[lajhsdfkl]

>If anything, GDPR should be seen as an opportunity to disrupt the quasi-monopolistic online ad market.

It's amazing to me how people manage to fool themselves into thinking there is hope when the world is crumbling around them.

If Google can't make ads profitable in the EU what makes you think some tiny European company will be able to disrupt the ad market?

How would they even do it without tracking? I can see the conversation with major brands now

EU Ad Startup - "Trust us, the ads you are paying for are performing great. We are very confident that they are driving conversions on your website."

Brand- "Ok, do you have any numbers to prove we are receiving conversions due to your ads?"

EU Ad Startup - "No as that would be illegal under GDPR, but please trust our business."

[camillomiller]

Which is how the paper and TV ads industry worked for more than half a century, forcing brands to push creative limits in creating campaigns that we regard sometimes as a pinnacle of arts and media culture. Just because the Internet lets you laser focus a campaign by profiling the shit out of people, it doesn’t mean that is how things should work.

[lajhsdfkl]

> Which is how the paper and TV ads industry worked for more than half a century, forcing brands to push creative limits in creating campaigns that we regard sometimes as a pinnacle of arts and media culture. Just because the Internet lets you laser focus a campaign by profiling the shit out of people, it doesn’t mean that is how things should work.

How did the paper and tv industry work? Oh yeah, advertisers would crowd around and bid up the largest players. Small niche products would receive little to no revenue and die quick deaths.

That is what I suspect will happen in the EU. Without tracking Advertisers will be unable to know how their ads are performing. Without metrics such as conversions which require end to end tracking advertisers will need to rely on the reputation of the platform.

Products such as google and facebook will receive significant attention from advertisers. The tiny blog you enjoy reading that is barely scraping by will receive very little.

[tannhaeuser]

> Without metrics such as conversions which require end to end tracking advertisers will need to rely on the reputation of the platform. Products such as google and facebook will receive significant attention from advertisers.

Yes that's a valid concern. But blogging hasn't been profitable or even sustainable for a very long time now in the way it used to be ten or fifteen years ago, with YouTube, Fb, microblogging platforms, and news aggregators having taken this space instead. Those who keep on running blogs do so for promoting their own services, products, or other agendas, or as a hobby, and will continue to do so. So it's not a terrible loss really; the great starving of blogs has already happened in the past.

But sites such as product review blogs could get a boost by ad money being in need to be allocated in innovative ways. Post-GDRP advertising requires thinking a little bit out of the box, and leaving the "ad" model as we know it behind which isn't very effective to begin with. If you consider attention a scarce resource to compete for, I could imagine ad money going into more and new native advertising sites, temporary sites for local events with direct sponsoring, focused sites for special interests, etc.

[usrusr]

Small niche products thrived on their inherently high precision in content-based targeting. When their niche had ad buyers. (edit: actually I meant "if", niche content providers without much on-topic ad budget are a winner of tracking-based targeting)

The more recent capability of targeting those niche ads also on random click-bait sites didn't exactly help those small niche products.

(Edit, for clarification: with unrestricted tracking, if you publish to a niche with good ad money, the few ads that you do show, for a tiny fraction of the ad budget of your niche, become the information source used for drawing much of your niche's ad money to ads displayed to your audience on unrelated sites. Your ad-network should practically "steal" your content-targeting information to divert on-topic ad money to entirely unrelated sites)

[kinsomo]

> Your ad-network should practically "steal" your content-targeting information to divert on-topic ad money to entirely unrelated sites

Do you have a link to support that? I believe it, but I'm looking for an article that explains it well. I read one that had a good example of an advertiser basically telling the operator of a high-quality, premium site that he's only going to use them to gather audience targeting information so they can be targeted at cheaper sites.

[usrusr]

The tiny "share on facebook" button, a google analytics script and so on, you don't even need to show an ad to associate my browser identity with the topics on the site I am visiting. But ads can certainly serve the same purpose.

Maybe you misunderstood what I meant (my wording wasn't exactly perfect), I'm not talking about some dramatic ad-fraud scheme: without tracking-based targeting, all ad-money about scuba-beekeeping (just making up some really small niche) would go to the few sites dedicated to pleasures scuba-beekeeping. This is how Google started their dominance, they were the best at automatically matching scuba-beekeeping advertisers to scuba-beekeeping websites. Content-based targeting.

With tracking, ad-networks show a small, cheap ad (or even just some tracker the site includes without monetary compensation) on the scuba-beekeeping site and take a note that the browser identity a target for scuba-beekeeping. Ads about scuba-beekeeping will now appear to that browser-identity on random news sites and the like while the niche site won't see a cent for the targeting information.

All in all, if the "native" ad market (the one addressable by content-based targeting) of a site has above-average value per eyeball, a site will tend to lose more from cross-site targeting than they will gain from showing ads unrelated to their content (but related to whatever their visitors have visited before), if the "native" ad market is lower then they may win. Visit frequency also plays a role, if the content-targetable sites take only a small percentage of their users' browsing activity, a no-tracking scenario would cause a bidding war amongst on-topic advertizers, if they take a large chunk of their users' browsing, inbound tracking targeted ads (about other topics) could easily more than make up for the losses in on-topic ads.

[tannhaeuser]

An excellent argument that isn't receiving the attention it deserves IMHO.

[Grollicus]

It should be possible to track ad campaigns and therefore see exactly the turnover ratios as long as the campaigns are broad enough that they don't target individual users.

In the analog world they do this for example via coupon codes which are unique to the ad.

[lajhsdfkl]

>It should be possible to track ad campaigns and therefore see exactly the turnover ratios as long as the campaigns are broad enough that they don't target individual users. In the analog world they to this for example via coupon codes which are unique to the ad.

This will severely undercount the number of conversions. It's not atypical for someone to view/click an ad and then purchase at a later date through a different channel.

It was possible to track that before GDPR. It is not possible now.

[christophilus]

By following a different business model? Employ a small team, sell ads based on relevance to the content you're reading, going after niches... It's not like there's only one formula for success. GDPR is going to force a different formula on the market.

[Mirioron]

This relies on the fact that your business can be served anywhere. What if you're in a niche that can only be limited to your area or to people who speak a specific language in that geographical area?