Exactly. In the old world, ads were attached to matching content, which gave an incentive to produce insightful pertinent content (and develop a reputation in a certain content subject area). Those ads were not much of a problem.

Today, the ad industry tracks the user, and ads are attached to matching user interest, which gives an incentive to produce arbitrary, but addictive content, with most of the benefit accruing to the ad oligopolies instead of the content producers.

also, while ads were certainly dispersed through magazines and the like, a huge chunk of them were really just in the back and not with the main stuff.

Also, it was unlikely you'd see the same set of five ads on every page of every article. Because such a thing would not just be pointless, but counterproductive.

Today's statistically-driven advertising does not relate to the context and thus has no bridge for engagement. We are all desensitized to them, so they just have to block content, flash more incessantly, and make the dismiss click box smaller (or just start putting fake dismiss boxes to trick people into more engagement).

I think the scammy/dark side of advertising is driven by the cost of impressions being so low. This is because of the pricing disparities allowed by the advertising broker tracking attributions rather than the business themselves. Legitimate products suffer as a result, similar to the effect of spam on email.

This is a good point. I don't need to see the same GoDaddy or St. Jude's ad 200+ times a week.

>I disagree.

I dont think we disagree.

Like I wrote in another post, most on HN couldn't understand the difference between placement ad on Google Search Engine and Google Ads Network. And suggested we should ban all "tracking ads". And later all ads. I explicitly ask them and suggest what you just wrote. That there could be good ads, and they, by majority disagree. This isn't just on HN, it is pretty much across the whole tech industry. Benedict Evans wrote a lot about this [1] and on Twitter. We even went to ask people offline to make sure we are not in an online bubble. But so far the results suggest otherwise. Especially with Tracking [2].

[1] https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2021/5/13/apples-ads...

[2] https://twitter.com/benedictevans/status/1387414650443141120...

I think it's just a reaction to the adtech community's total disinterest in user's objections to tracking. They keep invading our privacy and only really consider our wishes when it starts hurting their bottom line for real.

I'm sure that's what inspired my hard line against ads. I block ads and tracking where I can. And I've become so used to an ad-free web that I don't think I'll go back anymore.

If they'd only listened to us this before things got totally out of hand this could have been avoided.

> This single comment contains many of the contrarian view against HN. It is nice we have these real world stories on HN to balance the ideological fight against ads, where All Ads are evil.

I still don't understand your point. The only reason Facebook's ability to properly attribute went down drastically is specifically because of the iOS privacy changes that require user opt in to track across different sites.

Fine, I don't doubt there were other HN commenters who were arguing different meanings of "tracking", but that's all a moot point. In this instance, we know exactly why Facebook's ad effectiveness went down - it went down because they could no longer track all your interactions across the majority of the web. Tough shit.

Why does ability to attribute an ad depend on the ability to track individuals?

IIUC, you can do attribution with a very basic ad: <a href="website.com/ad-34" ping="fb.com/my-product/ad-34/ping"><img src="fb.com/my-product/ad-34/img.jpeg" /> Come buy my product, you'll love it!</a>

Then you sum up all the "/ad-34" hits, and figure out how many of those user sessions (which are now on your own site -- single domain, but perhaps leveraging a script supplied by the ad network) went and actually bought something. The ad network can correlate those sessions with the "ping" it receives to determine clicks vs. conversions.

Not all purchases come immediately after clicking through an ad. They may come days later, even. Knowing that "this user who purchased this product saw this version of the ad" and "this user saw the other version" is what attribution is.

You do not understand correctly.

Facebook (and other ad networks) want credit if someone clicks on your ad, spends time on your site, but then doesn't actually buy anything until a couple days when they enter the URL directly (i.e. not clicking on an ad). This is the problem generally referred to as attribution. Facebook (and others) do this by tracking everyone all around the web. They track the ad click and then they track you going back to the website the next day, and they know it's the same person.

Ad attribution directly depends on pervasive tracking.

You can do that with first-party cookies though.

Allow some facebook supplied javascript to set a first party cookie when the user hits website.com/ad-34, and then reference that 1st party cookie the next day when the user returns. Phone home when they buy something. Facebook can now correlate (1) the ping they received to begin with, (2) the user session cookie they initiated on the first visit, and (3) the user session they observed when a purchase was made.

I'm sure things get easier with 3rd party tracking, but fundamentally you can do it without cross-site tracking.

Out of curiosity, does attribution also work if the ad is not clicked?

For example, I bought a product the other day after seeing a Facebook ad, but I didn't click on the ad itself and rather went searching for it on DuckDuckGo, then after reading a bit about it online, bought the product.

I'm curious as to whether that got attributed to the ad impression or not.

Modern models do try to take views into account. (Also cross-device views and DOOH - which again rely extensively on tracking.)

Oh, anti advertising maximalists certainly exist! I'm certainly not in the majority, but if I could live in a world where:

A) Advertising was considered so extremely gauche that no one did it B) No revenue from advertising existed C) Ad-supported services went away

I would be a very happy man.

So would I, but I’d also not have a job, or at least make a lot less income. Without marketing, advertising and sales, there is very little economic activity.

It’s like the old adage: this job would be great it weren’t for those pesky customers.

> and the average privacy-conscious user not wanting tracking.

zero traction in the real world for this. people will click on whatever you show them.