This is probably the worst thing you can do to online advertising. It's probably one of the only good things about the online ad industry. If you book time slots, only the biggest players will be able to compete for that slot. Essentially killing the entire selling point of online ads, which is giving a chance to smaller players a chance at the game. I don't want to, ever, see online ads transform into TV ads. Targeting would be okay if it was done properly. In its current state, it's unethical and probably should be illegeal. Advertisers shouldn't know what I like, they should only know that a certain device with a certain ID likes X,Y topics.
How about a system where probability of seeing an ad is weighted by how much money an advertiser pays? Then you just normalize across bidders and choose on that curve. Then perhaps the time slots just serve as a bucket to allow advertisers to approximate their target audience, perhaps there are additional buckets for things like geolocation.
We should instead be using user metrics to evaluate and punish ads that lead to pages users regret navigating to.
> "Never allow dynamic ad content! Ads should be individually approved by publishers and not subject to change after approval."
What's so awful about TV ads? I'd be fine with seeing more "mainstream" ads if the tradeoff was no targeting/tracking.
Aunt Mae's cookie shop will never be able to compete with Pepsi for airtime
It still can’t compete with CPM
Getting 100 or 1000 impressions vs millions of impression is not really competing for air time.
Open a newspaper. Look at page two. What do you see? Ads for local businesses. Watch local TV. More ads for small businesses.
Okay, now go to the websites for those newspapers and TV stations. No local businesses. Literally all scam ads.
I was like "ok, is that really true" so I went and checked, and by golly, you're right. And it's 50-50 the "scam ad" I got is a direct result of a doctor leaking my medical records.
The whole online ad industry should be regulated out of existence.
In any case, it's not them who are exploiting the information. The ad industry is like a fence for stolen goods.
It's not that my medical information is top secret; it's that I don't want to see ads about earwax. And I think Google execs should be forced to watch them until they repent and become monks or something.
Nearly all the major tech reporting sites have died: TechReport, Hardware Canucks, Linux Journal, etc. etc. When you look at who can actually sustain a modern tech reporting site, its the Youtubers: Linus Tech Tips, Gamers Nexus, etc. etc.
Even then: when the tech reporting sites were around, they were mostly on Google Adsense. The others are on Facebook Ads.
----------
The sites that are making it possible for small-style discussion to thrive again are new "networks" like Patreon. A lesser evil for sure, but a "Skyscraper" nonetheless.
The financial barrier of entry of TV & print advertising is a very effective filter against scams. I have yet to see scam ads for fake tech support or "win an iPhone by filling a survey" or some "free" trial which uses unreadable fine print to sign you up for something very expensive, but those are commonplace online.
Surely there’s a better way.
To this day, I have no idea how any TV stations are financially solvent.
No one has ever had a favorite internet banner ad.
The Super Bowl specticle is just that, a one-off event where the ads are more like short films and talked about for maybe a day before entirely forgotten.
This is well-meaning but unfortunately it's also naive.
That kind of information, in aggregate, is trivial to de-anonymize at scale.
I'd like to see secondary markets for PID banned outright, personally. If you want that, go on the dark web and risk criminal sanctions. I'm sure there are some positive effects which would get thrown out with the enormous moral hazard, but I'd have to be convinced that it isn't worth it: as it stands, keeping personal user data should be a cost center for most businesses, something which exposes them to liability with no means to monetize other than providing whatever service they nominally exist for.
I totally agree with this, but I think it'd be terribly hard to implement in practice. How would you eliminate the rise of a single large body that partners with everyone during data consent forms? Sort of like a VISA for personal data. The result is the same, or arguably worse, but wouldn't be banned under your scheme.
We can imagine a better regime, which could say "if you attempt to cheat or skirt around on this, we're going to hammer you harder than if you just break the rules", but how to actually get it is pretty murky. Easy to aim for that, and land in a situation where shadowy individuals wield great and capricious power.
There may well be a company selling big-ass belt buckles with anime themes that is trying to reach you. When designing their ad campaign they could say they want people with an interest in anime/manga AND interest in westerns, trucks, boots or jeans. They would have no way to do that with a traditional media campaign.
- location of ip address
- article/page the ad is placed on
You could get targetting down to a very small number of people, and consequently make advertising very cheap.
Because of the degree to which paid advertising us about creating common knowledge that a product exists, ads of this sort are likely more useful to the advertiser anyways, at least in the long run. If you merely want to inform people that your product exists, there are usually cheaper forms of marketting.
This would still remove the incentive for fake clicks.
They shouldn't know any ID, not even one that gets sent only to that one advertiser and is reset after 30 days.[0] Even that much data shouldn't be stored, because it's not needed unless you want to do shady tracking-related stuff (e.g. run statistics that determine who gets a special offer with a lower price).
The way it's ‘done properly’ right now is that advertisers can subscribe to a segment of consumers who recently looked at X-type products from stores A, B, or C, in region Y. Then they make bids on how much an ad impression is worth to them when a match shows up. Kind of like auto-bidding on eBay, except more meta. The problem with this is that there still needs to be some ad platform that tracks user IDs. The better ones have a reputation to uphold, so they'll make some effort to protect consumers … from finding out what's really being tracked and when there was a leak.
I like the idea of giving smaller players a chance, but:
You don't need any tracking for targeted ads.
A lot of the most relevant ads I see are on Youtube, where I have personalisation turned off. Composer explains music theory? Music store. Chef explains recipe? Cooking classes from lecture video site. Formula 1? Expensive car brand. And energy drinks. E-sports? Gaming peripherals. And different energy drinks. Half the time, no meaningful match could be made and I get something generic. Neighbouring Swamponia is beautiful in toad season. These douche-bros will give me totally legit financial advice for free. The insurance I already use has a great product for people twice my age. Founder of local thimble manufactory rambles incoherently for five minutes.
In aggregate, that's way more relevant to me than ”you recently bought that power bank you needed, so here's another power bank”. I skipped 9/10 ads after 5 seconds, but now I know which brand makes a 6-string bass that's affordable for a guitarist who'd just like to give it a go for a bit. And I did see offerings from smaller players. So I also learned that the local neo-nazi party is pretty good at folk dancing. Homeland, sweet auto-tuned homeland.
I don't blindly assume that Google aren't tracking anything I don't want them to store. But they show me a lot of targeted ads and there's never any indication that they know what I did last summer.
[0] Oh, and obviously even that kind of ID shouldn't identify an entire device. When your offspring borrows your tablet to play Candycraft, do you want them to see ads meant for you? Do they want to see those ads?
(Wait, what? You just said I'm completely new here.)
Click here to continue reading the article. We promised no cookies, so there's no reason to worry about why Firefox/Privacy Badger/Ghostery just blocked connections to 20 different service providers. It's not our fault; far too few people are willing to pay for high-quality journalism nowadays. Before you continue reading the article, would you like to know which Spice Girl Slim Shady wanted to impregnate? Number 5 will shock you! OK, OK, back to the article. Here's an embedded video. If you can't see it, it's definitely your browser acting up; surely we're not supposed to know about youtube-nocookie.com. Of course you can scroll to the previous paragraph to have another look, but did you know you can subscribe to our e-mail newsletter? Where were we … right, so now you should see this relevant picture, but it ain't gonna happen unless Facebook can join the conversation. Was it good for you, too? Don't forget to feign engagement, boost share-holder value and spam all your friends!
Alright, Black Mirror, I'll grant you that. But apart from How TV Ruined Your Life, Newswipe, Black Mirror, and Weekly Wipe … what has Charlie Brooker ever done for us?
Fair enough, Antiviral Wipe. But apart from How TV Ruined Your Life, Newswipe, Black Mirror, Black Mirror, Black Mirror, Black Mirror, Black Mirror …
That is in fact what advertisers know. It’s the aggregators that know who you are, not the advertisers.
Partially agree. Publishers should definitely be able to blacklist advertisers. However, networks like Google get thousands of ads that run for only a handful of impressions. Asking publishers to manually approve every single ad that might run is onerous.
I would like to see approval required for anything executable: JavaScript, Flash, etc. Waking up to find that your website has become an attack vector through malicious banner ads is not okay.
> Ban user tracking and targeting.
Mostly disagree.
I click on a meme site. There's not a lot of relevant ads for that. I could get served ads for lolcats-themed merchandise that I don't want, or low-value broad-targeted ads that probably still aren't relevant to me. Nobody wins.
Or, based on my search history, I could get ads for computer parts that I'm actually interested in. I get ads that are relevant, the publisher gets more revenue, and the advertiser has a real chance at a sale. Everyone wins.
> It's a red queen's race and no one benefits.
That couldn't be less true.
Now, systems that try to track individual people (rather than blocks with similar demographic/behavioral traits) are a serious problem. We do need stricter controls to prevent this.
> Pay for ad time slots, not user impressions.
Here we go. You want to throw away the very thing that democratized digital advertising. You want a system where either you pay five figures to reserve a time block, or you don't get to play.
Hard disagree.
> Use anti-trust to prevent link aggregators from being advertisers.
I'm not sure how anti-trust ties into this. Are you alleging that, say, Fark has a monopoly status, and is abusing it to gain an unfair advantage in an adjacent market?
Now, I think you're on to a very real problem here--advertising dollars are being diverted away from the organizations that produce content--but severing the only real revenue source for most aggregators seems like an inappropriate response.
Yes, that is the promise of these networks - that there are exactly 8 people searching for this search string every day and I could show just those people this very targeted ad.
I wish this were the case, but unless something has changed in the last few years, it is not.
You see, google scores your ad on a "quality" metric and if your ad only rates a handful of clicks it will be disabled and can only be reenabled by paying a very onerous (20x, even 50x) premium. Even if the search terms are esoteric and not targeted by anyone other advertisers, google would rather show nothing than show your ad.
So I am afraid this dream of a niche product showing a highly targeted ad to a handful of searchers each day is actively thwarted by google.
Frankly it's no longer an issue for us - the venn diagram of "people smart enough to use rsync.net" and "people not using an adblocker" contains zero people.
No reason timeslots can't be sold in the minutes, seconds, or even miliseconds on high traffic sites. Five figures assumes a long timeslot.
You could even do "every 100th impression during the timeslot" or so on without doing anything that would offend the user you are replying to.
Just seems like a less transparent way of doing the same thing.
It seems like a way of directly eliminating fraud, by preventing people from having an avenue to lie about impressions, and a way of discencentivizing tracking, since impressions stop being the billing metric and therefore stops "needing" to be accurate. Hopefully this (as well as the other things suggested by OP to discentivize tracking) would result in less tracking and less hoarding of dangerous user data.
Maybe they should find a better business model, then.
This is not what I observed from Project Wonderful when they were still around. Ok I guess it wasn’t precisely timeslots, so much as “amount of time” (though one could choose to only bid during the time you want), but the prices I saw were fairly often low enough that people would briefly get the slot just for a gag.
Pretty sure there were even bidding wars between groups who were both doing jokes?
For the podcasts that follow the former model, they don't seem to rely on timeslots (i.e. payment just for ad being shown), though some may be involved. Instead, it seems they rely on coupon codes to measure conversions. I assume the podcast gets paid per coupon code redeemed. Barring show sponsors, in my experience ever single podcast ad read by a host will use a coupon code.
I think Stitcher does this as well.
Say someone's listening to WAP on the free version of Spotify, Their ad tracking indicates that they've had recent searches for life insurance. The algorithm would then inject a Cardi B sounding rap lyric about how bomb Northwest Mutual's whole life product line is.
https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/8/21056336/spotify-streaming...
> Spotify Podcast Ads offer the intimacy and quality of traditional podcast ads with the precision and transparency of modern-day digital marketing
Yeah, that's what I like about online targeted advertising. The transparency.
- No dynamic ad content (we do allow geo-ip targeting for continents and countries, but this is using a self-hosted maxmind list)
- Half-month or Monthly advertising time slots
In addition to those practices, we also do the following:
- Self-host our ads
- Sell our own ads and have direct relationship with the ad buyers
- No animated advertising (only static graphics)
- Advertising is tailored to the content on our website which is an indirect way of targeting users (if users enjoy our content, they will likely find value in the ads).
edit: One of the benefits of the time-slot method of selling advertising is that it doesn't encourage methods of maximizing impressions (clickbait, galleries, etc) and also there is no reason to try to game clicks as with CPC.
I noticed that my ad blocker doesn't block your ads, and like you mentioned, they don't interrupt the browsing experience. They're almost like those in a high-quality paper magazine!
If I remember correctly, we used Google and self-hosted for a while, but eventually it made financial sense to replace the Google Ad slots with self-hosted so we were able to capture the full ad sale.
Several years on, I am really happy with the decision and it is great to not be subject to the whims of an ad marketplace we have no control over.
However, you are using a Google-Analytics script????
Nothing wrong with that Buuuuttt.... uhm, yeah.
That said, we do use the Anonymize IP setting and have all of the demographic / interest settings turned off for Google Analytics.
We basically whittled 3rd party stuff down to GA and a Google font, so while not 100% perfect, I am pretty happy with the strides we have made.
Plausible looks more promising of the two and I will check it out (PostHog could also be, but I didn't really understand the features as it related to a normal WordPress website).
It would be interesting to know how other Plausible users have found their traffic numbers compare vs Google Analytics. Likely that some users would be counted that weren't before, while perhaps bot filtering works differently.
If you are looking to replace Google Analytics with a self-hosted solution (to fully eliminate 3rd parties) you can check out the analytics platform I'm building: https://www.usertrack.net
Could you tell me what was the most important metric missing from userTrack for you? I keep adding new features (eg. just recently added the ability to filter all sessions from a specific user), so knowing which ones are the most common requested is really helpful!
I commented on it because I spotted the Google Ajax calls which sort of lead me to believe that you might have also been using Google for the Geo-Location stuff. When combined with the GA stuff it made me do a 'hang on a minute, something doesn't match up'. Thanks for taking the time to clarify.
It's genuinely baffling, given largely bad-faith "fake news" accusations, that news organizations are willing to light their credibility on fire like this. It feeds the nonsense, and justifiably so.
Those rabbit-hole articles where they split eight facts across 12 pages and in some cases never mention the fact they were advertising in the original link. All so they can put six more ads per click in front of you.
Also it doesn't matter what the NYtimes puts on its site - Sean hannity calls it librul and they all just fall in line anyway, why even bother catering to that crowd?
It’s one thing for a platform to not be responsible for free content, but entirely another to take money from a fraudulent enterprise and enable their fraud.
Edit: to be clear the reasonableness legal concept would be in play here in the US. Plenty of frauds could slip by a reasonable advertising network review. Some clearly would not.
It was nice to not having to actively go through the hundreds of pages of lamps and instead get presented a few different ones in each ad group now and then, as a break in my usual feed. The drip exposure also made me contemplate each one in isolation instead of being overwhelmed.
What I don't like is that I keep getting ads for lamps now after I've already bought it.
To remove dynamic ad content ignores the value that can be unlocked through targeting to more specific individuals. It must be considered, especially for small businesses who may not be able to afford larger timeslots, as are being proposed here. I think it is important to remember that a huge part of this more personalized marketing approach is that it allows small companies (not the P&Gs of the world) to engage in the ad market far more productively, with niche products. To ignore these advantages does the benefits of the current dynamic market a great disservice.
>Ban user tracking and targeting.
You do bring up a good point though. Reducing dynamic ad content and user targeting reduces advertising "supply." Instead of showing 10 ads at once, you show 1 ad per timeslot.
Small businesses wouldn't have the in-house capacity to search for lower-cost ad options directly. They'd have to use brokers, eg some SaaS ad marketplace, or automated tooling to just submit to price-appropriate options. This does increase burden on small businesses. But most of all it increases burden on the companies that show ads. Now they have to hire (a team?) of people to manually review something that used to be automated.
I don't disagree with OPs point. Manual curation would lead to higher quality of ads, and probably benefit society as a whole. Just a lot of barriers.
As a counterpoint, most podcasts use this manual curation model with the hosts themsevles reading out the ads.
And I am far, far more likely to explore a product endorsed by a favorite podcast than I am to click into a random link on the very same podcast's main site.
Is that value worth it when it opens the floodgates for scams (manual review is impossible since the amount of ads is now near-infinite instead of being limited to a single ad per ad spot per period of time), misinformation (you can target your ad to only the people most likely to fall for it, while remaining completely invisible to those who might identify it as incorrect/malicious), malware or privacy violations (ad targeting involves collecting large amounts of personal data which can then leak or be misused)?
On top of the other objections, surely this would just move the fraud to another place, by incentivising people to create fraudulent traffic so as to drive up the perceived value of the time slot?
We underestimate the value small businesses get from the current ad market. It’s partly because of this value that ad fraud is rampant.
Enabling small businesses to advertise to cheap also makes it cheap for fraudulent advertisers to commit ad fraud.
Tracking and targetting has clear benfits for me as a consumer. I see adverts for things that actually interest me. If anyting I'd like it to be more precise.
[0] For example a make-up company really doesn't really care about putting an ad in front of me a man who doesn't wear make-up.
How do you know if Facebook or pinterest is better ROI for your marketing budget?
You then just count the number of purchases from each campaign, compare that with the amount you spent on that campaign and there's your ROI.
The OP question was about banning all tracking.
This would end fraud. This would end mis-clicks. This would benefit the purchaser of ads AND would make the ad market more efficient. So, asking for "world peace" might be a easier route to go.
Can you elaborate on this?
I would rather live in this kind of internet.
Common sense fixes:
- Never allow dynamic ad content! Ads should be individually approved by publishers and not subject to change after approval.
- Ban user tracking and targeting. It's a red queen's race and no one benefits. Everyone is better off once it's illegal.
- Pay for ad time slots, not user impressions. Instead of selling by CPM, publishers should say "independent analyst X says we have traffic Y on an average Sunday. You can buy placement for next Sunday for $Z." This is how all offline ads are sold, and it's much healthier for everyone than CPM. It essentially kills the motivation for the Reddit fraud discussed here.
- Use anti-trust to prevent link aggregators from being advertisers. This is a bigger issue, but putting ads on the aggregators creates perverse incentives to promote bad content and not actually pay for it. Why would you pay to put an ad on publisher A which may or may not have traffic when you can put the ad on aggregator B which will definitely have traffic? The problem is this means A cannot pay writers and the whole system breaks down.