No Stupid Questions

I really don't understand the massive ad spend from most companies. I'm a bit of a minimalist. I have like the Ron Swanson "people who buy things are suckers" mentality. I buy wood, material, tools and occasionally computer parts. Outside of shoes most of my clothes are 5+ years old and most of my shoes are too.

All that to say, I guess I'm an outlier. I haven't clocked on and bought anything from an ad that I can ever remember and I've been living a life very lacking in consumer disposable goods that they push for going on a decade ago this point.

I don't understand anyone who doesn't do extensive research and buy the best product in their price range on any purchase these days. If I do need to buy something I probably average an hour of research on any product I spent over $100 on and far more on anything over $1,000. Astroturfing YouTube reviews and forums would be more effective than ads on my purchase decisions. Which they do too, but they're normally pretty easy to spot.

It stops as soon as we all start calling it what it really is: stalking. If this makes it into the public consciousness, it will end the ads based internet. Europe is already on board by their policies. The English word stalking is the most simple and powerful tool possible. It is black and white politics, and there is no effective countermeasure. No politician can run on a platform of I support stalkers. It is all about the wording and how arguments are phrased. It really is that simple. It is following people around collecting information and looking for opportunities to exploit people. Two or more parties colluding to exploit a person is irrelevant to the cause and effect. This is not about showing you banner ads. This is about shaping your echo chamber and the products and prices you see. It is all about exploitation and manipulation; stalking.

It's just a newer form of publishing. A quick Google, which is just a yellow pages with search, says 1488

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwabe_(publisher)

Outdoor advertising still works. TV ads still work. Social media advertising won't collapse. It may become less effective if legislation moves towards greater privacy protection but it'll still be effective.

Closest thing to breaking the business model is the data harvesting that makes targeted ads so profitable.

We’ve already seen Apple’s tracking restrictions hurt meta a lot. As governments, and companies that don’t have big ad businesses, continue to restrict tracking, that limits the growth of ad businesses.

Newspapers, radio, television, internet, ????

Step 4 is most likely from a markets perspective and step 2 from a regulatory perspective.

The regulatory landscape is slowly shifting against limitless surveillance as the cost of using the free internet. Free platforms like Reddit and Facebook will struggle if they can’t collect limitlessly. More interestingly for me, portability and interoperability regulations could lead to exoduses from those platforms as people are no longer locked in - there is no reason why you can’t message someone on Signal using Messenger other than Facebook doesn’t want you to. Taking your personalization data from Spotify to Apple Music would mean you didn’t have to start from scratch if you didn’t want to keep paying Spotify. It’s an existential threat to companies that depend on a “data moat.”

From a markets perspective programmatic advertising is (as Cory Doctorow says) a bezzle. It’s a scam. ROI and attribution rely on faithful and accurate data on audiences and reach, in addition to engagement. The major ad platforms have regularly been caught lying about these. To be clear paying for ads on these platforms largely works - that’s not up for dispute and is why the bezzle is successful. The issue is that these platforms are selling targeted ads (I.e. show ads to people we believe want a pair of Nikes) that work BETTER than contextual ads (I.e. show ads to people searching for shoes) and that’s not clear.

When AI gets good enough that all of the accounts are fake, and real people either can't compete, or look fake if they do.

I believe that steps #3 and #4 are specially fragile, due to tragedy of the commons.

Every platform tries to squeeze an additional penny out of ads, so it offers yet another ad space; more offer leads to lower prices, so the price of every ad space goes down, encouraging platforms to use more ad spaces, etc. in a vicious cycle. In turn, the increased amount of advertisement on the internet as a whole pisses the users off, and encourages them to skip ads completely through ad blockers, making online ads even less interesting, thus lowering the price of ad spaces even further.

Steps #2 and #5 are also somewhat fragile, but less so than #3 and #4. People don't like this sort of data vulturing, for a few reasons: it's invasive to your privacy, it's used for something that you dislike (it'll later on become advertisement = spam [YES] to annoy you), and the whole idea that someone is making a profit out of your data rubs plenty people the wrong way.