Ever.
If you own a site, just curate a set of ads on your site that actually enhances your sites appeal. A fashion site should have matching fashion ads. A tech site should have matching tech ads. A local site should have matching local ads. Reach out to advertisers to get these ads. Never use an algorithm. You, as an editor, should be better than the algorithms. Ads are supposed to be useful to your audience, instead of being annoying. People buy fashion magazines - filled with 600 pages of ads- and Sunday newspapers BECAUSE of the ads. They should want to visit your website as well because of your ads.
The worst thing you can do for your site is to place out-of-context ads in the middle of your site. Can you imaging if Vogue.com decided to place Flash SSD ads on their site? This is how you destroy an audience, and as a publisher, your number one concern should be to grow your audience.
Once you curate a set of ads for your site, you'll find that click-through rates and conversion are far higher than random programmatic ads. You should know your audience, and the kind of ads that would appeal to them. Mark ads as content in your CMS. This avoids ad-blockers.
Curating ads is how advertising has always worked, and will continue to work, after all these programmatic garbage goes away.
Not all publishers subscribe to the low quality Google AdExchange. In fact, they typically have a variety of ad bids, and the highest bidding ads are chosen for placement programmatically.
Edit: I just visited vogue.com. Guess who served me my ad? doubleclick. It was relevant and I bet it was programmatic. Programmatic does not mean random. Ad placement programs have a lot more data to work with than any individual at the publisher. There's a lot more sense to it than manual prediction
In reality, I have a math blog with ads for Cap'n Crunch cereal and strange new yogurts which seem very distracting and poorly-targeted when compared to, say, ads for O'Reilly math/CS books or a MOOC on probability and statistics.
Yes, that's a move toward integrity and away from endangerment and excess income.
If "some higher up in marketing" doesn't understand their users, the problem is they're out-of-touch and that should be corrected, as opposed to endangering user's privacy.
Currently, my tiny site operates this way, with hand-chosen Amazon ads and no google Adwords.
Not in my experience. My hand-picked ads are alway at a higher CTR than programmatic. Intent-driven programmatic gives me a 2x CTR over random static ads. Hand tuned gives me about 10x more CTR.
You may be able to optimize down a set of hand-picked ads programmatically, but you still need that manual curation in the process.
More important is losing your audience to a bad user experience via programmatic ads when they visit your site.
Also, I'm pretty sure Vogue or the advertisers use DoubleClick as just the ad hosting network for analytic purposes. They are likely sold on a display basis in Vogue.
What I really want is a service that can match me with advertising firms based on the content of my site, and do the negotiations for me. And give me a means with which to contest ads if I find they're not appropriate, or the matching itself if I discover my matched company is doing something immoral.
There are a few minor, but significant differences between this and programmatic ads. Do those differences make it good, or at least neutral? Does such a company exist?
I was going to hand select things on Amazon that my players would be interested in. Science Fiction books, dvd box sets, that kind of thing. Then present them to the players with my affiliate code where I would normally show a google ad.
I didn't fully implement the idea because I think the affiliate rewards are so small I was worried the math didn't make it worthwhile. But I'd still like to try one day.
You're really supposed to curate display ads. But, this means you'll have to make the call to your local advertisers to actually sell the ads. ("Hey do you want to place an ad on our site for 6 months for $500? I'll take you out for pizza & beer if you're interested so we can talk details.") You're not going to sell display ads to Amazon, but you might for your local gaming shop.
The only ads I see are native ones like you describe, and they're usually actually useful.
Should I stay away from AdSense? Where am I going to find the ads to "hand-pick"?
I hope this is of use! Sam
If you're a content farm then rock on
Ad networks work by letting you select categories, but not much more. Obviously that's because they want to keep control and maximize short-term revenues.
Unfortunately, you have just reinvented publisher-direct deals, a mainstay of many ad networks for the past decade.
1. Old Internet - Pages curate and/or sell whatever ads they can possibly get. They are generally statically hosted assets. 2. Original Ad Networks - They don't know anything about you, but it removes the need for pages to individually make ad contracts. You'll get whatever ads are in the queue, possibly sorted by rough groupings; "technology" ads, etc. 3. Current Situation - Everywhere you go you are presented with ads relevant to your interests, regardless of your current site. Vogue might try to show SSD ads or car parts ads, even though that's not the kind of content you would go to Vogue to consume.
I think there's an interesting case to be made that clickthrough decreases can be at least partially attributed to the fact that as tracking increases the probability that the ad represents the content of the site decreases and becomes an even more unwelcome distraction. Sponsored content is a way to defeat this, and ad blocking, by making the advertising appear more in line with the content of the site (or is it making the content of the site more in line with the advertising?).
Ah sweet, it's that one commenter who can prescribe the absolute correct answer to very complex situations with a couple of simple platitudes! Since you seem to be in a mood to drop the correct answer, maybe you can help me with some difficult decisions I'm facing:
what programming language should I use?
what should the next move of my business be?
is she really the one, or should I move on?
Regardless of how good your advice is, proscribing a thing for every possible complex situation with the wave of a hand is disingenuous at best and dangerous at worst.
>what programming language should I use?
Haskell.
>what should the next move of my business be?
If you're not in a Series C, growth hack; if you've done your Series C, look into the Caymans.
>is she really the one, or should I move on?
Have a divorce attorney on retainer, be ready to delete your Facebook account at a moment's notice, and ideally start going to the gym now, but with those preparations in mind pursue her as if she's the one.
>Regardless of how good your advice is, proscribing a thing for every possible complex situation with the wave of a hand is disingenuous at best and dangerous at worst.
This isn't a question and I don't understand how to respond to it.
I say - with differing commentary after the first 4-5 sentences - in every class I teach:
"I don't like the phrase 'best practice'. I won't use it. It's presumptuous and condescending. What's best for me might suck for you. Who am I to know your business requirements? There is only one true 'best practice', in my view, and that is simply to have practices that you and your team follow that serve to further your business goals and meet your business requirements. SharePoint isn't a best practice, but a system to support a corporate culture of collaboration or information sharing is a practice that many businesses can agree with. jQuery isn't a best practice, but using a framework that improves your team's productivity and helps it to meet your business' requirements - that's a good practice to follow."
We need a new phrase that gets the point across without the cognitive burden of being condescending and presumptuous. Consensus practice? Common practice? Popular practice? I don't know. But I know that "best" is a superlative that is too often used to disguise a marketing goal or to dazzle the listener/reader into accepting the superiority of the person using it.
This is exactly the sort of techno-douchebaggery that the author is writing about, so way to prove his point, nimrods.
The one redeeming quality of such comments is that they fall into the category of "HN comments that are best read in Comic Book Guy voice", and when read that way they're good for a chuckle.
Musk is working towards something he believes has the capability to mitigate human extinction events. Whether you think that's likely or not, reducing that to "he plans detonate nuclear weapons on Mars" just so you can call it out is not exactly an above-board argument.
Maris wants to keep people alive longer, possibly indefinitely. By implying only billionaires will be able to do this, he's immediately separated Maris' goals from your own (unless you are a billionaire), and set this up as useless investment that won't help you. Let's not discount that his goal is actually to save lives.
I generally love the different talks by Maciej Cegłowski, but this one has an unneeded negative turn at the end. To put this in perspective, we can use the same tactics against this talk.
In 2012 38 million people died of noncommunicable diseases, and another almost 13 million died of communicable diseases[1], and this guy is worried about seeing shit on the streets of San Francisco? Seriously?
Is that fair to his argument? I don't think so, but it's exactly what he did to others in his talk.
1: http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs310/en/index2.ht...
http://byterot.blogspot.co.uk/2015/09/rule-of-most-accessibl...
One way to stop this would be to have people who post low-value high-expected-karma-yield posts get randomly banned. This would function as a variable punishment and should be quite effective at training HN users.
Only if "nontrivial" means "two out of a freakin' lot". Also complains are perfectly warranted. While 'idlewords has (as usual) a lot of good points in his text, that Musk quote was straight dishonest.
So I'm not sure where 1 == nontrivial portion of HN comments....
I agree with all of the author's points and quite enjoyed the read-through. The ONLY thing I took issue with was the Musk comment and even then it was just annoying, it's not like I'm going to throw out the baby with the bathwater.
I'm getting really annoyed by these top-rated comments saying some BS like "Everyone is complaining about X" then I look for those complaints and there are 1-2....
Nietsche's point in the beginning of the "use and Abuse of History": “Moreover, I hate everything that only instructs me without increasing or immediately stimulating my own activity.” These words of Goethe's, a boldly expressed ceterum censeo, provide an appropriate beginning for our observations on the worth and worthlessness of history.
The great thing about a presentation like this is that it burst one of the may filter bubbles I walk around in... Oh and also it is n't Powerpoint.
It's like some people scanned the article, paused at the picture of Elon Musk, then read the last two sentences. It's a very deep essay.
I don't think I can withstand working with that kind of people in the long term, this is really soul-destroying.
It's not secret Machiavellian billionaires running around shoving ad tracking upon us, it's ourselves just trying to get a tiny glint of social approval for out thinking everybody else without regard for consequences at scale.
It provided some useful insights (one thing that surprised me was how bad people were at recognising and operating drop downs), but we very quickly (we got the idea, pushed it out, started looking at data, decided to stop doing it within a day) recognised that we'd been too quick to jump at the "cool, we can do this" factor and that even though it was beneficial, it was way too invasive.
E.g. while we might think that "it doesn't matter, it's a form on our page so we'll see the data anyway", of course that wasn't true when we actually thought about it:
The keyboard events meant that e.g. if a user cut and pasted something by accident, we'd see it, and that might include things like passwords from other sites. Or they might write something, change their mind and enter something else; explicitly withholding the original information from us. We didn't capture anything particularly private in the short amount of time it was live, but we saw enough changes (e.g. people changing contact phone numbers) that we thankfully recognised the problem before it became a real problem.
Why are you working with them now?
I realized before I was even in industry that I didn't ever want to work for a company that received their income from advertising, and I haven't worked for one in my entire career. It hasn't always been easy to find jobs, but the jobs I did find actually tended to be a bit higher-paying.
Ads are sucking up a lot of the intelligence in our society and the only people who can stop them from doing that are intelligent people. If we refuse to work with advertisers they will suffer from the incompetence of the people they do hire.
Well, at a rough cut, it could verify that there was a client system with a person in front of it.
With more work you could maybe use eye-tracking, reflections, etc., to get a more reliable indication of whether the ad was visible to the user.
"Here's Elon Musk.
In a television interview this week, Musk said: "I'm trying to do useful things." Then he outlined his plan to detonate nuclear weapons on Mars.
These people are the face of our industry."
Italics mine.
"Then he outlined his plan to detonate nuclear weapons on Mars."
This deliberately takes the quote out of context to make it seem silly.
Thiel wasn't "complaining" about the extension of the franchise. He was simply making the historical observation that women are a hard constituency for libertarians to convince.
Musk just said that there are 2 options how to warm up Mars: the fast way and the slow way, Colbert asked about the fast way so Musk mentioned Thermonuclear weapons. IMO the quote in the presentation is not honest.
This isn't a new idea - Kim Stanley Robinson mentions nukes being used to melt underground polar ice in his Mars trilogy.
After all, we'd all think using nukes to move an asteroid on a collision course with Earth was a good idea - so its not like a "harmless" use of a nuke is impossible.
It doesn't hurt to ask what problems need solving.
Ultimately this just isn't altruism but it is promoted as whilst people are in deep shit all around him.
I'm not really sure what my point is but I suspect it is a new form of hypocrisy.
That's good, and that's sort of the point of getting money, is it not? We should encourage those who are rich to pursue goals beneficial to everyone. They have the ability to achieve things no "democratic" groups (and countries) can, because the latter are plagued with coordination problems.
In the long run, writers (and presenters) must take the risk and assume that their audience is intelligent and informed, lest we be left with lowest common denominator dreck.
I'm not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing.
Provided we get codes that recognise the difference between personal, small business, and large business, it won't be so bad.
http://gadgets.ndtv.com/internet/features/deleting-a-whatsap...
http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/07/08/421251662/...
> In a television interview this week, Musk said: "I'm trying to do useful things." Then he outlined his plan to detonate nuclear weapons on Mars.
> These people are the face of our industry.
It's hard to take the rest of the article seriously when the author is purposely misquoting people to make them look bad. The comment in question was said on Late Night with Stephen Colbert, when asked what the fast way to heat up Mars would be, as he posited several methods to do it. He later indicated that nuclear bombs would not be the preferred method.
But he ignores all of that, and concentrates entirely on a single offhanded remark by the guy. That's incredibly dishonest.
And if he's that dishonest about Musk, what about the others he discusses? I don't know them well enough to say whether they're being fairly represented or not. But I do know that I can't trust the author to get it right.
If we can't fix these problems locally, how do we expect to fix them remotely?
Even what you call "mindless pursuit of space" isn't so; SpaceX aims for space for known, well-thought and well-defined reasons. It's not just fueled by imagination.
That seems at odds with centuries of human existence. Nations, cultures, and people have migrated, immigrated, expanded, and contracted for a very long time. A hyper-local focus is (probably) just as toxic as a hyper-global focus, no?
The URL told me that it's probably a talk (maybe about that category of videos?) using words that don't do anything.
Skimming the first screen worth of text led me to the conclusion that it must be about privacy or hacking.
And here I see comments about advertising?! Two or three words, one being "Talk", the other being whatever this is actually about, would have helped tremendously here.
It's a terrible title...
> Ban on Third-Party Ad Tracking
My experience in finance makes me skeptical that this will play out the way that he hopes. Most of the financial regulation in the world started with laws "average people can understand". Things like Banks should have enough risk free capital to cover outstanding deposits and banks shouldn't make "speculative investments". But it turns out that the devil is in the details with these sorts of things. What is a "speculative investment" etc? And there are dramatic financial mismatches between the people trying to work around the laws and the people trying to enforce them.
So when I hear "information the site has about the visitor" being the only thing a publisher can share with the ad network, I have to wonder
a) can publishers share data with each other? If not how does that impact things like open ids, publisher networks etc.
b) doesn't this rule simply give even more of a stranglehold to giant companies like facebook and google? How does having a couple of giant extra-governmental tracking agencies make our lives better than having a huge network of them? If advertisers can only serve the ads they want on facebook/google, won't that mean that publishers will be levered into only using those sources for publishing? How do you break out of that cycle?
For a) I imagine data sharing is fine, except that you can't share behavioral data about users, and you can't use any of the shared data for advertising. That said, I know very little about how publisher networks work and would appreciate pushback.
b) is unfortunately quite right. If you're sufficiently pessimistic, one thing that makes having giant tracking agencies better is that they're more likely to not get hacked or leak your data. But I agree that this is a real problem and one that my proposals from this talk will exacerbate.
I have no insider knowledge, but I'm starting to think Apple is placing a huge bet on the fact that ad-blocking will 1.) eventually make the web unprofitable then 2.) shepherd users onto platforms like iOS and Facebook where they can be monetized better. This, to me, is starting as an experiment with Apple Music vs Spotify (ad enabled) to test whether their platform has enough clout to get people to pay $9.99 for their platform and is now eventually moving to News where Apple is now starting with exclusive news but may move to a pay model where you also pay $9.99 for news.
If this model "works", you may see sites move inside Apple's wall garden in order to keep the lights on, and create a barrier for new sites to ever build up an audience without relying on Apple's/Facebook's walled garden.
All this stems from the fact of my fear that while everyone seems to be gung-ho about the proliferation of ad-blockers, no one, except Apple (Music, News for now) and Facebook (News), is providing any real alternative solutions to publishers for a source of revenue.
Especially the part about fighting against the tobacco industry. It really made me realize that this is a fight that can be won. I honestly thought this was a lost battle.
It will, however, be a more subtle battle as the advertising industry (Big Ads ?) cannot be linked to something as clearly detremental as lung cancer and will be quick to point out that the technology developped can help fight terrorism (a winning buzzword bingo if ther's ever been one) by identifying behavior on the internet, including so-called dangerous ones.
Why? Because it's easy to be apathetic. This is not a knock on you personally, it's a statement on the human condition. Most people just don't feel like they have the free bandwidth (time, money, energy) to take on a big ideological fight, particularly if they think they can't win anyway.
But the truth is that the last 100 years of history is chock full of amazing stories of victories in just such fights.
I'm most familiar with U.S. history so I'll just highlight a few:
- 100 years takes us back to the beginning of the modern labor movement. Viciously opposed by well-funded industry and government forces, it nevertheless succeeded in massively shifting social norms and installing numerous laws and regulations to protect workers. It is still a strong force today.
- 60 years takes us back to the births of the modern civil rights and environmental movements. Like labor, they were out funded by huge margins, but still changed the world through shifting social norms and numerous laws and regulations. Both are still powerful movements today.
- We only need to look back about 30 years to see the birth of the modern LGBT movement, whose victories are in our headlines today. That movement will undoubtedly continue to be a powerful force in American society for decades to come, at least.
Now take a look at those timelines... 30 years is the most recent. The tobacco victories were on a similar timeline. Nothing comes quick and easy when we're talking about moving the opinions and laws of an entire nation. But is the fight winnable? YES! The evidence says it is.
Those top 5 agencies are the ones who can afford to do privacy-invading advertising, because they can do it at scale.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/danielfisher/2013/12/12/study-fi...
I thought this was a little hilarious. For so many people who live in the Bay Area, a favorite way to pass the time is to complain about how terrible it is. I too thought it was terrible, so I made the irrational decision to no longer live there.
Everything else in the piece was pretty solid, as usual.
I want to hijack the bit on the EU cookie law to bring up a recent annoyance though: does anyone else here have their browser configured to block cookies by default? I do, on my main browser. Have you got any idea just how many sites completely fail to work at all with cookies turned off? I don't just mean sites that require a login or paywalled sites like NYTimes, and I don't mean sites where some functionality is crippled. I mean sites like Washington Post, which (apparently intermittently) fail to render any content at all. For those of us that are actively taking some steps to protect our privacy, the web is gradually becoming outright hostile.
Far from the regular demographic starting or running our current decade's "unicorn" startups with million dollar Series B and burnrates larger than some small countries.
It wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if a good portion of his time or money went towards improving the state of affairs in SF. ;-)
I have at various times tried to use the web this way by default, and it's frustrating to no end.
The comments from the talk about the browser being the user agent really hit home for me. The browser is all we have to fight this, and it still (mostly) does what we tell it to. There are ways to deal with cookies other than outright blocking which allow you to bypass such defective-by-design sites (e.g. "private browsing" and add-ons like self-destructing cookies).
The biggest concern I have, though, is how much computing I do on my Android telephone now. I have Firefox and uMatrix even there, sure, but it's an entire product designed to collect my data.
you forgot the kicker - while claiming to be superior to west LA, manhattan, chicago, etc, etc, etc.
Maybe those informational widgets that pop up when you Google suicide-related terms didn't actually arise from a sense of humanity or civic duty, but from a desire to reduce employee turnover in their ad divisions. /s
Macabre humor aside, I actually wonder if there's any organizations out there funding ads targeted at suicidal individuals. Search terms can only go so far, and ad networks have the ability to gain a far more complete picture. You'd almost think it's something ad networks would partner up on pro bono.
Moreover, it's not hard to imagine imperfect targeting being beneficial, e.g. a family member being alerted to a loved one's state of mind via receiving the ads themselves. Obviously there's quite a few ways such a scheme could backfire or otherwise have adverse effects, though it is interesting to contemplate.
Need help? United States:
1 (800) 273-8255
National Suicide Prevention Lifeline
Hours: 24 hours, 7 days a week
Languages: English, Spanish
Website: www.suicidepreventionlifeline.org
(edit: It's also hilarious how ad tech people refuse to recognize how evil and backwards their entire business models are. They vehemently defend, downvote, and mob-mentality their way through the cognitive dissonance of hurting hundreds of millions of users in exchange for retaining their jobs. Because, after all, if I'm doing the work, it can't be bad, right? I'm not a bad person, so the people arguing against me must be the evil ones.
One comment theme that seems to get instant downvotes on HN: the concept you are not entitled to track and record every client-side user action. So many people assume invasive tracing and recording of all user behavior is "just how the world works" and "if we don't do it, we'll fall behind." Kinda military-oligarchy mindset, isn't it? If we don't have all the power, who knows what people will do!)
Yeah, I wasn't suggesting those were ads.
> ... pretty much everybody on the planet knows forced pre-roll youtube ads are a bad idea. Nobody wants to watch them.
Totally agree. I'm amazed a better method hasn't been implemented.
What makes you say that?
When I switched my evil bit on, I came up with a company that helps you make your suicide look like an accident, so that your life insurance pays out, and no one perpetuates hateful memories of you for taking the easy exit.
The premium service makes your suicide look like a civil offense against you, so that your family may also win an additional settlement from a large corporation or government entity.
The extra-evil service matches you up with a demolitions engineer from a terrorist organization that most closely shares your values.
The morally questionable service matches you up with rich people awaiting organ transplants, who don't pay you to kill yourself, per se, but rather to enjoy the final moments of your life in the vicinity of a particular hospital, without being burdened by worry about the future financial needs of your loved ones.
And that's where I turned my evil bit off, because I was starting to creep myself out.
This problem probably affects most cities with a large transplant population.
I've been thinking about this a lot mainly because I live in Nashville which is experiencing its own growth challenges with a lot of transplants. I've been here since 2008 (TN since 98) and I'm really only just now being to take "ownership" of the city. Perhaps it's because I'm out of school finally and thinking more long term, but it's tough to consider a city "yours" when you know you're going to be transitioning (potentially) to a new job and a new city.
But since I've got a job here, it seems like it's more appropriate to put more effort into my own hometown. It's tough to get past that mindset that you're only renting the city and somebody else will clean it up. Part of it is there seems to be a stigma against having an opinion about how a city should be without a certain amount of time spent living in the city. This just encourages, in my mind, a bad attitude towards active civic involvement. But it has to be tempered with the understanding that a transplant does have less experience of living in the city.
I don't know where I'm really going with this. Maybe all I'm saying is young people, I think, probably view the city they study in as they do their student housing or an apartment: something they rent and somebody else's problem.
>But we expect that people will trust us to reinvent their world with software even though we can't make our own city livable.
Where does it propose "socialism as the one true government"?
>I would urge you to get back in touch with this side of yourselves, climb in the longboats, and impose modern, egalitarian, Scandinavian-style social democracy on the rest of us at the point of a sword.
[0]: http://idlewords.com/talks/web_design_first_100_years.htm
Every Internet-connected device should have a hardware off switch, same for cameras and microphones. I would be interested to hear the opinions of people who disagree.
- ugly
- unreliable
- confusing UI: you need to know whether it was physically switched off or auto-powered-down to know how to turn it back on
I guess we're at a point now where todays 25 year-olds have never seen what socialism can deteriorate into.
For the record, there are lots of places on the socialism spectrum and many of them haven't deteriorated at all, and some of them look quite lovely...
You'll find that much of Europe is in some form of "socialism" by American standards. And we're doing quite well from it!
There are, in fact, also real websites serving real ads to fake traffic for real money. When publishers promise an advertiser impressions or downloads or some other metric on a campaign, and then the traffic fails to materialize, the marketing department can always call in the bots. It happens at some of the biggest and most reputable sites out there, and what's crazy is the agencies (middlemen who buy ads on behalf of publishers) know it and don't care because hey, the metrics got met and they got paid their cut!
This bothers me. This bothers me a lot. There are two problems with this.
First, it's not tech's problem to fix. It's a city-wide problem. Faulting tech for not solving problems that are not tech's to solve is at best dishonest.
Second, this ignores the way that these problems have been codified as unsolvable by the city. For instance, you'll find a lot of support for housing first approaches among the tech community. You'll find virtually zero real support in the city, because that approach requires building housing. We all know how well that goes over. Pretty much any change encounters similar entrenched resistance.
So we wind up with a tech community that finds itself incapable of solving problems for everyone. We cannot contribute to our neighborhoods because our neighbors blow their tops when we try. We do the next best thing - we solve problems for ourselves. It's very far from ideal, but at least we can make ourselves a bit less miserable. We're going to get yelled at either way, so we might as well do so in comfort.
Want to see this change? Start by looking at why we stop caring about the communities we're in. I know I can't be bothered to care about people who have done their best to make me feel unwelcome from day one. "We don't want your kind here" does not move me to empathy - or funding local artists.
Tech workers living in the city are no less of residents because of their job. Tech is no less a participant of the city than any other business sector. Your post is basically the Bystander Effect in action.
I've seen what happens to people who advocate for things like more housing in SF. Do I need to be personally crucified in the media in order to be allowed suggest that there are major problems? Is it the Bystander Effect to note that a lot of people are trying all the things that are supposed to work and they're collectively accomplishing fuck-all? And that maybe throwing more time and effort and money into what's not working may not be wise?
But nevermind that. What do you think I should do? If you answer is to get involved in (local politics|my neighborhood group|planning board|whatever), then at what point am I allowed to give up in frustration at no problems being solved?
Right now I'd love for there to be some course of action that doesn't have a lot of precedent as a monstrous waste of time. I'll settle for being allowed to say that something isn't working.
If the new normal is “We've sold our customer’s privacy and personal data to the highest bidder and yet we’re still wasting 50% of our ad spend & have allowed a faceless Silicon Valley company to insert itself in between us and our customers.” then the old way of doing things suddenly looks quite attractive by comparison.
advertisement revenue and ads ROI calculations predates internet by a fair margin
This is absolutely not true in my case. I'm both a small publisher and a small advertiser. I have absolutely no trouble making ends meet. Perhaps I will in the future, but it is very unlikely that click fraud or or privacy concerns will be to blame.
In general, I'm always looking for ways to justify spending more money on producing better content. I work hard to build the trust of my audience and to provide ever increasing value to them. Fortunately, as my business grows, this becomes easier in some ways, due to economy of scale. A bigger audience generates more revenue, which means I can spend more on content. Better content means more readership, which in turn increases revenue. It's a gratifying business. :)
Um, I assume they have it invested in some manner.
Cash, money market instruments, and other types of fixed income. Basically lots of things that can be turned into cash quickly without much volatility in their price.
I have long predicted this outcome and always thought I was being a bit too realistic. It's nice to see someone else making the same forecast.
Of course, only time will tell.
Doubtful many folks will stop buying insurance due to this fact.
Maybe I missed what you were trying to say.
If you read this paragraph critically, it is easy to find the problem with the argument in this article.
There is a fundamental failure to explain how the privacy concerns are having a negative impact right now.
The cigarette comparison is ridiculous, because cancer is an obvious problem. Cancer is bad. Cigarettes cause cancer. It's is very easy to understand that.
What is the "cancer" correlation with online ads?
Something that might happen in the future if the advertising bubble bursts?
I'm not saying that there isn't a serious problem. It's just that the negative affects are not clearly stated. And that is a problem -- especially if you want to cause change.
People don't want cancer. That's why cigarettes are almost universally seen as bad. With online advertising, what is the correlation? I don't see one.
edit: I want to add, that in my experience as a small publisher and a small advertiser, I have no problem with click fraud. The robots are not winning. (I spend around $30-40k a year in ads, generate significantly more in ad revenue.)
1: http://idlewords.com/talks/web_design_first_100_years.htm
Denmark was almost entirely homogeneous until the 1990s and is slowly becoming less so - but in a very racially charged way. Their fastest growing political party, the Danish People's Party, is heavily anti-immigration and anti-non-danish folks. It's also has an incredibly well educated population due to decisions made 50+ years ago that would take a massive effort and timescale to implement in the US - even if it would work.
Also the definition of rich in Denmark is equivalent to lower-middle class in the US (with healthcare added). Homes are smaller, cars are fewer, people spend more of their take home salary on food and other basics... The main difference being it is less costly to screw up in Denmark.
Things are overwhelmingly getting better for everyone and even the poorest in America... http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2015/09/were-living-through-the...
...and the value of improving computers, technology, biology, space travel on a universal time scale is huge on a utilitarian scale. Things have never improved so quickly in so many ways.
Finally - "be the change you wish to see" applies here more than ever. No one is stopping individuals from donating large swaths of their money to causes - in fact almost all of those donations come out of taxable income. Targeting individuals to do great things rather than vague policy points may be a better option when policy has overwhelmingly worked in most areas.
The main difference being it is less costly to screw up in Denmark.
The window of acceptability needs to shift a couple of times (just a couple) before this happens.
The next few years should amaze indeed.
30 years of reading Science Fiction and I never thought I'd hear those words...
"The companies that come out of [venture capital funding] are no longer pursuing profit, or even revenue. Instead, the measure of their success is valuation—how much money they've convinced people to tell them they're worth."
I yearn now for a modern day Ambrose Bierce to write up something clever and cutting, with entries like:
_valuation_: how much money you've convinced people to tell you you're worth
Oh can we please not start adding this bit of meta to our posts? It's in the same category as "I know I'm going to be downvoted..."
And the homeless problem in San Francisco, and the other problems it faces, are mostly due to poor governance rather than Facebook or Google.
I really like the suggested "creative commons type licenses for websites" or promises. I have doubts that it'll work but its a reasonable instrument that I'd like to see. There's already ways of promising these things but I like the idea of having nice icons and solid branding for it like you get with CC.
I disagree with some points, most notably the "money sitting offshore doing nothing" one. It's not hoarded it's saved to be spent later (which is actually a good thing). The central planning argument also seems contradictory. He rails against big VC making decisions about what to do but then it seems that his suggestion for a fix is letting some other elite (himself?) decide. I'd much rather have the people that invest their money make the decisions than some social norm that says "space flight/immortality is not a desireable/realistic goal"
De Havilland comet crashes and the ensuing bankruptcy probably is the real reason why flying is safe.
Usually when regulating succeeds, the industry is with the government trying to get loose guns back in the line.
Having worked at several publishers, this is actually an advertising model we could support. It would work better for users, publishers, and most advertisers. The only people who would lose out are the AdTech firms.
Unfortunately, I think getting there requires that the people who want this sort of thing start acting reasonable. Instead of constantly demanding the death of all JavaScript, or an end to a century-old business model, demand measured change like this.
Additionally, sad news is that there a lot of people who don't care about their privacy or the homeless however hard you find that to believe.
In this world, privacy becomes a luxury good. Mark Zuckerberg
buys the four houses around his house in Palo Alto, to keep
hidden what the rest of us must share with him.
And no one forces us to give our data to him. Don't abuse language. Only the state can legally use force, and they often do it illegally as well.
I don't exactly have warm and fuzzies about Mark, but there's enough truthful appalling material out there to support your claims about the lack of privacy.
He's explained that the worst part of being a billionaire is going to the grave with everyone else. “I just hope to live long enough not to die.”
This is my FAVORITE example of SV silliness. "Waah death! But I'm TOO RICH to die!"
Not even remotely true. "some" people were no more happy. Most were not just used to it, but enjoying it.
The real problem is crony capitalism, where large corporations have captured government regulatory processes, and effectively work hand-in-glove to maintain control of world processes that only benefit the "elite".
Someone should start an "advertising consumption as a service" company where we can pay a subscription to a 3rd party to provide software to consume all of the ads that would otherwise be targeted at the user! Some of that fee can then be sent to the original advertisers as a return on otherwise-lost advertising revenue!
Please note, that this in no way resembles a protection racket.
<removes tongue from cheek>
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirk_Gently%27s_Holistic_Detec...
It's cat-and-mouse. We're enjoying the benefits of a faster, safer and cheaper web (as are the developers behind those content sites using the ads, I reckon), but my prediction is that those benefits will be short lived. There are cleverer people than the browsing masses, they will find a way.
It's a talk by someone of European origin in Europe. It is not a science talk, it is meant to provoke thought and yes, entertain.
geez.
a) The parlous state of San Francisco does not strike me as relevant to the issue of how advertising violates privacy on the Internet.
b) And then when he does get on the topic he exhibits the same blind spot he's decrying in other techies -- ignoring the role of decades of foolish ideological governance and one-party rule of the city leading to its terrible social stratification, and instead deciding to blame techies for not inventing more comfortable park benches for the victims of those policies to sleep on.
However, I did a CTRL+F of both the article and these comments and don't see one mention of Acxiom.
The social pressure comparison to tobacco might be workable, but until there's significant "sin taxes" put on web ads, I don't think there's quite the same motivation for change.
I guess my reluctance to raise any hopes here is caused by two things;
a) Unless I'm missing a trick this is a legislative issue, and fighting for privacy isn't on the political agenda (except maybe in Iceland because those folks are phenomenal). What's more, until the ERMAGHERD TERRRRRSM narrative changes it won't get a look in, and even then you'd need to get enough people interested in privacy to make it a fair fight against all the lobby groups who'd want to shut you down.
b) Some of these proposals seem overly privacy-centric to me, which I guess is fair in the early stages of an idea, but it makes me worry that it won't be taken any further. The example that comes to my mind is limiting behavioural data to 90 days. Some insights from behavioural data might take a year or more to come to light. While as a consumer I might shrug at 90 days, as someone trying to understand how people use new types of products I personally would push back against that as being unreasonable (and a hinderance to innnovation).
You could get a phantascopic system planted directly on your retinas, just as Bud's sound system lived on his eardrums. You could even get telæsthetics patched into your spinal column at various key vertebrae. But this was said to have its drawbacks: some concerns about long-term nerve damage, plus it was rumored that hackers for big media companies had figured out a way to get through the defenses that were built into such systems, and run junk advertisements in your peripheral vision (or even spang in the fucking middle) all the time—even when your eyes were closed. Bud knew a guy like that who'd somehow gotten infected with a meme that ran advertisements for roach motels, in Hindi, superimposed on the bottom right-hand corner of his visual field, twenty-four hours a day, until the guy whacked himself
"You can have my data if these conditions apply".
Love it
I'm also totally onboard with a new, anarchistic alternative to the internet. I think about this idea all the time, but I don't have anywhere close to the knowledge needed to start figuring it out.
It's a bit surprising to me that the page includes a Google Analytics tracker.