In a logical world it would mean that you see fewer ads. If your matches increase, your price per ad goes up so the service needs to show you fewer ads to hit their ad revenue target for you.
But if you think that will happen I have an East River transportation startup in New York that is seeking an angel investor.
> the service needs to show you fewer ads to hit their ad revenue target for you.
In a logical world, yes.
In a capitalist world, that revenue target goes up every year. Apple became the richest company on earth selling hardware, yet here they are now drowning their software with ads.
I've come to the conclusion that we should just ban all advertising, completely. Any possible positives to allowing advertising are entirely dwarfed by the negatives.
I would love it if there were no ads. Seems like a dream though. Has any government tried it? If so, what kind of sneaky ads posing as content emerged? "Native ads" posing as content already exist. At least it's easy to tell the difference when the ad is out in the open and marked clearly.
So would you ban shop signs? What about a shop-sign that simply said "Cafe"? Or "Meals"? That would be the end of chain stores (which I would not regret).
I don't mind shop signs; I do mind posters all over the street-scene.
The Post Office delivers about 4X as much unaddressed junk advertising pizzas and estate agents than real mail, and I object to that. In this country (UK), anyone can stuff whatever junk they like in your mailbox; in the US, I believe only USPS can put anything in your mailbox. Are USPS allowed to deliver unaddressed pizza fliers?
The best argument in favour of advertising is that it makes it possible for a new entrant to a market to make an impression; without it, markets would always be dominated by incumbents, give or take the occasional surprise. I don't know how to capture that benefit, without ending up with the whole world covered in billboards.
I think this new sort of AI-powered language model assistant search will be interesting once it trickles into end user control. Injecting ads requires the model output to be under central control where the they can inject ads. But when we get to the point that we can just automate our browsers to fetch 1000 pages and generate summaries locally, ads will be toast. There is a massive battle for control over generalized computing brewing because the ad networks need to force us to not build.
GP is exaggerating, but they definitely do seem to be increasing the number of ads in apps. Apple News (even the paid News+) has tons of ads, often after a single sentence in an article. In AppleTV+ (a service I love!) they’ve removed the image cards of shows in your up next queue on the “What to Watch” page and replaced them with a big auto-playing audio and video preview of one of their shows that’s not in your list. There’s no way to get the old functionality back. I’ve stopped using the app other than from the Home Screen where I have it set to show my “Up Next” queue. It’s really disgusting that they’re making these changes and it’s really turning me off of their services which I loved until recently.
While that's true, the questions was specifically about the claim they are "drowning their software with ads". Providing a single example doesn't really support that claim.
You can get ads for their services (mostly Music an Arcade) in iOS settings (and IIRC System Settings on MacOS), unsolicited push notifications from App Store etc.
Of course that's the goal. The IAB isn't an NSA front. The problem with advertising is not the primary goal, but all the secondary things that can happen.
lokedhs said "ostensibly" because the internet advertising industry has long maintained the pretence that tracking users and showing them relevant ads is helpful to the user, when the truth is the advertising industry cares about the opinion of users like the thanksgiving industry cares about the opinion of turkeys - which is to say, not at all.
There's a reason these things are opt-out rather than opt-in.
The answer to marcus0x62's question - why would a person want advertisers to correlate their behavior - is that they wouldn't, and if they want to advocate for their own self-interest they should install an ad blocker.
If it's the goal, you'd expect ads to be actually be more relevant and useful to users.
They don't, which has been shown in studies. What has been shown is that showing the same things people already bought give people regret which increases total amount of purchases.
In other word, the goal is to not to give users a good experiences watching ad's. It is to make them buy more, which is an orthogonal goal.
Let’s say you’re DHS. You contact some person and have a conversation like this
Govt: “I need IP addresses, ideally cellular and known public wifi, of a person using this email address”.
Data broker: “Here’s the list including the most recent cellular IP address associated with that person at this timestamp and their most used public wifi locations.”
Govt: “Hey, cellular provider, where is this subscriber right now?”
Provider: “Here’s the lat/long, last seen 1 second ago. Happy hunting!”
How does that contradict what the parent poster is saying? Even though ad-tech companies make tracking individuals easier, it doesn't change the fact that it's still largely funded by advertising itself, not through some shady government shell company.
I disagree: The main problem with advertising is with its primary goal, which is manipulting people into excess consumption. There are of course other secondary issues as well, but even without them ads are already a net negative for society.
But if you think that will happen I have an East River transportation startup in New York that is seeking an angel investor.