[alexb_]

Google has such a gigantic incentive to lie about how effective their advertising is. It's impossible to verify and they make more money the more effective they say it is. So it's something I've suspected is happening for a long time.

The question then becomes, what does the internet look like if advertisers only spent 10% of what they do now? How much of the internet is built on the lie that digital advertising works? What services would have to shut down? How valuable is user data really? If user data isn't valuable, because advertising isn't valuable, then what else on the internet becomes impossible financially?

Many, many websites function based on the assumption that user data and advertising will always be money makers. What if they aren't? What if we've all been lied to about the effectiveness of ads?

[safety1st]

In 1995 the Internet existed, it was basically great, and basically no website was ad funded.

I cannot think of a single essential service I use on the Internet today which is ad funded. If it's essential I'm paying for it because the free, ad-funded version is shitty and unreliable.

We could ban Internet advertising tomorrow (give people time to migrate to paid services) and I genuinely don't think it would have much negative impact on society. Social media like Twitter and Meta would take a big hit and that would be very good for our society. Less teen girls would commit suicide, and less hate would be spread.

I'd start paying ten bucks a month or whatever for Google (already pay them a pretty penny for Workspace) and can't think of much else that I'd lose that would matter. Subscriptions to a couple sites of professional interest like Stack Overflow? Small price to pay for ending Internet ads.

[munk-a]

I'd also add that personally motivated hosting is basically what gets small sites through the day. I worked on a MUD for quite a while where a small portion of the playerbase was working professionals and the majority of the playerbase was broke college students with far too much free time. The working folks would shell out a completely inconsequential 30 dollars a month between ten of them just so they could have fun playing the game - there was never any serious discussion of adding a paid requirement to join because 3$/month is very little for a steady stream of entertainment and because the "leeches" actually contributed immensely to the activity in the MUD. The workings folks contributed money, the college folks contributed time and everyone had fun.

If you're an independent reporter running a blog you can easily cover the hosting costs by just writing an occasional article for a major organization. If you have a fun hobby that hobby is probably worth the cost of hosting a server to attract other hobbiests.

Really, the only thing that would possibly die forever might be services like YouTube which have absolutely absurdly weak monetization potentials when compared to their infrastructure costs. Losing YouTube would suck, but if it meant I'd never need to see another internet ad I think the cost is worth it... and more curated services like Nebula have proven that purely subscriber funded video content can work - but it'd be hard to enter that market with no free hosting platform like YouTube.

[carlosjobim]

> If you're an independent reporter running a blog you can easily cover the hosting costs by just writing an occasional article for a major organization.

I agree with most of what you wrote except for the above. Unless you're an independent reporter in things like gardening or motor sports, the major media organizations see you as an enemy and would prefer to shut you down.

[AshamedCaptain]

> In 1995 the Internet existed, it was basically great, and basically no website was ad funded.

Sorry, but which parallel universe is this?

Advertising was definitely less intrusive, but I would say that an even larger proportion of websites was ad-funded than today.

A shitton of content is (and was) on platforms which are entirely ad-funded. Think geocities, the various blogging platforms, and twitter et al. today. You remove ads, you force the authors of this content to pay for their publication (a ridiculously cheap amount sure, but the large majority of them won't pay a dime).

I have paid for hosting my personal/hobby websites since approx 1993, but I know very well I'm a 1 to 10000 exception, based on the ratio of people who participate on my website.

[phpnode]

Ads were of course common in 1995, but monetisation in general was rarer. A greater proportion of the web was hobbyists writing and collating information about subjects they were interested in, not because of financial incentives.

[threeio]

I mean, isn't that basically what the first .com was about? :)

Everyone went from thinking every page view was equivalent to a magazine/tv/radio ad view, paying 5-10$ CPM and then everyone wised up and the industry was decimated for a while.

[ipaddr]

The first .com bust was that these e-stores weren't profitable compared to valuations. So much money was poured in.. I use to get 1 or 2 dollar checks from free spin places. Too much money too soon. Ads had nothing to do with the bust. When pets.com went bust the market the air left with it and everyone moved into companies laying cable.

[stemlord]

>It's impossible to verify

1. Determine sales rate 2. Deploy ads 3. Determine delta sales

Am I missing something?

[htrp]

Confounding effects

[stemlord]

Wouldn't that be a good reason not to spend money on ads?

[thfuran]

>What services would have to shut down? How valuable is user data really? If user data isn't valuable, because advertising isn't valuable, then what else on the internet becomes impossible financially?

If it suddenly stops being the case that everything is judged against an ad-supported but free to use baseline, I think paid services become more viable than they currently are. There would probably need to be some work on payment models, but I think not many things would be forced to shut down (ignoring whatever shutters while the dust settles).

[carlosjobim]

> It's impossible to verify

Spend on ads is extremely easy to verify. For every ad channel you use a different discount code. Then you see how many customers used a specific discount code when making a purchase. Discount codes work everywhere: Social media, search ads, radio, TV, banners, etc etc

If you don't use discount codes when advertising it means you don't care for how you spend your marketing money - which is the truth for a large majority of businesses. They simply don't care if their advertising works or not.

[jokethrowaway]

That was the past, which gave us a glorious internet at the expense of idiotic advertisers in exchange for a few bits of data.

Thanks to the EU and the privacy social justice warrior that era is gone: welcome to the era of cookie banners and walled gardens.

Search will be even worse than today, your Google search won't be very useful (and it's definitely not as useful as it was 15 years ago): you'll have to search on Reddit, Facebook and who knows how many other walled gardens which can't live off advertising anymore and will need to find a different revenue model (which probably will cost the user).

[jimnotgym]

Hang on... the decline in Google search is due to the EU?

Walled Gardens are caused by cookie banners?

I have heard some things in my time....