Hacker News Reader

Comment by sprokolopolis | Hacker News Reader

I find the current state of ad services to be morally wrong; therefore, I do not feel bad about using an adblocker. I wouldn't be opposed to tasteful, cookie-less ads that don't attempt to track people around the internet and mine their data. I realize that people need to be paid for their time and content, but maybe there is a better way to manage, serve, and present the ads.

It would also be nice if people could decided on a sane and logical system of standard ad sizes, because the current standards are ridiculous and awkward.

View on HN

Without tracking there also wouldn't be ad fraud detection and that would hurt the group of honest publishers financially.

And the malware distributors! Won't someone please think of them - how will they survive if the ads are gone! They have an HN approved business model too! /s

Then maybe those honest publishers need to find a revenue source that doesn't potentially support the sale of their viewers' private information (ad-based or not). People made money and sold products before internet ad-networks existed.

If they don't track you they have no way to serve you relevant ads, and I would much rather want relevant ads than ads which promote useless products to me.

"Relevant ads" my arse.

They don't want to show me ads for things I'm already interested in, they want to make me interested in things I didn't know about, or more interested in things I knew about but wasn't going to buy.

They don't care about relevant, they want successfully manipulative ads.

That's not true. TV, radio, printed newspapers, ... has done it for decades. It's content based. They are tracking because they can make more money out of the tracked data.

Can you explain end-to-end what you mean about advertisers making money out of the tracked data? (eg. what you think they track, what they do with the data, how they make money from the data, etc.)

I think it's very easy for different people to mean different things when having conversations on this topic, so it's good to spell it all out.

Google/Facebook knows my friends, my searches, the websites I visit, what pages/product I look at, ...

They sell this data(even if it's anonymized).

Then they should make them relevant to the context of the page, rather than me individually. How am I supposed to trust the opinion of an ad network that is selling my information for their profit? They aren't just using that information to serve me relevant ads. They are selling that data, making more money off my data than they are off of my non-existent purchases.

It is extremely rare that I ever see an ad that is actually relevant to me, with tracking or not. When I do see ads that are relevant to me they are completely useless (ex: showing me the exact product that I just looked at a few minutes ago and nothing new). Furthermore, I have been conditioned to completely ignore anything that might even look like an ad. I can't think of anytime that I have ever bought something because I saw an internet ad for it. I have purchased things that were recommended and/or reviewed by a trusted source online. Context and qualifications are much more convincing and influential than a box telling me to buy something.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com