HN Gopher Feed (2017-12-28) - page 1 of 10 ___________________________________________________________________
The Digital Advertising Duopoly
82 points by kernelv
http://avc.com/2017/12/the-digital-advertising-duopoly/___________________________________________________________________
brndnmtthws - 3 hours ago
All the more reason we need adblockers and private-by-default
browsing. It worries me that I can't use something like Privoxy on
Android without rooting the device. An alternative would be a good
privacy VPN with blocking/filtering of ads and trackers.
wan23 - 1 hours ago
I think you're missing the main point here. What we really need
is a better way to pay for the web. If everyone blocks all ads
without solving this problem first there won't be any content
left to block ads on.
pjc50 - 41 minutes ago
There was content before even advertising. And we're here
creating ""content"" without being paid on a site with no ads.
ashark - 17 minutes ago
There was also commercial ad-supported content before
tracking advertising. You know, 100% of ad-supported content
before the Web. The world will for sure not end if
spyvertising goes away.
organsnyder - 2 hours ago
I've switched to using Firefox Focus as my main Android browser.
It provides ad blocking and privacy features. For apps, I try to
avoid ad-supported ones whenever possible, and am happy to pay
for apps that I find useful.
paulie_a - 2 hours ago
I'd it possible to import passwords and bookmarks into focus?
I've been meaning to ditch chrome on all devices because of the
sewer of ads on chrome mobile
JoshTriplett - 2 hours ago
You can also just run the standard Firefox on Android, and
install uBlock Origin.
brndnmtthws - 2 hours ago
I'm using Focus too, it's pretty nice.
weeksie - 3 hours ago
Being against government intervention is naive. If the US did what
the EU has done with allowing people to avoid being tracked the big
tech companies would be nudged toward developing smarter business
models. Maybe it's not necessary but it's foolish to dismiss
government out of hand.Allowing your largest companies to compete
over hijacking your public's attention is precisely the sort of
thing that reeks of government failure.This generation of internet
users is a lot more willing to pay for content than mine was. Gen
X's reluctance to spend money online is what created the attention
economy to begin with. Maybe the shift will happen on its own, but
how much damage will we do in the meantime?
xPhobophobia - 20 minutes ago
> If the US did what the EU has done with allowing people to
avoid being tracked the big tech companies would be nudged toward
developing smarter business models. Maybe it's not necessary but
it's foolish to dismiss government out of hand.Do you think that
they would really get "better" for a consumer, or more covert as
they become "smarter"? I'd assume the latter.
mgraczyk - 2 hours ago
If the US did what the EU has done, I would probably have to wait
another 50 years for products I use every day like - Google Maps
- Google Speech Recognition - Google Photos Search - Google
HomeI'm thankful that my government has allowed innovation to
continue. I'm glad they have represented my interests as a
consumer by favoring technological growth over protection I
neither want nor need.
pimmen - 2 hours ago
Ever used Skype? Spotify? Trivago? Those are EU tech products
many people use everyday, just goes to show that intervening
from time to time doesn't necessarily mean that we live in some
socialist, repressive regime.You're welcome, by the way.
hackbinary - 1 hours ago
Also, YouTube.
killjoywashere - 1 hours ago
YouTube is from San
Mateohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_YouTube
ovao - 2 hours ago
> This generation of internet users is a lot more willing to pay
for content than mine was.I haven't seen any evidence to suggest
this is the case. Do you know of any?
snowwrestler - 1 hours ago
Two examples I can think of off the top of my head are news
subscriptions, and Patreon. Both seem to be growing a good
clip. A decade ago there was a lot of talk about digital
subscriptions as a business model, but few if any success
stories.
bdibs - 1 hours ago
I?d actually guess it?s the opposite. Why pay for a news
subscription when you can get ?news? for free on Facebook and
the like.
brucephillips - 1 hours ago
> I don?t want nor do I expect any governmental response to this
market failure.Why is it a failure? Price? Quality? Something else?
I'm not convinced this is a problem.
CaptSpify - 1 hours ago
How do you not consider people being openly lied to and
manipulated on a daily basis anything other than a failure?
brucephillips - 35 minutes ago
I never said I did. What on earth are you talking about?
f00_ - 29 minutes ago
market participants not taking externalities into account. i.e.
this transaction benefits both you and me, but doesn't take into
account the effect of the transaction on the environment/others
brucephillips - 18 minutes ago
What do externalities have to do with duopolies?
CaptSpify - 1 hours ago
>We need models that support free consumption of media for many
reasons.We have that already. In fact, we've had it for a while.
The problem is that we keep taking something that is already free
to distribute, and putting it behind arbitrary gates. We then think
it's perfectly normal to pay the gatekeepers.I don't know why we
still use this model which hasn't made sense for >10 years.
buro9 - 1 hours ago
Isn't this normal?Doesn't radio advertising have a similar duopoly?
Same for outdoor advertising?The internet never delivered
disintermediation, it only changed who those intermediaries were.
malchow - 1 hours ago
Cofounder of successful mid-tier competitor in this space
(www.publir.com). Can confirm.
username223 - 2 hours ago
These people project that we'll be setting $105 billion on fire for
digital ads by 2019. To put that in perspective, it's more than
10% of what we spend to provide health care to seniors and poor
people via a mostly dysfunctional health care system:
https://www.hhs.gov/about/budget/fy2017/budget-in-brief/cms/...
mlinksva - 1 hours ago
Solution: tax ads.
shubhamjain - 2 hours ago
There are only two ways to break the duopoly: create your own
massive medium like Facebook or work with publishers. Having worked
in this industry, I think working with publishers is an impossible
battle. The whole publishing world is rife with fraud and desperate
attempts to increase page views.Most publishers cram their websites
with ads. The number of low-content, click-baity websites is just
staggering. Sometimes I wonder how could this even be a profitable
proposition for advertisers. This is one reason why Google
absolutely dominates the space. It has the capability to deal with
all the fraud, calculate the right reward for publishers, and give
a meaningful ROI to the advertiser.Maybe a new kind of
advertisement medium could unseat Google from its dominance but the
way digital advertising works today, it sounds like an impossible
idea.
f00_ - 24 minutes ago
just a couple counter examples I wanted to point
out:giantbomb.com (ads + subscription only content) 4chan (I
would like someone to explain it more deeply to me, but I think
they run their own ads, do they use an outside service?)
stevesearer - 2 hours ago
My site https://officesnapshots.com doesn?t really fit into
either of those molds.We sell our own advertising space, self-
host it, and use static jpgs for the graphics.The ads are also
targeted against the content (office design) and tend to be for
products like office furniture. In a roundabout way this targets
the readers but only because if they are on the site they are
likely interested in learning about new products in their field.
mcrowcroft - 20 minutes ago
Do you track things like viewability? Why not use something
like an adserver?
tannhaeuser - 4 minutes ago
All that needed to happen is that the authority responsible for
enforcing US antitrust laws vetoed against the acquisition of
DoubleClick by Google and of Whatsapp by Facebook. Why haven't
they?
herodotus - 1 hours ago
The problem with subscriptions is not the cost, its the sheer
number of them - and some come up almost accidentally. I pay a lot
to my ISP every month. I would like to see a company that charges
me monthly to eliminate all adware by micro-paying the
participating websites for my actual page visits. In fact, if my
ISP added such a service for a fee, I would sign up.
harshreality - 54 minutes ago
You want your ISP to [be able to] spy on, and track, your
browsing habits? For unencrypted pages, that would probably take
the form of DPI and injected javascript. For encrypted (SSL) web
traffic, all your ISP has access to are 1) the ip of the website,
2) SNI hostname, if any, in the SSL helo, and 3) how long the TCP
stream stays alive, which is probably not representative of your
interaction with the site. They have no page-level
information.There's already a service that is probably capable of
doing what you ask. It's called google analytics. Google's in
the payment business, and google's in the tracking business. If
only all publishers could agree to use analytics.js, and petition
google to implement micropayments with some agreed upon fee
structure.
herodotus - 26 minutes ago
I am sure there are ways to design such a system that precludes
tracking. For example, suppose I have a browser that includes
an extension that does this: I want to visit U (some url). My
browser sends a request to the no ad service to see if U has
signed up. If it has, then it sends me a once-only token. I
send this as proof of status to U, and they send it to the no
ad service to claim their micro payment. The only parties who
know I have visited U are (a) my ISP - I assume all requests
probably go through them; (b) the no ad service (actually, all
they really know is that I asked for a token); and (c) U, of
course - although all U knows is my IP address, nothing
else.Anyway, that is roughly how such a service might work. I
am sure that even better safeguards could be designed into it.
andschwa - 58 minutes ago
That's kind of the idea behind ORCHID:
https://orchidprotocol.com/.
herodotus - 24 minutes ago
Thanks for the link. Orchid looks interesting.
IBM - 3 hours ago
>I don?t want nor do I expect any governmental response to this
market failure.You should want it and it's weird not to expect it
because the EU has already begun.
nerdponx - 3 hours ago
Isn't that the role of governments in a healthy economy? To step
in when markets fail?
alexryan - 1 hours ago
This is where all corruption originates. One group seeks to use
the state to impose their will on another group. The victimized
group, in turn, seeks to defend itself by bribing the
enforcers. Instead of capital flowing to those who are best
able to convert it into the most happiness for the most people,
it flows to those seeking to enrich themselves by pitting
people against each other in order to extract ever larger
bribes. The state grows ever more corrupt in this fashion. It
might be wise to refrain from the impulse to use force long
enough to consider alternative ways to remedy the perceived
problem.
arrosenberg - 1 hours ago
What you call "imposing their will" might be called
"balancing the scales" by others. In any organized society,
government necessarily creates economic rules and incentives
one way or the other, through action or inaction. The debate
must be over which rules provide the proper incentives to
maximize utility for the most number of people, not whether
rules should be made at all.
ashark - 5 minutes ago
Or, you know, government happens to be the best solution we
have to certain types of coordination problems, some of which
plague market economies.But no, I'm sure literally everything
government does that interacts with the market just creates
corruption without sufficient benefit to outweigh any such
harm, and it'd be better if we didn't do anything at all.
Certainly it's easier to think about politics if we can
permanently rule out an entire class of solutions this way,
saving us from having to consider and weigh each per se.
Bonus points if we can define "liberty" as "fewest things
outlawed by government"?measuring that is way easier than
trying to figure out the degrees of freedom of action
available to ordinary people in practice.
thisisit - 3 hours ago
The content looks similar to the WSJ
article:https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-google-facebook-duopoly-
thr...Discussed here:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15960606
jasode - 2 hours ago
>I don?t think subscriptions are the only answer here, as many
do.>We need models that support free consumption of media for many
reasons.If you rule out paid subscriptions to subsidize the
freeriders, what options are left for "free" consumption? Either
advertisements or a government-sponsored system (e.g. citizens
taxed to support the BBC tv channels).If there's a crypto financing
option that Fred is hinting at, what would that look like?
amoorthy - 2 hours ago
Any idea why Fred is not a believer in subscriptions?My
hypothesis is subscriptions, for news at least, are all-or-
nothing propositions. But in a world where there's so much
content, much of it for free, we will only want to bypass a
paywall for a given site occasionally when we encounter it.Why
hasn't someone built a variable subscription model that is geared
to one's reading habits?
nickdandakis - 1 hours ago
Subscription fatigue, maybe?The idea of variable subscription
models is interesting, especially if the consumer can see
detailed justifications for their bill. I think that's a key
point in battling subscription fatigue.Software companies water
down their financial models to a very simplistic bill, partly
because there's no way of (easily) variably billing consumers
of their software, but also because it's easy to understand.I
know that if I received an easily digestible bill of my monthly
Spotify usage, and was charged more than what I'm currently
paying for on my fixed plan, I'd be ok with it. I also know
that if I'm not using Spotify as much for a specific month, and
was charged less than what I normally pay for it, I'd also be
very ok with it!
jasode - 2 hours ago
>Any idea why Fred is not a believer in subscriptions?He's ok
with subscriptions. However, his particular statement is in
context of subscriptions interfering with providing free
content.As far as I can tell, if we want to have websites
provide "free" content we have the following choices to that
puzzle:1) sponsored by advertisers2) sponsored by government
taxes (e.g. collect a new "web usage tax" from citizens to fund
a CitizenBook as free alternative to Facebook ads and
PublicNewsTimes as free alternative to New York Times paid
subscription. I doubt that enough voters would support such a
tax just to avoid ads.)3) blockchain? cryptocurrency? (Not
sure what Fred has seen with this option.)
brucephillips - 1 hours ago
Yeah I don't understand why he doesn't describe the solutions he
claims to be thinking about.
mtgx - 1 hours ago
A cryptocurrency-backed tipping model (extremely low friction in
tipping compared to any non-crypto alternative) is starting to
look very promising.Take a look at http://steemit.com/ for
instance. It's kind of a Reddit clone based on that model. I
think it still only has fewer than 1 million users, which means
the quality of the user-generated posts won't be as good even as
that from the (much larger) Reddit right now. But the tipping
itself seems to be (largely) working.I say largely, because last
I checked months ago, I still thought it prioritized a sort of
feedback loop for the "rich to get richer" on the platform. But
this is easy to change with an algorithm update. My guess is the
main reason they don't do it is because having people earn
"$1,000 per post" is getting them a lot of publicity and word of
mouth promotion, compared to if they made it so "almost everyone
can earn at least $1-$5 on every post".But as the platform grows
(and the money on the platform grows with it) I would like to
imagine they won't allow the "famous posters" to make tens of
thousands of dollars on every post, and they will try to
redistribute that to the rest of the platform users. If they
don't do that, the platform will fail under its own weight
anyway, and another competing cryptocurrency tipping platform
will take its place.But overall, I think this sort of platform
has extremely high potential. I've seen many smaller-time
Youtubers start using it, because it almost immediately allowed
them to make more money than they made from YouTube alone.Oh, and
perhaps the "secret sauce" of the Steemit.com site is that it
also spreads the earnings with the upvoters/downvoters as well as
the commenters, which is basically paying for the curation of the
platform, thus offering real monetary incentive to do those
actions properly (although I imagine there may be some who try to
abuse it, too).
f00_ - 26 minutes ago
steemit seems like a ponzi scheme. Could someone explain the
whole "powering up" system? I think it's counter example to
Proof of Stake, like there isn't the economic incentive there
is for Proof of Work