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Tell HN: Now Washington Post is asking to turn off Firefox's tracking protection

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Re: Tell HN: Now Washington Post is asking to turn off Firefox's tracking protection

#271

Post by munchbunny »

reaperducer wrote: post #133
munchbunny wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked in ad tech for a number of years, so maybe I can address this one. Ads that are annotated with tracking/targeting capabilities are in fact substantially more valuable. There's the obvious aspect (targeted ads in general) but there's also the ability to measure whether your ads are actually working. Analytics requires tracking too. This is an oversimplification, but let's say you're buying ads at 10 cents per…

there's also the ability to measure whether your ads are actually working. This is not unique to online advertising. It's possible to tell is ads are working in paper/radio/television, as well. Companies have been doing it for literally hundreds of years. The only value online ad tracking adds is near real-time feedback, and granularity. Which is useless to 99% of companies, since the process of making large ad buyin…

You are applying a lens of what you think should happen to a question of what is currently happening. Sure, I actually do agree with you about ad tracking, but if the question is why ads with tracking data are more valuable, then my answer is a statement of what advertisers are willing to buy, which is not what I think the advertising industry should be doing.

> Want to advertise your movie to movie fans? Put ads on a movie fan web site. Want to attract car buyers in Bedrock City? Put your ads on a Bedrock City web site. Want to increase sales of Slurm Cola to American man 18-25? Put Slurm Cola ads on content of interest to American males 18-25.

And then some company decides that there is an arbitrage opportunity in inferring who the 18-25 year old males are and selling you the ability to target them on cheaper websites and on undifferentiated inventory. In order to get access to that inventory, publishers are paid part of the difference. Voila, programmatic advertising.

> This is not unique to online advertising. It's possible to tell is ads are working in paper/radio/television, as well. Companies have been doing it for literally hundreds of years.

That's not true. That's certainly not what pretty much any big brand marketing department thinks. It's notoriously hard to tell whether any specific strategy is working if you do a lot of advertising. Which is why the extra granularity is considered valuable, regardless of their ability to infer conclusions from it.

> The benefits of online ad targeting have been perverted from a nice add-on to something that is absolutely necessary because it helps fuel the paychecks of the advertising middlemen.

That's certainly a factor, but they're not all idiots. Some of it actually does work in theory and in principle, and dismissing that is underestimating the beast you are fighting.

Re: Tell HN: Now Washington Post is asking to turn off Firefox's tracking protection

#272

Post by phjesusthatguy3 »

noobermin wrote: post #5

Perhaps a link will help. You'll see this if you click on articles and don't have a subscription, a modal of a kind will pop up asking you to "unblock ads." Clicking on the link[0] to unblock ads brings you to a page giving steps for "disabling Firefox’s native ad blocker," showing a gif for turning off tracking protection. [0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/steps-for-disabling-firefoxs-...

This is the minimum what I would have expected from the OP. Because I use ad-blocking, and I went to washingtonpost.com and clicked on a bunch of stories, and have no idea what the problem currently is.

Re: Tell HN: Now Washington Post is asking to turn off Firefox's tracking protection

#273

Post by stickfigure »

reaperducer wrote: post #141
Pyxl101 wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> by falsely convincing them that an ad view on a screen is worth 1,000 times less than an ad view on printed paper What makes you believe that this hypothetical comparison is false? The problem with traditional advertising is that everyone sees it, regardless of their interest in the subject matter or lack thereof. As an advertiser you have to pay to show your ad to a lot of people who aren't likely to be interested…

The problem with traditional advertising is that everyone sees it, regardless of their interest in the subject matter or lack thereof. This is false. The internet ad tech companies didn't invent marketing demographics. Advertisers who want to sell things to old people advertise on TV shows and in magazines that appeal to old people. Advertisers who want to sell Product X advertise in places where people who want to b…

every single other advertising method has more impact than online ads

Nonsense. "I don't click on ads, therefore online ads are useless" is not a valid methodology.

I buy Facebook ads for a niche audience. I can track them; the ads work and bring me business and put food on my table. There is absolutely no way I could advertise with traditional media; demographics like "males 18-24" is nowhere near targeted enough.

I don't click on online ads either. But then I'm just not the type of person that does. That doesn't change the fact that they work in a measurable way.

Re: Tell HN: Now Washington Post is asking to turn off Firefox's tracking protection

#274

Post by komali2 »

michaelt wrote: post #183
komali2 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why?

It's traditional for the super-rich to buy newspapers and run them at a loss to advance their pet political causes; give favourable coverage to their friends and business interests; and flatter them by including them in celebrity coverage. This tradition is literally older than America.

Given that Trump regularly accuses, without evidence, bezos of doing this, and given the generally high respect paid to wapo among non-conservatives, I guess my question is now - despite Appeal to Tradition, why would bezos sacrifice the respectability of wapo to turn it into a favorable rag?

Basically, I don't think he could get away with stirring his fingers around in wapo (which it's reported he currently doesn't do) without far more negative consequences than positive.

Re: Tell HN: Now Washington Post is asking to turn off Firefox's tracking protection

#275

Post by amgutier »

bogomipz wrote: post #269
marmaduke wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> how much faster the web is without it, and how much smoother, and how much less cluttered I know HN has some JS, but I realized that I usually click on comments link for HN stuff since I know it's going to load super fast and not have a ton of useless crap on the page. If the comments are interesting I might read it, but most of the time there's more information in comments than the article itself. Or people quote…

>"I simply disable JavaScript. It's incredible how much faster the web is without it, and how much smoother, and how much less cluttered." I'm curious is there any practical fallout turning JS off completely? Do you just switch it back on for things like e-commerce, web UI's etc? I always find the context switching to the settings menu a bit of a pain. Do you have some recommendations for things that make JS-free web…

I've attempted to keep whitelists working, but now I just use a separate chrome profile with javascript+cookies disabled that is for random blogs/news sites/etc. If you have 2+ chrome profiles open, there is a menu item for "Open link as > No Javascript" that does wonders.

Re: Tell HN: Now Washington Post is asking to turn off Firefox's tracking protection

#276

Post by stickfigure »

nradov wrote: post #256
Pyxl101 wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> by falsely convincing them that an ad view on a screen is worth 1,000 times less than an ad view on printed paper What makes you believe that this hypothetical comparison is false? The problem with traditional advertising is that everyone sees it, regardless of their interest in the subject matter or lack thereof. As an advertiser you have to pay to show your ad to a lot of people who aren't likely to be interested…

If targeting works then why do I keep seeing ads for products that I've already purchased and have no intention of buying again any time soon?

It doesn't run on telepathy. Some people do rebuy those products. And maybe this is just the best ad (of nothing great) that happened to be available at the time.

If you want to have any idea of how well advertising works, you have to approach it from the perspective of an advertiser, not an ad target. Then you can get real data. You are a data point of one.

Re: Tell HN: Now Washington Post is asking to turn off Firefox's tracking protection

#277

Post by Symbiote »

eksemplar wrote: post #56
paulgb wrote: post #40

What infuriates me about WaPo is that even though I pay for it, their site is pretty much unusable without an ad blocker. The text jumps around as I scroll to make room for dynamically loaded ads. And then there are the bottom-feeding Outbrain (or whatever vendor they use) ads at the bottom of the article. It's a mess.

I switched from digital news to paper and I couldn’t be happier. It took a little getting used to not checking the 24/7 news cycle, but it’s less stressful and the quality of articles is higher. I did specifically chose a news paper with high quality content, and one that only arrives once a week to further the distillation of what News makes it my way, but it’s danish, so it wouldn’t do you much good. I’ve really gr…

Hvad er dansk avisen? Min dansk er meget enkel, men jeg kan købe det et par gange om året.

(I think double-checking with Google Translate made this worse; now I'm just confused.)

What's the Danish newspaper? I might buy it very occasionally, and puzzle through with a dictionary.

Re: Tell HN: Now Washington Post is asking to turn off Firefox's tracking protection

#278

Post by abdullahkhalids »

dagw wrote: post #177
abdullahkhalids wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will wait till we get a micro-transaction system built directly into the browser (same system for every browser) that allows me to pay 1 cent per news article - maybe 5 cent for a super duper long essay. I am poor but I am willing to pay as much as 5 dollars a month. My personal information is not for sale or distribution and I refuse to allow any computations on my computer that enable someone to gather it.

Sounds like you might like blendle.com. Although article prices are an order of magintude more that what you're hoping for.

https://blendle.com/privacy.html

> Blendle shows you articles your friends and more or lesser known fellow country-folk recommend, and can propose additional articles and subscriptions you might be interested in

> Finally, Blendle uses tracking cookies to keep track of the articles you've read, and to suggest articles you might enjoy.

> When using social plug-ins, third-party cookies are placed on your computer. These cookies can be designed to optimize your user experience, but they might also be tracking cookies. The latter are used to track your browsing habits across multiple websites and build a profile of these browsing habits of yours.

> Blendle may also use information collected through the use of Blendle to engage in “look-alike marketing,” which enables us to reach out to an audience, well, similar to you. We may use third parties to help perform or facilitate such marketing on our behalf.

So you pay them money and they still need your information. And you need to browse articles through their interface instead of naturally through the actual newspaper website. Actually worse than the status quo.

Re: Tell HN: Now Washington Post is asking to turn off Firefox's tracking protection

#279

Post by AsyncAwait »

Ntrails wrote: post #254
AsyncAwait wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are stupid laws, but privacy protection is not one of them. People narrowly voted to bankrupt their economy, that's for sure.

> People narrowly voted to bankrupt their economy, that's for sure. Source Required.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jan/17/apple-ios... https://www.marketwatch.com/story/pound-tanks-stock-futures-... etc.

Re: Tell HN: Now Washington Post is asking to turn off Firefox's tracking protection

#280

Post by runn1ng »

jasonlotito wrote: post #261
runn1ng wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Washington Post have a secret, hidden "Premium EU Ad-Free" subscription that removes all the ads. You have to go specifically here and click on the third option - but NOT when you have a subscription already (you need to cancel it first) https://www.washingtonpost.com/gdpr-consent/ Despite "EU" and "GDPR" in the name, it works outside of EU too

Did you actually try to sign up with it? It does not work outside the EU.

Really? I am signed up now. But, I started to sign up in EU, so that might be why. I am now outside of EU and it keeps working. I assumed wrong then
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