[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.