| > and comes fundamentally from a "web consumer" mentality Not for me, it doesn't, For me, it comes from an "I don't want to be spied on" mentality. If the online ad world would do everything that they currently do, but actually leave me out of it when I tell them to, I wouldn't consider them to be evil. But not only don't they do that, they put a lot of time, effort, and money into actively working around the various defenses I put up against them. > I think that it would be valuable to reframe the question from the producers point of view You're talking as if the problem is the ads themselves. It's not. It's the spying that's the problem. > The ad-tech solution is actually quite elegant in theory I don't assert that it's not elegant. I assert that it's deeply unethical unless informed consent has been obtained from the people the data is being gathered from. > then people ask "where did the old internet go"? People ask that right now, and adtech is one of the things that have killed it. > it would be great if the people who criticize it came up with something other than "fuck the small businesses and content producers". Plenty of proven alternatives are brought up all the time. Even the IAPP article here mentions the strongest one: have ads, but don't target them based on data extracted from unwilling participants. Target them based on the context in which the ads appear. Just like newspapers, magazines, TV, etc. The adtech world doesn't want to do that because they can make even more money by being bastards, instead. |
I don't think this is actually true. When I think about the old internet vs new internet, a lot of it is about people running their own blogs / websites vs. platforms. And I think most of that is not really about ad-tech at all, but about the mechanisms of content and audience discovery. But the fact remains that if you want to say... publish videos of some kind, you are likely to make much more on YouTube vs uploading them to your own website, and that's at least partially because Google is able to show effective ads.
> Target them based on the context in which the ads appear.
Possible, but in some cases significantly less effective. As I mentioned above, ad-tech comes with some very interesting progressive effects, where the people who spend the most money are the ones who end up paying the most in aggregate for content. An interesting example is luxury goods, which are both high-value and niche. If you run say... a news site, or something else that's general purpose, you probably don't want to be showing Rolex ads to everyone. But rich people still read news, and if you could target your Rolex ads to them, that basically subsidizes everyone else.