European Union Justice Commissioner Didier Reynders recently told German newspaper 'Welt am Sonntag' that the European Commission is aware of how annoying cookie consent banners have become...
TV never targeted commercials directly at “Dave Smith, likes fishing and interracial porn, lives in Chesterfield, searched for new cameras recently”, but they still operated.
Sure, but also beside the point? I’m talking about the effects of changing an underlying mechanism of a live system, not of comparing two different systems that developed over time.
Here are my guesses: sites that have enough unique visitor count and data to work directly with advertisers may not fall. Small sites that rely on Adsense networks for revenue would no longer have revenue. A small (though non-zero) number of people/groups would continue on and seek alternative funding. Without ad networks, many tech companies fall.
I’m not saying that I’m against any of this, either. In my view, there’s a large chance that nothing of real value (to a society) would be lost. Maybe we can bring web rings back.
Ad networks could still work, they just wouldn’t have the targeting data to work with or the usage data they can sell as an entirely unrelated business model. They were profitable before the current big data push, there’s no reason they couldn’t continue to be profitable without that big data again
There’s no reason they can’t just use the page you’re on and a very rough “location from IP address” (e.g. just the country, and sometimes not even that), to give the advertisers something to aim at. If you’re on a camera website, you’d see camera shops in the UK, etc, rather than a load of weird buttplug shaped things from Temu.
Free sites already operating out of the goodwill of some random admin and making single-digit ad revenue anyway <– you are here
Porn aggregators
SEO filler
SEO filler
Wikipedia
End of list
The only ones whose business model would truly be threatened and whose loss would be problematic are newspapers.
OTOH newspapers accidentally cornering themselves in a “freemium” business model has fucked journalism over so bad I’m not sure how it could even be worse.
Free websites like the ones we are on barely exist anymore anyway, because how the fuck do you “compete” in the “free marketplace of search indexing” when some russian troll is burying you to page 5 of google’s search results and you can’t reach anyone via facebook or twitter without paying thousands?
Craigslist struck the first blow against newspapers by taking away classified ad revenue. The death blow came when Silicon Valley taught people that “information wants to be free,” which meant that no one wanted to pay for local news anymore. That led most local newspapers to collapse, while the few that managed to survive --apart from a handful of “legacy” papers-- mostly did so at the cost of turning into click-bait sites or outrage machines.
We have to bring back the idea that people should be happy to pay for local news.
They can just run ads without all the tracking bullshit and data collection like they do on every other medium with free ad supported content like radio and television. Somehow I can watch TV and listen to the radio for free and they manage to stay running without monitoring my every move.
Might be less profitable for them but so be it. Just because tracking helps their business doesn’t mean it is justified.
I really wish we had a simulated world sandbox to try these ideas out in. I suspect this might lead to the end of most free websites.
TV never targeted commercials directly at “Dave Smith, likes fishing and interracial porn, lives in Chesterfield, searched for new cameras recently”, but they still operated.
Sure, but also beside the point? I’m talking about the effects of changing an underlying mechanism of a live system, not of comparing two different systems that developed over time.
Here are my guesses: sites that have enough unique visitor count and data to work directly with advertisers may not fall. Small sites that rely on Adsense networks for revenue would no longer have revenue. A small (though non-zero) number of people/groups would continue on and seek alternative funding. Without ad networks, many tech companies fall.
I’m not saying that I’m against any of this, either. In my view, there’s a large chance that nothing of real value (to a society) would be lost. Maybe we can bring web rings back.
Ad networks could still work, they just wouldn’t have the targeting data to work with or the usage data they can sell as an entirely unrelated business model. They were profitable before the current big data push, there’s no reason they couldn’t continue to be profitable without that big data again
There’s no reason they can’t just use the page you’re on and a very rough “location from IP address” (e.g. just the country, and sometimes not even that), to give the advertisers something to aim at. If you’re on a camera website, you’d see camera shops in the UK, etc, rather than a load of weird buttplug shaped things from Temu.
Did you entirely miss Nielsen and the data they gave to advertisers?
Could we go back to that? Paying people to install spyware box behind their router?
Which free websites? The modern web is just:
The only ones whose business model would truly be threatened and whose loss would be problematic are newspapers.
OTOH newspapers accidentally cornering themselves in a “freemium” business model has fucked journalism over so bad I’m not sure how it could even be worse.
Free websites like the ones we are on barely exist anymore anyway, because how the fuck do you “compete” in the “free marketplace of search indexing” when some russian troll is burying you to page 5 of google’s search results and you can’t reach anyone via facebook or twitter without paying thousands?
“Free sites already operating out of the goodwill of some random admin” are where the good shit is.
Craigslist struck the first blow against newspapers by taking away classified ad revenue. The death blow came when Silicon Valley taught people that “information wants to be free,” which meant that no one wanted to pay for local news anymore. That led most local newspapers to collapse, while the few that managed to survive --apart from a handful of “legacy” papers-- mostly did so at the cost of turning into click-bait sites or outrage machines.
We have to bring back the idea that people should be happy to pay for local news.
They can just run ads without all the tracking bullshit and data collection like they do on every other medium with free ad supported content like radio and television. Somehow I can watch TV and listen to the radio for free and they manage to stay running without monitoring my every move.
Might be less profitable for them but so be it. Just because tracking helps their business doesn’t mean it is justified.