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WebKit Tracking Prevention Policy

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Re: WebKit Tracking Prevention Policy

#91

Post by golemiprague »

peanutz454 wrote: post #55
andykx wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not impossible to advertise without tracking users.

For some reason people just have an aversion to paying for stuff they use. Facebook's revenue per user is less than 7$, I don't use facebook, but do not mind paying that little for something I use instead of getting tracked wherever I go. Similarly Google's service that I use like gmail and photos are easily worth about 7$ per month. I would pay if they said they will stop tracking me. I don't know about youtube.

you can buy a g-suite user for 9$, then they don't track you

Re: WebKit Tracking Prevention Policy

#92

Post by kibwen »

downandout wrote: post #62
kibwen wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to suggest offense, but I wonder how old you are? I may not quite be a greybeard just yet, but I remember being enraptured by the content on the internet long before it was caught in the stranglehold of advertisers. Big-budget affairs would be more scarce, but there would be no dearth of content.

I am old enough to have seen the Internet emerge. You were enraptured by content and services provided by companies that lost billions of dollars, courtesy of investors, during the dot com era. Those investors provided that capital in large part because they knew how lucrative it could be if online advertising became as efficient and effective as it is today. You will not see that kind of subsidy in the post-ad world…

Can you be more specific about what sites you're referring to? As much as the dotcom bubble gets remembered by history, I personally wasn't frequenting any of the darlings of the VC world. My haunts were backwater forums hastily hand-coded in the 1999 dialect of PHP and other sites with totally ordinary text ads. These weren't billion-dollar overvalued companies, these were sites stood up in a server in someone's garage, and users made all the content. Even the biggest of the fish back then, Yahoo--fancying itself a media company--was relevant to me only because it hosted Geocities (again relying on user-generated content, and Yahoo was hardly one of the companies hemorrhaging money in this era).

Re: WebKit Tracking Prevention Policy

#93

Post by shandor »

jazzyjackson wrote: post #76
geofft wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Didn't people make money off internet advertising before the modern surveillance-marketing complex? What happened to it? I mean, maybe the answer is that those ads were only profitable because of the novelty factor and now that we have metrics we know they don't work, or at least don't work anywhere close to how much they cost. But I do miss things like the webcomics running their own ad network, Google's textual ads…

From what I can tell, the pre-surveilence norm was businesses having to find a website with an audience they wanted to advertise to, or a website finding a business that might want to market to their users, and then every website having to negotiate contracts with every business that wanted to set up ads. Basically the print magazine model. But as businesses wanted to advertise to larger populations (we want to do a…

> Basically the print magazine model.

And also TV, as it is still today. Oh, and every other form of advertising basically. If advertising without invading user privacy is so bad (as the perpetrators are rationalizing it), how come all other forms of advertising are still a billion (trillion?) dollar business worldwide? Just makes one wonder.

Re: WebKit Tracking Prevention Policy

#94

Post by qroshan »

rale00 wrote: post #40

So what is going to happen when Apple succeeds in making it impossible to make any money off advertisements shown to iOS users on the web? I'm currently imagining a future where publishers start to just redirect iOS traffic to install their app, where they can actually make money. Good news for the walled garden, I guess?

Most of HN don't understand that the Advertising ecosystem is what is feeding the tech boom and their livelihood. Just like housing it is an entire ecosystem now with many people's jobs and livelihood is based on.

Hit that ecosystem and you get a recession. However it doesn't stop at the recession. Most VCs are funding hundreds and thousands of startups with the hope that one of them is going to get sold to Google or Facebook or Amazon or any of the Advertising Cash Cow business. Dry that tap and you'll have VCs pulling money from Tech.

Now, there is glut of Programmer supply and a severe lack of investments. Not dissimilar to 2008.

Re: WebKit Tracking Prevention Policy

#95

Post by IfOnlyYouKnew »

rale00 wrote: post #40

So what is going to happen when Apple succeeds in making it impossible to make any money off advertisements shown to iOS users on the web? I'm currently imagining a future where publishers start to just redirect iOS traffic to install their app, where they can actually make money. Good news for the walled garden, I guess?

I believe Apple is doing a better job allowing monetization to continue than Google is.

They are working on ways to do anonymized personalisation/attribution/etc. The current Safari Technology Preview has someting called Ad Click Attribution API, for example.

Re: WebKit Tracking Prevention Policy

#96

Post by rahimnathwani »

flyinglizard wrote: post #83
peanutz454 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For some reason people just have an aversion to paying for stuff they use. Facebook's revenue per user is less than 7$, I don't use facebook, but do not mind paying that little for something I use instead of getting tracked wherever I go. Similarly Google's service that I use like gmail and photos are easily worth about 7$ per month. I would pay if they said they will stop tracking me. I don't know about youtube.

The problem is that by doing that, you’re skimming the top percentile of your user base with the most purchasing power. You’re much less attractive to advertisers then.

The same argument could be made arguing against the launch of YouTube Premium.

Re: WebKit Tracking Prevention Policy

#97

Post by benjiweber »

geofft wrote: post #47
rale00 wrote: post #40

So what is going to happen when Apple succeeds in making it impossible to make any money off advertisements shown to iOS users on the web? I'm currently imagining a future where publishers start to just redirect iOS traffic to install their app, where they can actually make money. Good news for the walled garden, I guess?

Didn't people make money off internet advertising before the modern surveillance-marketing complex? What happened to it? I mean, maybe the answer is that those ads were only profitable because of the novelty factor and now that we have metrics we know they don't work, or at least don't work anywhere close to how much they cost. But I do miss things like the webcomics running their own ad network, Google's textual ads…

There is also the ongoing escalation between adverrtisers and fraud. Creating an incentive to collect ever more data to detect ever more sophisticated forms of fraud.

Re: WebKit Tracking Prevention Policy

#98

Post by [deleted] »

toasterlovin wrote: post #77
cthaeh wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it very easy to use "Apple" and "monopoly" in the same sentence. Apple has been consistently making it harder to make money off iOS users without sharing that revenue with apple. Furthermore, they don't allow side loading of apps, their own apps have special api's that their competitors can't use, etc. I could go on and on.

Luckily for this discussion, the word 'monopoly' has an accepted definition, which is: > The exclusive possession or control of the supply of or trade in a commodity or service Since Apple has, at most, below 50% market share in developed countries (and a much lower market share in developing countries), they do not possess a monopoly on the smartphone market.

[deleted]

Re: WebKit Tracking Prevention Policy

#100

Post by tialaramex »

therealx wrote: post #87
cameronbrown wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

YouTube being the only one you've listed that has a premium option. The problem is people will say they'll pay but as soon as the option comes up, they don't.

Sure, but YouTube doesn't stop tracking you when you pay.

But what does that mean? YouTube keeps a history list, which I download and periodically reset. If it didn't I would need to add some sort of Firefox add-on that remembered which videos I'd seen.

What else are they "tracking"? Does YouTube have tracking on other sites (like Facebook, Twitter etc)? I haven't seen anything like that.

You can switch the history off, I presume that would work even without Premium, but it never occurred to me to even try it since I definitely want history.

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