Coming? The advertising cartel has been coming for the web browser since Google bought DoubleClick in March 2008 and then released Chrome in September.
"Eternal September II" is when Chrome was first released to the public.
The advertising cartel coming to your web browser
71–76 of 76 posts
Re: The advertising cartel coming to your web browser
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nobody asked for free content. It was pushed on us so they could track us. Before the Internet, you normally paid for what you consumed (at least, more than now. And before that even more).
Newspapers, network tv, etc has been subsidized by ads for 100 years+
And for the most part of this time period they weren't free.
Re: The advertising cartel coming to your web browser
#73"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.
Don't forgot the cost of worse products. If you're an honest company trying to build the best product, and your competitors choose to milk their customers instead, they can still win more market share by spending more on advertising.
Of course it's possible for customers to find out about these practices by doing research - too bad the marketing industry manages to sabotage every halfway reliable indicator after a few years.
Re: The advertising cartel coming to your web browser
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly, I really question how much value personalized ads provide over contextual ones. It's very hard to track or provide an experiment for, but right now companies seems to be accepting the "Trust me bro" from the large advertising companies.
> how much value personalized ads provide I think it's important we break this question apart by "value to whom." 1. Consumers barely notice ads for things they don't care about. 2. Sellers will see it as percentage inefficiency in their spending, wrapped up in other reporting noise. 3. Ad-networks on the other hand, may view a not-interested impression as a lost chance to make revenue by putting something "better" i…
Alas, they don't view their methods through the lens of the impressions they lose by pressuring people into developing and using adblockers
Re: The advertising cartel coming to your web browser
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a debate I've seen many times now on HN. I sympathize with what you're saying, but the flip side is that many users seem to prefer a free ad-supported funding model over a paid, ad-free model. If a site is going to be serving me ads anyway, then all else being equal I'd rather them make as much money off each impression as possible to incentivize them to keep providing me with free services. The privacy and r…
> many users seem to prefer a free ad-supported funding model over a paid, ad-free model. You don't need pervasive and invasive tracking and wholesale trading of your data to display advertising.
Correct. The whole point of this proposal (and other related ones like FloC/the topics API) is to get rid of the former while preserving the effectiveness of the latter.
Re: The advertising cartel coming to your web browser
#76This seems like this is written by an advertiser who wants their profits, but pretending to care about privacy so they get users' support. Here is a more honest summary: "This proposal hurts us, small advertisement networks and professional marketers. Reject it, or we will ramp up the tracking to compensate for the lost opportunities!"
I just spent an hour reading the WC3 proposal and I indeed think this is the core problem with it, and I came to agree with the original post here, this is a change that will benefit advertising networks and remove transparency for advertisers that want to verify ad networks.
As a user I do not mind when an advertiser (eg Nike) tracks what blog I came from to Nike website. My concern is a Meta / Google that tracks every site I was on and went to. So in this way, I think advertisers and users should be aligned.