having trouble finding anything that is (invasive) ad supported that benefits my life. If most of these things will go away, I will happily revert to the old ways. I'm definitely not happier now because of ad supported services.
If we did really understand the implications of the society we live in, we would not stop at selecting "don't track me" on a phone.
We're living through a major extinction, we know that the next century is going to be a bloodbath, we know this crisis has been brought to us by productivism, and we're discussing whether it's fair to ignore calls for more consumerism on our phones.
I am perfectly willing to see ads as an indirect payment for free services. Show me some ads with tasteful photography, good art, or a nice pun. I might even click on them and buy something! This is not new, we have been doing this for centuries.
What we currently have are hardly good ads in any way, shape, or form. They rely upon invasive tracking to show you lazy creepy notifications like “Oh you live in 123 Evergreen St. and bought a toaster recently? Here are ads for five other toasters!". Ugh, no thanks.
Advertising is fine. Getting rid of invasive personal tracking will allow the creativity and art to come back into advertising.
Do we want them to though? What would a web without free look like?
The small additions I might enjoy might be some flash games, Wikipedia, and blogs; these were early 2000s IIRC. I would actually draw the line at Youtube. It's great and all, but it could as well not be the web, but a dedicated native app for all I care, but give me the old YouTube at its very first breakeven point[1].
We pretend like the current multi-hundred billion dollar Crapshow Creeper Web full of carnival barkers hounding you every second is absolutely necessary, and it's not. What fucked up the Web was money--way too much of it. We're in a denial phase with the Web bubble desperately pumped up with steroids to support multiple 800 pound gorilla/leeches that provide little value other than "scale" (or some shit).
[1] (and Google will never publicly say when that was, but definitely before 2010--it's just that the stupid growthism mindset required absurd revenue growth to keep up with stockholder and executive greed).
I don't actually. If I could pay for something that gives good value and by doing so I also shut off all tracking of any kind, I'd do so, assuming it was something I was interested in.
By outsourcing ads to a 3rd party the website has lost an element of control over their "own space on the internet" and hence led to mish mash crap on so many sites - and it follows you making the sites all blend into one another!
I would accept a website to host it's own static advertising - not GIF, not video, not audio - that doesn't discriminate between myself and fellow humans. A website on my browser, or any similar browser around the world, should be the same, barring accessibility differences.
This would bring us back to motoring websites having ads for cars, tech websites having ads for tech etc. People don't get tracked, they get ads relevant to their interests, and pages look cohesive and have an identity.
The devil's in the details, for sure. Such a system would immediately turn into an arms race between running it fairly and gaming it. At the end of the day, what I want the internet to give me is neither impressions nor time spent, but value, and only I can really judge that - but I don't really want to be thinking about judging it all the time. The best scheme I came up with was one that tracked time/impressions/whatever and came up with a default payment for a given site, and let me adjust it if I felt it was high or low.
The second problem was -- what's up with $10/mo? Might that be low, for specialized content? High, for poor people? I had set it based on gut feel relative to the price I was paying my ISP at the time. I thought that perhaps what I'm paying by default can be negotiated with paywalls behind the scenes, and if it isn't high enough they can ask me for more for the one impression, and I can set it higher ongoing if I like what they have. An alternative approach was the one pursued by Project Wonderful, which had advertisers bidding against each other for space on a web site and (maybe it was this project or another) users bidding against those advertisers for those spaces to be blank! The free market enthusiast in me loves that in principle. In practice, projects in that vein all failed for reasons I don't understand.
That leads into a third problem, though. A lot of the value I get out of the internet is user-generated on larger sites -- like comments on this one. I appreciate Reddit pioneering some ways to thank these people, but as for making a larger and more general fair solution, I must admit I'm a bit lost. I dislike the idea of paying Facebook for aggregating the content of people I really want to be thanking and taking all the money for it (which is in fact, more or less what happens now).
With that said, I do like services that have this sort of fee for subscription for all content model. It seems to be dominating these days, and I take that as validation that the scheme is fundamentally the right way to go about solving the problem. But it needs another iteration. I hate having a dozen content subscriptions. I hate that they come in "a month" as the smallest size. And I hate that it gives the network so much control over where my money goes -- these schemes are notoriously unfair to creators. It would be much better if my relationship was with the creators directly, as I know what things are worth to me. If I could just cruise onto YouTube and it would hit my GlobalContentPayer up for $0.30 for an hour of ad free viewing (or $19.99 for a movie that just came out) or whatever, I'd be a much happier camper. I'm willing to pay you, but I don't really want that much of a relationship.
I definitely hate one-sided ad relationships. I don't mind ads like the old newspaper classifieds -- where both I and the advertiser got value out of it and that's the only reason it worked. Information exchanges are good, and if both parties are paying for access, that's a good sign of their health. One-sided ad relationships in which I am a product and not a party are inherently toxic. While I am sympathetic to creators needing a way to support themselves, that sympathy doesn't extend to allowing that sort of psychological abuse into my life. I avoid these sorts of ads whenever I can, in any way I can, without remorse.
1. Pervasive, asymmetric surveillance increases the power differential between individuals and big corps/governments. The latter groups can use that power to preempt healthy competition, causing individual quality of life to stagnate in a local maximum.
2. Ads themselves are attention hijacking, thought injection, and manipulation/coercion—all forms of mind control. Most people consider their mind central to who they are (often along with body, memories, and personality), it's wrong to mess with that non-consensually. (No, clicking "accept ToS" isn't consent.)
3. Centralizing surveillance data (as by companies and governments) prevents the surveilled from protecting their own vulnerabilities from bad actors. It's like passwords: you can invest in memorizing many strong ones, or re-use one that's written on a post-it on your desk, but since in this metaphor the surveillants are also storing your password in plaintext in paper filing cabinets, so it doesn't matter how much effort you put into protecting your passwords. Put another way, if the Coke recipe or a Boeing blueprint were leaked, it's the company's loss, so they work hard to protect their secrets. But if someone hacks a consumer company's user data, it's the users who are affected; if it weren't for regulatory fines and news exposés, companies wouldn't even be hurt by such breaches.
As for the end-game goals: Companies surveil and advertise because they're allowed to and it works.
We see futuristic attention hijacking tech in sci-fi films and TV, like giant holograms [Blade Runner], ads that address each individual [Minority Report], or ads that stop until you're paying attention again [Black Mirror]. But it's less common to see futuristic attention protection tech. (That makes sense if you consider the funding source of these sci-fi productions.) Black Mirror did have one episode where a person was exiled from everyone else's senses, but I can't think of others.
[It works] The individual's goal could be total control over perception of the world. As a natural-born human, you can easily close your eyes, but your other senses are harder to dampen, and so provide vectors for involuntary thought injection (ads). Now with widespread earbud use, you can sort of close your ears too. But imagine installing an ad-blocker so your senses just didn't report ads, or your brain didn't perceive them? As with many technologies, it'd be quite dystopian if centrally controlled, quite freeing if under individual control. Even more fantastical would be the ability to experience but be unaffected by stimuli (including ads), which might not even be a technology exactly.
[They're allowed] The other goal could be simply to use our collective power (i.e. government) to more strictly regulate—or even ban—surveillance and advertising (and enforce it!). While this always possible, I'm afraid it's no longer realistic in U.S., though other countries could still pull it off, as could whatever government eventually replaces the American one.
Lastly, what if nothing were free? Part of the problem is that the difference between $0 and $1 is much, much larger than from $1 to $2, i.e. free is a way better price than even dirt cheap (or sometimes even being paid). Tech start-ups are especially guilty abusing the marketing power of "free" in combination with unsustainable infusions of venture capital, which is dishonest if not somewhat fraudulent. Business would survive the removal of tactics like "free + ads" and "loss leaders".
A global ban on targeted advertising. Fines in % of global revenue instead of fixed sums. Bankruptcy of adtech companies and concerts in the ruins of their headquarters.
I don't think the typical HN user insists on not paying for the software we use. I don't understand people who insist they want unpaid software.
What I do is Building relevant ads to my content when I find fitting affiliate programs. As they are just text (or image) with an link they ain't blocked and respect my users privacy.
I would argue that are the only actually targeted ads. And lucky content creators won't be blocked either (usually)
Other projects I just go for a paid or free/paid model.
I think most HN users will agree that the good stuff costs money. So the question is really who pays, and how.
For me the ideal end-game is ability to get what I want through a direct pay-as-you-go transaction. In the ideal world this transaction is explicit, instant, anonymous, nearly zero overhead and non-recurring. Explicit, because as a consumer I want to be able to say no, and know exactly when I engage in a transaction. Instant, because waiting X working days sucks. Anonymous, because there are many reasons to stay anonymous. Zero overhead, because we want to cut middlemen. Non-recurring, because a recurring payment is _always_ an up-sell. Paper money works great in the offline world.
Any kind of an indirect payment is not ideal because it takes control from the consumer and gives it to someone else.
Advertisement does not pay for the vast majority of content created. The creators pay by spending their free time making it.
LOL at this below:
"Seufert estimated that in the first full quarter users see the prompt, the iOS changes could cut Facebook’s revenue by 7% if roughly 20% of users agree to be tracked. If just 10% of users grant Facebook tracking permission, revenue could be down as much as 13.6%, according to his models. The first full quarter with the prompt is the third quarter. Facebook reports second quarter earnings at the end of July."
FB revenue is going to be up in Q3, not down, would bet $10k on that.
The discrepancy is that a 75% reduction in users opting into Facebook tracking is leading to only a 30% reduction in iOS share on the highest ROI ad campaigns. 30% is big but not 75% big.
Another possible explanation is that opting out of tracking in iOS doesn't make you invisible. It just makes it hard for Facebook to correlate your off-app/non-Facebook.com web activity, but there are ways around that. So what 30% means hinges a lot on how the 1st touch -> 2nd touch leap is done, and the data for that leap doesn't always come from Facebook.
I'm the first one most of my friends come to for tech questions, and I make a point of explaining privacy issues to them and helping them counter creepy behavior in apps/websites. When my parents buy iPhones, the first thing I'll be telling them is which button to push when apps want to stalk them.
By myself, I'm an irrelevantly small data point, but it's not just me—most of my "tech support" friends are privacy-aware and evangelize it. I suspect iOS losses have only just begun, and will continue.
There's a "always, silently, deny" option in settings for this. It's labeled something like "allow apps to request tracking" and if you turn it off, they can't and just get a "no". No more asking per app, which is fine because it's not like anyone would ever want to allow it. It's not as if it's the kind of prompt where someone might actually want to say yes, sometimes. The screen is easy to find by searching "track" in iOS settings.
I know because this headline prompted me to double check that I had it set correctly.
Why?
FB actually ends up profiting pretty well from this change (at the cost of losing some of the small business advertising that was priced out)
They can't correlate that ad to an action, which means they can't make you a happy chart that says the ROI is there. So you're going to pay less for it.
This isn't going to harm small businesses no matter what FB says.
Whoever submits the highest bid wins that ad impression. Less information will mean people bid less, and the targeted ad prices will revert to their less targeted peers from a price perspective.
"scared" is the wrong word for these powerful companies. She is probally the last thing Mark is worried about. Does he even have worries at this point?
Marketing is arrogant (we are the best), misleading (overpromise, leave out unfavorable information), manipulative (fear of missing out, social pressure, pricing something as x.99$) and loud.
Imagine the above as a person, randomly popping up in your view about a thousand times a day, screaming at you. The person also follows you everywhere, takes notes of everything you do.
Marketing perpetuates consumer culture, stimulating demand that didn't even exist.
Marketing lacks any form of basic human decency.
It's depressing that the smartest minds in our world seem to have an existential dependency on the above.
Not only dependent. Don't forget how many psychology PhDs get jobs at Facebook and Google instead of "helping people". Why would you work with a bunch of depressed drug addicts and wife-beaters? Why not get a joint degree in PhD and Marketing? https://marketing.wharton.upenn.edu/joint-doctoral-degree-in... You'll make 10x as much.
> For consumer researchers, psychology is one of the foundational disciplines that comprise the field of marketing. For psychologists, the marketplace is filled with questions and insights about human cognition and behavior.
It's so on the nose it's painful - I truly think limiting the amount a business spends on advertising would have a net good for society.
That's not what the engineers are working on. They want you to click. It doesn't matter if it leads to depression, anxiety...just bloody click. Or read. Or watch that video. And then the next one.
Citation needed.
Now why would you go and think a thing like that?
When person X buys item Y from company Z, company Z is unlikely to broadcast that fact. Ergo, the 'system' doesn't know that you have now brought item Y and that you no longer have an active interest in purchasing Y.
*Things may have changed in 20 years so the above is just an outdated observation based on a brief stint at a turn of the century B2B marketing start-up.
Or someone goofed and forgot to include the exclude "item purchased" event in the criteria
This may conceivably be because having previously visited a website is a stronger indicator of interest than say, male 18-30 making $XYZ/yr.
It may also be purely coincidental and garbage. You were going to buy anyway/you already bought it.
The truth most often lies somewhere in-between.
The statistic rigor of the people purchasing these ads is not always the highest. The companies offering these solutions typically have very little reason to not sell as many ads as possible, as long as the metrics look good.
In the end consumers are blasted with stalking ads that they don't want and the entire industry is shooting itself in the foot
Where are you getting your information? There are entire businesses built solely on top of FB/Insta/etc ads. I went 15+ years on the internet without buying anything from an ad, and then in the last 5, I've made at least 5 conscious, purchases from Insta ads. They've become really good in recent years.
It's hard to believe the economy is dumping almost 100B/year into a product that doesn't work.
Seing how massively even Google have mistargeted me and lots and lots of others I'm even sure it is a fluke anymore:
AFAIK Google sells ads not by the click anymore but by the impression. Now, how do you maximize revenue? You show the most expensive ad to as many people as possible.
A little (ok, a lot) of fudging here and there and I am a target demographic for shady dating sites / mail order brides / senior dating / gay cruises for 13 consecutive years.
Was it ever relevant to me? No way. I even repeatedly reported those ads.
Does relevant ads exist? As Facebook has proven a few times: yes.
Did Google earn a lot from them? Probably yes.
There are many success stories with ads. I’ve been involved with two exits that is all attributed to digital advertising. No where else do you get a ROAS in the double digits. Here is a good example of the difference. When I worked for a challenger bank. We paid under $75 per signup and $10 per app install. Chase and BOA pays $1200 per new customer in marketing expenses using traditional marketing channels.
If those figures are even near the ballpark, this would surely represent a significant blow to FB. If widely circulated, this could be wielded to some effect in a campaign by FB detractors/rivals.
But who are the FB ads rivals that aren't affected in a similar manner by this change? Since the tracking permission isn't specific to FB, wouldn't other players with a similar business model also be negatively impacted?
Google. Apple's privacy changes restrict tracking from within mobile apps like Facebook and Instagram. Google is primarily browser-based and remains largely unaffected.
Perhaps I am unduly influenced by the sorts of ads that I like, which tend to be posters, billboards or, just occasionally, TV/cinema/online pre-rolls. My favourite example would be the success of a Levi's ad from the '80s, see [1]: ‘It was a piece of magic’: How Levi’s ‘Laundrette’ ad led to an 800% sales boost
Yes, I realise that no small company can afford such advertising as that, but in a previous life, when I spent about a year in advertising sales for a local newspaper, I was wined and dined about a dozen times by local firms who'd let me come up with ad copy for them, and sometimes a campaign, who (rightly or wrongly) attributed a sales boost to my efforts.
Anyhow, you make a good point nonetheless.
[1] https://www.marketingweek.com/levis-laundrette-sales-boost/
> Yes, I realise that no small company can afford such advertising as that, but in a previous life, when I spent about a year in advertising sales for a local newspaper, I was wined and dined about a dozen times by local firms who'd let me come up with ad copy for them, and sometimes a campaign, who (rightly or wrongly) attributed a sales boost to my efforts.
I mean, the fact that this isn't really a thing anymore is almost certainly part of what kills local media nowadays, and by a kind of vicious cycle also helps kill local businesses. It used to be that small, local businesses weren't competing on the same playing field as large (inter)national businesses. They'd get local eyes on local ads in local venues. That would keep local media alive, and the ads would keep local businesses competitive.
Now they fight with national brands for ad space on national platforms where they're outspent for more narrowly targeted ads than were ever possible in the old days. Local media dies to national media, local businesses die to national businesses, meanwhile the national media gets bigger and richer every day.
Can’t wait to see more paid placement in content, getting around my paid subscriptions, ad blockers, and “do not track” requests.
It looks like the 7% and 13.6% figures the article quotes are the initial revenue decreases for a single quarter, which the model assumes would recover thereafter. In general, the model is based on some very, um, stylized assumptions. I'm really skeptical that a 12.5% increase in the number of users who block tracking (from 80% to 90%) would result in a 60% increase in the impact of that blocking on revenue.
That said, I don't think the numbers are drastically out of line. Apparently >60% of Facebook's revenue is from iOS, so it wouldn't take that large of a decrease in efficiency for the revenue hit to end up in the 10% ballpark. The main question to me is the extent to which the loss is borne by Facebook or by advertisers. It's possible that advertisers are effectively price-takers and will keep paying basically the same amount despite a decrease in efficiency.
... proceeds to lament said small businesses ...
If you ask me, if businesses have come to be 100% dependent on Facebook, isn't Facebook a monopoly that should be broken up?
Hopefully this will signal a pivot in ad tracking and lead more companies to try subscription based services.
I highly doubt this. I suspect this will instead signal a pivot to products that are intrinsically "trackable".
It's important to remember that ATT doesn't disable tracking in its entirety, it only disables cross-app tracking. It's only harmful to your business if you are reliant on tracking users while they are not using your product.
Lots of products will continue doing fine - think about Google Search, where you directly tell Google what you want. There is not necessarily a huge need to track you while you are not using the product - after all, the product literally revolves around you directly telling Google what you want.
The products that will benefit the most are the ones that a) shows ads, and b) where the product's functionality intrinsically collects information about the user without the need to rely on third-party data.
Oddly enough FB's apps fit decently into this. Your behavior within the FB main app are still "fair game" as far as tracking goes, and FB shows ads directly in the app.
I guess ads will continue to work about as well as before and then ad buyers will realize they can buy ads directly instead.
I am not quite sure what advertisers are complaining about. Facebook should still be able to track purchases of physical goods, since most of those will require an email address and facebook can use that to link up the sales.
Web site retargeting is not really affected by this. I guess people using shopping apps would be impacted, but a lot of those folks will be logged in and trackable. This article references "Most retail websites" but they are not affected by the recent change (ITP does affect them, but that is not new).
App downloads are probably much less trackable and that would definitely be affected.
I really nearly fainted when I saw my location history on google and now that I have a firewalled Huawei with Google forbidden on it, I finally feel a bit location-safe :D And it's not that I care that americans know where I am, it's that people can just get my phone/account, people close to me, and track me, eww.
I really am impressed you found relevant stuff on instagram, but I found that desiring less things is usually just as rewarding as getting an add for the right flavor of yoghurt.
It's mostly been small alternative-type stores, typically for clothes which I'd have never even found out about otherwise but match my aesthetic presumably because they just advertise to a niche audience like me based on the data.
I'm sure some of you have some experience working in the "ad supported" space, and obviously most of the internet and many of its services run on the ad model. So where are we going to end up if there is a full on public distrust of the current ad model?
I never understood why these companies don't offer paid options with no ads or tracking, at least in adddition to the ad supported "free" version.
Patreon, paid newsletters and paid news subscriptions are all mature industries now. Why do we act like the sky's going to fall if the spigot of useless memes, influencer primping and political propaganda gets turned off?
Influencers get their own vanity URLs with discounts and tracking attached, so attribution is no issue, beyond the friction of the extra 'link in bio' step. It'll be recorded accurately whether or not the vendor's site has the Facebook Pixel installed.
Not sure I get this. Presumably an e-commerce site knows it’s been clicked from an ad due to the url. This must be referring to sites that aren’t recording that and relying on some Facebook pixel in the checkout or aren’t handling cookies themselves to remember when people have visited before.
It's not technically challenging to track users if they click on your ads
I don't even believe that 25% of users actually wanted tracking. I think a lot of people just blindly tap buttons to make annoyances go away, and these guys just hit the wrong button.
Something like Deny Tracking Allow Tracking
instead of the "Ask app not to track" I have to read the prompt a few times to make sure i pick the right one
But yeah, my preference would be just something like "Do not track".
1) It denies the app access to the IDFA identifier that is used for tracking. This is 100% reliable, apps just will not get this if you click "Ask app not to track".
2) It signals to the app that it is not to track you using any other method either. There is no technical way to enforce this, so it is up to the app developer to honour this themselves. Apple will do some checks to make sure you follow this, but there is obviously no way they can detect this reliably. All they have is the threat of kicking you out of the app store if you get caught.
https://9to5mac.com/2021/04/27/what-does-ask-app-not-to-trac...
https://www.reddit.com/r/ios/comments/ma7gwx/why_does_it_say...
Where’s the subscription management startup model?
The problem is that subscription services make billions annually on forgotten subscriptions. None of them want an easy "disable" slider next to their name in a convenient app. It also makes à la carte subing easy, where you sub for a month every few months to "catch up".
Basically, good luck getting an API with an easy unsubscribe command from any subscription based service.
Make introductory rates low and let people lock in. If they unsub and then resub they will have to do so at a higher rate.
The key word here is "programmed" - and what has been programmed can be deprogrammed. I honestly believe that we can re-rehabilitate people to no longer automatically give away their privacy for a service, and instead consciously and carefully assess the financial cost vs. utility of a service.
This could lead to both a reduction in the amount of available services (as smaller ones go out of business because people realized that it wasn't really worth it for them) and an increase in the number of services people are actually willing to pay real money for.
Also, if the subscriptions were far cheaper (say, $2/month), I think that 20 concurrent subscriptions would be acceptable to many people.
It is definitely possible to have “nice” ads, like simple text or images, with no creepy or CPU-draining elements in them. Nothing is preventing those ads from supporting free services.
Within the Google search itself, I was surprised by the number of ads that are disguised as search results. It's grown significantly. Now I have to scroll to get real results...
They also didn't used to trick unsophisticated or distracted users into clicking ads by putting them inline with search results.
Both changed, I assume, when someone was allowed to run an experiment and the projected profit trend line went from "exceptionally good" to "holy shit, it's all the money in the world". And all it took was being evil. Go figure.
Some tie this to internal fallout from the the DoubleClick acquisition, which checks out pretty well timeline-wise.
Without that promise, there’s no reason to favor advertising on these platforms over other platforms. Which, if you flip it around, means that there’s no reason that these platforms should be valued in excess of the traditional-advertising-impression-value of their MAU. (Which is, to be clear, a lot lower than the value these companies currently have!)
The GP comment said:
> Nothing is preventing those ads from supporting free services.
And my thought is, a zero-or-negative profit margin might very well be. It costs a lot to run Google/Facebook/etc. — probably a lot more than it costs to run the types of services they compete with. For the companies to not go bankrupt, their ad clicks/impressions need to be of at least as much value as their CapEx+OpEx. With adtech type ads, they certainly are at least that valuable. With only traditional type ads, would they still be?
I'm not arguing that these companies should be allowed to do this because they have some fundamental right to exist, mind you. Just pointing out that taking adtech out of the equation could "pop the bubble" drive margins negative, and just erase the whole free-ad-supported-services market entirely.
(Consider: why don't traditional-ads companies offer free web services supported by said traditional ads? Is it only because nobody cares about buying placement with them when targeted placements are available from Google/Facebook/etc.? Or is it because, even with full dealflow, it's still negative-margin?)
Precisely. Instead, there will (again) be reason to favor advertising on high quality content.
Redistribution of income away from ad platforms and content spam mills to original journalism and high-quality entertainment would be an unambiguous win for society.
(Whether this is a good or bad thing depends on your perspective.)
When paid services are normalized, it opens up a huge amount of potential for smaller players to innovate.
I despise ads, and generally approve of anything that makes ad companies sweat, but it didn't have to be that way. We are where we are because those ad companies have a sociopathically disrespectful attitude towards the people whose attention they need. With tactics like auto-playing videos, popovers, animated ads, and hideously obtrusive design, it was simply inevitable that people would try to get rid of that garbage. That approach to advertising is borne of greed and laziness, and it deserves to fail.
But there are tech blogs I read that do not adopt that approach. They have small, tasteful, non-animated ads. They don't need to violate my privacy to have a good idea of the kinds of things I'd be interested in; the fact that I'm on a tech blog means I'm more receptive to ads for tech-related tools and services. The people who run these sites have more respect for their visitors, so they choose a more respectful approach to ads.
Like I said: most companies' approach to ads is rooted in abject contempt for the people they need. If your business strategy is based on treating people badly, you have no grounds to complain when they decide not to put up with that anymore. You can either whine about how unfair it is and fail, or you can identify an approach that is appealing enough to be sustainable.
This could be a chance for that much-vaunted market-force-shaped innovation. Facebook's current strategy—whining—suggests they're still stuck in the old way of thinking: greed and laziness.
Personally, I hope things like this start to kill off the "free internet." I'd much rather pay for the things that I use.
Bonus: Maybe this will be an opportunity for content providers to reset the decline of advertising prices that has happened over the last decade. (Remember the blooming blogger scene in the 2000s, when you could still make substantial revenues? Remember the thriving online news papers? We could get back there, if advertising became less invasive and less aggressive and also more profitable for content providers, e.g., how it had been in print.)
I guess, reducing distraction and moving towards a client-based and user-controlled "ads manager" may have a decisive impact on overall blocking habits.
No matter what there would be discrepancies in the numbers (publisher says it sent 75 clicks, advertiser says it got 70) and that breeds mistrust. Participants have a reason to lie. Having multiple third party watch the whole thing helps them trust each other.
P.S.: The general idea of targeted advertising misses the concepts of state of mind and focus of interest entirely. There's a (significant) difference in delivering a message in context and out of context. (The latter may have even adversarial effects.)
Is this an argument for the open web, or is this an argument for Google being more popular than Facebook? If the former, I am with you. If the latter, the gap is not as big as you might think - 4 billion worldwide users of Google Search vs 2.85 for Facebook [1]. Slight advantage to Google, but how many US advertisers really care about international buyers? When it comes to advertising, you want people with money burning holes in their pockets. Facebook's financial results show that they plenty of access to this demographic.
> The general idea of targeted advertising misses the concepts of state of mind and focus of interest entirely. There's a (significant) difference in delivering a message in context and out of context.
You're slightly lagging with this argument. This exact reason was why Google was so dismissive of paid social back in the formative years of Facebook ("who gives a shit about what college students talk about on social networks?"). And then the oh shit moment happened in 2011. Eric Schmidt had to step down and Larry Page tied bonus payouts to the success of Google Plus. You have to give Larry some credit here - while a bit slower than Zuck, he did see the writing on the wall before the rest of the world did. If you tried advertising on both platform in 2011, Google would just crush you with their results. By 2016, Facebook was already competitive with their interest and lookalike targeting for a large group of advertisers (and even enabled Trump to win the presidency), and by 2018 the game had advanced to the new concept of "creative targeting" which is basically entirely driven by the algorithm and takes minimal targeting input from advertisers. At that point, paid social became so good that it got creepy and turned the public sentiment to negative and incentivized Apple to jump on the band wagon with iOS 14.
So I wouldn't agree with your argument that Facebook has a fundamental problem with recognizing intent. If anything, they are too good at it for their own sake.
[1] https://review42.com/resources/google-statistics-and-facts/
On a historical note, as it turned out G+ was soon scrapped and quite a loss, while we're dealing still with the fallout of Google's uniform platform strategy, which was put in place to provide for G+.
For instance, there are discontents around Nielsen (they've had scandals in India, and I infuriate people in the TV industry with the suggestion that a Nielsen home got bribed to blast MTV in an empty room) but the participants believe in Nielsen: people know probability-based sampling basically works.
This is very common on HN these days - stating something with a lot of confidence that turns out to be some self-constructed mental model that has nothing to do with reality. Then, add the obligatory "all related studies are showing it" and you have met the publishing standards.
Legally or illegally, morally or immorally, for better or worse, Facebook has created the most sophisticated ad targeting engine the world has ever seen. You want proof? Look at their financial statements. You want more proof? Look at all the companies that went public on the back of Facebook's ad targeting engine. Again, perhaps it shouldn't exist in the first place, but trust me, it works.
That said, I've never come upon a study that showed significant gains due to targeting, rather to the contrary. – So, after a decade, I'm still waiting for any proof in favor of targeting. (The suspicion must be still that targeting is rather a lazy alternative to media analysis and its perceived advantage is rather rooted in minimising efforts than in effectiveness.)
Regarding "Facebook has created the most sophisticated ad targeting engine", this is a rather biased proposition. It has enforced Facebook as a broker, made advertising cheap, while less effective, and has driven ad revenues for content providers downhill. (Google is to blame, as well.)
* Consultancies that improve marketing campaign efficacy make lots of money
* HN users are making small fractions of that money and constantly complaining about it
* Any HN user capable of picking this low hanging fruit could do this for two years and retire for life
* They are not
* Conclusion: Either there is no low hanging fruit, or the HN users observing this are making millions of dollars, or these HN users do not care for money at all and get greater utility from complaining about money.
You could also conclude from your remarks that there is a pervasive idea around ad teams that former generations (in the times of media analysis) were just delivering complete failures. However, this model had delivered for more than a century. How could this model perform with todays instruments and data?
In software, we call this "talk is cheap; show me the code", but of course here you don't need to show me the code. It's just that you're letting this golden opportunity go to waste. Up to you, I guess.
Edit: Moreover, you had to compete with the paradigm of low effort, high interchangeability and big data. (Meaning: interchangeable code, interchangeable users, interchangeable professionals, interchangeable clients, and lean know-how stack as it's "all in the data". While this adheres to criteria of optimization, it doesn't necessarily mean that it represents an optimum of effectiveness, as well.)
Those are someone else's words, not mine. I never argued that winning on Facebook is "easy" (and for the record, neither is it on Google). It's not easy, it's just doable. And for those who have the skills and resources to do it, it's massively profitable. I would even argue that if you're letting an agency run your Google or Facebook account, you're lacking the resources to do it right. What you need is top-level talent competing against your nearest competitors, and winning battles inch by inch. An agency will never give you the talent you need to go up against a company that just raised $100m and is running their performance marketing in-house (and if you don't have such a competitor, then you're either smarter than anyone else in the world, or simply not pursuing a VC-investable market).
So no, it's not easy at all. But it's doable and totally worth it.
Homeopathy peddlers make a killing, so does the agile consultants and th catholic Church, if this is proof they must both be right?
Just because someone made loads of money doesnt mean their claims are sciebtifivally valid.
> All related studies are showing that the latter isn't working anyway.
I pointed out that Facebook wouldn't be profitable if the ad platform is ineffective, and you called that argument fallacious. I am really curious to hear what's fallacious about it.
It just means that Facebook is good at selling ads, whether they are effective or not.
> It just means that Facebook is good at selling ads, whether they are effective or not.
Facebook doesn't sell ads. Marketers choose to sign up and spend money, because their jobs depend on being able to achieve ROAS targets. Contrary to popular belief, the world of marketing is very quantified and apart from experimental budgets, most of the money is spent on channels that are proven to work.
But without getting any deeper into all of this, I think I found my answer - it appears that at least a subsegment of people on HN believe that over 100BN of ad dollars (25% of overall digital ad market) is spent on Facebook in an unprofitable way, and that 5 million marketing teams get away with it, year after year. Hence, it's possible for Facebook to achieve great financial results without their ad platform being effective.
1) Nobody is saying that ads aren't profitable or that marketers are throwing money out the window because they are stupid. The discussion is about whether invasive user tracking is effective. Ads can be profitable even though user tracking is ineffective.
2) This thread also is mostly about your very weak argument. You wrote:
> Facebook has created the most sophisticated ad targeting engine the world has ever seen. You want proof? Look at their financial statements.
That's just not a good argument. Who knows, maybe Facebooks tracking really is the best thing in the world, but the fact that Facebook is raking in loads of cash on its own tells us very little about how effective their user tracking is.
You said:
> I am really curious to hear what's fallacious about it.
But apparently that was just a figure of speech, not an actual question.
1) People want the services more than they value their privacy. Maybe they'll just not use the service if they can't use it without tracking
2) That invasive tracking is required to sell ads. The media industry made billions (trillions?) of revenue from ads before tracking became a thing.
3) That platform ads are the only way to make services that are free for consumers. For example, Vimeo offers an ad free video delivery service that the content creator pays for. If Youtube was no longer free, maybe content creators would just pay for content delivery instead of having consumers indirectly pay for deliver with ads. Content creators have no issue selling ads / sponsorships without any tracking whatsoever. The result would be the same as now (content free for consumers) only that now non-targeted ads would pay for everything.
4) And finally, you are assuming that targeting via tracking actually works well enough to make it worthwhile. From what I've read, ad targeting is nowhere near as good as Facebook et al would have advertisers believe. Maybe invading your users privcy just doesn't make such a big difference in the end.
Or they'll just go outside and find better uses for their time.
Imagine that your entire business is only appealing to people if it is free.
I mean a lot of crappy 70's sitcoms would not exist if people had to buy tickets to watch. Honestly, I would not mind that world. :-)
People really like free. When it's there, it will tend to suck the air out of almost everything else. Including things that are almost-but-not-quite-free.
I think there's much more evidence to the contrary than there is for your position.
Facebook is absurdly, staggeringly profitable. Uber and WeWork by comparison are the BS business models, needing to break local laws and requiring nation-state levels of VC backing and still nowhere near profitability.
Because it is stealing - the transactions were not voluntary and informed. most users are only now catching on to what they've been robbed of.
If FB's targeting wasn't working, then nobody would have a reason to move away from paying Google and Bing to post ads on search results. FB and Google now own the online ads market, and FB got there in well under a decade.
I'm reminded of a comment from the guy that created the TV-B-Gone. He would turn off TV's in public places like self-service laundromats, etc. He said he was surprised by the general reaction of those that had just recently been transfixed by the flickering 60Hz cathode glow. Mostly they just turned away form the TV and went back to quiet thoughts or whatever.
It was like the TV could go away and people would be like, "okay".
I would definitely find it relieving if someone showed up with a TV-B-Gone and clicked it off.
20+ paid subscriptions make no sense, but checking a box with your ISP to get a 2 USD monthly credit to use on the articles you click on, could work.
Which gives them leverage. If they were better organized, they could make demands based on that leverage.
This is a real phenomenon known as consent fatigue.
Would they be willing to accept the end of Facebook to stop the tracking? No. How do we know that? Because they kept using it in the past.
Of course, if this catches on (and I hope it does), we ultimately run up against “people prefer not to pay for things.” Will be fun to watch.
(Making social media harder to access cuts both ways, of course; it's entirely possible that limiting social media to those who can pay would only amplify the voices of bad guys with money. Does make me wonder how much social media toxicity is related to these sites being totally free, though.)
I wonder, are people who use facebook and who would prefer to not have their eyeballs monetized like this not aware of Facebook's business model?
How do they think Facebook will stay operational? I personally think it's best to just drop Facebook, but I'm sure my parents and grandparents would rather have Facebook with adds than no Facebook.
The same way ads work in print media - the publisher doesn't have as detailed targeting info for the advertiser, and presumably would charge less.
Do adds in print media not "monetize people's eyeballs" also?
> The publisher doesn't have as detailed targeting info for the advertiser, and presumably would charge less.
Okay but I was responding to a claim about adds not tracking.
Seems to me like using something else would be easier, or at least make for a happier life.
Like if I don't like spinnach but I really need to get some fiber, it seems like the simpler option is to find another way to get fiber, rather than eating spinnach while constantly moaning to the whole world how spinnach is just the worst.
But a more direct answer to the question is they don't think about it, they don't care about it, or they don't want Facebook to stay in business. If Facebook crashed tomorrow I would need to start emailing a bunch of people to put together contacts but other than that it would be a net benefit.
Why not start today?
However, if nobody could be monetized, then Facebook couldn't exist, making those people (for whom monetization of their eyeballs is an acceptable cost in exchange for Facebook) to be worse off.
The only reason piracy and ad-blocking haven't totally killed for-profit media is because most people don't use them (either because they don't know how, for legal or ethical reasons, or because it's a hassle).
Anyone know how this would work? My spidey-sense is tingling here at the thought of apps scanning data on my phone!
they still cluster you, but instead of collecting your browsing activity from partner websites, they do it locally using browser history that doesn't leave your device, and the net effect is that you have an equivalent of a browser cookie or additional http request header that doesn't identify you, but does identify your cluster memberships.
some people are still not ok with this, i'm on the fence.
Good point about the scanning, though. These scumbags certainly would try to pull something like that off.
I have zero sympathy for Facebook, advertisers, and businesses whose models depend on a fundamental privacy flaw in the design of the web. Business worked fine before that flaw existed and it will be fine after it's fixed.
I imagine a pop-up like this would auto-register for a lot of people the same as "accept the terms of service to continue"
Does anyone know what he's referring to in this quote? There isn't a way for advertisers to move their purchase flow onto Facebook's app is there?
So far I feel like this strategy has worked fine, 90% of the time I don't get served any unwanted content and I can view a decent timeline.
Gonna try it on Twitter though since you say it works...
I'd count that as progress as they are easier to ignore. The ones I don't want are those that are relevant enough that they might prompt a change in my behaviour.
For Instagram the web based app has no adverts, at least not on iOS/Firefox/NextDNS.
How about tracking, aggregation, selling and reselling your data, and abandoned privacy therefrom? Malware? Bandwidth from downloading all the non-content? Burning cpu's to run the teraquads of javascript?
They would realise that the quality of their audience is far more interested in the advertisments being shown than those that are thrown into peoples faces, tailored or not.
If I want to see ads, and I select "tailored ads on" my value as an audience should be far higher.
I'd go so far as to say that for a decade advertisers and social media experts have been given a more or less free ride.
It's often not the companies themselves who manages the ad buy, it's agencies who only knows how to click around in Facebook or Google AdWord. They have NO IDEA how to run an effective ad campaign or how to buy ad space.
The advertisers just see the numbers the agencies gives them, and in self defence user privacy is attacked and not the competency of the ad agencies.
This all makes me start feeling like I might finally want an iPhone...
The more accurate analogy would be the grocery store owner teaming up with other local businesses to aggregate your shopping habits across stores into a central database. What you're describing would be if facebook installed a RAT on your computer after visiting it.
Edit: although they do track your physical location in real time through the app. That's more direct spying.
But for that to happen you need to explicitly gave consent?
Or maybe don't use Facebook on Android?
For example?
Most companies and apps advertise on FB.
And block any and all Facebook DNS queries with a PiHole.
(I haven't yet worked out how to automate connection to VPN once out of range of my home wi-fi, or disconnection when in range, but doing it manually isn't much hassle).
I also have a cloud-hosted PiHole instance (planned as a service to friends and family), but that's still a work in progress that I'd actually semi-forgotten about...
Need more incentive? Just try finding the delete button on your Facebook or Instagram account. Go ahead, just look for it right now.
You weren't able to find it, right? Just "disable"? That's because you can only delete either account through the delete account page, which you can only navigate to via... a link. Nowhere in the UI leads to this. And the Instagram one clearly hasn't been maintained since 2007 or so.
Pages:
Instagram: https://instagram.com/accounts/remove/request/permanent/
Facebook: https://m.facebook.com/account/delete
Haven't deleted your account yet? Just think for a minute about why you maintain an account with a company that respects your autonomy so little that they make you jump through multiple obnoxious hoops just to delete your account. And make you wait a full month, just in case you aren't 100% sure. Because they're your friend.
Not only to communicate with friends and family, but also services like takeout, the plumber, etc.
I installed an adblocker and found that almost all sites with advertising would refuse to server content to my ipad, whereas an adblocker on my computer gets blocked only occasionally.
It seems if you have a iDevice people think you're made out of money.
Clearly that was either never the case, or things have changed. Or now there is the sense of "well maybe we can shove that genie back where it came from."
If you have to leave your social circle, or try to convert them all to something else, (or in the case of all those noncompliant GDPR warnings, tapping a button, waiting 15 seconds, tapping 4 more buttons) that is too much work and you give up
I'm not going to shed too many tears if businesses which were in the business of making my business their business go out of business. It was a bad business to begin with.
If ad publishers like Facebook generate less revenue per ad impression (which is what these tracking changes do), publishers will inevitably end up showing users more ads not less (to make up for the lost revenue).
How many more ads could they possibly squeeze in before people just give up using the platform?
I have been using an adblocker for a long time. But a few weeks ago I turned it off 'just to see'. The internet was a lot more 'noisy' than I remember it. I remember when one simple banner ad at the top of the page was considered 'crazy'. If only we knew.
Yeah sure, they can still track the click, but would lose visibility beyond that.
A potentially controversial take, but I believe that Apple can force developers to use SFSafariViewController to enhance privacy and UX, without too much blowback. SFSafariViewController is a privacy-friendly alternative that prohibits third parties from seeing your browsing data (unlike the custom in-app browsers used by apps like Instagram). I’ve yet to see a custom in-app browser that has ever provided a better experience than SFSafariViewController.
Exceptions could be provided where it makes sense. For example, I would still permit apps to load webpages owned by the developer in their own in-app browser (this is necessary for web-based logins, for example).
Oh right. They didn't even have an ad platform before 2008. Just bucketloads of VC money.
But, doesn't this increase competition for any other advertiser who doesn't have all historic data and algorithm Facebook has had.
In the US at least, yes, because most cell providers switched to IPv6 long ago. In other places, carrier-grade NAT is widespread.
Ridiculous.
Advertising and marketing have been, at least as far as my cultural memory extends past the 80s, cynical and soul sucking. Always trying to figure out what was going on in people's heads and spit out some amalgam of an image or lifestyle or identity for people to latch onto and, critically, for businesses to exploit.
The wrapping paper has eternally been "what's wrong with matching a product to a customer" and justifiably that is a difficult point to disagree with. If we are to have products and customers it is almost self-evident that they should be harmonized. But the premise in question presupposes that a customer will have a need; to the degree that needs are invented as much as the product even to justify the expenditure of resources to create a product in the first place. In the end we loop back to the the previous paragraph. Creativity in service of what? pure exploitation.
Software Engineering is, or can be, an exceptionally creative profession. That alone isn't justification for whatever we design! We must be more careful.
That needed some pretty clever set up from the marketing folks, company-specific graphics and stuff, and the pipeline to be per company. It was cool, man.
I mean, yeah, sure, lots of you guys would be like "OMG I would hate your company for that" etc. etc., but it turns out that's not how directors at big firms think.
If facebook wants this correlating data for outgoing traffic they should be asking to buy it from individual providers instead of assuming consent and scraping it via a side channel on your phone.
No-one else does.
I mean, if you know someone’s personal details, they per definition has lost that privacy towards you.
Having the data stored locally is certainly better than having it stored in someone else's database. No argument there, that's an improvement. But that's just making the problem slightly less bad, not solving it.
These sort of schemes just strike me as being sneaky ways of continuing to engage in the abuse that the adtech world loves so much. The major difference being mostly what machines are doing the tracking.
Also, of course, your browser history isn't exactly private even though it's stored on your machine.
Arguments against tracking/personalization I have heard in the past, which make sense to me, are that having all the data stored remotely gives a lot of power to an evil engineer or government to exploit your data. With a 100% local approach, based on data that is stored anyway, that aspect would go away.
I don't see how in that world personalized ads are worse than unpersonalized ads. Ads in general can be argued to have negative externalities (though I am not 100% convinced of that), but if we take their existence as a given, and the choice is between personalized and unpersonalized, I think I would prefer personalized.
No, the argument is that collecting data about me or my machines without my informed consent is bad. The purpose to which that data is put doesn't even come into play.
> With a 100% local approach, based on data that is stored anyway, that aspect would go away.
No, it doesn't. The exposure is certainly reduced, but companies can still determine quite a lot about you by combining the "cohorts" you're a part of with other data.
>I think I would prefer personalized.
I understand that. Personally, whether an ad is "personalized" or not doesn't increase or decrease the ad's utility to me, so I don't care about that directly (with one exception -- personalized ads deprive me of useful information about the site/app/whatever that I'm using: I no longer have clues as to what the target demographic of the site/app/whatever is.)
What I care about is stopping the incessant assault by the marketing companies in terms of spying.
Why didn’t I think of that?
Tracking users is necessary, otherwise we would have to spend way too much on ads. Tracking users is necessary, otherwise my small business can not survive. Tracking users is necessary, otherwise we can not understand who our customers are. Tracking users is necessary, otherwise we can not identify new customers. Tracking users is necessary, otherwise we can not evaluate the effectiveness of our ads.
If your business success relies on tracking everyone all the time, then you have no fucking business and should go out of business.
I do personaly have a problem with not being given the choice, also it should be an opt-in option. Privacy shouldn't be compromised and then restored after the data is already gone.
I generally agree with the poster. A majority of "modern" companies that pop up have one of two strategies nowadays:
1. No sustainable business model, nothing to sell to users. Grow as fast as possible, get bought by one of the established megacorps.
2. The product is kind of there, but it is only an excuse to grab as much data as possible. Again nothing to sell to actual users.
The ad business has kind of become a market that trades among themselves, they don't sell anything but the promise for others to sell more, except now companies that mainly sell ads also buy advertisements for their business.
It's become a huge house of cards and you really have to wonder what the reason for their existence is.
Thinking purely as a customer the fact that I have just no way to just give a company my money and in turn they'll just leave me alone with all of their useless and hostile bull** is hugely frustrating and I think they deserve to go out of business if they truly have no other way to keep the shop running.
No, I do not want this single strawberry for free just for you to break into my house and photocopy as many documents as you can (and leak them to the public a few months later because you don't care a single bit about keeping your data secure)...
Informed consent is almost always lacking. 99.999% of people party to it do not understand this bargain. Do you fully understand it or just "in principle" - which is fine until the rubber hits the road.
"All you have to agree to is being warm, sensitive and caring to our clients." Fine. Prostitution should be legal and absolutely nobody should be subject to it on that basis of understanding what they're signing up for.
Properly informed consent is always crucial to this argument that people are fine with it. The dishonesty, bait and switch, ongoing secretiveness of it should not be necessary and would not happen if it were informed consent. But that consumer fraud being perpretrated 100% built google and facebook. There is not now nor has there ever been consent. Morever when consent is completely withdrawn - you delete your account - they keep a shadow account. To HELL with them and those who pretend all this is honest and above board because it just isn't.
Businesses assume that every user is a customer, and have inflated profit goals. You're right about entitlement.
I loved my grandmother but targeted ads always remind me of the junk my grandma would get me for Christmas. She knew enough to be in the ball park but because she was in the ball park my taste is more picky and ultimately I never liked almost anything she got me.
No. It is in fact your sense of entitlement that makes us sick.
Update: ok, after checking danbruc's comment history, they probably weren't arguing for tracking, and the second paragraph should be read in third person... I'll take my downvotes ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
You haven't read the whole thing.
What's convoluted about your argument is you are asking the service provider to change their business model by pointing our somewhere along the chain they are making money from you so they should be happy. Changing business models might also mean completely changing the way they provide the service. The whole service might have evolved differently if this model was enforced from the beginning rather than suddenly springing it on them now and then saying "make money in a way that's more convenient for me, I don't like how you make money now".
Their business model, leaving aside the ethics/merits, is pretty simple. They offer targeted users on a platter to advertisers. It's easy to package up and sell. Suddenly that's being taken away. Of course they will kick and scream because they've depended on this predictable money making model. Saying "I buy things so you make money" doesn't even make sense. They become no different to a billboard provider.
And it matters how you divide it up. You could have a high ticket price and give away all the food for free but that big upfront payment would probably be off-putting for many even if they end up not paying more. For people who only want to ride some roller-coaster and not eat and drink your offering is now not attractive. Other people would exploit your offering, eating only the most expensive stuff in huge quantities.
You could also do it the other way around, have no tickets and pay for everything individually. This will change the entire experience and you have the added complexity of processing payments in many more locations. And all this also applies to you tax example, some services are only used by some part of the population, the other part might be unhappy to also pay for it. If you do not have a driving license, why should you pay for driving license renewals? On the opposite end of the spectrum you might have healthcare where you want to spread the risk across everyone and not only have those pay that actually need it. Its all mostly a matter of trade-offs and incentives how you structure it.
To make the analogy more fitting, imagine Disneyland not charging you for tickets. But they put up cameras and track you all day long, record what you eat, with whom you visit the park, what merchandise you buy, and measure some chemical indicators when you use their toilettes. And then they sell this information to other companies to pay for your visit to Disneyland.
Bingo! This is exactly my point! To go off what you said, if Disneyland operated like how you described (selling your data for income), the park would be completely different. They would be optimized to collect that data because the whole park was built on the premise that everything is free and we are going to siphon as much from you in the form of data. Every ride in the park will be built to gather that data. However since Disneyland is not that, they haven't optimized for data collection. It's built on making you happy by the time you leave, not making you spend as much time as possible in the park. You seem to want to walk into a Disneyland that's optimized for data collection and be like "Wow you guys are collecting too much data! You guys anyway make money from me buying stuff! Just stop collecting my data! I pay for all I use indirectly though the stuff I buy!" <--- That's convoluted and unfair. Your sudden awakening for privacy concerns doesn't suddenly replace all the lost income that they have depended on and everyone has willingly given for so long. You can't just wave a magic wand on such a fundamental business model change and expect it to be fixed after your sudden change of mind. It's incredibly naïve to thing you can change business models like that. Companies live and die on their business models.
Again looping back to the things you mentioned about two Disneylands - they are completely different. It was you who changed in between. Suddenly you feel that they are not entitled to your data. But you've been giving them your data for years, and got them hooked on it. And now suddenly you are disgusted. Nothing wrong with changing or wanting different things but you feeling disgusted suddenly says a lot more about you than them.
Personally I think its a necessary change but I would have liked to seen it implemented in a more regulatory level but over a longer period of time so everyone has time to change. Apple is acting in an extremely predatory manner. They are forcibly lowering the quality of their competitor's ad network quickly so suddenly their ad network becomes a lot more viable. I wouldn't be surprised to see a big jump in the ad network spend over the next few years. They're doing all this under the guise of protecting the user but it's obviously bullshit. This is very clear with their vehement opposition of right to repair. They don't care about the consumers. They want to keep growing and they will keep doing so by whatever means necessary (under the guise of protecting consumers) to achieve this goal.
Tha value of Facebook is in its users, not the people who write the website's PHP and run the servers. It is commonly agreed that writing a Facebook clone is not a difficult task. That value is the users. There is a reason Facebook will never charge a usage fee to anyone.
Zero, hopefully. I am not much of a Facebook user.
"How are they going to maintain their website from zero money they get from you paying for internet access?"
That's not my concern. They ran the website without ads for years. They later received millions in investment. There is no such thing as infinite growth. The multi-billion-page website with content of pages uploaded by users for free and moderation performed by low-paid workers in other countries idea is an experiment that might be a failure. Time will tell. But as I said, I am not a user, so it is not my concern.
"How are you going to put all your content online..."
I am not going to do that. Not really my thing. I prefer to submit my public thoughts and ideas to HN. If I want to communicate and share stuff with family, friends and colleagues I do not think using a page on someone else's website is a great solution. Peer-to-peer makes more sense.1 The fees I pay for internet access cover that cost.
1 However I do not believe Facebook's "assistance" is needed, e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirehog
Do you think Y Combinator investments don't use tracking? You would get laughed out of a room if you said you track nothing and have a solid product. A phone call to ask about your product is tracking because it all gets recorded and noted.
I welcome the day such intrusions are rendered illegal or impractical, so that the market can price these offerings appropriately. Until then, why not use what exists?
The GDPR was an attempt. Guess what happened? Everyone implemented it in such a way as to appear compliant but not necessarily be compliant, and to cause maximum annoyance to the user.
What the solution is here is to have an educated population and powerful privacy tools, like uBlock Origin. [1]
But of course, the surveillance oligopoly is developing its own browser [2], specifically to maintain control and make it hard to implement such tools [3].
[1] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Blocking-mode:-medium...
[2] https://news.softpedia.com/news/google-chrome-microsoft-edge...
[3] https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-issues/issues/338
You're right that GDPR hasn't been enforced strongly enough. It is actually quite a good law (imperfect, but pretty good).
I donate money to NOYB (https://noyb.eu/en/our-detailed-concept) to fight for enforcement of the law.
Quality for consumers has only ever been truly won by regulation - all major economies heavily regulate all industries. The market didn't make food safe, regulation was needed (see history e.g. https://www.hygienie.org/a-brief-history-of-uk-food-safety-l...).
Those are not free, the users are paying for them with their share of the ad budget in the price of all the products they buy. And I am not complaining about ads per se - even though I would personally prefer if they disappeared and I could directly pay for the services I use - but about the tracking behind them.
ex. $5 per month from 1000 HN readers is only $5000. This is petty money if you want and all swinging, all dancing product, profit and work/life balance.
You should check out Indie Hackers which is essentially a graveyard of products, ideas and people asking why their $3 per month product is not being purchased or used.
You using software for free and in return providing some data in return is the old barter system. Which many people would love to go back to...
That said, advertising without tracking across multiple sites/apps is perfectly viable - The New York times does it (https://stuntbox.com/blog/2020/05/new-york-times-third-party...).
So clearly people are happy to be advertised to so why not show them things they might be interested in via tracking?
Honestly what would be really interesting to me would be to give users a clear-cut choice between tracking vs paying. E.g. replace the dialog in the article with a choice between allowing Facebook to track your activity across other companies' apps and websites or paying a $2/mo subscription fee. I am not so delusional as to think that 75% of people will opt for the subscription, but it would be really interesting to see how many actually would!
Which is weird in itself, not exactly sure how we ended up in this spot. People in a restaurant or a bar are never thinking whether they should order another drink that will be gone in a couple of minutes based on the costs but they refuse to spend one dollar on buying a mobile game that they play for hours and hours and that forces them to watch an ad every minute.
Ask someone for £3 for a full vehicle check to know if it's been stolen, crashed, written off, still on finance (basically major headaches) is way too much of an ask.
An example that I have is my project that does the above. 300 free checks and 5 premium checks 6 months later, I still scratch my head at how people are scared of buying 2nd hand cars but literally do nothing to protect themselves.
Charge customers. Go ahead. In the first place, Advertisers are the actual customers. Freemium models for retail consumers are a business choice.
People are notoriously bad at processing obscured costs. You see it with things like plastic pollution and waste - that cost is never added to the price of M&M packaging. Tomorrow if it were, people would respond logically and change their buying habits.
To call this entitlement, when its an issue of market structure, is to drive this conversation into identity and morality arguments.
The dominant models in tech are some version of freemium, because “network effects”.
Solve for that either technically or legally and you don’t have to start attributing blame where none exists.
This. If something has commercial value, then put a price on it. We've had currency for thousands of years now. It's a really useful way of signaling value in a commonly understood way. Much more efficient than barter.
Stop asking us to barter away data for services. If the service is truly worth something, then put a clear price on it and show some respect to your customers instead of trying to trick them.
Similar to how if an app sends just one spam notification, it's an uninstall and a 2 star rating.
The frog boiling that got me to block tracking and advertising in every way available to me was the era of the advertising hyperlink (late 2000s). An article would have what looked like hyperlinks to other stories or sources but were really just links to ads for products that matched that keyword.
If your cursor even hinted at hovering over them they would generate a popup with some obnoxious ad with a "close button" so small it was virtually impossible to click it without going to the advertiser site. Such sites would almost invariably spit out pop-unders, resize browser windows, and try to install browser toolbars.
When that style of ad got popular I started blocking domains in my hosts file and using GreaseMonkey scripts to block ads. I haven't stopped in the decade and a half since then. I don't oppose advertising nor do I necessarily oppose tracking since at the very least I can't hide from a server's access logs. I do oppose the absolute bottom feeding of AdTech companies.
I still cannot imagine that it is more effective to completely get to know me and subsequently serve me Makita ads for weeks because I looked for and bought a cordless drill months ago, then to serve me a context relevant ad. Like an SSD ad next to a benchmark article on SSDs. And that is on them, because they don't communicate. We should all try to make those companies fail. Our collective human attention is not something to be taken lightly. It was about time some company made a move that is pro their own paying users.
Reading this article also makes me feel like FB orchestrated this whole privacy horror, using consultants and lobbyists to convince the world they need tracking for good ads, because tracking is what FB does. But maybe we don't. I really wonder what happens if all these companies tell FB and the trackers: Let's see where this ends up, it may well be proven that they didn't need FB and its inane tracking in the first place. If you sell Mountain Bikes, just pay a website owner that lists MTB trails when you want some ads on their site. Disintermediation, it's what the internet is about. Sure there can and will be third party advertisers, but they could focus on site content rather than site visitors. And who knows, maybe I'll come to your site more often when I don't see that I blocked 79 trackers, downloaded 3 MB for some text and had to dig 3 pages into "options" for disabling tracking cookies finding out that I actually really can't.
You know who is a lookalike? All those other visitors on that site that targets a certain demographic.
“I don’t think anyone truly understands how many businesses in the world are 100% dependent on Facebook,” I think you have more problems when you are one of those companies, what's your plan B? Evidently you are not just dependent on FB, you are also dependent on something that the majority of your users really don't like.
IF a model is trained with historical data, that would be good enough to track without actually tracking.
Perhaps, even, we should require people to think and empathize and communicate rather than feed a pile of unvariegated data into a black box and do what it tells us to.
I'm shockingly OK with having to make a connection with people to try to sell them something, and to have that be an upper limit on a company's reach.
How is this the case?
If I have an online shop using any of the major tools and platforms out there, they all have the ability to tell when someone puts something into their carts and did or didn't buy it. They can all send an email to say "oi there, you forgot to buy <thing>. Here's a 10% discount if you buy it". In addition, I do know that there are addons in Shopify that will re-target stuff along the lines of "customers who bought X bought Y".
It sounds like advertisers are the ones losing out and crying here, not the shop owners!
On the other hand, ad spenders (people who buy inventory) want cost per action. You click my ad, you signup, then you purchase something, then pay the publisher a cut. FANNG pretends cost per action does not exist.
The current compromise between the two is cost per click. Removing tracking on the click would be a HUGE win for publishers (Google/FB). They could increase fraud and revenues. Ad spenders would be completely screwed spending money on fraud with no accountability.