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The advertising cartel coming to your web browser

blog.zgp.org

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Re: The advertising cartel coming to your web browser

#31

Post by fao_ »

theamk wrote: post #16
SirFatty wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And you think that they team up for your benefit?

Most people (and orgs) do things that benefit themselves. The question as a user, who is likely to be more aligned with you? - Mozilla, Meta, Google, Facebook - VP of "monetization technology" company, "Marketing data expert"

Meta and Google are entirely advertising-focused companies, with their main revenue coming from being able to put together accurate profiles of people to spam them with campaigning attempts to get them to buy things.

Re: The advertising cartel coming to your web browser

#32

Post by cm2012 »

"The average person in the USA has about $1200/year spent on advertising intended to reach them. Where do you want “your” $1200 spent?"

Interestingly $1,200 is roughly 3.5% of what the average American spends per year (roughly $78k), and $1200 is roughly 15% of the average American's discretionary spending. That doesn't seem too crazy to me as a cost for the main driver of the matching and branding system of the capitalist economy of the United States.

Re: The advertising cartel coming to your web browser

#33

Post by rpastuszak »

cm2012 wrote: post #32

"The average person in the USA has about $1200/year spent on advertising intended to reach them. Where do you want “your” $1200 spent?" Interestingly $1,200 is roughly 3.5% of what the average American spends per year (roughly $78k), and $1200 is roughly 15% of the average American's discretionary spending. That doesn't seem too crazy to me as a cost for the main driver of the matching and branding system of the capi…

The cost is your attention, your mental health, as well as buying things you didn’t know you needed or didn’t know you didn’t need. It’s not a level playing field.

Re: The advertising cartel coming to your web browser

#34

Post by crowcroft »

gruez wrote: post #3

I'm not sure what this blog is complaining about. >Problem one: Over-rating search, social, and app store ads Isn't this a problem with today's ad attribution system? The author doesn't try to argue how the new system makes it worse. >Problem two: Incentives for extra tracking Same as above. It sounds like he's against attribution in general, which is an okay position to have, but I'd rather he say this upfront and m…

The issue is that problem one is real, but not in a way that's beneficial to other advertising products.

Search, social and app store ads are over rated in that a lot of brands should probably decrease their investment, but things like programmatic display ads are absolutely not under rated. The correct number of dollars that should be spent on those placements is close to zero.

Re: The advertising cartel coming to your web browser

#35

Post by xmcp123 »

Ajedi32 wrote: post #7
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #4

So they “reinvented” HTTP cookies but with only advertisers? > Technically, the way it works is that a script running on a site with ads asks the browser to record an ad impression. Then the browser keeps a record of ads seen from all the sites you visit. Later, when you buy something, the retail site can ask the browser to generate a “conversion report” that can be passed to a centralized aggregation service.

Sort of. Cookies track you as an individual with a unique identifier. The conversion report only tracks anonymized aggregate statistics that can't be used to identify you as an individual.

This sounds a lot like “you’re getting analyzed by AI/ML, tied to a specific bucket of similar users, then your continued data expands the bucket, splitting off into different adhoc buckets of similar users”

If so, you can’t be tied to a specific purchase but you can be so tightly grouped it’s basically the same.

Re: The advertising cartel coming to your web browser

#36

Post by aleqs »

cm2012 wrote: post #32

"The average person in the USA has about $1200/year spent on advertising intended to reach them. Where do you want “your” $1200 spent?" Interestingly $1,200 is roughly 3.5% of what the average American spends per year (roughly $78k), and $1200 is roughly 15% of the average American's discretionary spending. That doesn't seem too crazy to me as a cost for the main driver of the matching and branding system of the capi…

Except it isn't a level/merit-based 'matching and branding system', it's exactly the opposite - people see what others pay for them to see (and what's most likely to influence the viewer in a generally detrimental way), not what's actually beneficial/useful to them.

Imagine if all google results were ranked purely based on advertising potential... this is already starting to happen and it clearly makes google noticeably worse.

Not only is it bad for people and society, but it also undermines the whole idea of open and fair competition in a capitalist system - why do I need to make my product better if I can just spam advertising and dishonest marketing instead?

Re: The advertising cartel coming to your web browser

#38

Post by customguy »

skybrian wrote: post #18

> Don’t look for a section on permissions or consent in that document, by the way. There isn’t one. And nothing about nerd lawyer stuff like “opt out of sale” or “objections to processing” in there, either. The Big Tech companies want a two-track system, where other companies’ ad features are required to do all the privacy regulation hassles, but the browser’s own built-in tracking feature is something that people ha…

You don't need cookie banners unless you want to track the user before they opted in on their own (maybe in the "website settings"). That's why countless websites have none.

The browser would only have to ask once, and then it would still just be "one browser setting", except you'd be notified it exists, as soon as it exits. So what's the point here, other than trotting out the same old stuff nut about cookie banners?

On update, "this is the thing, and that thing is enabled by default, is that okay? Otherwise, click no, then it gets turned off. If you change your mind later, it's under settings -> thing"

It's not complicated, and blaming laws that enforce human rights to avoid the most basic craftsmanship is suspicious.

Re: The advertising cartel coming to your web browser

#39

Post by cm2012 »

aleqs wrote: post #36
cm2012 wrote: post #32

"The average person in the USA has about $1200/year spent on advertising intended to reach them. Where do you want “your” $1200 spent?" Interestingly $1,200 is roughly 3.5% of what the average American spends per year (roughly $78k), and $1200 is roughly 15% of the average American's discretionary spending. That doesn't seem too crazy to me as a cost for the main driver of the matching and branding system of the capi…

Except it isn't a level/merit-based 'matching and branding system', it's exactly the opposite - people see what others pay for them to see (and what's most likely to influence the viewer in a generally detrimental way), not what's actually beneficial/useful to them. Imagine if all google results were ranked purely based on advertising potential... this is already starting to happen and it clearly makes google noticea…

Both ads and capitalism are messy and have some externalized harms, but are better than the alternatives.

In the "advertising led" model of customer discovery, businesses advertise to essentially tell the market that they exist and provide a service. They do so by paying for advertising space across various mediums. This includes everything from their store signage to Craigslist ads, to TV and sophisticated digital advertising.

Most modern advertising is an auction where businesses compete to serve their message to customers the algorithms think are most likely to be interested.

This function - of matching users that might be interested in products to businesses providing products - is at this point hugely scaled.

People who want to ban ads will usually give the alternative of a reviewed directory of products and services for each category. That, they say, would be the ideal method of product discovery, along with word of mouth.

However, that runs immediately into the same problem that communism has historically. Who actually controls these directories, which would be a huge source of power for society? I posit that that it is impossible to centralize this effectively, and that the most likely most effective method for idea and product dispersal is something close to modern marketing and advertising.

Re: The advertising cartel coming to your web browser

#40

Post by aleqs »

cm2012 wrote: post #39
aleqs wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except it isn't a level/merit-based 'matching and branding system', it's exactly the opposite - people see what others pay for them to see (and what's most likely to influence the viewer in a generally detrimental way), not what's actually beneficial/useful to them. Imagine if all google results were ranked purely based on advertising potential... this is already starting to happen and it clearly makes google noticea…

Both ads and capitalism are messy and have some externalized harms, but are better than the alternatives. In the "advertising led" model of customer discovery, businesses advertise to essentially tell the market that they exist and provide a service. They do so by paying for advertising space across various mediums. This includes everything from their store signage to Craigslist ads, to TV and sophisticated digital a…

Why do you assume that any alternative to ads has to be centralized? You also seem to assume the advertising space is not centralized (lol).

If we can build a (centralized or decentralized) system capable of querying/serving content based on price and ad revenue projections, we can also build system capable of querying/serving content based on relevance, ratings, reviews and any number of parameters.

You seem to imply that advertising and marketing give us some kind of advantage in terms of (de) centralization, but that's really not true. The whole purpose of advertising is MAKE people look at ads despite the fact that almost nobody actually enjoys or values looking at ads, whether it's run as a centralized or decentralized model is an implementation detail.

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