[rale00]

So what is going to happen when Apple succeeds in making it impossible to make any money off advertisements shown to iOS users on the web?

I'm currently imagining a future where publishers start to just redirect iOS traffic to install their app, where they can actually make money. Good news for the walled garden, I guess?

[geofft]

Didn't people make money off internet advertising before the modern surveillance-marketing complex? What happened to it?

I mean, maybe the answer is that those ads were only profitable because of the novelty factor and now that we have metrics we know they don't work, or at least don't work anywhere close to how much they cost. But I do miss things like the webcomics running their own ad network, Google's textual ads based solely on the search query, even the text ads on Read The Docs from a few years ago, etc.

Also I assume / hope that iOS ads aren't tracking people either; third-party cookies simply have no equivalent in the iOS app sandbox design. (And in-app ads tend to be abysmally targeted in my experience, at best "You're playing a mobile game? Try this other mobile game with even more in-app purchases!") So why wouldn't similarly untargeted web ads work too?

[jazzyjackson]

From what I can tell, the pre-surveilence norm was businesses having to find a website with an audience they wanted to advertise to, or a website finding a business that might want to market to their users, and then every website having to negotiate contracts with every business that wanted to set up ads.

Basically the print magazine model.

But as businesses wanted to advertise to larger populations (we want to do a $10million ad spend, how many little phpforums are we going to have to reach out to before spending all this money?) and websites grew larger audiences (how many companies are we going to have to reach out to before we start making a profit?) the overhead was too high.

The model now is, any company can fork over whatever budget they have to an ad network, and websites can serve as many ads as they want and everyone gets the reduced overhead of just dealing with the middle man.

So that's what I think happened.

[shandor]

> Basically the print magazine model.

And also TV, as it is still today. Oh, and every other form of advertising basically. If advertising without invading user privacy is so bad (as the perpetrators are rationalizing it), how come all other forms of advertising are still a billion (trillion?) dollar business worldwide? Just makes one wonder.

[floatingatoll]

Broadcast TV, not Internet TV. It’s valid for broadcast antenna and cable TV, because those can’t be tracked, but it’s not valid for smart TVs, smart cable boxes, or almost all Internet TV sources — as those are all generally subject to the same level of invasive tracking using the account credentials.

[shandor]

You're right of course. I was indeed talking only about the old-school TV.

[TeMPOraL]

I think that at a minimum, we need to get back to that model. What "reducing overhead" really bought us is tracking and behavioral targeting with all its failure modes. All because companies wanted and could externalize the costs of actually curating and targeting the ads they serve themselves.

[redwall_hp]

It was more profitable, especially for small sites. I used to cold email businesses and ask them if they wanted to buy a static banner on my blog, back in the 2000s. I made a few hundred a month on a site that had 30k views per month.

You're lucky to get a fraction of that now. Advertisers get a much lower cost through AdSense and a ton of metrics.

[babuskov]

I was in similar boat as you, but I think we look at the past with rose-tinted glasses.

You forget to factor in the time you spent to build the e-mail list, write a nice e-mail and send it, and repeat that every once in a while when people cancel. And you have to track payments, see if someone's credit cards runs out so they fail to renew the subscription, etc.

And let's not forget the fact that there was almost no competition - for businesses who didn't want to spend the time to research the Internet, the decision was most likely between advertising on your website or not advertising online at all.

BTW, you can still do that. I still go out, research and get people to advertise directly. I split the ad space on my website into premium and "regular" sections depending on page traffic and actual place on the page (header, footer, etc.). Premium has banners manually checked and contracted, hosted on the same domain as the rest of website's content, so no ad blocking and content very relevant to the website. The rest of space is filled with Google Ads. Premium banners earn about 5x more than Google Ads, but require that I maintain it. Google Ads just run without me having to do anything.

[alkonaut]

And all I want my browser to do is make sure that is what online advertising returns to.

[rale00]

> Didn't people make money off internet advertising before the modern surveillance-marketing complex? What happened to it?

Non-contextual advertising still exists, but it's perceived as less effective, so there's a lot less money in it. I don't know if that perception is correct, but I do remember back when a common complaint from people was that the ads they saw weren't relevant to them.

It's also not just targeted advertising that will be affected. Without any sort of user tracking, it will be even harder to prevent fraud. No one wants to spend money showing ads to bots.

> Also I assume / hope that iOS ads aren't tracking people either; third-party cookies simply have no equivalent in the iOS app sandbox design.

You might want to look into the Apple Advertising Identifier.

[saagarjha]

> Non-contextual advertising still exists, but it's perceived as less effective, so there's a lot less money in it. I don't know if that perception is correct, but I do remember back when a common complaint from people was that the ads they saw weren't relevant to them.

As far as I’m aware, the current state of advertising is people either being too creeped out by ad suggestions to buy anything or still feeling like they’re getting bad recommendations.

[philliphaydon]

Back in May I was looking for a new apartment. Via what’s app I requested the agent ask the landlord to put window restricters on the windows as they do not have window grills.

I never googled it searched or said anything in Facebook. Since the day after I requested this from the agent. I’ve had window restricters and grills show up in Facebook advertising.

I find it creepy that what’s app is meant to be private and encrypted when clearly it’s not.

[quotemstr]

> As far as I’m aware, the current state of advertising is people either being too creeped out by ad suggestions to buy anything or still feeling like they’re getting bad recommendations.

Given the massive revenues that advertising generates, how could you think this judgement (which I'm sure accurately reflects how _you_ feel) applies universally?

[geofft]

There's an old saying in marketing that half of your advertising money is wasted, you just don't know which half.

It's entirely possible for most people to find advertising either useless or creepy and for significant amounts of advertising revenue to nonetheless exist. And even if ads work some small fraction of the time, they can still be genuinely profitable for the advertisers.

[jjulius]

For me, absolutely.

[briandear]

> No one wants to spend money showing ads to bots

Bots can watch TV, somehow TV ads work. Newspapers have audited circulation, it wouldn’t be that hard to have a website visit audit company to verify “circulation.”

[makomk]

Auditing of TV and newspaper ads is done largely on the receiving side, not the sending side - companies monitor what's actually shown in the stations broadcast and papers sent to real people, they pay people to install monitoring devices to see what they watch, and they contact people to find out what they're reading. The internet equivalent isn't really possible on iOS without doing some kind of Facebook-esque end-run around Apple's walled garden and paying people to install non-Apple-approved monitoring apps - and even that would probably only work for really massive, broad advertising campaigns.

[blowfish721]

I don't know about the US but at least here in northern Europe on the broadcasting side this used to be true. Now the monitoring of what people are watching is done through the setup boxes as well as the web streams. When it comes to what commercials being broadcast it's usually done through logging in the software that handles the playlist (for linear tv) and then reported back to the advertisers. The advertisers probably have different systems in place to verify it as well however.

[alkonaut]

There is less money in that advertising because the invasive advertising exists. If browsers ensured it didn’t exist, money would return for static/untargeted/context-based advertising again.

[scarface74]

If I am reading Daring Fireball - list ad price $6500 a week for an ad at the beginning of the week and a thank you at the end of the week - doesn’t that automatically tell you something about me?

[kibwen]

> Didn't people make money off internet advertising before the modern surveillance-marketing complex? What happened to it?

And to take the exercise one step further: "Didn't people make the internet worth being on before it was feasible to make money off of it? What happened to that?"

[benjiweber]

There is also the ongoing escalation between adverrtisers and fraud. Creating an incentive to collect ever more data to detect ever more sophisticated forms of fraud.

[briandear]

How is fraud handled for TV advertising? Or print? This isn’t some weird new problem. The truth is that ad-tech wants to track you to make your profile more valuable, however, a less valuable user doesn’t mean advertising doesn’t work, it just means the bottom-feeding middlemen get a less profound payday.

Why not just flip the model from eyeballs and clicks to actual ad effectiveness? Newspaper car ads have this down to a science. They don’t count “clicks” of their newspaper ad — they see how many customers come in asking about a car in the ad.

If I have an airplane website and someone wants to advertise to people who like airplanes. I can suggest a price of $1000 and if the advertiser wants to spend the money, they do. I might charge $1000 because I have a lot of visitors or just because I want to. That’s the price I set for whatever reason I set it. If an advertiser doesn’t want to spend that, they can choose not to. If they want to measure effectiveness, they can do it by offering viewers of that ad a discount code or something. When the code is used, they know they got that customer from my ad. Once they’ve validated that their ad “works” and the acquisition cost works, then they’ll keep paying my rate — no bot influence at all. No real chance of fraud because there wouldn’t be any money in it. Publishers would actually have an incentive to sell your product because they want to justify their ad rates. No need for tracking either.

Advertising works and it can be both more effective and privacy-respecting. Ad-tech has turned vast swaths of the Internet into a cesspool. It doesn’t have to be like that.

If you are a publisher and have actual content humans care about, ditch the ad networks and start selling your pixels directly to relevant advertisers.

The problem is that the incentives for fraudsters and publishers are aligned under the current model: more clicks equals more money, the actual advertiser who is selling something gets to pay that fraud tax. Perhaps advertisers should start seeking out relevant content and offering to buy space directly, refusing to deal with “networks.” Their acquisition costs would go down, that’s for sure. Harder to scale, but so what, you have a higher yield effort for a lot less money.

[downandout]

if you are a publisher and have actual content humans care about, ditch the ad networks and start selling your pixels directly to relevant advertisers.

Good luck with direct ad sales, unless you are a large company with a large ad sales team and correspondingly large budget.

[scarface74]

John Gruber’s Daring Fireball and a few other sites seem to be doing okay without a large sales team. He is a one man company.

[feanaro]

> Didn't people make money off internet advertising before the modern surveillance-marketing complex? What happened to it?

Yeah, the old web was in many ways better than the new web so I'd gladly lose ads and go back to the old web in the process.

[GrifMD]

There is a resettable device id (IDFA) that in-app (but not Safari based) ads can use for identification, but it doesn't seem to be as heavily utilized as cookie-ids in browsers.

[denkmoon]

AdTech bubble collapses, thousands of unviable businesses collapse, and the internet becomes a better place.

A man can dream.

[andykx]

It is not impossible to advertise without tracking users.

[peanutz454]

For some reason people just have an aversion to paying for stuff they use. Facebook's revenue per user is less than 7$, I don't use facebook, but do not mind paying that little for something I use instead of getting tracked wherever I go. Similarly Google's service that I use like gmail and photos are easily worth about 7$ per month. I would pay if they said they will stop tracking me. I don't know about youtube.

[cameronbrown]

YouTube being the only one you've listed that has a premium option. The problem is people will say they'll pay but as soon as the option comes up, they don't.

[TeMPOraL]

Why would they if they can still not pay and get ads, which hurt less short-term (spending money can feel like losing hit points), and can be ignored either through effort or an ad blocker? Ten times more so if you still are going to show them ads.

You want people to pay, make them pay. If you worry about ad-driven competitors, then maybe this should serve as a good argument to advocate instituting regulations against funding services with ads.

[therealx]

Sure, but YouTube doesn't stop tracking you when you pay.

[tialaramex]

But what does that mean? YouTube keeps a history list, which I download and periodically reset. If it didn't I would need to add some sort of Firefox add-on that remembered which videos I'd seen.

What else are they "tracking"? Does YouTube have tracking on other sites (like Facebook, Twitter etc)? I haven't seen anything like that.

You can switch the history off, I presume that would work even without Premium, but it never occurred to me to even try it since I definitely want history.

[millstone]

Part of the answer is that YouTube algorithms optimize for engagement, not satisfaction. They don’t show me what they think I’ll like, they show me what they think I’ll keep clicking into. You can pay to subscribe, but that doesn’t change their algorithm.

[ferzul]

if youtube isn't tracking me in malicious way, why would I pay them to stop them from tracking me?

but the error here is conflating a tool with a legal person. Google will track me no matter how much I pay them for any of their services, including YouTube.

the situation at the moment is that no-one believes that a corporation who offers a free service is going to not track you because you pay for the premium version. so (a) I'm not going to pay Google or Facebook to get the premium version since it is not going to be untracked and (b) Google and Facebook aren't going to detrack their premium services since no-one believes that's going to happen anyway - the value add is removing ads/playing with the screen off/etc not the absence of tracking.

the best you can do is pay a third party to offer you some service Google or Facebook offers for free, thereby reducing your exposure. for instance, Google surely knows the content of many emails sent to me, but not all of them, since I pay for email from another provider; or I'm strongly considering paying for a substitute for Google docs, except that I don't like unpredictable monthly USD payments.

[fapjacks]

Well, for starters, now they're tracking that you are willing to pay a ransom. That's the same kind of knowledge value as spammers get when a user clicks the "unsubscribe" link in one of their emails.

[auslander]

> You can switch the history off

And trust Google, Ad company, to erase it in its backend?

[davedx]

Tell that to Spotify, Netflix, Apple, all the other thousands of subscriptions based businesses.

People are maybe less willing to pay for something they’ve been using for free (with ads) for years.

[flyinglizard]

The problem is that by doing that, you’re skimming the top percentile of your user base with the most purchasing power. You’re much less attractive to advertisers then.

[rahimnathwani]

The same argument could be made arguing against the launch of YouTube Premium.

[flyinglizard]

YouTube has essentially monopolized video (especially being that Netflix has no adverts). YouTube knows that from that position, it’s competing only with adblockers.

[wbl]

Notice how the NY Times has subscriptions.

[makomk]

Which makes the New York Times very attractive to advertisers since they show adverts to their subscribers, meaning that they offer a pre-selected audience of people with higher purchasing power.

[downandout]

Google makes $21 on average per US user per month [1], almost all of which comes from advertising. Would you pay $21/mo for your Google services?

[1] https://mondaynote.com/the-arpus-of-the-big-four-dwarf-every...

[danielscrubs]

I’ve bought zero products via google ads, except the case when I search for a company name and their official homepage is the top sponsored result. Which is insane.

And yet, my eyeballs looking at text with less text than a tweet is worth 21 USD. It feels like Google disrupted, but it’s far away from being optimal for companies.

[joosters]

Just because you've not bought something by clicking on an ad doesn't mean that the advertising has changed your purchasing habits.

...unless you are magically immune from advertising?

[danielscrubs]

I saw a coke sign three hours ago outside. I’ve been surfing the net for one hour and don’t remember a single ad. I don’t use adblockers.

I’m not saying ads don’t work. I’m saying Google Ads are ready to in turn be disrupted.

Especially with bots running amok...

[feanaro]

And now we get into magical, unprovable territory. You can't prove the ads don't work so we better continue the status quo!

[Someone]

$21 per user per month, on average, doesn’t imply $21 on you, every single month.

Other users react differently to that advertiser and/or you may click once every few years to bring in $1,000 advertising revenue for them on a very high-margin item.

[ferzul]

well, I don't see Google ads so I don't know what the content is, but no-one knows that I bought a coke after seeing an ad for a coke at the train station. but it still works. the effectiveness of advertising is an empirical question.

[Doctor_Fegg]

I’d love to pay £20 a month for a search engine that had results as good as Google, didn’t track me, and behaved responsibly in encouraging a plural web.

[millstone]

Google optimized to help me instead of manipulate me, that would be worth probably $1k a year for me.

[rpastuszak]

Contextual targeting is fairly kosher and can be genuinely useful. Let's hope changes like these make the current approach less feasible, cost-wise.

[IfOnlyYouKnew]

I believe Apple is doing a better job allowing monetization to continue than Google is.

They are working on ways to do anonymized personalisation/attribution/etc. The current Safari Technology Preview has someting called Ad Click Attribution API, for example.

[peteretep]

> So what is going to happen when Apple succeeds in making it impossible to make any money off advertisements shown to iOS users on the web?

Then they start offering micropayments, and iOS users are such a gigantic market, who Apple already micro-charge for Apps, and who’ll pay good money, that every publisher jumps on board immediately.

[Gustomaximus]

Is there no money in roadside billboards? They are not highly targeted.

Removing tracking will take some profitability off ads but eyeballs are always going to be valuable.

[rpastuszak]

> I'm currently imagining a future where publishers start to just redirect iOS traffic to install their app, where they can actually make money. Good news for the walled garden, I guess?

Some might? The situation has been getting worse for the past 1-2 years, so this is just another nail in the coffin. There are different strategies here: subscriptions, micropayments, premium/free content split, <stick anything that Guardian tried to do here...>

Less creepy, and genuinely useful forms of targeting exist (e.g. contextual targeting). There's just not enough momentum in the AdTech industry to shift. These could work just fine.

In other words, what WebKit is trying to achieve is good news for us.

Publishers so far seem to have given up on the higher CPMs coming from non-targeted ad calls on Safari. Additionally, they would be more than happy to skip ads completely if a different, stable source of revenue existed. There's a bunch of startups dealing with monetising publisher content without ads (Scroll, Blendle, etc...).

[Analemma_]

I’m way past the point of caring. Five years ago maybe I’d have been bothered, but targeted advertisement installs spyware on my computer, destroys its performance, and builds a profile on me that is begging to be exploited by hackers and/or the government. May it rot in pieces and to hell with the consequences, and if advertisers are unhappy that I’ve taken such an extreme position, they should examine how their behavior drove me to this point.

[dbuder]

From my experience, the people making these decisions are incapable of examining their behavior. When many news websites tried to go paywall a few years ago I spoke to someone who worked at one of them and I tried to be diplomatic but eventually said, why do you need 26 pieces of malware to display less than a thousand words and why is the the size of any given page bigger than a Windows 3.1 install? I didn't even get a coherent response, it was basically, oh these guys in a meeting said we need to and we wanted the money so we happily signed up.

[briandear]

Ads without allowing tracking networks. You know, like print ads. And sites already annoy you to download their godforesaken apps. See Yelp, Reddit and Quora.

[ferzul]

I don't know whether or when God forsook any particular mobile app, but I do know it the preposition "for" used as a verbal prefix with a negative implication, not the word and prefix "fore" meaning in front.

[Waterluvian]

Such a high dependency on tracking is, if anything, advertisers being complacent, sloppy, or generally bad at their job. You absolutely don't need all these data to advertise to people.

[nyolfen]

perhaps they can just use advertising that doesn't involve tracking

[scarface74]

The same thing that happens as more people install ad blockers.

[ARandomerDude]

Yes. The walled garden of AAPL. Spend money in an app, Apple gets a cut. As it is, Google and Facebook get the revenue instead.

[sesellis]

As an end user I’d rather have it be this way though. At least under this model I can download apps and vote with my wallet.

[cromwellian]

And if every website becomes an app because that's the only way to make money, the distributed, decentralize web dies in favor of one giant app store.

Is that what you want? Most of human culture behind app based paywalls? No more archive.org content to preserve. Micropayments everywhere?

Can you imagine the cognitive burden of continuously, always, purchasing stuff? Of the effect on the have-nots for whom deciding to pay money for commodity content vs immediate needs is a much more important decision?

[saagarjha]

Apple gets no money from in-app advertisements.

[ARandomerDude]

I didn't say they did. I was talking about users making in-app purchases vs no user purchase and Google/FB relying on advertising.

[qroshan]

Most of HN don't understand that the Advertising ecosystem is what is feeding the tech boom and their livelihood. Just like housing it is an entire ecosystem now with many people's jobs and livelihood is based on.

Hit that ecosystem and you get a recession. However it doesn't stop at the recession. Most VCs are funding hundreds and thousands of startups with the hope that one of them is going to get sold to Google or Facebook or Amazon or any of the Advertising Cash Cow business. Dry that tap and you'll have VCs pulling money from Tech.

Now, there is glut of Programmer supply and a severe lack of investments. Not dissimilar to 2008.

[beagle3]

That's usually called "the broken window fallacy".

A kid goes out and breaks random windows in people's home; as a result, a lot of economic activity ensues - the glass producers, the people who produce glass cutters and specialized tools, the people who install windows, the cleaners who specialize in cleaning broken glass, etc ...

The ad industry is breaking everyone's windows. It does indeed produce a lot of economic activity; But it is more likely than not "misallocation and waste of funds" when looked at in a broader context.

[qroshan]

Broken Windows is actually not a fallacy (classic Keynsian vs Hayek argument) If past decade has proven anything. Keynsian economic policies worked (printing money forcing people to spend) while a Austrian Austerity would have been disastrous.

Again, HN will not understand the side effects of destroying a major ecosystem. They all think they are much smarter and can stand on their own and VC money has no effect on their livelihood and it's their superior linux skills that keep them making tons of money

[beagle3]

The past decade has proven that central banks can keep a system afloat for a decade. It remains to be seen if it proves anything else.

[TeMPOraL]

I think many HNers do understand this. I do and I am sad by the amount of waste it creates. The jobs in adtech are better left not done at all, and the manpower and money redirected to more socially useful jobs.

[eecc]

We could be working on distributed systems and analytics engines to - say - chew through all the protein mediated DNA/RNA expressions.

That would cost a few pennies in engineering skill and we might even find cures to things that might kill us or our loved ones.

But no, we’re throwing these opportunities away trying to be the next overvalued IRC skin.

[qroshan]

Again, this is someone who doesn't understand economics

[feanaro]

The sooner the ad nonsense stops, the sooner we can turn to finding profit in something more useful to humanity.

[downandout]

I came here to say exactly this. Most profits for online ventures come from retargeted ads, and most businesses lose money on cold audiences just so that they can build retargeting audiences. As a result, when tracking dies, so does most online ad spend.

I am really curious what the web itself (outside of apps) will look like in a world where the quality of content and services implodes because of the inability of publishers to generate revenue to pay for it. You may have your privacy, but you may also not have much left to do on the web. This is definitely a “be careful what you wish for” scenario.

[kibwen]

Not to suggest offense, but I wonder how old you are? I may not quite be a greybeard just yet, but I remember being enraptured by the content on the internet long before it was caught in the stranglehold of advertisers. Big-budget affairs would be more scarce, but there would be no dearth of content.

[onemoresoop]

Same here. Internet felt like a benevolent community where wonderful things florished. Now it’s becoming a giant tracking apparatus flooded with competing addictive garbage.

[downandout]

I am old enough to have seen the Internet emerge. You were enraptured by content and services provided by companies that lost billions of dollars, courtesy of investors, during the dot com era. Those investors provided that capital in large part because they knew how lucrative it could be if online advertising became as efficient and effective as it is today. You will not see that kind of subsidy in the post-ad world.

[8bitsrule]

I'm old enough to have seen it all, from promising start to today's degeneracy.

Noone begged those companies to try to turn the Internet into a profit center, or to chew up enormous bandwidth and energy costs after being sold a foolish dream about targeting adverts.

The quality of the content was already being shared by millions of talented and thoughtful people. Because that's where the talent arises. Then your investors did for the internet what the music business did for music.

Oh, but that wasn't enough. After the ads, collecting and selling personal data to anyone came along. Regardless of millions of voices saying stop. Now the stream was not just full of trash, but flowed with multiple toxins.

A pox on all of them. I'd like to see all commercial interests limited to a very short list of TLDs. Then let's watch and see the mass migration. Let's call it 'choice'.

[kibwen]

Can you be more specific about what sites you're referring to? As much as the dotcom bubble gets remembered by history, I personally wasn't frequenting any of the darlings of the VC world. My haunts were backwater forums hastily hand-coded in the 1999 dialect of PHP and other sites with totally ordinary text ads. These weren't billion-dollar overvalued companies, these were sites stood up in a server in someone's garage, and users made all the content. Even the biggest of the fish back then, Yahoo--fancying itself a media company--was relevant to me only because it hosted Geocities (again relying on user-generated content, and Yahoo was hardly one of the companies hemorrhaging money in this era).

[saagarjha]

> You were enraptured by content and services provided by companies that lost billions of dollars, courtesy of investors, during the dot com era.

What about the independent blogs?

[downandout]

Of course anyone who wanted to spend their time back then doing what we now call blogging, who wanted to pay for their own hosting, could have done so. However, I am not sure that the ability to read the thoughts of independent bloggers was a major driving force behind the mass adoption of the Internet. It was quality content and services, subsidized by investors who for the most part hoped companies could generate revenue from advertising, that drew the public to the Internet.

[wokwokwok]

Yes, and the companies who are making products which are actually good own the whole ecosystem, end to end, like google and Facebook, and will be almost totally unaffected by this change or future changes.

It’s everyone else who makes click bait ad spam that will suffer; and frankly, why should we care?

Gmail isn’t going to disappear.

Kotaku or TechCrunch might... or maybe some of those spam cooking sites. ...but, seriously? The whole internet exist because of personalised tracking > big marketing spend?

Come on.

You’re vastly overstating the case here: yes, there would be some impact, no it wouldn’t really make a big difference at this point.

Maybe if you go back in time, it would, but you can’t, so it’s a mute point.

What’s important is where we want to go from here, and personalised ad tracking driving content farms of fake cooking videos isn’t really the ideal “endstate” for the internet imo.

...even if some spammy companies I don’t like end up going out of business, along with some companies I do like.

[feanaro]

I often see this vague and unsubstantiated "quality content" mentioned in relation to this, but seeing this immediately after and counterpointed to independent, information rich blogs is even more puzzling. I see it mentioned, but I'm at a loss to what this financed quality content is.

[TelmoMenezes]

> It was quality content and services, subsidized by investors

You're joking about the "quality content" part, right?

[nitrogen]

Quality should increase dramatically because the SEO spam networks will not have ads to make money, and the remaining sites will either have a solid subscription base or be from people sharing for the love of sharing.

[feanaro]

The web as a knowledge disseminating medium will neither disappear nor suffer if or when the targeted ad industry wilts away. The physicists, mathematicians, programmers, computer scientists, biologists, chemists, ... of the world will still need and want to communicate and collaborate, not to mention the variety of hobbyists and people with odd but passionate interests. And they will do so freely, because this is the only way it makes sense. This is only beneficial for those who value knowledge and discussion since the interests are then actually aligned with those activities, instead of being only tangentially hitchhiked on top of something else.

What would fail is the likes of the fashion industry, such as Instagram influencers peddling Nike sneakers and cosmetics.

[stockkid]

I think that quality services need not implode at the cost of more privacy on the web, if we collectively shift our mind to actually pay money for the services we use rather than paying in our data. But I suspect that such change will be not easy to come by.

[quotemstr]

Indeed. I think this effort to ban third-party cookies is fundamentally misguided. It'll only serve to entrench the current big advertising networks and make it difficult for new ones to emerge. Due to this market concentration, this move will reduce, not improve, privacy.

[marcthe12]

I agree. Even if subscription services exist and quality does not implode, the free services may have hidden agenda. Let's see how it goes.

[alkonaut]

I’m completely happy for the AdTech bubble to die in the same fire as 90% of free products, services (and associated jobs) on the web.