Apple’s Ad-Targeting Crackdown Shakes Up Ad Market • Hacker News Board

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

#221

Post by visarga » Tue, Dec 10, 2019, 7:20 AM UTC

starchild_3001 wrote: post #114

Seeing more relevant ads => good Getting your data sold to a data broker => bad free web sites & internet => good having to pay for quality content => bad (gee, who pays for NYT or WP after they're put behind a paywall?) Getting the best ads possible without any human involvement => good discovering the best products & services => good microtargeting => bad getting manipulated through political ads => bad Look, ads e…

> Look, ads ecosystem is the sponsor of free internet.

They are the sponsors of the shitty part of internet. They usually lead to the creation of crap articles and websites that use SEO to grab and resell traffic.

I think that even without ad revenue enough people are willing to put quality content online that we don't need to fear. There are more reasons that making ad money to create content.

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

#222

Post by manigandham » Tue, Dec 10, 2019, 7:22 AM UTC

inetknght wrote: post #159

manigandham wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. TLS certificates have nothing to do with domain ownership or the businesses providing services behind them. Anyone can buy and transfer certificates. Besides there are actual business contracts in place so there's no need for such tenuous connections over domain names in the first place. As for your disagreement, what's your basis for claiming that publishers can build, operate, and scale their own adtech infrast…

> No. TLS certificates have nothing to do with domain ownership or the businesses providing services behind them. > Anyone can buy and transfer certificates. The registrar has a business relationship with the domain because the domain was purchased. The domain's owner uses DNS to point to an IP address. The client connects to that IP address and verifies that the IP address knows about the domain. "I paid for you to…

> "Business contracts don't mean shit to me because I can't inspect them. I can inspect DNS, however."

Your personal beliefs don't overrule how global business is conducted. Domain name ownership has nothing to do with business operations, liability or regulations. You can blame a certain domain all you want but it's ultimately meaningless.

> "Publishers can just as easily create advertisements and host them... Scaling advertisements is just as easy"

I have 15 years of experience in adtech and know 100s of publishers personally. It's not that easy and it's only getting more complicated as advertisers, campaigns and measurement get more sophisticated.

Please don't underestimate an entire 12-figure industry as if everyone else is clueless and you figured it all out. It would be no different then walking into Boeing and telling them how to design a plane or telling Dropbox you can code it all in a weekend.

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

#223

Post by visarga » Tue, Dec 10, 2019, 7:34 AM UTC

Terretta wrote: post #70

jedberg wrote: post #7

I was talking to my friend about this the other day. He's an executive at an ad company (not Google). He had an interesting take on this: Yes, it is in fact working and breaks targeting and retargeting. But what is the outcome of that? The CPMs (how much the website makes) are 10x higher for re/targeted ads. So as they stop working, do you think the website will cut their revenue? No, they'll either put up a paywall,…

Your proposed tradeoff space are not the only two options. As a ‘third way’, you can match ads to real content, and have audience interests and advertiser interests aligned. Folks who try this, find it works, in some cases only a percentage point or two worse than high end retargeting, and in most cases, better than retargeting when sold by third party or retargeting across run of site. EDIT: CPC (cost-per-click) and…

> As a ‘third way’, you can match ads to real content, and have audience interests and advertiser interests aligned.

Doesn't work because the advertisers usually want to sell something different from what the majority of users are interested in. If they strictly respected the interests of the users most of the ads would disappear.

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

#224

Post by visarga » Tue, Dec 10, 2019, 7:37 AM UTC

quotemstr wrote: post #179

hk__2 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's just the smaller websites who suffer by not getting ad revenue. I’m ok with anything that frustrates people who get money from ads.

Why cut off your nose to spite your face?

More like cutting off an ugly sticker off your back than nose.

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

#225

Post by dannyw » Tue, Dec 10, 2019, 7:49 AM UTC

jefftk wrote: post #104

manigandham wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Advertisers don't care and have never worried about this. It's the adtech supply chain, and the publishers who get paid that worry about the revenue and targeting.

Depends on the advertiser! Big brand who mostly wants to reach everyone in a geographic area? Targeting doesn't matter. Retailer that wants to bring someone back in to complete a purchase? Without targeting they won't buy ads at all. (Disclosure: I work on ads at Google)

You suggest this as if the majority of ad spending comes from small businesses trying to retarget their customers; when the vast, vast majority of ad spending comes from big brands; and your mom and pop business isn't running a sophisticated ad targeting campaign.

Adtech is for the establishment.

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

#226

Post by vassilyk » Tue, Dec 10, 2019, 8:26 AM UTC

zie wrote: post #167

vassilyk wrote: post #43

Related. The next big change for privacy and ad targeting is the removal of the IDFA by Apple and the GAID by Google. Removal or aggressive randomization, but there is no way those IDs remain as persistent as currently. It's a matter of months, maybe a couple of years. When this happens, what is happening with Safari now will look like a minor issue.

You can set the IDFA on iOS to all 0's in Settings. See: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT205223 under "Opt Out of Targeted Advertising" (at the end).

Yes indeed. And reset your GAID when you want and know how to do it. But my point is that such a behavior will be forced by the OS rather than offered as a choice.

It's what is happening with Safari (and the other browsers). First, knowledgeable users are empowered to make a decision, then, that decision is rolled out automatically to the masses. E.g., https.

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

#227

Post by rimliu » Tue, Dec 10, 2019, 8:40 AM UTC

api wrote: post #115

_bxg1 wrote: post #37

Let us not forget that Apple isn't doing this out of altruism, but 50% because it hurts their competitors and 50% because it makes their users happy. That said, being 50% motivated by making their users happy is more than can be said about Google or Facebook. Edit: To be clear, I am an Apple customer and it's mainly on privacy grounds. I just like to keep realistic expectations about their present and future behavior…

The closed/open/free/freedom paradox of Apple is something people should be thinking more about: They are in many ways the most closed of all the big tech companies. Their flagship platform (in revenue terms), iOS, is the most closed general purpose computing platform in history. Overall it's second only to things like game consoles for being locked down to everyone including the owner. They are also the platform and…

  > iOS, is the most closed general purpose computing platform
  > in history. Overall it's second only to things like game
  > consoles for being locked down to everyone including the
  > owner.

So, overall it is not "the most closed".

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

#228

Post by bartread » Tue, Dec 10, 2019, 8:46 AM UTC

Abishek_Muthian wrote: post #211

snowwrestler wrote: post #150

> Only about 9% of Safari users on an iPhone allow outside companies to track where they go on the web > In comparison, 79% of people who use Google’s Chrome browser allow advertisers to track their browsing habits on mobile devices through cookies. Something to keep in mind the next time you see someone from Google complaining about how Apple won’t allow Google Chrome to run natively on the iPhone.

And when there is a security vulnerability which exploits webkit by just visiting a website, one has to wait till Apple releases an OS update(if it decides to acknowledge and fix it[1]), where as one on Firefox 'if Apple had allowed its own engine' could get updated via the AppStore. What Apple has done with the trackers is commendable, but the security argument when it comes to browsers is always in favour of allowi…

I may be misremembering but my understanding was that Apple disallowed other rendering engines not primarily for security reasons (although I'm sure they're a factor), but for performance and, by proxy, battery life.

It's not dissimilar to the argument against Flash: yes it was insecure and unstable, but mostly it was a performance hog and a battery drain, which isn't great on mobile devices with limited battery life.

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

#229

Post by reubenmorais » Tue, Dec 10, 2019, 8:48 AM UTC

lilyball wrote: post #193

danaris wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple will let whatever browsers want to run on iOS. Chrome is, in fact, on there. They just won't let them using any rendering engine but WebKit—and this restriction long predates Google's current level of draconian dominance in that sphere. I don't believe the tracking settings are tied to the rendering engine, so I would be surprised if Chrome on iOS has settings that different to Chrome on macOS in that regard.

The rendering engine also includes the entire network infrastructure. I can't think of how I would plug my own network infrastructure into WKWebView on iOS, which means I can't block any built-in tracking prevention.

Chrome on iOS uses its own networking stack.

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

#230

Post by Nextgrid » Tue, Dec 10, 2019, 9:00 AM UTC

manigandham wrote: post #63

mffnbs wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was enjoying the irony of reading the article on safari only to have it cut off so they can ask me for my personal information to track me.

It's a paywalled site. They're not tracking you other than to ask you to pay for the content. This will only become more common as sites shift from ad revenue to subscriptions.

I’m not too sure about that. There’s no guarantee they won’t both get your payment and then track you (with confirmed personal details you provided during payment).