Facebook users said no to tracking, and now advertisers are panicking

The first banner ads were certainly less annoying; but since I definitely remember my reaction to seeing Canter+Siegel posts... I'd still say online advertising has always been relatively obnoxious.

I personally tend to think your framing is letting the publishers sneak a bit out of frame, though. Publisher in this context refers to an entity that has a site or app that attracts eyeballs into which ads may be emitted.

Once upon a time, as you're mentioning, sites had only a few rectangles and skyscrapers that they had to sell themselves. By and large any site capable of bringing in real money had to hire ad sales folks to sell those slots (yes, to real ad agencies!). Some others would join consortiums to split the cost of ad sales folks, etc.

Those publishers needed to hire programmers in addition to those ad sales folks to develop targeting tools in order to make better pitches to the ad agencies. This was similar to how "old media" (newspapers, radio, and television companies) used to do it: you had to create spaces for ads (commercial==ad slot), go out and find people who wanted to buy those slots, and then rent them your ad space (and, of course, the eyeballs associated them).

All of that costs effort and money... plus ad agencies are also expensive so only "reputable" brands had ad budgets that could move the needle. This meant the publisher's content had to be something a reputable company would want to be associated with. That's even more costs for the publisher; i.e. not just hiring programmers and sales folks, but editors and actual journalists, etc.

Your incentive in this game is to produce content which can attract reputable merchants by having an audience that those deep pocketed merchants want to reach. Or, otherwise, to become so popular and well read that the advertisers would naturally want to pay you.

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So, what changed?

Even with ace ad sales folks most publishers couldn't actually sell all of their available slots (side note: anyone seen a real house ad in the last few years!)

Enter... "Remnant advertising." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remnant_advertising)

What if a company offered to pay you for all of your unused slots?

You're not going to get a huge contract like a run-of-site takeover campaign, and in fact you no longer have any relationship with the advertiser at all, just with the remnant ad broker.

But they will toss you a few pennies every time you can scrounge together 1000 eyeballs. Kind of like pull tabs or collecting aluminum cans, it's now a volume game.

But, consider what became of the incentives for the publisher: you no longer have to get great or respectable content or become super popular so "respectable" merchants will pay you... you can just focus on the numerator now: eyeballs == money.

In fact, with that incentive system you might start shoving modal dialogs and interstitials and just plain adding ad slots everywhere! If you can sell the same eyeball a dozen times instead of once that's even more money! So... ad slots took over the web, and you suddenly had to scroll a lot more.

Note that I haven't once talked about the content of the advertisements themselves just how inexorably the dynamics of this market lead to more obnoxious webpages and apps into which those ads (good or bad) would appear.

--- What about the remnant merchants? Well, they hired sales people and programmers. And then they consolidated, and merged, and consolidated some more.

And they'd built software to schedule campaigns and produce the targeting reports for publishers and ad agencies to do remnant! Plus ad agencies preferred not having to deal with 1,000 websites if they could just work with a few brokers.

The BMWs, PepsiCo's, Unilevers were all still hiring ad agencies to design campaigns; but now everyone worked with the ad brokers.

But for the publishers,not only do you not hire programmers and ad sales folks, you don't really need editors or to pay your "journalists" much... You might even just pay your "content creators" based on how many eyeballs their arti^h^h^h^hlist-icle brings in. The publishers could become brokers of eyeballs too!

If you're keeping score we're now in the rapid descent phase... tragically you've no longer got a newspaper or an essayist or a journalist or whatever... just a bunch of dealers trying to sell eyeballs.

Of course kutsunesoba's right that the advertisers (folks with ads looking for eyeballs) were also complicit, though. They quickly realized they were competing with 10 other ads appearing on the same and this meant almost instant neon-disco-ball obnoxious ads!

But, from my perspective, in addition to the scuzzy advertisers, and those scummy ad brokers, all this time swimming right alongside them were the publishers.

And this whole article is about one of them (being upset with Apple).

I don't get your Disneyland example. I replied to comments saying users are getting to use Facebook for free but that is not true, they are paying indirectly via ads. Did anyone claim that you get Disneyland for free? No, you pay for it. Some part with the ticket price, some part when you pay food and drinks, some part with merchandise, some part maybe later when you watch your next Disney movie as the whole thing is to some extend a gigantic ad.

And it matters how you divide it up. You could have a high ticket price and give away all the food for free but that big upfront payment would probably be off-putting for many even if they end up not paying more. For people who only want to ride some roller-coaster and not eat and drink your offering is now not attractive. Other people would exploit your offering, eating only the most expensive stuff in huge quantities.

You could also do it the other way around, have no tickets and pay for everything individually. This will change the entire experience and you have the added complexity of processing payments in many more locations. And all this also applies to you tax example, some services are only used by some part of the population, the other part might be unhappy to also pay for it. If you do not have a driving license, why should you pay for driving license renewals? On the opposite end of the spectrum you might have healthcare where you want to spread the risk across everyone and not only have those pay that actually need it. Its all mostly a matter of trade-offs and incentives how you structure it.

To make the analogy more fitting, imagine Disneyland not charging you for tickets. But they put up cameras and track you all day long, record what you eat, with whom you visit the park, what merchandise you buy, and measure some chemical indicators when you use their toilettes. And then they sell this information to other companies to pay for your visit to Disneyland.

Are you upset about movie trailers? I'll be honest I haven't been to the theatres in quite a while so I don't know if they actually show ads now but back when I was younger all "ads" before a move were just trailers for upcoming films which I loved because it let me stay current with what was coming out in the future. I don't mind that at all considering I'm not spending a lot of time at home Googling upcoming movies

Who's gonna ban? I'm cynical but if it's the ad network, then other ad networks will not ban that behavior and in turn outcompete the one that did. If it's the government (somewhere), there's a high probability the implementation of it will either be unenforceable (slap on the wrist for players making crazy money) or poorly implemented to the point of being counterproductive (can even happen if different governments have contradictory frameworks).

I had an old dream of building a good micropayment scheme for the web. Notionally, I'd like to pay $10/mo (or whatever) for "web content", and have some algorithm divvy that up into fractions of pennies for sites I momentarily visit.

The devil's in the details, for sure. Such a system would immediately turn into an arms race between running it fairly and gaming it. At the end of the day, what I want the internet to give me is neither impressions nor time spent, but value, and only I can really judge that - but I don't really want to be thinking about judging it all the time. The best scheme I came up with was one that tracked time/impressions/whatever and came up with a default payment for a given site, and let me adjust it if I felt it was high or low.

The second problem was -- what's up with $10/mo? Might that be low, for specialized content? High, for poor people? I had set it based on gut feel relative to the price I was paying my ISP at the time. I thought that perhaps what I'm paying by default can be negotiated with paywalls behind the scenes, and if it isn't high enough they can ask me for more for the one impression, and I can set it higher ongoing if I like what they have. An alternative approach was the one pursued by Project Wonderful, which had advertisers bidding against each other for space on a web site and (maybe it was this project or another) users bidding against those advertisers for those spaces to be blank! The free market enthusiast in me loves that in principle. In practice, projects in that vein all failed for reasons I don't understand.

That leads into a third problem, though. A lot of the value I get out of the internet is user-generated on larger sites -- like comments on this one. I appreciate Reddit pioneering some ways to thank these people, but as for making a larger and more general fair solution, I must admit I'm a bit lost. I dislike the idea of paying Facebook for aggregating the content of people I really want to be thanking and taking all the money for it (which is in fact, more or less what happens now).

With that said, I do like services that have this sort of fee for subscription for all content model. It seems to be dominating these days, and I take that as validation that the scheme is fundamentally the right way to go about solving the problem. But it needs another iteration. I hate having a dozen content subscriptions. I hate that they come in "a month" as the smallest size. And I hate that it gives the network so much control over where my money goes -- these schemes are notoriously unfair to creators. It would be much better if my relationship was with the creators directly, as I know what things are worth to me. If I could just cruise onto YouTube and it would hit my GlobalContentPayer up for $0.30 for an hour of ad free viewing (or $19.99 for a movie that just came out) or whatever, I'd be a much happier camper. I'm willing to pay you, but I don't really want that much of a relationship.

I definitely hate one-sided ad relationships. I don't mind ads like the old newspaper classifieds -- where both I and the advertiser got value out of it and that's the only reason it worked. Information exchanges are good, and if both parties are paying for access, that's a good sign of their health. One-sided ad relationships in which I am a product and not a party are inherently toxic. While I am sympathetic to creators needing a way to support themselves, that sympathy doesn't extend to allowing that sort of psychological abuse into my life. I avoid these sorts of ads whenever I can, in any way I can, without remorse.