"A new report says that iOS 14 tracking changes could cost the advertising revenue billions if an early trend in spending decline continues."
Does it not follow then that advertisers are saving billions of dollars?
Now, admittedly, the advertisers aren't going to be getting now what they used to get, but this Freakonomics Podcast episode, "Does Advertising Actually Work? (Part 2: Digital) (Ep. 441)" https://freakonomics.com/podcast/advertising-part-2/ makes me wonder how much it'll really impact the people who pay for advertising.
It annoys me beyond belief that every single digital ads HN thread this is the most upvoted hot take and it rarely comes from someone working in buy side let alone ads in general.
Good or bad or neutral, FB's targeting specifically works amazingly well and better than anything else for many buyers. Especially for direct response ads.
If you can't make money selling your product from digital ads, you're not saving dollars you're losing revenue. This is true especially for 'internet only' upstart products, for example everyone who gets stuck in for instance a $60 athletic short ad loop as an example!! Sometimes you hear examples here about a new product or kickstarter who pre-this type of digital would probably not be able to launch or it would be much harder.
Brand advertising is different and targeting can definitely argue doesn't matter as much.
But these changes has already changed how we spend money, and we're tiny in the grand scheme.
The other point that always gets thrown out: It's also incredibly simple to measure effectiveness or lift.
Staying with FB as an example, if you are selling a product it can be as simple as using a unique link for your FB ads. ROI = Purchases with that link / FB spend. FB also has a large set of conversion tracking JS and offline like loading your retail conversions to the platform to match.
But given the new rules FB is now 'modeling' ROAS and it has decreased accuracy for us from something like previously capturing 80-95% of conversions to sometimes less than half. This makes a big difference in auto-optimizing on their end and thus our ROAS.
And again sure, it gets complicated and definitely more snake oil to buy some 3rd party ad tech which claims to model across all your channels online and off. A lot of times that's gamed or just a bunch of BS.
But another way to measure is say you're a larger brand buying TV, digital, OOH etc the works. You can simply control by making only one single change segregated to a control and treatment geo/group before and after, measure delta.
Perhaps I’m naive but my view is that online advertising should have targeting no better than bus stop ads (coarse geographic) and conversion should ideally not even be measurable. When I buy shoes I prefer to not even say which campaign made me do it (just like the bus stop ad).
I don't know. It isn't that I think targeted ads are bad. I think it is simply jarring that humans are that quantifiable, and separately, that I am skeptical of the privacy policies of the gatherers of this data.
My Instagram feed shows me lots of startup clothing companies for young to middle aged men, and I finally tried some, and damnit if they aren't decent jeans.
If we accept that ads are not inherently evil, and we accept that ads (when not manipulative or selling unethical/addictive products) are more beneficial to a recipient if they're relevant, then targeting (if done ethically and stored as anonymously as possible) is a great thing.
I find that the ads are actually more straightforward than traditional ads. They literally say "These jeans are stylish, durable and American-made". I didn't sit through 30 seconds of Brett Favre throwing a football to signal that I'm just like him.
I think they are bad if they use context I didn’t want to provide. I’d be happy to give any website a pretty detailed profile of interests and “cohort” if I knew that’s where it stopped.
But I don’t think ads can target ethically and with respect for privacy. I’d love to be proven wrong.
I don't like this assumption that we all have piles of disposable cash (or credit) - our main concern is the struggle to find the right "fit" for using it and therefore targeted ads are improving our lives. Due to the size of the global economy, there are many more products that fit you than you could ever buy.
It can only be considered "a great thing" as a response to an earlier status quo, but it's not one in and of itself. Taken to its logical conclusion, in a world where you can encounter dozens of targeted ads in a day, what happens when every single one you is a fantastic fit for you? It's surely not "a great thing" for mental health to have things you truly desire shown to you at a frequency faster than you can afford them, especially in a world where credit loophole agencies like Klarna prey on the vulnerable. And this isn't even opening the data privacy can of worms which is required to achieve that, or the fact that these platforms are competitive and reward the highest spender for any given perfect fit.
At least let's try to stave off the dystopian future for a little while longer and hold on to the notion that consumerism doesn't have to be optimised into ever more efficient workflows. Even if you enjoy shopping, doesn't this take out some of the excitement and satisfaction? How long now before some unknown third party is monitoring your spending habits to deduce your payday, sells that information to another third party that buys data from a smart speaker company which overheard you discussing jeans in a public place and automatically sends a message selling the lead to the highest bidding jeans shop who has the product in stock in the waist size which is available from another this party and your virtual assistant puts an event in your calendar telling you to be at home to receive it?
I'm also not opposed to targeting in principle, and in fact I'd love to reach an end state where a company - whether you call it an ad company or otherwise - does 98% of my shopping for me. But I feel like we're in an uncanny valley in which adtechs are hoovering up more data than they'd even need to do that, but with no incentive to push consumers toward products we'll actually be happy with. Facebook is probably better off if your new jeans wear out in a few months, and Amazon can't even be trusted to reliably ship you the products they think they're shipping you, let alone vouch for their quality.
I run a theater troupe. We do a little bit of Facebook boosting. Our customers are spread thin: there are people who want to see Shakespeare, but they don't cluster in one place.
We do use geography in our buying; nobody is going to travel 100 miles to see us. But if I showed it to 1,000 random people even in a 20 mile radius, the odds are that 999 will be completely disinterested, and the 1 remaining person will be doing something else that weekend.
On the other hand if I show it to 1,000 people who have shown at least a little interest in theater, or Shakespeare, or literature -- and who have the money to spend $20 on a theater ticket[1] -- maybe I'll find a few people who would actually come.
I wouldn't show my ads on a bus stop. It would cost a fortune and probably do no good. I spend $30 or so, and I get a few extra bodies out, because my ads are targeted.
This is just an example I happen to be familiar with. Perhaps it's a little too abstruse to be applicable. But it's what I think of whenever I hear people railing about all ads. There are a lot of things for which blanket advertising just wouldn't work.
I'm not even trying to turn a profit or pay salaries. I just want to do some good art that people might enjoy. It's worth getting the word out for it, and not pester every single person on the planet about it.
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[1] I make it as cheap as I can, but theater space costs money.
But when you show it for 1000 well targeted people, what are you paying?
The key to all this is that it’s expensive because they are targeted. If you could show 1M less targeted people for the same money you would show it to the same people.
Sure, 999/1000 people would see an ad they weren’t interested in, but that’s inevitable with less intrusive tracking.
I also wouldn’t mind being shown a very well targeted theater ad if I had volunteered that info. But if that info is gathered without my consent I just shouldn’t see the ad, and that’s regardless of whether 90% of the free content of the web and a huge number of small businesses die in the process.
I'm guessing you've never tried to start an Internet-based business. Being able to target ads is often your lifeblood of your company. Or have you tried and somehow found a different method?
I run a company where about 70% of my audience (in 2018 no less, so likely a lot higher now) use adblockers. To me, any amount of search ad spend or similar is pissing money down the drain.
For reference, our marketing strategy is opt-in email newsletters, organic social media, the occasional sponsorship of events, and natural word-of-mouth (no incentive). And we've been in business for 12+ years.
I absolutely have not. But I don’t think the possibility of buying tracking ads is somehow excused because e.g “you couldn’t start internet businesses otherwise” or even “most of the free content online would disappear”.
Targeting doesn’t have to imply tracking or trading in my info. Facebook knows my age and gender, and some of my interests (from groups etc). That should be plenty. That means a company that sells kitchens can’t target people “interested in kitchens” in the sense they have recently searches for it or visited a site of a kitchen manufacturer that told Facebook. They can target people in country X of a certain age. If that doesn’t sell enough kitchens then just close down me kitchen business or buy a bus stop ad but don’t follow me around the internet.
Note that plenty of advertising like bus stop ads, especially if there's any QR code, is often tracked for conversion (by having a unique reference code embedded in the URL in the QR code).
> You can simply control by making only one single change segregated to a control and treatment geo/group before and after, measure delta.
Because nothing else is going on in the world besides your ad campaign, right?
Like you I find the comments about the ad industry here on HN largely ignorant, but I also think most advertisers and agencies are dumb as rocks, or at best high on their own supply. Like, a piece of analysis I saw recently had some claimed weirdass causation along the lines of, X days is the optimum period between first indication of intent in a product and showing an ad for that product, if the user didn't convert immediately. They had run an experiment like you suggest with varying intervals for audiences. But, the way better correlation was with stimulus payouts. That wasn't in their model, because their model only had the inputs they controlled, before and after, and measured delta.
Everyone is selling snake oil because every advertiser is demanding snake oil. It's so fucked up.
Yeah definitely 'multi-touch attribution' ad tech is a lot of crap a lot of the time especially for big brands stuff. And lol got to love advertisers selling advertising it's like one of the launch websites you see on Show HN sometimes that just have a bunch of #words that have no meaning ;)
it's the flat out 'ads don't work you can't know they worked' stuff which bugs me that is evidently hard to simply explain
As someone who doesn't work in advertising but is insterested in the space, I find your comment interesting but it doesn't help you are not providing much data for your hot take either. You mention Kickstarter, but looking at the list of crowdfunded projects, most of the successful ones were quite a while ago, if anything the most recent ones looks like scammy crypto coins, which would suggest advertising works rather for bad projects, a net negative.
> You mention Kickstarter, but looking at the list of crowdfunded projects, most of the successful ones were quite a while ago
If you want to see Kickstarter projects that failed because of lack of advertisement, I suggest you to go Kickstarter itself[1]... you may have better luck than going on the List of highest-funded crowdfunding projects, which is mostly unrelated to Kickstarter.
You'll see that most of them doesn't require much money to works. The only reason they doesn't get that money is their lack of advertising. Sure they could buy ads, but you'll see that they all are pretty niche too, they can't just get the same advertising as a bus stop, that would be just too absurd and cost them 100x more than their current goal.
You can believe they just doesn't deserve to exist, that's fair, but that's not the point. The point is to show the importance of advertising and how niche project just couldn't reach their audience if you make it harder and harder to reach.
I’m not deep in this space but was thinking something along the lines of your response. If I understand it right, advertisers will lose efficiency here but I’m skeptical that it’ll cost ad networks much because advertisers will still need to reach an audience but will now suddenly be less effective at targeting.
If Facebook ads are so good, why is it that I basically only get shitty, general ads?
I am a single geek with disposable income, why is my feed not filled with ads for cool tech products? I just checked and the only Facebook ad was for cancer awareness.
in my experience, fb ads are a mixed bag. they tend to give you the illusion of control without the commensurate results, converting at a noticeably lower rate. sometimes prices are low enough to compensate for the lower conversion, but not usually.
though it might be changing with the normalization of the fb marketplace, folks aren't usually looking for the things that require advertising inducement on facebook, so there's a significant intent/context mismatch.
I come from the user side and I am extremely pleased to hear this news. Advertising on my device has gotten completely out of hand, I never asked for it and I don't want it.
>Good or bad or neutral, FB's targeting specifically works amazingly well and better than anything else for many buyers. Especially for direct response ads.
I buy political ads for a living. I can (usually) make an immediate positive return on investment running ads for donations or growing an email list. Been doing this for years and has raised millions for our clients.
I have tested and spent money on other platforms none of them work nearly as well for our clients. Search ads work but I believe that's far more of what OP is talking about. If your website is already #1 spot and someone searches to donate they would probably do it already getting there quickly without the ad. The problem is when others or even the same party parent org buys that top spot to get that traffic.
As someone not familiar with the advertising world, it wouldn't strike me as particularly surprising to learn that political advertising on fb works better than other domains. Not only do people post entire novels on their political opinions, but they're constantly exposed to debates and likely are more likely to feel that the ads are important to react to in the moment.
I think it's partly the 'housewives' older demographic the people who spend a lot of time on the platform sharing political stuff they read.
But mostly it's the data and attention on higher quality ad space. We upload donor data and target that + lookalikes.
We can't do that with google anymore, using 3p data on a DSP is both way worse quality data but also wayyyy worse quality ads. twitter never worked for us either.
I will be happy to be corrected if I'm wrong, but I have a hunch that your clients skew conservative. Not based on anything you've said, just based on your apparent success on Facebook as a platform. Would you be willing to confirm or deny that?
No one is arguing that data brokers don't make millions selling ads. The argument verified by the study is that demographic and location segmentation doesn't work when targeting ads.
Demographic and location segmentation is just a shitty way to target and is a prime example of looking for your keys under the lamppost because that's where the light is. That said, your point is unfortunately very relevant because many advertisers still do this.
Actually, I think it is pretty important that they explained that they are an expert in the field, and that you, a not expert, don't really know anything about the space, and thus your opinion is quite literally, not as informed as theirs.
First, I'm talking about better targeting than demo + geo. That's what 'old' media has had for like a century. What works for many D2C and DR advertisers specifically on FB as an example is a combo of: retargeting, customer list upload (using lifetime value e.g. someone who bought many times in past sees more ads), lookalike from those lists.
probably wasted a bunch of time but I went ahead and searched some things if you care to learn more.
There are a ton of sources showing value of this data and ROI. FB just recently posted this study they did with Group M which is like the biggest media buying conglomerate they touch everything. FB's research is pretty good though obviously they wouldn't publish something totally negative.
App Install ads are another huge vertical for direct response which drives a ton of revenue.
I just looked at Zynga 10-k. quick word search they say from FB, google ads "In 2020, 2019 and 2018 we incurred $583.1 million, $377.2 million and $157.7 million, respectively, of these player acquisition costs."
I don't see quickly if they report a direct roi (im sure that would be closely held..) or cost per active user acquired but they do mention a ton how it's revenue driver and list all the risks from iOS privacy changes, and mention risk with more volatile ad market with covid.
and privacy/data rules impact Zynga double because they have to pay FB for instance for new users, but then they sell ads in their games.
They specifically talk a lot about building up their own 1P data (like FB) to up value on their inventory (or evidently own ad network if they are buying/building one). But the risk is iOS will be blocking a lot of this, and in my experience 'open market' ad exchange 3p data is not even close to as good as FB. and see link about build/buy their own ad network
No offense I don't think you know more than they do about their own businesses (and like also questioning mine...).
It bugs me that people who don't seem to work in the industry just assume they know better and that these million dollar revenue companies (sometimes billion $) are just throwing their money away because they are what. Stupid?...
Like Amazon is another great example of the high value of the type of data apple wants to get rid of. Not many companies will pay $20 for a $10 purchase at any scale. Maybe for Dollar Shave Club type business they do since they have recurring revenue projected.
I only found one kind of hit on scholar there aren't any direct response articles easily findable.
I can't read this one but the title says "Personalized ads on Facebook: An effective marketing tool for online marketers"
That study isn't about Facebook targeting, right? It's anecdotal, but FB/Instagram ads are noticeably better for me than anywhere else: they're probably the only ads that have ever resulted in me buying the advertised product.
The blanket statement "Advertisement does not work", which I really hope is a strawman, is trivially wrong. If you start a new B2C business the only way to do inbound sales is advertisement, as by definition no one knows about your company/brand/products/services. Outbound sales is (usually) impossible in B2C for cost reasons. Almost every successful B2C company is evidence that advertisement works. There are some exceptions like banking and utilities, where the LTV of a retail customer is high enough to do outbound sales, but most B2C companies can't afford this.
> If you start a new B2C business the only way to do inbound sales is advertisement, as by definition no one knows about your company/brand/products/services.
This is not strictly true. Inbound sales is one tactic, there is also inbound marketing (aka SEO). The tactic or set of tactics available to a new B2C business largely depends on what trade offs they are willing to make between time and money. A cash-strapped B2C could invest time in SEO, while a decently-funded competitor could invest money in paid search ads. A well-funded rival could do both while also investing in social media ads. The tactics that will prove effective will largely depend on how clear the messaging is relative to more established competitors.
> Outbound sales is (usually) impossible in B2C for cost reasons. Almost every successful B2C company is evidence that advertisement works.
Again, not totally correct because you are using terms in a non-standard way. For instance, you refer to ‘advertisement’ when you really mean ‘marketing’.
Sales and marketing as human activities, have existed from the beginning.
Advertisements, the thing so derided on HN, only became feasible (and widespread) with the help technology. In other words, all ad forms depend on a enabling technology for their existence.
The spread of printing presses eventually made one of the first ad formats—handbills—economically feasible when compared to the traditional practice of shouting to draw attention from patrons to the market square. The telephone made telesales/robocalls economically feasible at a scale that far surpasses doing cold calls on foot (i.e. door-to-door sales). Same with radio, television and ad formats enabled by the modern Web.
Only under the assumption that no alternatives to advertising exist.
Ban advertising, and suddenly this statement is not true anymore: "If you start a new B2C business the only way to do inbound sales is advertisement, as by definition no one knows about your company/brand/products/services."
... for the simple reason that people will look for other means to find products online. For example non-biased search engines, product catalogues, review sites, etc. etc.
And no, listing your product with objective info is not the same as advertising.
> For example non-biased search engines, product catalogues, review sites, etc. etc.
This absolutely makes logical sense and I deeply wish this could work. The problem is that in reality, almost all of these sites are as (if not more) “manipulatable” as the ads you’d like to replace. Search engines have their own optimization games, most review sites these days are pay-to-play (or would rapidly become even more so), etc.
So the fundamental issue is that any non-advertising method of getting the word out rapidly becomes just obfuscated advertising. Given the choice I’d prefer at least the ads be honest about being ads.
And then those other means will become commercially very interesting and you'll have to buy your way into them.
But let's assume advertising doesn't work. Two companies start with the same product and same market at the same time. One advertises, the other doesn't. According to you, the former one should lose, because it wastes money on ads. I'm betting that (on average), the latter will lose, though.
I know, it's a very black-and-white hypothetical situation.
The whole problem we should avoid is that people have to pay for advertising. The best product should win, not the one with the biggest advertising budget. Advertising undermines the principles of the free market.
> Does it not follow then that advertisers are saving billions of dollars?
No — if the targeting is less effective, the advertisers are not getting the same incremental value from the ads.
The ads are cheap, but draw in less total revenue for the company, saving nothing. The bid prices are just lower on untargeted ad slots, adjusting to the lower CPM / lower lift.
Edit: Truly, the best part of HN are the Dunning-Kruger programmers who once read a substack post about advertising, and now believe they have deep hidden insight that a hundred thousand marketing professionals, running marketing campaigns as their job, every day, have not figured out — aha, internet advertising doesn't work!
Given how rampant ad fraud is in programmatic, I wonder how much revenue actually drops for these companies, relative to the decreased ad spend.
Uber’s [1] experience is one example:
“We turned off two thirds of our ad spend – $100m out of annual spend of $150m – and basically saw no change in our number of rider app installs. What we saw is a lot of installs we thought had come through paid channels suddenly came through organic.”
Even without ad fraud, you have things like user wants to install Uber, so searches for Uber in a web search. First link on the page is an ad to install Uber, maybe a couple more ads, then first organic search result is a link to the Uber home page, and maybe the second result is to install it. If the ad weren't there, the user would probably install organically, but since it's there and at the top of the page, it's likely to get clicked and cost money.
How is that fucked up? There's a certain number of slots, and someone is going to fill them. It's like in a grocery store. If Kellogg's doesn't offer Kroger a price they like, they'll just stock General Mills instead... that's just business.
> The only winners are those who didn't advertise at all and only competed only on value.
I keep seeing this sentiment here on HN. What fantasy world do people live in where advertising can't exist and people can still find products/services?! It's existed for centuries, the medium just changes over time.
The digital advertising world is far from perfect, but suggesting it should outright not exist because we have perfect information about goods and services is laughable.
I don’t know if there’s some objective measure of “percentage of sensory perception occupied by ads” but I guess if there were it would be about 90% lower 50 years ago - and still people found things.
It’s not binary ads/no-ads, and not all are equal (e.g. product placement is often subtle and not in-your-face).
It is not unthinkable that 95% of ad budget is wasted. (I am sure the majority of ad budget 50 years ago was too, even if it was just 70%)
Going back even more in time, we had word of mouth and domain experts to ask for advice. That works still now but it's pretty slow for somebody aiming at establishing a large scale business. Advertising money makes time run faster. I can understand why they want ads. On the other side I'm blocking all I can block and very rarely see an ad (not every month) and yet I find what I want to buy.
Your original comment ignores the fact that with perfect ad targeting, there will be way more niche spending in your budget since small companies can create and market tightly targeted products cheaply. You’ll be happier with this outcome.
With totally untargeted advertising, the whole population will get an ad mix that reflects aggregate spending patterns. The niches will disappear. Only through massive upfront investment into a major marketing campaign will consumer spending shift to a new product. Only the blandest, most mainstream, least interesting among us will be happy with this outcome.
Not sure; targeted ads can work pretty well for small niche businesses, getting the same amount of conversions through untargeted ads may not be feasible. I could imagine those getting hit harder by this change than, say, Uber, so probably not quite the same end result.
Definitely. Is that something you can buy right now? I was under the impression there was little to nothing substantial in between untargeted and programmatic these days
We've been slowly refactoring our products to offer more contextual possibilities (building more aggregations by domains, keywords, etc. instead of audiences). No one is interested in buying.
I bet this is a result of customer self-selection. This is all a hunch, but I bet a shit-ton that the advertisers who actually care about good targeting only buy from a small number of leading providers (Facebook, Google, etc.) whose stats are not going to show up on HN.
I am not involved at all in our sales department, and I have no interest in being identified, so I can't offer much more. We do have some very large customers, although we are not always a large account for them. But maybe you misunderstood - all our customers want "classical" audience targeting, to the point they're refusing contextual offerings even as GDPR regulations and technology changes make the audience-based products ever less efficient. If they want anything besides that, it's cohorts, which they don't really understand but see as a way to do targeting magically with storing cookies. If they want anything besides that, it's some BI assistance e.g. uplift models. Contextual is absolute last in line.
Sounds like a principal-agent problem. The people actually buying the ads on behalf of the customer don't care about accuracy. Just train some model, no matter how shitty, and call it "best-effort". Boxes are checked and everyone's happy.
On the other hand, for the publishers this may be a net win. I’ve always argued that very narrow targeting mostly benefits the advertisers, and the publishers are left with a very small audience that yields a lot, and a very large audience that is difficult to sell.
Of course, this may not be the case for Facebook et al, but it’s definitely the case for a lot of apps and websites that live off advertising. Now, without super narrow targeting, they are suddenly able to sell a lot more inventory.
Assuming you can find a buyer for enough of those individual cuts yes. If most of them have no buyers you're better off selling burgers which I think was the point.
Maybe you're right. But if less advertising means that less money is going into businesses, then ads don't make products free, because they increase consumer spending and decrease the efficiency of consumer spending. If what you're saying is true, then advertising has a tangible cost for consumers.
There are three possible theories about how advertising works:
A) Advertising increases consumer spending and makes consumers spend dollars less efficiently based on attributes like branding that are unrelated to quality. In which case, all of this "advertising makes apps free" talk has been really deceptive, because consumers who are viewing ads are spending more money for worse/inflated products to compensate.
In this world, it's worth asking what the costs of advertising are and whether we want it to be the primary way of funding the Internet.
OR
B) Consumer spending/efficiency doesn't change, consumers are smart enough to buy the best product anyway, and the only thing that changes is which companies get that money and have brand recognition. In which case, it starts to become difficult to argue that consumers opting out of ads they don't want to see is particularly harmful. In the world where advertising is just making people aware of new information and helping them make informed purchasing choices, then it's probably a good thing that across the board everyone is being forced to cut down on the pointless noise that amounts to companies trying to scream over each other and increasingly hyper-target people in creepy ways.
If advertising does not increase consumer spending, and if everyone is reducing spending and effectiveness by the same amount on iOS, then this should be good for advertisers -- they'll spend less money on ads, and consumers will still spend the same amount of money themselves. The only reason that wouldn't be the case is if highly targeted ads actually changes consumer behavior and spending habits in meaningful ways -- but if we admit that, we need to admit that the advertising industry is a lot more problematic and a lot less "free" for consumers than it likes to claim.
OR
C) Advertising is a public good, and consumers actually want to know about these products, and ultimately people want targeted ads.
But this is obviously not the case for the majority of advertising. If it was the case, than iOS's changes wouldn't be a big deal. If consumers want targeted ads, they have the option to keep allowing them in iOS. The whole reason we're in this situation is because consumers have overwhelmingly demonstrated that they do not want targeted ads.
So at best, the advertising industry can position itself as a kind of metaphorical "vegetable", claiming that everyone hates them but ultimately the world would be better if more things were commercialized. But it's just not a realistic theory, the data is pretty clear that consumers don't like ads and it's very hard to argue that unrestrained commercialism and forced targeting is good for society. There are more efficient ways we could be doing this if our goal was really just to make it easier for people to compare products and learn about new solutions to their problems.
I agree with you, I hate when news report as "cost", a loss of revenue they never going to get is not a "cost". They just need to adjust to the market.
This will bring only good things to the ecosystem. Your app can’t support itself without tracking, and your users don’t want to pay? Maybe your app doesn’t provide as much value as you think. Advertising is a race to the bottom, so kudos to Apple for raising the bar for everybody.
It's very convenient to conclude "bad things happen to you? maybe you're a shitty person", but that's not how reality works.
Users may not want to pay for myriad of reasons, like unfair competition, or competition of lower quality where the user can't clearly determine the quality they receive, preconditioning and other existing biases, and so on.
How do you think our media found themselves in a continued decline over the last few decades? They were paid, but they had to focus on online presence and ads as low-quality blogs and fake news replaced them. People don't want to pay for quality journalism, because they can't tell the difference. This doesn't mean quality journalism doesn't provide value.
Furthermore, ads by themselves are not a bad service in our world. It's basically a business saying "hey I'm here, I have this to offer, if you want it". Is that such a bad concept? Of course there are scams, and so on. But that's not INHERENT to ads right? It's one thing to fight for higher quality ads, another to hate ads entirely.
I think that mostly ads are bad, but sometimes they’re fine. There are plenty of other cases of them being a negative for society, and, to me, a few where they’re good
exactly. duckduckgo has ads that don't track you. its okay. i see them whenever i search and sometimes maybe click on them to see what exactly is going on. Thing is they don't track and I am okay with it.
>"hey I'm here, I have this to offer, if you want it"
This is a lie to children. It's like saying the decision to drop nuclear bombs in WWII was made to bring Japan to surrender and not a show of force to Russia. It's simply a false dichotomy.
Ads exist to maximize profit and its done by pushing individual rights back. Nobody voted to give up privacy to the government or private sector.
The answer to your burning question is simple: people don't give a shit about your product or your ad. Sheep are shaped by what they see. You're paying for a stake in the perverse attention economy.
Another comment here suggested that non-free social media would see rich people getting wider distribution.
And I think that's exactly what would happen.
Freemium dating sites let you use the most basic features for free, but to actually reach more than a few potential dates, you have to pay.
Freemium social media might also do the same. For free, maybe you get sent to just a few of your closest friends. For money, you can be sent to all your friends and random strangers.
And perhaps you have access to flashier messages and better icons. Perhaps meme/picture posting is limited for free.
It's easy to think that the users would just go elsewhere, but if Facebook can't afford to operate without tricks like that, smaller sites have even less chance.
And once that door is opened, it quickly gets wider and wider. Look at DLC and IAP in games now. It used to be non-existent. And then "horse armor" appeared and sold like hotcakes, despite all the protests. From there, we ended up with gacha games that absolutely abuse people with certain mental instabilities, often when they have money to burn, but often even when they don't.
As much as I hate ads, I'd hate to see social media get worse.
Stop conflating someone paying for digital goods as being a “rich person”.
If you’re serious about dating, you could afford to spend $10 a month. Most people can make $10 in less than an hour of work. You could probably afford $40 dollars a month easily. Don’t worry, your actual dates will probably cost you more than that and often you’ll get nothing in return...
People have been sucking on the teet of free social media for so long that the thought of even paying a couple dollars for something makes them feel they are buying a luxury good, when you are literally just giving up some pocket change.
Meanwhile, they buy $5 lattes and $10 burgers a few times a week and pay god knows how much for a myriad of streaming services, without a second thought.
> if Facebook can't afford to operate without tricks like that, smaller sites have even less chance.
It could be the opposite.
The ambitions of social media operators need to be downsized. One of the most salient data points is that WhatsApp served a half billion users with 50 employees when they were acquired by Facebook. And reportedly they were profitable at that point by charging $1 per user per year after the first year. By 2018 Signal had already made a substantial entry into the messaging market with [only 2.3 FTE engineers on average](https://signal.org/blog/signal-foundation/) (I'm not sure on the current headcount but I'm guessing it's still on the order of magnitude of the WhatsApp numbers), and it is self-sustaining based largely on a $50m endowment provided by one individual (Brian Acton, not ironically the co-founder of WhatsApp).
It's totally conceivable that for the type of social media that people prefer (no algorithm in the timeline, no tracking, etc.) a very small organization could provide it.
Could the Signal foundation develop a competitor to Twitter or Facebook, or could the social features and groups in apps like Signal or Telegram (also a relatively small team) continue to chip away at the jobs that people hire Facebook for? I don't see a strong argument against this.
Andrew Carnegie decided to put libraries in cities all across America because he thought he could make a major contribution to the needs of the day through improving access to literacy and self-education to those who otherwise couldn't afford it. From what I can tell [Brian Acton](https://www.forbesindia.com/article/special/i-am-the-david-g...) is doing the same by ensuring that private communication is free and available to even the least amongst us. Why would we assume that we'll see less and not more of this sort of thing?
> Acton: In some ways, I'm the David going against the Goliath that I created. I think that I stand on my principles the most, having been in the industry and seeing how the industry has developed around advertising and behaviour-tracking and user-tracking, I’m here to stand on my principles and present alternatives. I’m not going to just say the world should be a different place. I’m actually going to try and build the world a better place and that’s why I wake up every morning. That’s why I go to work every morning and that’s why I don't sit on a beach and sip cocktails.
There’s a sense in which free ad-supported apps are “redistributive”. Whether you’re rich or poor, Facebook costs the same and the experience and features you have access to are identical. Effectively, the rich users are subsidizing the app for the poor users (the rich users’ eyeballs being worth much more). I personally view that as a strong upside compared to paid models.
I’m not sure where I’m going with this. What does paid social media look like? Perhaps more like traditional media: only deep pockets will have access to “virality” and wide distribution. I could certainly see a market for that with the Instagram crowd.
> the rich users are subsidizing the app for the poor users
That would only hold if the majority of paid ad placements on a social media site targeted rich people. As is evident by the ads that appear surrounding elections, the ads targeting average people to dump their savings into crypto and all of the gambling (might as well be gambling...) gaming ads that doesn't seem like a safe assumption to make although I have no data to support either assumption.
It is well established that the ARPU from richer demographics (income levels, countries etc) is much higher than that from poorer ones. The redistributive effect is real, though perhaps there may be other ways (e.g. reparations) that have less harmful side effects.
Search ads you don’t need user targeting. You target on the search term and most likely it will be relevant for the user. Only standard display ads need targeting to be able to show relevant ads to the user.
Content based ads still seem valuable. If I am on Don’s how to fix something pages, then add for something fixing tools seem possible to sell without involving my data
There's always the context of the page on which the ad will appear. If I search for "teach your kid how to read", the search engine can display ads based on the query and the destination page seems like it should show the exact same types of ads.
I totally agree with you. I wouldn't necessarily say that rich people subsidize poor ones, other one we wouldn't see Facebook racing for Brazil and Google racing for India. But yes, one major property of ads is how it adapts to the user's revenue.
I believe that anyone who wants to take on ads, need to understand this first. And to accomplish an ad-free realk, one needs to somehow have people pay differently based on their incomes. And I can't see any way without tracking on how to do that.
One company who managed to do that, to some extent, is Netflix. Their price range from 3$/month (lowest tier in India) to 20$/month (highest tier in France), for pretty much the same service. It's still only one order of magnitude of adaptation. While ads scale from pretty much 0 (poor people who can "mis"spend only 5$/month), to I think maybe 100$ for some clicks.
Basically, from my point of view, ads are a way to raise money based on what people can give, while removing the free-rider problem that doing it directly would raise. Can we make a useful crypto money that fixes this? (you're allowed to a big computation budget, since ads have a very expensive global budget)
This is something I thought about too. The dilemma for Facebook and Twitter to offer paid service is interesting
Wealthy eyeballs worth more (a lot). Wealthy people most likely to pay to not see ads. A super high price to justify not showing ads to wealthy people will make the whole offering moot.
I don't have the numbers but if it's anything like the rest of the economy, top 10% is probably spending something like 60% of total spent. So removing the top 10% from the targetable population for ads can be a huge hit to ad revenues.
In the past, we had paid social media (kind of) with services like CompuServe, AOL, etc.
People tended to self-segment by demographics. Also, there was more than one network to choose from, since things were segmented by which internet connection you had. (This was also the heyday of BBS’s and Usenet, which probably wasn’t a coincidence.)
Maybe having N vertically integrated communities with different norms is better than what facebook, twitter, etc built via their horizontally-integrated services.
Most (all?) prior mediums were initially pay to play. Print, radio, telegraph, TV, cable, fax, ATMs.
Then there's some kind of phase change. Like maybe when costs reduce enough for Metcalfe's Law to kick-in.
[I don't quite recall what some other theorists have said. Shirky's observations about cost of coordination. McLuhan's distinctions between passive and active engagement (aka push vs pull).]
Apple's privacy power play may be the first time someone manages to put the toothpaste back into the tube, for an entire medium and by extension ecosystem.
Some mediums, like rail and phones, manage to remain pay to play. Maybe there's something to be learned by compare and contrast.
> Whether you’re rich or poor, Facebook costs the same and the experience and features you have access to are identical.
Or you can say, the amount of work that's extracted from the user is the same. Because the major "service" of social media isn't the webapp that has a feed timeline, or a fancy UI, or availability (which can be easily copied by competitors). It's the network effect that comes from user's participation. It's very possible there's a net profit for the majority of users (either from clicking the ads, or from simply using the social media), so the "subsidized" users' loss is not a primary concern here.
It's been years since there was organic viral videos... that ship sailed - we're at the point of pay for play, sex or extremely high risk/danger/endangerment content for eyeballs..
These are not the only alternatives. Messaging apps allow people to stay in touch with each other without any of the timeline corporate surveillance society nonsense.
For uninteresting reasons, I had to wipe settings on my iPhone this weekend, which meant re-approving everything, including the do not track setting mentioned here. When 14.5 came out, I updated faster than apps like Instagram could, so I missed their "please approve" screens that I got to see now. It's not strange to see an app explain why it is about to prompt for permission to do something, but posing for better personalization in the ads I'm going to see anyway really didn't land with me. I fully admit that I was never going to approve this setting, but I still find it surprising that they think I would be happier with more specific ads. Does that work for some folks? I guess I can understand that if I have to see ads at all, may as well make them personalized, but I'd still rather not see ads, to the point of blocking them when possible.
> I guess I can understand that if I have to see ads at all, may as well make them personalized
I think this is the greatest lie the ad industry has foisted on us, and unfortunately I see a lot of people fall for it.
We hear the word "personalized" and we think "relevant" or "interesting". That if you _have_ to see an ad, at least let it be one that tickles your fancy.
Yet interesting and relevant is _not_ what ad tech is optimizing for. Rather, ads are optimized for _conversion_; the likelihood that a user will be converted into a "sale" (where "sale" can range from simply clicking the ad, to buying a product, to subscribing to a service, etc. Whatever is most important to the ad buyer and measurable.)
Optimizing for conversion is _not_ the same as optimizing for being relevant or interesting. Instead these ads are being optimized to exploit whatever weaknesses you, the targeted user, may have. How can they _trick_ you into converting.
It's the same problem we see with social media. Social media companies optimize for engagement, which means they get filled with the baser human emotions in ways that get people addicted, regardless of its cost to the user or society as a whole. Ad tech is doing the same thing, and in many ways "engagement" is synonymous with "conversion". Ad buyers are paying ad markets to do absolutely whatever it takes to engage a user in the ad buyer's desired activity. Come hell or high water, those ad markets will convert you and they will consume as much data and processing power as necessary to find a way to do that.
All this to say that ad tracking is not about making ads more interesting to a user, more palatable, like many seem to believe. It's about using _your_ personal data to _manipulate_ you.
Ad tracking is finding ways to tailor a drug to the specific user to maximize the seller's profit.
I’d much rather have unpersonalized ads, because then I won’t be tempted to buy yet more stuff I don’t need. I might get suckered into picking up some new widget that I’ll play with once and then forget about. There’s zero chance I’d get talked into buying, say, a box of tampons.
If you substitute “predatory” for “personalized” whenever the subject comes up, it better represents my thoughts.
I've never found a benefit in "Personalized ads" because they have never been something that I am interested in, it seems to really mean "we can charge the brands more for this ad". There is a ton of stuff I would willingly pay for but it never seems to be what people want to advertise to me
This was always true for me until recently the Instagram ads (I use Instagram to see what my kids and their friends are up to). Those ads are all very much in the sweet spot of my weaknesses. Haven’t bought from them, but I still watch more than halfway in fascination before I realize consciously what has happened.
I opt into personalization and am constantly getting ads for tampons (not a woman), essential oils (yuck), iced tea (I only drink water), chinese clothing (lol), and then sporadically...
100k+ metal 3d printers and other industrial engineering equipment. I am a disabled, unemployed student.
I also have serious doubts that "personalized" ads even really exist. It's like they're trying to show me the least applicable products to my life.
All else being the same, I would prefer to see personalized ads over not. It's not worth the incursion of privacy to me, but that said, I'd prefer to see ads for, say, clothes I might wear rather than perfume or prescription medicine.
No, not really. My only point was that in a vacuum, if I have to see ads, I would prefer to see ads that are relevant to me over seeing ads that are irrelevant to me. I do NOT think that this justifies the invasion of privacy, and I block trackers (and ads in general) whenever possible.
I would prefer more specific ads. Maybe they will finally show something worthwhile?
I mean I am not holding my breath, despite all their tracking facebook can't show me relevant ads and google kept showing me ads for things I was interested in (I have since changed to DDG).
To folks that are complaining of being manipulated, I always felt that if you can be coerced into impulse-buying something voluntarily, and then regretting the purchase, there is probably not anyone to blame but yourself. Putting aside the existence of ads for a minute (I hate ads too), why do you feel that voluntarily purchasing something based on an ad is “manipulation”? If you resent such purchase afterwards, seems to imply you made a bad decision (rather than anyone manipulated you).
Many humans struggle to stay on the path of activity that their best rationality and knowledge of a fulfilling life recommends. If you ever stay up too late, drink too much, struggle with a bad relationship or smoking or you know too much Free Flow, you have to chance to be aware of some of the weaknesses in our nervous systems. Perhaps you are so far away from the human norms that you don’t find anything tempting that is not also beneficial, but is it quite common I promise you.
Of course it's manipulation. Ads are made in order to modify your behavior in the benefit of the brand. That's literally the definition of manipulation: to control or play upon by artful […] means especially to one's own advantage; controlling someone […] to your own advantage […].
> why do you feel that voluntarily purchasing something based on an ad is “manipulation”?
There's nothing in the definition of manipulation that says it has to be involuntary.
There are literally psychologists working to use our brain’s design to their benefit. It’s not entirely fair to criticize someone for being manipulated by highly trained experts who labor to manipulate them.
As someone who was in the past a salesperson, I don't see how data-hungry digital advertisement is fundamentally different from old and tried sales methods. Salespeople would kill to know as much as possible about their prospects including their personal life, so that they can appeal to basic human emotions. I mean, this is literally how sales are made. The difference is that in online ads this part of the process is automated with algorithms, which apparently rubs some people the wrong way.
If you are repulsed by sales as an activity, I can see how you'd arrive at the "manipulation" point of view. However, I would much prefer this type of "manipulation" to being hard sold in a car dealership, for example, or having to endure cold calls from strangers. Undesired synchronous sales interactions are much more emotionally draining than seeing computer-generated ads online, IMHO.
It’s interesting because I believe everyone would choose to see personalized ads if asked. But the wording Apple employs is “the app is asking to _track_ you”, which is negative wording and thus has no chance of being accepted. They pretty much turned off the feature but made it look like the user still had a choice.
Er but that’s the truth, no? And if the truth is damning for Facebook and Instagram and Google, well that’s what those companies chose as their business model
It's interesting you believe that, because every pc or laptop I helped anyone who asked me for advice buy had its native microsoft ad targeting turned off by the respective buyer during setup. People understand that "personalized ads" means "allow us to stalk your every move to try and coerce you into buying garbage you don't need". This is for m$ windows 10, so the wording is as abusive and deceptive as possible, not as plain as apples.
Follow the money - Apple's "privacy" initiative is just about Apple ensuring that every dollar spent in an iOS device sends 30 cents to Apple. That isn't the case with ads not served by Apple. So Apple is making themselves the only viable way to serve ads on iOS (https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT205223) and encouraging in-app purchases for everything else - problem solved.
Also, isn't it convenient that Apple is only concerned about their customer's privacy for business conducted outside of China and Russia?
As it should and I don’t care. Advertisers and data brokers get no sympathy from me. An Apple ad venue allows for some more uniform controls as well, such as tracking revokable consent of a user’s data, even if you found a way to pay the user for their data at some point.
I agree Apple has the right to run the lawful aspects of their business as they see fit but I'm a little concerned about those that think Apple has their back with this privacy scam.
This change will really hurt them. The biggest effect is on paid app installs since you no longer have access to the advertiser ID which makes it extremely difficult to measure performance and tracking app usage on the device. I’ll take a bet that some of this gets rolled back when it hurts Apple’s App Store revenue.
Why didn’t they just turn off the feature though? The wording they use “tracking” is so negative no user will ever reply yes to it. Maybe to educate users about privacy?
And yet when Apple describes how they track where you are, what apps you use, and what news you read for their own advertising platform, they don't use that word [1]
I know nothing about how apples advertising works so sorry if this is a silly question:
The screenshot in the link posted explicitly states apple does not track (maybe how they justify not using the word) you for their advertising network, so what are they doing instead?
It will decimate the ecosystem and have no impact on users.
Meanwhile a world of premium-priced alternatives or subscriptions remains out of reach because of Apple's 30% commission and $0.99 minimum charge, and lack of support for upgrade pricing (although Apple will happily launch competitor apps and take 100% of the proceeds, as well as giving itself premium search positioning).
Some of the biggest companies (eg. Facebook) might just buy carrier user data directly, actually worsening privacy.
Well, on the other hand, we have an existence proof that there are plenty of subscription based offerings in the App Store like Office 365, Adobe’s suite and smaller players who force you to get a subscription outside of the App Store where Apple doesn’t get a cut.
While I dislike this attitude from non-programmers, I despise it from my peers and it seems to be universal across the spectrum except, maybe, older programmers (> 50) who seem to have a better sense of the value they're getting.
Peer: "You paid $30?!?! For an app?!?!" (I think it was OmniFocus)
Me: "Umm, yeah, because it's good and I use it literally every day across all my devices" (At the time I'd just ditched my Windows gaming PC, and my Linux instances were all VPSes or similar)
Peer: "But it's an app!" (like shouting louder explains something)
Me: "Right, which is what we make. You should understand, more than most, the actual work that goes into something like this."
Peer: Shaking head "But it's an app..." wanders off confused
I suspect people know what they're getting out of that $4 cup of coffee. With a $1 app, it might end up being a waste of money.
Does the Apple Store have refunds? If a user could refund an app within 48 hours of purchase (no questions asked), might that increase sales? (An abrupt change in policy might negatively impact premium "one time use" apps though...)
I've bought cups of coffee that were bad enough to throw away for $4. Not often, but it's happened. It doesn't stop me from buying coffees from new cafes.
I reckon trying to solve this as though it's rationally thought-out is wrongheaded. I didn't consider and decide that I didn't like paying for apps, I just got used to not paying for apps. And indeed, once I got used to paying for apps again,* I stopped worrying about whether the $1 app would actually do what I wanted.
* Since we're sort of discussing what would prompt people to spend money, for me it was games. Free-to-play games are so reliably so annoying that I eventually swore off downloading them.
And many cups of coffee either taste bad or are bad for health, yet those customers still pay for those options and throw the cup away afterward. It's worth noting those cups of coffee typically cost more than $1.
Coffee has a marginal and fixed cost. Digital products like apps only have fixed costs and marginal costs for manufacturing and distribution is zero or near zero.
This allows lots of new methods that aren’t possible for physical products.
For me, I buy software when it has a good value (I like Omni products) but the argument that people should buy apps because they buy coffee is disingenuous and not useful without more info.
I certainly wouldn’t buy coffee for 3-4 if it didn’t require a building and barista and shipping coffee across the world and roasting beans, etc. If coffee could magically appear in my hand for almost $0, then I certainly wouldn’t pay so much.
Of course, there are still costs like design for digital goods, but they are very different.
At my previous office one of the guys brought in a $300 espresso machine that (most of us) chipped in to pay for, we had an "espresso club" with $2/month dues for 15 people other than that one time we asked everyone to chip in an extra $20 to cover the new machine (replaced the much cheaper Mr. Coffee machine that he donated to us at no cost). We made much better drinks than you'd find at Starbucks for a fraction of the cost.
Over 4 years we asked people to pay, about, $120 total (regular dues, the better machine, and once to replace some broken cups or mugs), that's approaching $0 to get a coffee to appear in your hand (and for most of the people it was "magic" as they didn't operate the espresso machines, they showed up and a coffee was handed to them).
Maybe, but this will be very, very, very hard. I'd love to be able to make a paid-front app rather than freemium, but the current habits make that impossible unless you are an established brand or have a huge marketing budget.
Hence my point about learning to pay. Its a mindset change for both parties involved. If your app is something people don't want to pay for, then maybe its not worth it. If you aren't willing to pay for an app you use a lot, dont expect it for free or look for other alternatives.
I wonder if that will ever happen. IMO even if all ads went away, the freemium model where a couple of paying users bear the burden of supporting the developer wins in the end, due to the “natural” marketing of having lots of users. Now, this of course won’t work for niche programs.
If someone was giving out free coffee on demand on your phone, trust me, after a certain amount of time, you'd see a lot fewer cafes. It's a very toxic orange site take, this "just pay for it" perspective.
I strongly suspect that $3-4 for coffee is dictated by the unwillingness of the American public to have different prices for take away, counter or sit at a table with a computer for two hours. I live in Italy, and an espresso at the counter is on average 1 euro, go to a nice place sit down and have a waiter serve you and it can easily double in price, if you're sitting in a famous square in Venice it can go up to 5, but in any case you won't be able to order just one coffee and sit for two hours.
So my guess is that every Starbucks customer is just paying for rent, whether they use the table or not. (also possibly the fact that Starbucks can't overcharge you for alcohol is a factor).
killing advertising also means discovery is going to be a huge problem for developers. it doesn't matter how many people are willing to pay for your app if there's no effective way to make them aware of it
By definition sharing information about your product to convince people to buy it is an ad. Doesn't matter where you put it or how it reached the user. I'd love to hear your way of sharing information that doesn't match this definition.
"An advertisement (often shortened to advert or ad) is the promotion of a product, brand or service to a viewership in order to attract interest, engagement and sales."
The vast majority of people on the planet cannot afford $4 for a cup of coffee, though Apple tends to not care about most people as much as its rivals (so it doesn't market its phones to most people).
Your cafe charging $3-4 for coffee doesn't have to pay 30% to Apple.
They'd have to charge $4.28 - $5.71 to make the same as before - actually more, since demand would also be reduced due to the higher price.
Its likely that the cafe business would be basically completely uneconomic... we cannot anticipate the kind of ecosystem we could have if the platforms charged based on the service that they provide (which would be a few % points, with credit card fees as the main cost) instead of extracting monopoly rents.
Your cafe charging $3-4 for coffee doesn't have to pay 30% to Apple.
No, but they do have to pay their landlord. In all likelihood, they pay even more than 30% to their landlord, especially when sales slow down. I can't tell you how many restaurants and cafes have closed during the pandemic.
Businesses buy and rent land on an open market, with pricing based on supply and demand, and the opportunity to move if they feel they are not getting a good deal.
No such ability exists on iOS.
Software developers have to pay rent too. And salaries, and for hardware, and finally for a giant 30% commission to Apple..
You are operating on the basis that a 30% commission from a platform owner is an established fact of the Universe, whereas I am suggesting it is merely an artificial cost tacked on to extract exorbitant rents and for no purpose other than to enrich an owner who faces zero competition.
I think one way to look at Apple's iOS App Store is like a mall. Storefront property in a mall must be leased from the mall, it's not available on the open market. Shop owners pay a lot for access to the large amount of foot traffic the mall provides.
Developers are free to take their business elsewhere, such as to Android or PCs, or even to some open source phones. Apple just happens to own the "mall" with the lion's share of the foot traffic and the wealthiest customers.
Former director of a coffee shop here. If we could limit our rent, business rates, etc. etc. to 30% (or indeed 15% as per the new small business rate) we’d have been very happy.
Meanwhile, Google's and Facebook's market caps are near all time highs. The invisible hand dictates that the impact may very well be insignificant for those two.
This is awesome news. We need the web to not be reliant on ads and also build the expectation amongst users that they need to pay for articles/services etc. just like how they would in the real world. This is the first step in doing both
They'll charge a fee and offer paid placement to brands. The ads will not be obvious, will just show up as prioritized over other listings. Maybe even routes will adjust accordingly to put you closer to advertisers. And you'll pay for the honor.
OpenStreetMaps doesn’t have paywalls. In sone things it is worse, in my day to day use it is better, the only thing I use gmaps/Waze/Amaps is for live traffic.
HN has neither paywalls nor ads.
Fastmail has a paywall compared to gmail - and I gladly pay it. There’s no ad supported option ttbomk.
The only two that don’t have a real alternative are the metcalfed Twitter and FB (and the live traffic feature in maps)
> Can't wait for [...] gmail [...] to have paywalls
With my mail service, I pay 1€ per month for my mailbox (on a pre-paid model where I deposit 20€ at a time into my account and get reminded when the balance runs low). That's a price that I gladly pay for the benefit of knowing that I'm actually the customer.
New change has been a huge pain for developers. Apple makes these new privacy announcements and takes all the credit, but pushes work to iOS devs to actually implement.
I’m the opposite. I hate ads that have nothing to do with me. I value my time and I prefer that if I’m going to see an ad, then that ad be something I would find interesting.
* Will they simply disappear from iOS?
* Will new subscription options appear?
* Will they remain free but require users to enter a 20 question demographic survey to continue?
Worth noting that unless you’re personally selling advertising (which only a few people can do), ads are subject to a fee as well, by the broker/network.
You don’t collect 100% of the money paid by the advertiser.
What you avoid with ads on iOS is paying twice: Once to the broker, and again to Apple.
Sounds fine to me. The problem with apps is not quantity but quality. If we had ten percent as many and they were twice as good, I would be happy. Even if they were basically the same but didn’t constantly put click here to go to the App Store screens, I would be happy.
I am really puzzled by the negative sentiment around adtech on Hacker News, especially since I would guess that a lot of people here have a salary that depends directly or indirectly on advertising.
"Tracking" gets a lot of bad press, so much so that I sometimes wonder if this is not organized by the tech giants (Apple, Google, Facebook) who have access to their own first party and who thus have much less to lose when cross site tracking disappears.
Adtech providers only have access to products you buy/see, for a limited time and without any personal data, meanwhile Google and Facebook know everything about you, your friends, your center of interests the places you go to, along with your name but somehow everyone seems hell-bent on abolishing 3rd-party cookies.
Apple's own apps are not subject to this change, and as noted by other commenters this will probably shift budgets to subscription of which Apple takes its cut.
All this will further the supremacy of walled-gardens and big tech, at the expense of smaller independent players.
I'll be honest, there is a creepy feeling when being tracked cross-site, and adtech providers have collectively failed at providing explanations, and a transparent account of how this works and why this is useful. They have also relied on fingerprinting, which has hurt the credibility of the field.
The issue is that the replacement that are currently in the works (https://github.com/WICG/floc and https://github.com/WICG/turtledove/blob/main/FLEDGE.md) are extremely complex, will still dramatically impact adtech performance and only improve privacy for a very contrived definition of the concept which incidentally benefits once again big tech vendors...
As to the effectiveness of advertising, removing tracking will have a huge impact. And this affects all players in the value chain, not only adtech providers but also publishers and more importantly advertisers which will see their return on ad spent severely impacted. There is a real of loss "social welfare" (I mean in a game-theoretic sense, but also for real if you believe in capitalism) if tracking is disabled.
The freakonomics article gets cited a lot but the industry as a whole is moving forward with a greater emphasis on proving incremental sales.
Advanced clients (who can spend billions per year) have real statisticians doing permanent randomized control trials proving that every dollar spent is providing incremental sales.
I work for an adtech company and we have automatic RCTs for every single client, and guess what, advertising works for most clients. This is on top of fact that we are measuring the effectiveness of dollars spent on us, in addition to the dollars spent on competitors/other channels on which we have no control of course.
The fact that Uber could see no impact when going from 150m to 50m is a testament to the incompetency of their CMO, which could not be bothered to actually measure and pilot the campaigns correctly, not the effectiveness of adtech as a whole.
Thoughts are my own not my employer's.
Well said. What if Apple's popup said "personalization" instead of "tracking"? Advertising works well for most of us, most of the time. Ironically, Apple is spending significant sums on advertising that touts how they are crippling advertising to protect your privacy.
Does it not follow then that advertisers are saving billions of dollars?
Now, admittedly, the advertisers aren't going to be getting now what they used to get, but this Freakonomics Podcast episode, "Does Advertising Actually Work? (Part 2: Digital) (Ep. 441)" https://freakonomics.com/podcast/advertising-part-2/ makes me wonder how much it'll really impact the people who pay for advertising.