Advertising is an intentionally complex system so that companies can clip the ticket at multiple stages throughout the process. Google should be broken up, but the whole ad tech system needs to go into the bin if these problems are going to ever get fixed.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/augustinefou/2021/02/15/how-muc...
> Three industry studies showed less than 50 cents of every dollar goes to showing ads.
Every penny of what is spent goes to showing ads, by definition. However, that doesn't mean that every penny goes to the publisher. The advertiser may look at the 60 cents being spent on everybody between them and the publisher and say "hey, I'm getting ripped off! I could be paying 4 cents/CPM instead of 10 cents/CPM!" but each middleman (usually) adds some kind of value to increase acquisition rate. For example:
* Identity providers who have lists of user IDs that belong to "high CTR" audiences (users more likely to click ads)
* Geo providers who tell the bidders where the User's location is so that they can target locally-focused advertisements to them
* User intent plugins, "abandoned cart" retargeting, product recommendation providers, etc. who look at user interaction events and build profiles of people who can be retargeted
* Exchanges which conduct auctions across multiple DSPs to get a better price for publishers while also making more inventory available to advertisers
At one company I worked for, we allocated impressions ahead of time. Based on prior years' data and viewer ratings of TV shows, we could predict the future, determining how many viewers a video or TV show would get, and then selling the advertising inventory based on that prediction. That shit ain't free!
All of these things are designed to increase your acquisition rate from x% to y%, where x > y. Sure, you could just pay $5,000 a month to a website to show a banner ad directly, but a larger % of your money would be wasted on users who are utterly uninterested in your banner.
> * Geo providers who tell the bidders where the User's location is so that they can target locally-focused advertisements to them
> * User intent plugins, "abandoned cart" retargeting, product recommendation providers, etc. who look at user interaction events and build profiles of people who can be retargeted
That's horrible! In a better world such practices would be made illegal and those involved would be hung, drawn, and quartered.
I guess this is a big and probably unbridgeable divide, some people think this sort of thing is obviously evil and others, like me, actually prefer it very strongly over a world where all advertising is untargeted but there is massively more of it because it's so much less valuable...
However, mine and many other folks' position is not preferring untargeted intrusive annoying ads over targeted intrusive annoying ads. It's preferring almost zero ads with maybe the rare, non intrusive easily avoidable ad on certain appropriate websites[1]. That is why we aggressively use ad blockers and go to great lengths to avoid the status quo.
[1] a shopping website having a _single_ banner on the home page announcing an ongoing sale for HP laptops is OK. However, if I search for lenovo laptops and I see a HP laptop as the first "sponsored" result....(Looking at you amazon).
And about tracking, I absolutely don't want my librarian running to my travel agent telling him I recently looked up france travel guides. The digital equivalent of this happens daily to everybody. It's simply a no-no for me, there can never be a justification for it.
The fact is that if you ban these two classes of practices, the whole of ad tech comes crashing down. I hope everyday for this to happen.
And so you're paying for the content you're reading as well?
im not talking about piracy here - I pay for multiple streaming services and yt music provided the resulting experience is ad free.
But ads on your news/shopping website? Regardless of if I pay or not I'm gonna get upsells and ads. That simply does not fly. In any case, intrusive ads are a no-no. If your platform utilizes intrusive ads, I have no remorse for any loss incurred on your part.
>> Regardless of if I pay or not I'm gonna get upsells and ads.
I'll say it again for your ad-tech addled brain only rivalling vomit-inducing people like prabhakar raghavan:
If there was an option to have zero, zero, even minutely intrusive ads/tracking, then I will be willing to pay a price for it. If this is not an option, then I have zero remorse for your wasted efforts/loss of revenue.
Tell me _one_ news website today offering this feature? I will pay for it.
https://help.nytimes.com/hc/en-us/articles/360001712553-Ads-...
> Advertising remains a critical part of our business model of supporting independent journalism, as such, we do not offer ad-free subscriptions.
Even the ones that _do_ have a half-decent, "ad-free", paid option, if you actually pay and visit their website, you will be sure to see ads related events in the network tab. Disqualified.
For the case of tracking, like I (again) stated above: if my library goes over to my travel agency telling them what travel guides I have been looking at, I have zero remorse for the library's revenue stream, even if they satisfy all of the requirements above (such as offering a completely intrusive-ad-free paid subscription).
If there are alternatives that don't indulge in these completely unethical practices, I would love to, and I do, use them. However, there are exactly zero news websites like that, so it leaves me with no choice but to "steal" whenever I read an article.
Off-topic, but I can't help snort at:
> independent journalism
Finally, if your company ever does something like using Wi-fi SSIDs as an alternative when I intentionally disable location services in my phone, then it goes in the bin. No recourse, sorry.
This is already the case for most newspapers. Helas, most users prefer the free but ad-ridled version.
> Even the ones that _do_ have a half-decent, "ad-free", paid option, if you actually pay and visit their website, you will be sure to see ads related events in the network tab. Disqualified.
You should report this to the publishers. This is usually and genuinely not what they would like to happen if they provide a paid version.
> For the case of tracking, like I (again) stated above: if my library goes over to my travel agency telling them what travel guides I have been looking at, I have zero remorse for the library's revenue stream, even if they satisfy all of the requirements above (such as offering a completely intrusive-ad-free paid subscription).
Most of the time the data itself will never be sold. What happens is that a brand or ad agency will buy pre-filtered traffic or ask the publisher to operate a campaign on specific user segments. This means that the data never leaves the site that collected it.
There are of course external companies that become third-party data providers as a business model like credit card companies or telecoms. But even then, data providers try to protect their own data by operating campaigns themselves rather than selling the data.
> If there are alternatives that don't indulge in these completely unethical practices, I would love to, and I do, use them. However, there are exactly zero news websites like that, so it leaves me with no choice but to "steal" whenever I read an article.
Just as an added piece of context, due to publishers surviving (and I really mean it) thanks to advertisement income, they also have little in-house tech talent that can actually make sur that things like "absolutely 0-tracking if it's a paying user" is correctly implemented.
Do what you will with this information.
> Finally, if your company ever does something like using Wi-fi SSIDs as an alternative.
Only mobile apps might have the SSID (and only with granular user consent on app install). Websites do not have access to this information.
I just gave an example of the NYTs stance on the position. Can you find me a newspaper that doesn't say that?
> Pre-filtered segments
Which party has the information is not of relevance. That any one has it at all is already a problem. I don't care if it's advertiser sending the newspaper ["football shoes"] and the newspaper matching it with the fact that I'm interested in ["football"]. If I pay, I want none of that at all. Not even one side of the process should take place.
> Only mobile apps
Yes yes.. it was an example. Again, stop being obtuse and missing the point. You and I both know the extent to which browser fingerprinting and other techniques are used. Not to mention the larger along the news websites also have mobile apps where they employ similar techniques.