Conill: an inside look into the illicit ad industry [LWN.net]

Ariadne Conill shares some experience of working in the online advertising industry.

The cycle of patching on both sides is ongoing to this day. A friend of mine on Twitter referred to this tug-of-war as “core war,” which is an apt description: all of the involved actors are trying to patch each other out of being able to commit or detect subterfuge, and your browser gets slower and slower as more mitigations and countermeasures are layered on. If you’re not using an ad blocker yet, stop reading this, and install one: your browser will suddenly be a lot more performant.

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Conill: an inside look into the illicit ad industry

Posted Nov 5, 2021 17:14 UTC (Fri) by weberm (guest, #131630) [Link] (32 responses)

Can we as developer community not trying to invade people's privacy, not arming up those with ill intent, come up with a strategy to deal with those who get and got their hands dirty? If we take the (at times brilliant) weaponsmiths out of the ad industry's arsenal, we might live at peace once more.

Conill: an inside look into the illicit ad industry

Posted Nov 5, 2021 17:31 UTC (Fri) by notriddle (subscriber, #130608) [Link] (3 responses)

Refusing to work for actual arms dealers didn't put an end to war, so I'm not sure why refusing to work for the metaphorical arms dealers would work either. Conscientious objectors just cause the price to go up a little. There always seems to be someone who's desperate[1], amoral[2], or brainwashed[3] enough to work on it.

[1]: Would you work on ad tech if your mom was dying of cancer and this was the only job you could find that payed well enough for the treatment and was willing to hire you? If so, you're a whore just like the rest of them, and we're just haggling over the price.

[2]: You've been on the Internet long enough to know that there are a lot of assholes who just don't care, and some of them are actually pretty smart. If ad tech pays well, and it's a real contract gig where you set your own hours and not one of those fake contract gigs where you get the ugly taxes while still being treated like an employee...

[3]: I'm not sure if there are very many people who think click fraud is morally just, but plenty of people manufacturing weapons of violence thought they were securing the world for a just cause. But I'm sure if you talk to someone in ad tech, you'll get some attempt to paint the distinction as irrelevant, and to claim that all of the market is just as bad as ad tech is, with no real ethical leg to stand on for anyone who doesn't opt out of society entirely and move to the woods.

Conill: an inside look into the illicit ad industry

Posted Nov 6, 2021 14:52 UTC (Sat) by ariadne (subscriber, #138312) [Link] (2 responses)

Ad tech is basically half people who have deluded themselves into thinking they are solving a legit problem, and half people who took an engagement in order to get paid to undermine the rest of ad tech. I'm sure the literary tone I used makes it clear which side of that coin I was on from the beginning.

And it kept the lights on. I spent maybe 10-15 hours a week on average solving problems for that guy, and I was able to sit there and write actually useful things the rest of the time, and I got material for several stories out of it. I wasn't particularly *desperate* at the time, but I would be lying if I said it didn't solve my funding problem at that time.

Conill: an inside look into the illicit ad industry

Posted Nov 11, 2021 8:27 UTC (Thu) by nilsmeyer (guest, #122604) [Link] (1 responses)

Aren't you worried at all about legal repercussions from this?

Conill: an inside look into the illicit ad industry

Posted Nov 19, 2021 18:21 UTC (Fri) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link]

The ad industry may be scummy but the players that've survived this long are not naive enough to Streisand themselves. Drawing attention to one's business is a really bad idea when the cash flow relies on ignorant marks.

The ones who *do* think they're powerful and righteous enough to pick a legal fight over a blog post calling the emperor naked are dependent on liquid (or more likely powdered) courage. Those people tend to be the Darl McBrides of the world - they don't last long unless someone else is propping them up.

Conill: an inside look into the illicit ad industry

Posted Nov 6, 2021 8:35 UTC (Sat) by oldtomas (guest, #72579) [Link] (27 responses)

I think this "chasing criminals" focus is the wrong approach to the problem.

As notriddle put it, there may be many reasons to be part of such a system, and everyone of us is indirectly.

We should rather think more globally and ask ourselves how we managed to build a world where this is part of. Whether we want such a world at all.

And here I think people like Ariadne Conill are extremely important and deserve our support. We, as techs, have the responsibilty to explain to others what's going on, and that there are, perhaps, alternatives.

The slope is slippery, and you often don't see its beginning.

Conill: an inside look into the illicit ad industry

Posted Nov 7, 2021 10:16 UTC (Sun) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link] (26 responses)

And bear in mind that there's a deep bit of human psychology involved here; Facebook's ARPU is around $10/month according to their SEC filings. As a society, though, we've decided that spreading that $10/month across all products that get advertised via Facebook ads is better value than each user finding a way to pay $10/month to Facebook for the value it provides them. Alphabet's SEC filings are harder for me to navigate, but it looks like a similar number applies to Google.

Now, that $10/month number is a simplification; some users are a cost to Facebook, others are worth hundreds of dollars a month. But the principle still applies: we have built a system where paying for a product directly is less effective than paying via ads. I suspect people would be rather shocked if they were asked to pay what advertisers pay for access as direct cash.

Conill: an inside look into the illicit ad industry

Posted Nov 7, 2021 15:14 UTC (Sun) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325) [Link] (23 responses)

> As a society, though, we've decided that spreading that $10/month across all products that get advertised via Facebook ads is better value than each user finding a way to pay $10/month to Facebook for the value it provides them.

No, *Facebook* decided that. Zuck said as much to Congress on at least one occasion. And the reasoning is fairly obvious: Some people would refuse to pay for it, and that would reduce network effects, so they would earn less money overall.

(Disclaimer: I work for Google, but that doesn't mean I approve of all of their business practices, either.)

Conill: an inside look into the illicit ad industry

Posted Nov 7, 2021 16:25 UTC (Sun) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link] (18 responses)

But if society was structured differently, Google and Facebook would both earn a lot more money by charging subscriptions than they get from ads. Similar applies to television, and to newspapers (it's not an online thing) - there is more money in advertising than in subscriptions.

The fact that it's better for Google to run ads than to charge $10/month or so for use of their features is a sign of a social issue.

Conill: an inside look into the illicit ad industry

Posted Nov 7, 2021 19:16 UTC (Sun) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (5 responses)

> The fact that it's better for Google to run ads than to charge $10/month or so for use of their features is a sign of a social issue.

Google never tried subscription model. But there were others who did. And they failed. That is how we know it's decision of society, not just decision of Google founders.

Conill: an inside look into the illicit ad industry

Posted Nov 7, 2021 19:54 UTC (Sun) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (4 responses)

Can't you get ad-free youtube by payi8ng for it? But how many people are prepared to pay?

Likewise, I think you can get ad-free ITV over the internet here in the UK. But I doubt many people are prepared to pay...

Cheers,
Wol

Conill: an inside look into the illicit ad industry

Posted Nov 7, 2021 23:27 UTC (Sun) by awww (guest, #122021) [Link]

Problem as I see it though is that my payment does nothing to stop the collection and processing of data, which is more objectionable than most of the ads themselves. I probably would pay if it stopped the processing rather than just adding another revenue stream.

Conill: an inside look into the illicit ad industry

Posted Nov 8, 2021 8:16 UTC (Mon) by NAR (subscriber, #1313) [Link]

Can't you get ad-free youtube by payi8ng for it? But how many people are prepared to pay?

I did, because on the "smart" TV I can't install an ad-blocker and politicians started to spread their lies between "Peppa the Pig" episodes. So the consequence is that if there's no (easy, simple) way to block ads, the ads are really disturbing and there's a fairly easy and not too expensive option (I think Youtube Premium costs about +1 EUR/month over my existing Youtube Music subscription), people might be prepared to pay. The reason I had Youtube Music subscription is to support the creators of the music - I think they don't get much money out from Google, but maybe more than nothing.

Conill: an inside look into the illicit ad industry

Posted Nov 8, 2021 16:47 UTC (Mon) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75) [Link] (1 responses)

Can't you get ad-free youtube by payi8ng for it? But how many people are prepared to pay?

You can pay to remove the ads by Google but there is still sponsored content, and there's really nothing you can do to remove that. FWIW, I have paid to remove the Google ads. It's something like $9/month, and I watch enough YouTube that it seems like a worthwhile price to pay.

Conill: an inside look into the illicit ad industry

Posted Nov 12, 2021 12:57 UTC (Fri) by ianmcc (guest, #88379) [Link]

SponsorBlock - Skip Sponsorships on YouTube

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sponsorblock/

Conill: an inside look into the illicit ad industry

Posted Nov 8, 2021 16:28 UTC (Mon) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325) [Link] (11 responses)

If physics was structured differently, we could drive to Mars. What's your point?

Conill: an inside look into the illicit ad industry

Posted Nov 8, 2021 17:44 UTC (Mon) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link] (9 responses)

That we've set up society such that ads are in many senses the best way to fund services that everyone wants access to, and that this is a communal outcome from individual decisions.

It's not as simple as "well, Google and Facebook are just evil and fund themselves via ads" - there are solid reasons why we're in this world that encourages the existence of the illicit ad industry, and an attempt to fix the downsides of ads and ad-supported services has to take those reasons into account.

You can't just look at Google, Facebook, Twitter et al in isolation, and say that they made the choice to make the world like this.

Conill: an inside look into the illicit ad industry

Posted Nov 8, 2021 23:15 UTC (Mon) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325) [Link] (8 responses)

"This is what society wants" is a convenient excuse that the plutocrats often use in order to screw the rest of us over. Those very same plutocrats (consciously or unconsciously) shaped the economy into such a structure that ads would thrive in the first place. In this context, the argument is disingenuously suggesting that the invisible hand of the market drove us towards ads, when in fact the digital economy is heavily concentrated in a few companies, and those companies are making all of the decisions that actually matter. Amazon and Netflix, for example, are primarily payment-driven rather than ad-driven, and Microsoft uses a mixture of those strategies. Facebook decided to run ads because they thought that would maximize profits. Netflix decided not to run ads because they thought that would maximize profits. Since they operate in different sectors, they may both be right about that.

Sure, society influences the economy, but the economy also influences society. If the plutocrats all decide that social networking is going to be an ad-supported product (and they will, because it lets them maximize network effects), then nobody will be able to get a paid competitor off the ground, and therefore social networking is ad-supported. This becomes a background expectation of society, and therefore brings the corollary that "everyone is on Facebook/Twitter/[whatever this decade's new social thing is]." Those of us who aren't on Facebook get quietly excluded from the rest of society.

Conill: an inside look into the illicit ad industry

Posted Nov 9, 2021 10:06 UTC (Tue) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link] (7 responses)

Sure, but plutocrats are also part of society - they're not an entity to one side.

My argument is that to actually fix the problems caused for society by ads (bearing in mind that many of these problems predate the digital economy - my grandfather was worrying about very similar issues in the 1950s, just with newspaper and billboard ads, and then in the 1970s with TV and radio adverts under the newly created IBA), we need to understand why we get into the recurring pattern that advertising revenue is greater than subscription revenue.

Why, in the digital world, is Vimeo getting both lower user counts and ARPU than YouTube, given that they're both UGC video sites? Why (in the USA paper world) has the New York Times routinely made more money from advertising than from selling the paper? Why are newspapers like The Guardian and the Financial Times so upset by Google News (which takes some of the advertising revenue, but doesn't take away all of the ad revenue, nor any of the subscription revenue)? Why (just looked at SEC filings) does AMC make more money than HBO? In short, why has society been structured since at least the 1950s such that advertising revenue is at least as significant as product revenue.

It's interesting that you chose Amazon as an example; Amazon's advertising business is doing surprisingly well, and Amazon is fast getting to a point where Amazon's consumer-facing activities are effectively funded from advertising, with the payment driven component being a minor profit point. B2B has never been taken over by advertising funding, which is part of why AWS (and Google Cloud, and Azure) are payments driven.

Going back further in history, the French First Republic is illustrative - there were people in the French Revolution who genuinely believed that once France had experienced freedom from a monarch, the French people would remain a republic forever. Instead, Napoleon founded the French First Empire, restoring France to a monarchical government under a different monarchy; the Second Republic did little better, being replaced by the French Second Empire, and it wasn't until the Third Republic that French society shifted enough that the fix for a faulty republic became "create a new republic", not "go back to monarchy" (the next stages were the Vichy government under Nazi conquest, then the Fourth and Fifth Republics after the war).

Conill: an inside look into the illicit ad industry

Posted Nov 10, 2021 10:04 UTC (Wed) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link] (6 responses)

> Going back further in history, the French First Republic is illustrative - there were people in the French Revolution who genuinely believed that once France had experienced freedom from a monarch, the French people would remain a republic forever. Instead, Napoleon founded the French First Empire

To be honest this had a lot more to do with other European monarchs taking advantage of the situation to try to diminish France, giving a huge boost of power to the French military, than people being “unready” for the Republic (and conversely France become a Republic when proeminent monarchists could not settle on a single candidate not when the people started clamoring for this particular regime).

It’s all fine and dandy to dismiss the influence of the rich and powerful but they *do* have influence, commensurate to their means. They may not always achieve their objectives (and then often because they do not agree with one another, not for lack of power) but they definitely distort the choices of the rest of the population.

Conill: an inside look into the illicit ad industry

Posted Nov 10, 2021 11:20 UTC (Wed) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link] (5 responses)

Not arguing that it wasn't complex - but it needed social change to get to a point where France remained a republic. If you just get rid of the symptom (a corrupt monarchy in the case of 18th century France, ad-supported online businesses like Google today), someone else will move into the space they leave behind.

This is a hard shift to make - in both cases, you're looking at entire lifetimes of social norms (the ad business that nowadays supports Google, Facebook, Twitter and others got its start with newspaper ads in the early 20th century, and has grown from there) that need to be adjusted, and powerful people who don't want those changes to happen. But without the social change, all you do is displace one powerful person and leave room for another to replace them; if you want to get rid of that position of power completely (e.g. killing off the oversized influence advertising has in our consumer economy), then you need the social change that means that when that powerful person is displaced, the hole they leave behind closes up.

Conill: an inside look into the illicit ad industry

Posted Nov 10, 2021 11:32 UTC (Wed) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (1 responses)

> the ad business that nowadays supports Google, Facebook, Twitter and others got its start with newspaper ads in the early 20th century

Aren't you a bit behind the times? Surely it was with Victorian industrialisation about 50 years earlier :-)

The other problem is that advertising is mostly a zero-sum game, but your SHARE of the cake is heavily influenced by your advertising spend (and hence brand awareness). My current employer is hitting the limits of "word of mouth" advertising and is now dabbling heavily with advertising in the media. But with the problem that our capacity has been hit by all the labour shortages so we don't want to advertise too much and end up with more customers than we can satisfy ...

Fascinating when you're watching these dynamics play out from within :-)

Cheers,
Wol

Conill: an inside look into the illicit ad industry

Posted Nov 10, 2021 12:06 UTC (Wed) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link]

The ad industry as we know it today came into existence when the descendants of the Victorian industrializers of the 19th century started outsourcing their advertising spend to specialists. Advertising had existed long before that, but you didn't have the middle man - you directly paid the entity publishing the advert (newspaper, billboard owner, town crier) to put your advert that you'd come up with in house into their output.

In the early 20th century, this changed. We had the beginning of advertising agencies appear, where you paid a middle man to get your advert in the right places; those middle men then got good at modifying your advert to get better, and the industry took off, until the sorts of agencies that Mad Men is based on came into being.

And that thing about "zero-sum, but ad spend needed to get a big share of the cake" is exactly the sort of social issue that needs to be thought through when fixing the industry. If we don't fix it, just get rid of the more parasitic bits of the industry, we'll simply create a hole for new parasites.

Conill: an inside look into the illicit ad industry

Posted Nov 10, 2021 13:57 UTC (Wed) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link] (2 responses)

> Not arguing that it wasn't complex - but it needed social change to get to a point where France remained a republic.

French people were no more nor less ready for their Republic than Americans were ready for their own Republic a few years before. Left alone they’d have probably settled down like the Americans did (values were close enough both sides of the Atlantic that intellectuals both American and French were visiting one another all the time). Just like the French were no more nor less ready for the III Republic, that flourished because Bonapartists and Monarchists were in disarray at that particular moment and left a decade to Republicans to consolidate (plus France had just lost a major war, there was nothing left to win for its neighbors, who had no reason to meddle).

Most people will let demons lie and accommodate themselves with any political regime that gives them a break and provides bread and circus. Empire/Kingdom building is a game for the powerful, for young hotheads, or philosophers with too much time on their hands. The outward form of any regime is mostly due to historical accidents that winners take advantage of and claim forethought of. Insider games do reflect societal changes but are depressingly similar regardless of the regime outward form.

Society is basically conservative and will find whatever exists at any particular time normal and “natural”, including pervasive ad-funded monitoring in western countries, or pervasive state-funded monitoring in Russia and China, regardless how accidental the current societal construct was at the beginning.

Marxists believed in scientific history progression; look how it all ended up. Putinist Russia is a lot better explained by the attempt of Western countries to plunder Russia after USSR fall, discrediting all the “democrats” that supported closer ties with the West, than any particular political theory or society maturity.

Conill: an inside look into the illicit ad industry

Posted Nov 10, 2021 16:11 UTC (Wed) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

> French people were no more nor less ready for their Republic than Americans were ready for their own Republic a few years before.

Yup. America, France, Ireland, the *majority* of people were ?accidental? monarchists until something happened. The Founding Fathers were deeply UNpopular until the incident where British troops massacred a load of civilians - was that New York about 1778? Likewise, the IRA were a complete minority until the Easter Uprising conspirators were executed. Without those two incidents (or something similar), both the American and Irish independence movements would probably have been crushed, to public acclaim.

Presumably something similar was required in France. One only has to look a little bit earlier at the English Civil War and consequences - Parliament rebelled against Charles I, Oliver Cromwell's son made a mess of it, Charles II was recalled very much under the thumb of Parliament, James II was deposed by William and Mary at the behest of Parliament, and we ended up with our Parliamentary Monarchy with the monarch pretty much a figurehead. Since when we've been moderately stable apart from the minority attempting to provoke a groundswell because they want a change. Almost exactly the same as happened in America, France, Ireland, and probably plenty of other places ... the best propaganda money can buy ... (which is back to advertising!!!)

Cheers,
Wol

Conill: an inside look into the illicit ad industry

Posted Nov 10, 2021 18:50 UTC (Wed) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link]

The particular issue with monarchism at the dawn of the Third Republic was that the Legitimist candidate (who the Orleanists could have stomached otherwise, since he had no children and there was no prospect of him fathering any) wanted to abolish the tricolour, which made it politically impossible for the Orleanists to support him.

Conill: an inside look into the illicit ad industry

Posted Nov 15, 2021 11:24 UTC (Mon) by immibis (subscriber, #105511) [Link]

There is nothing humans can do to change physics, but there is plenty humans can do to change humans.

Conill: an inside look into the illicit ad industry

Posted Nov 7, 2021 19:13 UTC (Sun) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (3 responses)

> No

Yes. Oh, so much yes.

> *Facebook* decided that.

Sure, but that's not important. Facebook is not the first social networks. And there were attempts to create other social networks. Heck, you may consider LWN a mini-social network.

Most social network that tried to go with subscription model failed. LWN survived, as well as few other such small niche networks but none of them have grown to billions of users.

And that means society as the whole have chosen to pay for social networks via ads.

Note that outcome wasn't predetermined. In fact we have similar yet opposite situation: ISPs. Most of us pay for internet access instead of using free wifi providers. There were numerous attempts to provide free, ads-supported, WiFi, but they succeeded in a very niche places (I think Moscow subway have one, e.g.).

Thus… no, we don't have ads on Facebook solely because it's founders have decided to have these. And the same with Google. This was very much the decision of the society as whole.

Conill: an inside look into the illicit ad industry

Posted Nov 7, 2021 23:02 UTC (Sun) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link]

This was very much the decision of the society as whole.

Or, more precisely, that part of society to whom privacy is less important than having free (as in beer) access to Facebook. This apparently includes enough people to keep Facebook afloat based on ad revenue. The rest are presumably using something else, or don't use social networking at all.

Conill: an inside look into the illicit ad industry

Posted Nov 7, 2021 23:26 UTC (Sun) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link]

Not directly. Ads are a roundabout way to do microtransactions and international money transfer without involving the banking system.

Conill: an inside look into the illicit ad industry

Posted Nov 8, 2021 17:19 UTC (Mon) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75) [Link]

I think there are several reasons why ad supported content does better than subscriptions:

People treat foregone revenue differently from outright expenditures. This means they don't see spending $10/month on a subscription the same way as losing $10/month they could earn by selling their attention to advertisers. The net result is that they make different decisions depending on the flow of money, even if the net result is the same.
Ads are effectively pay-as-you-go, which means they naturally match the actual cost of users more closely than a subscription. A flat-rate subscription tends to overcharge occasional users and undercharge heavy users, which is not what the company wants. Flat rate pricing tends to discourage new and occasional users, which hurts growth.
People have all kinds of bad experiences with subscriptions. Most people can tell you about instances where they either discovered they were still paying for a subscription they didn't know about or had to spend a lot of time fighting to unsubscribe from a company that didn't want to give up the revenue. These things make them really leery of subscribing to something, especially something they aren't sure they'll want to stick with.

Conill: an inside look into the illicit ad industry

Posted Nov 11, 2021 8:23 UTC (Thu) by nilsmeyer (guest, #122604) [Link] (1 responses)

> Now, that $10/month number is a simplification; some users are a cost to Facebook, others are worth hundreds of dollars a month. But the principle still applies: we have built a system where paying for a product directly is less effective than paying via ads. I suspect people would be rather shocked if they were asked to pay what advertisers pay for access as direct cash.

You can add to that that those people who choose to install an ad-blocker get to ride for free on the backs of those that don't, in essence someone else is bearing the cost of having to look at ads while I only have to pay more for products that are advertised.

Conill: an inside look into the illicit ad industry

Posted Nov 15, 2021 11:27 UTC (Mon) by immibis (subscriber, #105511) [Link]

Alternatively, people who don't block ads are voluntarily donating for free to those who do.

Conill: an inside look into the illicit ad industry

Posted Nov 5, 2021 19:02 UTC (Fri) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link]

This corroborates the accounts I've read from other advertising cult escapees.

There are no real people buying into this stuff and never have been, it's magical thinking and paid indulgences all the way down, and the only difference between Google and Nigerian Prince Emails and open-sewer VPNs and NFTs and cryptolocker malware is how many layers of Rube Goldberg mechanisms are skimming off dollars between the marks and the ringleaders - either by scamming the other players into believing they're worth far more than they actually are, or by auditing them, in the scientology or highwayman sense.

I'd like to see someone like Microsoft or Apple ship a browser with real ad blocking built in, and begin the end of this plague. We know the others aren't even going to try.

Conill: an inside look into the illicit ad industry

Posted Nov 5, 2021 23:15 UTC (Fri) by jkingweb (subscriber, #113039) [Link] (38 responses)

> If you’re not using an ad blocker yet, stop reading this, and install one: your browser will suddenly be a lot more performant.

I've been filtering out ads since 2003, for performance. I can't even imagine how awful things are nowadays. Has the difference been quantified recently?

Conill: an inside look into the illicit ad industry

Posted Nov 6, 2021 17:53 UTC (Sat) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link] (37 responses)

I saw mention of a news article last week where the iPhone's spyware protections are costing advertisers an estimated $9-10 billion. That's not earned money.

I'm hesitant to call advertising an industry at all when the only thing it seems to produce is human suffering - these are the same people who've rendered the entire US telephone system unusable through spam during a pandemic.

Conill: an inside look into the illicit ad industry

Posted Nov 6, 2021 19:19 UTC (Sat) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75) [Link] (36 responses)

There's a lot of terrible advertising out there, but there is a legitimate need to let potential users know about products that might serve their wants and needs. We just need to be better about making sure the advertisements aren't fraudulent or unnecessarily disruptive. And the people who rendered the phone system unusable for the most part aren't advertisers; they're scammers. That's why they aren't afraid to use tactics that are already illegal. Their basic business model is criminal to start with, so it's no surprise they're willing to break a few more laws with robocalls.

Conill: an inside look into the illicit ad industry

Posted Nov 6, 2021 19:38 UTC (Sat) by zdzichu (subscriber, #17118) [Link]

There exists no separation between advertisers and scammers; one blends softly casual into the other.

Conill: an inside look into the illicit ad industry

Posted Nov 7, 2021 8:55 UTC (Sun) by oldtomas (guest, #72579) [Link] (34 responses)

Let me propose two stories:

* First story: Sport shoes

In my neighbourhood (Berlin) a building's outside was going to be renovated. Plaster, perhaps thermic insulation. Scaffolding was put around it. Then, a big, colourful ad from a well-known sports outfitter "Some see a soccer player who's made it to the top. I see chances for the community" ("and" me says: "I see an ad. Why is it that those folks are allowed to take such a big slice of public space?").

The tenants living there were less than amused. Their windows were /behind/ all that. The thing went (locally) viral on Twitter [1].

That helped. While ad industry seems so powerful, they sometimes crumble in the presence of a small shitstorm. Go figure.

It took two days for the ad to disappear (the scaffolding took five more days: the renovation wasn't done, after all).

I don't know whether the house owner made good on their threat of billing the tenants for the lost ad revenue (they are one of those crappy, mean outfits which are in the market to extract as much as they can from the tenants).

* Second story: the free browser

Remember those times where your favourite browser had a check box "disable Javascript"?

I loved that box. The idea of my browser executing random code of uncertain origin (and even more uncertain intentions) never went well with me.

Remember all those web pages whining at you that you better enable Javascript (for the "experience", whatever /that/ means)? Remember them explaining to you in excruciating detail how to do it, for the different browsers en vogue at the time, because, surely, you disabled it by mistake?

Now there's this Mozilla foundation, which, at first blush should be the user's ally and not the ad industry's. Still, they made this check box disappear, thus making sure that the "web page makers" can count on enabled Javascript everywhere.

My take on this: while I do assume the best of intentions at Mozilla, I still do think their "frame of reference" is extremely biased and influenced by ad industry (that's what the latter is good at, remember?). Just the idea of an unencumbered, universal and compatible availability of Javascript at the user's workstations is like spreading fertilizer before dropping an invasive species's seeds.

From time to time, you still see a web page whining at your missing Javascript, like a distant echo from the past. Most of the Javascript-only pages are just a "black hole" (or a "white hole"), though. Some don't care (LWN, for one). I love those.

Now in those two stories, do tell me. Who is The Good, who is The Bad, and who is The Ugly? We humans are complex. A whole bunch of us (called "society", "humankind" and other things) is fiendishly complex.

But giving up ain't an option, either :)

All in all, I'd like to see ad industry much more strongly regulated. It is feeding on, but at the same time destroying the already thin balance we, as humans need to survive.

[1] Just another one: why should a private company have such a world-wide power over communications? But I disgress.

Conill: an inside look into the illicit ad industry

Posted Nov 7, 2021 12:57 UTC (Sun) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (6 responses)

I wanted to look at (and maybe buy) a certain company's products - a one-man-band, iirc. The website was *pure* *flash* so, because I had flash-block enabled, I could see absolutely *nothing*.

I emailed the company, asking why was their site all flash? And pretty much got the reply "loads of sites have flash. If you don't like it, lump it". Well, pretty much NO site I visited then (and nor would they today) had flash. So the guy got a polite response back that I'm borderline autistic, pretty much the ONLY use of flash I ever came across was adverts which play hell with said autism, and sorry no way was I going to enable flash just for his site.

One lost customer (and he knew it...)

Cheers,
Wol

Conill: an inside look into the illicit ad industry

Posted Nov 11, 2021 9:40 UTC (Thu) by wtarreau (subscriber, #51152) [Link] (5 responses)

That remembers me that I loved it when ads were in flash: it was sufficient to install an outdated flash plugin that the browser had blacklisted to be certain never to see any of those annoying ones. It worked even better than the flashblock plugin for me!

I don't run ad blockers and am supportive to *reasonable* ads. i.e. those not in the middle, no popup, no animation, etc. If they're just on the border where I can decide whether I want to have a look at them or not, and are in relation with the site (and not with my recent searches) I know they help small sites to stay up and sometimes (very rarely) they inform me about the arrival of a product I'd been waiting for.

I immediately close sites with animated ads, popups etc because they're too disturbing. And youtube has become too much invaded, I visit it much less often now, and often close a video during an ad. Sometimes I'm thankful they remind me I was needlessly wasting my time :-)

Conill: an inside look into the illicit ad industry

Posted Nov 15, 2021 9:19 UTC (Mon) by jezuch (subscriber, #52988) [Link] (4 responses)

Oh gods, YouTube became unbearable recently. I've been using youtube-dl for a long time, but it appears they started throttling it.

As for ads, I'm simply not interested. I'm not interested in products that promise to save me time so that I can spend more time working so that I can afford those products ;) And I'm not interested in that great new show on whatever platform as there's already too many interesting things to watch (or read) than I can do in my lifetime.

Just give me a micropayments account and I can support those who are worth it directly (as I do on Patreon - and LWN - already).

Conill: an inside look into the illicit ad industry

Posted Nov 15, 2021 11:30 UTC (Mon) by immibis (subscriber, #105511) [Link]

yt-dlp is a fork which avoids the throttling.

Conill: an inside look into the illicit ad industry

Posted Nov 15, 2021 11:49 UTC (Mon) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (2 responses)

You can pay for https://www.youtube.com/premium that gives you ad-free YouTube, and it pays content creators unlike youtube-dl.

Conill: an inside look into the illicit ad industry

Posted Nov 15, 2021 12:13 UTC (Mon) by jezuch (subscriber, #52988) [Link] (1 responses)

OK, if pays content creators, then I'll definitely give it a try.

Thanks!

(But I'll probably still use youtube-dl because the YT UI is crap, and embedding videos in the browser is unnecessarily slow for some reason on my machine.)

Conill: an inside look into the illicit ad industry

Posted Nov 15, 2021 12:15 UTC (Mon) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

Yeah. I wish there were an official way to download Youtube videos, at least the unprotected ones. It's not like they are not _public_ already.

BTW, I second the recommendation for ytp-dl. It downloads my videos at 40MB/s.

Conill: an inside look into the illicit ad industry

Posted Nov 7, 2021 19:45 UTC (Sun) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (16 responses)

> Remember those times where your favourite browser had a check box "disable Javascript"?

Of course. I even remember these times when you were supposed to pay Netscape some money to be able use something better than Mosaic. Very few people did.

> Now there's this Mozilla foundation, which, at first blush should be the user's ally and not the ad industry's.

Why? Users, en masse, refused to pay anything for browsers and today use nothing else but ad-supported browsers (for some time Opera was popular, but mostly in Russia, where people weren't buying it either… eventually it succumbed and now just a version of Chromium). The only exception is Safari, but only on Apple products and Apple is also not a company known for it's refusal to work with ad industry.

That means that at most the expectation should be that Mozilla would try to balance the needs of ads industry (which pays money to make Mozilla viable in the first place) and end users (without which ad industry would have no money to pay Mozilla anything).

And this is exactly what happens. Why are you surprised?

> We humans are complex. A whole bunch of us (called "society", "humankind" and other things) is fiendishly complex.

Not as complex as you try to portray. One single human is indeed very finicky and unpredictable. But when you look on the decisions made by millions or billions then decisions are averaging, complexity evaporates and you see very simple patterns.

The fact that people prefer ad-supported, free, yet complicated and powerful browsers was established very early and reinforced by the rise of Chrome. Few web developers bothered to support truly free browsers like Lynx and very few users used them. And if we, as society, did that choice then it's very strange to complain that browser makers consider supporting ads industry important.

> All in all, I'd like to see ad industry much more strongly regulated. It is feeding on, but at the same time destroying the already thin balance we, as humans need to survive.

Unfortunately to achieve that we would need to first start strongly regulating the internet. By building hundreds of Golden Shields and separating Internet into separate networks with limited, regulated, connection between these. Is it really a good price to make ads less invasive? I… have no idea, really. Once upon time I would have said: “no, that's completely unacceptable”, but as country borders become more and more important… maybe that's good idea, after all.

Conill: an inside look into the illicit ad industry

Posted Nov 7, 2021 20:07 UTC (Sun) by rodgerd (guest, #58896) [Link]

> Few web developers bothered to support truly free browsers

Sadly the industry spends most of its time complaining that Apple is the only meaningful holdout on the Chrome monopoly.

Conill: an inside look into the illicit ad industry

Posted Nov 7, 2021 20:13 UTC (Sun) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (3 responses)

> Is it really a good price to make ads less invasive? I… have no idea, really. Once upon time I would have said: “no, that's completely unacceptable”, but as country borders become more and more important… maybe that's good idea, after all.

Different countries, different mores. I would have no problem whatsoever with saying that AD networks need to be national - if you want to serve ads to a UK internet address you have to have a UK-based operation serving UK-regulated ads from UK advertisers.

If I go looking for foreign stuff, that's not a problem. It's my choice. But try not to push foreign agendas abroad ... :-)

Cheers,
Wol

Conill: an inside look into the illicit ad industry

Posted Nov 7, 2021 20:30 UTC (Sun) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (2 responses)

> I would have no problem whatsoever with saying that AD networks need to be national - if you want to serve ads to a UK internet address you have to have a UK-based operation serving UK-regulated ads from UK advertisers.

How do you plan to enforce this without Golden Shield? What would stop local web sites from move ads and hosting to some other country?

> If I go looking for foreign stuff, that's not a problem. It's my choice. But try not to push foreign agendas abroad ... :-)

But how do you prevent that in a world where local web site can be placed somewhere else? Heck, how would you even know it's local web site? This seemingly Serbian web site is located in US and is used, mostly, by people outside of Serbia.

Conill: an inside look into the illicit ad industry

Posted Nov 7, 2021 21:38 UTC (Sun) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (1 responses)

You can't (to a large extent).

But in the UK, I presume we have jurisdiction over UK domains? They have to be registered via Nominet?

So the easy way to stop UK web-sites hosting foreign ads is to seize their .uk domain. It's easy enough for people to use VPNs to get round national restrictions, and I don't want to interfere with the *user*'s ability to view what they want. But if you are serving ads to UK-based people, then you should be subject to UK laws.

If Google wants to serve ads to UK IP addresses ...

If UK citizens choose to use a VPN and hide their location, then so be it ... (It's like my attitude to porn mags. If people want it, they're going to get it. So let's go back to the old days where it was under the counter at the newsagent. Easily available, but not on view ...)

Cheers,
Wol

Conill: an inside look into the illicit ad industry

Posted Nov 7, 2021 21:52 UTC (Sun) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

> But in the UK, I presume we have jurisdiction over UK domains? They have to be registered via Nominet?

No. They have to be registered through company which have an agreement with Nominet. US people may use Google Domains, Russian people may use NIC.RU and so on.

UK doesn't have direct control over .uk domain. Sure, it can be arranged, but this would take years to resolve and if you are going that way then you may as well start building the Golden Shield, too.

That's, ultimately, where it all goes.

> It's easy enough for people to use VPNs to get round national restrictions, and I don't want to interfere with the *user*'s ability to view what they want.

But government wants to. And if you would give government an excuse to do that under acceptable guise they would do it for sure.

Thus I don't think a nirvana where ads are regulated but VPNs still work is possible. More likely there would be future where connections between different countries would be controlled by government and only whitelisted services would be allowed. Google Play or Battle.Net would be permitted unconditionally but to access LWN you would need to get a special permit.

Conill: an inside look into the illicit ad industry

Posted Nov 8, 2021 9:25 UTC (Mon) by oldtomas (guest, #72579) [Link] (10 responses)

Interesting points you make. The first one is IMO the most relevant: consumers will take a freebie over a for-pay thing nearly any time.

But even this is much more complex than it suggests: it is part of a feedback loop I'd call "race to the bottom". Which in part is the user's free choice, in part isn't.

As to "not as complex", economy makes this mistake each and every time. They treat humans as molecules in an ideal gas and think you can derive phenomenological values (pressure, temperature) from "some statistics". After all, it works for physicists, why not for us?

For one, there are ~6x10^23 air molecules in that small cupboard next to my desk, but only ~3x10^9 humans, for other, the "interesting" parameters those economists try to study are the result of feedback phenomena, thus highly non-linear.

Don't you think that the Facebook strategy with their huge subscriber base (they claim 1/3 of humankind: let it be more realistically 1/30) has an influence on free-rideritis?

Do you think someone in, say, Ghana, who /depends/ on FB to sell their vegetables is /able/ to shell out $10/month for the service? How do you start /now/ an alternative for that?

And so on.

What we agree on is, that it'd be difficult to divide the world in Bad and Good.

The point I was trying to make is that those big platforms cause significant collateral damage, quite probably more than the riches they generate and are thus parasitic.

Ergo they need regulation. And no, I think national states aren't quite the right institutions for that.

Tough questions :-)

Conill: an inside look into the illicit ad industry

Posted Nov 8, 2021 11:03 UTC (Mon) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (4 responses)

> Do you think someone in, say, Ghana, who /depends/ on FB to sell their vegetables is /able/ to shell out $10/month for the service?

To be fair, the current ad returns per user from Ghana are unlikely to approach $10 per month.

Conill: an inside look into the illicit ad industry

Posted Nov 9, 2021 5:21 UTC (Tue) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link] (3 responses)

Interestingly, we have recently learned that for Facebook, being in most markets doesn't really make much financial sense for them. That is, they probably lose money operating in Ghana, and in the future will probably make very little. Their business in rich countries essentially subsidizes being in poorer countries.

They just think they have to be in every market to preclude a competitor taking hold.

Conill: an inside look into the illicit ad industry

Posted Nov 9, 2021 8:47 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (2 responses)

> Interestingly, we have recently learned that for Facebook, being in most markets doesn't really make much financial sense for them. That is, they probably lose money operating in Ghana, and in the future will probably make very little. Their business in rich countries essentially subsidizes being in poorer countries.

The marginal cost of operating in Ghana is probably not even worth mentioning for FB. It's a small bunch of servers and maybe some localization. So why not?

Conill: an inside look into the illicit ad industry

Posted Nov 9, 2021 11:01 UTC (Tue) by zdzichu (subscriber, #17118) [Link]

Technocrats tend to dismiss "soft" part of operating in any country.
You need to be compliant with local law, so you need services of someone knowing this law. To be compliant, you need to follow changes in legislation and adjust your service.
You need to screen and answer law enforcement's requests. You may be required to provide secret network tap connectivity for intelligence agencies in a country.
If you do business (like selling ads to Ghanians), you need to take the tax law into account.
"Small bunch of servers and localization" may not be much, but all the costs around can be quite substantial.

Conill: an inside look into the illicit ad industry

Posted Nov 9, 2021 12:42 UTC (Tue) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

In addition to the list in the sibling comment, there is also the moderation Facebook (should) need to enforce its ToS. As bad as they've dropped the ball here in the US (and other English-majority regions), it is apparently much worse in other areas[1].

[1]https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/10/four-revelati...

Conill: an inside look into the illicit ad industry

Posted Nov 8, 2021 11:47 UTC (Mon) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (4 responses)

> The "interesting" parameters those economists try to study are the result of feedback phenomena, thus highly non-linear.

Economists predict these just fine. They fail at the next step: when they attempt to influence the policy makers.

At this point we start dealing not with millions or billions (where you can use statistical methods) but with dozens or, in some cases, singular entities. Worse yet: these entities react to the advice of one (or very few) economists. And complexity comes back.

Also, economists are often forced to pick between bad and worse choices when citizens demand good choice. Think about packages which, basically, stopped the US economy. What was the alternative? US bankruptcy, essentially. Would have US survived that? Nobody knows but it was obvious that Trump wouldn't survive it (he would have lost the chance of reelection for sure, I mean, chances of his physical survival would have been hard to predict). Thus we have these huge congestions of 100+ ships.

It would be exactly the same with an attempts to regulate ads, too: we can, relatively easily, predict how ad makers and companies and end users construction would be developing if left alone, but once we would try to regulate that thing… predictions would stop being easy to do.

Conill: an inside look into the illicit ad industry

Posted Nov 11, 2021 8:58 UTC (Thu) by oldtomas (guest, #72579) [Link] (3 responses)

> Economists predict these just fine.

My take is rather, that, after the crash, you'll be able to unearth some economists in the position to say "told ya". They might be different ones, of different schools, each time. And they might sometimes cheat a bit by saying "told ya".

Let's agree to differ on that one :-)

Conill: an inside look into the illicit ad industry

Posted Nov 11, 2021 9:40 UTC (Thu) by Karellen (subscriber, #67644) [Link] (2 responses)

How does the joke go - Economists have successfully predicted nine out of the last five recessions :-)

Conill: an inside look into the illicit ad industry

Posted Nov 11, 2021 10:48 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (1 responses)

"The stock market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent"

Betting on the inevitable is a loser's game, sadly ... anyone can see we've got to wipe out all the money that's been printed because of CoVid, so either a crash or massive inflation (or both) is inevitable. But *when* is anybody's guess.

Cheers,
Wol

Conill: an inside look into the illicit ad industry

Posted Dec 2, 2021 19:38 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

> Betting on the inevitable is a loser's game, sadly ... anyone can see we've got to wipe out all the money that's been printed because of CoVid, so either a crash or massive inflation (or both) is inevitable. But *when* is anybody's guess.

Some inflation is happening, but creation of lots of new money was essential simply to *stabilize* the money supply, because when there's a major problem like this one, people hunker down and start saving (throughout the lockdown period, the savings ratio shot up across the world to levels much much higher than before, though still lower than those routine in most of the Far East). Another way of putting it is that when there's a major problem like this one, people hunker down and start repaying loans -- which is another way of saying "destroying the money which was injected into the economy when those loans were granted".

So massive destruction of money was underway. Obviously it was necessary to counteract this unless you actually like major deflation (and there was a pile of deflationary pressure in *any* case because of lockdowns, even in the absence of the lockdown-induced savings ratio increase). That most of the money created went to people who actually needed it and was immediately spent (unlike most episodes of, say, quantitative easing) is even better -- it helped prevent a sharp recession from becoming a disastrous depression, *without* overly increasing the money supply (most metrics show that it hasn't increased at all, with the unique exception of the US, where multiple rounds of stimulus possibly resulted in overheating and *have* increased M3, but even there M0 and M1 have barely budged.)

Conill: an inside look into the illicit ad industry

Posted Nov 8, 2021 0:07 UTC (Mon) by roc (subscriber, #30627) [Link] (5 responses)

By the time it was removed, the "disable Javascript" checkbox was for 99.9% of users nothing more than a "break the Web" checkbox with a confusing label.

To this very day you can disable Javascript in Firefox via about:config, toggle "javascript.enabled". That is about as difficult to access as it needs to be.

This has nothing to do with the ad industry's relationship to Mozilla.

Conill: an inside look into the illicit ad industry

Posted Nov 8, 2021 0:10 UTC (Mon) by roc (subscriber, #30627) [Link] (4 responses)

Also, serious users who want to disable Javascript use NoScript because a global toggle is just unworkable. Mozilla supports NoScript to the extent that NoScript is one of the few extensions Firefox officially supports on Android.

The idea that Mozilla actively tries to ensure Javascript is always enabled, to benefit the ad industry, is just absurd.

Conill: an inside look into the illicit ad industry

Posted Nov 8, 2021 10:59 UTC (Mon) by oldtomas (guest, #72579) [Link] (3 responses)

This, at least, is the effect I see.

I know that you are from the "inside", roc, and I really appreciate that you take the time to answer to what I write, although it could be construed to be an all-out attack.

It's not meant to be.

"The idea that Mozilla actively tries to ensure Javascript is always enabled [...]"

See? There we have our misunderstanding. I don't even know whether we'll be able to clear it.

What I'm trying to say is that the influence is way more subtle. I don't picture Mozilla devels as those evil types "let's try to nudge the silly users towards enabling Javascript, hee, hee". On the contrary. Javascript is the best thing since sliced bread, fun tech (a Scheme in disguise, what's not to like?). Watch in awe (as I did!) the work Asa Dotzler et al did with PDFjs.

And still, cringe in disgust with all those things like implementing infrastructure for DRM, the pocket story, etc. There are enough traces that I think the (subtle) influence is there.

The weak point in our communication is "Mozilla actively". Mozilla is not a person, so has no will. There are lots of persons in there, and their own motivations aren't clear to each one of them.

But I'm (painfully!) convinced that the ad industry (that's their job, after all, no?) tries, and succeeds in implanting some bias into that.

Conill: an inside look into the illicit ad industry

Posted Nov 8, 2021 21:19 UTC (Mon) by roc (subscriber, #30627) [Link] (2 responses)

FWIW I've been out of Mozilla for more than 5 years so I'm not really an "insider" anymore.

I did work closely with the people who did the policy and technical work around DRM. I am 100% sure about Mozilla people's motive for DRM in Firefox: the inescapable fact that 99.9% of users who want to use Netflix etc would simply switch browsers if Firefox didn't support it. People who insist that Firefox should never have supported DRM in any form are implicitly or explicitly insisting that Mozilla should have died on that hill. But again none of that is related to the ad industry in any way.

I don't know much about Pocket but I also don't see how that's related to the ad industry.

Forgive me for being dubious about your claim to be able to detect "subtle influences" from a distance when specific examples don't hold up to scrutiny.

Conill: an inside look into the illicit ad industry

Posted Nov 9, 2021 10:16 UTC (Tue) by oldtomas (guest, #72579) [Link] (1 responses)

"Forgive me for being dubious about your claim to be able to detect "subtle influences" from a distance [...]"

No need. I more or less expect that. I'm glad we can have a healty & civil disagreement about this, strong as it may be.

Let me add that, sometimes, it's possible to mis-perceive something by /not/ being at some distance.

And on "subtle influences": let's not forget that the propaganda industry has /specialized/ on just that. I wouldn't underestimate them.

Conill: an inside look into the illicit ad industry

Posted Nov 9, 2021 20:38 UTC (Tue) by roc (subscriber, #30627) [Link]

> Let me add that, sometimes, it's possible to mis-perceive something by /not/ being at some distance.

That's fair.

Conill: an inside look into the illicit ad industry

Posted Nov 9, 2021 22:37 UTC (Tue) by dfsmith (guest, #20302) [Link] (1 responses)

According to Mozilla's tax return [1] nearly all of their 2019 income was derived from "Royalties" which I will interpret as "ultimately backed by advertising interests".

[1] https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2019/mozilla-2019... page 9.

Conill: an inside look into the illicit ad industry

Posted Nov 10, 2021 8:35 UTC (Wed) by oldtomas (guest, #72579) [Link]

Thanks for that data point.

Still, I don't want to be misunderstood. Given all my criticism above, one could infer that for me, Mozilla are The Bad. On the contrary. I'm a Firefox user, and I'm enormously thankful to them: otherwise I'd have to use Chrome.

I just wanted to raise awareness towards more subtle mechanisms which might be (and IMO _are_) at work here.

As always when nerdy folks are given the possibility to do cool, techy things. Ask Robert Oppenheimer, Edward Teller or Wernher von Braun. Not really a new thing, is it?

So rather as a heads-up to us all nerds: look into the mirror, from time to time.

Conill: an inside look into the illicit ad industry

Posted Nov 15, 2021 11:30 UTC (Mon) by immibis (subscriber, #105511) [Link] (1 responses)

Disabling JavaScript in Firefox is better done selectively with an addon like NoScript. Given that the addon exists, I'm not sure there's any real problem with removing the functionality from the browser itself. You don't want to *globally, always* disable JavaScript. You actually want to disable JavaScript except for the JavaScript you like.

Conill: an inside look into the illicit ad industry

Posted Nov 17, 2021 4:19 UTC (Wed) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link]

I definitely want to always disable JavaScript globally forever in a single browser profile.

Conill: an inside look into the illicit ad industry

Posted Nov 13, 2021 11:10 UTC (Sat) by busman (subscriber, #7333) [Link] (12 responses)

Sorry for being late for the party but I just found these excellent
comments when reading weekly edition :) But because there was only one
mention of microtransactions/micropayments and even then in
descriptive sense only I feel my 50 cents must be tossed on this pile
still.

I believe most people are not after the "cheapest" in a monetary
sense. They want to consume as little as possible of their *resources
as a whole* time being the other big chunk. Most people
are prepared to consume money in order to save time - exact valuations
vary off course.

So if you have to pick between subscription (creating account, handing
over payment details) or being forced to watch ads you naturally pick
the option that consumes less as a whole ie. ads. It's not about money
in the end - it's about being frictionless.

What is frictionless is about what technologies are available. Most of
my live I have been forced to buy gas to get mobility. There are many
legitimite reasons to *want* mobility naturally ;) But the available
technology sets the limits how I can fullfil them. And of course there
have been people who have declined to use cars altogether for
enviromental reasons and of course there have been people who built
electric cars with led batteries for themselves. But the majority of
humanity just wanted to get around and in that process created the
greatest and most powerful companies (before these current ones). See
the parallels here ;P ?

All I want to do is to occasionally get to read Economist or
Washington Post or what not article Hacker News or Lobsters links to
*without* being forced to subscribe. I want to see a button on the
page that says the price (10 cents for example), push that button and
then get to read that article ad free. I don't believe I'm the only
one.

The content provider gets to keep all of that 10 cents per page
view. I get to read what they have to say wihtout distractions. To me
that looks more frictionless than the current model. And as an added
bonus we make the current hypercorporations get less money and thus
have less and less lobbying and barganing power in the coming years.

So all we need is the technological solution that provides
that. Cryptocurrencies are a joke (that isn't funny anymore) but Taler
seems like it is almost there. However, there is nobody that accepts
it as a payment yet, unfortunately. I already have the Firefox
extension installed though :)

Conill: an inside look into the illicit ad industry

Posted Nov 13, 2021 13:21 UTC (Sat) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (2 responses)

That looks interesting, actually.

We already have "auto-top-up" in the UK, for example I have an account with Dart-Charge that manages the Dartford crossing, and every time my balance gets low it gets topped up automatically.

The problem here is often that a subscription is seen as poor value - if I read maybe one article a week, I have no desire to pay a subscription that gives the entire daily paper ... if only we could link an article to something like ApplePay, or GooglePay, or whatever and the browser would kick up a pop-up that says "accessing this article will pay 10p from your account to the Financial Times". You click "okay", the transaction goes on behind the scenes and you get your article. Hopefully the website remembers you've paid for that article and you get permanent access ...

Cheers,
Wol

Conill: an inside look into the illicit ad industry

Posted Nov 15, 2021 11:35 UTC (Mon) by immibis (subscriber, #105511) [Link] (1 responses)

Even better would be some fixed-price subscription that pays sites you visit according to the number of articles you read. You paid $10 and read one article, guess they get all $10, lucky them. You read 1000 articles, they get $0.01 each.

Probably doesn't make sense economically, but it avoids the HUGE frictional barrier of "do I really have another $0.10 to spare to open this page?"

Conill: an inside look into the illicit ad industry

Posted Nov 15, 2021 11:51 UTC (Mon) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

> Even better would be some fixed-price subscription that pays sites you visit according to the number of articles you read.

Scroll used to do that ( https://partner.scroll.com/ ). You pay fixed membership price and it gets distributed proportionally to websites that you visit (and that are in the Scroll network).

But it got acquired by Twitter. RIP.

Conill: an inside look into the illicit ad industry

Posted Nov 13, 2021 13:47 UTC (Sat) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link] (8 responses)

> Cryptocurrencies are a joke (that isn't funny anymore) but Taler seems like it is almost there.

Remember to say "GNU Taler" if you're talking about GNU Taler in contrast to cryptocurrencies, because there appears to also exist a conventional cryptocurrency called Taler as well.

Looking at the "Principles" page for GNU Taler, it occurs to me that the auditability part creates tension with the "payer anonymity" part, given that this is not an in-person transaction:

"As a payment system must comply with local laws in order to operate legally, GNU Taler must be designed to comply with these requirements. GNU Taler must provide an audit trail for investigators operating under the law."

In the general case, the legality of a transaction can only be positively confirmed if both parties' identity is known.

Conill: an inside look into the illicit ad industry

Posted Nov 13, 2021 15:28 UTC (Sat) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (2 responses)

Not sure if it's taler or thaler (or whether it matters) but there's also a *real* (obsolete?) currency called taler.

Cheers,
Wol

Conill: an inside look into the illicit ad industry

Posted Nov 13, 2021 16:06 UTC (Sat) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link]

I assume that's why the cryptocurrency and the GNU asymmetrically-anonymous payment system are named the way they are :)

Conill: an inside look into the illicit ad industry

Posted Nov 16, 2021 21:25 UTC (Tue) by nilsmeyer (guest, #122604) [Link]

Yes, thaler was one of the coins of the Holy Roman Empire." The word is shortened from Joachimsthaler, the original thaler coin minted in Joachimstal, Bohemia, from 1518"[1]. Tal (or the old spelling, Thal) means valley in German. The name "dollar" also derives from it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thaler

Conill: an inside look into the illicit ad industry

Posted Nov 13, 2021 16:22 UTC (Sat) by busman (subscriber, #7333) [Link] (4 responses)

Yes, GNU Taler. Sorry for the omissions.

If you read on on the page and follow some links they say the transactions actually *are* anonymous for the buyer. Buyer is identified when they convert real money to Taler tokens (like with teller machines). Vendor is identified when they receive the Taler tokens. It's based on blind signature crypto which to my old unix admin and non-cryptoanalyst eyes look seriously clever use of PKI.

To a law abiding citizens GNU Taler is actually even better than real cash as with GNU Taler I can be sure that a) my purchases remain anonymous (like with cash) and b) vendor can't hide my payment (unlike with cash).

Conill: an inside look into the illicit ad industry

Posted Nov 13, 2021 17:15 UTC (Sat) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link] (2 responses)

> If you read on on the page and follow some links they say the transactions actually *are* anonymous for the buyer.

Yes! That's exactly my point.

To be able to audit the legality of a transaction, you have to know not only what is being sold and who is selling it, but who they're selling it to.

Conill: an inside look into the illicit ad industry

Posted Nov 13, 2021 18:11 UTC (Sat) by busman (subscriber, #7333) [Link] (1 responses)

I'm not sure I follow what you are trying to say here :|

Naturally all those purchasing transactions which require customer
eligibility (age restrictions, student/retiree discounts, guns) are
not *anonymous* but the actual payment transactions *are*. Customer eligibility is checked separately by the vendor. Identity (even if required) is not stored alongside the payment transaction data and sent to the token provider to determine transaction's legality. In most cases it's not stored at all AFAICT. The burden is on the vendor. Customer is off the hook. Taler doesn't work any worse than cash in those situations.

All legalize is overwhelmingly on the vendor's side only. After
spending probably weeks in total in cashier lines in my life looking
at people buying stuff I'm quite convinced that vast majority of
purchase transactions are both legal and don't require customer
identification :)

Conill: an inside look into the illicit ad industry

Posted Nov 14, 2021 11:21 UTC (Sun) by kleptog (subscriber, #1183) [Link]

It's a bit hard to see how this doesn't run into anti-money-laundering legislation. But looking at their website it appears they take the same approach as card payment terminals: the vendors are strictly regulated. So it's not like I can set-up a site that accepts Taler. I have to use some kind of payment provider that verifies my identity.

This is certainly doable, but it hasn't seen much uptake yet. The best bet is to convince a group like Mollie or Ogone to support and you get all their customers for free. But that doesn't really help with the micro-payments.

Conill: an inside look into the illicit ad industry

Posted Nov 14, 2021 6:59 UTC (Sun) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link]

Cash has serial numbers and probably extensive surveillance of those numbers, not to mention how suspicious it looks in a world where only credit/debit cards are in for RL payments.

Conill: an inside look into the illicit ad industry

Posted Nov 15, 2021 11:22 UTC (Mon) by immibis (subscriber, #105511) [Link]

Ad-tech isn't the purest example of capitalism, though: that's gotta be cryptocurrency.