"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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)...
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.
> 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.
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.
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 ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
I don't get your Disneyland example. I replied to comments saying users are getting to use Facebook for free but that is not true, they are paying indirectly via ads. Did anyone claim that you get Disneyland for free? No, you pay for it. Some part with the ticket price, some part when you pay food and drinks, some part with merchandise, some part maybe later when you watch your next Disney movie as the whole thing is to some extend a gigantic ad.
And it matters how you divide it up. You could have a high ticket price and give away all the food for free but that big upfront payment would probably be off-putting for many even if they end up not paying more. For people who only want to ride some roller-coaster and not eat and drink your offering is now not attractive. Other people would exploit your offering, eating only the most expensive stuff in huge quantities.
You could also do it the other way around, have no tickets and pay for everything individually. This will change the entire experience and you have the added complexity of processing payments in many more locations. And all this also applies to you tax example, some services are only used by some part of the population, the other part might be unhappy to also pay for it. If you do not have a driving license, why should you pay for driving license renewals? On the opposite end of the spectrum you might have healthcare where you want to spread the risk across everyone and not only have those pay that actually need it. Its all mostly a matter of trade-offs and incentives how you structure it.
To make the analogy more fitting, imagine Disneyland not charging you for tickets. But they put up cameras and track you all day long, record what you eat, with whom you visit the park, what merchandise you buy, and measure some chemical indicators when you use their toilettes. And then they sell this information to other companies to pay for your visit to Disneyland.
> And it matters how you divide it up. You could have a high ticket price and give away all the food for free but that big upfront payment would probably be off-putting for many even if they end up not paying more. For people who only want to ride some roller-coaster and not eat and drink your offering is now not attractive. Other people would exploit your offering, eating only the most expensive stuff in huge quantities.
Bingo! This is exactly my point! To go off what you said, if Disneyland operated like how you described (selling your data for income), the park would be completely different. They would be optimized to collect that data because the whole park was built on the premise that everything is free and we are going to siphon as much from you in the form of data. Every ride in the park will be built to gather that data. However since Disneyland is not that, they haven't optimized for data collection. It's built on making you happy by the time you leave, not making you spend as much time as possible in the park. You seem to want to walk into a Disneyland that's optimized for data collection and be like "Wow you guys are collecting too much data! You guys anyway make money from me buying stuff! Just stop collecting my data! I pay for all I use indirectly though the stuff I buy!" <--- That's convoluted and unfair. Your sudden awakening for privacy concerns doesn't suddenly replace all the lost income that they have depended on and everyone has willingly given for so long. You can't just wave a magic wand on such a fundamental business model change and expect it to be fixed after your sudden change of mind. It's incredibly naïve to thing you can change business models like that. Companies live and die on their business models.
Again looping back to the things you mentioned about two Disneylands - they are completely different. It was you who changed in between. Suddenly you feel that they are not entitled to your data. But you've been giving them your data for years, and got them hooked on it. And now suddenly you are disgusted. Nothing wrong with changing or wanting different things but you feeling disgusted suddenly says a lot more about you than them.
Personally I think its a necessary change but I would have liked to seen it implemented in a more regulatory level but over a longer period of time so everyone has time to change. Apple is acting in an extremely predatory manner. They are forcibly lowering the quality of their competitor's ad network quickly so suddenly their ad network becomes a lot more viable. I wouldn't be surprised to see a big jump in the ad network spend over the next few years. They're doing all this under the guise of protecting the user but it's obviously bullshit. This is very clear with their vehement opposition of right to repair. They don't care about the consumers. They want to keep growing and they will keep doing so by whatever means necessary (under the guise of protecting consumers) to achieve this goal.
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.
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.
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?
"How much of that money for internet access goes to facebook?"
Zero, hopefully. I am not much of a Facebook user.
"How are they going to maintain their website from zero money they get from you paying for internet access?"
That's not my concern. They ran the website without ads for years. They later received millions in investment. There is no such thing as infinite growth. The multi-billion-page website with content of pages uploaded by users for free and moderation performed by low-paid workers in other countries idea is an experiment that might be a failure. Time will tell. But as I said, I am not a user, so it is not my concern.
"How are you going to put all your content online..."
I am not going to do that. Not really my thing. I prefer to submit my public thoughts and ideas to HN. If I want to communicate and share stuff with family, friends and colleagues I do not think using a page on someone else's website is a great solution. Peer-to-peer makes more sense.1 The fees I pay for internet access cover that cost.
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.
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.
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?
> 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].
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...).
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.
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.
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...
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!
[...] 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.
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 £3 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?"
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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).
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.
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.
> 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!
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."
> [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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Because the issue isn't where the data is stored, the issue is what the data is used for. In this case, it would be used in a way that still reveals personal information about me -- for instance, in a FLoC-type setup, it's still being revealed which cohorts I'm a part of.
Having the data stored locally is certainly better than having it stored in someone else's database. No argument there, that's an improvement. But that's just making the problem slightly less bad, not solving it.
These sort of schemes just strike me as being sneaky ways of continuing to engage in the abuse that the adtech world loves so much. The major difference being mostly what machines are doing the tracking.
Also, of course, your browser history isn't exactly private even though it's stored on your machine.
So is the argument that personalized ads are inherently bad?
Arguments against tracking/personalization I have heard in the past, which make sense to me, are that having all the data stored remotely gives a lot of power to an evil engineer or government to exploit your data. With a 100% local approach, based on data that is stored anyway, that aspect would go away.
I don't see how in that world personalized ads are worse than unpersonalized ads. Ads in general can be argued to have negative externalities (though I am not 100% convinced of that), but if we take their existence as a given, and the choice is between personalized and unpersonalized, I think I would prefer personalized.
>So is the argument that personalized ads are inherently bad?
No, the argument is that collecting data about me or my machines without my informed consent is bad. The purpose to which that data is put doesn't even come into play.
> With a 100% local approach, based on data that is stored anyway, that aspect would go away.
No, it doesn't. The exposure is certainly reduced, but companies can still determine quite a lot about you by combining the "cohorts" you're a part of with other data.
>I think I would prefer personalized.
I understand that. Personally, whether an ad is "personalized" or not doesn't increase or decrease the ad's utility to me, so I don't care about that directly (with one exception -- personalized ads deprive me of useful information about the site/app/whatever that I'm using: I no longer have clues as to what the target demographic of the site/app/whatever is.)
What I care about is stopping the incessant assault by the marketing companies in terms of spying.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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).
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...
...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."
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
It is dark because it is not clearly written in the standard language that iOS and apps have been using for 15 years. It is deliberately designed to make it unclear as to the purpose of the choice, which is then not a real choice.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 à 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.
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.
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.
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.
Actually your sibling's comment made me realise that you were talking about the old style of ads in web pages.
Within the Google search itself, I was surprised by the number of ads that are disguised as search results. It's grown significantly. Now I have to scroll to get real results...
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.
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.
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.
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!)
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.
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?)
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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?
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.)
> 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.
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+.
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.
> 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.
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.)
* 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.
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?
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.
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.)
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Would you mind to elaborate? I am genuinely wondering if you're a troll or if I am mistaken in my argument. To summarize, I responded to the claim below that Facebook's ad platform is ineffective:
> All related studies are showing that the latter isn't working anyway.
I pointed out that Facebook wouldn't be profitable if the ad platform is ineffective, and you called that argument fallacious. I am really curious to hear what's fallacious about it.
I guess we have to define effective. Is it effective from the consumer point of view? That might be a long discussion, and we might assume that a world without advertising might be the most effective way to live your life, etc. But is it effective from the advertisers' point of view? Unless you want to call 5+ million marketing teams around the world total idiots, you have to assume that they are meeting or exceeding their ROAS targets and therefore pouring a lot of money into Facebook.
> It just means that Facebook is good at selling ads, whether they are effective or not.
Facebook doesn't sell ads. Marketers choose to sign up and spend money, because their jobs depend on being able to achieve ROAS targets. Contrary to popular belief, the world of marketing is very quantified and apart from experimental budgets, most of the money is spent on channels that are proven to work.
But without getting any deeper into all of this, I think I found my answer - it appears that at least a subsegment of people on HN believe that over 100BN of ad dollars (25% of overall digital ad market) is spent on Facebook in an unprofitable way, and that 5 million marketing teams get away with it, year after year. Hence, it's possible for Facebook to achieve great financial results without their ad platform being effective.
If that's your takeaway, then I think you need to read this thread again.
1) Nobody is saying that ads aren't profitable or that marketers are throwing money out the window because they are stupid. The discussion is about whether invasive user tracking is effective. Ads can be profitable even though user tracking is ineffective.
2) This thread also is mostly about your very weak argument. You wrote:
> Facebook has created the most sophisticated ad targeting engine the world has ever seen. You want proof? Look at their financial statements.
That's just not a good argument. Who knows, maybe Facebooks tracking really is the best thing in the world, but the fact that Facebook is raking in loads of cash on its own tells us very little about how effective their user tracking is.
You're just confused about how marketing works. The fact that you're dissociating tracking sophistication from performance tells me all I need to know. To learn more, dig a bit into the iOS14 impact on the Facebook performance results.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 333 ms ] threadTracking 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.
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.
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)...
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.
Businesses assume that every user is a customer, and have inflated profit goals. You're right about entitlement.
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.
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 ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
You haven't read the whole thing.
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.
And it matters how you divide it up. You could have a high ticket price and give away all the food for free but that big upfront payment would probably be off-putting for many even if they end up not paying more. For people who only want to ride some roller-coaster and not eat and drink your offering is now not attractive. Other people would exploit your offering, eating only the most expensive stuff in huge quantities.
You could also do it the other way around, have no tickets and pay for everything individually. This will change the entire experience and you have the added complexity of processing payments in many more locations. And all this also applies to you tax example, some services are only used by some part of the population, the other part might be unhappy to also pay for it. If you do not have a driving license, why should you pay for driving license renewals? On the opposite end of the spectrum you might have healthcare where you want to spread the risk across everyone and not only have those pay that actually need it. Its all mostly a matter of trade-offs and incentives how you structure it.
To make the analogy more fitting, imagine Disneyland not charging you for tickets. But they put up cameras and track you all day long, record what you eat, with whom you visit the park, what merchandise you buy, and measure some chemical indicators when you use their toilettes. And then they sell this information to other companies to pay for your visit to Disneyland.
Bingo! This is exactly my point! To go off what you said, if Disneyland operated like how you described (selling your data for income), the park would be completely different. They would be optimized to collect that data because the whole park was built on the premise that everything is free and we are going to siphon as much from you in the form of data. Every ride in the park will be built to gather that data. However since Disneyland is not that, they haven't optimized for data collection. It's built on making you happy by the time you leave, not making you spend as much time as possible in the park. You seem to want to walk into a Disneyland that's optimized for data collection and be like "Wow you guys are collecting too much data! You guys anyway make money from me buying stuff! Just stop collecting my data! I pay for all I use indirectly though the stuff I buy!" <--- That's convoluted and unfair. Your sudden awakening for privacy concerns doesn't suddenly replace all the lost income that they have depended on and everyone has willingly given for so long. You can't just wave a magic wand on such a fundamental business model change and expect it to be fixed after your sudden change of mind. It's incredibly naïve to thing you can change business models like that. Companies live and die on their business models.
Again looping back to the things you mentioned about two Disneylands - they are completely different. It was you who changed in between. Suddenly you feel that they are not entitled to your data. But you've been giving them your data for years, and got them hooked on it. And now suddenly you are disgusted. Nothing wrong with changing or wanting different things but you feeling disgusted suddenly says a lot more about you than them.
Personally I think its a necessary change but I would have liked to seen it implemented in a more regulatory level but over a longer period of time so everyone has time to change. Apple is acting in an extremely predatory manner. They are forcibly lowering the quality of their competitor's ad network quickly so suddenly their ad network becomes a lot more viable. I wouldn't be surprised to see a big jump in the ad network spend over the next few years. They're doing all this under the guise of protecting the user but it's obviously bullshit. This is very clear with their vehement opposition of right to repair. They don't care about the consumers. They want to keep growing and they will keep doing so by whatever means necessary (under the guise of protecting consumers) to achieve this goal.
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.
Zero, hopefully. I am not much of a Facebook user.
"How are they going to maintain their website from zero money they get from you paying for internet access?"
That's not my concern. They ran the website without ads for years. They later received millions in investment. There is no such thing as infinite growth. The multi-billion-page website with content of pages uploaded by users for free and moderation performed by low-paid workers in other countries idea is an experiment that might be a failure. Time will tell. But as I said, I am not a user, so it is not my concern.
"How are you going to put all your content online..."
I am not going to do that. Not really my thing. I prefer to submit my public thoughts and ideas to HN. If I want to communicate and share stuff with family, friends and colleagues I do not think using a page on someone else's website is a great solution. Peer-to-peer makes more sense.1 The fees I pay for internet access cover that cost.
1 However I do not believe Facebook's "assistance" is needed, e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirehog
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.
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?
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
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...).
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.
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...
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...).
So clearly people are happy to be advertised to so why not show them things they might be interested in via tracking?
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!
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.
Ask someone for £3 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.
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.
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.
Similar to how if an app sends just one spam notification, it's an uninstall and a 2 star rating.
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.
https://github.com/kdeldycke/awesome-falsehood
IF a model is trained with historical data, that would be good enough to track without actually tracking.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concept_drift
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.
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.
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.
Citation needed.
Now why would you go and think a thing like that?
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.
Or someone goofed and forgot to include the exclude "item purchased" event in the criteria
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
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.
It's hard to believe the economy is dumping almost 100B/year into a product that doesn't work.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's not technically challenging to track users if they click on your ads
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.
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!
Anyone know how this would work? My spidey-sense is tingling here at the thought of apps scanning data on my phone!
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.
Good point about the scanning, though. These scumbags certainly would try to pull something like that off.
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.
No-one else does.
I mean, if you know someone’s personal details, they per definition has lost that privacy towards you.
Having the data stored locally is certainly better than having it stored in someone else's database. No argument there, that's an improvement. But that's just making the problem slightly less bad, not solving it.
These sort of schemes just strike me as being sneaky ways of continuing to engage in the abuse that the adtech world loves so much. The major difference being mostly what machines are doing the tracking.
Also, of course, your browser history isn't exactly private even though it's stored on your machine.
Arguments against tracking/personalization I have heard in the past, which make sense to me, are that having all the data stored remotely gives a lot of power to an evil engineer or government to exploit your data. With a 100% local approach, based on data that is stored anyway, that aspect would go away.
I don't see how in that world personalized ads are worse than unpersonalized ads. Ads in general can be argued to have negative externalities (though I am not 100% convinced of that), but if we take their existence as a given, and the choice is between personalized and unpersonalized, I think I would prefer personalized.
No, the argument is that collecting data about me or my machines without my informed consent is bad. The purpose to which that data is put doesn't even come into play.
> With a 100% local approach, based on data that is stored anyway, that aspect would go away.
No, it doesn't. The exposure is certainly reduced, but companies can still determine quite a lot about you by combining the "cohorts" you're a part of with other data.
>I think I would prefer personalized.
I understand that. Personally, whether an ad is "personalized" or not doesn't increase or decrease the ad's utility to me, so I don't care about that directly (with one exception -- personalized ads deprive me of useful information about the site/app/whatever that I'm using: I no longer have clues as to what the target demographic of the site/app/whatever is.)
What I care about is stopping the incessant assault by the marketing companies in terms of spying.
Why didn’t I think of that?
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.
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.
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.
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).
This all makes me start feeling like I might finally want an iPhone...
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.
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?
Or maybe don't use Facebook on Android?
For example?
Most companies and apps advertise on FB.
And block any and all Facebook DNS queries with a PiHole.
(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...
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.
Not only to communicate with friends and family, but also services like takeout, the plumber, etc.
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.
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
But yeah, my preference would be just something like "Do not track".
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.
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...
Where’s the subscription management startup model?
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 à 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.
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.
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.
https://patreon.com/
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.
Within the Google search itself, I was surprised by the number of ads that are disguised as search results. It's grown significantly. Now I have to scroll to get real results...
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.
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!)
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?)
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.
(Whether this is a good or bad thing depends on your perspective.)
When paid services are normalized, it opens up a huge amount of potential for smaller players to innovate.
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.
Personally, I hope things like this start to kill off the "free internet." I'd much rather pay for the things that I use.
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.)
I guess, reducing distraction and moving towards a client-based and user-controlled "ads manager" may have a decisive impact on overall blocking habits.
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.
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.)
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/
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+.
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.
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.
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.)
* 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.
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?
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.
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.)
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.
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.
> All related studies are showing that the latter isn't working anyway.
I pointed out that Facebook wouldn't be profitable if the ad platform is ineffective, and you called that argument fallacious. I am really curious to hear what's fallacious about it.
It just means that Facebook is good at selling ads, whether they are effective or not.
> It just means that Facebook is good at selling ads, whether they are effective or not.
Facebook doesn't sell ads. Marketers choose to sign up and spend money, because their jobs depend on being able to achieve ROAS targets. Contrary to popular belief, the world of marketing is very quantified and apart from experimental budgets, most of the money is spent on channels that are proven to work.
But without getting any deeper into all of this, I think I found my answer - it appears that at least a subsegment of people on HN believe that over 100BN of ad dollars (25% of overall digital ad market) is spent on Facebook in an unprofitable way, and that 5 million marketing teams get away with it, year after year. Hence, it's possible for Facebook to achieve great financial results without their ad platform being effective.
1) Nobody is saying that ads aren't profitable or that marketers are throwing money out the window because they are stupid. The discussion is about whether invasive user tracking is effective. Ads can be profitable even though user tracking is ineffective.
2) This thread also is mostly about your very weak argument. You wrote:
> Facebook has created the most sophisticated ad targeting engine the world has ever seen. You want proof? Look at their financial statements.
That's just not a good argument. Who knows, maybe Facebooks tracking really is the best thing in the world, but the fact that Facebook is raking in loads of cash on its own tells us very little about how effective their user tracking is.
You said:
> I am really curious to hear what's fallacious about it.
But apparently that was just a figure of speech, not an actual question.
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.
Or they'll just go outside and find better uses for their time.
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. :-)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
I would definitely find it relieving if someone showed up with a TV-B-Gone and clicked it off.
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.
Which gives them leverage. If they were better organized, they could make demands based on that leverage.
This is a real phenomenon known as consent fatigue.
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.
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.
Gonna try it on Twitter though since you say it works...
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.
For Instagram the web based app has no adverts, at least not on iOS/Firefox/NextDNS.
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?
But, doesn't this increase competition for any other advertiser who doesn't have all historic data and algorithm Facebook has had.
Ridiculous.