161–170 of 343 posts
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Agreed about privacy. So how is apple helping websites get paid?
The plan should be to make something so good people will pay for it. Asking Apple to help with that is a little like asking a guitar company to help musicians make money.
As someone who worked in ad tech for half a decade, I fail to understand the fuss about cookie based targeting. We're speaking of databases mapping data to random numbers stored in a file that can easily be deleted. The real issue is ad targeting by a handful of large companies that have personally identifiable information. It's not like cookie based targeting is very effective either. It's very difficult to get cook…
What matters to ad campaigns is lift and not accuracy. What about conversion attribution? Don’t you need cookies for Amazon/etc to figure out what website led you to a purchase?
What the article lacks is a breakdown of who the ad buyers are. In particular, there’s probably a big difference between today’s Facebook vs display ad buyers (especially vs 5 years ago).
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,…
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…
I want to check a story by my local newspaper. I don't have my phone handy so I borrow the nearest work computer that isn't typically used for web browsing. I open an incognito window and go to the website, click on the article, and read through it. I leave the page open while I go back to work. Sometime while I'm not paying attention one of the many ads on the page refreshed because when I turned back instead of the newspaper I see a full-screen message that my computer has been "hacked". There's an pseudo-unclosable alert box warning me not to turn off the computer and to call "Microsoft" at some phone number. This computer didn't have speakers attached, but if it did I suspect they would have been making noise or using text-to-speech to read the fake warning.
This is a daily occurrence for thousands of unwitting computer users. You can't blame the victim by saying they were doing anything to make themselves vulnerable. I saw this happen on a continuously patched and vulnerability-scanned Windows 10, running the most up-to-date chrome. While visiting the website of a mainstream web site operated by a major newspaper syndicate.
I put the responsibility to stop this on the ad networks, and the site operators who partner with them. Until you can guarantee that none of the ads you serve are malicious or deceptive, I'm blocking everything and denying your revenue stream.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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In theory a "user" is more valuable the more you know about them because the extra info lets you better target them for higher response rates. Better privacy means you know less about the user, meaning you are less likely to bid high for that user's eyeballs, meaning the user is worth less ad spend. The actual story is a little more nuanced: when you target an ad, you are usually bidding for users in an auction. You'…
There's also a countervailing force, depending on the market. First an example that supports what everyone is talking about: * User X loves cola Pepsi and Coke both bid more to serve their cola subscription services or whatever. Ad price goes up. Now add more data: * User is a Coca Cola fanatic. Even though this is the same user, the ad price goes down , because Pepsi doesn't want to bid. Now add another Pepsi fanati…
Your scenario just seems to single out one particular example where more information can reduce spending on one group, while increasing it on another.
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Amazon has been repeatedly showing me office chair casters as a suggestion after I bought a set on Amazon. Despite having much better information on things I actually spend money on than the average ad network (all my devices have adblockers), Amazon isn't clever enough to figure out that I'm probably done with that product category for years.
To explain how this happens will take several pages of notes on the complexities of ad serving that are the exact opposite of "not clever enough". A summary is that your adblocking may have an impact on syncing stats, your purchases are not unique enough to matter for that category, serving some ad is better than serving no ad, and it maybe better to show you that impression however worthless than to bother with some…
I'd like to see a p2p mesh network where articles stripped of ads are upvoted, annotated, and shared. Something like outline, but truly distributed. The markup doesn't allow for embedded javascript or cookies. If it were to get popular, a microtransaction system could be built on top to pay the authors. In fact, payment could serve as one kind of ranking heuristic. Store articles in a blockchain and garbage collect t…