[HN Gopher] Facebook users said no to tracking, and now advertis...
___________________________________________________________________
Facebook users said no to tracking, and now advertisers are
panicking
Author : 1vuio0pswjnm7
Score : 260 points
Date : 2021-07-15 08:49 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bloomberg.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bloomberg.com)
| soco wrote:
| "have already seen a decrease in effectiveness of their ads" I
| take it rather they cannot tell anymore what's going on. Maybe
| the ads are less effective but maybe they are more effective.
| They just can't reliably tell anymore.
| _Understated_ wrote:
| > Losing the ability to re-target products to customers after
| they viewed them online but didn't buy hurts businesses trying to
| sell more expensive products, advertisers say
|
| How is this the case?
|
| If I have an online shop using any of the major tools and
| platforms out there, they all have the ability to tell when
| someone puts something into their carts and did or didn't buy it.
| They can all send an email to say "oi there, you forgot to buy
| <thing>. Here's a 10% discount if you buy it". In addition, I do
| know that there are addons in Shopify that will re-target stuff
| along the lines of "customers who bought X bought Y".
|
| It sounds like advertisers are the ones losing out and crying
| here, not the shop owners!
| grumple wrote:
| As put succinctly by the character Malcolm Reynolds on the tv
| show Firefly: "'Bout 50% of the human race is middlemen, and
| they don't take kindly to being eliminated."
| astuyvenberg wrote:
| The only aspect of this story which surprises me is that 25% of
| iOS users opted _in_ to tracking.
| kgwxd wrote:
| I doubt most of it was on purpose
| tomjen3 wrote:
| That seems high to me, but there are plenty of people who do
| not value privacy and who would rather want ads that are
| tailored to them.
| overgard wrote:
| Probably just people mashing "ok" without paying attention.
| Tenoke wrote:
| Plenty of people find value in things like better ads or more
| connectivity across sites. Tracking can imrpove some services
| (I let maps keep my location history) and while I always use
| adblocks on PC, I admit to have found interesting relevant to
| me stores on instagram presumably because they keep data about
| me.
| xwolfi wrote:
| That's interesting ! They exist !
|
| I really nearly fainted when I saw my location history on
| google and now that I have a firewalled Huawei with Google
| forbidden on it, I finally feel a bit location-safe :D And
| it's not that I care that americans know where I am, it's
| that people can just get my phone/account, people close to
| me, and track me, eww.
|
| I really am impressed you found relevant stuff on instagram,
| but I found that desiring less things is usually just as
| rewarding as getting an add for the right flavor of yoghurt.
| Tenoke wrote:
| >I really am impressed you found relevant stuff on
| instagram
|
| It's mostly been small alternative-type stores, typically
| for clothes which I'd have never even found out about
| otherwise but match my aesthetic presumably because they
| just advertise to a niche audience like me based on the
| data.
| sidlls wrote:
| I'm surprised it's so low. These sites are used mostly for
| indulging in narcissism, and people who tend that direction
| generally prefer to have their lives be less private.
| wintermutestwin wrote:
| They want their lives to be public to the masses that matter
| to them, not an evil corporation.
| sidlls wrote:
| Even if they make that distinction I don't think they care.
| nrclark wrote:
| Good.
| fairity wrote:
| Be careful what you wish for.
|
| If ad publishers like Facebook generate less revenue per ad
| impression (which is what these tracking changes do), publishers
| will inevitably end up showing users more ads not less (to make
| up for the lost revenue).
| maybelsyrup wrote:
| Great! Maybe that'll drive people away from these platforms and
| we can have our brains back.
| boring_twenties wrote:
| Out of the first 12 posts in my facebook feed currently, three
| are ads (25%). Two of those ads are for the same exact thing
| FWIW.
|
| How many more ads could they possibly squeeze in before people
| just give up using the platform?
| after_care wrote:
| People's attention is a marketplace. If only one platform
| increases their ads then likely people will move to other
| platforms. I think it's more likely all platforms (or no
| platforms) will increase their ads because all social media
| will have this problem.
| sumtechguy wrote:
| This is true. Look at the TV landscape. How long is a 'one hour
| show'? 45 mins these days? At one point it was 55. Toss in some
| overlays and so on. Crush out the credits in speed and split
| screen it.
|
| I have been using an adblocker for a long time. But a few weeks
| ago I turned it off 'just to see'. The internet was a lot more
| 'noisy' than I remember it. I remember when one simple banner
| ad at the top of the page was considered 'crazy'. If only we
| knew.
| atulvi wrote:
| I wonder why 25% opted in. Even for accidental touches, that's
| way too much. Loving this. Almost makes me want to move to an
| iPhone.
| Ashanmaril wrote:
| My guess is that even more than accidental mistouches would
| just be how many users are used to blindly accepting things
| because it's the only way to not get harassed with pop-ups.
| They might automatically assume that if they don't accept now,
| they'll get prompted again every time they open the app.
|
| I imagine a pop-up like this would auto-register for a lot of
| people the same as "accept the terms of service to continue"
| tomelders wrote:
| Advertising used to be a creative industry. Online advertising
| has pretty much destroyed that. Perhaps anti-tracking measures
| will put the focus back on quality in advertising.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Advertising is a super creative industry. One time we targeted
| people who worked at a particular (large) company in a certain
| capacity with ads that were specific. This is just standard
| Account Based Marketing, but we had great conversion rates and
| one of them was like "I saw your guys' product advertised to me
| between Words with Friends turns like 'This is how [our
| company] can help [his company] with [problem we anticipated
| they'd have]' and I was like woah this is cool, is it kinda
| creepy? I don't know. But it's cool!".
|
| That needed some pretty clever set up from the marketing folks,
| company-specific graphics and stuff, and the pipeline to be per
| company. It was cool, man.
|
| I mean, yeah, sure, lots of you guys would be like "OMG I would
| hate your company for that" etc. etc., but it turns out that's
| not how directors at big firms think.
| xemdetia wrote:
| A campaign who's willing to do the legwork to actively
| identify potential customers/decision makers and advertise to
| them in innovative ways is perfectly reasonable. The issue is
| always going to be how they identified the targets and if the
| sources of data are ones actively consented to, which is
| different than what Facebook are collecting and providing. A
| lot of these firms are assuming consent and then reaching as
| far as they can, and that's always been the problem. I
| consent to plenty of sources of advertising data through
| contests, conferences, newsletters, accounts and actions on a
| particular service, public social media, and so on. If you
| want to aggregate that consented to information from multiple
| providers it is fine as long as their privacy policies make
| that clear. What I don't consent a single provider assuming
| they can just leech off other providers through device
| snooping/super cookies/other shenanigans. When some of these
| inputs are coming from these shady or overreaching sources
| the campaign itself and anything that's an outcome of that
| becomes fruit of a poisoned tree. If you look at it from that
| perspective what becomes 'good' compared to 'bad' becomes
| straightforward.
|
| If facebook wants this correlating data for outgoing traffic
| they should be asking to buy it from individual providers
| instead of assuming consent and scraping it via a side
| channel on your phone.
| gexla wrote:
| Maybe because back in the day you needed big money for a big
| audience. Local channels on TV had worse ads than national
| channels. The best ads were on the most expensive airtime and
| became part of the Superbowl experience. On FB, anyone can buy
| ads.
| malwarebytess wrote:
| I would not put it that way. Criminals, all manner of bad
| actors, too can be creative. Creativity alone is not enough of
| a good to rescue a practice, there are other things to be
| considered.
|
| Advertising and marketing have been, at least as far as my
| cultural memory extends past the 80s, cynical and soul sucking.
| Always trying to figure out what was going on in people's heads
| and spit out some amalgam of an image or lifestyle or identity
| for people to latch onto and, critically, for businesses to
| exploit.
|
| The wrapping paper has eternally been "what's wrong with
| matching a product to a customer" and justifiably that is a
| difficult point to disagree with. If we are to have products
| and customers it is almost self-evident that they should be
| harmonized. But the premise in question presupposes that a
| customer will have a need; to the degree that needs are
| invented as much as the product even to justify the expenditure
| of resources to create a product in the first place. In the end
| we loop back to the the previous paragraph. Creativity in
| service of what? pure exploitation.
|
| Software Engineering is, or can be, an exceptionally creative
| profession. That alone isn't justification for whatever we
| design! We must be more careful.
| datavirtue wrote:
| It's as though they had evidence that the tracking yielded some
| kind of benefit.
| danbruc wrote:
| That sense of entitlement makes me sick.
|
| Tracking users is necessary, otherwise we would have to spend way
| too much on ads. Tracking users is necessary, otherwise my small
| business can not survive. Tracking users is necessary, otherwise
| we can not understand who our customers are. Tracking users is
| necessary, otherwise we can not identify new customers. Tracking
| users is necessary, otherwise we can not evaluate the
| effectiveness of our ads.
|
| If your business success relies on tracking everyone all the
| time, then you have no fucking business and should go out of
| business.
| Bancakes wrote:
| I can guarantee I never have and never will click on an ad, out
| of spite. I've never bought things from ads directly nor
| transitively.
|
| Businesses assume that every user is a customer, and have
| inflated profit goals. You're right about entitlement.
| machinehermiter wrote:
| What is worse though is I have bought many products from non-
| targeted ads because I didn't even know I wanted the item
| until I randomly ran into.
|
| I loved my grandmother but targeted ads always remind me of
| the junk my grandma would get me for Christmas. She knew
| enough to be in the ball park but because she was in the ball
| park my taste is more picky and ultimately I never liked
| almost anything she got me.
| melomal wrote:
| I love the personal entitlement people have when using free
| email, free social media, free search engines and everything
| else to the point they are offended if they try to make ends
| meet by making profit.
|
| Do you think Y Combinator investments don't use tracking? You
| would get laughed out of a room if you said you track nothing
| and have a solid product. A phone call to ask about your
| product is tracking because it all gets recorded and noted.
| danbruc wrote:
| _I love the personal entitlement people have when using free
| email, free social media, free search engines and everything
| else to the point they are offended if they try to make ends
| meet by making profit._
|
| Those are not free, the users are paying for them with their
| share of the ad budget in the price of all the products they
| buy. And I am not complaining about ads per se - even though
| I would personally prefer if they disappeared and I could
| directly pay for the services I use - but about the tracking
| behind them.
| melomal wrote:
| But 1000 HN readers paying $X per month for a web browsing
| service is not going to pay for the R&D needed to overcome
| Google's amazing ability to search the web.
|
| ex. $5 per month from 1000 HN readers is only $5000. This
| is petty money if you want and all swinging, all dancing
| product, profit and work/life balance.
|
| You should check out Indie Hackers which is essentially a
| graveyard of products, ideas and people asking why their $3
| per month product is not being purchased or used.
|
| You using software for free and in return providing some
| data in return is the old barter system. Which many people
| would love to go back to...
| frabcus wrote:
| If advertising wasn't a viable business, all of these pay
| for services would suddenly get much more popular.
|
| That said, advertising without tracking across multiple
| sites/apps is perfectly viable - The New York times does
| it (https://stuntbox.com/blog/2020/05/new-york-times-
| third-party...).
| melomal wrote:
| Youtube Premium is a perfect example IMO. I know a lot of
| people who flat out refuse to do a trial, me included.
|
| So clearly people are happy to be advertised to so why
| not show them things they might be interested in via
| tracking?
| jlkuester7 wrote:
| Sure, if you are not paying for a service you are the
| product. I get that. You get that. We can make informed
| decisions about balancing cost/privacy. But the same cannot
| really be said for the average consumer. This is not because
| the average consumer is too stupid to understand, but more so
| because the services themselves deliberately obfuscate their
| data collection and its consequences forcing users to do
| their own research to try and understand what is happening.
|
| Honestly what would be really interesting to me would be to
| give users a clear-cut choice between tracking vs paying.
| E.g. replace the dialog in the article with a choice between
| allowing Facebook to track your activity across other
| companies' apps and websites or paying a $2/mo subscription
| fee. I am not so delusional as to think that 75% of people
| will opt for the subscription, but it would be really
| interesting to see how many actually would!
| danbruc wrote:
| _[...] paying a $2 /mo subscription fee. I am not so
| delusional as to think that 75% of people will opt for the
| subscription [...]_
|
| Which is weird in itself, not exactly sure how we ended up
| in this spot. People in a restaurant or a bar are never
| thinking whether they should order another drink that will
| be gone in a couple of minutes based on the costs but they
| refuse to spend one dollar on buying a mobile game that
| they play for hours and hours and that forces them to watch
| an ad every minute.
| melomal wrote:
| Because people like products and tangible things. Look at
| the Apple accessories - overpriced, overengineered yet
| people will happily overpay, lose it and then pay for it
| again.
|
| Ask someone for PS3 for a full vehicle check to know if
| it's been stolen, crashed, written off, still on finance
| (basically major headaches) is way too much of an ask.
|
| An example that I have is my project that does the above.
| 300 free checks and 5 premium checks 6 months later, I
| still scratch my head at how people are scared of buying
| 2nd hand cars but literally do nothing to protect
| themselves.
| intended wrote:
| This is a little, cart before horse; obviously, nothing is
| free.
|
| Charge customers. Go ahead. In the first place, Advertisers
| are the actual customers. Freemium models for retail
| consumers are a business choice.
|
| People are notoriously bad at processing obscured costs. You
| see it with things like plastic pollution and waste - that
| cost is never added to the price of M&M packaging. Tomorrow
| if it were, people would respond logically and change their
| buying habits.
|
| To call this entitlement, when its an issue of market
| structure, is to drive this conversation into identity and
| morality arguments.
|
| The dominant models in tech are some version of freemium,
| because "network effects".
|
| Solve for that either technically or legally and you don't
| have to start attributing blame where none exists.
| the_snooze wrote:
| >Charge customers
|
| This. If something has commercial value, then put a price
| on it. We've had currency for thousands of years now. It's
| a really useful way of signaling value in a commonly
| understood way. Much more efficient than barter.
|
| Stop asking us to barter away data for services. If the
| service is truly worth something, then put a clear price on
| it and show some respect to your customers instead of
| trying to trick them.
| throwawaycuriou wrote:
| The irony you manufacture doesn't hold. Yes, these products
| are cheap (currently free) no small part due to the market
| aberration caused by the tracking and advertising. But it's
| not certain that they would go away if advertising had to
| revert to a model less driven by privacy intrusion.
|
| I welcome the day such intrusions are rendered illegal or
| impractical, so that the market can price these offerings
| appropriately. Until then, why not use what exists?
| danuker wrote:
| > such intrusions are rendered illegal or impractical
|
| The GDPR was an attempt. Guess what happened? Everyone
| implemented it in such a way as to appear compliant but not
| necessarily be compliant, and to cause maximum annoyance to
| the user.
|
| What the solution is here is to have an educated population
| and powerful privacy tools, like uBlock Origin. [1]
|
| But of course, the surveillance oligopoly is developing its
| own browser [2], specifically to maintain control and make
| it hard to implement such tools [3].
|
| [1] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Blocking-
| mode:-medium...
|
| [2] https://news.softpedia.com/news/google-chrome-
| microsoft-edge...
|
| [3] https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-
| issues/issues/338
| frabcus wrote:
| Voluntary use of tools like uBlock Origin shows the way,
| ultimately though we need regulation to stop the arms
| race you refer to.
|
| You're right that GDPR hasn't been enforced strongly
| enough. It is actually quite a good law (imperfect, but
| pretty good).
|
| I donate money to NOYB (https://noyb.eu/en/our-detailed-
| concept) to fight for enforcement of the law.
|
| Quality for consumers has only ever been truly won by
| regulation - all major economies heavily regulate all
| industries. The market didn't make food safe, regulation
| was needed (see history e.g.
| https://www.hygienie.org/a-brief-history-of-uk-food-
| safety-l...).
| elaus wrote:
| There is a huge difference between the tracking Facebook does
| and "a phone call yo ask about your product". Having no
| tracking at all forced onto you might be the idealistic end
| goal for users, but it sure is unrealistic. Of course that
| doesn't prevent you from criticizing the intrusive,
| overboarding tracking of some social networks or advertisers.
| only_as_i_fall wrote:
| You're identifying the wrong problem. Users aren't upset
| because they can't use social media for free while not being
| tracked, they're upset because they can't use social media
| without being tracked period.
| redleggedfrog wrote:
| You have it entirely backwards. The advertisers on things
| like facebook should be paying the users for using the site
| and getting their ads in front of them. facebook is not even
| worth $1 a month to most people, that's why the won't charge
| for it, and shows it's actual value to the end user. The real
| benefit of facebook is to the companies trying to shill their
| wares on facebook.
| jensensbutton wrote:
| There's an argument to be made that "tracking" has had less
| real world harm to humanity than the push to get rid of it.
| Real harm will come to people/business through loss of income
| due to the clamp down on tracking. Not to mention that ads are
| the foundation of all the content we get for "free" that we've
| come to rely on.
| tedajax wrote:
| "Won't someone think of the poor businesses" is not a good
| argument lol.
| [deleted]
| adamsvystun wrote:
| I would personally not agree to tracking, but who should be and
| shouldn't be in business based on tracking is not for you (or
| me, or anyone) to decide. If there are people who are fine with
| tracking in exchange for services, then they should be able to
| make that exchange.
| salawat wrote:
| This is the kind of false choice that simply can't be
| allowed; similar to selling oneself into slavery or selling
| one's organs are not considered valid transactions. If it is
| allowed, the market will converge on it. Without a price and
| disincentive to implementing pervasive surveillance, it will
| be guaranteed to happen.
| 2pEXgD0fZ5cF wrote:
| > but who should be and shouldn't be in business based on
| tracking is not for you (or me, or anyone) to decide
|
| I generally agree with the poster. A majority of "modern"
| companies that pop up have one of two strategies nowadays:
|
| 1. No sustainable business model, nothing to sell to users.
| Grow as fast as possible, get bought by one of the
| established megacorps.
|
| 2. The product is kind of there, but it is only an excuse to
| grab as much data as possible. Again nothing to sell to
| actual users.
|
| The ad business has kind of become a market that trades among
| themselves, they don't sell anything but the promise for
| others to sell more, except now companies that mainly sell
| ads also buy advertisements for their business.
|
| It's become a huge house of cards and you really have to
| wonder what the reason for their existence is.
|
| Thinking purely as a customer the fact that I have just no
| way to just give a company my money and in turn they'll just
| leave me alone with all of their useless and hostile bull**
| is hugely frustrating and I think they deserve to go out of
| business if they truly have no other way to keep the shop
| running.
|
| No, I do not want this single strawberry for free just for
| you to break into my house and photocopy as many documents as
| you can (and leak them to the public a few months later
| because you don't care a single bit about keeping your data
| secure)...
| baq wrote:
| i agree, nicely put. just a small addendum to your two
| points: having very little product for users to sell only
| works if the product is free-as-in-beer for them - and the
| way to get there is to sell data about users to paying
| customers. these are fundamentals of engagement economy:
| get users kind of addicted to something which has barely
| any value and they wouldn't pay for it if they had to and
| sell everything they tell about themselves in the process
| of using it to people willing to buy the data. due to
| network effects user data value grows super-linearly, so
| you can perceive your own data as 'worthless', but it
| becomes worth much more once you get data about others.
| harry8 wrote:
| > If there are people who are fine with tracking in exchange
| for services, then they should be able to make that exchange.
|
| Informed consent is almost always lacking. 99.999% of people
| party to it do not understand this bargain. Do you fully
| understand it or just "in principle" - which is fine until
| the rubber hits the road.
|
| "All you have to agree to is being warm, sensitive and caring
| to our clients." Fine. Prostitution should be legal and
| absolutely nobody should be subject to it on that basis of
| understanding what they're signing up for.
|
| Properly informed consent is always crucial to this argument
| that people are fine with it. The dishonesty, bait and
| switch, ongoing secretiveness of it should not be necessary
| and would not happen if it were informed consent. But that
| consumer _fraud_ being perpretrated 100% built google and
| facebook. There is not now nor has there ever been consent.
| Morever when consent is completely withdrawn - you delete
| your account - they keep a shadow account. To HELL with them
| and those who pretend all this is honest and above board
| because it just isn 't.
| danbruc wrote:
| In principle I agree. On the other hand, are people agreeing
| to be tracked really aware of what they agree to and what the
| value of the resulting information is? Would they still agree
| if they knew? And this of course also requires that my choice
| is actually honored and I currently have very little trust in
| this respect, after all we already had Do Not Track and
| nobody cared.
| bilekas wrote:
| This is fine, and I know some people who are aware and are
| happy with the ads they recieve.
|
| I do personaly have a problem with not being given the
| choice, also it should be an opt-in option. Privacy shouldn't
| be compromised and then restored after the data is already
| gone.
| deagle50 wrote:
| Ok, how do you suggest we achieve this? It's been over two
| decades now and the US govt hasn't done much.
| layoutIfNeeded wrote:
| >That sense of entitlement makes me sick.
|
| No. It is in fact _your_ sense of entitlement that makes _us_
| sick.
|
| Update: ok, after checking danbruc's comment history, they
| probably weren't arguing for tracking, and the second paragraph
| should be read in third person... I'll take my downvotes
| -\\_(tsu)_/-
| b3kart wrote:
| Sense of entitlement for...privacy? What a world we live in.
| layoutIfNeeded wrote:
| What? OP was arguing that tracking is necessary...
| zinekeller wrote:
| > If your business success relies on tracking everyone
| all the time, then you have no fucking business and
| should go out of business.
|
| You haven't read the whole thing.
| jvzr wrote:
| I think you misread OP. Paragraphs 1 & 3 are OP talking,
| paragraph 2 is "advertisers" talking.
| layoutIfNeeded wrote:
| True. I've updated my comment...
| ako wrote:
| That sense of entitlement that you can get stuff for free
| without having to pay for it in some way. You use facebook
| for free, it seems to provide you some value, why do you
| think you are entitled to get this for free?
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| We pay for internet access. When I first used the web in
| 1993, the internet fee was covered by the tuition I paid,
| as only universities, government and a relatively small
| number of corporations were connected. Later, ISPs were
| formed and we began paying for home access. The
| "entitlement" we pay for, IMO, is access to a network
| free from surveillance and advertising, or at least one
| where we can navigate around that. The 1993 web was full
| of free content. Few web users paid for anything. (As
| remains true today.) The beauty of the web is that anyone
| can set up a website. However no one is entitled to
| traffic. There used to be this idea of "netiquette". I
| think it is fair to say that these enormous websites like
| Facebook with massive traffic are playing by their own
| rules. They do come across as having a sense of
| entitlement. It is not their network. It is _our_
| network. Most if not all of the "content" they use to
| draw the traffic they get is user-generated. You pay your
| fee and you are entitled to access the network but
| (arguably) that does not include conducting mass
| surveillance and sustaining a massive advertising
| campaign that targets people personally.
|
| Tha value of Facebook is in its users, not the people who
| write the website's PHP and run the servers. It is
| commonly agreed that writing a Facebook clone is not a
| difficult task. That value is the users. There is a
| reason Facebook will never charge a usage fee to anyone.
| ako wrote:
| How much of that money for internet access goes to
| facebook? How are they supposed to develop and maintain
| their website from zero money they get from you paying
| for internet access? How are you going to put all your
| content online if they don't invest in developing and
| maintaining their services?
| [deleted]
| danbruc wrote:
| I am not getting it for free, I am already paying for it
| with my share of the ad budget included in all the
| products I buy. And I am not asking for anything to be
| for free, just allow me to pay for it.
| intev wrote:
| This is such convoluted reasoning and you keep mentioning
| it. For example I could say: "I don't want to pay the
| road toll, I pay for it with the gas tax I pay" or "I
| don't want to pay for Disneyland, I pay for it with all
| the things I buy inside". Technically Disney could make
| entrance free and charge ridiculous rates for everything
| inside but I'm certain that makes theme parks
| significantly less viable as a business - maybe even
| straight up unprofitable.
| danbruc wrote:
| What is convoluted about that? I buy a product, some
| fraction of the profit goes into the marketing budget,
| some fraction of the marketing budget goes to Facebook.
| How am I not paying for using Facebook? Where does their
| revenue come from if not from me?
| intev wrote:
| Take my Disney example. All what you said applies to that
| example too. Where does their revenue come if not from
| you? They could make entrance free and make money on what
| you buy inside. In fact, you can go further with this.
| You should not pay for any government services other than
| taxes. Where does the government revenue come if not from
| you? Why should they charge for things like drivers
| license renewals. Everything should be free and come from
| your taxes...
|
| What's convoluted about your argument is you are asking
| the service provider to change their business model by
| pointing our somewhere along the chain they are making
| money from you so they should be happy. Changing business
| models might also mean completely changing the way they
| provide the service. The whole service might have evolved
| differently if this model was enforced from the beginning
| rather than suddenly springing it on them now and then
| saying "make money in a way that's more convenient for
| me, I don't like how you make money now".
|
| Their business model, leaving aside the ethics/merits, is
| pretty simple. They offer targeted users on a platter to
| advertisers. It's easy to package up and sell. Suddenly
| that's being taken away. Of course they will kick and
| scream because they've depended on this predictable money
| making model. Saying "I buy things so you make money"
| doesn't even make sense. They become no different to a
| billboard provider.
| ako wrote:
| Isn't that up to facebook to determine how they want you
| to pay for their services? Just like it's up to disney,
| apple, microsoft, tesla to determine what their pricing
| model is. And it's up to you if you can live with this
| pricing model, and if you don't, don't use the product or
| service.
| crazy1van wrote:
| I prefer privacy too. But there is something entitled about
| wanting to interact with a company but keep the details of
| that interaction secret from that same company.
| orangepanda wrote:
| While I dont mind some tracking and telemetry, platforms have
| abused that trust and track everything they can now. I'm all
| for going scorched earth policy.
|
| Similar to how if an app sends just one spam notification, it's
| an uninstall and a 2 star rating.
| giantrobot wrote:
| > platforms have abused that trust and track everything they
| can now
|
| The frog boiling that got me to block tracking and
| advertising in every way available to me was the era of the
| advertising hyperlink (late 2000s). An article would have
| what _looked_ like hyperlinks to other stories or sources but
| were really just links to ads for products that matched that
| keyword.
|
| If your cursor even hinted at hovering over them they would
| generate a popup with some obnoxious ad with a "close button"
| so small it was virtually impossible to click it without
| going to the advertiser site. Such sites would almost
| invariably spit out pop-unders, resize browser windows, and
| try to install browser toolbars.
|
| When that style of ad got popular I started blocking domains
| in my hosts file and using GreaseMonkey scripts to block ads.
| I haven't stopped in the decade and a half since then. I
| don't oppose advertising nor do I necessarily oppose tracking
| since at the very least I can't hide from a server's access
| logs. I do oppose the absolute bottom feeding of AdTech
| companies.
| [deleted]
| xibalba wrote:
| Now do software users who believe they're entitled to the labor
| of other people for free...
| danbruc wrote:
| What are you referring to, pirated software in general? Or
| are you talking about ad supported software?
| Bancakes wrote:
| It's a free-of-charge business model.
| xg15 wrote:
| I stay with my rule of thumb: Any corporate press release that
| contains the words "we believe that" is trying to bullshit an
| unethical business practice into something positive.
| fairity wrote:
| > Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg said Facebook "may even
| be in a stronger position" following the iOS changes if it means
| more businesses start to make sales directly within Facebook's
| apps instead of sending users to a web address.
|
| Does anyone know what he's referring to in this quote? There
| isn't a way for advertisers to move their purchase flow onto
| Facebook's app is there?
| celestialcheese wrote:
| Facebook Shops (https://www.facebook.com/business/help/23430351
| 49322466?id=1...)
| elorant wrote:
| Probably Facebook Marketplace
| asdff wrote:
| Do legitimate companies actually put products on there?
| Whenever I check that its like craigslist but with more spam
| and likely stolen products. craigslist seems to have much
| better moderation.
| elorant wrote:
| They do. But in my experience only a limited part of their
| full inventory.
| _Understated_ wrote:
| > [Disruptive Digita] is also looking into technology that would
| let Facebook deliver personalized ads based on targeting data
| stored on the user's device, meaning Facebook wouldn't need to
| access it.
|
| Anyone know how this would work? My spidey-sense is tingling here
| at the thought of apps scanning data on my phone!
| wcarron wrote:
| My idea? FB app stores data locally, uses this local data to
| pull ads onto your phone to be served/rendered. Don't need to
| send user data out. Just identify the ads this phone should be
| targeted by and render them as needed.
|
| Good point about the scanning, though. These scumbags certainly
| would try to pull something like that off.
| a-dub wrote:
| probably just like google's federated learning of cohorts
| thing.
|
| they still cluster you, but instead of collecting your browsing
| activity from partner websites, they do it locally using
| browser history that doesn't leave your device, and the net
| effect is that you have an equivalent of a browser cookie or
| additional http request header that doesn't identify you, but
| does identify your cluster memberships.
|
| some people are still not ok with this, i'm on the fence.
| niksmac wrote:
| I would call it a huge success
| neoCrimeLabs wrote:
| Now if only there was a way to force the IOS Facebook app to use
| an external browser for links clicked within the app.
|
| Yeah sure, they can still track the click, but would lose
| visibility beyond that.
| spideymans wrote:
| Those in-app browsers are so annoying. They make it
| intentionally difficult to open those pages in Safari
|
| A potentially controversial take, but I believe that Apple can
| force developers to use SFSafariViewController to enhance
| privacy and UX, without too much blowback.
| SFSafariViewController is a privacy-friendly alternative that
| prohibits third parties from seeing your browsing data (unlike
| the custom in-app browsers used by apps like Instagram). I've
| yet to see a custom in-app browser that has ever provided a
| better experience than SFSafariViewController.
|
| Exceptions could be provided where it makes sense. For example,
| I would still permit apps to load webpages owned by the
| developer in their own in-app browser (this is necessary for
| web-based logins, for example).
| gerikson wrote:
| Facebook: "We believe that personalized ads and user privacy can
| coexist."
|
| No-one else does.
| csilverman wrote:
| Also Facebook, silently: "Please, please don't ask us how
| 'personalized ads' actually work."
| uvesten wrote:
| How would this even be theoretically possible?
|
| I mean, if you know someone's personal details, they per
| definition has lost that privacy towards you.
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| Perhaps facebook could advertise to me using the data that I
| have put into their site directly rather than snooping on me
| on other websites through cookies.
| nickthegreek wrote:
| Exactly. On instagram, I follow and like content on the d&d
| and 3dprinting hashtags, so show me related ads. But don't
| try and follow me around the internet to see what other
| sites I visit. This allows them to still personalize ads
| without me feeling that there is a private investigator
| tailing me everywhere I go.
| sp332 wrote:
| Well, you don't need to know a person's name and home address
| to advertise. A profile could include a list of interests.
| The trouble is that identifying the user across different
| websites to build the profile requires, you know, an
| identifier.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| Allow facebook into your private circle of trust and boom!
| personalized ads and privacy!
| uvesten wrote:
| :facepalm:
|
| Why didn't I think of that?
| phreeza wrote:
| At least theoretically, you could have the whole logic
| deciding which ad to show you running locally on your device,
| without the need to send any private data to Facebook?
| JohnFen wrote:
| That just makes your device the spy. Sure, it's an increase
| in the amount of privacy, but it's not actual privacy.
| phreeza wrote:
| How is it different from your browser history being
| stored locally?
| allenrb wrote:
| It's almost as if, given information and a choice, people prefer
| not to have their eyeballs monetized.
|
| Of course, if this catches on (and I hope it does), we ultimately
| run up against "people prefer not to pay for things." Will be fun
| to watch.
| zohch wrote:
| > It's almost as if, given information and a choice, people
| prefer not to have their eyeballs monetized.
|
| I wonder, are people who use facebook and who would prefer to
| not have their eyeballs monetized like this not aware of
| Facebook's business model?
|
| How do they think Facebook will stay operational? I personally
| think it's best to just drop Facebook, but I'm sure my parents
| and grandparents would rather have Facebook with adds than no
| Facebook.
| kingaillas wrote:
| >How do they think Facebook will stay operational?
|
| The same way ads work in print media - the publisher doesn't
| have as detailed targeting info for the advertiser, and
| presumably would charge less.
| zohch wrote:
| > The same way ads work in print media
|
| Do adds in print media not "monetize people's eyeballs"
| also?
|
| > The publisher doesn't have as detailed targeting info for
| the advertiser, and presumably would charge less.
|
| Okay but I was responding to a claim about adds not
| tracking.
| freeone3000 wrote:
| Nothing about this change prevents Facebook from serving
| ads! Opting out doesn't remove ads, only tracking.
| zohch wrote:
| I agree, but I still don't understand what people who
| prefer not to have their eyeballs monetized are doing on
| Facebook.
| freeone3000 wrote:
| Connecting with their friends and family.
| zohch wrote:
| They could just use something else, instead of using
| Facebook while complaining about it all the time how they
| don't want to use it because it monetizes their eyeballs.
|
| Seems to me like using something else would be easier, or
| at least make for a happier life.
|
| Like if I don't like spinnach but I really need to get
| some fiber, it seems like the simpler option is to find
| another way to get fiber, rather than eating spinnach
| while constantly moaning to the whole world how spinnach
| is just the worst.
| tomjen3 wrote:
| Facebook has x billion users. What you do have net 0% impact
| on them, but a large impact on you. So people block ads and
| use Facebook anyway.
|
| But a more direct answer to the question is they don't think
| about it, they don't care about it, or they don't want
| Facebook to stay in business. If Facebook crashed tomorrow I
| would need to start emailing a bunch of people to put
| together contacts but other than that it would be a net
| benefit.
| zohch wrote:
| > If Facebook crashed tomorrow I would need to start
| emailing a bunch of people to put together contacts but
| other than that it would be a net benefit.
|
| Why not start today?
| umanwizard wrote:
| Well, of course. But there's a free-rider/tragedy-of-the-
| commons problem here: people might reasonably think the
| monetization of their eyeballs is an acceptable cost to be able
| to use something like Facebook, even if they choose not to be
| monetized _when they get to use Facebook either way_.
|
| However, if nobody could be monetized, then Facebook couldn't
| exist, making those people (for whom monetization of their
| eyeballs is an acceptable cost in exchange for Facebook) to be
| worse off.
|
| The only reason piracy and ad-blocking haven't totally killed
| for-profit media is because most people don't use them (either
| because they don't know how, for legal or ethical reasons, or
| because it's a hassle).
| Zababa wrote:
| It's a bit of a cynical take, but maybe it'll help cut useless
| apps and help people focus on what matters a bit more. A good
| thing about paying for something with money is that it makes
| you conscious of what you're doing. When you're paying with
| your data, it's harder.
| csilverman wrote:
| Agreed. And I have to wonder if online extremism would be
| less of a problem if sites like Facebook switched to a
| payment model. State-sponsored troll farms might be willing
| to pay for access, but most regular-Joe crazies/griefers
| probably would not.
|
| (Making social media harder to access cuts both ways, of
| course; it's entirely possible that limiting social media to
| those who can pay would only amplify the voices of bad guys
| with money. Does make me wonder how much social media
| toxicity is related to these sites being totally free,
| though.)
| meepmorp wrote:
| Yeah, but facebook would just take the money and still
| harvest your data.
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| How in the world can this be considered reasonable for them to
| track you across other apps and sites? This like if the local
| grocery store owner would install hidden cameras to spy on me at
| home and at work and in the car and one day somebody forced them
| to ask if I'm sure that's what I want them to do.
|
| This all makes me start feeling like I might finally want an
| iPhone...
| kalleboo wrote:
| You're basically describing Apple's latest privacy ad
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8w4qPUSG17Y
| csilverman wrote:
| ...and then, when finally prevented from doing so, they issued
| a quavery-voiced lament about how not being able to secretly
| film people without their consent will "hurt my ability to run
| my camsite efficiently and effectively."
| gruez wrote:
| >This like if the local grocery store owner would install
| hidden cameras to spy on me at home and at work
|
| The more accurate analogy would be the grocery store owner
| teaming up with other local businesses to aggregate your
| shopping habits across stores into a central database. What
| you're describing would be if facebook installed a RAT on your
| computer after visiting it.
| sp332 wrote:
| Exactly. All those other sites voluntarily send your data to
| Facebook.
|
| Edit: although they do track your physical location in real
| time through the app. That's more direct spying.
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| I'm not sure that always is really voluntary. Perhaps they
| don't have much choice. I don't know how can Facebook force
| them but e.g. with Google you have to use Google Analytics
| to score good in the search results AFAIK.
| gruez wrote:
| >Edit: although they do track your physical location in
| real time through the app. That's more direct spying.
|
| But for that to happen you need to explicitly gave consent?
| sp332 wrote:
| Isn't it pre-installed on a lot of phones?
| https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2019/03/27/preinstalled-
| and... and the paper mentioned is this PDF https://haysta
| ck.mobi/papers/preinstalledAndroidSW_preprint....
| pier25 wrote:
| > _This all makes me start feeling like I might finally want an
| iPhone..._
|
| Or maybe don't use Facebook on Android?
| JohnFen wrote:
| Facebook isn't the only threat, by a longshot.
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| Or maybe don't use Facebook at all?
|
| And block any and all Facebook DNS queries with a PiHole.
| sarsway wrote:
| Yep go delete your WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram accounts
| now. Takes 10 minutes. No one truly needs them. Don't make
| excuses why you need them. In fact these apps only hurt
| you. So don't hesitate, just do it. It can feel uneasy, but
| in only a week or so you'll be happy you pulled through.
| dont__panic wrote:
| Too bad it takes 1 month for any of those services to
| permanently delete your account -- logging in up to a
| month after clicking the "delete" button, even
| accidentally, fully restores the account and you have to
| go through the entire process again.
|
| Need more incentive? Just try finding the delete button
| on your Facebook or Instagram account. Go ahead, just
| look for it right now.
|
| You weren't able to find it, right? Just "disable"?
| That's because you can only delete either account through
| the delete account page, which you can only navigate to
| via... a link. Nowhere in the UI leads to this. And the
| Instagram one clearly hasn't been maintained since 2007
| or so.
|
| Pages:
|
| Instagram:
| https://instagram.com/accounts/remove/request/permanent/
|
| Facebook: https://m.facebook.com/account/delete
|
| Haven't deleted your account yet? Just think for a minute
| about why you maintain an account with a company that
| respects your autonomy so little that they make you jump
| through multiple obnoxious hoops just to delete your
| account. And make you wait a full month, _just in case
| you aren 't 100% sure_. Because they're your friend.
| sarsway wrote:
| Yes, luckily I was able to find the delete button :)
| WhatsApp was instant, only FB & Instagram took 30 days.
| But that's not a reason to not delete the accounts, isn't
| it? Just hit the button, remove the apps, and forget
| about it, a month later the accounts will be gone.
| pier25 wrote:
| Whatsapp is the main form of communication in many
| countries.
|
| Not only to communicate with friends and family, but also
| services like takeout, the plumber, etc.
| zarkov99 wrote:
| Can you actually use PiHole to serve DNS for your Android?
| I was able to direct my Linux systems to my PiHole but my
| Android phone seemed to not care a wit about my internal
| DNS.
| Guest19023892 wrote:
| I setup a Pi-hole yesterday with two Android phones
| (manually setting the DNS on each device at the moment
| until I'm sure there are no issues and I want to set it
| at the router level for all devices on the network). Both
| phones worked as expected. One is a Pixel 4a with Chrome
| as the browser and I didn't experience any issues or have
| to do anything special during setup.
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| I've solved this problem by hosting a VPN server behind
| the network-wide PiHole DNS, and I have my Android phone
| connected to the VPN whilst on mobile data.
|
| (I haven't yet worked out how to automate connection to
| VPN once out of range of my home wi-fi, or disconnection
| when in range, but doing it manually isn't much hassle).
|
| I also have a cloud-hosted PiHole instance (planned as a
| service to friends and family), but that's still a work
| in progress that I'd actually semi-forgotten about...
| hansvm wrote:
| Yes, absolutely. A few apps (notably chrome) use secure
| dns by default, and given the state of that ecosystem
| they default to their own provider. You'll need to set up
| secure dns on your pihole and tell chrome to use that
| provider (or disable it in chrome).
| city41 wrote:
| I have secure dns on my pi hole, but on my Android phone
| I did nothing at all. Just use it as-is, and when I'm on
| my home wifi all ads get blocked.
| hansvm wrote:
| If I'm understanding their desired goal correctly they'd
| like to get that kind of DNS-level blocking everywhere,
| not just on their home wifi. I know I appreciate having
| those nuisances blocked remotely -- some apps don't even
| run with poor cell service for me without DNS-level
| blocking because of all the extra data they're trying to
| transfer.
| driverdan wrote:
| Yes. Set it as the DNS server to use in your router.
| mehlmao wrote:
| Facebook is tracking users of other, non-Facebook apps.
| Apple's new feature allows users to deny Facebook that
| ability.
| pier25 wrote:
| > Facebook is tracking users of other, non-Facebook apps.
|
| For example?
| rchaud wrote:
| Any app that uses Facebook SDK, of which there are
| thousands. Zoom only removed it in March 2020, after it
| was raised as a privacy issue. they are a massive,
| publicly traded company, and they were fine with keeping
| it in their codebase, until enough people complained.
| celestialcheese wrote:
| Anyone who advertises with FB sticks the FB pixel SDK in
| their app to track conversions and performance of their
| FB ad spend. This pixel tracks a lot and reports back to
| FB.
|
| Most companies and apps advertise on FB.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I got an iPad and was shocked to see an ad load on the web twice
| that on an Android tablet or on an ordinary computer. For
| instance, two prerolls instead of one preroll on Youtube.
|
| I installed an adblocker and found that almost all sites with
| advertising would refuse to server content to my ipad, whereas an
| adblocker on my computer gets blocked only occasionally.
|
| It seems if you have a iDevice people think you're made out of
| money.
| subsubzero wrote:
| It isn't just facebook that will see this decline, they are the
| bellwether in social media so to speak since they are the largest
| player. Expect an across the board drop in revenue for social
| media and any company that uses ads and tracking of users
| behavior as its primary form of income.
|
| Hopefully this will signal a pivot in ad tracking and lead more
| companies to try subscription based services.
| Kye wrote:
| Twitter is already doing this with Super Follows and buying
| Revue.
| adtechperson wrote:
| I have worked in ad tech for a while and I am not sure that I
| really believe a lot of this article.
|
| I am not quite sure what advertisers are complaining about.
| Facebook should still be able to track purchases of physical
| goods, since most of those will require an email address and
| facebook can use that to link up the sales.
|
| Web site retargeting is not really affected by this. I guess
| people using shopping apps would be impacted, but a lot of
| those folks will be logged in and trackable. This article
| references "Most retail websites" but they are not affected by
| the recent change (ITP does affect them, but that is not new).
|
| App downloads are probably much less trackable and that would
| definitely be affected.
| skinkestek wrote:
| Actually I think one thing that might happen is ad spenders
| will realize they have been massively fleeced.
|
| I guess ads will continue to work about as well as before and
| then ad buyers will realize they can buy ads directly instead.
| potatolicious wrote:
| > Hopefully this will signal a pivot in ad tracking and lead
| more companies to try subscription based services.
|
| I highly doubt this. I suspect this will instead signal a pivot
| to products that are intrinsically "trackable".
|
| It's important to remember that ATT doesn't disable _tracking
| in its entirety_ , it only disables cross-app tracking. It's
| only harmful to your business if you are reliant on tracking
| users _while they are not using your product_.
|
| Lots of products will continue doing fine - think about Google
| Search, where you directly tell Google what you want. There is
| not necessarily a huge need to track you while you are not
| using the product - after all, the product literally revolves
| around you directly telling Google what you want.
|
| The products that will benefit the most are the ones that a)
| shows ads, and b) where the product's functionality
| intrinsically collects information about the user without the
| need to rely on third-party data.
|
| Oddly enough FB's apps fit decently into this. Your behavior
| within the FB main app are still "fair game" as far as tracking
| goes, and FB shows ads directly in the app.
| sokoloff wrote:
| It seems like retargeting will be substantially harmed, which
| is surely a non-trivial portion of Google search revenue.
| saiya-jin wrote:
| I've read similar comments since around 2010. Stock market
| doesn't seem to agree. They always find another loophole to
| work as usual
| long_time_gone wrote:
| It's not that "stock markets don't seem to agree", it's that
| the revenue of social media companies doesn't agree. If this
| new scenario has any appreciable effect on how many users
| Facebook can track, it will hurt their future revenue
| potential, which will impact their stock price.
| peakaboo wrote:
| I dont think so. Users already don't want to be tracked.
| Companies don't care. Nothing will change.
| Diti wrote:
| How delightfully ironic that this article cannot be read without
| agreeing to tracking (cookies), or having to pay for a
| membership. In the European Union this would be illegal.
| csilverman wrote:
| If people opt out of what you're doing to them as soon as they're
| made aware you're doing it, then perhaps that's a sign that you
| shouldn't have been doing it in the first place.
|
| I don't even believe that 25% of users actually wanted tracking.
| I think a lot of people just blindly tap buttons to make
| annoyances go away, and these guys just hit the wrong button.
| EamonnMR wrote:
| Almost all "consent" to these types of "services" is obtained
| via people blindly tapping buttons to make annoyances go away.
| permo-w wrote:
| it's almost funny, but more sick, considering the
| connotations that the word "consent" carries these days
| dwighttk wrote:
| At another point the author mentioned that the iOS new version
| uptake is currently 75% so maybe 100% of people who have seen
| the prompt hit no... (obviously the numbers are not exactly
| representing that)
| IfOnlyYouKnew wrote:
| People get to deny tracking and still use Facebook. Of course
| they like that choice.
|
| Would they be willing to accept the end of Facebook to stop the
| tracking? No. How do we know that? Because they kept using it
| in the past.
| user3939382 wrote:
| > people just blindly tap buttons to make annoyances go away
|
| This is a real phenomenon known as consent fatigue.
| notwhereyouare wrote:
| I personally wish the wording was slightly different.
|
| Something like Deny Tracking Allow Tracking
|
| instead of the "Ask app not to track" I have to read the prompt
| a few times to make sure i pick the right one
| marc__1 wrote:
| there are some reasons behind that, including liability on
| Apple's side
|
| https://9to5mac.com/2021/04/27/what-does-ask-app-not-to-
| trac...
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/ios/comments/ma7gwx/why_does_it_say.
| ..
| downrightmike wrote:
| Dark pattern on purpose
| drstewart wrote:
| Please explain the purpose of this dark pattern? Keep in
| mind that my follow up question to you will be: "why even
| show the popup at all then?"
| okwubodu wrote:
| The strange wording may be intentionally used to stop users
| from skimming the way they would for more "necessary"
| permission prompts like camera, notifications, etc. I know it
| pauses me for a second longer than the others.
| csilverman wrote:
| I agree. My guess is that Apple suspects it can't be 100%
| effective at preventing apps from tracking, so they're trying
| to set expectations accordingly in case someone figures out
| how to track users anyway.
|
| But yeah, my preference would be just something like "Do not
| track".
| tikkabhuna wrote:
| Perhaps because you login to Facebook on the Facebook app,
| they obviously know who you are on your phone. They won't
| have access to the advertising identifier, but they can
| still track everything within the app, if they want.
| user-the-name wrote:
| The prompt does two things:
|
| 1) It denies the app access to the IDFA identifier that is
| used for tracking. This is 100% reliable, apps just will
| not get this if you click "Ask app not to track".
|
| 2) It signals to the app that it is not to track you using
| any other method either. There is no technical way to
| enforce this, so it is up to the app developer to honour
| this themselves. Apple will do some checks to make sure you
| follow this, but there is obviously no way they can detect
| this reliably. All they have is the threat of kicking you
| out of the app store if you get caught.
| permo-w wrote:
| It isn't clear, but I think the 25% just haven't downloaded the
| update yet
| aviraldg wrote:
| As soon as ad supported free services start shutting down
| because of ad blocking and lowered clickthrough rates on ads
| because of targeting being blocked, most people will probably
| start changing their minds. (The alternative being maintaining
| 10-20+ paid subscriptions.) For now, all this change means is
| that users who _are_ opted-in to tracking are subsidising those
| who aren 't.
| suction wrote:
| At least then they'll be aware of the deal they're agreeing
| to.
| csilverman wrote:
| Or these ad companies could come up with ways of making money
| that people don't _want_ to block.
|
| I despise ads, and generally approve of anything that makes
| ad companies sweat, but it didn't have to be that way. We are
| where we are because those ad companies have a
| sociopathically disrespectful attitude towards the people
| whose attention they need. With tactics like auto-playing
| videos, popovers, animated ads, and hideously obtrusive
| design, it was simply inevitable that people would try to get
| rid of that garbage. That approach to advertising is borne of
| greed and laziness, and it deserves to fail.
|
| But there are tech blogs I read that do not adopt that
| approach. They have small, tasteful, non-animated ads. They
| don't need to violate my privacy to have a good idea of the
| kinds of things I'd be interested in; the fact that I'm on a
| tech blog means I'm more receptive to ads for tech-related
| tools and services. The people who run these sites have more
| respect for their visitors, so they choose a more respectful
| approach to ads.
|
| Like I said: most companies' approach to ads is rooted in
| abject contempt for the people they need. If your business
| strategy is based on treating people badly, you have no
| grounds to complain when they decide not to put up with that
| anymore. You can either whine about how unfair it is and
| fail, or you can identify an approach that is appealing
| enough to be sustainable.
|
| This could be a chance for that much-vaunted market-force-
| shaped innovation. Facebook's current strategy--whining--
| suggests they're still stuck in the old way of thinking:
| greed and laziness.
| abruzzi wrote:
| This sums up my thoughts perfectly. I would add a comment--
| all of the anti-apple voices in the article talk only about
| the poor business that will be hurt. The never talk about
| the benefit or drawback to the people being tracked. Their
| approach can be summed up as "we have a right to this data
| and telling people about our tracking and asking if it is
| alright with them is not alright." So businesses have
| rights but individuals don't.
|
| Personally, I hope things like this start to kill off the
| "free internet." I'd much rather pay for the things that I
| use.
| shadilay wrote:
| Or people will realize the service isn't as valuable as
| what's being charged. No one asked for 80% of facebooks
| features, it could be run/maintained by a much smaller team.
| wintermutestwin wrote:
| So much this. All I wanted was a simple way to share pics
| and updates with family and friends. Instead, I got an anal
| probe and mind control. Seriously, it is harder and harder
| to actually find my family and friends on their convoluted
| mess of a site.
| pyronik19 wrote:
| I loose no sleep if these products go paid only and facebook
| loses its influence massively and with it their ability to
| censor and manipulate information and our elections.
| masswerk wrote:
| How about tracking back to content related advertising rather
| than tracking based advertising? All related studies are
| showing that the latter isn't working anyway. And, as these
| metrics (and ethics) suggest, it has been an illegitimate
| invasion, right from the beginning. The fancy "conversion
| rate" dashboards are just not worth it.
|
| Bonus: Maybe this will be an opportunity for content
| providers to reset the decline of advertising prices that has
| happened over the last decade. (Remember the blooming blogger
| scene in the 2000s, when you could still make substantial
| revenues? Remember the thriving online news papers? We could
| get back there, if advertising became less invasive and less
| aggressive and also more profitable for content providers,
| e.g., how it had been in print.)
| masswerk wrote:
| P.S.: An interesting experiment may be an ad-blocker with
| an option "block animated ads and tracking only" (or
| rather, "show static ads only"). And maybe another option
| "filter ads to greyscale".
|
| I guess, reducing distraction and moving towards a client-
| based and user-controlled "ads manager" may have a decisive
| impact on overall blocking habits.
| bserge wrote:
| Still not sure why that didn't become predominant. Dynamic
| content based ads seemed to be the new fad in late 00's,
| then it kinda disappeared, with user tracking becoming the
| norm.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Tracking is necessary for the advertising economy to
| control bad behavior on the part of publishers and
| advertisers, not just to serve targeted ads.
|
| No matter what there would be discrepancies in the numbers
| (publisher says it sent 75 clicks, advertiser says it got
| 70) and that breeds mistrust. Participants have a reason to
| lie. Having multiple third party watch the whole thing
| helps them trust each other.
| masswerk wrote:
| This has been possible before. Google was built around
| content based advertising. Also, maybe click-through
| rates are not that important? Maybe exposure is a more
| decisive metric? As a side-effect, we may reduce social
| bubble effects and maybe even return to a shared reality?
| (Many of the unwanted effects of the Web are really due
| to targeted advertising and its consequences.)
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Some kind of verification is necessary for impression-
| based advertising too.
|
| For instance, there are discontents around Nielsen
| (they've had scandals in India, and I infuriate people in
| the TV industry with the suggestion that a Nielsen home
| got bribed to blast MTV in an empty room) but the
| participants believe in Nielsen: people know probability-
| based sampling basically works.
| aerosmile wrote:
| You're clearly under the impression that all that
| Facebook does is get you good click-through rates and low
| conversion rates. Similarly, you're under the impression
| that Google's conversion rates are through the roof. Did
| you ever stop to ask yourself if your world view might be
| limited to a small sample size (eg: your own
| experiences)? I know plenty of businesses where the
| conversion rates are exactly the opposite of what you
| described. It turns out, the right marketing platform is
| related to the product you're selling. For example, if
| you want to buy a vacuum, Google will do a great job in
| connecting you with the right advertiser. But what if you
| just started a new hobby and don't yet know what it is
| that you need in that hobby? Eg, you started racing, but
| have no idea that upgrading your suspension will get you
| more performance than upgrading your exhaust? The
| advertiser selling suspension components will use
| Facebook to share this information with you (and Facebook
| will do a much better job than Google of identifying the
| person who needs that component but doesn't know it yet),
| and they will also advertise on Google as well, but
| Google will only be relevant once the buyer starts
| researching suspension solutions. Kind of nice to be the
| first one to pitch a suspension solution to a willing
| buyer, don't you think?
| masswerk wrote:
| On the other hand, if I'm not on FB, I probably miss
| those vendors of suspension components all together.
| Advertising "in the bubble", as opposed to "in the
| world", comes with its disadvantages. With content based
| advertising (media analysis), you'll probably catch me at
| the related watering holes and communities. Also,
| excluding non-targeted audiences doesn't exactly benefit
| a shared world view.
|
| P.S.: The general idea of targeted advertising misses the
| concepts of state of mind and focus of interest entirely.
| There's a (significant) difference in delivering a
| message in context and out of context. (The latter may
| have even adversarial effects.)
| aerosmile wrote:
| > Advertising "in the bubble", as opposed to "in the
| world"
|
| Is this an argument for the open web, or is this an
| argument for Google being more popular than Facebook? If
| the former, I am with you. If the latter, the gap is not
| as big as you might think - 4 billion worldwide users of
| Google Search vs 2.85 for Facebook [1]. Slight advantage
| to Google, but how many US advertisers really care about
| international buyers? When it comes to advertising, you
| want people with money burning holes in their pockets.
| Facebook's financial results show that they plenty of
| access to this demographic.
|
| > The general idea of targeted advertising misses the
| concepts of state of mind and focus of interest entirely.
| There's a (significant) difference in delivering a
| message in context and out of context.
|
| You're slightly lagging with this argument. This exact
| reason was why Google was so dismissive of paid social
| back in the formative years of Facebook ("who gives a
| shit about what college students talk about on social
| networks?"). And then the oh shit moment happened in
| 2011. Eric Schmidt had to step down and Larry Page tied
| bonus payouts to the success of Google Plus. You have to
| give Larry some credit here - while a bit slower than
| Zuck, he did see the writing on the wall before the rest
| of the world did. If you tried advertising on both
| platform in 2011, Google would just crush you with their
| results. By 2016, Facebook was already competitive with
| their interest and lookalike targeting for a large group
| of advertisers (and even enabled Trump to win the
| presidency), and by 2018 the game had advanced to the new
| concept of "creative targeting" which is basically
| entirely driven by the algorithm and takes minimal
| targeting input from advertisers. At that point, paid
| social became so good that it got creepy and turned the
| public sentiment to negative and incentivized Apple to
| jump on the band wagon with iOS 14.
|
| So I wouldn't agree with your argument that Facebook has
| a fundamental problem with recognizing intent. If
| anything, they are too good at it for their own sake.
|
| [1] https://review42.com/resources/google-statistics-and-
| facts/
| masswerk wrote:
| I wouldn't pose this as FB vs Google. Google is dealing
| intrinsic conversion metrics, as well, which are highly
| problematic regarding the total impact. (So, Google is
| yet another, while maybe broader bubble.)
|
| On a historical note, as it turned out G+ was soon
| scrapped and quite a loss, while we're dealing still with
| the fallout of Google's uniform platform strategy, which
| was put in place to provide for G+.
| aerosmile wrote:
| > All related studies are showing that the latter isn't
| working anyway.
|
| This is very common on HN these days - stating something
| with a lot of confidence that turns out to be some self-
| constructed mental model that has nothing to do with
| reality. Then, add the obligatory "all related studies are
| showing it" and you have met the publishing standards.
|
| Legally or illegally, morally or immorally, for better or
| worse, Facebook has created the most sophisticated ad
| targeting engine the world has ever seen. You want proof?
| Look at their financial statements. You want more proof?
| Look at all the companies that went public on the back of
| Facebook's ad targeting engine. Again, perhaps it shouldn't
| exist in the first place, but trust me, it works.
| masswerk wrote:
| Disclaimer: I studied media theory and publishing, but
| well before the Web became the all-decisive factor.
| Meaning, I have some idea about those things and have
| still an interest in them. (Also, I actually programmed
| ad embedding mechanisms for ad networks, but quit this
| field, when things became too invasive and ads too
| aggressive and I couldn't justify this any longer. - At
| this time, tracking was commonly done for multistage
| campaigns only.)
|
| That said, I've never come upon a study that showed
| significant gains due to targeting, rather to the
| contrary. - So, after a decade, I'm still waiting for any
| proof in favor of targeting. (The suspicion must be still
| that targeting is rather a lazy alternative to media
| analysis and its perceived advantage is rather rooted in
| minimising efforts than in effectiveness.)
|
| Regarding _" Facebook has created the most sophisticated
| ad targeting engine",_ this is a rather biased
| proposition. It has enforced Facebook as a broker, made
| advertising cheap, while less effective, and has driven
| ad revenues for content providers downhill. (Google is to
| blame, as well.)
| renewiltord wrote:
| * There is a pervasive belief on HN that marketing teams
| are making easy errors, i.e. there is low hanging fruit
|
| * Consultancies that improve marketing campaign efficacy
| make lots of money
|
| * HN users are making small fractions of that money and
| constantly complaining about it
|
| * Any HN user capable of picking this low hanging fruit
| could do this for two years and retire for life
|
| * They are not
|
| * Conclusion: Either there is no low hanging fruit, or
| the HN users observing this are making millions of
| dollars, or these HN users do not care for money at all
| and get greater utility from complaining about money.
| aerosmile wrote:
| Alternative conclusion: as with all things in a
| capitalist society, there is a small minority of people
| that is killing it, and they are not making it easy for
| everyone else to discover their playbooks.
| renewiltord wrote:
| That doesn't work because we're assuming that most
| marketers are making easy mistakes. The playbook is so
| simple that people on HN could write it, supposedly.
| aerosmile wrote:
| > That doesn't work because we're assuming that most
| marketers are making easy mistakes. The playbook is so
| simple that people on HN could write it, supposedly.
|
| Those are someone else's words, not mine. I never argued
| that winning on Facebook is "easy" (and for the record,
| neither is it on Google). It's not easy, it's just
| doable. And for those who have the skills and resources
| to do it, it's massively profitable. I would even argue
| that if you're letting an agency run your Google or
| Facebook account, you're lacking the resources to do it
| right. What you need is top-level talent competing
| against your nearest competitors, and winning battles
| inch by inch. An agency will never give you the talent
| you need to go up against a company that just raised
| $100m and is running their performance marketing in-house
| (and if you don't have such a competitor, then you're
| either smarter than anyone else in the world, or simply
| not pursuing a VC-investable market).
|
| So no, it's not easy at all. But it's doable and totally
| worth it.
| masswerk wrote:
| Maybe, there's a biased view in ad business and some of
| the perceived benefits and effects are rather
| tautological? (This is why we have studies.)
|
| You could also conclude from your remarks that there is a
| pervasive idea around ad teams that former generations
| (in the times of media analysis) were just delivering
| complete failures. However, this model had delivered for
| more than a century. How could this model perform with
| todays instruments and data?
| renewiltord wrote:
| The best thing about startups is that they test questions
| like that in a way that these studies can't. Because the
| participants have a very real and strong incentive to
| succeed they will perform that continuous search and
| hypothesis adjustment till they hit gold or die. If you
| truly have a Thiel hypothesis, you're going to get very
| rich.
|
| In software, we call this "talk is cheap; show me the
| code", but of course here you don't need to show _me_ the
| code. It 's just that you're letting this golden
| opportunity go to waste. Up to you, I guess.
| masswerk wrote:
| The problem being only that these startups are still
| acting in the bubble of common beliefs of the field. So
| these are actually testing the beliefs, not their real-
| world effectiveness. (Also, at this stage, you have to
| comply and conform to the delivery networks right from
| the very beginning with little chance of competing with
| the big, established ones.)
|
| Edit: Moreover, you had to compete with the paradigm of
| low effort, high interchangeability and big data.
| (Meaning: interchangeable code, interchangeable users,
| interchangeable professionals, interchangeable clients,
| and lean know-how stack as it's "all in the data". While
| this adheres to criteria of optimization, it doesn't
| necessarily mean that it represents an optimum of
| effectiveness, as well.)
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| >"You want proof? Look at their financial statements."
|
| Homeopathy peddlers make a killing, so does the agile
| consultants and th catholic Church, if this is proof they
| must both be right?
|
| Just because someone made loads of money doesnt mean
| their claims are sciebtifivally valid.
| aerosmile wrote:
| I went out of my way not to give Facebook any moral high
| ground, and yet you still managed to get offended.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Your 'proof' makes no sence, what does 'offense' or
| 'moral high ground' have to do with it?
| pseudalopex wrote:
| Snark isn't a sign of offense.
| aerosmile wrote:
| Call it what you want, the outcome is the same. You want
| to say [A], but before you say it, you have to start with
| [B] just not to get the conversation derailed by call-it-
| what-you-wants. And it turns out, the call-it-what-you-
| wants are still going to do their thing, pretending this
| is Reddit.
| saint_abroad wrote:
| Indeed, maybe it's about time advertisers got back to
| sponsoring quality content their target audience enjoys,
| rather than direct marketing through the back door on the
| lowest common denominator.
| handrous wrote:
| It's hard to know what the Web, social media, and tech
| generally might look like if the spyvertising money-spigot
| gets shut off. Paid and fully-free-and-open alternatives to
| spying-paid "free" services & content are nearly impossible
| in the former case, and discouraging to participate or work
| on in the latter, in the current environment. There may be
| other models, too, that are in some sense better or
| preferable, or at least acceptable or sufficient, but
| currently not viable.
| ggggtez wrote:
| The problem with this kind of thinking is that if Cable TV is
| any indication, things that start as subscription services
| will slowly begin to double-dip and you'll be paying money
| upfront and watching ads anyway.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| At least now we have piracy as a counter balance for that.
| Iv wrote:
| Mark my words: as soon as the world starts to turn their back
| on advertisement, there will be several micropayement
| unicorns flourishing in the next 6 months.
|
| 20+ paid subscriptions make no sense, but checking a box with
| your ISP to get a 2 USD monthly credit to use on the articles
| you click on, could work.
| kalleboo wrote:
| I'm still disappointed that Flattr never took off
| yarcob wrote:
| You are making a few assumptions:
|
| 1) People want the services more than they value their
| privacy. Maybe they'll just not use the service if they can't
| use it without tracking
|
| 2) That invasive tracking is required to sell ads. The media
| industry made billions (trillions?) of revenue from ads
| before tracking became a thing.
|
| 3) That platform ads are the only way to make services that
| are free for consumers. For example, Vimeo offers an ad free
| video delivery service that the content creator pays for. If
| Youtube was no longer free, maybe content creators would just
| pay for content delivery instead of having consumers
| indirectly pay for deliver with ads. Content creators have no
| issue selling ads / sponsorships without any tracking
| whatsoever. The result would be the same as now (content free
| for consumers) only that now non-targeted ads would pay for
| everything.
|
| 4) And finally, you are assuming that targeting via tracking
| actually works well enough to make it worthwhile. From what
| I've read, ad targeting is nowhere near as good as Facebook
| et al would have advertisers believe. Maybe invading your
| users privcy just doesn't make such a big difference in the
| end.
| naravara wrote:
| > As soon as ad supported free services start shutting down
| because of ad blocking and lowered clickthrough rates on ads
| because of targeting being blocked, most people will probably
| start changing their minds.
|
| Or they'll just go outside and find better uses for their
| time.
| cheschire wrote:
| If subscriptions were always as easy to manage in one place
| like they are on an iPhone, I would have absolutely no
| problem with 20 subscriptions.
|
| Where's the subscription management startup model?
| addingnumbers wrote:
| > Where's the subscription management startup model?
|
| https://patreon.com/
| _greim_ wrote:
| Brave's BATs (Basic Attention Tokens) spring to mind.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| I've thought about this a lot, but the stumbling block for
| me is getting services onboard.
|
| The problem is that subscription services make _billions_
| annually on forgotten subscriptions. None of them want an
| easy "disable" slider next to their name in a convenient
| app. It also makes a la carte subing easy, where you sub
| for a month every few months to "catch up".
|
| Basically, good luck getting an API with an easy
| unsubscribe command from any subscription based service.
| fullstop wrote:
| > where you sub for a month every few months to "catch
| up".
|
| Make introductory rates low and let people lock in. If
| they unsub and then resub they will have to do so at a
| higher rate.
| bin_bash wrote:
| I highly doubt that most users would be comfortable paying
| for 20 subscriptions--or even 1.
| fouric wrote:
| I think that this happens to be the case _now_ , but is
| not an intrinsic property of humans. I think that we're
| living in an age where most consumers have been
| "programmed" to expect things for no _financial_ cost and
| only a _privacy_ cost.
|
| The key word here is "programmed" - and what has been
| programmed can be deprogrammed. I honestly believe that
| we can re-rehabilitate people to no longer automatically
| give away their privacy for a service, and instead
| consciously and carefully assess the financial cost vs.
| utility of a service.
|
| This could lead to _both_ a reduction in the amount of
| available services (as smaller ones go out of business
| because people realized that it wasn 't really worth it
| for them) _and_ an increase in the number of services
| people are actually willing to pay real money for.
|
| Also, if the subscriptions were far cheaper (say,
| $2/month), I think that 20 concurrent subscriptions would
| be acceptable to many people.
| walkedaway wrote:
| Ads still exist. Advertising has existed for a long time,
| effectively, without personal tracking. This will weed out
| the players from the wannabes.
| makecheck wrote:
| This is not destroying the whole concept of ads, it is only
| pushing back against awful variants.
|
| It is definitely possible to have "nice" ads, like simple
| text or images, with no creepy or CPU-draining elements in
| them. Nothing is preventing _those_ ads from supporting free
| services.
| derefr wrote:
| However, the reason companies looking to place ads, will
| choose modern-adtech-platform-X (Google, Facebook, etc.)
| over traditional advertising medium Y (billboards, TV,
| etc.) is that the former promises to be more targeted
| (using the ad"tech") than the latter, such that there's
| higher value-per-click or value-per-impression.
|
| Without that promise, there's no reason to _favor_
| advertising on these platforms over other platforms. Which,
| if you flip it around, means that there's no reason that
| these platforms should be valued in excess of the
| traditional-advertising-impression-value of their MAU.
| (Which is, to be clear, a lot lower than the value these
| companies currently have!)
| nicoburns wrote:
| Consider how much profit a company like facebook makes.
| Ad value could take drop a lot and they'd still be a
| viable company. They's lose, but from a societal
| perspective I'd argue that probably a positive.
| [deleted]
| Retric wrote:
| Many companies are prohibited from doing stuff that they
| would profit from. I am sure soda companies would love to
| be able to add heroin to their products etc. However,
| maximizing random companies profits isn't societies only
| concern.
| derefr wrote:
| My point wasn't so much about _maximizing_ profits; it
| was more that these free-service companies might not even
| be _tenable_ (at least at their current scales, or
| anything like them) with the drastically lower profit-
| margins of traditional ad impressions.
|
| The GP comment said:
|
| > Nothing is preventing those ads from supporting free
| services.
|
| And my thought is, a zero-or-negative profit margin might
| very well be. It costs a lot to run Google/Facebook/etc.
| -- probably a lot more than it costs to run the types of
| services they compete with. For the companies to not go
| bankrupt, their ad clicks/impressions need to be of at
| least as much value as their CapEx+OpEx. With adtech type
| ads, they certainly _are_ at least that valuable. With
| only traditional type ads, would they still be?
|
| I'm not arguing that these companies should be allowed to
| do this because they have some fundamental right to
| exist, mind you. Just pointing out that taking adtech out
| of the equation could "pop the bubble" drive margins
| negative, and just erase the whole free-ad-supported-
| services market entirely.
|
| (Consider: why don't traditional-ads companies offer free
| web services supported by said traditional ads? Is it
| only because nobody cares about buying placement with
| them when targeted placements are available from
| Google/Facebook/etc.? Or is it because, even with full
| dealflow, it's still negative-margin?)
| Retric wrote:
| Tracking doesn't actually add that much to how much they
| can sell advertising for. As to traditional advertising
| companies it's simply a question of competence, you may
| as well ask why they don't sell vacuum cleaners.
| hedora wrote:
| > _Without that promise, there's no reason to favor
| advertising on these platforms over other platforms._
|
| Precisely. Instead, there will (again) be reason to favor
| advertising on high quality content.
|
| Redistribution of income away from ad platforms and
| content spam mills to original journalism and high-
| quality entertainment would be an unambiguous win for
| society.
| alkonaut wrote:
| Yes! So money will flow back to magazine ads, billboards,
| radio, tv, and other media that has seen money flow away
| the last decades. Because their untargeted ad model is
| now not much worse.
| umanwizard wrote:
| Simple text and image ads can't provide enough revenue to
| keep something like Facebook running.
|
| (Whether this is a good or bad thing depends on your
| perspective.)
| rascul wrote:
| I vaguely recall that Google used to use text ads. Not sure
| if they still do, or if I recall correctly.
| handrous wrote:
| That used to be all they did. You'd see a lot of "of
| course I block all ads--except Google's, they're fine".
|
| They also didn't used to trick unsophisticated or
| distracted users into clicking ads by putting them inline
| with search results.
|
| Both changed, I assume, when someone was allowed to run
| an experiment and the projected profit trend line went
| from "exceptionally good" to "holy shit, it's all the
| money in the world". And all it took was being evil. Go
| figure.
|
| Some tie this to internal fallout from the the
| DoubleClick acquisition, which checks out pretty well
| timeline-wise.
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| And we don't even know if their measurement is right--
| they probably got a high rate at first because people
| weren't used to them and were deceived. As people wise up
| the effectiveness will drop.
| handrous wrote:
| All the non-tech-nerds I see use phones or computers hit
| the inline ads at a _very_ high rate. As in, on most
| searches. They do not realize they are ads, mostly, or do
| but aren 't paying attention.
| als0 wrote:
| From a Google search I made in the last hour, the top 6
| search results were all text ads.
| rchaud wrote:
| I think the OP meant AdSense (now Google Ads), which is
| when publishers display ads from Google's advertiser
| inventory. Those are a combination of text-only or banner
| ads. Although I mostly see banner ads on the rare
| occasions I turn off my adblocker.
| alkonaut wrote:
| If sites can't fund their content with ads based information
| I'm _willing_ to give up, then they can beg me for money, or
| charge for the content, or beg me to look at ads or whatever.
| But I want that transaction to be transparent and deliberate.
| And I don't care if 90% of content online just disappears
| because we click the privacy button. Then it was never a
| viable business model to begin with.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Yes, if Facebook goes away due to lack of ads and no paid
| subscribers it means it simply was not worth paying for in
| enough people's minds.
|
| Imagine that your entire business is only appealing to
| people if it is free.
|
| I mean a lot of crappy 70's sitcoms would not exist if
| people had to buy tickets to watch. Honestly, I would not
| mind that world. :-)
| jfengel wrote:
| It seems that the news is only appealing to people when
| it's free. In part that's because it's competing with a
| lot of other things that are free -- including "news"
| subsidized by those who want to influence what news you
| consume.
|
| People really like free. When it's there, it will tend to
| suck the air out of almost everything else. Including
| things that are almost-but-not-quite-free.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Yeah, I admit news might be the exception here.
| rchaud wrote:
| > Then it was never a viable business model to begin with.
|
| I think there's much more evidence to the contrary than
| there is for your position.
|
| Facebook is absurdly, staggeringly profitable. Uber and
| WeWork by comparison are the BS business models, needing to
| break local laws and requiring nation-state levels of VC
| backing and still nowhere near profitability.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| >"Facebook is absurdly, staggeringly profitable."
|
| Because it is stealing - the transactions were not
| voluntary and informed. most users are only now catching
| on to what they've been robbed of.
| rchaud wrote:
| Ad account managers do not care about impressions that
| the FB application reports (unless they're Coca-Cola or
| J&J). They care about the actual conversions, i.e. sales.
| Those are happening on their internal ecommerce platform,
| so those aren't stats FB can juice. You can see where the
| converting traffic is coming from.
|
| If FB's targeting wasn't working, then nobody would have
| a reason to move away from paying Google and Bing to post
| ads on search results. FB and Google now own the online
| ads market, and FB got there in well under a decade.
| alkonaut wrote:
| I didn't mean "it doesn't work" I mean it only works
| because one end of the transaction doesn't really
| understand what they are paying, and if they did - they
| wouldn't. That's not viable. It's similar to a business
| model that relies on people mistyping a search term or
| forgetting to cancel a subscription. It only "works" (is
| profitable) because of the lack of transparency
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I don't know. I think when ad supported free services start
| shutting down people will move on with their lives. We'll
| find out instead how really unimportant Facebook, etc. was in
| people's lives. Put another way, how on earth did people get
| along without Facebook before there was a Facebook?
|
| I'm reminded of a comment from the guy that created the TV-B-
| Gone. He would turn off TV's in public places like self-
| service laundromats, etc. He said he was surprised by the
| general reaction of those that had just recently been
| transfixed by the flickering 60Hz cathode glow. Mostly they
| just turned away form the TV and went back to quiet thoughts
| or whatever.
|
| It was like the TV could go away and people would be like,
| "okay".
| b3morales wrote:
| This might just be me, but I've always found that TVs in
| public have this weird pull to them. Even if I have no
| feelings at all about what's on the screen (a soap opera
| I've never seen?) my gaze is still repeatedly drawn to it.
| If there's one around I generally try to position myself so
| it's not in my peripheral vision or I have to spend some
| effort ignoring it. It feels like whatever it is that keeps
| kids, as we say, "glued to the screen" doesn't always go
| away in adulthood.
|
| I would definitely find it relieving if someone showed up
| with a TV-B-Gone and clicked it off.
| wolpoli wrote:
| Do you have any examples of ad supported free services that
| you think are at risk of shutting down?
| 8ytecoder wrote:
| You seem to think it's a bad thing. I'd argue "Free" products
| destroy innovation. It's extremely hard to beat gmail or
| Facebook without massive VC funding.
| JohnFen wrote:
| Yes, and just to underline your use of quote marks there,
| those "free" products aren't even remotely free. You're
| just paying with a different currency, and -- in my view --
| it's absurdly expensive.
| inesta wrote:
| cant they track by just ip address? for most, the ip address is
| quite unique. Apple only disallowed the unique id from being
| passed around right?
| jaywalk wrote:
| On Wi-Fi, you're going to have multiple people sharing one IP.
| On cellular... good luck.
| inesta wrote:
| yeah on wifi, but if your home, its only your household. i
| thought cellular you get a unique ip? or does the cell
| operator hide your ip. i'm not aware how routing on cellular
| works.
| umanwizard wrote:
| > i thought cellular you get a unique ip?
|
| In the US at least, yes, because most cell providers
| switched to IPv6 long ago. In other places, carrier-grade
| NAT is widespread.
| jaywalk wrote:
| CG-NAT is widespread in the US as well, but is only used
| when a site isn't reachable over IPv6.
| umanwizard wrote:
| True, but in this particular context the IPs would be
| unique, as Facebook has been IPv6-native for many years.
| air7 wrote:
| I dislike being tracked as much as the next guy, but I often
| wonder what "our" ideal end-game goal is? By "our" I mean the
| typical HN crowd that understands both the technological and the
| economical implications of this.
|
| If we want top-grade products to remain available without a
| direct monetary transaction (i.e "free"), it seems we must give
| _something_ that the product providers can turn into monetary
| value indirectly somehow. Yet it seems we are actively against
| any such options: We block ads guilt-free, we rally against any
| attempt at collecting valuable personal information even
| anonymously, we consider crypto mining in the background (which
| is basically paying via your electricity bill) borderline
| malware.
|
| I am part of this "we", and yet I ask myself, what _am_ I willing
| to give as indirect payment? What other options are there?
| dharma1 wrote:
| Youtube Premium (paid) is well worth the price of admission, to
| not have to watch ads. Don't think I'd pay for Facebook
| the-dude wrote:
| This can be had for free with uBlock Origin ( I never see an
| ad on YT ).
| tshaddox wrote:
| Yes, and I'm sure you can jailbreak/root your mobile
| devices or use a VPN running Pi-hole to remove _all_
| YouTube ads. You can also download YouTube videos with
| youtube-dl (another feature of YouTube Premium). But for me
| it 's well worth the $12 a month to remove ads and get
| mobile downloads without any hassle or nonsense.
| jakubmazanec wrote:
| That works only on desktop.
| max_hammer wrote:
| YouTube Vanced works on Android.
|
| Also, Firefox + Unblock.
| xxs wrote:
| or anything with that has firefox.
| ikiris wrote:
| A lot of this crowd thinks toll everything is the right
| solution, since there is a heavy libertarian... presence.
| s0rce wrote:
| I pay for a bunch of services (Caltopo for topographic maps,
| bazqux for RSS feeds, google drive for storage space, streaming
| services, Garmin inReach for satcom). The ones that I don't pay
| for, I probably wouldn't pay for if they changed models and
| wouldn't be terribly upset if they went away (Strava,
| Instagram, Facebook). Some I would miss and might pay for in
| some form or another (Reddit).
| cortesoft wrote:
| Switch back to content based ads, which is what we had prior to
| the internet. If you have a car related product, advertise on
| car related websites. Don't try to advertise to a car person
| visiting a Jazz music site.
|
| I think going back to content based advertising will greatly
| improve the quality of content on the internet.
|
| The way it works now, the most valuable content is the cheapest
| content that can get valuable eyes to look at it, which leads
| to clickbait and low effort content.
|
| If advertisers can only make ad decisions based on the content,
| quality content will be more valuable.
| voisin wrote:
| I think the issue is that there isn't a transparent option to
| pay directly. Why not say "opt out of tracking and pay $5/mo,
| or allow ad tracking" and see what people choose?
| neolog wrote:
| Browsers can support microtransactions for pageviews. That
| would avoid many of the problems, but not all.
| corford wrote:
| Perhaps the answer is a lot of these services are less vital
| and desired as their MAU figures lead everyone to believe.
|
| If someone really wants or needs something, they'll find a way
| to pay for it (directly or indirectly) if access cannot be had
| any other way. Everything else is "nice to have" until the cost
| or friction gets a little higher than zero.
|
| The fact that people are increasingly unwilling to "pay for"
| things like FB seems to suggest these services are not actually
| _that_ vital despite their high usage figures.
| bllguo wrote:
| nobody pays (directly) for Google search but surely most
| would agree search engines are vital. clearly the advertising
| business model has enabled certain products in a way that
| direct purchases could not; to reject the model wholesale
| seems like luddite conservatism
| SimeVidas wrote:
| You're confusing ads with tracking.
|
| Do we have any proof that regular, old non-tracking ads could
| not sustain a top website? I've heard stories that websites can
| actually earn _more_ by excluding all the ad tech middlemen
| from the equation.
| lizard wrote:
| For me, there are 2 things:
|
| 1. I want more honesty and transparency in products and
| services. I'm tired of being sold something to "Connect with
| friends and the world around you" that are actually just a
| front to collect as much information about me as possible to
| for advertisers.
|
| I'm not even opposed to targeted ads, but at this point have to
| assume that if a product is capable of collecting ever bit of
| data it can and selling it, it will. Even privacy policies and
| user agreements are meaningless because they all contain text
| of the effect that the provider can change the terms at any
| time.
|
| I just want companies to be honest about what they are actually
| doing and what the cost to me really is.
|
| 2. I want ads to back the hell off.
|
| I don't mean they need to go away entirely. There are times
| when I _want_ to learn about different products and find new
| things to solve problems I have.
|
| But I'm tired of them them pushing to get as in my face as
| possible, of them beating me over the head with problems I
| don't have, and of them trying to manipulate me into giving
| them money instead of helping me find things that will actually
| help me.
|
| It's as if product discovery isn't profitable; like companies
| are afraid to be honest about their products. So instead of
| making better products, they entire market just makes different
| colored cheap boxes with nothing inside and uses ads to
| manipulate as many people into buying them before they figure
| it out.
|
| I block ads guilt free because at this point I honestly don't
| feel like I can trust any company that participates in this
| racket.
|
| Personally though, I'm might just be willing to give up on
| products that depend on ad revenue. While I admit I do use some
| services based on ad-tech, I'm pretty quick to leave any site
| that complains about my ad-blocker and don't really feel like
| I'm missing anything. I could probably be convinced to leave
| most these other services behind if they started making a worse
| experience of it.
| jimkleiber wrote:
| Your post inspires me to look at it from a real-world analogy.
| If I imagine that online ads are the same as offline ads, I
| start to think about what offline ad tracking would look like.
| I imagine cameras being on the streets to watch me walk down
| the street, following me to different stores to see what I buy,
| with whom I meet, and other activities to inform which
| billboards/street advertisements should exist. I think about
| ads being not just on billboards and bus stands, but on the
| sidewalk, on every skyscraper, or even more functionally
| annoying, having to physically remove an ad to open a door to a
| building, or going halfway up the stairs to be hit with a
| physical ad that drops from the sky and stops me from entering
| unless I swipe my ID card.
|
| I could go on and yet I think some points start to emerge. I'm
| OK with ads, I don't like the pervasive tracking. I'm OK with
| ads, I don't like them interrupting the functionality. I
| actually even like ads when I have some control over them, not
| them controlling me. Give me more options to choose which types
| of ads I want to see (not only don't want to see), don't track
| me to try to guess/manipulate which ones I want to see.
|
| Lastly, I think in physical real estate, there are laws about
| who can advertise, where, and when, and I think in digital real
| estate, there don't seem to be those regulations and
| advertisements and ad-tracking creep more and more. While
| advertisements seem to be one of the best ways to grow income
| (i.e., more people viewing/more accurate audience = higher ad
| price), I think an ad does have a ceiling price and then once
| it hits it, companies start to make more ads, more intrusive
| ones, and more tracking ones.
|
| I think more than anything, I want more agency over the
| process, and right now, my options for agency are often do
| nothing, avoid the site completely, constantly click on ads to
| say "I don't want to see ads like this" and end up seeing more
| ads tangentially like it, install an ad-blocker, or one of many
| other almost guerrilla-like tactics to gain some semblance of
| agency.
| kwanbix wrote:
| As far as I see it, tracking is there to make sure you get
| relevant adds.
|
| I remember the internet in the HoTMaiL era, all of the adds
| where mainly about casinos, porn and such, and very rarely
| interested to me.
|
| I personally think that if tracking is done with good
| intentions, it shouldn't be an issue. At least from my point
| of view.
|
| I rather see totally relevant ads than have again
| "casino/poker/porn" ads.
| Smoosh wrote:
| I suspect that in the early days of internet advertising
| casino/poker/porn was much more common because they were
| the ones willing to take a risk on advertising in the new
| media. Over time other more mainstream industries joined
| in.
|
| I don't agree about the good intentions. The tracking is a
| means to an end. People are tracked to measure engagement
| and to target ads, both of which have the purpose of
| increasing the value of the advertising to the benefit of
| the ad networks. They don't care if you get relevant ads.
| They care that they can charge more for your eyeballs
| because they can classify you as "male, 19-29, in USA,
| interested in technology, art, exercise" and sell you as
| part of a package to companies wanting to target that
| market.
| joreilly wrote:
| Performing the same though-exercise, I find myself with a
| different conclusion; I despise physical advertising. I hate
| driving down the high-way and seeing a massive billboard for
| who-even-cares interrupting the fields and forests. I don't
| want to have products pushed at me while walking around
| downtown. Sao Paulo removed all
| billboards/branding/advertising with their Clean City Law [0]
| in 2007 and the difference before and after is massive. It
| immediately looked so much more clean and beautiful (at least
| for the parts of the city they photographed, probably some
| selection bias here). Assuming that billboards and
| advertising are somehow putting money into the government's
| pockets, I would gladly raise my taxes to eradicate public
| advertising permanently. Bringing the analogy back to digital
| advertising, I'd be happy to pay some sort of monthly fee to
| "The Internet" to receive access to it and never see an ad or
| be tracked again, perhaps similar to what Coil [1] is
| attempting, but somehow at full-internet scale. Naturally,
| how this could be implemented is far beyond me, as are the
| economics behind advertising, so I suppose I'm doing little
| more than wistful thinking.
|
| If I had to compromise, I would agree that more agency and
| less intrusive ads and tracking are a start.
|
| [0]: https://99percentinvisible.org/article/clean-city-law-
| secret...
|
| [1]: https://coil.com/
| distances wrote:
| I agree totally. There's not that much physical world
| advertising in my part of Europe (e.g. almost no road side
| banners at all), but I still despise how we've sold bus
| stops and metro walls to the highest bidder. Public space
| should be advertisement-free as you can't opt out of it.
|
| Private spaces like inside shopping malls is fine for me.
| jimkleiber wrote:
| I like that distinction between public and private
| spaces. And I think those rules exist in many places (at
| least in the US) but maybe not as strict as you may be
| desiring. I'm pretty sure my town has restrictions on how
| tall/big billboards can be, and I know they used to have
| restrictions about how tall the McDonald's or other
| restaurant signs could be.
|
| I like the idea that inside a private building is opt-
| in/consent, whereas outside of it is not.
| joreilly wrote:
| Parroting jimkleiber, I like the distinction between
| advertising in public and private spaces, although I
| suppose it would be a matter of being adamant that
| anywhere that isn't in a private building, isn't private
| space.
|
| > There's not that much physical world advertising in my
| part of Europe (e.g. almost no road side banners at all),
| but I still despise how we've sold bus stops and metro
| walls to the highest bidder
|
| I lived in Germany for a few months and was shocked to
| see advertisements for cigarettes on the sides of the
| local buses. I suppose this will be changing in 2022, so
| a good first step [0].
|
| [0]: https://www.thelocal.de/20200918/germany-set-to-ban-
| cigarett...
| jimkleiber wrote:
| > Sao Paulo removed all billboards/branding/advertising
| with their Clean City Law [0] in 2007 and the difference
| before and after is massive. It immediately looked so much
| more clean and beautiful...
|
| Reminds me of how one day, I think in SF, I was trying to
| go around without reading things and just realized there
| are so many things shouting at me with words, especially
| billboards and other forms of public advertising. I would
| love to even have a city here in the US experiment with
| something like this.
|
| > I would gladly raise my taxes to eradicate public
| advertising permanently
|
| I would, too, especially as a consumer, and yet, as a
| producer, I wonder how annoyed I would be without ads.
| Maybe there's a balance, and I believe needs to be have
| more consumer voice, and less producer voice.
|
| > Naturally, how this could be implemented is far beyond
| me, as are the economics behind advertising, so I suppose
| I'm doing little more than wistful thinking.
|
| Lol, me too. I guess it comes down to how much does
| advertising actually work and if advertising disappeared,
| what downstream impacts would it have on the economy (and
| would those be "bad")?
|
| I think part of the reason I'd like to go into public
| office is to run these experiments and also I feel sad that
| more public offices don't seem to run that many experiments
| :-)
| joreilly wrote:
| > Reminds me of how one day, I think in SF, I was trying
| to go around without reading things and just realized
| there are so many things shouting at me with words,
| especially billboards and other forms of public
| advertising. I would love to even have a city here in the
| US experiment with something like this.
|
| I'm in the exact same position, I'd love to see a large-
| scale experiment to determine the economic and
| psychological impact of removing public advertising, or
| at least reducing it to a more "comfortable" level,
| whatever that may be. The Canadian government
| experimented a bit with universal basic income in the
| 70s, and more again recently with COVID, so perhaps
| they'd be willing to give this a shot as well.
|
| > I would, too, especially as a consumer, and yet, as a
| producer, I wonder how annoyed I would be without ads.
| Maybe there's a balance, and I believe needs to be have
| more consumer voice, and less producer voice.
|
| Another concern/shortcoming I forgot to address above is
| what companies will do to get their products out there;
| will advertising take a more subtle, perverse tone if
| they're not allowed billboards and banner ads? Perhaps a
| middle-ground will stop a more covert extreme from
| appearing. Perhaps I'm falling for the middle ground
| fallacy.
| randcraw wrote:
| Totally agree. To that end, I'd like to propose a new
| inverse model for advertising in America where every
| consumer gets to sell airtime on their eyeballs. Each time
| an advertiser wants to promote something to me, I get to
| charge them a fee -- aprice that's set by me. Henceforth,
| every advertiser who wants to stick their ad in my face
| must pay for the privilege to do so.
|
| Now that Near Field Comm has arrived and active invasive
| advertising soon is likely follow us everywhere we go, it's
| time we consumers reasserted ourselves and took back
| control of our eyeballs.
| Animats wrote:
| _physically remove an ad to open a door to a building_
|
| "Oh, that's where it is. I couldn't find the product because
| the ad was in the way." Grocery store standalone displays
| partially blocking aisles and shelves are a pain during busy
| periods. You get cart jams.
| dillondoyle wrote:
| Some of that 'offline' pervasive tracking you describe does
| exist!
|
| Not on the scale of the internet and you give some good
| examples that are egregious. a lot of it is just 'adtech' bs,
| but it's there.
|
| and the traditional in-store transaction data marketplace is
| huge. Companies have been tracking you and your purchases
| around forever.
|
| passive bluetooth IDs track you in store - though didn't iOS
| mitigate that by changing them frequently? idk maybe not.
|
| There are some 'eye tracking' billboard tech but it's kind of
| dumb imho. The simpler is just trying to estimate
| impressions.
|
| though maybe that's more digital ads than not. but
| collecting, selling, aggregating consumer data, combining it
| with purchase data, and using that for direct marketing ha
| been around for ages.
| tempestn wrote:
| Absolutely agree with this. Both from a consumer perspective
| and as a website owner I'd prefer to have ads that are simply
| intended to appeal to the expected audience for that
| site/content, as you would expect for offline ads.
| Unfortunately it doesn't tend to be a good use of time for
| small to medium operators to curate their own ads directly,
| so in order to get there we need major ad networks to support
| this, and, critically, advertisers on those platforms to see
| value in contextual ads vs precise targeting and tracking.
|
| I do think that value is there though. Some of our best
| marketing for AutoTempest has been through youtube
| sponsorships where we find creators and videos relating to
| cars and car buying, and work with with the creator to
| include a pitch for our service in exchange for (usually) a
| flat fee. It's dead simple for both sides, and as long as
| what you're advertising is legitimately useful and you're
| transparent about the relationship, the response from viewers
| tends to be very positive. I suppose it could be trickier if
| your product had a very niche audience, but I would think
| these days there are corners of the web targeting every
| niche, so you just need to find where your potential
| customers hang out, and go there, rather than trying to
| target them wherever they might be.
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| >If we want top-grade products to remain available without a
| direct monetary transaction
|
| Don't want.
| phkahler wrote:
| >> If we want top-grade products to remain available without a
| direct monetary transaction (i.e "free"), it seems we must give
| something that the product providers can turn into monetary
| value indirectly somehow.
|
| For the sake of argument, lets assume FaceBook is a top-grade
| product that people currently don't pay for with money. It
| exists because advertisers pay FB. The targeting of ads to
| individual users allegedly results in a high CTR or whatever.
| Without targeting, FaceBook can still sell ads but they will be
| less targeted, and presumably have a lower CTR. That means they
| will be less valuable than other forms of ads and the ad spend
| will be adjusted accordingly. That seems bad for our "free"
| service. OTOH if we stop targeting in all areas, there will be
| no medium that is "better" to put ads and so the spend will
| likely move in proportion to where peoples eyeballs and ears
| are, as things used to be. That might actually result in more
| ad spending in areas like radio, TV, and any other medium that
| never gained the ability to target specific people.
|
| Maybe that's a good thing for us consumers.
| LargeWu wrote:
| I don't really even mind if Facebook is targeting ads to me
| based on the stuff that I do _on Facebook_. It 's when
| Facebook, and Google, Amazon, whoever, start reaching their
| tentacles into other spaces where I can't get away from them
| or don't give them consent that I have a problem.
| SergeAx wrote:
| Without targeting we will just see mediocre, if not shitty,
| all-terrain ads, like those on TV. Men will see ads of women
| products and vice versa.
|
| Internet advertising will become the home ground of big
| companies, which don't mind spending tons of cash for widest
| possible audience reach. Small business will be effectively
| cut out of online ads, except search engines with their
| keywords targeting.
| spideymans wrote:
| >I am part of this "we", and yet I ask myself, what am I
| willing to give as indirect payment? What other options are
| there?
|
| I would like to see us move to direct payments. If direct
| payments were the norm, the web would be less polluted with UX
| anti-patterns and other crap.
|
| There's nothing particularly extreme about this idea. We pay
| for all our products and services in the physical world. We pay
| for streaming music and video. Heck, even in social networking,
| people pay/paid to use WhatsApp, iMessage and BBM, which
| are/were two of the largest messaging platforms (BBM and
| WhatsApp had monthly fees and iMessage is paid for with device
| purchases).
|
| If your social media platform cannot convince people to pay,
| say, $1.99/month, perhaps it just isn't enriching the lives of
| your end users, and thus shouldn't exist. A lot of people
| (particularly those focused on growth hacking) would say this
| is a flaw of direct payments, but I view it as a feature.
| SquishyPanda23 wrote:
| I think the answer is going to be a form of micropayments.
|
| The system we have now is micropayments. Personal data has
| economic value and we pay with that.
|
| The engineering problem is to figure out how to make the
| payment system less indirect so that companies can't rent seek
| by extracting more data (payments) for the same service.
| milofeynman wrote:
| My end game would be knowing who has my data and being able to
| say no to 3rd parties getting my data.
|
| Fine, Facebook knows which hobbies I'm looking at on Instagram
| and has incredible ads and suggested posts. Ok that's fine. But
| random 3rd party I don't know getting that data... No thanks.
| afpx wrote:
| I'm less concerned about incompetent advertisers (99% of the
| ads I see are poorly placed) than I am about rogue states (like
| Saudi Arabia, who buy a lot of personal data and metadata),
| finance and investment companies (who use our private data to
| rig the system against us), and criminals.
| thrwaeasddsaf wrote:
| > If we want top-grade products to remain available without a
| direct monetary transaction
|
| Fantasy world. These products do not exist, as far as I'm
| aware. The reality is trash products. I couldn't care less if
| all that trash just vanishes from the internet.
| cactus2093 wrote:
| I wonder this too, and don't forget this is only half the
| equation. The free platforms need ads to support them, but a
| lot of the businesses buying the ads might not be able to exist
| without the direct ad targeting that has been possible the past
| 5 to 10 years. I'm a big fan of direct to consumer brands, yes
| some of them turn out to be completely ridiculous (like the
| infamous Juicero a few years ago), but it's amazing that a
| small team can dream up a new product or better design and
| start selling it quickly with minimal risk. The loss of ad
| targeting definitely benefits big existing retail players and
| makes things more difficult and costly for consumer product
| startups.
| [deleted]
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| Nothing. I'd pay directly. And I do with many sites. But I will
| block anything else.
|
| And cryptominers are not borderline malware. They are malware
| full stop.
| leokennis wrote:
| Re: blocking ads guilt free:
|
| Not that long ago someone posted this beautiful Banksy quote
| about it on HN:
|
| > "People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt
| into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear.
| They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small.
| They make flippant comments from buses that imply you're not
| sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else.
| They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They
| have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has
| ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers
| and they are laughing at you. You, however, are forbidden to
| touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and
| copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever
| they like with total impunity. Fuck that. Any advert in a
| public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not
| is yours. It's yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do
| whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking
| to keep a rock someone just threw at your head. You owe the
| companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don't owe
| them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the
| world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for
| your permission, don't even start asking for theirs." - Banksy
|
| I'll damn well block all shitty ads on every site.
|
| You're a newspaper site and want to block me for using an ad
| blocker? Feel free, I'll leave your site.
|
| You're an advertiser who refuses to bid on ad space as too many
| people block the ads anyway? Please stop bidding then.
|
| But don't pretend that by offering your site for free and me
| using it for free somehow requires me to see shitty ads.
|
| If you want my money, ask for it. If your content is worth it
| I'll pay for it.
| TheAceOfHearts wrote:
| In the same spirit, I saw this post recently[0]:
|
| "All institutions & organizations must shut the hell up. To
| all egregores: you do not speak unless spoken to, and I will
| NEVER speak to you. I do not want to hear 'thank you' from a
| corporation. I am a divine being : you are a construct. You
| have no right to speak in my holy tongue."
|
| [0] https://twitter.com/St_Rev/status/1413780183283294208
| [deleted]
| ElFitz wrote:
| > But don't pretend that by offering your site for free and
| me using it for free somehow requires me to see shitty ads.
| If you want my money, ask for it. If your content is worth it
| I'll pay for it.
|
| One of my personal favorites: movie theatres.
|
| You pay, a handsome amount of money, to see a movie, once,
| and if you happen to have the weird idea of not be just late
| enough to the movie, you get the wonderful, once in a
| lifetime opportunity... to get ads shoved in your face. Ads
| for food, ads for random stuff, and ads for other movies.
|
| The best of both worlds, really.
|
| Used to drive me crazy. Now I simply don't go anymore.
| smegger001 wrote:
| I went to the theatre last weekend (first time since before
| the late unpleasantness) and showed up about ten minutes
| after the posted showtime. The attendant at the ticket
| booth confused asked "are you sure you don't want the next
| showing that one has already started". I confirmed no I
| wanted the one that had "started". I didn't miss any movie
| though just the ads.
| darknavi wrote:
| And then there is my girlfriend, who makes use show up 10
| minutes early to make sure we are in our seats for the
| trailers!
|
| Honestly I don't mind the pre-movie trailers. I like
| movies and they give me time to go pee and stuff.
| flatiron wrote:
| Or more recently my $2k TV that shows me ads from the TV
| itself. Thank goodness for pi.hole (which runs great in
| Docker btw)!
| ElFitz wrote:
| Oh, true, forgot that one; it's even better! Some also
| (used to?) connect to any open wifi nearby if you forgot
| to give it access to yours. How thoughtful...
|
| Pretty much the reason I scorned every single "smart tv"
| continuational wrote:
| I'd simply prefer if all services became paid.
| afavour wrote:
| It's undeniable, though, that such a limitation would shut
| off access for people who can't afford it. You see it today
| with newspaper paywalls and the like.
|
| I suspect the vast majority of us in HN would have no problem
| paying for most of these services but I'm not sure how I feel
| about us making those choices on behalf of those that can't.
| [deleted]
| diamond_hands wrote:
| And we wonder why people _seem_ more uninformed than
| ever...
| KittenInABox wrote:
| If its vital enough that everyone must have access, then it
| should be considered a public utility like water, or
| something the government should subsidize like food stamps.
| I'd be happy for my tax dollars to go towards a well-
| moderated social media platform that everyone can access
| and by design doesn't do shit like optimize "engagement" or
| whatever monetizing nonsense current platforms do to try
| and make a buck.
| leokennis wrote:
| How about a model like Wikipedia?
|
| It's free. If you find it useful and can afford it please
| donate. If not it's still free.
|
| Seems to work out excellent for them.
| throwamon wrote:
| This argument just shows how blind people have become to
| the possibilities. It's not either/or. There should be at
| the very least an _option_ to pay and not be tracked. Most
| services offer no such option.
| bllguo wrote:
| why should there be an option? is there some kind of
| moral imperative?
|
| At the market there is one way to buy, I don't get to ask
| for alternatives to paying upfront. This (for lack of a
| better term) entitlement really puzzles me. In the
| physical world, if I don't like the terms, I leave and
| don't do business. But on the internet, when people don't
| like the terms they flout the rules and consume anyway.
|
| edit: I think it would be ideal to have multiple options,
| I would rather pay directly myself than paying by
| watching ads. I just have a problem with justifying
| refusing to pay in the way the business wants, yet still
| consuming their content.
| asdff wrote:
| If its an important service it could be subsidized. You can
| get past newspaper paywalls with a library card in most
| cases, people are just lazy and prefer to spend the 20
| seconds it takes writing a comment complaining about a
| paywall rather than the two minutes it takes to find out
| your library covers these newspapers.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > You see it today with newspaper paywalls and the like.
|
| Curious example, since this was the case for most of the
| history of journalism.
| afavour wrote:
| Not entirely, historically newspapers had both ads and a
| sale price. That price was subsidised by ads.
|
| But you're right that it's not so clear. Maybe a more
| straightforward example is broadcast TV: ABC, NBC and the
| like. Free at delivery, paid for by ads.
| archduck wrote:
| Classifieds were a huge source of income as well.
| BeetleB wrote:
| Yes, that's what I meant. Even though it was subsidized
| by ads, you still needed to pay for it.
| rhizome wrote:
| Run ads internally for a period of time disconnected from the
| number of clicks. It's worked well for decades. Basically, to
| reduce the integration of ads and browsers.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| I would honestly have paid Facebook a monthly sub long ago if
| they had asked, but they've grown to such a creepy state that
| I've lost interest in giving them any money. I refuse to buy
| the Occulus because of the creepy lock-in they're attempting.
| They've also worked hard to merge IG and FB, they're just
| waiting for the right moment to do it. It's really telling when
| if one of their services has an outage, the rest do as well.
| sleavey wrote:
| I'm in the same boat as you and I don't have a solution but I
| would say that I'd be fine if the web were far, far smaller.
| Most content on the web is trash. The information density of
| most YouTube videos is so low that it would be quicker to read
| a concise text article on the topic if such a thing existed (it
| usually doesn't). Gone are the days (perhaps before 2007 or so)
| when most blogs were labours of love; now they're mostly
| clickbait to show ads and affiliate links. Maybe a partial
| solution to paying for it all is to reduce the amount of
| content being pumped around the internet in the first place.
|
| As a side point, many labour-of-love websites start to monetise
| to sustain the hosting costs. But some of the best blogs I read
| are flat HTML. The running costs of such websites must be
| negligible for all but the most heavily trafficked blogs. When
| my blog got hit by hundreds of views per second over the course
| of a few hours via reddit, Apache on a Core 2 Duo barely broke
| a sweat because it was flat HTML. With modern CSS websites can
| look fantastic with minimal assets and bandwidth. I'm happy to
| pay EUR20/month for such a server myself, and donate my content
| to whoever wishes to read it.
| sharkweek wrote:
| A great example here with the archive link sitting atop this
| thread to allow us all to skip past the paywall.
| martin_bech wrote:
| I would happily pay instead.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| The other option of "what you can give" is "give up using the
| service". That is, if you don't want ads, if you don't want to
| be tracked, and you don't want to mine crypto, the remaining
| option is to not use the service. If you insist on none of the
| first three, the service providers will eventually force the
| fourth option on you.
|
| Or, as continuational said, you will have to pay for it.
| svachalek wrote:
| The option to walk away if you don't like it is an illusion.
| Facebook and Google can get an incredible amount of data on
| you just by tracking your friends. Communications logs,
| location data, calendar information, and more. The mere
| existence of the model also funds the continued development
| of mass surveillance capabilities. I don't see the will to
| make it happen, anywhere, but the only way out of the current
| situation is total abolition.
| dreyfan wrote:
| > and the economical implications of this.
|
| The average HNer has absolutely no clue the economic impact
| derived from invasive privacy tracking and the not-so-secretive
| data industry. It's absolutely massive across finance,
| consumer-facing-anything, insurance, and government.
|
| One particularly good journalist covering the topic is Joseph
| Cox [1]. Follow his work and you'll start to get a tiny sense
| of how massive we're talking.
|
| [1] https://www.vice.com/en/contributor/joseph-cox
| woudsma wrote:
| I don't mind to pay for privacy and transparency. FB and other
| platforms are hoarding and abusing highly personal information
| for profit, they're parasites.
| Agenttin wrote:
| I think people have shown to be willing to give direct payment.
| Twitch subscriptions, Patreon, Kickstarter, even OnlyFans.
| People will invest in the people and the projects they like.
|
| I don't want anything that's advertising supported. Anything.
| There is no media I want to consume so badly that I'll tolerate
| ads to watch it. There's no product so interesting I'll view
| ads to use it. No website contains information I need that
| badly.
|
| People keep saying that without ads we'll have to pay for
| things. Fine. Sure. Set up a Patreon. I give money on Github to
| a few projects I rely on to make sure their maintainers don't
| get day jobs. I couldn't afford to pay a programmer's salary,
| but I can afford to pay a small percentage of one.
|
| I think the problem has actually been the donation button
| itself. You want $1 a month out of me that's a pretty easy
| sell. You want me to sign up for your website and give you my
| credit card information and you're SOL. I tried to donate to
| VoiceMeeter a few months back because it's so good. They only
| accept $20 donations, no more no less, and their payment system
| wasn't working.
|
| Just, like, get a Venmo.
| diffeomorphism wrote:
| How about ads without surveillance? Sure, they are paying less,
| but how much? 2 times? 10 times? 50 times?
|
| Does this change if nobody is allowed to do surveillance? I.e.
| if privacy-respecting ads are not competing with more intrusive
| ads, does the price change?
|
| I think discussing options is a waste of time if we don't have
| any data to base our decisions on.
| midhhhthrow wrote:
| I just think advertisement is when other people pay for the
| media products you get for free, if you don't buy the ad
| product. It's a plus. Why are people so charged up about it? If
| you don't want to be manipulated by ads then just don't be.
| chefkoch wrote:
| >If you don't want to be manipulated by ads then just don't
| be.
|
| If you are depressed, just don't be?
| tshaddox wrote:
| > If we want top-grade products to remain available without a
| direct monetary transaction (i.e "free"),
|
| Is Facebook a "higher-grade" social networking product than
| other free ones that exist without the same monetization of
| personal data, or than other free ones that _could_ exist
| without the same monetization of personal data if such
| monetization of personal data was considered unacceptable? I
| don 't doubt that Facebook delivers more value to shareholders
| than if they were not able to monetize personal data to the
| same extent, but I see no reason to believe that they or their
| competitors would be less of a "top-grade product."
| swlkr wrote:
| I wouldn't mind if more services were paid only.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| I think it's worth pointing out that ad blockers only became
| popular because ads came to be so badly behaved.
|
| The earliest iterations of banner ads weren't that bad. They
| were basically print ads with some low-key animations added at
| worst, and many weren't even graphical.
|
| But then arose an arms race to create the most attention-
| grabbing, obnoxious ads possible, and ad supported pages
| quickly became neon disco raves that sucked up CPU cycles and
| sometimes even hijacked users' browsers. This was the first
| tipping point.
|
| And then ads became ever more invasive, fingerprinting users in
| any way possible. This was the second tipping point.
|
| Had web ads stayed lightly-enhanced, unscripted print ads, I
| doubt anybody would care to install an ad blocker, but here we
| are today where doing so is practically essential not just from
| a privacy standpoint, but also from a security standpoint
| (since ads can exploit 0days).
|
| So the industry largely brought this upon itself, at least in
| my eyes.
| dfrankow wrote:
| This is prisonner's dilemma / tragedy of the commons. The
| best-performing ads made more money, anyone who didn't grab
| attention enough would be strongly pushed towards grabbing
| more attention by industry norms. It was rational for every
| individual to grab more attention, but it was bad for the
| group.
|
| Prisoner's dilemma problems are hard to solve.
| r00fus wrote:
| It's solved by banning that group/activity. When the value
| proposition is net-negative, there should be curbs on such
| activity.
| [deleted]
| jayspell wrote:
| I remember a time in the late 90's when it was considered
| etiquette to click on the ads to support the websites.
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| I think the answer is small social networks for several hundred
| and thousand people at a time, running on hosting which can
| cost 10-20 bucks a month.
|
| Of course, that would mean techies stepping up and doing this
| for their families and tribes...
|
| Many of us seem to be preoccupied with chasing the advertising
| dollar which exploits those same people.
| BeetleB wrote:
| It would be good to list what features are really of value to
| us that are funded by ads.
|
| For me, I pay for email and web hosting. The only big thing I
| rely on is news, I believe. And Internet search.
|
| Youtube is mostly useless except when I'm trying to repair
| stuff at home. Almost everything else falls into the category
| of "entertainment", for which there are plenty of alternatives
| that don't involve ads. If there is one thing there is no
| shortage of in this country, it's entertainment.
|
| Most of the (non-news) articles I read online really don't add
| much to my life, and there were plenty of choices pre-Internet
| (e.g. magazine subscriptions).
|
| I'm happy to get ad-subsidized stuff like they did in the old
| days (news + magazines) because although it was annoying, it
| was not invasive.
|
| So apart from Internet search, I'm having trouble finding
| _anything_ that is (invasive) ad supported that benefits my
| life. If most of these things will go away, I will happily
| revert to the old ways. I 'm definitely not happier now because
| of ad supported services.
| atoav wrote:
| Run ads but don't target them. Target them by paying facebook
| groups or individuals to post them, give FB a share.
| helsinkiandrew wrote:
| > Media buyers who run Facebook ad campaigns on behalf of clients
| said Facebook is no longer able to reliably see how many sales
| its clients are making
|
| Not sure I get this. Presumably an e-commerce site knows it's
| been clicked from an ad due to the url. This must be referring to
| sites that aren't recording that and relying on some Facebook
| pixel in the checkout or aren't handling cookies themselves to
| remember when people have visited before.
| rgavuliak wrote:
| The sites are recording the sales, but in order to optimize
| advertising you would want to know which of the advertising
| channels (google/fb/etc.) is the most efficient or even which
| campaign (or creative) on a given channel works best. What
| facebook tracking did is connect a given marketing campaign
| that a user saw to the purchase they've made. Without allowing
| FB to track you on a vendor's site you don't get that
| information. There are ways to approximate it (see Market Mix
| Modeling), but those are statistical models that have mostly
| been the domain of big companies as opposed to SMEs that could
| afford them (even though now with the proliferation of ML it's
| getting better).
| helsinkiandrew wrote:
| Ah yes so the e-commerce site knows purchasers come fro FB
| but FB doesn't know the purchase was successful so can't how
| the ad to more similar people.
| tyre wrote:
| Couldn't Facebook include a parameter in the url that ties
| back to the click? Then the destination site just calls
| back to Facebook with that unique event id.
| celestialcheese wrote:
| This is tracking within iOS apps, not the browser.
| cerved wrote:
| No they are referring to the fact that click throughs are
| not necessarily the only relevant metric for evaluating the
| success of your ads.
|
| It's not technically challenging to track users if they
| click on your ads
| randomperson_24 wrote:
| I mean this is amazing!
|
| But, doesn't this increase competition for any other advertiser
| who doesn't have all historic data and algorithm Facebook has
| had.
| bellyfullofbac wrote:
| God damn, why remove the punctuation mark for the HN title...
| dazc wrote:
| I think it was Ogilvy on Advertising where I read that titles
| shouldn't have full-stops (periods).
| junon wrote:
| Chances are HN did it. It also capitalizes titles by default
| (each word) which also annoys me.
| amelius wrote:
| "Falsehoods programmers believe about headlines"
|
| https://github.com/kdeldycke/awesome-falsehood
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| More of Facebooks "Boohoo small business" spin. The #1 losing out
| here is Facebook. Good.
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| Listen to the world's smallest violin .
|
| I have zero sympathy for Facebook, advertisers, and businesses
| whose models depend on a fundamental privacy flaw in the design
| of the web. Business worked fine before that flaw existed and it
| will be fine after it's fixed.
| amoorthy wrote:
| Can someone help me understand if users saying they do not want
| to be tracked affects CPMs on Facebook? We've seen a large
| increase in CPMs and I'm wondering if the two are related.
| Thanks.
| clouddrover wrote:
| > _"What Facebook was great at is they were able to see who
| bought and find that user's buyer behavior - what other websites
| are they visiting, what other things are they doing," Stuck
| said._
|
| I'm not going to shed too many tears if businesses which were in
| the business of making my business their business go out of
| business. It was a bad business to begin with.
| imvetri wrote:
| I don't think they need tracking anymore.
|
| IF a model is trained with historical data, that would be good
| enough to track without actually tracking.
| blackbear_ wrote:
| > In predictive analytics and machine learning, concept drift
| means that the statistical properties of the target variable,
| which the model is trying to predict, change over time in
| unforeseen ways. This causes problems because the predictions
| become less accurate as time passes.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concept_drift
| eropple wrote:
| This is true, but...meh? OK? Perhaps there are places where
| inefficiencies are not a bad thing, and perhaps advertising
| is one of them.
|
| Perhaps, even, we should require people to think and
| empathize and communicate rather than feed a pile of
| unvariegated data into a black box and do what it tells us
| to.
|
| I'm shockingly OK with having to make a connection with
| people to try to sell them something, and to have that be an
| upper limit on a company's reach.
| [deleted]
| teekert wrote:
| Screw them, really, these advertisers are super nontransparent,
| to us, humans, while our very attention is their product. And
| when we don't like it, they come up with dark patterns that shove
| it down our throats using pure confusion.
|
| I still cannot imagine that it is more effective to completely
| get to know me and subsequently serve me Makita ads for weeks
| because I looked for and bought a cordless drill months ago, then
| to serve me a context relevant ad. Like an SSD ad next to a
| benchmark article on SSDs. And that is on them, because they
| don't communicate. We should all try to make those companies
| fail. Our collective human attention is not something to be taken
| lightly. It was about time some company made a move that is pro
| their own paying users.
|
| Reading this article also makes me feel like FB orchestrated this
| whole privacy horror, using consultants and lobbyists to convince
| the world they need tracking for good ads, because tracking is
| what FB does. But maybe we don't. I really wonder what happens if
| all these companies tell FB and the trackers: Let's see where
| this ends up, it may well be proven that they didn't need FB and
| its inane tracking in the first place. If you sell Mountain
| Bikes, just pay a website owner that lists MTB trails when you
| want some ads on their site. Disintermediation, it's what the
| internet is about. Sure there can and will be third party
| advertisers, but they could focus on site content rather than
| site visitors. And who knows, maybe I'll come to your site more
| often when I don't see that I blocked 79 trackers, downloaded 3
| MB for some text and had to dig 3 pages into "options" for
| disabling tracking cookies finding out that I actually really
| can't.
|
| You know who is a lookalike? All those other visitors on that
| site that targets a certain demographic.
|
| "I don't think anyone truly understands how many businesses in
| the world are 100% dependent on Facebook," I think you have more
| problems when you are one of those companies, what's your plan B?
| Evidently you are not just dependent on FB, you are also
| dependent on something that the majority of your users really
| don't like.
| yumraj wrote:
| Who are the 25% who said yes to tracking? People who don't know
| better or people who actually see value in being tracked?
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| Alright HN, so what is the end game here?
|
| I'm sure some of you have some experience working in the "ad
| supported" space, and obviously most of the internet and many of
| its services run on the ad model. So where are we going to end up
| if there is a full on public distrust of the current ad model?
| JohnFen wrote:
| With a different ad model. It wasn't really that long ago when
| it wasn't possible for ad companies to engage in such
| widespread spying -- but ad-supported things existed
| nonetheless. It's not like nobody knows how to do this
| correctly.
| barnabee wrote:
| Hopefully purely ad supported services cease to exist.
|
| I never understood why these companies don't offer paid options
| with no ads or tracking, at least in adddition to the ad
| supported "free" version.
| tempestn wrote:
| Short answer is that so few people are willing to pay for
| that, it's generally not worth the time. (Unless there are
| other premium features you can add as well, without
| completely hamstringing your free version.)
| rchaud wrote:
| We go back to the stone age. Me make product ('content'). You
| want product. You pay money.
|
| Patreon, paid newsletters and paid news subscriptions are all
| mature industries now. Why do we act like the sky's going to
| fall if the spigot of useless memes, influencer primping and
| political propaganda gets turned off?
| [deleted]
| celestialcheese wrote:
| Wait. Influencer pimping is going to get significantly worse
| in a "3rd party tracking-free" world. Coupon codes and "link
| in bio" are one of the few channels that aren't affected by
| this.
| rchaud wrote:
| Influencers have direct deals from sponsors, so the
| sponsors are less reliant on FB's ad-targeting
| capabilities.
|
| Influencers get their own vanity URLs with discounts and
| tracking attached, so attribution is no issue, beyond the
| friction of the extra 'link in bio' step. It'll be recorded
| accurately whether or not the vendor's site has the
| Facebook Pixel installed.
| deregulateMed wrote:
| I couldn't actually find a source on this. The Bloomsburg article
| doesn't talk about any companies in panic.
| celestialcheese wrote:
| Browse /r/ppc or /r/adops on reddit, or browse the big slack
| and discord channels for marketers and there's a lot of
| panicked posts.
| deregulateMed wrote:
| I wouldn't say lots. I could only find 1 post and it wasn't
| panicked..
| mariusor wrote:
| For the past year I've had this ritual of clicking on every
| advertising tile as soon as it appears and mark it as irrelevant
| and that I don't want to see any more from that company.
| Currently this happens for a couple of days at the start of some
| months.
|
| So far I feel like this strategy has worked fine, 90% of the time
| I don't get served any unwanted content and I can view a decent
| timeline.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| Why not just install a good ad blocker in your browser?
| boring_twenties wrote:
| Facebook seems to have the upper hand vs UBO at the moment.
| For the last year or two my feed is full of ads.
| mariusor wrote:
| I use uBlock origin and uMatrix on top of Firefox's regular
| tracker blocking. I never heard of regular Facebook ad tiles
| being blocked by anything, but maybe I just didn't look into
| it enough. If you have some info about it, feel free to
| share.
| artursapek wrote:
| On Twitter, I've been blocking every account that pushes ads.
| Slowly I think I've gotten most of them lol. I don't see as
| many now.
| devb wrote:
| I've been doing this for several years, and it doesn't seem
| to reduce the number of ads I get. I just start getting
| absurdly irrelevant ads. A memorable one was for
| @7Up_Nigeria. I live near NYC.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| >I just start getting absurdly irrelevant ads.
|
| I'd count that as progress as they are easier to ignore.
| The ones I don't want are those that are relevant enough
| that they might prompt a change in my behaviour.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| Anecdotally, this strategy does not work on Reddit: I've
| blocked u/madebygoogle and still get shown ads by that user
| account all the time.
|
| Gonna try it on Twitter though since you say it works...
| derwiki wrote:
| Is that a list that can be easily exported/imported?
| artursapek wrote:
| I don't think so, which makes my account more precious :)
| comprev wrote:
| You're still served ads though. To me it doesn't matter if the
| advert is relevant or not - I still have zero interest in
| clicking on it or pausing to read it. Little point in wasting
| time "marking" adverts.
|
| For Instagram the web based app has no adverts, at least not on
| iOS/Firefox/NextDNS.
| svrtknst wrote:
| I don't know if or how it could be leveraged, but marking
| something as irrelevant is also providing information to the
| ad system. Even if that data is "Less of this, please".
| imglorp wrote:
| Is this really about wanted vs unwanted ads?
|
| How about tracking, aggregation, selling and reselling your
| data, and abandoned privacy therefrom? Malware? Bandwidth from
| downloading all the non-content? Burning cpu's to run the
| teraquads of javascript?
| mariusor wrote:
| I do not want any ads. I'm using Firefox containers for
| isolating Facebook on regular websites, I liked 4 total
| pages, I removed most of the information from my profile, I
| have scrubbed 90% of my past activity. The only things I
| deliberately allow Fb to know are my friends and my old
| pictures. I feel like that is an equitable exchange for me
| using their website.
| [deleted]
| pmontra wrote:
| I used to do that too, then I installed Blockada. No ads
| anymore, even in apps.
| officialjunk wrote:
| do you worry any of the links are malicious?
| mariusor wrote:
| No. I just want to see what my friends are up to, not ads.
| neonate wrote:
| https://archive.is/8ieHp
| cm2012 wrote:
| I own an advertising agency. I've tracked ios impressions % over
| time on all of our remarketing campaigns (as a proxy), its down
| about 30% from peak and stabilized. Not a huge deal.
|
| LOL at this below:
|
| "Seufert estimated that in the first full quarter users see the
| prompt, the iOS changes could cut Facebook's revenue by 7% if
| roughly 20% of users agree to be tracked. If just 10% of users
| grant Facebook tracking permission, revenue could be down as much
| as 13.6%, according to his models. The first full quarter with
| the prompt is the third quarter. Facebook reports second quarter
| earnings at the end of July."
|
| FB revenue is going to be up in Q3, not down, would bet $10k on
| that.
| lwb wrote:
| > FB revenue is going to be up in Q3, not down, would bet $10k
| on that.
|
| Why?
| bquest2 wrote:
| Because they are still serving an ad in that spot, just one
| that costs the advertiser more as the now have to bid in a
| larger pool.
|
| FB actually ends up profiting pretty well from this change
| (at the cost of losing some of the small business advertising
| that was priced out)
| edmundsauto wrote:
| Targeting larger pools should reduce per impression costs,
| because FB has more options for where and when to place
| your ad. Smaller groups have fewer opportunities, so if you
| want to show your ad to them specifically, you have to pay
| more.
| smachiz wrote:
| No, this isn't right - because FB can no longer tell you as
| much information about the ad they're about to display,
| they're going to collect less money for it.
|
| They can't correlate that ad to an action, which means they
| can't make you a happy chart that says the ROI is there. So
| you're going to pay less for it.
|
| This isn't going to harm small businesses no matter what FB
| says.
| probably_wrong wrote:
| That's one possibility. I'd like to offer a second one:
| that Facebook will charge the same amount and we are
| going to pay it. It's not like there are that many
| successful Facebook clones around.
| smachiz wrote:
| Except that's not how the ads work. They're all being bid
| in real time, by both people using FB tools (small biz)
| and 3rd parties.
|
| Whoever submits the highest bid wins that ad impression.
| Less information will mean people bid less, and the
| targeted ad prices will revert to their less targeted
| peers from a price perspective.
| jensensbutton wrote:
| Lot of people who were hoping for Facebook's demise are going
| to be sorely disappointed this year.
| hellbannedguy wrote:
| They aren't going anywhere. They are, along with Google,
| scared of the current head of the FTC. They claim she is
| biased.
|
| "scared" is the wrong word for these powerful companies. She
| is probally the last thing Mark is worried about. Does he
| even have worries at this point?
| bronzeage wrote:
| If you expect any kind of pressure from Biden
| administration against the companies which nearly bought
| his presidency, you're naive.
|
| Facebook literally bought the Wisconsin elections,
| including the whole infrastructure. You think Biden do
| anything at all against Facebook when he owes his power to
| them more than the people?
| csilverman wrote:
| I think it's a bit early to be claiming that iOS impression
| loss has "stabilized".
|
| I'm the first one most of my friends come to for tech
| questions, and I make a point of explaining privacy issues to
| them and helping them counter creepy behavior in apps/websites.
| When my parents buy iPhones, the first thing I'll be telling
| them is which button to push when apps want to stalk them.
|
| By myself, I'm an irrelevantly small data point, but it's not
| just me--most of my "tech support" friends are privacy-aware
| and evangelize it. I suspect iOS losses have only just begun,
| and will continue.
| handrous wrote:
| > When my parents buy iPhones, the first thing I'll be
| telling them is which button to push when apps want to stalk
| them.
|
| There's a "always, silently, deny" option in settings for
| this. It's labeled something like "allow apps to request
| tracking" and if you turn it off, they can't and just get a
| "no". No more asking per app, which is fine because it's not
| like anyone would ever want to allow it. It's not as if it's
| the kind of prompt where someone might actually want to say
| yes, sometimes. The screen is easy to find by searching
| "track" in iOS settings.
|
| I know because this headline prompted me to double check that
| I had it set correctly.
| fouric wrote:
| iOS impressions down 30% from peak is "not a huge deal"? This
| is very counterintuitive to me, as iOS both holds the majority
| share of the US market, and 30% seems like a very high number.
| Can you explain?
| munchbunny wrote:
| This is key: "on all of our remarketing campaigns"
|
| The discrepancy is that a 75% reduction in users opting into
| Facebook tracking is leading to only a 30% reduction in iOS
| share on the highest ROI ad campaigns. 30% is big but not 75%
| big.
|
| Another possible explanation is that opting out of tracking
| in iOS doesn't make you invisible. It just makes it hard for
| Facebook to correlate your off-app/non-Facebook.com web
| activity, but there are ways around that. So what 30% means
| hinges a lot on how the 1st touch -> 2nd touch leap is done,
| and the data for that leap doesn't always come from Facebook.
| mertd wrote:
| Maybe peak is Christmas?
| alliao wrote:
| I think so too. Previously we have a naive model of how
| facebook does tracking. now that apple closed this pathway,
| it's pressuring Facebook to reveal how they REALLY track or
| hide the fact they able to do so at some financial cost.
| beervirus wrote:
| Good. Your shitty, invasive, unethical, failing business model is
| not my problem.
| samizdis wrote:
| _[Eric] Seufert [a mobile analyst who writes the Mobile Dev Memo
| trade blog] estimated that in the first full quarter users see
| the prompt, the iOS changes could cut Facebook's revenue by 7% if
| roughly 20% of users agree to be tracked. If just 10% of users
| grant Facebook tracking permission, revenue could be down as much
| as 13.6%, according to his models._
|
| If those figures are even near the ballpark, this would surely
| represent a significant blow to FB. If widely circulated, this
| could be wielded to some effect in a campaign by FB
| detractors/rivals.
| whynotminot wrote:
| I wonder if more money will go to "influencers" whose reach can
| be somewhat more easily well understood.
|
| Can't wait to see more paid placement in content, getting
| around my paid subscriptions, ad blockers, and "do not track"
| requests.
| bookofsand wrote:
| According to a sibling comment, ">60% of Facebook's revenue is
| from iOS". Our society is selling out on privacy and subjecting
| itself to mass 24/7 surveillance for a paltry 22.5% of Facebook
| / adtech revenue. In other words, we could outlaw user tracking
| tomorrow, and Facebook / adtech would continue just fine, with
| only a moderate haircut. Are we that desperate to milk the last
| possible $ right now?!
| cfjgvjh wrote:
| > If widely circulated, this could be wielded to some effect in
| a campaign by FB detractors/rivals.
|
| But who are the FB ads rivals that aren't affected in a similar
| manner by this change? Since the tracking permission isn't
| specific to FB, wouldn't other players with a similar business
| model also be negatively impacted?
| samizdis wrote:
| I should have been clearer, sorry. I wasn't considering those
| competing against FB for ads in the same medium. I was
| thinking more of rivals for ad spend generally. Perhaps some
| of it would revert to print titles, or broadcast, as a
| result. I'd like to think that sometimes an advert can be
| effective even if you can't measure its impact precisely.
|
| Perhaps I am unduly influenced by the sorts of ads that I
| like, which tend to be posters, billboards or, just
| occasionally, TV/cinema/online pre-rolls. My favourite
| example would be the success of a Levi's ad from the '80s,
| see [1]: _'It was a piece of magic': How Levi's 'Laundrette'
| ad led to an 800% sales boost_
|
| Yes, I realise that no small company can afford such
| advertising as that, but in a previous life, when I spent
| about a year in advertising sales for a local newspaper, I
| was wined and dined about a dozen times by local firms who'd
| let me come up with ad copy for them, and sometimes a
| campaign, who (rightly or wrongly) attributed a sales boost
| to my efforts.
|
| Anyhow, you make a good point nonetheless.
|
| [1] https://www.marketingweek.com/levis-laundrette-sales-
| boost/
| stormbrew wrote:
| I mean it doesn't have to move to dead venues like print or
| tv broadcast in order to just get away from targeting. It's
| not like internet advertising _requires_ narrow demographic
| and individual history targeting for some reason, it 's
| just that it made that more convenient.
|
| > Yes, I realise that no small company can afford such
| advertising as that, but in a previous life, when I spent
| about a year in advertising sales for a local newspaper, I
| was wined and dined about a dozen times by local firms
| who'd let me come up with ad copy for them, and sometimes a
| campaign, who (rightly or wrongly) attributed a sales boost
| to my efforts.
|
| I mean, the fact that this isn't really a _thing_ anymore
| is almost certainly part of what kills local media
| nowadays, and by a kind of vicious cycle also helps kill
| local businesses. It used to be that small, local
| businesses weren 't competing on the same playing field as
| large (inter)national businesses. They'd get local eyes on
| local ads in local venues. That would keep local media
| alive, and the ads would keep local businesses competitive.
|
| Now they fight with national brands for ad space on
| national platforms where they're outspent for more narrowly
| targeted ads than were ever possible in the old days. Local
| media dies to national media, local businesses die to
| national businesses, meanwhile the national media gets
| bigger and richer every day.
| fairity wrote:
| > But who are the FB ads rivals that aren't affected in a
| similar manner by this change?
|
| Google. Apple's privacy changes restrict tracking from within
| mobile apps like Facebook and Instagram. Google is primarily
| browser-based and remains largely unaffected.
| jensensbutton wrote:
| No they don't. They only prevent tracking _across_ apps.
| Facebook will track everything you do and show you just as
| many ads in their properties as they did before. This
| really does harm smaller companies more than Facebook.
| klodolph wrote:
| I think this will affect different advertising platforms
| differently depending on how much they rely on targeting to
| begin with. Facebook's ad platform has some crazy tools for
| targeting to begin with--it's a big part of the platform's
| value in the first place. Less so for most competitors.
| tfehring wrote:
| Here's his model:
| https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/14UkIkzBCfcQzYZagC5qo...
|
| It looks like the 7% and 13.6% figures the article quotes are
| the initial revenue decreases for a single quarter, which the
| model assumes would recover thereafter. In general, the model
| is based on some very, um, stylized assumptions. I'm really
| skeptical that a 12.5% increase in the number of users who
| block tracking (from 80% to 90%) would result in a 60% increase
| in the impact of that blocking on revenue.
|
| That said, I don't think the numbers are drastically out of
| line. Apparently >60% of Facebook's revenue is from iOS, so it
| wouldn't take that large of a decrease in efficiency for the
| revenue hit to end up in the 10% ballpark. The main question to
| me is the extent to which the loss is borne by Facebook or by
| advertisers. It's possible that advertisers are effectively
| price-takers and will keep paying basically the same amount
| despite a decrease in efficiency.
| pradn wrote:
| 7% is about a quarter or two of growth, but not a fundamental
| blow. The upper end of 13.6% is much more painful, but probably
| still only like a year of growth. Will this make Facebook
| change its business model and incentives completely - I don't
| think so. We'll still have to deal with design for engagement
| and data harvesting/storage/analysis at a grand scale.
| sam_goody wrote:
| The article spins it (towards the end) as though this is a bad
| thing.
|
| Ridiculous.
| SakeOfBrevity wrote:
| I'd wager that 2/3 of software industry jobs market (number of
| positions and compensation figures) are built on online
| advertising industry. Now you tell me what is good or what is
| bad
| bilekas wrote:
| If advertisers put in the effort and allowed for an opt-in only
| option.
|
| They would realise that the quality of their audience is far more
| interested in the advertisments being shown than those that are
| thrown into peoples faces, tailored or not.
|
| If I want to see ads, and I select "tailored ads on" my value as
| an audience should be far higher.
| mrweasel wrote:
| > If advertisers put in the effort
|
| I'd go so far as to say that for a decade advertisers and
| social media experts have been given a more or less free ride.
|
| It's often not the companies themselves who manages the ad buy,
| it's agencies who only knows how to click around in Facebook or
| Google AdWord. They have NO IDEA how to run an effective ad
| campaign or how to buy ad space.
|
| The advertisers just see the numbers the agencies gives them,
| and in self defence user privacy is attacked and not the
| competency of the ad agencies.
| SakeOfBrevity wrote:
| Couple more of cracks in the online advertising industry and
| there will be a major pop of demand for software jobs.
| [deleted]
| yawaworht1978 wrote:
| Even with all the tracking, the generated ads still suck, showing
| things already purchased. This reminds me of the overhyped lead
| generation tools out there, they do not work as expected.
| Someone's financial interest is the root cause here, someone is
| making good money with ads. The ones who sell ads? For sure. The
| ones who buy adds? Not many success stories out there.
| dntrkv wrote:
| > Not many success stories out there.
|
| Where are you getting your information? There are entire
| businesses built solely on top of FB/Insta/etc ads. I went 15+
| years on the internet without buying anything from an ad, and
| then in the last 5, I've made at least 5 conscious, purchases
| from Insta ads. They've become really good in recent years.
| [deleted]
| worker767424 wrote:
| This is called retargeting. Aside from possible repeat
| purchases, my guess is that enough people browse a site or
| never complete their checkout that advertisers are happy to
| take the chance that 50% of people who see the ad might no
| longer be interested because that's still higher interest than
| you can get from almost any other channel.
| somedude895 wrote:
| To add to that, the retargeting setup is mostly the job of
| the advertiser / agency, so it's not Facebook's fault when
| it's badly implemented. The advertiser often doesn't notice,
| because even terrible retargeting will usually perform really
| well.
| baq wrote:
| they wouldn't do it if it didn't work. i'm not in the business
| but i think these kinds of ads work quite well if you return
| the thing you just bought.
| danaris wrote:
| > they wouldn't do it if it didn't work.
|
| Citation needed.
| Nicksil wrote:
| >hey wouldn't do it if it didn't work.
|
| Now why would you go and think a thing like that?
| nemothekid wrote:
| > _The ones who buy adds? Not many success stories out there._
|
| It's hard to believe the economy is dumping almost 100B/year
| into a product that doesn't work.
| skinkestek wrote:
| Snake oil salespersons can sell to companies as well.
|
| Seing how massively even Google have mistargeted me and lots
| and lots of others I'm even sure it is a fluke anymore:
|
| AFAIK Google sells ads not by the click anymore but by the
| impression. Now, how do you maximize revenue? You show the
| most expensive ad to as many people as possible.
|
| A little (ok, a lot) of fudging here and there and I am a
| target demographic for shady dating sites / mail order brides
| / senior dating / gay cruises for 13 consecutive years.
|
| Was it ever relevant to me? No way. I even repeatedly
| reported those ads.
|
| Does relevant ads exist? As Facebook has proven a few times:
| yes.
|
| Did Google earn a lot from them? Probably yes.
| jstx1 wrote:
| Freakonomics have a great episode on this -
| https://freakonomics.com/podcast/advertising-part-2/
| adrr wrote:
| They don't know you purchased it because it's not commonly
| shared to ad networks unless they are making cohorts but that
| is usually done at the product category level.
|
| There are many success stories with ads. I've been involved
| with two exits that is all attributed to digital advertising.
| No where else do you get a ROAS in the double digits. Here is a
| good example of the difference. When I worked for a challenger
| bank. We paid under $75 per signup and $10 per app install.
| Chase and BOA pays $1200 per new customer in marketing expenses
| using traditional marketing channels.
| Engineering-MD wrote:
| The explanation I have heard previously is that people have
| bought an item are actually more likely to buy another: unhappy
| with the current purchase, or people who need multiple items.
| Sure, for most people it's irrelevant as they are happy with
| their purchase, but most ads are ignored anyway.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| at the same time it's very easy to run into anecdotes people
| have like "you bought the 5th edition of this college
| textbook? do you want to buy the 3rd edition in Spanish?"
| Engineering-MD wrote:
| Yeah, that sounds like a flaw in the methodology! And quite
| a funny one too.
| Pick-A-Hill2019 wrote:
| One of the other things to consider* is that the details of
| person X that is looking to buy item Y are a snaphot at the
| time that information was brought/sold.
|
| When person X buys item Y from company Z, company Z is
| unlikely to broadcast that fact. Ergo, the 'system' doesn't
| know that you have now brought item Y and that you no longer
| have an active interest in purchasing Y.
|
| *Things may have changed in 20 years so the above is just an
| outdated observation based on a brief stint at a turn of the
| century B2B marketing start-up.
| bquest2 wrote:
| This is partially the answer. Sometimes people are running
| ad blockers that block sending events to Facebook, so the
| "Item Purchased" event never gets sent, but the account was
| created with an email that can be used in custom audiences,
| so the email is retargeted as if they never purchased the
| thing.
|
| Or someone goofed and forgot to include the exclude "item
| purchased" event in the criteria
| dboreham wrote:
| These explanations come from delusional people. The real
| explanation is that targeting really doesn't exist in any
| useful form.
| cerved wrote:
| Retargeting typically has very favorable CPC (cost per click)
| and other "ROI" metrics that marketing managers use to
| determine the success of their advertising campaigns.
|
| This may conceivably be because having previously visited a
| website is a stronger indicator of interest than say, male
| 18-30 making $XYZ/yr.
|
| It may also be purely coincidental and garbage. You were going
| to buy anyway/you already bought it.
|
| The truth most often lies somewhere in-between.
|
| The statistic rigor of the people purchasing these ads is not
| always the highest. The companies offering these solutions
| typically have very little reason to not sell as many ads as
| possible, as long as the metrics look good.
|
| In the end consumers are blasted with stalking ads that they
| don't want and the entire industry is shooting itself in the
| foot
| nobody0 wrote:
| Why a webpage needs to know more than what I click? If you put
| legitimate ads that are relevant to the media that I am consuming
| per se, I guess I can bear with that.
| rchaud wrote:
| Replace 'web page' with "real-time customer intelligence
| platform' and you'll have your answer.
| kaminar wrote:
| Good, glad to hear this is happening. FB is much too entwined in
| the operating systems.
| wintermutestwin wrote:
| It would be great if someone created a non-profit simple website
| for sharing pictures and updates with family and friends. EFF
| could promote it and all the smart people who hate FB could
| volunteer to build it. I'd donate buckets of $ to it to stick it
| to FB and show the world that the current model of surveillance
| capitalism is not the only way.
| HeckFeck wrote:
| Makes you wonder how the web would be if 'Do Not Track' and other
| standard methods of signalling user preference were enforceable.
| sharadov wrote:
| I have a friend who is a publisher and he's seeing the effect of
| these changes as we speak. FB allowed best user targeting. He
| believes the next quarter results are going to be a blow to FB.
| celestialcheese wrote:
| With how expensive the CPMs I'm seeing on FB right now, I'd be
| surprised if next quarter results are bad.
| ransom1538 wrote:
| Publishers (people that sell adds) do not want tracking. They
| want to take inventory space, display an ad then charge you money
| per impression. They do not want tracking,reports,clicks or any
| accountability. IMHO fraud is a large portion of publisher
| business.
|
| On the other hand, ad spenders (people who buy inventory) want
| cost per action. You click my ad, you signup, then you purchase
| something, then pay the publisher a cut. FANNG pretends cost per
| action does not exist.
|
| The current compromise between the two is cost per click.
| Removing tracking on the click would be a HUGE win for publishers
| (Google/FB). They could increase fraud and revenues. Ad spenders
| would be completely screwed spending money on fraud with no
| accountability.
| janpot wrote:
| Often I hear the argument, people saying "I prefer ads that are
| relevant for me over random ads". But the result of the tracking
| is not only that you get "relevant" ads, it's that your timelines
| and your feeds and your news gets tweaked in ways that makes you
| engage with ads as much as possible.
|
| Not only do you get manipulated in buying stuff you didn't ask
| for (ads in general). You're also getting spoonfed content that
| tries to make you as vulnerable as possible to this manipulation.
| Up to a point that this is downright threatening democracy and
| our way of life.
|
| I guess you could call this a form of censorship. Content gets
| suppressed, simply because it doesn't generate enough ad revenue.
| It's this type of censorship on "social" media that I consider
| much more harmful than the type that usually gets most of our
| attention.
| threatofrain wrote:
| I'm curious how much manipulation people think is involved in
| terms of buying things you didn't want. Enough to absolve
| someone of their financial responsibility for buying?
|
| Why or why not?
| long_time_gone wrote:
| I think it's more enlightening to view it from the other
| side.
|
| If desktop and mobile advertising didn't have a material
| impact, why would profit-maximizing companies do it?
|
| If profit-maximizing companies are interested in this type of
| advertising, what is it about Facebook and Google that
| captures almost all their spend?
| [deleted]
| BugsJustFindMe wrote:
| > _Often I hear the argument, people saying "I prefer ads that
| are relevant for me over random ads". But..._
|
| You don't even need your "but" (so hold on to it), because this
| is a classic false dichotomy anyway. Targeting does not require
| spying nor does spying tend to improve targeting. Basic
| immediate context (what you're doing, not who you are) works
| better for both advertisers and willing consumers than
| personally invasive intrusion does.
|
| You should rather ask whether they prefer relevant ads that put
| them at risk by aggregating everything about their lives into
| databases that regularly get breached or relevant ads that
| don't put them at risk. They can get relevant ads either way.
| They've just been sold a bill of goods on the need for personal
| invasion to do it.
| edmundsauto wrote:
| > Basic immediate context (what you're doing, not who you
| are) works better for both advertisers and willing consumers
| than personally invasive intrusion does
|
| How are you quantifying this?
| Tarsul wrote:
| I'd have no problem telling advertisers that I am between
| 30-40 years old, male and live in a certain region. And
| that's information that would help advertisers (if they did
| not have it yet) very much. So just ask your users to give
| some information and tell them how they will use it and maybe
| they will give it, but don't spy on your users every secret.
|
| But not Facebook. That ship has sailed. I can't and won't
| trust them.
| tobr wrote:
| > 30-40 years old, male and live in a certain region. And
| that's information that would help advertisers
|
| Region, sure, that makes sense for a local business. But
| targeting gender or age is discrimination.
| sturza wrote:
| how would you sell bras for women over 50?
| tobr wrote:
| First of all, what makes a bra only suitable if you are
| over 50, other than discrimination?
|
| You can always find an example of a product that is
| easier to sell to a specific niche group of people. That
| doesn't give the advertiser the right to know that fact
| about everyone. For the specific case of bras - how would
| you sell bras for women with large breasts if you don't
| know who has large breasts? Do you think that slight
| inconvenience on behalf of the advertiser should give
| them the right to keep a database of everyone's cup size?
| svachalek wrote:
| When the user indicates they are looking to buy bras for
| women over 50.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > Often I hear the argument, people saying "I prefer ads that
| are relevant for me over random ads".
|
| My response to that is "I prefer random ads, because relevant
| ads are an indication that I'm being spied on". My objection to
| ads isn't the ads themselves -- I'm going to ignore those no
| matter what -- it's all the spying the ads bring with them.
| villasv wrote:
| > I prefer ads that are relevant for me over random ads
|
| I froze up the first time someone said this to me. Of course I
| prefer random ads, cause this way they're less likely to push
| the right buttons on my vulnerable monkey-ass brain. Do people
| think tailored ads are good for them instead of consumerism
| triggers? Messed up worldview.
| mzkply wrote:
| Most people will be more annoyed than anything else at seeing
| a "random" ad, in the same way it's just more painful, for
| example, for a guy to sit through a 30 second women's shampoo
| TV commercial than a car commercial.
|
| I'd say most people don't even realize they may or may not be
| triggered, they simply don't want to suffer through a
| completely irrelevant ad.
| the-dude wrote:
| Isn't a women's shampoo TV commercial filled to the brim
| with beautiful women? I don't care what they are saying.
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| Random ads are effectively noise. Targeted ads occasionally
| are of value. If there's going to be an ad, better it be a
| targeted one.
|
| I also have no problem with companies tracking for the
| purpose of seeing which ads work.
|
| I do *not* like the retargeting ads--if I didn't buy the item
| there's a reason! Either I didn't want it or I'm waiting for
| a better price, neither of which you're going to solve unless
| you're telling me about a sale on an item.
|
| And the biggie is how intrusive they get. I'd like to see a
| system where the browser sends an acceptable-ad policy, a
| site can either comply or refuse to serve the page.
| kzrdude wrote:
| Ads should be targeted to the content, not the recipient
| IMO. If you're reading about California wine in an article,
| advertise based on that - travel, wine, whatever.
| bquest2 wrote:
| But surely, there are car enthusiasts who read about cars
| that would never read an article about California wine,
| but would benefit from knowing about it.
|
| In your world, that person misses out on the pleasures of
| california wine
| jfoutz wrote:
| This is an amusing example. I'd guess that car
| enthusiasts are aware of Sonoma for various reasons. I
| suspect they'd get some exposure to California wine
| inadvertently through that connection.
| asdff wrote:
| You can go to any gas station in the nation and walk out
| with a bottle of California wine for about $3.
| jfoutz wrote:
| I guess fancy pants California wine then. I know the
| valley grows a lot of grapes. I interpreted the thread as
| Napa /Sonoma
| wolpoli wrote:
| Also, retargetting ads are intrusive as they are the
| equivalent of a salesperson of a store following me after I
| left the store, asking me if I want to buy the item I
| looked at, when I am trying to do something else.
| reader_mode wrote:
| There are products out there that would increase my quality
| of life that I'm not aware of or not actively thinking about.
| In an ideal world ads are about informing the consumer, so
| absolutely ads can provide value to you as well. One of the
| recent life improving products I never thought about before
| an ad is an electric toothbrush - honestly I saw them but I
| considered it a silly gadget. Saw a plug in a random video,
| got some cheap version and was really surprised how useful it
| is I upgraded to a decent model. Likewise I never used an
| electric razor, tried Philips one blade after seeing an ad
| and it's also a great improvement. Point being there are
| products out there that would improve your life if you knew
| about them.
|
| That being said I dislike tracking not because I might get
| manipulated - I also prefer relevant ads. I dislike the fact
| that they can better target vulnerable groups - like
| depressed people with addictive personalities and gaming -
| this is the majority of app stores profit, I would bet it's a
| huge ad% as well - mobile gaming is basically milking people
| with low impulse control and nothing better to do with their
| time. It's just like those scamming telemarketing scum
| targeting old people
| villasv wrote:
| Yes, there are plenty of products out there that I would
| like to discover. But these are one in a hundred. I'd
| gladly sacrifice the few valuable ones. In fact I already
| do this, because I use adblockers and pi-hole as much as I
| possibly can.
|
| I'm not completely against marketing. I pretty often buy
| things advertised in podcasts, stuff that obviously paid
| for product placement in specific places. But those are ads
| that fit the medium, usually they're very related to the
| topic at hand. This is not at all the case with all random
| bullshit that shows up on Facebook and YouTube. Those are
| most often than not ads full of toxic subtleties like
| unreasonable standards of living, body image and success.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| Sometimes ads bring items into your life that improve it.
| That's not going to be the majority of cases though,
| usually ads will bring products into your life for the good
| of someone else, which is bad.
|
| If you didn't have ads, your dentist would have told you
| about electric toothbrushes.
| jrm4 wrote:
| Right -- but the solution here is simple, it just destroys
| much of the business model for the advertisers themselves:
|
| The answer is, "advertisers, open up to all of us exactly how
| it all works. Tell me honestly and truthfully what it is you
| would like to track and what you would like to know about me,
| and how you intend to use it and from that I will decide what
| to tell you."
| AuryGlenz wrote:
| I'm a photographer, and I right now I'm targeting local
| teenagers and their moms for high school senior portrait
| sessions. I would think they'd rather see that, be reminded
| it's time to get them done, and possibly learn about a better
| photographer than seeing an ad for an ice cream maker or what
| have you.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| In other words you want to manipulate them into buying
| something they wouldn't have if they hadn't seen your ad.
| That doesn't sound like a good thing for the person on the
| other side of the transaction.
| chillacy wrote:
| A common view is that both sides in an economic
| transaction gain some sort of benefit. Nonetheless
| sentiments like "all labor is exploitation" are fairly
| common, so I can see why that view exists, given the
| power disparity.
| AuryGlenz wrote:
| Most people (in my area) hire a photographer to take
| senior photos. They may hire me because they see my ad
| instead of someone else they already know of because they
| like my work better.
|
| Or, let's say they decided to just do it on their
| own/have a friend do it...until they see one of my images
| and go "wow."
|
| The second may be spending money when they wouldn't, but
| that's pretty rare. If they do it's because they decided
| it was worth it. The others are just being shown another
| option that they might not have known existed, meaning
| they're more informed about where they're going to spend
| their money.
|
| I don't see who is getting hurt in this scenario. I get
| work that I need to survive and they're getting photos
| that they're excited about.
| mingfli wrote:
| This seems like an extreme way of thinking about it.
| Maybe they like taking/looking at/sending the pictures,
| but between work, summer camp, soccer lessons, making
| sure everyone's fed, etc, they just forgot to book a
| session, and seeing the ad reminds them to do it. In this
| light, it seems like a great thing for both sides of the
| transaction.
| frickinLasers wrote:
| Not a mom, but if I want to learn about a better
| [photographer/plumber/mechanic/whatever] I will use the
| tools that list and attempt to give accurate information
| about businesses (yelp, angi, BBB, ?), inadequate though
| they may be. My brain doesn't register your ad. If it does,
| I'm probably _less_ likely to consider your business,
| because you shoved an intrusive internet ad in my face.
| AuryGlenz wrote:
| I mostly "boost" posts to my page, for what it's worth.
|
| Also, all three of those are worthless for photographers.
| We're not like a plumber where as long as the job is done
| right and priced well you're good. Our style is why
| you're hiring us, so an ad showing one of my images makes
| a lot of sense.
| bllguo wrote:
| Everyone says this about advertising, it's a tired
| narrative that has been disproven countless times in the
| aggregate. Advertising works. Even if you are correct
| about yourself (many people don't realize the subliminal
| impact of ads), the loss of your business is more than
| made up for by others.
| axaxs wrote:
| Do people really prefer relevant ads? I just disregard them,
| and it doesn't matter to me whether they are relevant or off
| the wall.
|
| The only ads I specifically don't like are the ones Youtube
| have randomly showed my wife and I. It's only happened twice to
| each of us, but they were a bit adult themed. Having a child in
| the house, I was pretty peeved.
| kstrauser wrote:
| I vastly prefer irrelevant ones. If I browse e-book readers
| because my coworkers were talking about them and I was
| curious about the current state of the art, I don't want ads
| to pester me into buying something I don't need. On the other
| hand, no amount of ads will manipulate me into buying diapers
| or a timeshare.
| nkingsy wrote:
| I don't necessarily think engagement is the wrong metric, and I
| don't mind some personalized tracking of that engagement to
| increase ad revenue.
|
| The issue is allowing any old engagement.
|
| I'd like to see the hacker news system scaled.
|
| Some things that could make moderators actions go further to
| keep the cost down:
|
| - outrage detection: before you hit post, you're warned that
| your possibly inflammatory post will be flagged for moderation.
|
| -timeouts: if a moderator finds outrage or outrage bait in a
| post, the poster gets a seven day timeout (cannot log on).
| ANYONE who replied to or liked the offending post gets a one
| day timeout.
| thrtythreeforty wrote:
| Why would I ever do anything but lurk in such a forum? The
| risk/reward ratio would be so out of whack that even if I
| wanted to learn something, I would rather not risk a drive-by
| ban if who I'm talking to turned out to make the moderator
| mad.
| nkingsy wrote:
| I don't see a 1 day ban as much of a punishment. If there's
| a platform involved it could just block posting/voting for
| a day.
|
| As far as incentives to lurk, I see quite the opposite. I
| don't comment on reddit unless I have something funny to
| say because outrage, point scoring and comedy is what rises
| to the top rather than reasoned argument.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > I guess you could call this a form of censorship. Content
| gets suppressed, simply because it doesn't generate enough ad
| revenue.
|
| Absolutely. I've seen entire websites completely reinvent
| themselves because someone complained to Google about some
| "offensive" page and got their ads pulled. Stuff I used to like
| got deleted because of advertisers.
|
| If this "sanitized advertiser friendly web" is the future, I'd
| rather not have a web at all.
| zionic wrote:
| Honestly one of the few things worse than advertisers are the
| engineers who work to enable them.
|
| Some things are worth more than money.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Agreed.
| long_time_gone wrote:
| This would include most Facebook and Google engineers, no?
| elzbardico wrote:
| This fills my heart with joy.
| literallyaduck wrote:
| If Facebook and its child companies blocked users who opted out,
| users would eventually opt in, they could even do it in rolling
| waves to prevent a mass exodus. Facebook and Google would likely
| be able to beat Apple and both depend on Ad revenue.
| jaywalk wrote:
| And Apple could then decide that the Facebook SDK is banned
| from their ecosystem due to abusive practices, and require any
| apps incorporating it to submit a new version with the SDK
| removed or face delisting. This is an arms race.
| tedd4u wrote:
| Apple says that's not acceptable. See 3.2.2(vi) here:
|
| https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/
| m1117 wrote:
| If only facebook made an option to have a paid account ($15) or
| free w/ ads, people would suddenly feel better about ads.
| jorgesborges wrote:
| A lot of apps started to prime users before iOS asks to allow
| tracking by showing an innocuous screen that describes some
| "feature". It says something like hey, do you want us to enhance
| your experience by x, y, z? Or it's written like hey, just agree
| to the terms so you can use the app. It would be great if apps
| didn't have an option to show anything before this prompt.
| wankerrific wrote:
| Facebook is probably clever enough to have optimized the layout
| and button placement of their initial alert to generate maximum
| mis-clicks on the "Allow app to track" button
| nottorp wrote:
| From TFA: "I don't think anyone truly understands how many
| businesses in the world are 100% dependent on Facebook,"
|
| ... proceeds to lament said small businesses ...
|
| If you ask me, if businesses have come to be 100% dependent on
| Facebook, isn't Facebook a monopoly that should be broken up?
| syrrim wrote:
| Monopolies aren't illegal. Abuse of monopoly through anti-
| competitive practices is illegal.
| rchaud wrote:
| How on earth did FB survive before everyone had a tracking device
| in their pocket?
|
| Oh right. They didn't even have an ad platform before 2008. Just
| bucketloads of VC money.
| ineedasername wrote:
| We'll, so much for the myth of privacy apathy. I've seen it
| mentioned before that for many people, the younger the more
| prevalent, the sense was "well the genie is out of the bottle so
| who cares."
|
| Clearly that was either never the case, or things have changed.
| Or now there is the sense of "well maybe we can shove that genie
| back where it came from."
| kalleboo wrote:
| If it's as easy as tapping a button, anyone will choose
| privacy.
|
| If you have to leave your social circle, or try to convert them
| all to something else, (or in the case of all those
| noncompliant GDPR warnings, tapping a button, waiting 15
| seconds, tapping 4 more buttons) that is too much work and you
| give up
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