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Apple’s Ad-Targeting Crackdown Shakes Up Ad Market

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Re: Apple’s Ad-Targeting Crackdown Shakes Up Ad Market

#81

Post by saagarjha »

summerlight wrote: post #79
saagarjha wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The engineers at Apple are well aware of the games that adtech plays.

Do you work for/with Apple regard to this issue? I followed discussions with WebKit devs and had an impression that they don't really care about the ecosystem but only Apple users. It seems they had never reached out to publishers/advertisers in the design phase of ITP. Later, they prepared a crappy conversion tracking mechanism to compensate the loss, but this design also had never involved the ecosystem.

I do not currently work for Apple on this, but you can read about the ways Intelligent Tracking Prevention has changed to adapt to the ecosystem on the WebKit blog: https://webkit.org/blog/category/privacy/. I was under the impression that the ad click attribution work (which I think is what you’re talking about) is being proposed as a standard and is open for comments right now.

Re: Apple’s Ad-Targeting Crackdown Shakes Up Ad Market

#82

Post by summerlight »

saagarjha wrote: post #81
summerlight wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you work for/with Apple regard to this issue? I followed discussions with WebKit devs and had an impression that they don't really care about the ecosystem but only Apple users. It seems they had never reached out to publishers/advertisers in the design phase of ITP. Later, they prepared a crappy conversion tracking mechanism to compensate the loss, but this design also had never involved the ecosystem.

I do not currently work for Apple on this, but you can read about the ways Intelligent Tracking Prevention has changed to adapt to the ecosystem on the WebKit blog: https://webkit.org/blog/category/privacy/ . I was under the impression that the ad click attribution work (which I think is what you’re talking about) is being proposed as a standard and is open for comments right now.

I understand how ITP works, its intention and goals since this had a significant impact on my work. And assuming a good intention on Apple's side, this makes me pretty confident that Apple doesn't want to put significant investment of its resource on studying how the ads ecosystem works (and of course they don't have a strong motivation to do so).

On browser-side conversion tracking, I can say that this will unlikely be adopted by advertisers/publishers in the current form. This is not my own opinion, but more about general feeling across advertisers/publishers that I've met.

Re: Apple’s Ad-Targeting Crackdown Shakes Up Ad Market

#84

Post by Wowfunhappy »

gruez wrote: post #29
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Combine my Canvas fingerprint (which a plugin update won't change) with my rough location (based on IP address), and I have to imagine you'd get very, very close to identifying me.

Canvas fingerprints are probably the same between other iphones of the same model and ios version. So unless you use a rare model and/or rare ios version, there's probably at least a few dozen people with the same fingerprint/ip range combination as you.

My understanding—only because another HN commenter told me as much, many months back—was that even the exact same model hardware would return different canvas fingerprints due to silicon differences. Not true?

Re: Apple’s Ad-Targeting Crackdown Shakes Up Ad Market

#85

Post by chipotle_coyote »

jedberg wrote: post #38
chipotle_coyote wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not nearly as anti-ad as many people I've interacted with on HN and Twitter. I like the idea of getting free-to-me content supported by ads. I resisted running ad blockers for a very, very long time. But. The ads just got bigger. And bigger. And more intrusive. They approached 50% of the visible content (and that's on the desktop, not mobile). They played more video. They played more music. They started blocking…

> So I gave in. I run an ad-blocker, too. Me too. I worked for a company that made almost all of it's revenue from advertising. It felt hypocritical to run an ad-blocker. But it just got so bad I had to do it. I'm just worried about what will happen to the web for all the people who don't run ad-blockers. I care about them too, especially since they are the customers in a lot of cases, and if they go away from the we…

I've heard the ad industry has been moving toward that model rather than clicks, which seems good -- but it doesn't seem to be appreciably helping make the ads suck less. For years Daring Fireball paid its bills and then some with a simple, non-moving, square sidebar ad; obviously that wouldn't keep the lights on at Vox, let alone the NYT, but I can't help but think ads could have been... better.

There are places that at least strike a balance that doesn't make me want to poke my eyes out -- The Outline, for instance, at least now that they've toned down the over-engineered JavaScript woo they launched with -- but it's depressing how uncommon that is.

Re: Apple’s Ad-Targeting Crackdown Shakes Up Ad Market

#86

Post by dmitrygr »

manigandham wrote: post #33
turdnagel wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m confused by this. If Safari users are harder to target, and demand for targeting Safari users hasn’t changed, shouldn’t the price go up?

The demand for highly-targeted users is what drives up prices. Since Safari users all look the same now and can't be highly targeted, they have lost that high-end demand and prices have fallen to generic display rates.

I would disagree. "People who can afford Apple gadgets" is a desirable high-income audience. I wouldn't be surprised if it was broken out as a special category for purchase by FB and GOOG soon.

Re: Apple’s Ad-Targeting Crackdown Shakes Up Ad Market

#87

Post by baroffoos »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #5

How has this been so effective, when Panopticlick still says my Safari browser has "a nearly-unique fingerprint"? (And based on what I've read from other users's experience, this is normal.)

Not sure if this is the case but it would be possible to fool fingerprinting by randomizing parts of the browser so each request has a unique fingerprint which isn't useful for tracking.

Re: Apple’s Ad-Targeting Crackdown Shakes Up Ad Market

#88

Post by kitsunesoba »

buboard wrote: post #76

Is apple offering an alternative for blogs to make money or should they have cake instead? Brave browser does it better than apple. I can already see webmasters sending users to download brave instead of safari Apple doesn't care about the web (why should they?). Their iAds thing went nowhere. (please enlighten me if apple is offering an alternative. i d love to use it)

I would not hesitate to find a paid alternative to a free site/service that tries to control my choice of browser. The moment you try to push me into changing my up to date setup is the moment you’ve lost me as a user forever.

Re: Apple’s Ad-Targeting Crackdown Shakes Up Ad Market

#89

Post by radicaldreamer »

dmitrygr wrote: post #86
manigandham wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The demand for highly-targeted users is what drives up prices. Since Safari users all look the same now and can't be highly targeted, they have lost that high-end demand and prices have fallen to generic display rates.

I would disagree. "People who can afford Apple gadgets" is a desirable high-income audience. I wouldn't be surprised if it was broken out as a special category for purchase by FB and GOOG soon.

iPhones are popular across income distribution and Macs are a very small market compared to phones
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