The ads. Aren't. The problem. The stalking is.

Ads can be useful. But no one is saying they aren't! So why is it constantly the case that when internet users make the simple and reasonable request "Please, can you just not stalk us everywhere we go?" the response is "but we're helping you!"

The parasitic advertising industry likes to pretend we're in a symbiotic relationship while conveniently ignoring the actual symbiotic solution (see e.g., DDG) because it won't make them nearly as much money.

Exactly. If you want online ads done right, look no further than how podcasts do it. The medium doesn't allow for stalking. Podcast producers often stake their own reputation by voicing the ads themselves. That editorial freedom lets them be creative and respectful of their audiences. And advertisers can use podcast-specific coupon codes to attribute ad campaigns to sales. It's a win-win for everyone.

Huh. Are you sure? I don't know anything about how podcast advertising works, but it sounds like you're assuming the full audio track, complete with ads, is the same everywhere and always.

Spotify will use everything it knows about you to target podcast ads https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/8/21056336/spotify-streaming...

Most podcasts and players operate on RSS feeds though. While they can very well target things via IP addresses and user-agent (no getting around that), podcasters and their advertisers don't have the capability to read/write persistent tracking data on the client, at least as far as I know. An advertiser would be hard-pressed to see that I personally listen to Stuff You Should Know and This American Life, even if the advertiser had contracts with both. The medium really hobbles how much tracking can be done.

It's possible to target ads to a specific audience by exploiting the selection effect that led to your audience existing. This doesn't favour general-audience communities, sure, but I'd honestly be happy with the answer "general-audience things just aren't how the future looks".

But I have no clue what would distinguish (to me) a non-shit ad? Is it saving me money on something I was already going to buy?

Yes. I've been looking for weight equipment over the past year because of the pandemic and gyms being closed and the majority of ads on Instagram are now exercise equipment. I ended up seeing an ad for a company in my country with fairly decent prices and bought a new squat stand. The price difference between the one I bought and the ones I was looking at from companies in the area was around $200. I give up some privacy, they give me targeted ads. Please give me more.

The usual answer to this is to use the context rather than personal information and browsing history. You bring less value to the company advertising their product, but I'd argue that most people are fine with this approach.

The problem is that current incentives lead to a race to the bottom: if some advertisers are less ethical, they can arguably bring more value to their clients, and the ethical advertiser cannot compete anymore.

Contextual advertising, on the other hand, is simple. It shifts the focus away from technology and toward people: recognizing your audience and crafting a message to them, instead of trying to have a computer do it for you. It's old-fashioned marketing.

Perhaps today, but not if we design browser APIs that allow targeting without cross-site tracking: https://github.com/WICG/turtledove https://github.com/WICG/privacy-preserving-ads/blob/main/Par...

Since at least the 1920s (I’m thinking of Edward Bernays but there are probably earlier examples) the goal of advertising is to manipulate consumers into making irrational decisions. The majority of ads make us feel inadequate to get us to buy something, like the only the thing that will make us whole is a new instant pot or whatever.

I know it's hard to disprove but I don't think adverts have that effect on me, partially it's because I don't see many adverts and partly because that kind of blatant manipulation is so hilariously blatant.

I acknowledge that someone might be running a really effective advertising campaign on me but since I basically don't buy anything I don't actually need I can't imagine what that would be.

Our cogniitive biases act as shortcuts to save energy when making decisions, and advertisers exploit those shortcuts. If you’re on high alert while shopping, catching and recalibrating for your biases at every step of the way then yeah you can probably escape most marketing but for most people that doesn’t come naturally.

If you’re not careful I bet you too slip up sometimes. I know I’ve caught myself at the grocery store reaching for one product over another just because it’s in unbleached cardboard packaging (signaling to me that it’s somehow more local or organic or whatever).

These tricks become obvious when you consciously work through them (ex: obviously some megacorp can package their items in cardboard the same way mom and pop small businesses can) but most of the time we aren’t processing consciously, and that’s how marketing works.

If people were interested in seeing ads, a business of selling pure ad catalogues would actually be a successful venture! As it stands now, you can't even give such material away for free without generating hate. Because people don't want to see ads! It doesn't matter if they're tracked or not. The ad is the problem!

Haven't bought anything techie for about 18mths and when I do mostly shop on specs, reviews from sources I trust.

I viscerally loathe advertising, I don't like been manipulated in any context so I run a background process mentally watching for it :).

I'm an advertisers nightmare, I'll not only ignore your advertising I'll go to significant technical lengths to block it for myself and everyone in my family.

One of the other replies note that podcasts do ads right. I hugely disagree. Not only does it steal the listener's time and focus (presuming they don't just scrub past it, which I presume most people do unless they put little value on their own time, and think a host is being sincere when they pitch some snake-oil supplement, pillow or VPN), it puts a dirty veneer over the whole realm where everyone becomes half-bit hucksters.

Many people have a favorite TV ads. People watch the Super Bowl for the ads. People sing radio jingles to themselves. College kids put nice magazine ads on their dorm walls. People pay money for clothes with logos that are essentially just ads for themselves. People watch videos of influencers unboxing/using/reviewing products they are paid to unbox/use/review. Etc. People love all kinds of ads.

No one likes banner ads. It is failed ad format and should be replaced. No one likes direct targeting. It should be made illegal. There are lots of other ad formats and methods that work great. Those two are the problem.

Look, for example, at large advertisers like Coca Cola. Coke spends ~$1 billion/year in the US alone on ads. That's not because nobody has heard of them. The point is to shift money into Coke's pockets.

Almost all advertising provides no net benefit to society; it's just an arms race between companies competing to manipulate people. If we banned it, we'd quickly find other ways to get people the minimal information content it contains. We'd definitely find ways to spend the $1tn or so that it consumes now. And that's not even counting the benefits from less waste and market distortion caused by advertising.

Yes. That's the problem. Make less money from ads --> make less content/riskier to make content (same thing). The more money ads make, the fewer of them you have to see to fund the same amount of content (or, alternatively, you get more/higher quality content for a given (fixed) quantity of ads).

There is no set "amount of effectiveness," so to speak. If ads are more profitable, advertisers are still going to spend just as much or more on them, precisely because they have a higher ROI.

So you see more ads, the people publishing content make more money (more ads + better ads --> more valuable eyeballs --> more valuable content), and then the ROI for making content is higher, so people make + publish more of it. You get more, more valuable content.

Now, you may argue that the privacy cost is higher than the reward of more/better content, but I think that it probably isn't. Especially because it's hard (not impossible) to match your browsing history with your IRL identity and no one really cares about you, I think that the privacy cost is smaller than the reward. You might disagree.

There's a couple of non-sequitors here.

1. You don't necessarily get more valuable content. A lot of times the higher ROI leads to gamification of the whole system and you get more content, but it's all spam or varying levels of quality. This spam varies from complete trash to fairly polished, but none of it is actually valuable.

2. Even if we concede the point and assume that we get purely more valuable content, there is a limit to the amount of content anyone can consume in a day. And the advertising itself competes for your attention with even that valuable content. So the benefit from an increased amount of valuable content has a natural limit. The harm from the increase of ads is not so naturally bounded. So even if the balance of cost/benefit starts on the side you think, where the benefit of the content outweighs the cost of advertising, it will naturally, eventually trend towards the cost outweighing the benefit.

You are correct that in my view, personally, the cost already far outweighs the benefit. We can argue whether that's true on the whole for most people, but there is no argument when it comes to me personally. It's not worth it. There is a lot of content I only consume because I'm blocking ads. If I was unable to block ads and had to pay that cost, I would certainly forgo the content.

So annoyingly while it is true that ads are a currently necessary part of funding the internet, it is also true that a perverse incentive exists to just keep hammering the $ button once you find a model that works. It is a good argument for why we probably should want to pay directly for content. Or y'know, just topple capitalism on account of it generating toxic localized optimizations literally everywhere.

But what about the manipulation?

My primary work is on https://github.com/WICG/turtledove (discussed in the post), which allows well-targeted advertising without sending your browsing history to advertisers

* Ads render inside "fenced frames" where they cannot learn what page they are on and the page cannot learn what ad is being shown

* Reporting is available, but it is aggregate-only

> GET https://first-ad-network.com/.well-known/fetch-ads?interest_...

So, at the very least, the ad network will be able to see your IP and know that you like athletic shoes and visited www.wereallylikeshoes.com. If you visit some other domain first-ad-network.com owns with the same IP whithin a small window of time, it can be pretty confident it's the same person and even store some client side data at that point. It feels like they can construct a reasonably good profile about their users by using that technique. That's considering the browser doesn't leak out any other potentially identifying information.

Then, the actual ad owner could have something in the URL that identifies which campaign you ultimately came from, as they probably know which interest groups they were targeting. So, when you click on the ad, they know one interest about you and, if you clicked in ads from other campaigns they run, they may reconstruct your profile well.

Yes, there are a lot of user identifying bits in an IP address. Chrome has two proposals: https://github.com/bslassey/ip-blindness I'm not sure what other browsers are thinking?

> That's considering the browser doesn't leak out any other potentially identifying information.

Which they definitely do. All the browsers are working on figuring out how to thwart fingerprinting, and it's really hard. I am glad, at least, that we were able to get Google Ads to publicly commit to not fingerprinting.

> when you click on the ad, they know one interest about you and, if you clicked in ads from other campaigns they run, they may reconstruct your profile well

Yes, when people click on ads in Turtledove the advertiser does learn something. This is a huge improvement to the status quo where advertisers learn things just by bidding, or an intermediate stage where advertisers learn things when they win an auction -- users don't click on ads very often, so the amount of information leaked this way is very low.

Exactly how much information the advertiser is able to learn on a click is still very much up in the air, so if you have views on this you might consider participating on the repo?

In a less techinical point of view, ads are probably a net negative for society. People are buying things they don't need, spending time they could be doing other things and just having a worse experience they could have were not for content farms and other practices incentivised by ads. I do see the value of ads bringing services to people who wouldn't have money to pay for them otherwise, it's income distributions of sorts, but I think we can do better.

Anyway, interesting read about ip blindness. As long as the CDNs and proxies are not controlled by the same company that owns the ad networks, then it could work out. Though it's hard to find the correct incentives for the right people to own the right parts of the network. Another alternative would be something like onion, which is more distributed (although quite wasteful of resources).

Similar things happen with jobs and ethnicity, jobs and gender, with jobs and age discrimination, etc.

But you asked how targeted ads hurt people, and I showed a fairly recent example. Something that wouldn't exist without targeted advertising. How does that not prove my point?

Here's a list of ways around "cannot filter by race". It took 2 seconds on google: https://www.searchenginewatch.com/2011/12/06/how-to-target-e...

But, you seem to be shifting the goalposts pretty significantly. So, do you agree with the base point that targeted ads can produce pretty bad results?

1. Facebook tracks users across the internet to enrich the profiles of their users

2. Data leaks.

3. Users are now in trouble.

I can come up with many more if you ask and then give me a sec.

I mean there are so many examples it's difficult to believe this is a genuine question. It sort of like asking in 1984 did anyone really get hurt by big brother watching?

Beyond that, it's an open secret (as in: it's been mentioned several times in available documents, but never deliberately disclosed or extensively discussed publicly, so far as I know) that since at least the mid or late 00s the US government has had contracts with multiple major tech companies that have a high level of access to citizen Internet traffic to basically search their databases of Internet activity at will. Which companies these are, I'm not sure—I suspect it's mostly telcos, personally—but it's another reason the existence of these datasets is inherently dangerous, and that they should not be permitted to exist at all, no matter who holds them.

The cost of advertising is not your attention; it is your perception. Advertisements fundamentally alter your perception of the world in favor of whatever the advertiser is showing you. You are choosing to have your view of the world shaped in a way that may change your behavior. Note that this change occurs on an emotional level and cannot simply be discarded by your rational mind even if you don't believe / care about the ad at a conscious level.

And there certainly is a universe where we would pay for search, in the same way that we pay for countless other things. Google's business model scorched Earth the realm, though, so there isn't a lot of potential for that now, but it's a universe I could easily imagine.

"the advertising model for using Google search and watching Youtube videos works better for me as a consumer."

Do you use an ad blocker? I certainly do, as does most of HN. Layers of ad blockers. It works for me because I get the content for free and I don't have the scourge of ads, so sure it's a fine model.

When that podcast starts with six minutes of promos I just scrub right past them. I don't believe I've clicked on a single ad online in decades, at least not intentionally. I honestly don't even understand how that industry survives. My gut instinct is that it's a giant illusion and effectively a massive fraud.

A major reason many of us have such a laissez-faire attitude towards the detritus of the ad world is that it's something that other people endure.

I understand it pretty well. I pay for a variety of services for the value they provide me and to ensure they remain viable. I use a lot of free, ad-supported tools without an ad-blocker.

I make a small amount of money from ad-supported sites. I make more money from user-supported sites.

I tend to be more concerned with the user experience. I don't mind ads that don't get in the way of my intent for using a tool or site. I have backed out of many sites that show me more ads than content, especially if presented in a way that make them more likely to be clicked accidentally than out of actual interest. They loose me as a user. That's a choice I get to make.

I enjoy physical magazines (or digital versions of physical magazines). I pay for several subscriptions, but I know they are making much more money from advertising. I wouldn't pay more for a version without ads. I like many of the ads. They are well-targeted and visually appealing. But I am free to ignore them and I am free to stop subscribing if the advertising diminishes the value I get from it.

Ad-supported sites are important to the ecosystem. Can they be done better? Yes! Can we make choices as consumers as to whether or not we patronize a site based on their advertising behavior? Yes! Ad blockers may play a role in that. Perhaps both will help push the industry in a more privacy-centric direction.

Privacy is more commonly seen as a feature these days. I have a few services I promote as both free and privacy-focused; no ads, no or minimal analytics, etc. And with enough interest I would hope to eventually charge for them to make them sustainable without ads.

However, I understand that if this had to change, the income would have to shift, too.

Recently, just from my youtube subscriptions I think, my youtube ads have been surprisingly relevant, for things like cnc routers or various embedded tools or what not -- ads that are actually for things I might be interested in buying. (Granted there's still a ton of obnoxious get rich quick schemes that I have to skip).

I have to admit, seeing ads that actually are of interest to me does change my mindset on advertising a little bit. I still find it super creepy being tracked, and I'd like the ability to know what they know about me, and erase it if I don't like it (is that even possible?), but it is kind of nice to get ads that don't suck if I have to sit through ads.

Just let the users set their own advertising profiles! Always relevant ads, no tracking needed.

with our own set profiles, we could opt out of gambling, loot boxes, and alcohol ads too. I've been suggesting this for some time now.

But measuring the net societal impact of a cheap stopped at that point is basically worthless. There are many 2nd and 3rd order impacts that must be included. The obvious is health, but others include the marginal cost considerations of where the money will go that is "saved". Or what alternative food would be purchased (if it's deep fried Twinkies, maybe free doughnuts are a health win).

Any work that makes the ad marketplace more efficient (easier for creation and deployment of effective ads or ad instrumentation) has huge effects on relative competitiveness of startups vs. conglomerates. Just as one example. And those effects directly affect consumers.

I can avoid ad surveillance to some degree, but am powerless to help a business that can't survive in an ad-driven economy. I can't single-handedly keep my local hardware store in business against the threat from conglomerates capable of operating indefinitely on zero margins.

Get me started on the ads that come with play store apps and "free games".

however at $12/month that would be $864 per year to help them. I would jump at $60 / year for 6 people.. heck that would save me on comcast overages several months of the year.

We still pay for some searches by paying the ad costs of the places we spend money, but that's another thing to figure.. $120 / year for search? I doubt my clicks amount to that for any advertiser. I'd pay 20 for ad free, zero tracking searches, but not 100.

The other day to prevent a young one from replaying the same soundtrack over and over via youtube - (bandwidth repeatedly counting against and lots of ads for the same repeated songs oh my) - I just popped over to amazon and bought the album and popped it onto a usb stick for them.

I picked up a couple of gift cards for their bday this week - one of them was a google play card - then I remembered G killed the music section of the play store, so I put it back and got an amazon card instead.

that premium would be a great deal if we had one more in the household here. we've got three chromecasts - two with the google tv - but not the gtv plan - sheesh the ads via youtube with that are a drain, and I wonder about the compression for music - but they still use them for convenience and the other things like discovery+ which is affordable.

Oh if only they would plex-like into a win7 box on the network and pull my collection of mp3s.

Maybe all this is going in a good direction. Fingers crossed.

In addition, a flat fee could lead to a slow on googles growth, as once a users pays, they can not find new ways to monetize that user.

Don't get me wrong, I love the option to pay a fee to opt out of certain ads. It really helps align the incentives of the user with the company, but unfortunately it would have to be expensive to average out the more lucrative ads.

I grew up with "free internet services" but I can't complain on one side about ads and consuming stuff and in the other side not just paying for those services directly and it's a monthly thing. Easy to cancel much better than all those 1 year contracts for stuff like paytv.

You advertise to me, You don't track every single fucking thing I do online to do it.

If we agree to that then I'll turn my adblocker/pi-hole off - otherwise enjoy the null-hole.

Yes. However...

I have found 0.001% of what I wanted because of an ad. That's something like one item in a decade. I don't think that's worth the costs of tracking to privacy and bandwidth. Certainly not worth the obtrusiveness of contemporary ad space which is the result of the inevitable runaway arms race between the flitting attention of users and the desperate need of businesses to sale their wares.

I don't see any resolution to the waste other than abandoning tracking for ads. Good enough demographics can be found by the content being consumed. Please, let's leave it at that.

I feel the main point is, no you haven't got this for free.

If you were to pay $2400 dollars, Google would also need to pay you for your attention during this time

Showing ads is the first level and from that perspective I suppose it's fine.

At the next level is harvesting data from those ads and sharing that data with third parties. I feel that's where things get very, very messy.

Because if ads can be targeted based on a person's profile, so can other manipulations. Especially if that data is available with an authoritarian government.

Since most companies showing ads don't play fairly, users in turn choose to block ads completely.

When you say "I'm using Google for free because it's supported by ads", what it means is:

- some companies are buying (expensive) ads on Google

- they are therefore increasing their marketing budget

- which mechanically increases the price of their services and products

- which you ultimately have to pay

so no, the "free ads" are not free for the consumers, you pay them as a "marketing tax" on each product and service that you pay for

And there's another issue. Even if all online services switched to a subscription model tomorrow, companies would not suddenly stop spending money on promoting their products. They would just do it differently and we would pay twice.

Maybe it's personal taste, but signing into an account is much more pleasant for me than watching an ad. As for the monetary cost, it only takes one ad per year that works on you to lose as much money anyway.

> Advertising should be open and transparent. If business of ads are truthful

Ads are not truthful because they are highly incentivized to lie > I will sometimes pay to see ads. E.g. I pay $10 ticket for a home & garden convention show so the manufacturers in booths can advertise their wares to me.

I have to honestly ask why? What do you feel you are measuring other than the advertising budget of the sellers? Granted, such a convention would also allow you to evaluate the wares to some extent, but doing that is to ignore the ads.

Only if you regret the purchase, no? For example, I subscribed to CBS (now Paramount+) because I saw ads for a show I was interested in watching (Picard).

(I realize lots of advertising does not follow this model)

So I resolved to sit back and enjoy what time I have left for getting a great experience.

In advertising, context matters. Ads when you’re in discovery mode looking for things to consume? Great, ads are usually unobtrusive in that context. But there are only so many discovery scenarios but lots of ad money to be made.

Advertising is a zero-sum game to dominate the human attention span. This has negative effects on our social lives and mental health. Is saving a few dollars a month worth the societal impact that constant advertising entails? In my opinion this constant barrage of ads is a big part of why we as a society can disagree about basic facts about the world: we’ve been conditioned to consume media that is promoted by virtue of its ability to draw eyeballs through being controversial / shocking, rather than the veracity or value of the information. Ads create a perverse incentive for publishers to operate at the edge of truth because those stories / media get more views.

It reads a lot like that.

Jeff posits that advertising is competing only with paywalls and brushes aside hobby work, people producing content for the pure benefit of it, as if that is not impacted.

If I produce something creative with real value as part of a hobby, I know there is a high chance it will be copied/stolen by a slick advertiser who will then out-compete me.

So, I'm net less motivated to participate in the whole system of creating content.

With video... I pay $70 USD for my cable company (HBO+Star+misc-crap) plus $13 USD for Netflix, plus $12 for disney plus (wife likes a couple shows there), plus $13 Amazon Prime, plus $10 for the local Netflix-like crap in my country (for some local shows).

That means $118 USD for video only, which is 14% of the average income in my country ($843 USD). Imagine if I had to pay $10 dollars a month for each of the internet services we use?

$10 Gmail $10 google $10 Reddit $10 HackerNews $10 Youtube $10 Linkedin $10 Facebook $10 twitter $10 Whatsapp $10 LiChess $10 Slack $10 Samsung Health $10 Google Maps $10 Podcast Republic $10 CBS News (The only US channel I like for news) $10 Home Workout $10 Discord

And that's at the top of my head, it will be $180 USD, or 21% of the average income of someone in my country.

If that happened, the internet will become "a place for the rich" and pretty much only the north emisphere will use it. Yeah, ads suck... but their are a necessary evil to "monetize" users that are just not monetizable any other way.

1. Bundling multiple subscriptions is a long-time practice and if more services were paid offerings we'd likely all buy some bundle that gave us most of what we wanted at a reasonable price.

2. Paying for services will reduce the number of services around... which may be a good thing when so many offerings are sub-par.

3. With more paid offerings, we will be more deliberate about how we spend our time, which is what advertising-based models make us forget we are really spending. And as you age you realize that the time you spent watching ad-supported drivel was more expensive than if you had just paid directly for the things you really needed and spent the rest of your time on things that matter - friends, family, experiences, learning etc.

Sh, it's OK, everyone does it, you are not alone :P

If groceries used to be free, but suddenly cost money, people would riot.

Thus: if groceries used to be free, but suddenly cost money, people would riot.

Arguably: why would people riot about not-free Youtube?

Free services like YouTube have provided me with an immense amount of value, but I would still be hesitant to pay for them unless I absolutely had to.

Does the web have to be supported by ads? If the web was a non-profit service, supported by public funds, managed by academic institutions for example, would we miss 90% of the content that's basically sponsored by someone who wants to sell something?

From my point of view it looks like the web is a giant advertising machine built on top of something that could be ... not a giant advertising machine. Still from my POV, it just happens that the big players on the web are suppoting ads because that's where their revenue comes from and if they weren't the big players, then we wouldn't have a web of ads.

So basically we're not paying for ads that we wouldn't be paying for if google didn't run the web.

I remember ~2001 or so a lot of the sites I visited were ad supported, but it mostly just made enough to cover hosting costs. At this point hosting costs are so cheap that I don't even think those style of sites would have trouble existing. Most of those sites existed because some people were interested in a hobby or a subject, and would publish news and have bulletin boards and articles and stuff. Sadly those kind of communities don't seem to exist anymore, now those kind of things end up being subreddits or facebook groups and I never feel like those are quite the same, they just don't have the same curation or community feel.

I didn't hear any outrage at all when several newspapers transitioned to a pay model and threw up a paywall. The parties most upset were the newspapers themselves.

It would be utterly exhausting, which is why it will not happen.

Ad fraud is already a huge problem, as are things like ransomware. Micropayments would just give bad actors a direct line to your wallet.

I wonder whether the gradual switch would need to be made possible through something similar to a micropayment subscription model, which is non publisher specific.

I don't want to commit to subscriptions for 5+ publications, but I'd happily buy a days access occasionally. This feels much more akin to buying a newspaper in the old world.

I think we'd end up seeing positive changes. Especially the end of content producers being held to ransom by advertisers and commercial pressures.

I completely agree - until you have kids watching Youtube the Ads are much better in general.

I am however extremely concerned with the amount of data being collected on my family to then aggregate and sell.

Ads on podcasts don't bug me as much as the ads Google/Facebook does. Nor do the ads that are sponsored inside videos (see LTT). I don't mind the ads that DDG does (which just uses key words in your search).

I don't like this dichotomy of ads vs no ads, I'm not sure that's really the right framework. I turn off ads everywhere I go because I can't trust ads. But I don't bother skipping through ads on my podcasts or in videos. So it isn't the ad part that's the problem.

That might be true in the beginning but long term ad's add a lot of friction and frustration e.g. having to wait X amount of seconds before getting access to the content.

I have been a YouTube Premium user since day one and I can't imagine not using it.

What I would love to see more is having a choice of having a free ad supported version and the option to upgrade and pay to remove those ads.

I do pay for YouTube Red, and it's worth it to not see ads.

> micropayments for each search query or a "Google Search Engine yearly subscription"

I would pay for this, too.

> ... or Patreon donations for video content ...

I do it for music. It feels really good to support creators directly.

Ads are the worst, and I adblock everything.

I'd happily pay for web content if there were microtransactions. Either that, or a content marketplace that disburses based on views or some other accounting.

I would absolutely pay that.

Search is incredibly valuable and has deteriorated as has the web as a whole largely because of ads and this terrible business model.

It’s not even slightly ‘free’, your attention is being wasted on stuff that other people are paying for you to see.

I value that at way more than $120 per year.

But people don't like to pay for software. So we alternatives.

I don't think that's why people are downvoting. Speaking for myself, it's because his analysis focuses only on the benefits of ads, and conveniently ignores the actual ethical problems (e.g. large-scale collection of personal information).

In other words, I see no fresh insight and perspective in jefftk's writing, and worse still, it bears remarkable semblance to a bad-faith argument. I'm sure he is a decent person (really!), but this particular essay is neither interesting, nor particularly respectable IMHO. As a result, a downvote feels appropriate.

1. All ads in general.

2. Targeted advertisement, regardless of the privacy implications.

3. Data collection for targeted advertisement.

4. Data collection for anything.

5. Whether or not users consent to all of the above.

So I don't really think it is fair for anybody to insist that there is a single agreed upon actual ethical problem in web advertising.

May be I am living in my bubble, but most of the site I visit, mostly mainstream media news in tech, along with most of the social media post, has a flat out dismissal of Ads in general.

So while ads works to pay for X isn't a "fresh" insight, it was never really pointed out ( enough ) in most of the discussions. If the discussion in general was even slightly balanced in pros and cons, then pointing out ads do serve some usefulness wouldn't even be what OP labeled as "contrarian opinion".

>and conveniently ignores the actual ethical problems (e.g. large-scale collection of personal information).

In the context of Ads. Not all ads are large-scale collection of personal information. Which is what FloC was ( AFAIK ) trying to solve. As Apple did with their differential privacy. I often wondered if Google didn't decide to invent a new term called FloC and instead follow Apple and call it differential privacy would the backlash still be the same. But I think at the end of the day it is just a matter of trust. Whether you Trust Google or Apple. ( Or Facebook )

Yes, I agree. That is indeed another unoriginal, stale perspective.

The question for me isn't so much whether hear from one side more than the other, but whether there is some new idea. For me, intellectual content matters much more than equal representation in (social) media.

By this measure, the OP's post is equally trite.

>In the context of Ads. Not all ads are large-scale collection of personal information.

We're talking about Google ads here. Let's stop pretending otherwise.

>Which is what FloC was ( AFAIK ) trying to solve.

Leaving my skepticism aside for a moment, this may have been an opportunity for OP to provide some insight into how the adtech market is evolving, and make the case that it is headed in an ethical direction. He did not. There is no insight here, either.

So again, I think a downvote is a pretty reasonable and measured response. The OP's post was unconvincing and cliched. No big deal. I've written plenty of stuff like that, myself.

There's a section of post with "build browser APIs that will allow this kind of well-targeted advertising without sending your browsing history to advertisers, and then get rid of third-party cookies"; I'm curious what you think of it?

Random generic advertising is fine. It isn't as profitable but it doesn't exploit a person's mental weaknesses. Targeted advertising is straight up exploitation.

Kids being bombarded with ads for plastic surgery nonestop on TikTok, radicalized individuals being targeted with fear-based ads. This is super toxic. And while advertising is a tale as old as human commerce, such insane targeted advertising is not.

I think that's what ads should be - exactly like TV.

Ads sucks and it is alive due to economic incentive from ads. And we know where there is economic incentive its hard to stop (eg. bitcoin mining economic incentive)

(If you said it was signaling race or wealth or something I would understand, but virtue?)

The "badness" of the ads results from the selecting function and what becomes sustainable and favored. Infamously with spam and phone calls it can include outright crime.

The insanely annoying thing that I have seen for a long time is that despite the fact that you have more information on me than anyone else the ads have been either useless or even insulting for years.

I remember bothering to click through the microscopic x in tve corner and select not relevant or something on Thai mail order brides. What did I get next? Filipino mail orders brides. Out of curiosity I marked a number of them as not relevant and I think I also saw:

- Polish

- Ukrainian

- Chinese

- and possibly a couple of more nationalities

- later I got ads for older women near me

- and then gay cruises

This went on for years.

Last year I finally started seing ads for electronics etc but now I feel no remorse for blocking ads anymore.

I'm just fed up.

Meanwhile Facebook, for all their faults and despite me blocking them for far longer than Google actually has had interesting ads.

Edit: I've nothing against Filipino or Thais or gay people or anyone, but I have something against scantily clad women etc showing up on my monitor both at work and at home and I think it says something about Google that they think this was the most relevant ads they could show me for years.

Yes it doesn't drive as much engagement, but that's the point. Over-optimizing for engagement is a bad thing. We have seen repeated evidence of this.

There should be general overarching categories: News site, food site, movie site, game site. But not "news site for radical right-wingers who believe in tucker carlson and think gun control is communism" which doesn't really require user tracking, but I think still falls on the bad side of things.

"Is a kid" is interesting. There's literally laws to prevent children from receiving too much advertising on TV _for good reasons_ their brains aren't developed enough to counter it. But on the internet? ANYTHING GOES!

This is "mainstream Republican" and it's about 1.5bits of information after "is UA resident".

Tucker is one of the most popular people in the USA.

Ignores? That's what the entire second half of the post is about ;)

Starting at "But the biggest issue I see people raising is the privacy impact of targeted ads..."

Yes, that's literally all you have to say on the subject.

The very next paragraph is about how this helps keep ads relevant...

Not at all! First I talk about the economic benefit of targeted ads ("Most products are a much better fit for some people than others..."), then how it works today ("Historically, ads like this have been built on top of third-party cookies..."), then how it can work without cross-site tracking ("build browser APIs that will allow this kind of well-targeted advertising without sending your browsing history to advertisers, and then get rid of third-party cookies...")

Why?

Can you be more precise about what you mean and why the current system doesn't have it? You're saying that everyone should see ads, even ads they won't like? Forgive me if this isn't a hill I'm interested in dying on.

"It makes content providers more responsible for the Ads they carry. It allows me to avoid sites that show me bad Ads (such as mail order brides)."

Not in a meaningful way. If the ads are generated automatically based on the content, the site might not have much to do with it. Example: Suppose there's a wedding planning site, and a content-based targeting system notices the word "bride" on the site a lot and serves mail order bride ads. Yes, you could avoid the wedding planning site because of this, but is there any reason to punish them? It's not their fault.

"If I get targeted by content independent targeted ads, it can be almsot impossible to avoid those Ads as they will follow you everywhere you go."

Isn't there a menu that lets you select "I don't want to see this ad"?

> Yes, you could avoid the wedding planning site because of this, but is there any reason to punish them? It's not their fault.

It is absolutely their fault. Content providers should face full responsibility for the Ads they allow to appear on their website.

One of the ways that the current Ad targeting system is awful is that it allows advertisers to pretend to foist this responsibility onto Ad companies that are much more insulated from consumer blow back.

> Isn't there a menu that lets you select "I don't want to see this ad"?

Those menus often don't stop other Ads of that type from being shown and there is no legal obligation to do so. All they really do is give the advertiser more information about you.

If the only recourse you have to abusive behavior is to politely ask them to stop, someone is going to keep abusing you to make money.

Instagram gives me fantastically targeted ads, and I appreciate that.

For example think about how much better society could've been over the past decades if, instead of saying "people can't reasonably make decisions about [insert drug here] so we're going to illegalize all of them" we'd said "wow, adults can make decisions for themselves".

The war on drugs was a fundementally bad approach to fixing the problem. If it had worked and drug use had dropped near zero over a decade or two, you wouldn't see the current level of support for ending it. There are other cases where removing personal choice is not controversial (such as seat belt laws, incarceration,

In fact, the failure of the war on drugs is an argument against relying purely on personal responsibility to solve the problem. Simply punishing people and expecting them to learn enough about the consequences of drug use to make the responsibile decision to stay away failed.

It turns out that sometimes to get people to a place where they can take full personal responsibility, it requires giving them some help.

We should strive to avoid removing personal responsibility and choice. The better job we do of providing the tools and support needed to make good decisions (i.e. ones the deciser will look back on without regret), the more respsibility we can easily allow.

For examole: If we do a good job of protecting amd treating gambling addicts, that facilitates opening up gambling to more people in more locations.

Your original comments were that you wanted to outlaw certain types of ads entirely, war-on-drugs style. Not "take care of people who might be adversely affected by certain types of ads", but rather "these ads shouldn't exist", even if (from the broader perspective) that approach could cause more harm than good.

This isn't about banning any type of ad, this is about removing a destructive way of targeting ads.

2. Banning ads targeted on personal info makes advertising a less effective/lucrative funding method for free services. This in turn increases the likelihood that such services will have to move to more regressive funding models, like subscriptions.

2. Citation please? The "progessivity" of ad supported services is debatable... especially when there aren't paid alternatives. Advertising is mostly a zero sum game so if a loss of tracking reduces effectiveness just means that other mediums that don't provide tracking wiol pick up market share.

I wish that my ads would be more relevant to what I like especially when it comes to music. What does youtube do? I search for a specific video because somebody told me it's there. I find it and sit through the whole length of 50+ mins and after I'm done navigate back to the YT frontpage. What do I see? A recommendation of the video I just watched. And it'll stay there for the next 6 weeks.

The other extreme for me is watching something from the other camp simply because I want to learn what they're being exposed to. In my bubble this means conservative stuff like videos of people debating Ayn Rand or a Jordan Peterson. And I swear I'll have to fight for the next 6 months to get similar shit off my timeline. In fact it's easier to throw myself into the rabbit hole of watching Foucault, Zizek, Philosophy genre and fighting my way into content that is dominated by the likes of Tucker Carlson (and what used to be Alex Jones, Brietbart and others) than it is to shed the conservative label that YT has filed me under. And with conservative I mean seriously questionable stuff like Q-anon, climate change denying, cray-cray type of things.

Because of this I now have different accounts for when I want to see the other side of the coin/polarization.

Not sure if I should be blaming YT/Google with this since society is so polarized that the algorithm just reflects that reality. But it's not like the algo hasn't played a major role in creating this dystopian reality in the first place.

I work in a different industry with its own issues and impacts on the society and the environment. I try not to think about it and even look at the positive things to gloss over the bad impact.

Now they are still doing that, but they have compounded the awfulness, because now they track where you are visiting and push more of those ads in your eyeline. Switched device, tough, the ads do too. The advertiser now also knows who looked at the ad, where they came from to see the ad, where the left to after they saw the ad. And then what they did for the next 2 weeks, so now they can make sure their ad is in front of your eyes whenever they want because they tracked your browsing habits.

Advertising was bad before, now it is insidious tracking and monitoring of users, under the pretense of advertising. /rant

My guess is that offline advertising has become cheaper and so they do more of it.

I live out in the country now. There are no outdoor ads here. I like it.

(The local weekly paper is called The Advertiser: an apt name, for it’s about ¾ ads. But I don’t look at it. My life is basically completely ad-free except when I go down to Melbourne.)

Some of the ads are hilarious. Some are for the services that are not common in the USA. Nintendo has some where they add in a trivia Q&A, the format being, Question->Ad->Answer and I usually find them interesting and I'm often happy to learn about whatever new Nintendo game they are showing off. Often there are ads for theater plays, concerts, museum events that I only find out about because I saw them on the train.

I also like some of the campaigns where they decorate an entire station or the entire train, the entire car.

Did you read the section starting from "This model has some major drawbacks from a privacy perspective"?

Anyway one thing I haven't seen mentioned yet about ads is that it encourages the unrestrained growth of ad space itself. There are just a billion articles on the internet written for the sole purpose of grabbing your attention and selling it. A lot of these sites have no real value, one of each ("How do I do X") on the internet would be more than enough. A lot of them ought to just be headlines that I can skip ("Man Utd interested in a teenager" would in the old days just say the guy's name).

The real argument against the article is that the calculus of paywall vs ads is not quite as straightforward as proposed. Either mode of operation has reflexive influence on what the internet looks like, and that's maybe where to dig deeper for an argument. How do the different options encourage different interests to behave?

So it’s hardly a surprise to me that people see it as ok for Google to use their information to provide them a service like routing, but disapprove of their using that data to enable an industry they see as harmful. I don’t think the problem is exclusively that Google makes money but rather that they make money as the kingpin of an industry most people feel negatively impacts their lives.

The opposing view would call "harmful" downright hysterical in the same way teens would nigh universally roll eyes at Tipper Gore's claims of music as harmful or Jack Chick's anything.

As for claims that the effort and money at Google could be spent in less harmful ways? No it couldn't, not the money they received - except as operating as a take the money and run scam which hardly qualifies as less harm as an instant zeroing of account values. The "harm" is why they got the money in the first place. You have to give the people paying money what they want to keep receiving money to get what you need to fulfill the demands.

Now, if Google spun off a non-profit foundation to offer those services for free without Ads, more people might accept trusting them with all that personal info.

friend unsure about her marriage.. getting ads to sell her wedding ring via fbook.. they divorced 2 months later. Guess what the first thing she did was?

A friend's father.. gambling addiction and an android phone - sleeps on the streets and eats via dumpsters, still keeps that addictive android device running.

Google sending data on people to fusion centers.. maybe none of those people were ever hurt by that - or the sharing of info from location data dumps, or the vids from nest cams.. I would assume there is a probability that at least one person was hurt when actions via gun toting state came knocking on at least one door, maybe more - and that stuff 100% coming from collection of data.

Just because journalists aren't interviewing these people to see if they were hurt, does not mean it's not happening.

I have no way to opt people out of alcohol ads.. I've seen them so I know others have.. does a sale on the new pink-liqour at 10am lead someone to drink out of juice boxes before noon at a kid's soccer practice? I can't say for sure.. it's just a coincidence they are drinking the new advertised thing - maybe it was an ad on the liqour store window that did it - there won't be hard evidence there.

I can think of more, but I know these are small data points from here. I'm glad you have not witnessed such things.

- Are you suggesting that your friend got divorced so that she could sell her ring, because an ad told her she could sell her ring? I doubt that was the straw that broke the camels back.

- The android phone has utility beyond it's addictiveness. Yes homeless people need a phone.

- Re fusion centers: ads targeting data is a relatively shitty surveillance too, the three letter agencies have much better ways of collecting this data.

- Targeted alcohol advertising I'll agree is an issue, but if you're an alcoholic, you can't really escape the ubiquity of alcohol everywhere.

I think the adverse privacy impact of targeted advertising is pretty overblown, but it so happens that ad targeting is so effective it has the illusion of being surveillant. The actual data being collected is anonymized and not personal.

when trying to cater to folks who struggled with such, indeed the options were limited for dining out.. IHop and waffle bouse two of the options I recall.

I suspect there may different rules for different jurisdictions/markets which might explain differences in your experiences.

The ring thing - I think it was the straw that broke the camels back honestly.. and hey that might have been a good thing - it certainly wasn't the two-ton elephant on top - but I do think it was the thing that made an easy / quick escape possible - maybe that's a good thing - some religious folks may feel otherwise - I'm on the fence about it - but it does point to a weird thing that probably should not be happening with social network data imho.

the fusion centers / requests for locations / emails / search history - all other data.. I agree ads are shitty surveillance generally - however the mass amounts of data being collected to make the ads more valuable - the location data, the emails, the search history - all of that has been quite valuable in many cases from what I have seen on the news..

when it's a murderous ex lover people may cheer - but how much reporting is done on the requests for data that just pry into people's lives and cause them to lose time and money and threats of being shot - that don't go to trials / convictions / wrong person...

so this is more of a reply to the parent comment to consider about harm from mass surveillance they could not think of any.. well there are some - and really many.. certainly many more than my weak top of the head considerations. Not just specifically ads themselves.

I think there are some places where alcohol ads on billboards are banned - and part of me thinks that's a good thing, the free speech absolutist in me says it's not.. but if we ban nudes or gore or whatever on billboards cuz public safety - well sadly alcohol and tobacco probably should also be included there - and gambling.. and addictive technology.. I mean maybe not in Vegas.. I dunno. I hate the alcohol ads on the tables at restaurants and the immediate upsell by waiters/resses with great drink specials.. they should ask if you want a "dry" experience at the table imho.

I agree targeted ads are very good in many ways - I just think people should get more control to 'stop showing X ad cuz Y (already bought it / decided I hate it / have an addiction / whatever) - turn off all targeted cuz it's a shared device and fam is seeing presents.. whatever..

I must disagree about the data being collected though - sure a third party advertiser on yahoo may not be collecting a ton of info about someone - but google does collect a ton of personally identifiable info including emails, gps / locations traveled, search history and much more I am sure.

That data can be used to harm people, by the state, by divorce attorneys.. one could say the hernandez location data led to him being jailed and suicided - I think most would argue that catching him with tech was a good thing - but the demanding of data from big G is not always used for such things, and it can be abused or just used to fish expedition into lives.

There are many ways to harm using the data collected.. oh yeah - the insurance fraud people in new york demanding all stored info about people while they fished for people pretending to be disabled.. I mean, doing good was thier goal - but some people's privacy was slayed that were not doing fraud - is that harm? People seem to lean towards certain other pics of people being shared re-harms victims - so I dunno.

It's not just the ads - it's the other data collected to enable highly targeted ads that can and is used to harm.

How many arrests have been made using google data? How many investigations to peer into lives that did not lead to an arrest? How many give us all cell phones near location X during Y-Z time so we can look into them.. How many times has google taken info and sent it voluntarily to agencies with guns? I'd love to see that in a transparency report.

I know both F and G occasionally push back in requests from doj - but in the end - they give up data on a regular basis even if they ask to limit scope sometimes - and certainly there are times when harm comes to a target at least once I would guess.

Not trying to make a strong case for digital ad companies evil - just trying to point to parent commenter that there are examples in the news of harm done using the data - and suggesting many more examples exist - we just don't hear about them all. Admittedly - percentage wise - it's probably .0000002 percent or something, unless we get into addictions and shopping addictions - then higher - but it's not like the intent by the companies is to do evil always - it's just that the tools do enable it imho.

Not to mention targeted ads just don't work for me. They always show crap I'd never use, within my domain of knowledge, and never show interesting things outside my domain. Overall I'm more than glad to block ads because I gain nothing from them. They are a liability. Anonymization I don't believe in, what's the difference between my SSN and a MD5 of my SSN?

https://www.intomore.com/you/facebook-ads-outed-me/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2018/12/12/dear-tec...

https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2020/4/9/21204425/targeted-ads...

https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-lets-advertisers..., https://www.propublica.org/article/hud-sues-facebook-housing..., https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-advertising-disc...

https://themarkup.org/citizen-browser/2021/04/29/credit-card...

https://themarkup.org/news/2021/04/13/how-facebooks-ad-syste...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Ana...

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-03-27/ad-scamme...

etc. etc. etc.

Links 2 and 3 are concerning. The FB and Google do have a way to stop that though - you can click an ad and say it doesn't interest you or you don't like it, that signal is insanely strong and the platforms will turn off the spigot.

The rest is not actual harm to people, its people concerned about the idea of targeting being harmful. Cambridge Analytica was a laughable scandal btw, absolutely no one was actually impacted by it.

via (Ads Are Impersonating Government Websites in Google Results, Despite Ban - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27150407 )

Targeted ads supports the status quo instead of exposing everyone to stuff they might want.

I don’t see irony there!

And there are also a lot of design questions remaining that Google hasn't answered or is not sure about.

Eg. How will ad bidding work with FLoC?

Finally, and most importantly as it relates to this post - Google pays an enormous amount of money to employees to spend their time and intelligence on building better profiling tools. Building profiling tools is something ethically questionable because of the damage that can be done.

I don't work on FLoC, but why wouldn't bidding handle it just like any other signal? For example, here's where it is in the OpenRTB docs: https://developers.google.com/authorized-buyers/rtb/openrtb-... An advertiser could take it into account in considering whether they want to bid and how much.

I think I have an idea. So by visiting site A, A gets your cohort and now there is somewhere a "central store" or register. Using that A can now do ad bids for that entire cohort to reach others.

But where is that central store? Is Google running that?

Might also work fundamentally different.

Some entity might choose to run a "store" like you're describing, but there's no reason there would only need to be one.

It looks to me like Chrome is proposing a low-level feature that anyone can build more sophisticated products on top of.

Sure, your use cases. Not other people's though, and we don't get a choice.

The Internet Archive is a great example of this. A non-profit that relies neither on advertising revenue nor subscription revenue from individual users, and instead thrives on income for providing archival services and grants from organisations that recognise the public good it is providing.