21–29 of 29 posts
Go ahead and get rid of Google and Facebook and the rest overnight and all you'll do is find a new vector for advertising spring up virtually overnight.
Every ad tech company is responding to market incentives. Breaking companies up or killing them with regulation etc... won't make a dent in the long run.
Outlawing advertising as a business however will end the surveillance economy swiftly.
> Consumers can pay for ad-free video subscription services like Spotify Premium or Hulu—why can’t they in search or social networking? Why are these markets stuck? The article has very pragmatic observatiosn but this is not one of them. This won't work, people won't pay with money for what they can easily pay with their targetting data. Private data is worthless in any other context than advertising, there is no opp…
This is absolutely correct. Not only is an individual's private data nearly worthless, but they can protect it for free simply by using the Brave browser or other adblocking/tracking solutions. People often claim that they would pay for web content if it were somehow easier or if micropayments worked better or something. I'm not sure that I believe them.
On the other hand, I'd like to support creators as well, so I've created a web site that allows readers to make payments easily. It's like scroll, quid, patreon, etc. but I've tried to reduce friction even further by only going with a HN-style sign up form (email/pass) and charging readers only once they've reached a minimum account balance:
My initial impression is that most people will just continue blocking ads everywhere, because it's the easiest and safest thing to do, and I'm not even sure I disagree with that approach.
Any feedback is appreciated.
Also - pretty much all ad networks are rounding errors compared to Google and FB, which make up 85% of all new ad spend. The last 15% is mostly Amazon, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest.
Yahoo/AOL have to still be in top 5 right? I’d think Microsoft (even outside of LinkedIn) and Snapchat should have decent percentages of the leftover too. At least the former.
Maybe the regulators can say to Google or Facebook that they can't collect those user data, or they limit the collection somehow. I can't imagine how else you can stop this duopoly. The problem with the whole ecosystem is that every system they have feed the other one, ie. Chrome gathers the search data to be used for Ads etc.
Meantime, the AI can update a private site with content that interest you.
An client side AI is the only way to make tracking useless.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is absolutely correct. Not only is an individual's private data nearly worthless, but they can protect it for free simply by using the Brave browser or other adblocking/tracking solutions. People often claim that they would pay for web content if it were somehow easier or if micropayments worked better or something. I'm not sure that I believe them.
> I'm not sure that I believe them. You don't have to take their word that people would pay. They already are paying. Millions[1] of people go out of their way[2] to pay creators monthly or per-work. However, a lot of that "web content" needs to realize the actual value of their content might be ~$0. Advertising distorted the market; a lot of people were able to extract revenue greater than the actual "market value"…
> Consumers can pay for ad-free video subscription services like Spotify Premium or Hulu—why can’t they in search or social networking? Why are these markets stuck? The article has very pragmatic observatiosn but this is not one of them. This won't work, people won't pay with money for what they can easily pay with their targetting data. Private data is worthless in any other context than advertising, there is no opp…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yahoo/AOL have to still be in top 5 right? I’d think Microsoft (even outside of LinkedIn) and Snapchat should have decent percentages of the leftover too. At least the former.
Yahoo/AOL have terrible targeting and no bot protection, so generate very little revenue.
I don't understand the conclusion: "But if we understand that user identity and user data are drivers of ad pricing, and that the terms that Google and Facebook are able to extract from independent publishers drive the health of the wider news ecosystem, it is impossible to continue to make this argument today." Earlier, the article explains pretty well how tracking increases the CPMs that publishers can achieve. In…