(also this feels hella iffy legally speaking)
It's amazing how newspapers were able to sustain themselves when they only had non-targeted ads
this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2024
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Whether targeted ads work for actually getting more revenue per ad impression is debatable. Those selling the surveillance infrastructure want you to think that they do, of course, though it has not been impartially shown that an ad targeted at someone whose browsing history, credit card purchases and TV viewing digest that they’re in the target demographic for a product get more conversions than a context-based ad (i.e., if you’re selling gym shoes, buying untargeted ads on fitness forums and such).
As someone who works in advertising, that is partially true, but also not the complete story...
Data brokers want you to believe that the more data you have the more likely your ads are to be successful, but in reality it's not about the amount of data but the quality of the data. If you have someone who has looked at reviews of gym shoes/different models on different stores, then that data is pretty valuable as you can focus on getting them to buy from your store or try and advertise models at the top of their budget, which will likely lead to a higher ROI than just advertising on fitness forums (note it is super hard to get the balance between tipping people over the line to buy and advertising them something they were already going to buy/had already decided against - Google particularly are absolutely terrible at this, but also do evaluation in house, so they'll misrepresent to advertisers that your ad which showed up one link above your non-sponsored link made 100% of the difference in getting the purchase). Similarly, if you have data that someone is active on a car audio forum and recently bought a specific model of car, you can advertise kits/speakers specifically to that car, which is better than just advertising "hey, we make audio upgrade kits for [specific car/cars in general] on a forum/related site".
This also makes advertising one of the few situations where using ML actually makes sense - there's huge amounts of data (way more than a person can consider) to come in, and patterns which lead to good results (someone purchasing something) or bad results (someone not purchasing something). It's not worth a human targeting every single microcategory, but if an ML model can pick up that advertising to (eg) people who have recently purchased cameras who are interested in triathlons and often visit areas with with high rainfall makes them more likely to buy your specific aftermarket lens hood, then it makes buying the ads so much more worth it and also lets you extrapolate onto other microcategories which may also have similar results, and if they don't then that updates the model.
Generally data is less useful for awareness campaigns (ie "next time you're in the supermarket/in the business for x, buy our brand" type of campaign), especially if it's already on a relevant site, but it's still somewhat useful if someone is reading on a (trustworthy) news site or watching an ad-supported streaming service, however purchase data & activity data is still useful for showing more relevant ads, as while 90%+ of people on a fitness forum are going to be into fitness, I don't think 90%+ of general site visitors or tv show viewers are going to be into anything specific enough to make it worth it to advertise it.
I used to work for a big data company and internally we acknowledged that for the targeting to be truly effective we'd have to do a truly creepy amount of behavior analysis. The fact that ads don't really drive clicks is a dirty little secret in the industry.
I feel like its also pretty easily spotted / avoided / defeated, after a very small amount of knowledge about the industry is understood. Unless there's an Ad-agent assigned to individuals, I can't see there being an ad targeted towards me that I wouldn't immediately note as such.
Oh they'll be putting "AI" on it as your personal agent soon enough. Undoubtedly already have pushed it through many black box algorithms and machine learning models, so arguably too late.
Like I said, they'd need an agent assigned to a small amount of people. If AI has shown us anything, its that its severely lacking in the "I" part in almost every context.
Well, that's because it's the marketing and exec hacks (read: morons) that decided to call it "AI". Any engineer with a quarter of a braincell left knows better than to call the current generation (or the next several) of ML models et. al. "intelligent", let alone AI.
An actual AI would be far, FAR more than capable of sorting your silly preferences.
They also charged for the paper. Although I’m not sure of the comparison between the cost of materials, printing, and distribution versus the cost of hosting servers.
Printing for a single city has got to be more than hosting for an entire country
Think of all the people you need to print everything out before the next morning - you need a big enough staff of editors and reporters that you can get everything ready in a short time frame, you need the staff to handle the printing overnight, you need drivers to deliver within a 3-ish hour period and the staff to coordinate and load them up
Meanwhile, for a website, a team of 5 developers/devops could handle all of it. You still need journalists and editors, but they are no longer on the same time frame - they can just release things as they're ready, and maybe curate an email for the day and what appears on the homepage.
As far as paper and print costs vs hosting costs? If each paper cost 1 cent, were talking like between .01 cent and .0001 cent per page view, maybe even a tenth or hundredth of that. It adds up quickly, but compared to paper and ink?
They didn't that's why they closed
There's a simple solution here: don't use that website.
Often yes, but if you need whatever it contains, then the real solution is to just click yes but not allow cookies for that website. Good luck trying to show me personalized ads when i have librewolf+ublock
blocks element
am I reading this right that you would pay and still get advertisements, just not targeted ones?
What a bargain, right??
And not even get subscriber content, it's £7/mo literally just to get non-targeted ads
lmao really? so you’re still a non subscribing pleb that gets the “please support our cause and subscribe” stuff but you literally only no longer get targeted ads? Shameless
"You will also need a subscription to view subscriber only content"
Double-dippers.
I mean the internet has become a piecemeal existence where you’re expected to add on things like it’s McDonald’s so I guess this is just the next step in the trend
I miss 1997 when the internet and all the information on it was free (save purchasing a computer and the monthly fee for an isp, if you want to be pedantic I guess)
It's also a game of "how much shit can people put up with before we start losing revenue"
uBlock Origin seems to do a pretty good job at rejecting personalized adverts.
I was surprised it was legal in the EU when Instagram started doing it. I promptly deleted it right after.
It's not, corporations' bad faith interpretation of the law doesn't make it legal.
https://www.wired.com/story/metas-pay-for-privacy-model-is-illegal-says-eu/
Doesn't help much in the UK unfortunately
Yet another of the endless benefits of Brexit! /s
Brexit is when England thinks colonies are better off because they're independent, when the truth is that they're England - free.
The equivalent is England leaving great Britain, with the consequence that Ireland unifies and Scotland does what it wants 🤣🤣🤣🤣
Good thing this was forbidden in the EU a few years back. As a user, you can't refuse "necessary cookies" but those from third parties you can (e.g. Google analytics). Imposing personalized ads if you don't pay is definitely forbidden in the EU I'd say
Really? Because literally every German news website does this.
They use every loophole legally available to them (you know what I mean, the button "I agree to sell my soul" being a hundred times bigger than the link to "I'd like to review your data collection and say which analytics service I adhere to"). But I haven't seen a website where they threaten compulsory personalized ads if you don't pay. It's generally "pay or you get cookies". But I tought those weren't third party cookies, just in-site ones.
Spanish newspapers were doing it until very recently but this was released a couple months ago: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_24_3582
I thought it was illegal to have the opt out be smaller than the agree. Even stack overflow had to comply
Yeah. I thought this was literally what was banned but seems that it isn't 🤷
Oh look! The reason I cancelled my Netflix subscription!
These ad companies must have everyone by the balls with how they have no reaction to consumer pushback.
Looking for option 3: Accept and spam the tracking endpoint with randomised data every 15ms
IIRC theres a Firefox extension that automates this in the background. I dont remember the name, though.
AdNauseum!
Is it the one that clicks on every ad and feeds it junk data?
If a website doesn't have intrusive ads, i always allow ads and click on them if i liked the content of the page, to give the website a few pennies
This said, paying a £7 subscription and still have ads is stupid
So one way or another I got ads…
I actually somehow didn't fully process that it didn't say "ad free", but rather "non-personalized ads". Wtf. €7 and you still get ads? Insanity. This is the sort of site I would never return to again.