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How online ads actually work.
Very simplified TLDR: you visit a news site. They load an ad network and tell it "put ads here, here and here".
The ad network now tells 300 companies (seriously, look at the details of some cookie consent dialogs) that you visited that news site so they can bid for the right to shove an ad in your face.
One of them goes "I know this guy, they're an easy mark for scams according to my tracking, I'll pay you 0.3 cents to shove this ad in their face". Someone else yells "I know this guy, he looked at toasters last week, I want to pay 0.2 cents to show him toaster ads just in case he hasn't bought one yet."
The others bid less, so that scam ad gets shoved in your face.
That's extremely simplified of course. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real-time_bidding has a bit more of an explanation.
::hugs my PiHole::
It's a good start but you absolutely want in-browser ad blockers too. Not all crap is served from dedicated garbage serving hostnames.
I recommend: LibreWolf + uBlock Origin for Desktop PCs and Mull + uBlock Origin for Android. Both web browsers are security hardened versions of Firefox.
I'd be interested in the amount of electricity that gets wasted on this
My guess is that it's a couple watts while you're actively using the internet, mostly due to the extra CPU load a few bad ads cause when they're on your screen. Without having done the math I expect all the servers, data transfer etc. to be negligible, on a per-user basis, because they serve so many users.
That's another interesting thing btw. Most of the "internet thing X uses Y amount of electricity" are utter bullshit and massively exaggerating. What uses most power on desktop/TV is the screen. The second biggest consumer is likely your router (which is on whether you use it or not, but the studies usually ascribe all of the standby usage to your active usage - this makes sense if you try to look at "how much CO2 does all our digital stuff including 'having an Internet connection' cause" but not if you're trying to look at "how much extra CO2 does activity X cause, assuming I already have an internet connection because I'm not gonna live in a cave").
Don't the fans use a lot of power? And wouldn't a datacentre or server need a lot of cooling?
Keep in mind, one of the reasons we use data centers because cooling one big room of computers is cheaper than cooling 200 small rooms with computers.
The server uses a kilowatt of power or more (most of it in the CPU). But if the server is serving 1000 active users concurrently, and only 5% of the time you spend online is spent fetching ads, 20000 people staring at their screens get their ads from let's say 2 kW of server power usage, plus another 2 kW for all the equipment to get the data there... for a total of 0.4 watts per user.
These are completely eyeballed numbers, and could easily be off by an order of magnitude.
But your on premise gear (screen, computer, router) are likely by far the biggest factor.
One easy way to cross-check power usage claims is cost. It will only catch the most egregious bullshit, but it's easy. A random page I found claims that "According to the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy it takes 5.12 kWh of electricity per gigabyte of transferred data."
A Steam game with 50 GB would thus consume 256 kWh. Even if your 300 watt idle gaming rig, 50 Watt Router and 150 watt screen to watch the progress bar spends 2 hours downloading that, that's 1 kWh. Even at 8 cents per kWh, that means just downloading the game would cost someone (not you) over $20. Do you think steam would let you delete and redownload that game that you bought on sale for $10 as much as you want if between them and your ISP someone had to pay for $20 just in electricity, each time? Not the game rights, not the servers, not the connection, just power.
Thanks, this makes a lot of sense.
And how you're tracked online. I've worked on Google ads accounts every day for a decade and I don't see you,the user, and your data.
I just click "female, 50+, likes home decor, uses a phone" and then a little business I work with bids 10% extra on you because they think you might be interested in their new autumn wreaths they're super proud of, and Google think you fit that box I ticked.
And that's advanced marketing for most businesses. Most businesses won't even get into the audience side of things and they'll stick to keywords: they'll show you an ad because you searched for "autumn home decor" and that's all.
Google take advantage of most advertisers by saying "let us be in charge of your keywords, and how much money you spend, our AI is smarter than you and you don't have time!"And most businesses just use the automatic stuff because they don't understand it, and it's true, they don't have time... so then Google takes your "autumn wreath" keyword and shows your ads to someone looking for "Christmas trees", because they're both seasons and they're both plant related, right?
And then the small business gets charged $1 by Google to show their autumnal page to someone who wasn't interested and left right away.
My job is to help these businesses actually make an advertising account that doesn't fall for all these little bear traps that Google sets all over their ads interface. They weren't there 7 years ago, but things have been getting worse and worse. Including third party sales companies like regalix, hired by Google to constantly call you and telling you to trust the automation and spend more.
It's fascinating that the enshittification is taking place on both ends of Google. I would have thought that the slow bastardization of search was for the benefit of advertizers but it's bad for everyone except Google.
That was always part of the enshittification formula. The final stage after exploiting users is to exploit business customers to the breaking point.
https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys
I heard that (at least on YouTube) it isn't only how high people bid but how likely someone is to click on your ad. Like if you have an ad they're likely to click on you may get shown even if you bid less. You probably know more about it, I'm just sharing this because it sounded fascinating when I heard about it.
Those are different models. Ads can be sold pay per view, pay per click, or even pay per conversion (the store reports when the customer buys something and only pays for that).
These can be converted by multiplying with the estimated probabilities. For example, if the scammer is willing to pay $1 for the click, and the probability that the user will click is estimated to be one-in-500, the view would be worth 0.2 cents.
If the scammer is willing to pay $20 for the conversion (because it means they successfully scammed someone out of $30), they'd need to succeed scamming one in 20 users that clicked for this to work out.
Works the same for legit businesses of course, where the business will consider total lifetime value (not just the current sale - you might also subscribe to something and keep paying for 2 years, or come back to buy again). Advertising / customer acquisition costs are a huge part of many businesses, which is why running online ad platforms is so obscenely profitable.
In this case, I don't know who in the chain will do the conversion - if the bid will be for a click and the ad platform will estimate how likely you are to click, or if the bidder makes the guess and bids based on that. The bidder in this case would be another ad platform of course, acting on behalf of the actual advertiser, and nobody in this "ecosystem" trusts each other. It's full of companies trying to scam each other or companies offering services to validate that the data someone is feeding you is real.