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Ad Tracking: Is Anything Being Done?
bsk_cw (1202181) writes "The W3C's Tracking Protection Working Group has been trying to come up with a way to make targeted ads acceptable to users and useful to advertisers — and so far, hasn't gotten very far. Computerworld's Robert Mitchell has interviewed people on all sides of the issue — consumer privacy advocates, vendors of ad-blocking tools, advertisers and website publishers — to try to unravel the issues and see if any solution is possible at all."
Use noscript , disable cookies. If your tin foil hat is too thick , Tor it out.
The basic problem is that most of the time it works to the detriment of the person viewing the ad.
Captcha: florid, once again unrelated to the topic
to try to unravel the issues and see if any solution is possible at all.
Right, because an interview with the wolves on the one hand, and the sheep on the other, is sure to discover some kind of compromise on the topic of what's for dinner.
Advertisers are parasites, and the only reason they will ever give in to anything is if we threaten them with extinction otherwise. AdBlockers and other defenses caused them to cave in a tiny bit and begin talk about "acceptable advertisement". Don't ever get deluded into thinking they'd give even an inch by themselves.
Solution? Yes, shoot them. That's a solution. Everything else is just a delay in their fight to cover every second of your live and every inch of your attention with their shit.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
a way to make targeted ads acceptable to users
That's like trying to come up with a way to make waterboarding more enjoyable...
Advertising, be it on television, newspapers, the internet or roadsign billboards, feels like mind rape to me.
I'm middle-aged and I remember more ads from my youth than stuff I learned at school. Ads for products that don't even exist anymore, but I can't get rid of the stupid ads in my head. Why do advertisers give themselves the right to pollute people's memory long-term with their shit?
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-... It just works. Together with old AdBlock, no more tracking of me anywhere.
I will open my door to these advertisers if they will give me the keys and alarm codes to their homes and promise not to prosecute me if I misbehave.
Sounds fair to me.
After all, that's what these people are asking from everyone else. It takes a real psychopath to want to do to other people what they would never want done to them.
Then get a new one.
If you can't find a way to fund what you're doing with ads then do something else.
The problem is not targetting: the problem is ads. Is there any ad provider who can be trusted to vet the content they pass on and avoid being a distributor of JavaScript malware?
And cleaning that up will take a LOT of effort and a LOT of goodwill.
Ad companies poisoned that well, I dare say for good. After years and decades of more and more (in both quality and quantity) obnoxious, irritating and outright rude in-your-face ads, more and more people were pushed to the point where they went and did something against them. We went and installed ad blockers.
In other words: We found a solution for our problem. Us not watching your ads is not our problem. You, dear ad companies, poisoned your well. You went onto our nerves with increasingly invasive ads. YOU, and ONLY YOU find a way out of that problem.
And if not, well, so be it. Nobody here really sheds a tear if you go bankrupt.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
And if your business model depends on sniffing through my surfing habits and otherwise invading my privacy, don't bother finding a new business model.
Just go and die.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Then most websites have a broken business model because they're being funded not because of what they offer or have but because of something incidental that happens.
How many people now brag about not watching TV? And what is the primary source of funds for TV? Advertising.
How many people now brag about not reading or needing newspapers? And what is the primary source of funds for newspapers? Advertising.
What's the pattern here?
Business models that depend on advertising are fundamentally flawed because they depend on something that is incidental to what they provide.
If I build a popular website that generates 1,000,000 hits a day, but nobody pays to use it, then it could be considered popular but also a money sink.
If I then throw advertising on it to generate money, it doesn't make the website any more worthwhile and it doesn't represent a worthwhile business model.
But what about facebook? Well, how many of us would pay to use facebook? Oh, you wouldn't? In that case what value does it have? Yeah. And people pay to advertise on it? More fool them.
advertisements do not have the intended effect on me anymore. Quite the opposite in fact.
The guy that shouts over the teevee that i should buy a pickup truck? He is virtually guaranteeing that i will NEVER buy a pickup truck.
I have never eaten at a Red Robin and I never will. Why? Because I once saw a commercial for Red Robin that i found particularly distasteful. Any time i go to a store, before walking in, if i can remember any particularly virulent ads, i turn around & go somewhere else. Mastercard may be priceless to you, but to me its a lame meme that stopped being funny in 1997.
Eventually i had to quit watching teevee altogether... there were so few places left that i could still shop at.
So when i block your ads, i'm doing you and your client a favor. Do NOT try to stop me from blocking your ads.
The problem is simple.
The user wants the CONTENT to have focus, as that is what they go there to get.
The advertisers want the ADVERTISEMENTS to have focus, so they have "Impact."
That is why advertisements are obnoxious, obtrusive, cover 80 to 90% of the display, hoover around, make blaring noises, flash rapidly enough to induce epileptic seizures in those vulnerable, and overall make users reach for adblock software.
The solution? Advertisers need to pay more for less obtrusive ads.
If a site can get enough revenue to operate on just a simple hyperlinking rotating image banner, they wont need full page flash plague competing with their content.
But advertisers want eyeballs. ALL of the user's eyeballs. If advertisers had their way, people would spend 80 to 90% of their time watching adverts-- both on the internet and on television.
Allowing advertisements to become ubiquitous to the point of requiring brain bleach to control is NOT the answer, and only further increases the "Need" to inject yet more adverts to secure a workable revenue stream for the site/channel operators. Basically, they are saturating the market for adverts, and the price paid out per advert served drops. To make up for that, they have to display more adverts. Works GREAT for advertising companies, but is poison for content producers. It has a double-edge, in that as the percentage of time spent viewing adverts goes up, the number of viewers watching the site goes down.
It should not be any bit at all hard to determine where the two trends meet, especially with the INSANE amounts of analytics going on with advert tracking, and page viewing.
The problem is that the advert companies dont want to pay what the adverts are actually worth, and are driving the price paid per impression into the ground, while making a killing doing so. Users dont want to actually pay a fee to use the internet's various webpage services, which have traditionally always been free. (with a few exceptions.)
The real solution is to keep content as the primary focus, put a fucking ball gag and super glue in the mouths of the advertisers, and cut off the flow of gravy by refusing to plaster wall to wall adverts all over the internet, thus making the internet advert real-estate space a premium commodity, commanding a high price through encouraging scarcity.
Users would easily handle a 30% advert (max), 70% content (min) mix. They will walk away from, or start using adblock to circumvent anything above where the curves meet.
This isnt hard.
You have them. Fuck ads. All of them. Always. Forever.
The targeted ads are far better then random ones that mean little to the users.
Actually, no. Because most targeted ads are just stupid. Personally, I couldn't get rid of targeted ads for products similar to something I bought and gave to someone else as a Christmas present, ads for restaurants in a town 10,000 miles away from my home where I worked for two weeks years ago, ads for products that I investigated and bought and I don't need another one, and recently ads by some scumbags that cheat contractors out of money.
On top of that, since my eBay and Amazon accounts are used by myself and my wife with very different interests, I get quite a schizophrenic set of ads and product suggestions from them - which could be considered a severe privacy violation as well, since we both shouldn't know what the other one is browsing for, unless we tell each other.
Advertisers try to sell 'happiness', trying to convince us that if we buy their product (car, soda or laundry detergent), we will be happy. It's all a con job.
I lost interest in internet ads back when they started inserting 'flashing strobe lights' to get my attention, totally annoying! The ad people haven't gotten any better at not annoying me since.
Google has gotten around it with google.com/analytics it used to be googleanalytics.com
It's the site that sends you your pre-selected ads on a mobile device as defined by where you've been, and who pays them.
IMHO these websites are examples of bad design .
While that is true, in practical terms it is irrelevant. Websites are now designed with little/no graceful degradation. That is simply the situation as it is, for better or worse. Websites are not designed to gracefully fall back and probably won't ever be designed that way going forward. There is insufficient economic incentive for commercial ventures to be bothered so it isn't likely to happen. Few people turn off Javascript and those that do are probably not of commercial interest so why design for them? Very annoying but I don't see any reasonably likely chance that it will change either.
Then do not go to those websites, no reason to use a website that was built by some kid that does not understand basics of webdesign.
Good luck with that. It isn't "kids" designing these websites and they know exactly what they are doing. It's commercial ventures who know that very few people turn off javascript and those that do are probably not likely to be customers anyway.
Sounds like the problem here is advertisers refusing to acknowledge the existence of Nash Equilibrium and operating under the assumption that they can just force their way in whatever way they feel like. The fact of the matter is that a lot of the blocking behavior by web users is the direct consequence of abusive marketing and the failure of the marketers to understand that is leading them to engage in shadier and shadier methods of marketing.
I don't necessarily mind ads, but I'm not interested in getting infected by them, having flash ads crash my browser or obscure content and I'm certainly not interested in that intellitext bullshit that makes browsing a real headache. And let's not forget about those stupid ads that load late and then cause the entire page to shift or are set to autoplay when I open a page.
fark.com is the one that comes immediately to mind. Of course, I then simply need to block the begging as well. Actually I find adblock indispensable not simply for removing ads, but for removing not-exactly-advertising meaningless UI elements that occupy screen real estate. I'm talking about boxes full of 35 different "share this page on these social media sites" icons, and static headers with flyout menus that stick to the top of the browser window, not to mention those goddamn annoying "toasters" that pop up in the lower right corner once you scroll past a certain spot in an article. And reader comment engines like Disqus, not to mention "recommended related content" IFRAMEs (e.g. Outbrain) on news sites. My Internet experience is completely different from that which would be experienced by someone without adblock, it's a lot more than just the absence of ads.