“If you’re going to see an ad regardless, would you rather it be relevant to you or not?”
The answer is and always has been “I don’t want to see an ad in the first place, I don’t want you collecting any information about me under any circumstances, and anything that makes ads spots worth less is a positive.”
You know the cheeky “you won’t see fewer ads, they’ll just be leas relevant” line? The only long term solution to actually see fewer ads is to drive their value down to nothing.
The fact that you can pay to remove ads on a lot of services kinda gives the game away that they’re a net negative. Why would you ever want them gone if they’re so useful and helpful?
AdTech is such a garbage industry — drunk on their own delusions of facilitating commerce and helping businesses reach customers while being so annoying and vile that the only way their products to function is to insert themselves into every facet of life because nobody would ever seek them out on their own. Bleh.
There's a huge amount of content that people are just not willing to pay for, but would gladly view ads. You may be willing to pay for Youtube Premium and Twitch Plus or whatever, but the vast majority of people do not.
Do I feel like I'm a horrible person because I help make websites more money so they can stay in business? Heck no. It's the only reason 90% of these sites are able to exist in the first place.
-- your next health insurance change to triple your premiums because of that previous bill you had such a hard time paying down
-- your mortgage / refi / loan application to be denied for factors completely separate from your actual credit report, but have made it into a reputation system
-- you get quietly, passively bypassed for that job application from the reputation hit from that one really poorly thought through social media post last century.
Data mining and data stores that affect people's lives and opportunities, that aren't just obfuscated, but actively secret are a blight.
If you have a service like YouTube that provides so much value and is such an economic multuplier that we can't possibly imagine society existing without it then why don't we just pay for it? The fact that we have no system to fund public goods that aren't ads and taxes is a huge failing. You're basically just describing a tax system that is paid in consumerism which sucks because it's inherently regressive.
If you have a product which is genuinely useful to hundreds of millions of people but that the value only materializes when it's available for 'free' to everyone then we should have ways of getting you funded that isn't attention or convincing individuals to pay you a subscription fee.
You're hitting on an important economic function that ads are currently doing but then twisting it around and saying that there's possibility for anything but ads to perform that function.
You can only hope that whatever marketers would do instead to promote their stuff is less annoying or damaging. I have my doubts.
Good point. Netflix replaced cable for a reason. People can stomach ads up to a point but I don't think anyone likes them.
- I don't trust ad networks to give me more relevant ads, the data they currently have has not made my advertising experience better, so I don't see why giving them more data is going to fix the problem. I don't see strong evidence that advertisers know how to make useful ads regardless of how much data they have.
- I don't trust ad networks to target responsibly for my benefit. Ad networks are trying to manipulate me into buying products, they are trying to affect how I view the world. That's a hostile relationship, they don't have my best interest in mind, so "more effective" is not necessarily going to translate to my benefit. Ad networks are not trying to make ads more useful to me, they are trying to get me to buy stuff.
- I don't trust ad networks to only use tracking to improve relevance. I take it as a given that their tracking will be used for underhanded price changes, changes to UX to make it harder for me to complete certain actions, deal availability, geolocking, changing results when I comparison shop, and other anti-user practices.
- I want to have control over what data goes into my advertising profiles. Tracking me everywhere forces me to treat my advertising profile like I would treat a cat -- I don't want to do reinforcement training on my ads. With tracking, if I want to be advertised a certain product, I have to reinforce to the network that I care about it. If someone sends me a link, I have to think before clicking on it because I don't know what that will signal to advertisers. This is a really awful way to interact with computers in general, and it discourages people from freely browsing the web.
- Ad tracking creates an additional security risk for my data. I might get advertised an embarrassing product at the wrong time in front of the wrong person, that information might get leaked to other 3rd-parties that are somehow even less scrupulous than advertisers. There are multiple instances of ad networks effectively doxing people, outing their secrets. It's not safe to trust ad networks with that data.
- Even if none of the above was true, I don't take it as a given that even at a purely conceptual level targeted advertising is better than untargeted advertising. I disagree with the philosophical premise behind that kind of marketing, I think that marketing should be user controlled and based on signals that users consciously give about what they want to see. I think in most cases that users should start the search for a new product themselves and decide what they want advertised to them. Even if the advertising industry was ethical (which to be clear, it's not), I still don't want targeted ads.
- And even if I did want targeted ads, heck anyone who is tracking me for advertising purposes without my permission. If your product is so heckin great, then it shouldn't be a problem for you to get me to opt into tracking. The lack of affirmative consent is a problem, regardless of the outcome. You have to get people's permission before you do this stuff -- even if I'm happy with the result, that doesn't excuse you from asking my permission. And no, collecting the data anyway but just showing less relevant ads on the front end doesn't count. I don't want the tracking code on my computer at all unless I've invited it to be there.
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Now, completely separately from everything above, I also don't want to see ads at all and I think everyone should block them and burn the entire industry to the ground regardless of the consequences. BUT that is not the primary reason why I'm against fingerprinting and user tracking. Even if I loved ads, I still wouldn't be OK with the kind of tracking that tech companies are doing, and I still wouldn't want them to fingerprint me.
And no, I am not being sarcastic, nor do I think I'm being overly hyperbolic in this.
