[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.