The way you target niche markets is by paying niche publishers who target those niche markets. The only reason this argument seems reasonable is that we're accepting that Facebook is the omnipublisher who is responsible for all information.

Supporting small publishers is at least as important as supporting small businesses. It would be nice if your small town news site got ads for local florists, they might be able to pay for a journalist without begging for direct payments. Paying directly to read journalism is stupid and will never work - people read things they hate and do not want to support, people don't know how to value the site that they read one story a week from (or how to pay that tiny amount), forcing people to pay limits the reach of your reporting when the reason you write is to convince or inform - ideally, you'd pay people to read what you write; a coupon for a local florist or the information that a restaurant is opening in your neighborhood is a nice micro-compensation.

Advertising, patronage by the wealthy, and/or ideological propagation are the only natural models for journalism, and SV giants sucking up all the advertising is destroying that. Now we're supposed to care about their problems while they pretend to care about ours.

> The way you target niche markets is by paying niche publishers who target those niche markets.

I don't think this works for non-hobbies like flowers, especially when I don't subscribe to or read local publications. That said I'd rather have choice to either pay for a service with my privacy or with my credit card.

Being pro-Small Business doesn’t meant you have to be pro-Advertising. Facebook makes a killing taking money from small businesses through advertising, yet it is consistently one of the lowest ROI marketing techniques, not to mention generally creates the worst UX.

Can you build a successful business on advertising? Yes. But I’d argue that you don’t need to. Almost every service I pay for came to me by word of mouth. That takes time and effort to cultivate, but it isn’t affected by a software update. Or me wanting to not share my personal data.

> Facebook makes a killing taking money from small businesses through advertising

It also takes a lot of money from governments and political campaigns. The micro-level targeting allows highly specific messages to be shown to people matching a specific segment and contradictory messages to be shown to another segment. It's disingenuous of Facebook to claim this is just about small business when it's arguably about undermining the foundations of democracy.

Word of mouth doesn't work for super niche services/products where e.g. there's a good chance no one who's recommendations you trust would be interested in the same type of service/product

It also favours more established businesses that are more known, making it harder for new businesses to gain any traction.

I'm not keen on advertising (I use adblockers on all my devices etc.), but there are definitely some (in my opinion) some compelling arguments on both sides.

> Word of mouth doesn't work for super niche services/products

Nonsense.

See, there are (were?) lots of niche specific publications and communities. They'd actually know about a subject, and provide informed and largely unbiased advice, and carry advertisement, of course. Similarly, there were regional newspapers, carrying information and advertisement of regional interest.

TV and other broad media could not steal their advertisement dollars, because that was the only way to reach the niche or region.

What Facebook is doing is to usurp all of that and monopolise advertisement, driving smaller niche and regional publishers out of business. Their hypocrisy is astounding.

> there's a good chance no one who's recommendations you trust would be interested in the same type of service/product

I think the trust problem has gotten much worse. As I said, there used to be niche publishers supporting communities (by interest or region) that were interested in keeping these sustainable long term, and therefore would not be interested in scamming their audience. Now, these publishers have been bled dry, and you have to find your information on the world wild web, where any scammer and fly-by-night producer can target you and link farm and buy fake reviews etc.

OK, but pretending that the world hasn't moved on from these niche publishers seems naive to me.

Perhaps I should have said "in the modern world, word of mouth doesn't work..."

Today, chances are those niche publications & communities are going to be online. And how do we determine the trustworthy ones from the ones that are just trying to exploit us? I guess we need to rely on word of mouth to determine which mouths we should listen to words from...

When you're talking about niche interests IME facebook just plain isn't good enough. You have to go to old-school forums, and from there word-of-mouth of the regulars of these forums.

Depending on the niche, you don’t even need to go forums. a simple YouTube search gets you reviews and opinions from niche professionals along with a comment section and a like/dislike count.

Quite the contrary. Word of mouth works wonders in small, tightly-knit communities that typically form around very small niches.

Right, but how do I find that tight-knit community (and begin to trust the people in it) if none of the people I currently associate with are interested in that niche & can introduce me to it?

Not from advertisements, that’s for sure.

Well of course, these types of communities aren't going to be paying for advertising because the communities themselves are generally going to be non-profit.

My point was if these communities are hard to find, targeted ads from small businesses in that niche might inform you of relevant products or services, not relevant communities.

Definitely not saying it's a perfect solution, or one that I like, just trying to point out it's not as black & white as people like to make out (especially on sites like HN)

They tend to cluster around a couple of websites or Facebook groups, so I would say Google. Reddit works as well, there are a lot of subreddits on any subject one would care to mention.

Sure, but how do I know if I can trust a random community I found via Google or on Reddit?

At least with ads (on a platform like Facebook), it's obvious they're ads and what their incentive is. With a random community, it may be unclear if people within it/the community itself is being paid by some company etc. Or if they have some other incentive to misrepresent the quality of certain products/services (e.g. recommending only what they can get affiliate links for).

Yes, you don't know whether you can trust a forum that's been up since 2004 whose only reason to exist is to discuss $topic. The rockbox forum for example, how would you know those guys _actually_ like cfw for mp3 players and don't just want to scam your crypto away?

Ads on the other hand you can trust to lie to you 100% of the time. Ads are never honest, their only intention is to fool you to buy something you don't need.

I legitimately don't understand how _anyone_ would think he gains any value from reading dishonest corporate propaganda, less how he would think "hey, thats nice! I'll buy that!"

Ah of course, all niche communities have existed for 16 years...

Your example of rockbox forum seems disingenuous because I assume they're not recommending you buy particular products (maybe recommending some particular mp3 players that the cfw works well on, but I think they try to target a wide range of players).

> Ads on the other hand you can trust to lie to you 100% of the time.

Exactly my point. You know exactly what you're getting and what their incentive is.

Well actually, maybe not exactly my point - it's pretty clear to me that ads do not "lie to you 100% of the time". Some ads are going to exaggerate the quality of their products etc., but some ads literally just inform you "this is a thing that is available", which is typically an easily provable claim.

But the point is that yes, with ads you know that it's being paid for by the people who have a direct financial interest in you buying the thing. You can make an informed decision.

I know how to evaluate the quality of the discussions and contributions from my experience.

Also, we can discuss the quality of Internet communities, but I would tend to trust one of these quite a bit more than an advert, even targeted, which was where we were coming from.

As real life examples, I have got advice on stuff to buy from photography websites, modelling (railway and wargames) Facebook groups and blogs without any trouble, and I know where to find it when I need it. I know when to take a photography buff raving about a camera with a grain of salt ("but it has a better score with DXOMARK"), I have about zero confidence in adverts on the web.

> how do I find that tight-knit community

Start from the related Reddit, and work your way out.

I also like Hackernoon as a starting point.

> If you can't hyper target, you get ads for tooth paste, cars and deodorant (TV ads).

Why should I be forced to give tracking information to allow people to 'hyper-target' me? I don't want to be hyper-targeted regardless of how small the business is.

Well, or how about letting yourself being hyper targeted by reading a magazine aimed at, say, parents or pilots or knitters or golfers or whatever. No need to give up your privacy for that, and you still get pertinent advertisement, and those specialised small businesses can still reach their target audience.

I'm assuming hyper-targeting in this context means targeting me as an individual, rather than targeting the content.

I'm absolutely fine with making ads relevant to the content I'm looking at. If I'm reading a blog about baldness and someone advertises some sort of hair transplant on the page that's totally fine!

What I'm not cool on is an advertiser tracking this page, cataloguing me as someone that suffers from hair loss, fingerprinting my device to follow other pages I visit to further target me, then placing advertisements for herbal remedies for baldness on every single page I visit, then changing the advert based on machine learning about the most effective advert based on my other attributes (a single young male living in a city).

These two things are not the same.

Adapt the ads to the content along which they are served, not to the people looking at them. That’s not difficult, and has zero privacy implication.

Is there any research how much benefit "hyper targeting" actually gives? Not just "it helps" but quantitatively (e.g. more effect than 30 just mildly target adds? Or just more effect than 2?)

In particular, how does it compare to somewhat targeted offline ads like (local shop advertising in local newspaper) or (car stuff advertised in car enthusiast magazine)?

Also, the question is about having a level playing field. If your competition has access to highly effective advertising, you can't afford to not use it as well. So right now you need it. However, if hyper targeting were forbidden (because the spying and stalking is prohibited by law or because browsers make it infeasible) then you don't need it.

Some vague numbers from facebook:

> https://twitter.com/DaveStangis/status/1339183289349918721

"cut of 60% per advertising dollar." So between 2 and 3. That is incredibly little for all the surveillance it brings with it. And I don't think fb would understate here.

If "hyper targeting" is that useless, why are even still discussing allowing it?

It’s really hard to prove as sales channels are messy.

Done right, it’s worth a lot.

Allowing small businesses to tack on a stealth 5% charge onto your credit card also helps small businesses, but would you advocate for that?

If you could convince credit card companies to waive their fees for small businesses and make it back by charging more to big businesses, that could be a pretty big win.

That will lead to what happened to farm subsidies. They were targeted to small farms so the large farms broke themselves into a series of small farms to maximize the subsidy.

That's pretty hard to do if you use a definition of small business that excludes any company owned in whole or in part by a parent corporation.

> If you can then you get ads for boutique florists in your area or gadgets you might actually like.

The magic moment of "I get relevant advertising" never happened to me so perhaps I'm jaded. For a while Google did just keyword targeting and it worked fairly well. (Not it's gone berserk and you often don't even see the organic results without scrolling). But the closest I get to relevant targeted advertising was when I'd do a search on Amazon for circular saws and see advertising for circular saws for the next 3 weeks.

Rough location based targeting is still going to be possible because requests will still have IP addresses. Likewise, the advertiser will know what app you are using and many apps provide context just based on what the app is.

Beyond that, I'm not super worried.

What would really help small businesses is if Goohle and Facebook would share the proceeds from advertising more evenly. Right now they basically suck all of the profits out of the market.

I don't intuitively understand how this change blocks targeted advertising outright. Sure, Facebook will have less information about me from other apps that I use, but certainly it has numerous other ways of targeting ads to me.

Facebook knows my demographic because I provided it to them when I signed up and the types of content I interact with in their apps, and they have both coarse and granular location (IP address and the location permission) from their first party apps. Most relevant forms of targeting seem to still work. Ads from the local florist can still be targeted.

It's credible to me that other, Facebook specific, magic such as "lookalike audience" and other behavior cohorting tools may be impacted by this change, but I don't view this narrow issue of IDFA consent to be an absolute judgment on ad targeting.

Most “Facebook Ads” are not delivered on Facebook. It is delivered through their Audience Network. I think their ability to track users on and within Facebook will be largely the same, but their ability to identify users while they are not using a Facebook owned property will be significantly impacted.

I think digital advertising does not have to be bad, but it very much is. Unfortunately it will probably get worse before it gets better.

It’s pretty easy to ignore that argument from Ben Thompson. It was one of the lowest quality posts of all time on Stratechery and full of giant holes in logic. Just see tons and tons of the comments from that HN thread. Here was mine for example,

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25344934

IMO this doesn't effect small business with revenue as much as it hurts their spending of marketing with facebook there are other marketing avenues that can be used by small businesses

There's an argument to be made though that hyper-targeting helps niche or smaller businesses more than a P&G who has to run a larger campaign so the IRR could drop more for smaller businesses than a large company on Facebook specifically?

The real argument here, that someone else made, is that if we want to help small businesses, Facebook needs to go. In the past small businesses would just use other small, local business, to advertise.

Facebook & co are just destroying all these small businesses (local newspapers, local magazines, billboard companies, local news websites, whatever).

It's naive to think that local newspapers would just spring back to life if Facebook disappeared.

The internet has changed how people consume and get new information forever and that won't change anytime soon.

I'm not arguing for actual news*papers. But Facebook and Reddit and other such aggregators are killing even local forums. They're sucking the local monetization into a US based black hole (because they then proceed to dodge taxes in the US).

I don't understand how can you be torn when you acknowledge that it's behavior that 99% of people oppose?

Is there any evidence that targeted advertising is actually more effective? People were buying goods before targeted ads, and they are still buying goods.

Ads online don't work anymore.

https://freakonomics.com/podcast/advertising-part-2/

Small businesses get their sales from being highly engaged on facebook/facebook pages...not by buying ads on the platform.

I think the issue is companies have become reliant on targeted advertising. Because of that other companies now sell products that harvest their users data and sell it to a different type of customer. If a customer buys a product then they shouldn’t be used as a product. A users information shouldn’t be required for a company’s success like it is for Facebook and google. I think what apple is doing is a step in the right direction.

Whomever is helps or doesn’t help Facebook should not be entitled to surveil me without my informed consent.

I assume "hyper targeting" in this case means tracking and correlating an individual across different apps. My question is, even if they're prevented from doing that, can't they use your location to serve you ads for small businesses in your area?

They can just use information that their users choose to share voluntary with them, such as language, location history from posts, interests, group membership, places where they checked in.

There's no need to spy on users outside Facebook's app to get relevant data.

It's not about getting profile information from users but rather getting attribution for things like tracking ad clicks to product buys.