[Barraketh]

> People ask that right now, and adtech is one of the things that have killed it.

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.

[JohnFen]

> 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

Yes, but you're only talking about people who are intending to make money here. There's a much larger world out there than that.

> but in some cases significantly less effective

True, but so what? At least doing it that way isn't abusive, and it would eliminate quite a lot of the anger people have about online advertising.

It's very disturbing when the response to "stop being abusive" is "but then we'll make less money."