BTW, if the take away is subscription is the answer for their sustainability over having to serve ads that utilize tracking, that's an argument to be had. Of course, inherent in that argument is that non-tracking ads are simply not profitable enough for them, which sounds terrible but I don't work in ads for a living so I wouldn't know.
Ads that are annotated with tracking/targeting capabilities are in fact substantially more valuable. There's the obvious aspect (targeted ads in general) but there's also the ability to measure whether your ads are actually working. Analytics requires tracking too.
This is an oversimplification, but let's say you're buying ads at 10 cents per thousand impressions. But you have no ability to tell who saw which adds and clicked where. Would you be willing to pay... say, 12 cents per thousand impressions to get actionable analytics? Would you be willing to pay, say, 20 cents per thousand to specifically target people who looked at your product on Amazon? Maybe not at those exact numbers, but you'd probably be willing to pay some substantial amount more, because that strategy (retargeting) works measurably better for converting an ad view into a purchase.
This is not unique to online advertising. It's possible to tell is ads are working in paper/radio/television, as well. Companies have been doing it for literally hundreds of years.
The only value online ad tracking adds is near real-time feedback, and granularity. Which is useless to 99% of companies, since the process of making large ad buying decisions still takes weeks or months.
The benefits of online ad targeting have been perverted from a nice add-on to something that is absolutely necessary because it helps fuel the paychecks of the advertising middlemen.
Want to advertise your movie to movie fans? Put ads on a movie fan web site. Want to attract car buyers in Bedrock City? Put your ads on a Bedrock City web site. Want to increase sales of Slurm Cola to American man 18-25? Put Slurm Cola ads on content of interest to American males 18-25.
It's not rocket surgery.
> Want to advertise your movie to movie fans? Put ads on a movie fan web site. Want to attract car buyers in Bedrock City? Put your ads on a Bedrock City web site. Want to increase sales of Slurm Cola to American man 18-25? Put Slurm Cola ads on content of interest to American males 18-25.
And then some company decides that there is an arbitrage opportunity in inferring who the 18-25 year old males are and selling you the ability to target them on cheaper websites and on undifferentiated inventory. In order to get access to that inventory, publishers are paid part of the difference. Voila, programmatic advertising.
> This is not unique to online advertising. It's possible to tell is ads are working in paper/radio/television, as well. Companies have been doing it for literally hundreds of years.
That's not true. That's certainly not what pretty much any big brand marketing department thinks. It's notoriously hard to tell whether any specific strategy is working if you do a lot of advertising. Which is why the extra granularity is considered valuable, regardless of their ability to infer conclusions from it.
> The benefits of online ad targeting have been perverted from a nice add-on to something that is absolutely necessary because it helps fuel the paychecks of the advertising middlemen.
That's certainly a factor, but they're not all idiots. Some of it actually does work in theory and in principle, and dismissing that is underestimating the beast you are fighting.
I do believe that, but I also wonder... Retargeting, i.e. ads of particular product stalking you everywhere you go, is the single method that so far guarantees I just won't buy the advertised thing, out of pure spite. It's also the one aspect of ad experience that I see regular people noticing and getting angry about. I wonder how big an impact of such reaction there is on retargeted ad performance, and if ad people even factor it into their calculations.