Furthermore, both Google and Meta have quietly conceded that a lot of the digital attribution data they generate is pretty bunk. It’s why Meta developed Robyn, which uses MMM techniques that have long been used to measure effectiveness of traditional channels: https://github.com/facebookexperimental/Robyn

In the early days of the internet click fraud was rampant, and it has only gotten more and more sophisticated. While you could still do advertising the overall value would probably be much less valuable.

"Click fraud" is still just a subversion of a dataset that was not available to pre-digital (print, radio, TV, billboard) ads.

You do not need that information in order to run effective online ads. You've just been conditioned to believe it's necessary by DoubleClick, Google, et al.

Ad fraud is still pretty rampant now too - from outright fraud like Roku screen savers that click ads though to softer things like content sites that are written just to farm ads

I think this is the key: advertising not only risks becoming a lot less valuable, it should be a lot less valuable.

Without pinpoint targeting, more irrelevant ads will be shown. That reduces value.

Without lots of invasive tech, you can’t avoid fraud or track conversions. This also reduces value.

This isn’t an unfortunate side effect of GDPR and adblockers.

agree https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/look-back-evolution-bots-frau...

yes, ads can be GDPR compliant. Consider search ads. They are shown based on the keywords being searched by the user, no data collection needed for search ads to work really well.

We have reasonable guesses for how many people are going to see a print or television ad.

The same kind of methods can be applied to internet websites, even more easily because it's digital. GDPR doesn't say anywhere that you can't do analytics or whatever on your website, it only says that you can't track the user, but there are plenty of way to do analytics in a GDPR compliant way, and there are a number of even open source projects alternative to Google Analytics for example that allows to do so.

Of course what you can no longer do (without user consent, because if the user give you explicit consent you can) is to provide ADS targeted to a specific user based on tracking data. But you can assume that if a user visits a page that has a certain content it will be interested in certain type of ads, this is possible because you are not targeting the specific user based on data you collected on the user, but all the user that look at that content will see the same ads (that are pertinent).

Is a big loss? Yes, to Meta and Google, to company doing advertisement not, because this kind of advertisement is not that effective, and to users even more not because tracking is bad for their privacy in many ways.

This is correct, it's trivial to measure click through rates and conversion rates online without knowing anything about the person at all.