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0 pointsalkonaut4y ago0 comments

> Basically your point is that most content on the internet should go away because you don’t like ads.

No. I'm conpletely fine with ads. This isn't about ads vs.no ads. This is about "bad" ads. The wholeseale trading in people's information. It's a transaction where the price (Being their PII sold somewhere) isn't visible to the buyer.

The reason we ended up where we are now where a site MUST use horrible adtech, is this: Because there exists ways of displaying pinpoint targeted tracking ads through unscrupulous adtech companies then that's what sets the baseline revenue for ads. Show ads that are 1/10th as efficient? You'll get just 1/10th the revenue. It's what a website has to do.

So if I'm a site that wants to show "ethical" ads, I can't. Because the ad market is such that ethical ads don't make money. If, however, bad ads don't exist - then ethical advertising could be able to make more money again. The endgame of all this isn't forcing all sites to either die or become paid services. To me the important outcome is to level the playing field between those that display (or want to display) "better" ads.

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danaris4y ago

And, to go a step further:

At least according to what I have read, before "bad" ads existed, the overall advertising budget of the corporate sector was roughly the same as it is now. This means that ad-supported business models were just as viable without all this crap.

The problem is that the tracking and whatnot is perceived to increase value, so the ad spending shifted to prefer the more invasive and "targeted" types of ads. But if we outlawed invasive, targeted ads and the tracking required to generate them...yes, there would be a certain amount of redistribution of ad spend, but overall, it doesn't seem like it would actually dry up and blow away.

So there's no good reason to think that getting rid of the really bad stuff would reduce the overall amount of ad-supported content out there.

alkonautOP4y ago

If the budgets stay the same then some content might go where the ad money is. For example, the internet strangled the free metro newspaper business because having an ad-supported print media in the 2000's was difficult. If internet ads became dumber, then print ads don't look so dumb. And some money might flow back into things like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metro_(Swedish_newspaper) So if anything, the ad-supported content might shift to other places such as print.

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