Adtech is built on a privacy fault line

https://iapp.org/news/a/a-view-from-dc-adtech-is-built-on-a-privacy-fault-line/

by iamacyborg • 3 years ago

127 169 3 years ago

JohnFen10• 3 years ago

Without major changes to its operating model, each day the targeted advertising infrastructure is inching closer to collapse.

Boy, I sure hope so. Adtech is a horrible, abusive industry that deserves to be buried and forgotten.

mrweasel3• 3 years ago

I feel like it was bound to happen. There has been a huge momentum behind the online ad industry for almost 20 years. The results are questionable, but we've just kept moving forward. It's a lot like the dotcom boom in some sense, there's now a huge number of people working in advertising who honestly knows very little about advertising. They know a lot about ad-spend, how to click around in Adwords, SEO and putting trackers on websites, but not running a successful advertising campaign. They've almost broke the internet with their shit, certain categories are now completely gone from some search engines, replaced by ads, poorly written blogs and SEO junk.

On LinkedIn I follow a few of these people, people I know from working in e-commerce years ago. They have no glue about what's happening. They see the thing they've worked on for 15 years fall apart, but won't accept any of the blame. They blame Apple, the EU, anyone but themselves. They don't see any of the damage that they caused. The internet and it's users is something to extract value from, not something that holds any value on it's own in their minds.

It's time that the online ad business get a reset. Ads will still be important, but the way they are managed and implemented needs to be adjusted.

speed_spread• 3 years ago

Adtech will not collapse because it is too useful as a surveillance tool. State actors will subsidize the ad industry as much as needed to ensure that the user activity data stays collected by the private sector in countries outside their realm of network control.

smoldesu• 3 years ago

The internet and it's users is something to extract value from, not something that holds any value on it's own in their minds.

When in the 21st century hasn't this been true?

The internet is a commodity you pay for from an ISP. They control your traffic and log it to whatever extent they desire. Site operators choose to allow or deny visitors based on arbitrary things; membership, adblock, browser choice, etc. If you don't provide enough value to the site operator (or alternatively, cost too much to host) then advertisement becomes inevitable. Even your browser was monetized and weaponized since Microsoft realized they could pack-in web clients. Now everyone is being abused by some corporate benefactor.

The online ad business is a reflection of how every first world government has let FAANG roll all over them and consequentially exploit their citizens. The only way we "reset" the ad industry is by bullwhipping Big Tech until they recognize your freedom as a computer owner.

iamacyborg4• 3 years ago

there's now a huge number of people working in advertising who honestly knows very little about advertising. They know a lot about ad-spend, how to click around in Adwords, SEO and putting trackers on websites, but not running a successful advertising campaign.

You’ve just described most of the marketing folks I’ve worked with for the last decade.

blacksmith_tb• 3 years ago

I wonder if shutting off the firehose means that the adtech companies will try to eke out a living riffing off all the old data they managed to acquire about all of us up to now, so we'll get even less relevant spam, tied to what we were shopping for years ago. Someone needs to build a GPT adblocker that just recognizes "this seems to be trying to sell you something, hiding now..."

jamiequint4• 3 years ago

What do you think pays for the free and open internet? Or are you just well off enough that you don't have to care?

pc86• 3 years ago

The internet isn't free if you have to give up your privacy for invasive ads and tracking in order to read a recipe on a blog.

ifdefdebug• 3 years ago

I pay a whopping 80 euro per month for my free and open internet to our ISP, one fiber and two mobile devices.

bigbillheck• 3 years ago

Sounds like they'll have to figure out something else.

JohnFen10• 3 years ago

I think it's a stretch to call the larger web "free and open" at this point. But there was a day, before ads, that it certainly was!

kstrauser• 3 years ago

I want less relevant ads. If I continually saw ads for, say, a new Raspberry Pi accessory, I might start considering it even though I don’t need it. No amount of ad bombardment would ever get me to buy feminine hygiene products.

classified• 3 years ago

Ad value is not intrinsically tied to the extraction of personal data.

It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.

dspillett4• 3 years ago

Adtech isn't even that successful as far as I can see.

While I block a lot of internet stalkers via PiHole at home and so forth I'm sure a lot about me and my activity gets through to the data hoarders. So then why has a lot of my recent advertising on Facebook in recent days been for feminine health products? For example: why would I, a middle-aged, long single (with no particular plans to change that state), child-less man, be interesting in a device that claims to help reduce period cramps?

Most of the other advertising I see ATM is wall-to-wall Temu. Even if I would ever have ordered something from them I likely won't now as they've successfully got in my nerves.

The only advertising that has worked on me in recent memory is a sponsored segment in a podcast (an event relevant to the subject matter of that podcast that I may book into), and getting that advert in front of me didn't involve tracking my movements wherever I go online & in the real world.

m463• 3 years ago

The ads you see aren't for you. Companies selling devices to reduce cramps bid to get to your eyeball because you (poorly) fit some demographic they want to reach.

The companies you are interested in - well, they already reach your wallet just fine without banner ads.

What gets me is what happens when you try to get a hotel, a plane ticket, a rental car, an emergency plumber, a tow truck or a ride somewhere.

jklinger4107• 3 years ago

Adtech isn't even that successful as far as I can see.

And then

While I block a lot of internet stalkers via PiHole at home

People who don't buy things after clicking on ads, who block all the ads they see, who are completely immune and hate ads, are not really qualified to talk about whether they work or not.

Not only is this pure anecdote, and the billions spent on advertising every year as a glaring counterpoint to your comment, but you are obviously biased against the concept.

This whole site is rabidly anti-advertising. Like we should all still be using terminal BBS and VIM because they are "better." These posts are so tiring.

IggleSniggle3• 3 years ago

Like we should all still be using terminal BBS and VIM because they are "better."

Well, to be fair...tabs ARE objectively better than spaces for tabulating a coherent hierarchy.

...and terminal BBS and vim are better.

dspillett4• 3 years ago

You have made some significantly incorrect assumptions there:

1. That I block things everyehere. “PiHole at home” does not cover all my browsing, far from it.

2. That “PiHole at home” blocks everything at home. Again, far from it. Many wish it were that effective.

3. That “PiHole at home” blocks all the data tracked by the likes of Facebook in-app. It is massively ineffective against that, and a few other techniques.

4. That I am, in fact, anti-advert. I'm anti being stalked around most of my life which does not have to be the same thing. Unfortunately blocking the latter also blocks the former because currently they are the same thing, or at least very closely overlapped. I don't use sponsor-block, because the segments that it blocks are not based on stalking but are often relevant to the information being consumed (not always of course: if I'm watching a summary or an IP related legal case the relevance of, for instance, a tank based casual game is at best dubious). I'm also anti-other-irritating patterns (auto-playing audio, auto-playing video, eating CPU and draining my battery when mobile, etc.) which are also endemic to advertising and like the tracking they do not need to be.

5. That companies paying billions for advertising means that the stalking works (as the old joke says: “Eat shit, 136×10¹⁵ flies can't all be wrong!”. The adtech industry is grossly disingenuous in both directions: to us when they tell us they value our privacy and to their customers when they make exaggerated claims about how effective their huge personal data dataset is as getting extra sales for any arbitrary products/services, compared to just advertising in places relevant to the product/service (or just carpet bombing our senses, the method apparently being employed by Temu ATM). The companies paying into this have little choice because the vast majority of adtech is doing exactly the same things and making pretty much the same claims. Everyone in adtech does it because if they didn't they'd lose sales to those who do and convince ad-space buyers that it makes a significant difference.

are not really qualified to talk about whether they work or not

Some might question whether a person making five incorrect sweeping assumptions in three sentences, is really qualified to talk about whatever it is that they are talking about :)

roland35• 3 years ago

I think us pihole users are a tiny tiny minority! Even in my household my wife doesn't use the pihole I set up since it occasionally (maybe 1%?) does not work with some websites and apps. I have no problem going in and disabling it for a minute but it is a hassle for her and I understand.

Adtech is still very lucrative even with a few of us blockers

tootie• 3 years ago

Advertising and ad targeting is a numbers game. Conversion rates for most campaigns are very low. On order of 1%. Running a highly targeted campaign that boosts conversion from 0.9% to 1.4% would be considered a huge win even though it's still invisible to 98.6% of people. And sometimes it's about the ads that don't hit you. Not wasting ad spend on people who aren't in your addressable market at all.

jamiequint4• 3 years ago

Ad value is not intrinsically tied to the extraction of personal data

Ad value may not be tied to the extraction of personal data, but it's unambiguously tied to the use of it. Obviously more targeted ads perform better.

johnnyworker• 3 years ago

Yes, but existing ads perform infinitely better than ads that don't exist. Hence "fault line". Maybe the ground just below the volcano is very fertile, but in long run, you don't want to live there.

Without major changes to its operating model, each day the targeted advertising infrastructure is inching closer to collapse. Those who build and maintain the adtech metropolis now face a decision: shore up defenses around their strategic interests with slight tweaks and creative legal theories, buying themselves as much time as possible, or rebuild before the crash.

minsc_and_boo3• 3 years ago

As long as there are imperfect markets, there is demand from sellers for advertising to do targeting.

If the goal is to remove advertising, then it may be better to set up mechanisms for consumers to share information with sellers, rather than play whack-a-mole with adtech.

convolvatron• 3 years ago

are you suggesting I should..publish my preferences so companies can decide if they want to pitch to me? or that I should just show up ready to hear whatever they have to say? really confused here.

mrweasel3• 3 years ago

Obviously more targeted ads perform better.

Do we honestly know if that's true in any meaningful way? It also depends on what you mean by targeted. If it's advertising power tools to someone who's clearly searching things related to DIY, sure, make sense. If we mean: "Push this product to men between 30 and 40, who works in construction and have 2 kids" then I'd love to see an A/B test that suggested that a broader campaign isn't cheaper and equally effective. You're cutting of a lot of potential customers when you're targeting is to narrow and I don't think that's accounted for in general.

mumblemumble3• 3 years ago

We probably don't. Empirically demonstrating the effectiveness of an advertising campaign is notoriously difficult and expensive and few people in the adtech industry have any interest in paying for that kind of research.

See, for example: https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/1963405.1963431

There was a point in an episode of the podcast You're Wrong About where one of the hosts made a comment about how much you can learn about people just by observing what kinds of things we don't require evidence to believe.

I think that the effectiveness of tracking-based advertising might be one of those things. It seems to be tied to an assumption that, where data is concerned, bigger is always better. Ironically, statisticians and philosophers of science have already known that this isn't actually true for about a century now.

jklinger4107• 3 years ago

then I'd love to see an A/B test that suggested that a broader campaign isn't cheaper and equally effective

Do you think no one has done this?

chankstein38• 3 years ago

Especially when I block ads everywhere but my mom loves to screenshot things and send them to me lol it's entirely possible a 50-60s baker living in a different household can affect my spending habits as an engineer.

Aerroon4• 3 years ago

Something you want to consider is language. If I open up Youtube without being logged in 6 of the 10 recommended videos at the top are in a language I cannot understand. I don't see how untargeted ads would be much different in that regard.

Another factor to consider is location. Very few services/products that are advertised globally will be available where you actually are.

mocamoca2• 3 years ago

There is a shelf-space issue.

Let's assume most of high-quality ad-spaces are available for "broader campaigns". Once each small business broadcasts ads here, they will compete for space. Price of space-unit goes up.

Then some ad-space-seller opens Pandora's box: "hey I can allow you to narrow the audience by location targeting. Each unit is more expensive but conversion rate is higher so you will end up with a better margin overall"

yjftsjthsd-h• 3 years ago

Obviously more targeted ads perform better.

If that's true at all, it depends on the targeting. Consider the classic "I bought a toilet seat, so now Amazon gives me loads of suggestions to buy more of them". I remain convinced that lots of ads are poorly or incorrectly targeted with the results that the additional information didn't actually help them and may have even hurt them.

jklinger4107• 3 years ago

I remain convinced that lots of ads are poorly or incorrectly targeted with the results that the additional information didn't actually help them and may have even hurt them.

There are certainly poorly targeted ads. Not sure what that has to do with the technology, though.

leptons2• 3 years ago

I worked at an Adtech company for a short while. It was the most toxic place I've ever worked. Beyond how they treated their employees, they were giddy with excitement about making a deal with a large hotel chain that gave them access to smart tvs so they could listen in and "capture data" from people staying at the hotel. When I realized what kind of people were running the place I quickly found another job. I had no doubt they would have used information gathered about me to try to control me as an employee, so I left before they could try.

Given_47• 3 years ago

That’s wild. I wonder if those people were just so immersed that they never actually took a step back and considered the larger picture? Cuz anecdotally ik some advertisers that don’t consider themselves “advertisers” but rather their ads as a piece of art and then expressing their creativity.

Honestly not sure if I would feel better if it was some heuristic blocking a true realization of their actions or just classifying them as evil lol

ikekkdcjkfke• 3 years ago

It's the same vibe as wallstreet bloodsuckers 2007 making money off people getting thrown out of their homes

latchkey• 3 years ago

Same. One time my boss (the head of engineering) got so pissed at his cousin, that he hired through nepotism, that he punched a filing cabinet. It was a wild sight.

secondcoming4• 3 years ago

I've worked at an Adtech company. It was great. The people were fantastic and diverse. The actual 'tech' part of Adtech is actually really interesting and also challenging.

leptons2• 3 years ago

I've worked at an Adtech company. It was great. The people were fantastic and diverse.

Thanks for sharing your anecdote, but the same "fantastic and diverse" people you worked with could still be doing morally and ethically questionable things to get their paychecks.

The actual 'tech' part of Adtech is actually really interesting and also challenging.

Atomic bombs are also "interesting and challenging" to make, that doesn't mean that using them is a good thing.

mumblemumble3• 3 years ago

Does personally targeted advertising even add that much value over contextual advertising?

I occasionally click on AdWords ads, or look up a company I see on an ad in the subway station, or follow up on Internet ads that I know are contextually targeted. But I generally have no idea how AdSense ads came to me.

Amusingly, since I started making an effort to improve my Spanish last year, my partner's started getting a lot of ads in a language she doesn't speak inserted into her English-language podcast episodes.

sethammons3• 3 years ago

20 years ago, marketing classes taught you that you don't get to know all your ad impressions that will expose you to your potential customer. However, they did studies and people needed to see a logo some six times before it stood out.

When online marketing blew up, marketers were lured in by the belief that they were getting all those previously untrackable impressions. They still aren't, but there is a big segment they can now track. At that point, I feel it became an optimization problem where they cant escape the local optimum. They can't even imagine not having the not-entirely-valid data.

FWIW, I feel that non targeted ads make so much more sense. If I'm reading a tech blog, I actually may want ads from a tech service. I don't need my wife's browsing habits to show me dresses.

skydhash3• 3 years ago

The whole blu-ray.com website is pretty much ads. But I don't mind and I often visit the site to see what movies has been released and read the review to see if it's worth watching (production wise). Goodreads also is ads, because the description is written to appeal to you. I don't want to see blu-ray ads when I'm shopping for clothes, and I don't want to see books ads when I'm buying electronic gears (unless the book is about the gears). So yeah, ads can be targeted. It's just that companies now feel entitled to your attention 24/7 that the whole adtech spac is what it is now.

RandallBrown• 3 years ago

My instagram and Facebook ads are almost entirely outdoor gear, golf equipment, and things for new parents.

Considering I spend most weekends hiking/backpacking, I golf somewhat regularly with my friends, and I'm expecting a baby in a few months, it's pretty accurate.

I have bought several things from these ads in the past and will probably continue to do so.

iamacyborg4• 3 years ago

Does personally targeted advertising even add that much value over contextual advertising?

In theory it makes it cheaper for the advertiser as they can target individuals on cheaper sites.

In practice what it’s done is absolutely decimate quality publishers and lead everyone into clickbait.

Barraketh7• 3 years ago

There seems to be a really strong disdain on HN for AdTech in general, which I think is misguided, and comes fundamentally from a "web consumer" mentality. I think that it would be valuable to reframe the question from the producers point of view: 1) I am a niche small business - how do I let people know that I exist? 2) I run a website and would like to monetize it - how can I get paid for the content that I produce?

The ad-tech solution is actually quite elegant in theory - if you can show ads only to the people to whom they are relevant, then, as a small business you can let people know you exist without blowing your ad budget, and, as a content producer, the more valuable an ad-view is, the more you can charge for it.

The current movement to avoid tracking is an extremely powerful centralizing force. The large platforms know a lot about you already - Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple, etc. So, in a way, "we're not going to let AdTech track users" = "we're going to make only ads on large platforms effective", which means that both content producers and advertisers will prefer them, and then people ask "where did the old internet go"?

The AdTech system isn't ideal, but it would be great if the people who criticize it came up with something other than "fuck the small businesses and content producers".

rebeccaskinner• 3 years ago

1) I am a niche small business - how do I let people know that I exist? 2) I run a website and would like to monetize it - how can I get paid for the content that I produce?

The thing is, this isn’t my problem. The fact that someone wants to market their business doesn’t entitle them to my attention.

brandall10• 3 years ago

If you're not paying for a product in which you see the ad, it is your problem though, no? What's in the ad space is immaterial, just that is how the product is monetized.

ryandrake• 3 years ago

That's really the root of it. Unless I am actively searching for the exact something your small business offers, I don't care whether your business exists. I don't want to know about it. I don't want you to "reach" me. Your ability or inability to let me know that you exist is not my problem.

My browsing to a website (or watching a TV show, or driving along a road with billboards, or filling up my gas tank) does not entitle anyone to my attention.

brickteacup3• 3 years ago

doesn’t entitle them to my attention

if you're looking at someone's website then yes they are entitled to your attention. what gave you the idea that you're entitled to consume for free content that other people payed to produce and host?

Barraketh7• 3 years ago

Well kinda. The business wanting to market themselves certainly isn't your problem, but the "how does the website monetize itself" is exactly your problem, or rather, it's part of the interaction between the owner of the website you're visiting and you.

You could say "oh, they should just charge for their content", and some definitely do. But the ad model allows for really interesting price discrimination in terms of "who pays for the content". So, if someone buys say.. a Tesla through a website, that conversion subsidizes a million poor kids who don't have to pay anything. In some ways the ad-supported model is the most progressive way to pay content creators - the people who end up paying are the people who spend the most money online.

Analemma_• 3 years ago

and comes a fundamentally from a "web consumer" mentality.

Because literally all of us are web consumers, so we're hostile to things that are hostile to web consumers. This is like saying there's really strong disdain for leaded gasoline which comes from a "human being breathing air" mentality.

I think that it would be valuable to reframe the question from the producers point of view: 1) I am a niche small business - how do I let people know that I exist? 2) I run a website and would like to monetize it - how can I get paid for the content that I produce?

I don't fucking care. This isn't my problem, and I'm really annoyed that we've build a giant world-spanning surveillance apparatus out of people trying to make it my problem.

pxc• 3 years ago

> and comes a fundamentally from a "web consumer" mentality.
Because literally all of us are web consumers

Exactly. GP might as well have written

The problem is that you're considering your own interests. I think it would be useful for you to consider my interests.

Aerroon4• 3 years ago

How many videos on vine do you watch these days?

How the companies, where you consume content, monetize is very much relevant to you. You have a choice though - you can choose to not watch the content and you won't get advertised to.

humanistbot• 3 years ago

1) I am a niche small business - how do I let people know that I exist? 2) I run a website and would like to monetize it - how can I get paid for the content that I produce?

You don't have a right to violate my privacy in exchange for this.

Barraketh7• 3 years ago

I think this is a genuinely interesting point, and I wish that we as a society had a more nuanced discussion about what that right is. AdTech is largely anonymous in the same way that crypto / web3 is anonymous - it shuttles around cookies / identifiers, but largely does NOT care about any information that is actually personally identifying. If the laws were regulating storage / transmission of information that is actually personally-identifying (addresses, emails, names, etc), that would be much more reasonable in my mind.

amelius5• 3 years ago

Ads are wrong because:

1. They nudge people towards buying stuff they wouldn't otherwise buy. This causes a tremendous amount of real waste.

2. Ads are a distraction. When I'm looking up something for work, don't bother me with ads, even if *you* think they are relevant. When I'm working, I'm not looking for a new job, or new pants.

3. On a fundamental level, ads work against the free market: not the best product wins, but the product with the biggest advertising budget.

And there are many more reasons ... Ads suck! And people working in ad-tech should be deeply ashamed!

secondcoming4• 3 years ago

You just demonstrated how advertising works.

charcircuit3• 3 years ago

They nudge people towards buying stuff they wouldn't otherwise buy.

It allows people to find things they value that they were not aware of before.

Ads are a distraction.

Yes, which is why apps need to design good ad experiences to balance monetization with user satisfaction.

On a fundamental level, ads work against the free market: not the best product wins, but the product with the biggest advertising budget.

If something really is the best product, why aren't they the one with the largest advertising budget?

elisbce• 3 years ago

Ads suck. But you know what's worse than Ads? Selfish people. If Google, YouTube and everywhere else starts asking you to pay high subscription fees for using their services, are you willing/going to pay? You looked up information for work, for life, for leisure, you spend hours online each day, gorging information and content for free. You even learned valuable things and made money using their services and information. And yet all you have to say is don't bother me while I'm leeching off your free content.

skydhash3• 3 years ago

The AdTech system isn't ideal, but it would be great if the people who criticize it came up with something other than "fuck the small businesses and content producers".

The thing is that people do hear about products and contents. Trailers are ads, products announcement are also ads. Sponsorship is ads. What people do not want is intrusive ads. It feels like someone going through my bedroom and bathroom, then talking to people about my underwear. Next, these people shout to me when I'm going to buy groceries. This is what the adtech is like nowadays.

So content creators, paywall your content and add sponsorship. Small businesses, announce your product and sponsor articles on relevant forums. But stop interrupting people when they're doing nothing that's relevant to you.

celestialcheese• 3 years ago

I don't get this. I find "passive" advertising like banners, mid-roll, etc so much easier to ignore/block/

The type of advertising that's invasive for me is the "sponsored content" or paid product placements, especially in movies. It feels like every big-budget movie I see these days is littered with "ads" for some car or electronics company. There's no way to block this, and sometimes its hard to tell if something is paid or just someones honest recommendation.

imchillyb2• 3 years ago

The AdTech system isn't ideal, but it would be great if the people who criticize it came up with something other than "fuck the small businesses and content producers".

Found the 'ad-guy...'

Look. We don't need to offer a solution in order to point out how broken adtheft is. They're stealing my time, my bandwidth, my cpu resources, my gpu resources, my memory resources, and my body's own motion by forcing me to click away or click gone or click click click.

Here's my solution: Take your ads and place them somewhere dark, moist, and smelly, preferably limited to your own person.

Barraketh7• 3 years ago

So, out my now 15+ year career, only about 4 were in AdTech, and I've been out of that game for more than 7 years. But fair enough - happy to play 'ad-guy' for the purposes of this discussion :)

I guess my main contention is that businesses really like ads. But that's usually ok - because it funds cool content! The majority of television historically was produced just to sell ads, but it still created awesome television. And if we make ads worse, well, the people who are gong to suffer are the businesses and the content creators. OR, like i mentioned above, we will just drive everyone to large platforms, which is essentially what's happening now.

Another way to frame the question - GDPR came out in 2016. Do you feel like the web is getting better?

tomjen32• 3 years ago

If you are a small business, sponsor a podcast relevant to the people you are targeting. I am still going to skip over you, but thats your best chance to get in front of people, and it involves zero privacy invasions.

bee_rider• 3 years ago

“What about small businesses” seemed like a better counter-argument during the previous round of ad tech, the kind of annoying flash pop ups that and third party JavaScript that only sometimes contained viruses.

Nowadays it is a major funding keystone of the attention economy, which is spreading propaganda and conspiracy theories, destabilizing governments. Propaganda spread over Facebook helped enable the Rohingya genocide. This isn’t a little annoying thing anymore.

JohnFen10• 3 years ago

and comes fundamentally from a "web consumer" mentality

Not for me, it doesn't, For me, it comes from an "I don't want to be spied on" mentality.

If the online ad world would do everything that they currently do, but actually leave me out of it when I tell them to, I wouldn't consider them to be evil. But not only don't they do that, they put a lot of time, effort, and money into actively working around the various defenses I put up against them.

I think that it would be valuable to reframe the question from the producers point of view

You're talking as if the problem is the ads themselves. It's not. It's the spying that's the problem.

The ad-tech solution is actually quite elegant in theory

I don't assert that it's not elegant. I assert that it's deeply unethical unless informed consent has been obtained from the people the data is being gathered from.

then people ask "where did the old internet go"?

People ask that right now, and adtech is one of the things that have killed it.

it would be great if the people who criticize it came up with something other than "fuck the small businesses and content producers".

Plenty of proven alternatives are brought up all the time. Even the IAPP article here mentions the strongest one: have ads, but don't target them based on data extracted from unwilling participants. Target them based on the context in which the ads appear.

Just like newspapers, magazines, TV, etc.

The adtech world doesn't want to do that because they can make even more money by being bastards, instead.

Barraketh7• 3 years ago

People ask that right now, and adtech is one of the things that have killed it.

I don't think this is actually true. When I think about the old internet vs new internet, a lot of it is about people running their own blogs / websites vs. platforms. And I think most of that is not really about ad-tech at all, but about the mechanisms of content and audience discovery. But the fact remains that if you want to say... publish videos of some kind, you are likely to make much more on YouTube vs uploading them to your own website, and that's at least partially because Google is able to show effective ads.

Target them based on the context in which the ads appear.

Possible, but in some cases significantly less effective. As I mentioned above, ad-tech comes with some very interesting progressive effects, where the people who spend the most money are the ones who end up paying the most in aggregate for content. An interesting example is luxury goods, which are both high-value and niche. If you run say... a news site, or something else that's general purpose, you probably don't want to be showing Rolex ads to everyone. But rich people still read news, and if you could target your Rolex ads to them, that basically subsidizes everyone else.

indymike• 3 years ago

There seems to be a really strong disdain on HN for AdTech in general, which I think is misguided, and comes fundamentally from a "web consumer" mentality.

I think the disdain is against surveillance and invasive content.

The current movement to avoid tracking is an extremely powerful centralizing force.

No, this is just removing the third party. If I'm on a Meta property seeing an ad served by Meta targeted by my data from using Meta, then there's not third party.

footy• 3 years ago

I have long wondered how people who work in adtech live with themselves and this was illuminating.

lastofthemojito• 3 years ago

I am a niche small business - how do I let people know that I exist?

Is this a serious question? You advertise. Just like people have been doing for generations. You advertise in publications or spaces that will attract people interested in your product or service. You're going to have to do more to convince me that we need individual level targeted for businesses to succeed.

We're not mad if the new bakery in town advertises in the town paper or sends postcards to everyone in the zipcode. We're not mad if the new geeky t-shirt website puts ads on geeky subreddits or Facebook groups. We're not mad if your new auto detailing service comes up if I Google "auto detailing <my city>". We're mad that those ads creepily follow us around the internet, reminding us of the scale of the enormous data collection that enables such behavior.

Don't tell me that bakeries or t-shirt shops or auto detailers can't thrive without targeted marketing. We've had those things for way longer than we've had targeted marketing.

MildRant3• 3 years ago

We've had those things for way longer than we've had targeted marketing.

You've had way less of those things as well. I'm not defending targeted marketing but you are ignoring that there are way more bakeries and t-shirt shops now than ever. As a small business, you aren't competing against other local t-shirt shops you are competing against every t-shirt shop that can setup a webpage and put a shirt in the mail.

akira2501• 3 years ago

You advertise in publications or spaces that will attract people interested in your product or service.

Are those publications most popular products, the online versions, selling advertising in the way their print only counterparts have? Or, are they just offering you targeting through their already extant advertising setup?

Don't tell me that bakeries or t-shirt shops or auto detailers can't thrive without targeted marketing.

Local advertising and national advertising are two entirely different things and the campaigns even have two entirely different purposes and metrics for measurement.

One of the great forces of the internet was to allow me to do regular and successful business with niche operations that may not be local to me. It was supposed to expand upon the previously existing model. Adtech is trying to stand across this gap, which still hasn't been filled for anyone outside of a local goods retailer.

esperent• 3 years ago

sends postcards to everyone in the zipcode.

I literally own a bakery and I would be mad at myself if I wasted that much paper.

I also don't even know if this town has a printed paper I could still advertise in. Maybe? But I'm unlikely to spend our extremely limited advertising budget there.

I also don't want to use invasively targeted online ads. I'd be totally satisfied for keyword based ads - like if someone goes on Maps and searches for "bakery", "coffee" etc. I think that's the best middle ground in the modern era.

I don't care if someone has a history of following baking related Facebook pages, searches for bakeries every day or for the first time ever. I understand that would make our ads more efficient but I'm willing to accept in exchange for respecting people's privacy. Unfortunately, I don't think there's any way for me to make that happen - if I pay to advertise on Google Ads, which unfortunately is the best choice for us, then I have to let Google invade everyone's privacy. There's no setting that I am can find to disable targeted advertising for my campaign.

zb32• 3 years ago

Well actually fuck "professional content producers", there's always someone there who writes just because they want others to read, I'll just read them instead and it'd be good if the search engine let me find them instead of that SEO spam.

dahwolf• 3 years ago

1. Especially for a niche business, contextual ads should be great. Appear in search results as well as content pages related to your niche. Relevant by default and requires zero personal data.

2. I'm afraid it's too late. The centralization has already happened. Most people consume content from a handful of mobile apps (youtube, social networks, etc). AI will escalate this even further. Small websites outside of big tech can't really monetize content reliably, exceptions aside. Likewise, your content has to be extremely special for people wanting to pay for it.

Havoc• 3 years ago

There seems to be a really strong disdain on HN for AdTech in general,

The ads aren't the problem, the targetting and the granular privacy invading data collection practices it implies.

It's not about "fuck small businesses" at all but rather that I'd love to scroll through some content without my 100ms pause over a specific post influencing what I see in future and thus shaping the reality I see.

That's how we got to a position where the various "factions" in society are seeing so different realities that to each the other seems unreasonable and they can't understand why the others don't see their (to them) obviously correct perspective. Adtech is actively contributing towards societal splits.

whoopdedo• 3 years ago

if you can show ads only to the people to whom they are relevant,

Except that's not what is happening. The information brokers learned that there's no money to be made in selling to someone who already knows they want to buy that product. With the ad you're getting 90% conversion but without you're only down to 70% conversion.

The real value is in convincing someone who had no interest in a product to spend money they wouldn't have otherwise. And targeting makes this happening by giving the advertisers tools to custom make campaigns that create new engagements. The role of the advertiser is not to connect potential purchasers with the products they want, but to trick unwary consumers into buying irrelevant junk.

And on top of that, it doesn't help small businesses because they only spend money on small campaigns. A tiny micro-targeted set of ads always loses the auction to an algorithmic carpet bombing of manipulative clickbait. That is, they'll "win" a few impressions at first until their budget caps out and then the spam ads will fill in the rest. Which means someone in that cohort will in any period see more of the bad ads than the good ones.

There is no incentive for anyone in adtech to fix this because the "solution" right now is charging more money for better ads. Consumers disliking ads and being inundated with malvertising is the system working as intended.

TheIronMark• 3 years ago

A lot of Internet users don't want to pay for content and don't want ads. I guess they're hoping some deity will magically pay all the content producers.

jrh3• 3 years ago

We tried funding the internet with banner ads and that didn't take. So early 2000s we sold our privacy to fund it. The "web consumer" mentality was built on the latter funding, which is now going away.

Small business is being hurt the most (because they benefitted the most from being able to buy targeted ads with a small budget).

I want my privacy private, and I'm not willing to share it. It is definitely interesting to see what AdTech can figure out next, especially for small business.

1vuio0pswjnm72• 3 years ago

"The ad-tech solution is actually quite elegant in theory - if you can show ads to the people to whom they are relevant, then, as a small business you can let people know you exist without blowing your ad budget, and, as a content producer, the more valuable an ad-view is, the more you can charge for it."

Elegant. In theory. How about in practice.

What problem does this proposed "solution" solve. Once we have answer then we ask whether it is effective at solving it. Proposing "solutions" to problems where 100% of the time the solution uses a computer is easy. We're drowning in such "solutions". The question is whether they actually work.

If ad tech isn't very effective then is it even a "solution".^1 It could just be a very successful marketing gimmick.

The "if we regulate data collection, bad things will happen" is a lame argument used by the ad tech incumbents and ad tech startups. "You'll lose what you have." More likely, the person making the argument will lose what they have. This type of "argument" is made by self-interested parties. It's speculative and there is no evidence to support it. Fear mongering. Without regulation, these ad tech startups, if they ever begin to grow larger, will surely be acquired by the incumbents, ideally producing a massive windfall for the founders and investors. We know this because we have watched it happen over and over. It's like arguing "we need to let the next DoubleClick grow and thrive". Soon followed by "we need to stop the governemnt from blocking our merger with Google." The truth is, bad stuff is happening right now. That isn't speculation. It's fact.

There's a problem. Data collection. And people are looking for a solution. Not the other way around. (A data collection "solution" looking for a problem.) Letting unfettered data collection continue is certainly not a solution to the problem of data collection.

Another line of reasoning is "it's too late to regulate data collection for future generations because some data has already been collected". It's like suggesting "it's too late to regulate pollution because the environment is already polluted". Not sure I should even call this reasoning.

Yet another way that people defend data collection and tracking in the face of public discontent is misdirection. "Industry/Company X is doing it, too. And they are much worse than we are." In the case of comparisons to other industries, we may have to compare the regulation, if any, to which each is subjected.

HN could be "misguided" on its views of so-called "ad tech", if we accept such generalisations. But what about others, who are not "web consumers", outside HN. The OP is one example. There are others.

https://digiday.com/marketing/confessions-of-an-ad-exec-most...

https://www.newsmediaalliance.org/ad-tech-its-worse-than-we-...

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/11/technology/bad-digital-ad...

https://adage.com/article/digitalnext/ad-tech-worst-thing-ha...

https://martech.org/stop-calling-ad-tech-advertising/

https://tbtech.co/business/why-billions-of-dollars-are-being...

It's funny that so-called "ad tech" companies, as intermediaries (middlemen), claim that they prioritise "users", but then they do not like it when they see "users" commenting about so-called "ad tech" on HN. But what about the folks on the other side of the transaction that "ad tech" intermediates. Perhaps there are folks besides "users" who can see problems posed by the unscrupulous middlemen performing data collection.

NB. In this comment I have focused on (a) the "arguments" being made in the parent comment, and elsewhere, that defend so-called "ad tech" and (b) the viewpoints of others, namely marketers and advertisers, about so-called "ad tech". References to regulation of data collection can be assumed to also refer to regulation of data use by the collectors or any parties with which they share collected data. IMO, it's likely any regulation of data collection would also apply to data use, and this would address data collection that has already occurred before the regulation takes effect.

Barraketh7• 3 years ago

So, since you seem particularly upset about it, I'd love to know - what is the problem of "data collection"? I've still never seen an example of damage to a user by AdTech data collection. What I have seen are

1) Data leaks by companies that collect and store true PII - this is your Equifaxes of the world, and they didn't collect that data using cookies. 2) People are generally creeped out by the idea of their movements across the web being tracked.

And so, even though no ad-tech company has ever really had a data leak, and although the tracking across the web has never really resulted in any negative outcomes, people are using (2) to try and kill ad-tech for often disingenuous reasons.

ssss11• 3 years ago

People should pay for products. Advertising should be static. There I solved it.

Barraketh7• 3 years ago

Well, this has been a fun discussion. A salient point that I haven't mentioned but that actually plays a big role is attribution. Many advertisers run ad campaigns not to get a clickthrough to their site, but to just keep their product 'top of mind', so that next time you go buy a car you buy a BMW. So from that point of view, if you see an ad and later go and sign up for a BMW test-drive, BMW would attribute that test drive to the ad that you saw. If you can't track attribution, it becomes really hard to figure out where you should be advertising in the first place. To everyone saying "use contextual advertising" - how do you know which contexts produce better results if you can't measure performance?

This is particularly relevant to mobile apps, because if you show the user an ad, they are extremely unlikely to switch contexts to go and actually click on it. If you can track users from the app to the purchasing site, then you can say "hey, I have a really valuable audience - you should pay me hella money to show them ads". This has been less GDPR and more Apple, but the result is the same - it makes ads generically less valuable.

And that is why I'm fundamentally pro ad-tech. I don't have any direct monetary interest in it, but I do want the digital economy to be growing and efficient, and in an ideal world decentralized beyond the 4-5 large platforms. People spending money online is GOOD. It's good for businesses, it's good for the people (under a rational agent model at least ;)), and it's good for me as a software engineer who wants to keep getting paid silicon-valley salaries.

iamacyborg4• 3 years ago

Ads aren’t less valuable, they’re now just not being over indexed by analytics products produced by advertising companies.

Marketing as a function will be better off once they wean themselves off of adtech attribution models.

hakfoo• 3 years ago

It's not just the tracking concern. The disruption to traditional media economics is socially toxic.

In the Before Times of 1993, if you're in situation #1, you call the advertisement department of the local newspaper, who is in situation #2. You pay them $250, the newspaper keeps basically all of it, and you get a quarter-page ad in the Sports section. You can go and open the paper and see the ad, and know roughly that most of the people in town read the local paper. You can also feel good that the money you spent is largely being used to support a local institution that has strong community value.

Now, you go to Google/Meta/etc and set up a campaign. You pay for $250 worth of service. If you're lucky, you get some dashboards to get a vague idea where the impressions occurred. A collection of disparate webmasters get a grand total of $30 in CPM or CPC fees. Brin and Zuckerberg buy some new yachts.

So advertisers aren't actually saving much, but we've dismantled the old media economy.

* We're slicing same ad dollar across more and more publishers. It's cute that you can make $12 per month with AdWords on your blog, but it contributes to the death-by-a-thousand-cuts of local TV/radio/newspapers. When everyone is working on a $12-per-moonth revenue feed, all you're going to get is listicles and clickbait, or stuff designed specifically to game ad metrics (see: the 29-page slideshow article)

* Visibility is terrible but in exciting new ways. The 1993 question was how "many people actually saw your ad in the Sports section?" The 2023 version is "how many of those 'people' are bots, how many of the clicks came from incentivized questionable activity, how many of these ads appeared on sites that would actually contaminate my brand?"

* The middlemen have consumed a lot of margin. The fact that newsrooms are closing and media is getting more paywalled by the day suggests that the digital ad space have failed to deliver the same revenue that traditional platforms did.

It's possible to do without a lot of this-- direct placement for example would pretty much work as well today as it did in 1993-- but it would require a lot of data to convince people that the big AdTechs' yottabytes of profiling don't justify the price they're charging.

tomjen32• 3 years ago

Adtech is a fraud. I am using Brave and IOS than they do a really good job of blocking Facebook trackers. However Facebook knows where I went to school and some of my interests - because I told it.

It would not be hard to extrapolate ads that might be interesting for a person who has graduated with a CS degree 10+ years ago (cool gadgets anyone? AI services?) but the ads I see are attrocious. It can only make any sense if Facebook isn't even trying, which only makes sense if they don't want anybody to know how little value they add.

Its the same with Googles topics - if you want to show me ads for things that might be relevant for me, then _let me choose those_. But it is almost as if the thought can't even cross their minds.

nobadcrypto• 3 years ago

This exists. You can choose what ads you want to see on Google.

johndhi• 3 years ago

I'd believe this article if it were written by Google or an adtech company... But this is iapp, a professional org for privacy professionals. Their understanding of the industry is more limited than we realized.

polalavik2• 3 years ago

I’m working on starting an ad-not-so-tech business.

Fixed number of ad slots per month, fixed price per slot, and advertised on a network of high traffic blogs (also fixed with an upper bound in terms of # of blogs allowed on the network). No tracking besides impressions served and maybe # of clicks. The blogs split a pool of half the revenue.

I think it could be a win-win for the network and the business if executed right. Trying to focus on specific domains: web, ML/AI and hardware/electronics engineering only. I’m currently looking for blogs to join the company which is the difficult part. The next difficult part will be reaching out to companies.

codetrotter2• 3 years ago

I’m currently looking for blogs to join the company which is the difficult part.

Are low-traffic blogs welcome to join? Or are you mainly looking for blogs with big readership?

Also, are other kinds of sites welcome to join? For example PeerTube instances? (Server similar to YouTube but open source, self hosted and uses peer to peer tech to stream videos.)

polalavik2• 3 years ago

Happy to work with low traffic blogs and any sort of website or service where ads can be displayed. Especially if there is growth potential. Open to chat if interested - feel free to email: hardwareteams at gmail

secondcoming4• 3 years ago

How is this different from a PMP?

1vuio0pswjnm72• 3 years ago

"Some claim that the death of targeted advertising is equivalent to the death of the ad-supported internet. This is a fallacy. Ad value is not intrinsically tied to the extraction of personal data."

IAPP is not HN. The organisation predates this forum. It is not comprised of consumer privacy activists or anyone with "disdain for AdTech". Quite the opposite. It's focused on corporate compliance.

People outside of HN are quite capable of seeing through bogus arguments put forth by so-called "tech" companies and their service providers. The later a group that sees licentious, surreptitous data collection as a "business model".

drivebyhooting• 3 years ago

Not trying to be snarky. Where can a software engineer with adtech (big data, ML, distributed systems) experience go and still earn $600K+ total comp? Liquid, mind you.

leon_theremin• 3 years ago

Users have been noticing Google's ads are based on thoughts they had and without any chance of correlation to whatever Google's AI could infer from previous interaction. Same for Twitter, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, TikTok.

Big Tech's algorithms have long been tapping into illegal surveillance of an unprecedented kind - besides the cliques of insiders who misuse this for stalking and harassment of children, human rights defenders, activists, minorities and everyone else.

Don't expect them to be honest about their surveillance.

Adtech is built on a privacy fault line

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