Stephen Downes makes a good point. As ‘content consumers’ we correctly have the expectation that paying for something does not mean reduced advertising. In no medium is that actually the case, so the web isn’t and won’t be different. The issue of adverts on the web isn’t about ads per se. It’s about ad tech, which needs to die. It’s about web ad intermediaries too, who currently ensure there’s no link between me seeing an ad, the site I’m seeing it on knowing it’s there, and the actual money going to that site. There should however be such a link between the adverts shown on a site and the site knowing that, and the money flowing as direct as possible between advertiser and site. Advert intermediaries (deemed necessary because of their ad tech expertise) purposefully make the connection between me and the medium opaque to all but the advert intermediary. The problem with web ads isn’t ads.
Tag: advertising
Eroding Our Privacy For Advertising That Doesn’t Work
Came across this article from last year, The new dot com bubble is here: it’s called online advertising. It takes a look at online advertising’s effectiveness. It seems the selection effect is strong, but not accounted for, because the metrics happen after that.
“It is crucial for advertisers to distinguish such a selection effect (people see your ad, but were already going to click, buy, register, or download) from the advertising effect (people see your ad, and that’s why they start clicking, buying, registering, downloading).”
They don’t.
All the data gathering, all the highly individual targeting, apparently means advertisers are reaching people they would already reach. Now people just click on a link the advertising company is paying extra for.
For eBay there was an opportunity in 2012 to experiment with what would happen if they stopped online advertising. Three months later, the results were clear: all the traffic that had previously come from paid links was now coming in through ordinary links. Tadelis had been right all along. Annually, eBay was burning a good $20m on ads targeting the keyword ‘eBay’. (Blake et al 2015, Econometrica Vol. 83, 1, pp 155-174. DOI 10.3982/ECTA12423, PDF on Sci-Hub)
It’s about a market of a quarter of a trillion dollars governed by irrationality. It’s about knowables, about how even the biggest data sets don’t always provide insight.
So, the next time when some site wants to emotionally blackmail you to please disable your adtech blockers, because they’ve led themselves to believe that undermining your privacy is the only way they can continue to exist, don’t feel guilty. Adtech has to go, you’re offering up your privacy for magical thinking. Shields up!
Suggested Reading: Adtech, Scarcity, Offline First, and more
Some links I thought worth reading the past few days
- On how blockchain attempts to create fake scarcity in the digital realm. And why banks etc therefore are all over it: On scarcity and the blockchain by Jaap-Henk Hoepman
- Doc Searl’s has consistently good blogposts about the adtech business, and how it is detrimental to publishers and citizens alike. In this blogpost he sees hope for publishing. His lists on adverts and ad tech I think should be on all our minds: Is this a turning point for publishing?
- Doc Searl’s wrote this one in 2017: How to plug the publishing revenue drain – The Graph – Medium
- In my information routines offline figures prominently, but it usually doesn’t in my tools. There is a movement to put offline front and center as design principle it turns out: Designing Offline-First Web Apps
- Hoodie is a backendless tool for building webapps, with a offline first starting point: hood.ie intro
- A Berlin based company putting offline first as foremost design principle: Neighbourhoodie – Offline First
- And then there are Service Workers, about which Jeremy Keith has just published a book: Going Offline
- Haven’t tested it yet, but this type of glue we need much more of, to reduce the cost of leaving silos, and to allow people to walk several walled gardens at the same time as a precursor to that: Granary
Suggested Reading: DNA, Reboot, Decentralisation and more
Some links I thought worth reading the past few days
- I think E and I will need to visit Copenhagen in September for TechFestival. Thomas calls it ‘Reboot at Scale’: The time is right for a new conversation on tech. One that anchors tech in society with human answers for progress.
- An important point made by Cory Doctorow discussing GDPR, data breaches are cumulative, a breach today may be combined with a breach already out there: The harm created by merging breaches should be part of establishing damages
- A visual tool to create deep learning models faster: Lobe.ai
- It all depends on whether GDPR will be enforced from May 26th: Doc Searls says GDPR will pop the adtech bubble
- Refocusing on the decentralised nature of internet: DECODE, a European project
- One researcher’s noise is another’s signal, non-human DNA edition: Genghis Khan’s Mongol horde probably had rampant Hepatitis B
- UK schools are sharing personal data on pupils far and wide: End bad practices in Education says Defend Digital Me report
- Just as obfuscating as pretending the data you actively share with FB is the only personal data they have on you: The “FB is just a tool” narrative
What’s Up Adgenta?
I have been playing around with using ads in my postings these past few months. The ads come from Adgenta and can be incorporated into my postings when I use my Qumana editor. As this is all experimental I am eager to share whatever experiences I have with ads on this site.
Today I looked at my site and saw an ad for “genuine replicas” of Switch watches. This raises my suspicion. The url for the ad is the same as in spam e-mail messages I have been getting by the dozens daily in these past weeks leading up to Christmas. Apparantly we should all be giving these fake watches to each other for Christmas. No thank you, I removed the ad immediately. (Even though the line “don’t settle for a cheap fake” made me laugh. Yeah, let’s all go out and buy expensive fakes!)
I do have some questions to Adgenta for Christmas however:
Are advertisers vetted before being admitted into the programme?
How come this obvious spammer selling possibly illegal products is advertising on my site through your programme?
What are you going to do about filtering out these ads?
How are you going to assure me that this won’t happen again?
Adgenta wants to put control with the blogger, which sounds like good thinking to me. Let’s see how we can work this out.
[UPDATE] Have been in touch with the people of Adgenta (thanks for the quick response folks!). They are taking this as a serious problem which can be a major threat to their credibility. The ads itself are delivered to Adgenta by Miva, one of the biggest on-line advertising supply networks. Adgenta is trying to get Miva to react to this stat.