I want no ads, but apparently it's impossible to build a business these days without also trying to manipulate me into buying random other stuff. If I can't go around them, I'd still prefer to ignore generic ads rather than targeted ones. It's easier to do and less creepy from their side.
the industry hasn't managed to solve this situation for decades now. the best solution has been ads. otherwise there's the subscription model, which reduces access to information.
The problem is people who would pay to avoid ads are those worth targeting... I'd love if a single service could let me opt out of all tracking and ads internet wide for a fixed fee, say $50-$100 a month.
Google actually provided exactly this service (for all Google-based ads, which is a high %) for a little over a year before it was discontinued, supposedly because nobody actually used it.
I don't have the exact number (I had only just signed up as a publisher about a month before they closed it -- maybe someone else can pop in with exact numbers) but I remember it being really low, around 5-7%.
It was low enough that it wasn't really a factor when determining what to price your ad-free pages at (most people went with 1-2 cents per load) -- most people just priced at whatever average your ads were pulling in currently without worrying about the cut, since it was a fraction of a cent.
One requires a network that tracks your every step and analyzes your behavior in a way that makes most totalitarian regimes green with envy. The other knows nothing about you except that the site you are browsing right now is about computer hardware and there might be a slight chance that you want to buy computer hardware right now.
agree, but they're there to pay the bills.
and most "computer hardware" websites i visit already offer "computer hardware" targeted ads. nothing special about this.
Generic ads are more useful to me anyway. When the ads are targeted, it's usually for products I already have an opinion about, and about which I have therefore already made up my mind.
Generic ads, on the other hand, can be about topics/products I usually would never consider or have a strong opinion about, when I realise it might be helpful to a problem I've been neglecting or something like that.
Put another way: Targeted ads are never useful to me, generic ads are sometimes useful to me.
That's because when a targeted ad is general enough to be useful, you misclassify it as a nontargeted ad. Nontargeted ads are pretty much only punch-the-monkey mortgage an dcar insurance scams.
There are two ad campaigns which caused me to try a new product. Neither time was I actually looking for a new product. (The products were Old Spice and Dos Equis. I figured they earned a try just for entertaining me. And I ended up liking both of them.)
I see generic ads as a signal that a company strongly backs its product. I see targeted ads a way for companies hocking cheap products to squeeze value out of their impressions.
The billboards on highway 80/101 in SF are usually rented by big brands with large corporate backing, but their products are usually solid, whereas AdSense ads usually show me what I assume must be dropshipped goods with little quality control (but usually have some sort of novelty value).
then i'm sorry to say, but ads are the least of your problems. in my country my ISP checks and stores all the urls i visit. and pro-actively blocks urls.
and what about governments and their spy agencies? shouldn't they be the focus of your discontent?
It’s not the least of my problems. A to me unknown but large number of companies try to track as much as possible of what I do online, and buy and sell this intensely personal data, causing a very concrete risk that private information about me becomes public. I’m not consulted about this, and I get nothing of value out of it, only risk of disaster.
Yes, there are other big privacy problems. They are all, to varying degrees, the focus of my discontent, and they have barely anything to do with this discussion.
“Targeted” ads almost never show me anything of interest and insist on compromising my privacy. “Generic” ads are more likely to be interesting to me and don't attack my privacy.
I think these terms are misleading though. Traditional advertising is targeted: at the audience of some particular media which takes advertising. And that kind of advertising is actually very effective, and still is. What do viewers of a technology YouTube channel perhaps have an interest in? Technology! What might readers of a gardening magazine want to buy? Gardening tools!
And traditional advertising also advertises to people things at the time they are most receptive to it: when am I thinking most about buying video games? Perhaps when I'm watching others playing them.
Would generic ads really be more interesting for you? Don't forget, the United States is not the only country in the world nor is English the only language. I hope you're ready for ads in Chinese, Russian, German, French etc.
You're fine with political campaign ads targeting you? Only showing their support of wedge issues you agree with, while hiding their support of issues you disagree with? Sorry, but that's just too manipulative.
The problem is less with me seeing personalized ads, and more with the ad-server and/or the website getting my PII, and anyone who sees my screen or sniffs my traffic acquiring PII by observing which ads I get.
Apart from obvious privacy concerns, I started getting much more interesting ads on sites that respect my settings. One time I found an ad for a poem this way.
Targeted ads simply show me what I bought or was interested in recently(there's always a delay).
You're joking, right? I'd be far more likely to buy something from an ad based on the content of the page I'm currently looking at as it's something I'm obviously interested in. The targeted ads I've seen tend to be for things I've already bought (how many mattresses does one man need!?)