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Comment by ApolloFortyNine | Hacker News Reader

>This tracking is not benefiting us.

Well unless you don't consider free access to video streaming (YouTube) or free access to news a benefit.

My honest opinion on all this has always been that the majority of people, if properly explained to that 'tracking' is never even viewed by a human, and even if it was, your identified as user 563758, would consider this a fair trade.

People largely think you can remove the tracking and access all the same content for free. But when the ads pay 90% less, it becomes much more difficult for the free content to survive.

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If you think a human never sees your information, you're sadly ill informed, I know 563758 lives in ottowa, the porn he searches for and that he's a vegan who is into electronic music from the 70s. These profiles are incredibly detailed, and available to every average advertiser.

These banners start with "your privacy is important to us", but they omit the next part of the phrase, but we'd like you to allow our partners to invade it.

The banners are there because the process is so abusive they need your consent to make 90% more.

>The banners are there because the process is so abusive they need your consent to make 90% more.

The banners are there because if you take away 90% of their revenue, they cease to exist. Imagine your salary reduced by 90% tomorrow unless you beg your boss daily for your full pay.

>If you think a human never sees your information, you're sadly ill informed

Are you under the impression ads are manually targeted? The only time someone at Google has ever laid eyes on your profile would be if somehow your profile bugged out and caused something to crash. And even if they did look at a single user's data, it would be meaningless without having the name attached. And even if the name was attached, it'd still be meaningless, because there's 300 million people in the US alone.

You have to strawman the absolutely perfect situation for it to even remotely matter.

> The banners are there because if you take away 90% of their revenue, they cease to exist.

I accept these conditions

You went to the website for some purpose no? So you'd rather not have gone to the website at all? So why did you attempt to visit the website in the first place?

It's just so irresponsible to take extremes like this, ignoring the amount of information and entertainment available on the internet.

In my experience, the number of ads, cookie banner shenanigans, and embedded Twitch streams is inversely correlated with the usefulness and quality of the website. Maybe if all of these websites went away, I could actually find useful information or entertainment on Google.

An internet maturing over twenty years full of hobbyist bloggers and forums rather than megacorp media and affiliate review sites is a world I’d be curious to experience.

Yes, I'd rather go to the ad-free website that they displaced (or at least out-SEO'd).

Look at the cookie consent page of any news article you read - your article is worth often 100+ people sharing my data. It's not, it's just not.

Do you know how many people get access to my search data? One. But your news article is worth 100x. How many get access to my streaming preferences? One. But your news article needs to violate my privacy 100x more.

Your arguments are sound in an imaginary world where six seconds of attention is worth being followed around for years. No.

Advertising does not require tracking. Remember over the air television and all it’s free news broadcasts.

Advertising with tracking barely covers costs, imagine without it.

Competitive markets reach equilibrium. With or without tracking it’s going to barely cover costs because otherwise more people enter the market due to minimal barriers to entry.

Sometimes equilibrium is 0.

We had ad supported websites well before tracking, so that seems like a non sequitur.

It think that means that advertising is not going to save content, and people will have to think of alternative revenue streams, because revenue from advertising is only going to go down.

Advertising without tracking would arguably cost less. Even if it makes less, it's not clear that the margin would be worse or non-viable.

Oh, I remember. They sucked! Both the ads and the news they funded.

Feel free to link to all these advertising supported websites better than Seinfeld. I could use a good laugh.

News was hit or miss. They did a lot of serious investigative reporting, but newspapers where simply a better medium for personalized in depth coverage.

If I had to choose between network television and YouTube, I would choose YouTube every day of the week and twice on Sunday. I mean, I enjoy Seinfeld too, but on the whole YouTube is both more entertaining and vastly more useful and educational than network television. Not because the content has the highest production values, but because the content matches my interests and needs. That's the true power of targeted advertising. It allows creators to focus on niches that can't be served by content produced for a mass audience. Even large 'niches' get dumbed down to the lowest common denominator for network television.

Case in point: Here's Jay Leno interviewing Elon Musk about SpaceX Starship for network television [1] vs YouTuber Tim Dodd [2]. Leno's program is fine for people who don't follow space. For my niche Dodd is vastly better, but he can't draw a wide enough audience to make money on non-targeted ads like Leno can.

And the thing is, everyone has their niches. There is no large population of people out there who are average in every way and need the network television version of everything. The average person doesn't exist.

[1] Leno: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wluBlr1j4qk

[2] Dodd: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t705r8ICkRw

Dodd got 6 million people watching a 1 hour segment. That valuable even without advertising targeting beyond estimates of viewership based on content.

Now, you can quibble about how much targeting increase revenue but the funny thing about total advertising is it’s fairly consistent through time. Tracking failed to significantly increase worldwide advertising spend, it only redirects it.

6 million views (a view only requires 30 seconds of watch time, not the full hour) over a period of 14 months, for the most viewed video ever on his channel. If he could draw that for every video, maybe he could come close to competing with Leno. But he can't. I mean, looking at YouTube numbers alone, Leno's show's most viewed video has 34 million views. And of course the vast majority of his viewership and revenue is elsewhere.

Dodd simply couldn't have a network television show with this kind of content. It wouldn't come close to making sense. If he did a network television show it would have to be a lot different, almost certainly in a direction that would make it less interesting for me personally.

My argument has nothing to do with global ad spend, that's a red herring. The key is how those ad dollars get distributed. Targeted advertising makes niche content viable in a way that non-targeted advertising can't match.

You can have non targeted advertising on niche content. In fact YouTube will display advertising to any user even those it knows nothing about.

The only difference is relative pricing, but again the global population and global advertising spend doesn’t depend on tracking so if it was banned little would actually change.

> global advertising spend doesn’t depend on tracking so if it was banned little would actually change

> The only difference is relative pricing

... the relative pricing difference is the whole difference I'm talking about. Without targeted advertising niche content makes less money, general audience content makes more. So you agree with me that this is true. Then you say that this is a small change. I say it has enormous effects on the content that gets produced. Honestly, this is transparently obvious.

It’s not that simple. Tracking doesn’t universally increase spend to all niche content, it reduces spend to some niche content and increases it to other niche content. So there would be some changes to which niche content is created but it’s not going away.

Just look at how much YouTube content is sponsored via an Ad inside the video. That isn’t tied to your personal history.

Certainly I wouldn't say that every single niche benefits from targeted advertising without exception. There are exceptions to every rule. But the vast, overwhelming majority of niche content would be worse off without targeted advertising, and this would overall have a strongly negative effect on the diversity of content produced.

Ok that I disagree with, if anything niche content in a world without tracking should attract a higher percentage of advertising.

If I manufacture say jigsaw puzzles and I can’t target individuals then I want to link to show up on a YouTuber with puzzle related content. But with tracking I shouldn’t care about the videos content as much and should be happy to show up on cat videos as long as tracking supports the association. That same logic would seemingly extend to any activity with associated products which is basically everything.

On the other hand soda manufactures are presumably less picky and could advertise on both.

Advertising soda is always worth it without targeting. But advertising jigsaw puzzles might not be. That jigsaw marketing money goes elsewhere, not YouTube, and YouTube jigsaw people don't have a lot of ads for their videos, because nobody else is choosing to specifically advertise on jigsaw videos. Maybe even if jigsaw people do advertise, they don't have a ton of money to spend on ads, so jigsaw content is still hurting. But with targeting, there are effective ads on every video, and content matters more than ad spend targeted at your niche. People choose the content they like by watching it, instead of advertisers choosing the content they like by steering their spending. Because there are far more people than there are advertisers, this promotes more diverse content.

We could continue to make up just-so stories about the effects of targeting on niche content. But I doubt we would convince each other. Is there any research on this topic?

Do you actually find that reasoning convincing or are you just trying to make a point?

Just look at Google. They became big by ads on the search site. Analysing the intent, not the history. If I search for a pen I want to buy a pen, thus an ad for buying a pen might be effective. If I bought a pen a day ago it is unlikely I am interested in pens for next few weeks. Look at the context of where the ad appears and match that.

To some degree that is how ads worked in print: In a magazine about horseback riding you will find ads about riding equipment, as readers are into that while reading.

Google bought doubleclick early on which is definitely ad tracking and not intent. It's important to remember the full history.

Google launched in 1998 and didn’t buy double click until 2008 when they could afford to spend 3.1 billion on it. So that was hardly an early purchase or required for extreme profitability.

"If I bought a pen a day ago it is unlikely I am interested in pens for next few weeks"

And yet whenever I buy anything online I'm inundated with ads for said item. In fact I almost wish there were an officially sanctioned/ standardised way of updating your status as a tracked user on various products you might be interested in or have in fact now purchased with no need to buy another soon. As it is I still see ads for baby formula on YouTube despite having had no need to purchase it for over 16 years (and I honestly would expect Google should know that about me, though when I ask Google Assist how old my children are it refuses to tell me...)

Google ad became big, television and news papers advertisement became small. The reasons were very obvious.

Google don't need to follow local law and regulations.

Google don't need to employ people to verify content or take legal responsibility.

Google can track users and thus categorize users in much more fine details than television and news papers ever could. A magazine about horseback riding might have a vague idea about who their readers are, but google can find out that a pregnant teenage girl has yet to tell her parents.

I think the biggest difference is simply a reduction in the relative amount of time watching TV. People see Google’s Ads at work, at home, and while waiting at line looking at their cellphones.

Let us test that theory.

Imagine that I went to a hospital and asked to get a copy of all the patients records. The contract I sign will say that no record should ever be viewed by a human, and if any human did read a record, patients would be identified by patient ID like 563758. In return patients would get services worth ~50 cent.

How many patients would consider this a fair trade?

In addition, drugs would get targeted advertisement, and the funds for advertisements would be raised through the profits of said drugs (ie, patients would be paying for it, by an average of $1 more per patient). Still, patients would get free services that costs the advertisement network ~50 cent per patient.

This is a fair point. If you don't want to be intrusively tracked, you should not expect "free" services.

However, IMHO the answer here is to find a different model for funding online software/services. Letting advertising firms run the internet does not really seem to be taking software in a user/consumer-friendly direction.

Plenty of services were free prior to commercialization of the web because they generated nom-monetary value (community, knowledge, etc.). Plenty of creators and artists also make money directly via donations (Patreon, etc.). I'm not sure we need the existing ad model for either free content or to make money on the internet.

"Ads only work if they have intrusive tracking" is presented by you and others as fact. It's not.

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