If I had to choose between network television and YouTube, I would choose YouTube every day of the week and twice on Sunday. I mean, I enjoy Seinfeld, but YouTube is both more entertaining and vastly more useful and educational for me. Not because the content has the highest production values, but because the content matches my interests and needs. That's the true power of targeted advertising. It allows creators to focus on niches that can't be served by content produced for a mass audience. Even large 'niches' get dumbed down to the lowest common denominator for network television.

Case in point: Here's Jay Leno interviewing Elon Musk about SpaceX Starship for network television [1] vs YouTuber Tim Dodd [2]. Leno's program is okay for people who don't follow space. For my niche Dodd is vastly better, but he can't draw a wide enough audience to make money on non-targeted ads like Leno can.

And the thing is, everyone has their niches. There is no large population of people out there who are average in every way and need the network television version of everything. The average person doesn't exist.

[1] Leno: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wluBlr1j4qk

[2] Dodd: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t705r8ICkRw

Dodd got 6 million people watching a 1 hour segment. That valuable even without advertising targeting beyond estimates of viewership based on content.

Now, you can quibble about how much targeting increase revenue but the funny thing about total advertising is it’s fairly consistent through time. Tracking failed to significantly increase worldwide advertising spend, it only redirects it.

6 million views (a view only requires 30 seconds of watch time, not the full hour) over a period of 14 months, for the most viewed video ever on his channel. If he could draw that for every video, maybe he could come close to competing with Leno. But he can't. I mean, looking at YouTube numbers alone, Leno's show's most viewed video has 34 million views. And of course the vast majority of his viewership and revenue is elsewhere.

Dodd simply couldn't have a network television show with this kind of content. It wouldn't come close to making sense. If he did a network television show it would have to be a lot different, almost certainly in a direction that would make it less interesting for me personally.

My argument has nothing to do with global ad spend, that's a red herring. The key is how those ad dollars get distributed. Targeted advertising makes niche content viable in a way that non-targeted advertising can't match.

You can have non targeted advertising on niche content. In fact YouTube will display advertising to any user even those it knows nothing about.

The only difference is relative pricing, but again the global population and global advertising spend doesn’t depend on tracking so if it was banned little would actually change.

> global advertising spend doesn’t depend on tracking so if it was banned little would actually change

> The only difference is relative pricing

... the relative pricing difference is the whole difference I'm talking about. Without targeted advertising niche content makes less money, general audience content makes more. So you agree with me that this is true. Then you say that this is a small change. I say it has enormous effects on the content that gets produced. Honestly, this is transparently obvious.

It’s not that simple. Tracking doesn’t universally increase spend to all niche content, it reduces spend to some niche content and increases it to other niche content. So there would be some changes to which niche content is created but it’s not going away.

Just look at how much YouTube content is sponsored via an Ad inside the video. That isn’t tied to your personal history.

Certainly I wouldn't say that every single niche benefits from targeted advertising without exception. There are exceptions to every rule. But the vast, overwhelming majority of niche content would be worse off without targeted advertising, and this would overall have a strongly negative effect on the diversity of content produced.

Ok that I disagree with, if anything niche content in a world without tracking should attract a higher percentage of advertising.

If I manufacture say jigsaw puzzles and I can’t target individuals then I want to link to show up on a YouTuber with puzzle related content. But with tracking I shouldn’t care about the videos content as much and should be happy to show up on cat videos as long as tracking supports the association. That same logic would seemingly extend to any activity with associated products which is basically everything.

On the other hand soda manufactures are presumably less picky and could advertise on both.

Advertising soda is always worth it without targeting. But advertising jigsaw puzzles might not be. That jigsaw marketing money goes elsewhere, not YouTube, and YouTube jigsaw people don't have a lot of ads for their videos, because nobody else is choosing to specifically advertise on jigsaw videos. Maybe even if jigsaw people do advertise, they don't have a ton of money to spend on ads, so jigsaw content is still hurting. But with targeting, there are effective ads on every video, and content matters more than ad spend targeted at your niche. People choose the content they like by watching it, instead of advertisers choosing the content they like by steering their spending. Because there are far more people than there are advertisers, this promotes more diverse content.

We could continue to make up just-so stories about the effects of targeting on niche content. But I doubt we would convince each other. Is there any research on this topic?

Do you actually find that reasoning convincing or are you just trying to make a point?