[snowwrestler]

> Ask everyone in the world if they "don't want to be tracked, understanding that is the economic foundation for almost all of the content they enjoy and thus they will either need to directly pay or go without" and somewhere approaching 0% will say yes.

That is pretty strong hyperbole. Individual tracking is not an essential component of an advertising business model. The print and TV industries both created tremendous economic growth with an advertising model, despite not being able to track individual users. Instead companies developed a wide variety of statistical tools to analyze their markets and advertising ROI.

[huggyface]

Were you online around, say, 1993? That was when the reality of the terrible non-performance of internet advertising really hit home -- the performance of most internet ads beyond below abysmal unless you used the most egregious of tactics (popups, popunders, etc).

Doubleclick -- the nefarious agent of evil -- essentially single handedly changed that by building up user profiles by tracking, with which they could individualize ads to a great enough degree that performance was somewhat useful.

What I described isn't hyperbole at all -- the actual industry already went through this.

[snowwrestler]

But what do you mean by "performance"?

You are talking about how the advertising industry went from measuring ads statistically, to measuring them by direct action--the click. Before the Internet, the only "ads" that were measured by direct action were coupons, because stores could keep track of redemption transactions. Other than that, it was understood that the value of ads could not be correlated to direct actions by consumers. Sort of like how no single thunderstorm can be directly attributed to global warming.

It's not that online ads perform abysmally. All ads perform abysmally when they are measured by the metric of direct action at the moment of viewing--the Internet was just the first time that could be directly measured on every ad. DoubleClick and others established a competitive advantage by being able to slightly reduce just how abysmal the measurements were. They spent a lot of time and money "educating" brand owners that direct clicks were the "right" way to measure their value.

The unfortunate side effect was that the shift of ad dollars from TV and print to online was greatly slowed. Brand managers look at the super-low online click numbers (even the best numbers from profile-driven networks) and say "what a waste of money, let's keep the bulk in prime time TV." They get numbers from the TV industry that indicate that millions and millions of people saw their ad--and they are not under any illusion that these people are doing anything about it that very moment. TV ads are held to a much lower standard of action, and therefore TV ads attract much higher levels of investment.

Why should online ads be measured by clicks?? The assumption that they should is quite recent (in the context of the full history of advertising), but already deeply held and rarely considered. But it's been incredibly harmful to the efforts to shift industries like TV and newspapers online.