[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.