Not that long ago someone posted this beautiful Banksy quote about it on HN:
> “People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you. You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity. Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head. You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.” - Banksy
I’ll damn well block all shitty ads on every site.
You’re a newspaper site and want to block me for using an ad blocker? Feel free, I’ll leave your site.
You’re an advertiser who refuses to bid on ad space as too many people block the ads anyway? Please stop bidding then.
But don’t pretend that by offering your site for free and me using it for free somehow requires me to see shitty ads.
If you want my money, ask for it. If your content is worth it I’ll pay for it.
One of my personal favorites: movie theatres.
You pay, a handsome amount of money, to see a movie, once, and if you happen to have the weird idea of not be just late enough to the movie, you get the wonderful, once in a lifetime opportunity… to get ads shoved in your face. Ads for food, ads for random stuff, and ads for other movies.
The best of both worlds, really.
Used to drive me crazy. Now I simply don’t go anymore.
Honestly I don't mind the pre-movie trailers. I like movies and they give me time to go pee and stuff.
* Relevant. You know I’m interested in movies, since I’m at one, so you don’t have to spy on me to do it. Some theaters might be spying on me, I dunno, but they don’t have to in principle.
* Not directly interfering with my original purpose. The movie hasn’t started yet. The only thing you might be showing me before the movie is, maybe, cartoon shorts? I guess that would be more fun than ads, but the ads aren’t going to give me malware or pretend to be from the FBI when they’re not, so it’s not as bad as internet ads.
* If the theater starts advertising scams, they have a brick-and-mortar address, they’re in the same legal jurisdiction as the visitors, and everyone sees the same ads, so suing them should be an option. Everybody who visited the movie saw the same set of ads, so if it’s a scam, there’s plenty of witnesses.
That’s something else that drives me crazy with both YouTube & Twitter. The number of scams that run in their ads.
Some falsely referring to some local celebrity only to sell some dodgy pseudo-financial product. Others selling medical products that would be heavily regulated if they did anything close to what they promise, sometimes vaguely citing "medical research" and "new discoveries".
Almost as if they didn’t review them before letting them go live!
But we never hear a word about that, no.
Governments try to have all our online chats preemptively monitored to chase after pedophiles[1] (and then it’ll be terrorists, and heck, after that, why not copyright infringements while they’re at it? ie Hadopi)…
The news and our Dear Leaders keep ranting about Facebook, Google and Twitter because of how they are used to spread disinformation to further some political goals…
They also all keeps bashing Facebook & Google for supposedly causing the ruin of the news media (all of which then rants on about it whenever given a chance, mostly spouting nonsense, even those I like).
But big, supposedly (and probably wrongly) trusted platforms spreading scams at scale all over the world? That’s apparently not worth any widespread effort, fine or headline.
Sorry for the rant. As I said; drives me crazy.
[1]: https://european-pirateparty.eu/parliament-approves-chatcont...
If that bullshit worked you could just throw yourself in the sea for free rather than paying some pillock on Facebook. No better connection to earth than that!
They got converted to pre-views pretty early on though because at the end of the movie people didn't stick around to watch them.
Pretty much the reason I scorned every single "smart tv"
LG ads: https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2021/3/10/22323790/lg-oled-tv-...
Samsung connecting to open WiFi: https://forum.developer.samsung.com/t/if-you-choose-to-not-c...
Samsung TV ads (you’ll find more sources, but adweek seemed a pretty ironic choice): https://www.adweek.com/convergent-tv/samsung-ads-debuts-thre...
Samsung, LG, Sony & others spying on what you watch: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/23/smarter-living/how-to-sto...
Quite a lot to avoid ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Or maybe skip straight to an LED projector, I hear those are nice.
Just glancing at Amazon, I see a 65-inch 4k digital signage display for under $1200 USD.
I wonder what would happen if you limited their bandwidth to a couple of kbps. Just enough to get the pings across but make any ad download excruciatingly slow. Or write some kind of DPI rule that drops packets to the internet above a certain size.
That's why I think experimenting with more advanced sabotage will pay off in the long run.
But buying a DVD to then be pestered with unskipable dire warnings for life and limb if I dare to pirate this DVD was really a bit rich.
Hello! I actually paid for this product. I'm really in the wrong target group for this shit. And moreover:
I think I'll pirate the next movie so that I'm not forced to endure such gunk.
Now when I moved to Canada: no numbered seats, and 20 (yeah, TWENTY) minutes of ads + trailers. WTF is wrong with you people? I just don't go anymore
Either you get a random seat, perhaps apart from your party, perhaps miss a bit of the movie (although unlikely), and get not to watch ads.
Or you arrive on time, perhaps slightly early, get to pick where you sit, together, and get a shit ton of ads shoved down your eyes and ears for nearly half an tour, in full IMAX & DolbyVision 20.8.
Edit: Oh, and you don’t know at what time the movie actually ends, because they tell you when the ads start, and how long the movie lasts. But you have to factor in the very important ad time.
But there’s also, before those, ~20 minutes of "regular" ads. Ads for M&Ms. Ads for cars. Ads for some pseudo-luxury perfumes. Ads, ads, ads… even ads for the company that places the ads in movie theatres!
"All institutions & organizations must shut the hell up. To all egregores: you do not speak unless spoken to, and I will NEVER speak to you. I do not want to hear 'thank you' from a corporation. I am a divine being : you are a construct. You have no right to speak in my holy tongue."
The business models that would become viable in that reality would be a better equilibrium and the incentives would be better aligned between software companies and their users.
Highly targeted advertising disproportionately benefits the little guy. I say this as a little guy, running a small dog treat e-commerce company. Almost all of my new customer acquisition is by way of Facebook ads.
If you get rid of Facebook ads and go back to the non-targeted, TV commercial and newspaper type ads, my company might not survive. Purina, though? They'd be fine. They can afford to spend enormous amounts, and they've got a range of products that means their potential customer base is much bigger than mine.
Your local vet can affordably reach pet owners in their area with targeted advertising. If it goes away, that will hurt them and greatly benefit VCA (huge, nationwide chain of vet hospitals).
You're right in the sense that my business model would become inviable, but the result is that you're going to concentrate power even more heavily among the largest corporations. Is that really a good thing?
That being said, if you are concerned about monopolies, there are better ways to fight them. Unfortunately they have been neglected in the last few decades. Perhaps channeling your money/influence towards that instead of ads would be better for everyone.
The world prior to 20 years ago was a very different one in terms of the scale and reach companies could achieve. Pretending as though the situation now is comparable is just naive on your part.
And honestly, the drama of calling it a cancer is just silly and dramatic. If you think this is all so terrible, go live in a commune instead of posting on a message board that is run by an organization that is deeply connected to big tech and all the things you're complaining about. I guess you probably can't see that connection all the way up there on your high horse, though.
Nobody said you should stop in this instant. I was criticizing how your approach to fighting your competitors inadvertently does a lot of damage to people that don't know any better.
>And honestly, the drama of calling it a cancer is just silly and dramatic. If you think this is all so terrible, go live in a commune instead of posting on a message board that is run by an organization that is deeply connected to big tech and all the things you're complaining about. I guess you probably can't see that connection all the way up there on your high horse, though.
This argument is basically the "yet you live in a society, curious" meme[0]. I work also work in tech(as an industrial automation contractor to be precise) so I enjoy the technical aspect of the conversations here. That being said I set a goal 5 years ago to not give SV gigacorps a single cent either directly or indirectly. It helps me keep a clean conscience in arguments like this.
Make no mistake I'm no leftie. I just find the direction the online world is heading deeply concerning. Social cooling[1] and all that. The fact that your means of making money is caught in this crossfire is not what I'm aiming for.
Doesn’t mean that Facebook isn’t a cancer on society, enabling a skyrocketing in polarization, setting groups up against each other against their best interests, giving megaphones to the most vile humans turds imaginable etc.
The nice and civil “Mount Pleasant baseball league” Facebook page that your ads run on and that make your business profitable are at best an unintended side effect of that.
I think on net the problems targeting creates are worse than the small business benefits, but that’s an easy position for me to hold because I don’t run a small business.
I also think in a world where advertising models are not really viable for supporting software companies (or media) - you get better models that have a better outcome for the group. Things like Substack.
I’d imagine in that world there’s still room for your company to succeed, but the model is probably different. Maybe niche community sites where people review high quality dog food? Someone from your company could be part of those communities in a genuine way. There’d still be advantages for little companies - it’s just hard for people to model what that kind of world would look like.
So I both agree with you that targeted advertising today helps the little guy, but I disagree that a world where that model isn’t viable is one where the little guy can’t exist.
Comments like the sister reply to mine don’t help because they make it seem like I don’t care about the trade offs - I do, I just think they’d be different and the costs today are pretty bad.
Facebook doesn’t give a rats ass about equity. If they did they’d copy a model like Apple’s App Store: as developer you pick a price tier for your app or subscription. That same tier translates into for example €2,99 per month in Europe, but the equivalent of €0,25 in less privileged markets. So the luckier people of the world subsidize the less fortunate, as it should be.
The earliest iterations of banner ads weren’t that bad. They were basically print ads with some low-key animations added at worst, and many weren’t even graphical.
But then arose an arms race to create the most attention-grabbing, obnoxious ads possible, and ad supported pages quickly became neon disco raves that sucked up CPU cycles and sometimes even hijacked users’ browsers. This was the first tipping point.
And then ads became ever more invasive, fingerprinting users in any way possible. This was the second tipping point.
Had web ads stayed lightly-enhanced, unscripted print ads, I doubt anybody would care to install an ad blocker, but here we are today where doing so is practically essential not just from a privacy standpoint, but also from a security standpoint (since ads can exploit 0days).
So the industry largely brought this upon itself, at least in my eyes.
Prisoner's dilemma problems are hard to solve.
Google is now blocking ads for all Chrome users for sites that have shown ads that are considered bad. Of course there's a bunch of companies doing rules lawyering to squeak by and they haven't been adding new bad experiences like they should. It does seem like something an online petition would help with though, as the non-CMA members of the coalition would then have more data to throw around about how users view these annoying ad experiences.
Examine the toxic business models, then defang them.
I personally tend to think your framing is letting the publishers sneak a bit out of frame, though. Publisher in this context refers to an entity that has a site or app that attracts eyeballs into which ads may be emitted.
Once upon a time, as you're mentioning, sites had only a few rectangles and skyscrapers that they had to sell themselves. By and large any site capable of bringing in real money had to hire ad sales folks to sell those slots (yes, to real ad agencies!). Some others would join consortiums to split the cost of ad sales folks, etc.
Those publishers needed to hire programmers in addition to those ad sales folks to develop targeting tools in order to make better pitches to the ad agencies. This was similar to how "old media" (newspapers, radio, and television companies) used to do it: you had to create spaces for ads (commercial==ad slot), go out and find people who wanted to buy those slots, and then rent them your ad space (and, of course, the eyeballs associated them).
All of that costs effort and money... plus ad agencies are also expensive so only "reputable" brands had ad budgets that could move the needle. This meant the publisher's content had to be something a reputable company would want to be associated with. That's even more costs for the publisher; i.e. not just hiring programmers and sales folks, but editors and actual journalists, etc.
Your incentive in this game is to produce content which can attract reputable merchants by having an audience that those deep pocketed merchants want to reach. Or, otherwise, to become so popular and well read that the advertisers would naturally want to pay you.
---
So, what changed?
Even with ace ad sales folks most publishers couldn't actually sell all of their available slots (side note: anyone seen a real house ad in the last few years!)
Enter... "Remnant advertising." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remnant_advertising)
What if a company offered to pay you for all of your unused slots?
You're not going to get a huge contract like a run-of-site takeover campaign, and in fact you no longer have any relationship with the advertiser at all, just with the remnant ad broker.
But they will toss you a few pennies every time you can scrounge together 1000 eyeballs. Kind of like pull tabs or collecting aluminum cans, it's now a volume game.
But, consider what became of the incentives for the publisher: you no longer have to get great or respectable content or become super popular so "respectable" merchants will pay you... you can just focus on the numerator now: eyeballs == money.
In fact, with that incentive system you might start shoving modal dialogs and interstitials and just plain adding ad slots everywhere! If you can sell the same eyeball a dozen times instead of once that's even more money! So... ad slots took over the web, and you suddenly had to scroll a lot more.
Note that I haven't once talked about the content of the advertisements themselves just how inexorably the dynamics of this market lead to more obnoxious webpages and apps into which those ads (good or bad) would appear.
--- What about the remnant merchants? Well, they hired sales people and programmers. And then they consolidated, and merged, and consolidated some more.
And they'd built software to schedule campaigns and produce the targeting reports for publishers and ad agencies to do remnant! Plus ad agencies preferred not having to deal with 1,000 websites if they could just work with a few brokers.
The BMWs, PepsiCo's, Unilevers were all still hiring ad agencies to design campaigns; but now everyone worked with the ad brokers.
But for the publishers,not only do you not hire programmers and ad sales folks, you don't really need editors or to pay your "journalists" much... You might even just pay your "content creators" based on how many eyeballs their arti^h^h^h^hlist-icle brings in. The publishers could become brokers of eyeballs too!
If you're keeping score we're now in the rapid descent phase... tragically you've no longer got a newspaper or an essayist or a journalist or whatever... just a bunch of dealers trying to sell eyeballs.
Of course kutsunesoba's right that the advertisers (folks with ads looking for eyeballs) were also complicit, though. They quickly realized they were competing with 10 other ads appearing on the same and this meant almost instant neon-disco-ball obnoxious ads!
But, from my perspective, in addition to the scuzzy advertisers, and those scummy ad brokers, all this time swimming right alongside them were the publishers.
And this whole article is about one of them (being upset with Apple).
I could go on and yet I think some points start to emerge. I'm OK with ads, I don't like the pervasive tracking. I'm OK with ads, I don't like them interrupting the functionality. I actually even like ads when I have some control over them, not them controlling me. Give me more options to choose which types of ads I want to see (not only don't want to see), don't track me to try to guess/manipulate which ones I want to see.
Lastly, I think in physical real estate, there are laws about who can advertise, where, and when, and I think in digital real estate, there don't seem to be those regulations and advertisements and ad-tracking creep more and more. While advertisements seem to be one of the best ways to grow income (i.e., more people viewing/more accurate audience = higher ad price), I think an ad does have a ceiling price and then once it hits it, companies start to make more ads, more intrusive ones, and more tracking ones.
I think more than anything, I want more agency over the process, and right now, my options for agency are often do nothing, avoid the site completely, constantly click on ads to say "I don't want to see ads like this" and end up seeing more ads tangentially like it, install an ad-blocker, or one of many other almost guerrilla-like tactics to gain some semblance of agency.
If I had to compromise, I would agree that more agency and less intrusive ads and tracking are a start.
[0]: https://99percentinvisible.org/article/clean-city-law-secret...
[1]: https://coil.com/
Reminds me of how one day, I think in SF, I was trying to go around without reading things and just realized there are so many things shouting at me with words, especially billboards and other forms of public advertising. I would love to even have a city here in the US experiment with something like this.
> I would gladly raise my taxes to eradicate public advertising permanently
I would, too, especially as a consumer, and yet, as a producer, I wonder how annoyed I would be without ads. Maybe there's a balance, and I believe needs to be have more consumer voice, and less producer voice.
> Naturally, how this could be implemented is far beyond me, as are the economics behind advertising, so I suppose I'm doing little more than wistful thinking.
Lol, me too. I guess it comes down to how much does advertising actually work and if advertising disappeared, what downstream impacts would it have on the economy (and would those be "bad")?
I think part of the reason I'd like to go into public office is to run these experiments and also I feel sad that more public offices don't seem to run that many experiments :-)
I'm in the exact same position, I'd love to see a large-scale experiment to determine the economic and psychological impact of removing public advertising, or at least reducing it to a more "comfortable" level, whatever that may be. The Canadian government experimented a bit with universal basic income in the 70s, and more again recently with COVID, so perhaps they'd be willing to give this a shot as well.
> I would, too, especially as a consumer, and yet, as a producer, I wonder how annoyed I would be without ads. Maybe there's a balance, and I believe needs to be have more consumer voice, and less producer voice.
Another concern/shortcoming I forgot to address above is what companies will do to get their products out there; will advertising take a more subtle, perverse tone if they're not allowed billboards and banner ads? Perhaps a middle-ground will stop a more covert extreme from appearing. Perhaps I'm falling for the middle ground fallacy.
Private spaces like inside shopping malls is fine for me.
I like the idea that inside a private building is opt-in/consent, whereas outside of it is not.
> There's not that much physical world advertising in my part of Europe (e.g. almost no road side banners at all), but I still despise how we've sold bus stops and metro walls to the highest bidder
I lived in Germany for a few months and was shocked to see advertisements for cigarettes on the sides of the local buses. I suppose this will be changing in 2022, so a good first step [0].
[0]: https://www.thelocal.de/20200918/germany-set-to-ban-cigarett...
Now that Near Field Comm has arrived and active invasive advertising soon is likely follow us everywhere we go, it's time we consumers reasserted ourselves and took back control of our eyeballs.
I do think that value is there though. Some of our best marketing for AutoTempest has been through youtube sponsorships where we find creators and videos relating to cars and car buying, and work with with the creator to include a pitch for our service in exchange for (usually) a flat fee. It's dead simple for both sides, and as long as what you're advertising is legitimately useful and you're transparent about the relationship, the response from viewers tends to be very positive. I suppose it could be trickier if your product had a very niche audience, but I would think these days there are corners of the web targeting every niche, so you just need to find where your potential customers hang out, and go there, rather than trying to target them wherever they might be.
Not on the scale of the internet and you give some good examples that are egregious. a lot of it is just 'adtech' bs, but it's there.
and the traditional in-store transaction data marketplace is huge. Companies have been tracking you and your purchases around forever.
passive bluetooth IDs track you in store - though didn't iOS mitigate that by changing them frequently? idk maybe not.
There are some 'eye tracking' billboard tech but it's kind of dumb imho. The simpler is just trying to estimate impressions.
though maybe that's more digital ads than not. but collecting, selling, aggregating consumer data, combining it with purchase data, and using that for direct marketing ha been around for ages.
I remember the internet in the HoTMaiL era, all of the adds where mainly about casinos, porn and such, and very rarely interested to me.
I personally think that if tracking is done with good intentions, it shouldn't be an issue. At least from my point of view.
I rather see totally relevant ads than have again "casino/poker/porn" ads.
I don't agree about the good intentions. The tracking is a means to an end. People are tracked to measure engagement and to target ads, both of which have the purpose of increasing the value of the advertising to the benefit of the ad networks. They don't care if you get relevant ads. They care that they can charge more for your eyeballs because they can classify you as "male, 19-29, in USA, interested in technology, art, exercise" and sell you as part of a package to companies wanting to target that market.
They need to track so that they can "prove" they did what they sold.
The challenge with having access to that much information is that it can be very powerful and a very lopsided/asymmetric power. I remember when Facebook had Open Graph Search-when any user on the platform could perform complex searches of their friends, friends of friends, and more. It was so powerful at times it freaked me out how powerful it was. I could search for friends of friends who are women who live in San Francisco who speak Spanish who are single and who like Dave Matthews and it would give me a list. Facebook shut it down a few years ago, but I imagine something similar still exists on the advertising side of things (side note, there was someone a few years ago that used the advertiser tools to send ads specifically to his one friend as a prank). So for me, why should some groups have access to this information and others not? Who gets to control who has so much info?
Again, the info itself is not necessarily the problem I see, it's the asymmetry and how those people use the asymmetric info they have on me, which can be to powerfully help me or hurt me or maybe even ignore me.
"Oh, that's where it is. I couldn't find the product because the ad was in the way." Grocery store standalone displays partially blocking aisles and shelves are a pain during busy periods. You get cart jams.
As a side point, many labour-of-love websites start to monetise to sustain the hosting costs. But some of the best blogs I read are flat HTML. The running costs of such websites must be negligible for all but the most heavily trafficked blogs. When my blog got hit by hundreds of views per second over the course of a few hours via reddit, Apache on a Core 2 Duo barely broke a sweat because it was flat HTML. With modern CSS websites can look fantastic with minimal assets and bandwidth. I'm happy to pay €20/month for such a server myself, and donate my content to whoever wishes to read it.
Often it does, but Google pushes youtube videos to the top of the search results. The same Google that earns money from ads shown along those videos of course.
I don't want anything that's advertising supported. Anything. There is no media I want to consume so badly that I'll tolerate ads to watch it. There's no product so interesting I'll view ads to use it. No website contains information I need that badly.
People keep saying that without ads we'll have to pay for things. Fine. Sure. Set up a Patreon. I give money on Github to a few projects I rely on to make sure their maintainers don't get day jobs. I couldn't afford to pay a programmer's salary, but I can afford to pay a small percentage of one.
I think the problem has actually been the donation button itself. You want $1 a month out of me that's a pretty easy sell. You want me to sign up for your website and give you my credit card information and you're SOL. I tried to donate to VoiceMeeter a few months back because it's so good. They only accept $20 donations, no more no less, and their payment system wasn't working.
Just, like, get a Venmo.
Something that I can put money into, set rules for, and over a period of time dispense cents/fractions of a bitcoin/whatever as per rules.
The rules - and default rules in particular! - would be important.
Maybe you like the author so much you donate on the regular just anyway.
Maybe a plugin in my browser can see when I visit a site and automatically donate. If I don't visit the site, it doesn't pay.
Maybe you donate 0.1 of a cent to ANY website that has no ads or doesn't trigger your adblocker. $1 buys you 1000 such visits.
Then a RSS-like "Donation" button would be meaningful for longer term income, without all the hassle of Patreon etc.
OTOH, I worry that sites would then start watching such transactions and try setting floor limits for how much you need to donate before they serve you.
Any ruleset will inspire gaming that ruleset.
I'd like it without a Corporation-In-The-Middle between me and the recipients but I will have to check this out.
Thanks!
The small additions I might enjoy might be some flash games, Wikipedia, and blogs; these were early 2000s IIRC. I would actually draw the line at Youtube. It's great and all, but it could as well not be the web, but a dedicated native app for all I care, but give me the old YouTube at its very first breakeven point[1].
We pretend like the current multi-hundred billion dollar Crapshow Creeper Web full of carnival barkers hounding you every second is absolutely necessary, and it's not. What fucked up the Web was money--way too much of it. We're in a denial phase with the Web bubble desperately pumped up with steroids to support multiple 800 pound gorilla/leeches that provide little value other than "scale" (or some shit).
[1] (and Google will never publicly say when that was, but definitely before 2010--it's just that the stupid growthism mindset required absurd revenue growth to keep up with stockholder and executive greed).
If we did really understand the implications of the society we live in, we would not stop at selecting "don't track me" on a phone.
We're living through a major extinction, we know that the next century is going to be a bloodbath, we know this crisis has been brought to us by productivism, and we're discussing whether it's fair to ignore calls for more consumerism on our phones.
1. I want more honesty and transparency in products and services. I'm tired of being sold something to "Connect with friends and the world around you" that are actually just a front to collect as much information about me as possible to for advertisers.
I'm not even opposed to targeted ads, but at this point have to assume that if a product is capable of collecting ever bit of data it can and selling it, it will. Even privacy policies and user agreements are meaningless because they all contain text of the effect that the provider can change the terms at any time.
I just want companies to be honest about what they are actually doing and what the cost to me really is.
2. I want ads to back the hell off.
I don't mean they need to go away entirely. There are times when I _want_ to learn about different products and find new things to solve problems I have.
But I'm tired of them them pushing to get as in my face as possible, of them beating me over the head with problems I don't have, and of them trying to manipulate me into giving them money instead of helping me find things that will actually help me.
It's as if product discovery isn't profitable; like companies are afraid to be honest about their products. So instead of making better products, they entire market just makes different colored cheap boxes with nothing inside and uses ads to manipulate as many people into buying them before they figure it out.
I block ads guilt free because at this point I honestly don't feel like I can trust any company that participates in this racket.
Personally though, I'm might just be willing to give up on products that depend on ad revenue. While I admit I do use some services based on ad-tech, I'm pretty quick to leave any site that complains about my ad-blocker and don't really feel like I'm missing anything. I could probably be convinced to leave most these other services behind if they started making a worse experience of it.
For the sake of argument, lets assume FaceBook is a top-grade product that people currently don't pay for with money. It exists because advertisers pay FB. The targeting of ads to individual users allegedly results in a high CTR or whatever. Without targeting, FaceBook can still sell ads but they will be less targeted, and presumably have a lower CTR. That means they will be less valuable than other forms of ads and the ad spend will be adjusted accordingly. That seems bad for our "free" service. OTOH if we stop targeting in all areas, there will be no medium that is "better" to put ads and so the spend will likely move in proportion to where peoples eyeballs and ears are, as things used to be. That might actually result in more ad spending in areas like radio, TV, and any other medium that never gained the ability to target specific people.
Maybe that's a good thing for us consumers.
Internet advertising will become the home ground of big companies, which don't mind spending tons of cash for widest possible audience reach. Small business will be effectively cut out of online ads, except search engines with their keywords targeting.
I would like to see us move to direct payments. If direct payments were the norm, the web would be less polluted with UX anti-patterns and other crap.
There's nothing particularly extreme about this idea. We pay for all our products and services in the physical world. We pay for streaming music and video. Heck, even in social networking, people pay/paid to use WhatsApp, iMessage and BBM, which are/were two of the largest messaging platforms (BBM and WhatsApp had monthly fees and iMessage is paid for with device purchases).
If your social media platform cannot convince people to pay, say, $1.99/month, perhaps it just isn't enriching the lives of your end users, and thus shouldn't exist. A lot of people (particularly those focused on growth hacking) would say this is a flaw of direct payments, but I view it as a feature.
The average HNer has absolutely no clue the economic impact derived from invasive privacy tracking and the not-so-secretive data industry. It's absolutely massive across finance, consumer-facing-anything, insurance, and government.
One particularly good journalist covering the topic is Joseph Cox [1]. Follow his work and you'll start to get a tiny sense of how massive we're talking.
If someone really wants or needs something, they'll find a way to pay for it (directly or indirectly) if access cannot be had any other way. Everything else is "nice to have" until the cost or friction gets a little higher than zero.
The fact that people are increasingly unwilling to "pay for" things like FB seems to suggest these services are not actually _that_ vital despite their high usage figures.
The system we have now is micropayments. Personal data has economic value and we pay with that.
The engineering problem is to figure out how to make the payment system less indirect so that companies can't rent seek by extracting more data (payments) for the same service.
I think going back to content based advertising will greatly improve the quality of content on the internet.
The way it works now, the most valuable content is the cheapest content that can get valuable eyes to look at it, which leads to clickbait and low effort content.
If advertisers can only make ad decisions based on the content, quality content will be more valuable.
I suspect the vast majority of us in HN would have no problem paying for most of these services but I’m not sure how I feel about us making those choices on behalf of those that can’t.
It’s free. If you find it useful and can afford it please donate. If not it’s still free.
Seems to work out excellent for them.
This can work for something like an encyclopedia or for moderating an online community.
It's not a silver bullet.
At the market there is one way to buy, I don't get to ask for alternatives to paying upfront. This (for lack of a better term) entitlement really puzzles me. In the physical world, if I don't like the terms, I leave and don't do business. But on the internet, when people don't like the terms they flout the rules and consume anyway.
edit: I think it would be ideal to have multiple options, I would rather pay directly myself than paying by watching ads. I just have a problem with justifying refusing to pay in the way the business wants, yet still consuming their content.
Curious example, since this was the case for most of the history of journalism.
But you’re right that it’s not so clear. Maybe a more straightforward example is broadcast TV: ABC, NBC and the like. Free at delivery, paid for by ads.
Or, as continuational said, you will have to pay for it.
They also track and profile you across the web. Even if you have no account with them, you still get assigned an advertising ID. Everywhere you see a "Share on Facebook" button? Yeah, that button tracks you even if you never click it, and that's just one of zillions of sneaky ways you're still tracked and profiled by the modern advertising industry.
And cryptominers are not borderline malware. They are malware full stop.
For me, I pay for email and web hosting. The only big thing I rely on is news, I believe. And Internet search.
Youtube is mostly useless except when I'm trying to repair stuff at home. Almost everything else falls into the category of "entertainment", for which there are plenty of alternatives that don't involve ads. If there is one thing there is no shortage of in this country, it's entertainment.
Most of the (non-news) articles I read online really don't add much to my life, and there were plenty of choices pre-Internet (e.g. magazine subscriptions).
I'm happy to get ad-subsidized stuff like they did in the old days (news + magazines) because although it was annoying, it was not invasive.
So apart from Internet search, I'm having trouble finding anything that is (invasive) ad supported that benefits my life. If most of these things will go away, I will happily revert to the old ways. I'm definitely not happier now because of ad supported services.
Of course, that would mean techies stepping up and doing this for their families and tribes...
Many of us seem to be preoccupied with chasing the advertising dollar which exploits those same people.
I am perfectly willing to see ads as an indirect payment for free services. Show me some ads with tasteful photography, good art, or a nice pun. I might even click on them and buy something! This is not new, we have been doing this for centuries.
What we currently have are hardly good ads in any way, shape, or form. They rely upon invasive tracking to show you lazy creepy notifications like “Oh you live in 123 Evergreen St. and bought a toaster recently? Here are ads for five other toasters!". Ugh, no thanks.
Advertising is fine. Getting rid of invasive personal tracking will allow the creativity and art to come back into advertising.
Fantasy world. These products do not exist, as far as I'm aware. The reality is trash products. I couldn't care less if all that trash just vanishes from the internet.
Is Facebook a "higher-grade" social networking product than other free ones that exist without the same monetization of personal data, or than other free ones that could exist without the same monetization of personal data if such monetization of personal data was considered unacceptable? I don't doubt that Facebook delivers more value to shareholders than if they were not able to monetize personal data to the same extent, but I see no reason to believe that they or their competitors would be less of a "top-grade product."
Do we have any proof that regular, old non-tracking ads could not sustain a top website? I’ve heard stories that websites can actually earn more by excluding all the ad tech middlemen from the equation.
Don't want.
Does this change if nobody is allowed to do surveillance? I.e. if privacy-respecting ads are not competing with more intrusive ads, does the price change?
I think discussing options is a waste of time if we don't have any data to base our decisions on.
I think most HN users will agree that the good stuff costs money. So the question is really who pays, and how.
For me the ideal end-game is ability to get what I want through a direct pay-as-you-go transaction. In the ideal world this transaction is explicit, instant, anonymous, nearly zero overhead and non-recurring. Explicit, because as a consumer I want to be able to say no, and know exactly when I engage in a transaction. Instant, because waiting X working days sucks. Anonymous, because there are many reasons to stay anonymous. Zero overhead, because we want to cut middlemen. Non-recurring, because a recurring payment is _always_ an up-sell. Paper money works great in the offline world.
Any kind of an indirect payment is not ideal because it takes control from the consumer and gives it to someone else.
Advertisement does not pay for the vast majority of content created. The creators pay by spending their free time making it.
By outsourcing ads to a 3rd party the website has lost an element of control over their "own space on the internet" and hence led to mish mash crap on so many sites - and it follows you making the sites all blend into one another!
I would accept a website to host it's own static advertising - not GIF, not video, not audio - that doesn't discriminate between myself and fellow humans. A website on my browser, or any similar browser around the world, should be the same, barring accessibility differences.
This would bring us back to motoring websites having ads for cars, tech websites having ads for tech etc. People don't get tracked, they get ads relevant to their interests, and pages look cohesive and have an identity.
Fine, Facebook knows which hobbies I'm looking at on Instagram and has incredible ads and suggested posts. Ok that's fine. But random 3rd party I don't know getting that data... No thanks.
Do we want them to though? What would a web without free look like?
A global ban on targeted advertising. Fines in % of global revenue instead of fixed sums. Bankruptcy of adtech companies and concerts in the ruins of their headquarters.
What I do is Building relevant ads to my content when I find fitting affiliate programs. As they are just text (or image) with an link they ain't blocked and respect my users privacy.
I would argue that are the only actually targeted ads. And lucky content creators won't be blocked either (usually)
Other projects I just go for a paid or free/paid model.
Also, Firefox + Unblock.
I don't actually. If I could pay for something that gives good value and by doing so I also shut off all tracking of any kind, I'd do so, assuming it was something I was interested in.
If you are depressed, just don't be?
I don't think the typical HN user insists on not paying for the software we use. I don't understand people who insist they want unpaid software.
1. Pervasive, asymmetric surveillance increases the power differential between individuals and big corps/governments. The latter groups can use that power to preempt healthy competition, causing individual quality of life to stagnate in a local maximum.
2. Ads themselves are attention hijacking, thought injection, and manipulation/coercion—all forms of mind control. Most people consider their mind central to who they are (often along with body, memories, and personality), it's wrong to mess with that non-consensually. (No, clicking "accept ToS" isn't consent.)
3. Centralizing surveillance data (as by companies and governments) prevents the surveilled from protecting their own vulnerabilities from bad actors. It's like passwords: you can invest in memorizing many strong ones, or re-use one that's written on a post-it on your desk, but since in this metaphor the surveillants are also storing your password in plaintext in paper filing cabinets, so it doesn't matter how much effort you put into protecting your passwords. Put another way, if the Coke recipe or a Boeing blueprint were leaked, it's the company's loss, so they work hard to protect their secrets. But if someone hacks a consumer company's user data, it's the users who are affected; if it weren't for regulatory fines and news exposés, companies wouldn't even be hurt by such breaches.
As for the end-game goals: Companies surveil and advertise because they're allowed to and it works.
We see futuristic attention hijacking tech in sci-fi films and TV, like giant holograms [Blade Runner], ads that address each individual [Minority Report], or ads that stop until you're paying attention again [Black Mirror]. But it's less common to see futuristic attention protection tech. (That makes sense if you consider the funding source of these sci-fi productions.) Black Mirror did have one episode where a person was exiled from everyone else's senses, but I can't think of others.
[It works] The individual's goal could be total control over perception of the world. As a natural-born human, you can easily close your eyes, but your other senses are harder to dampen, and so provide vectors for involuntary thought injection (ads). Now with widespread earbud use, you can sort of close your ears too. But imagine installing an ad-blocker so your senses just didn't report ads, or your brain didn't perceive them? As with many technologies, it'd be quite dystopian if centrally controlled, quite freeing if under individual control. Even more fantastical would be the ability to experience but be unaffected by stimuli (including ads), which might not even be a technology exactly.
[They're allowed] The other goal could be simply to use our collective power (i.e. government) to more strictly regulate—or even ban—surveillance and advertising (and enforce it!). While this always possible, I'm afraid it's no longer realistic in U.S., though other countries could still pull it off, as could whatever government eventually replaces the American one.
Lastly, what if nothing were free? Part of the problem is that the difference between $0 and $1 is much, much larger than from $1 to $2, i.e. free is a way better price than even dirt cheap (or sometimes even being paid). Tech start-ups are especially guilty abusing the marketing power of "free" in combination with unsustainable infusions of venture capital, which is dishonest if not somewhat fraudulent. Business would survive the removal of tactics like "free + ads" and "loss leaders".
The devil's in the details, for sure. Such a system would immediately turn into an arms race between running it fairly and gaming it. At the end of the day, what I want the internet to give me is neither impressions nor time spent, but value, and only I can really judge that - but I don't really want to be thinking about judging it all the time. The best scheme I came up with was one that tracked time/impressions/whatever and came up with a default payment for a given site, and let me adjust it if I felt it was high or low.
The second problem was -- what's up with $10/mo? Might that be low, for specialized content? High, for poor people? I had set it based on gut feel relative to the price I was paying my ISP at the time. I thought that perhaps what I'm paying by default can be negotiated with paywalls behind the scenes, and if it isn't high enough they can ask me for more for the one impression, and I can set it higher ongoing if I like what they have. An alternative approach was the one pursued by Project Wonderful, which had advertisers bidding against each other for space on a web site and (maybe it was this project or another) users bidding against those advertisers for those spaces to be blank! The free market enthusiast in me loves that in principle. In practice, projects in that vein all failed for reasons I don't understand.
That leads into a third problem, though. A lot of the value I get out of the internet is user-generated on larger sites -- like comments on this one. I appreciate Reddit pioneering some ways to thank these people, but as for making a larger and more general fair solution, I must admit I'm a bit lost. I dislike the idea of paying Facebook for aggregating the content of people I really want to be thanking and taking all the money for it (which is in fact, more or less what happens now).
With that said, I do like services that have this sort of fee for subscription for all content model. It seems to be dominating these days, and I take that as validation that the scheme is fundamentally the right way to go about solving the problem. But it needs another iteration. I hate having a dozen content subscriptions. I hate that they come in "a month" as the smallest size. And I hate that it gives the network so much control over where my money goes -- these schemes are notoriously unfair to creators. It would be much better if my relationship was with the creators directly, as I know what things are worth to me. If I could just cruise onto YouTube and it would hit my GlobalContentPayer up for $0.30 for an hour of ad free viewing (or $19.99 for a movie that just came out) or whatever, I'd be a much happier camper. I'm willing to pay you, but I don't really want that much of a relationship.
I definitely hate one-sided ad relationships. I don't mind ads like the old newspaper classifieds -- where both I and the advertiser got value out of it and that's the only reason it worked. Information exchanges are good, and if both parties are paying for access, that's a good sign of their health. One-sided ad relationships in which I am a product and not a party are inherently toxic. While I am sympathetic to creators needing a way to support themselves, that sympathy doesn't extend to allowing that sort of psychological abuse into my life. I avoid these sorts of ads whenever I can, in any way I can, without remorse.
If we want top-grade products to remain available without a direct monetary transaction (i.e "free"), it seems we must give something that the product providers can turn into monetary value indirectly somehow. Yet it seems we are actively against any such options: We block ads guilt-free, we rally against any attempt at collecting valuable personal information even anonymously, we consider crypto mining in the background (which is basically paying via your electricity bill) borderline malware.
I am part of this "we", and yet I ask myself, what am I willing to give as indirect payment? What other options are there?