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Comment by seydor | Hacker News Reader

if you re in tech your salary depends on advertising money somewhere along the chain

Good thing I'm not in tech, then. Pheeee-ew!

edit: but to add some substance:

If you (yes you, OP) are in the online advertising sphere, surely you're at the losing end of many battles, not just this lil EU thing? I'm thinking the ever-growing prevalence of adblockers, tracker-blocking, e-mail trackers being blocked etc.?

For you it must be like a game of whack-a-mole, except your mallet is increasingly smaller, and the moles' velocity is approaching lightspeed

Not all tech jobs depend on user targeted advertising. Only some big-tech ones.

that s not how it works though, tech is a big ecosystem. At least 3 of the trillion-dollar tech companies depend on advertising , which feeds money into the content system. The rest of the ecosystem is in the business of supporting and distributing this content. Advertising is very high in the pecking order of the tech business sector. Without it, the internet would be the equivalent of USSR era Pravda (and we'd probably have a different job)

Some of us work for big companies that still basically make what they did 50-70 years ago, just faster and better now, with the help of computers and data science.

>Without it, the internet would be the equivalent of USSR era Pravda Yes, remember USSR Windows XP from the era when it came without ads? It was so terrible. /s

Didn't know I was using USSR internet in the '90s-'00s before the advent of user targeted advertising.

In fact most websites and products were way better back then compared to the mess of today.

> At least 3 of the trillion-dollar tech companies depend on advertising

Boo-hoo, let me play you and them the world's smallest violin.

There’s a lot of jobs in boring sectors building all sorts of software to run old school businesses. Or helping people do all sorts of tasks.

The world does not turn around content (over)consumption.

> if you re in tech your salary depends on advertising money somewhere along the chain

You say that like it's a good thing.

without online media, computers would be in the sector of scientific instruments

> without online media, computers would be in the sector of scientific instruments

Computers were already common household items before massive online advertising even existed.

So forgive me if I don't find your arguments convincing (and it's not just because of this specific argument).

So your assertion is that there would be no online media in the absence of behavioral advertising?

I rather suspect that's incorrect, for two reasons. We had plenty of online media before online advertising existed at all, and there are many ways of doing advertising without it being behavioral.

Not plenty and nowhere near as popular

I have an enjoyable and well-paying job in the sector of scientific instruments.

Not mine as far as I know. As a consulting company of course we advertise, but not really to normal people. At least I don't think I've ever seen online ads for services that involve a team of programmers and large sums of money.

I’d happily take a hit if it meant removing behavioral advertising and tracking from the internet. There’s more to life than making money, but this isn’t really something that “people” in advertising usually understand.

Sure, but not necessarily the terrible sort of advertising being addressed.

Unless you have unusually good psychological resistance to ads, you're ultimately paying that money back in in one way or another, since advertising is a net profitable business.

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