[jhhh]

Unpersonalized ads can still serve the same democratic funding model you're identifying as the main positive reason for online advertising's existence. You present a false choice between obnoxious (visibility intrusive) ads versus these odious information gathering schemes. Since the latter make more money and people hate obnoxious ads we must choose personalization. Thankfully we're now fully aligned with how Google has implemented their ad targeting.

Hypothetically if congress could ban both obnoxious and targeted ads (somehow) leaving us with the unpersonalized newspaper model of ads would you be for or against that bill?

[earthboundkid]

As a developer in publishing, I would support that bill in a heartbeat. Tracking means you can target a niche market without paying for niche content. It’s terrible for publishers and consumers. It’s good for ad people.

[jefftk]

> Tracking means you can target a niche market without paying for niche content. It’s terrible for publishers and consumers.

This only seems partly right to me. Let's say someone wants to sell fishing equipment. The traditional way of doing this is to buy ads on fishing sites. So now my fishing equipment purchases make there be more writing about fishing; yay!

Then one of the fishing websites decides to put a tracking pixel on their site to drop "fishing website visitor" cookies. They make a deal with a third party provider and get paid a small amount per visitor. Then fishing retailers have a new choice: instead of buying ads on fishing sites they can instead buy ads on any site for users who have one of the "fishing website visitor" cookies. If there were a monopoly fishing site, then this would increase their earnings: while the ad space on their site isn't as valuable, they will set the pixel price high enough that they come out ahead. It's not a monopoly, though, so the price of the pixel gets driven down through competition, and money that would go to fishing sites instead goes to the publishers that people who spend money on fishing equipment visit.

In this case I see how it's worse for fishing sites, but not how it's bad for consumers: their willingness to buy fishing equipment translates into support for all the sites they visit, and not just the fishing sites.

But there are also many niches that don't have economic tie-ins, or have ones that are far weaker than "writing about fishing" and "buying fishing equipment". In a world with targeted advertising, these niches do better, because of overlap between audiences. A "let's have better housing policy" blog can show ads for fishing equipment, vacations, HVAC supplies, or whatever else visitors have shown interest in on other sites.

Additionally, targeted advertising increases the total amount of funding available for online content, because people with niche interests are available to be advertised to in more places. Seeing ten fishing ads once a week when you visit a fishing site vs seeing twenty fishing ads spread over the course of the week, etc.

So, yes, niche publishers in lucrative niches would make more money if we only had context-based advertising, but I don't think niche publishers overall, publishers overall, or consumers would be better off.

(Disclosure: still speaking only for myself)

[earthboundkid]

Good argument. I will think about it more.

[nl]

As a consumer I vastly prefer targeted ads. I don't like badly targetted ads much though.

(I don't work in adtech, but I have sold technology to adtech companies.)