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Top-level
@bagder Isn't that a similar line of thinking than saying: "Corporations don't actually need to make a profit" (as in: they can just break even)? People hate paying for services more than they hate ads. If the ads are not profitable enough, websites go out of business, including stuff critical to our democracy like news sites. What is the solution if not ads that are good enough to actually give enough money to those sites? 48 comments
  @res260 I don't think so. They want ads that work - but ads without tracking have been used already for well, at least a hundred years. We know they can work. I'm not saying that backpedaling what has already been given away is an easy task. I believe it is still worth pondering over. @bagder if you take TV or newspapers for examples of ads that worked without tracking, these are two examples of services where ads were not the only source of revenue. An online news site, it pretty much is these days, except donations, or its behind paywall :/ @res260 are you suggesting those with paywalls would remove them if they could just do user-tracking ads? That sounds bizarre. @bagder I wouldnt presume, I don't know enough about the financial inner details of news outlets. But the fact that revenue fell drastically for news outlets in the last decades is, in my opinion, a much bigger problem than ads that track you (and I trust mozilla much more than google to do it while balancing privacy than google or meta) and it's a problem that can't be solely blamed on media themselves  @res260 @bagder All the ad companies are the ones stripping journalism of money. Google and Facebook both scrape the important bits of the news, and host them on their own site with their own ads, instead of linking people to the sites themselves so the news outlets see the ad revenue. The issue is the ad companies becoming so greedy they are now focused on cutting out the content creators from the deal.   @ocdtrekkie @res260 @bagder I'm reminded of how the one change Apple made to how podcasts downloaded affected everyone's ad impressions [ https://youtu.be/DnktQrpXHrQ?si=BviNajLflbS88cB- ]. Hank Green argues that it's good, even if it drastically hurts smaller podcasts, because it's more accurate ad impression numbers...but it means that smaller podcasts all of a sudden aren't meeting their "Ad view goals" immediately upon publishing. That happens already! There are sites that I see regularly with a "turn off your ad blocker or subscribe" pay wall. Sometimes they just want you to log in to a free account (so they can track you, and sell that to data brokers correlated by email)  @bagder A popular Dutch news site has: @bagder and even though newspapers made most of their money with ads, when the more performing ad systems came (ie tracking users), advertisers fled these services which caused media having such a hard time surviving online  @res260 @bagder May I add that there are independent public media in the world exist and work well. However, when it came to written articles (at least in Germany) the ad-driven commercial media companies claimed unfair advantage and limited public media's ability to publish news stories in text format. @sheogorath @bagder Yes it's a common topic here in Canada as well with CBC/Radio-Canada being partly financed with ads and the other news outlets saying "well we're struggling and the public company is taking our ad money".  @res260 @bagder the first big nail in the coffin of local newspapers was Craigslist Subscriptions were useful but it was classifieds that were the big moneymaker in newspapers. In other words, ads. Highly localized ads. https://www.minnpost.com/business/2014/02/how-craigslist-killed-newspapers-golden-goose/  That's the point of user tracking. Precisely. Collecting and selling the user profiles to political parties for analysis and micro-targeting for example. Also harmful for democracies.  I believe purely context-based ads perform just as well while avoiding hundreds of the downstream negative consequences for society. The fine-grained user tracking is mostly there so that the big platforms can *market* themselves as having some ad targeting superpower which there's actually scant evidence for. These over-complex ad systems are actually worse for the advertiser because their complexity makes them opaque and unpredictable. @nottrobin @bagder So you think everybody who advertises on facebook and such are fooled by some scam by Big Ad? And that Cambridge Analytica had worthless data and that all the political parties are wrong thinking they gain an advantage microtargetting users for their political ad? Imo the idea that "tracking users for ads works, actually" is much much more plausible. I'm not aware of any persuasive evidence that Cambridge Analytica had much of a political impact. If you have some please send it my way. I agree, microtargeting would be most useful in politics - much more than commerce. Of course political campaigns would want to use anything claiming to microtarget. But my understanding there also is that the verifiable impact is minimal and the most standout campaigns rarely if ever cite Facebook as the differentiator. @nottrobin @res260 @bagder @res260 @nottrobin @bagder It works on big social because of the data points, but for the rest of us trying to make a living through publishing with regular sites, I donʼt see tracked ads having some superior power to the old contextual ones. Most of the ad companies that contact me are full of opaque jargon and canʼt give me any reason to run with them. @nottrobin @res260 @bagder Letʼs hope for all our sakes that it really is a giant con. facebook advertisers being misled about the effectiveness of facenbook ads? Yes, infamously so.  @jackemled @bagder That would work if supply and demand wasnt a thing. If facebook or google could charge 50x what they currently charge they for sure would  Then why are the sites with the most ads the sites that are most dangerous to democrathy, and the sites with no ads are most important to democrathy? Do sites that love ads hate democrathy on principle?  news sites are being killed despite ads already... I don't think that's as good an example as you think it is.  @res260 @bagder i think that non tracking ads could work better than tracked ads. For tracked ads, two weeks after buying a fridge online I still see ads for fridges... That's not going to get then sales. Serve ads based on the content of the page instead. Am I looking up a microwave give microwave ads on that page. There is a reason there is more beer commercials on TV during soccer matches than during Planet Earth documentaries. Its what people are interested in at that time. no From a perspective of someone who might want to advertise I want to make sure actual potential customers view my stuff. The pitch for tracking is snake oil so Google et al can pretend they're delivering that without doing the actual work of properly generating leads. Or finding good ad venues The person/company that's actually selling ad space is not the problem in this discussion. Google just makes selling ad space (much) easier than directly contacting brands would be. |
Gregory's Server
@res260 @bagder These days there isn't anyway to give money that is not more invasive tracking than ads you can block.