The sad, slow-motion death of Do Not Track

Posted Jul 22, 2020 22:48 UTC (Wed) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75)
In reply to: The sad, slow-motion death of Do Not Track by josh
Parent article: The sad, slow-motion death of Do Not Track

I would rather do without ads. At the same time, I acknowledge that much of the web is funded by ads, and blocking them is undermining the system I'm benefiting from. I try to put my money where my mouth is by paying for ad-free subscriptions or using the donate button on web sites I use regularly.

If going without ads isn't an option, I think I would prefer relevant, targeted ads to completely untargeted ones. There are a couple of good reasons for this. For one thing, relevant ads are likely to be interesting and possibly complementary to the site I'm using. For another, targeted ads are likely to be more valuable to the site hosting them, so they will either be more profitable (and hence be less likely to go out of business) or require fewer ads per page.

The sad, slow-motion death of Do Not Track

Posted Jul 23, 2020 3:21 UTC (Thu) by josh (subscriber, #17465) [Link] (3 responses)

I donate or subscribe to various sites that have that option as well. But I block ads everywhere, whether there's a subscription/patronage option or not. I don't want the mental pollution.

> blocking them is undermining the system I'm benefiting from

Blocking them is pushing towards the system I want to see. Blocking ads reduces the value of ads, which makes them less viable, which pushes future companies to not treat ads as a viable business model.

The sad, slow-motion death of Do Not Track

Posted Jul 23, 2020 5:05 UTC (Thu) by himi (subscriber, #340) [Link] (1 responses)

Unfortunately I think one of the results of blocking ads is that companies like Facebook have a massive incentive to build far more intrusive advertising platforms.

Of course, they have that incentive anyway, since they can make far more money selling their users' attention with a sophisticated and intrusive advertising platform than with a simple advertising platform . . . I'm not sure there's /any/ way we can push back against this kind of thing, short of completely rebuilding the Internet economy.

Maybe if there was a pervasive, unintrusive and easily managed way to make micropayments to the sites that you visited it would remove a lot of the incentive for advertising, but getting that in place would be kind of hard to do, and would potentially have lots of /other/ perverse incentives. But short of that I don't think there's a decent solution.

The sad, slow-motion death of Do Not Track

Posted Jul 23, 2020 22:22 UTC (Thu) by josh (subscriber, #17465) [Link]

> Unfortunately I think one of the results of blocking ads is that companies like Facebook have a massive incentive to build far more intrusive advertising platforms.

And people can choose to not use Facebook as a result, and adblockers will help prevent other sites from feeding data to Facebook.

> Maybe if there was a pervasive, unintrusive and easily managed way to make micropayments to the sites that you visited it would remove a lot of the incentive for advertising, but getting that in place would be kind of hard to do, and would potentially have lots of /other/ perverse incentives. But short of that I don't think there's a decent solution.

There's absolutely a decent solution: block all ads, and don't treat it as your problem to solve. Someone else's ad-based business model does not obligate anyone to help them succeed. If enough people block ads, and enough technologies make it easier and less out-of-the-way to do so, ad-based business models will become less and less viable.

The sad, slow-motion death of Do Not Track

Posted Jul 24, 2020 14:53 UTC (Fri) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75) [Link]

Blocking them is pushing towards the system I want to see.

Blocking ads alone is only an attempt to destroy the current system. If you want to push toward a specific alternative system, you have to actively support that alternative. Otherwise, you have no control over what you'll get in the long run. It might be the system you want, but it could be something worse, like a more abusive ad system that's harder to block or the collapse of useful ad-supported sites with nothing to replace them.

The sad, slow-motion death of Do Not Track

Posted Jul 23, 2020 23:39 UTC (Thu) by NAR (subscriber, #1313) [Link]

Once I was working at a company where I was not allowed to install adblockers. The experience was "interesting": I either got ads for businesses geographically near the company proxy (and 2000 kms from my actual location, so totally irrevelant) or ads for "marriage-minded bikini-clad Asian or Russian women (again, totally irrelevant). And it's not like I was visiting NSFW sites - they were blocked and also about 20+ people had clear view on my monitor in the open office, so I wouldn't dare to do that anyway.

The sad, slow-motion death of Do Not Track

Posted Jul 26, 2020 18:29 UTC (Sun) by nybble41 (subscriber, #55106) [Link] (4 responses)

> I try to put my money where my mouth is by paying for ad-free subscriptions or using the donate button on web sites I use regularly.

Another option is Scroll <http://scroll.com/>. In exchange for a flat subscription fee of $5 per month you get to browse all of their partner sites ad-free. Much better IMHO than subscribing to each individual site just to avoid the ads. (Premium content is still separate. No affiliation, just a happy subscriber.)

I've often thought it would be nice to have some integration with the *advertiser* networks, not just the publishers. As I understand it there is a sort of auction system running in the background to decide which ads are displayed for each page view. Why not provide a way to let the end user in on that auction? If the visitor's automated agent wins, bidding from a pool of money set aside for that purpose, then the ad slot could just remain empty.

The sad, slow-motion death of Do Not Track

Posted Jul 28, 2020 10:29 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (3 responses)

That would never do! It directly works against the interest of the auction operator (who wants *lots of advertisers* to drive up prices, not lack-of-advertisers to drive them down) *and* provides people with actual evidence that they're willing to pay to get rid of this stuff (and thus, that it is toxic rubbish that nobody actually wants), *and*, uh, could easily be spun as extortion and/or converted to extortion by sufficiently unpleasant advertising network operators (and these are not pleasant people). All they have to do is set up an "advertiser" of their own that always bids unrealistically high and that their advertising network always eventually refuses bids from, to jack up the price the user has to pay arbitrarily high. A crime? Sure, but very hard to prove, given that the operation of these auctions is even concealed from the advertisers.

The sad, slow-motion death of Do Not Track

Posted Jul 28, 2020 15:54 UTC (Tue) by nybble41 (subscriber, #55106) [Link] (2 responses)

Your objections seem a bit contrived. Adding another party to the auction system would drive prices up, not down. It's pretty obvious that most people don't want ads, and we already have plenty of evidence that they are often willing to pay to avoid them ("pay to remove ads" is a popular option in various mobile apps), but they are sometimes willing to put up with them in order to fund sites or apps that they care about when no other convenient method is available. The auction operator has no reason to care whether any ads are actually shown; they get paid the same either way.

As for jacking up the prices with fake bids, they're welcome to try. The user's agent wouldn't be configured to always place the highest bid at any cost. The user would set a threshold based on how many ads they're willing to see. If an advertiser's bid is excessively high then it would just let them win. At that point they can either pay up or take a penalty for cancelling after winning the bid (in which case no ad is shown and the user still effectively gets what they wanted).

The sad, slow-motion death of Do Not Track

Posted Sep 14, 2020 15:20 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (1 responses)

It's pretty obvious that most people don't want ads

Don't ignore the power of self-delusion when your paycheque depends on it. I know several people who work in adtech and a couple who work in old adland, and all of them are insistent that I am a freakish exception and that everyone really, really loves ads and everyone loves pervasive tracking and it's not creepy at all. (One of them actually watches ads in his spare time because he thinks they're an art form in their own right.)

I've pointed out that this is sort of disproved by the soaring popularity of adblockers, but nooo the problem there is that the messaging is wrong: people who use adblockers have all been lied to by evil people who point at the occasional rare bad apple like malware being delivered in ad networks, and if they can only find the right 'message' (i.e., countervailing lie) everyone will love ads again: sure they slow down your web browser, but in return you are gifted all these wonderful ads! Everyone loved ads in the high days of TV, you could tell by the way there were ads on TV: since the market is always right, that is proof enough!

(The existence of the ad-free BBC apparently does not constitute any sort of disproof, since it's government-funded. You'd think this would mean that it had a closer tie to the people the market is sampling the true opinions of, but apparently letting the people actually have input rather than leaving it up to the mythical superpowers of the all-wise market is axiomatically bad. Odd that.)

The sad, slow-motion death of Do Not Track

Posted Sep 14, 2020 21:10 UTC (Mon) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link]

Bill Hicks Was Right.