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daniel:// stenberg://

@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.

14 July at 21:57 | Open on mastodon.social
23 comments
Émilio Gonzalez

@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 :/

14 July at 22:02 | Open on infosec.exchange
daniel:// stenberg://

@res260 are you suggesting those with paywalls would remove them if they could just do user-tracking ads? That sounds bizarre.

14 July at 22:04 | Open on mastodon.social
Émilio Gonzalez

@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

14 July at 22:08 | Open on infosec.exchange
ocdtrekkie

@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.

14 July at 23:48 | Open on mastodon.social
Jack Yan (甄爵恩)
Don Marti

@jackyan @ocdtrekkie @res260 @bagder

The tracking is not there to identify the individual (the data doesn't have to be accurate) but to enable getting the highest-priced ad onto the cheapest possible site

Cross-context tracking puts higher value and lower value sites into competition to cut ad rates and drive up the % that goes to platforms—side effect is that much of the ad money ends up going to places that neither the advertiser nor the user would want to support

propublica.org/article/google-

@jackyan @ocdtrekkie @res260 @bagder

The tracking is not there to identify the individual (the data doesn't have to be accurate) but to enable getting the highest-priced ad onto the cheapest possible site

Cross-context tracking puts higher value and lower value sites into competition to cut ad rates and drive up the % that goes to platforms—side effect is that much of the ad money ends up going to places that neither the advertiser nor the user would want to support

15 July at 13:25 | Open on federate.social
Alexander The 1st

@ocdtrekkie @res260 @bagder I'm reminded of how the one change Apple made to how podcasts downloaded affected everyone's ad impressions [ youtu.be/DnktQrpXHrQ?si=BviNaj ].

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.

16 July at 7:14 | Open on mstdn.ca
Dan Veditz

@bagder @res260

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)

14 July at 22:33 | Open on infosec.exchange
Aroop Roelofs :verified:

@bagder A popular Dutch news site has:
- A paywall for their "premium articles" (which constitutes most of their articles).
- Tracking as-is (CDN resources + Google analytics).
- Tracking ads.

@res260

14 July at 22:57 | Open on social.linux.pizza
Émilio Gonzalez

@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

14 July at 22:04 | Open on infosec.exchange
Sheogorath 🦊

@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.

14 July at 22:08 | Open on microblog.shivering-isles.com
Émilio Gonzalez

@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".

14 July at 22:10 | Open on infosec.exchange
Nicol Wistreich

@res260 @bagder on free-TV, radio and podcasts, other than public-service broadcasters – ads without tracking are *the only* source of revenue.

You don't even get a precise number of views for the TV or radio ads, having to use sampling of a small subset of viewers/listeners. Yet they still generate approx $235bn & $23.1bn global annual revenues, respectively (sources: imarcgroup.com/television-adve & finance.yahoo.com/news/traditi)

@res260 @bagder on free-TV, radio and podcasts, other than public-service broadcasters – ads without tracking are *the only* source of revenue.

You don't even get a precise number of views for the TV or radio ads, having to use sampling of a small subset of viewers/listeners. Yet they still generate approx $235bn & $23.1bn global annual revenues, respectively (sources: imarcgroup.com/television-adve & finance.yahoo.com/news/traditi

15 July at 23:02 | Open on social.coop
Bee O'Problem

@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.

minnpost.com/business/2014/02/

16 July at 21:45 | Open on mastodon.gamedev.place
Bradley

@bagder @res260 yes ads work when relevant to the content just fine. So much time/money/effort/privacy wasted on "personalized" ads.

15 July at 2:55 | Open on techhub.social
Émilio Gonzalez

@bradley @bagder The point is not if they work or not, it's if they work as well as user-tracking ads, which many billion dollars into user-tracking ads from millions of people seem to indicate they don't. That, or it's one of the biggest scam in modern history.

News sites have been running ads that dont track users for decades on the internet, yet they pretty much all (those who are still here at least) transitionned to user-tracking ads

For many news outlets, this has not been enough to survive. But for some, it's what allows them to pay journalists

@bradley @bagder The point is not if they work or not, it's if they work as well as user-tracking ads, which many billion dollars into user-tracking ads from millions of people seem to indicate they don't. That, or it's one of the biggest scam in modern history.

News sites have been running ads that dont track users for decades on the internet, yet they pretty much all (those who are still here at least) transitionned to user-tracking ads

15 July at 3:04 | Open on infosec.exchange
Bradley

@res260 @bagder I'm just an interested outsider but I may be in the one of the biggest scams camp. Remembering how Facebook convinced many news orgs to pivot to video, look at all these views. Turns out the made up the views and cost many news orgs a lot of money/staff.

15 July at 3:09 | Open on techhub.social
Jack Yan (甄爵恩)

@res260 @bradley @bagder Contextual worked as well IMO, and the online ad business is a giant scam. Who does well online? The Financial Times. Why? You have to buy ads directly from them at a rate which was the norm in the late 1990s, and they donʼt use any of the dodgy ad companies that are all over the web who cut into their share of the money.
Bob Hoffman covers the scam in his books, e.g.:

amazon.com/ADSCAM-Advertising-

@res260 @bradley @bagder Contextual worked as well IMO, and the online ad business is a giant scam. Who does well online? The Financial Times. Why? You have to buy ads directly from them at a rate which was the norm in the late 1990s, and they donʼt use any of the dodgy ad companies that are all over the web who cut into their share of the money.
Bob Hoffman covers the scam in his books, e.g.:

15 July at 6:13 | Open on mastodon.social
Kg. Madee Ⅱ.

@res260 @bradley @bagder yeah, it's the latter. Facegle have a duopoly on the tracking ads market and are ripping their customers off pretty shamelessly. And that's on top of Facebook's efforts to capture their audience

15 July at 6:58 | Open on mathstodon.xyz
Petherfile

@res260 @bradley @bagder I thought the point was, regardless of how well tracked ads work, browsers and users don't need to bend over for it. It is not on the consumer to provide companies with what they want. It is the other way around.

If all users didn't support tracking from their end by choice, advertisers are left with only non tracked ads regardless of their preference. Advertisers, in theory, would still spend the dollars on ads without tracking, if that's all they could get, because it will be better than no advertising.

I thought the point also was, it's not very nice to sneakily add something to a browser that tracks you and turn it on without giving users any notice. Something that users clearly often don't want. Double so when you have features added in the browser reasonably recently to specifically avoid tracking. Erosion of trust there.

Some companies seem to get narky when some users support tracking and some don't and said companies base charging and revenue models on invalid assumptions that all do support it. The real problem here, as I see it, is the invalid assumption and nothing else. All involved need to understand that the tracking isn't always avaliable and work that into their systems, not try and sneak more tracking in users back doors.

Yes, I am mixing two different sorts of tracking here. I think the bend over and back door things apply to them both.

@res260 @bradley @bagder I thought the point was, regardless of how well tracked ads work, browsers and users don't need to bend over for it. It is not on the consumer to provide companies with what they want. It is the other way around.

If all users didn't support tracking from their end by choice, advertisers are left with only non tracked ads regardless of their preference. Advertisers, in theory, would still spend the dollars on ads without tracking, if that's all they could get, because it will...

15 July at 11:57 | Open on neurodifferent.me
🔶Mark Nicoll 3.5%🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🇬🇧🇪🇺🇺🇳

@bagder @res260 oh yes. Studies have shown tracking doesn't really improve the effectiveness of adds in terms of sales, half as much as it can amplify a negative opinion.
But it does generate a lot of data that can then be sold by google and other add hosting companies.

15 July at 8:24 | Open on mastodon.org.uk
anlomedad

@duckwhistle @bagder @res260

That's the point of user tracking. Precisely.
The claim in #1 is incomplete or wrong because it implies ads were the sole use for tracking.

Collecting and selling the user profiles to political parties for analysis and micro-targeting for example. Also harmful for democracies.

15 July at 9:42 | Open on climatejustice.social
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