One month after a US court ruled Google had an illegal monopoly on online search, the tech giant is back in court defending allegations it has also monopolised internet ads.
What if we just got rid of digital advertising altogether in the US? How many issues of privacy, health and personal finance would disappear or be greatly reduced?
It’s hard for me to imagine what that would look like or the downsides other than to the digital advertising industry itself.
Advertising plays an important role in the sale of digital goods and the physical sale of goods through digital means. It’s the only way you can really drive traffic to unknown markets.
Without advertising You’re going to be relying on YouTube videos or Google Play store or Apple store to get any sales. Any free online services would probably be a thing of the past. Small businesses would have trouble competing with larger entities can already put products in your face.
It’s not impossible to remove digital advertising and replace it with something else but I’m pretty sure the something else would be worse than what we have already
Targeted advertising, which requires collecting personal information without people’s knowledge, is what makes online advertising the absolute worst kind of advertising. That could be addressed on a way that could allow other less malicious forms to exist.
Yes, OP said all advertising. You mentioned the main problems with ditching all advertising. I added to the conversation with a poasible middle ground that addressed the worst parts.
You’re going to find that the appetite for un-targeted advertising to be much lower than that of targeted. The ROI for un-targeted blast is much lower than a smaller more focused targeted campaign.
As such, you’ll either see even more ads on the same content (in order to obtain similar level of revenue for the publisher), or, as the other user suggested, free ad supported service be a thing of the past.
Neither of which are good for the mass audience. People already aren’t willing to pay $1 to remove ads on most free ad supported apps, you’re going to find small businesses collapse left right and centre as result of the change.
That’s fine. I will either continue to use adblockers, pay, or stop using the internet outside of what is required to function in society. I already refuse to use anything that has decided to go ad supported without the ability to block ads and has a price I’m not willing to pay.
If small (or large) businesses require the mass collection of personal information by malicious advertisers to exist, then they don’t derserve to exist.
stop using the internet outside of what is required to function in society.
I agree with the sentiment. But also consider the threshold for “what is required to function in society” is experiencing endlessly expanding feature creep. The great mass hysteria of 2020 dealt the heaviest blow.
My prediction is different: I think that, in the long term, banning targetted ads will have almost no impact on the viability of ad-supported services, or the amount of ads per page.
Advertisement is an arms race; everyone needs to use the most efficient technique available, not just to increase their sales but to prevent them from decreasing - as your competitor using that technique will get the sales instead.
But once a certain technique is banned, you aren’t the only one who can’t use it; your competitors can’t either.
And the price of the ad slot is intrinsically tied to that. When targetted ads were introduced, advertisers became less willing to pay for non-targetted ads; decreased demand led to lower prices, and thus lower revenue to people offering those ad slots on their pages, forcing those people to offer ad slots with targetted advertisement instead. Banning targetted ads will simply revert this process, placing the market value of non-targetted ad slots back where it used to be.
People are not willing to get ads into every orifice, just nobody’s asking them. Ad blockers are reactive.
Bigger businesses will feel more pain, I can promise you that. Smaller businesses do not benefit from this ecosystem, quite the opposite - it heats up those who pay more for advertising, or those who are partners with those doing advertising.
As of payments again - when you are getting ads into your face with a message that you can pay to use something without them, you naturally feel against it.
I go through significant efforts to block digital advertising at multiple levels. Yet, I do not find it difficult to discover new things to buy (from both small and large businesses).
For myself, I suspect most of that is supported through online communities related to my interests and hobbies. Those purchases feel more informed and often more intentional too.
That is a very well placed observation from a consumer standpoint. Now consider it from a flower shop in your neighborhood trying to compete with the grocery store and FTD.com
How are you going to get your foot traffic other than word of mouth and people seeing you in a stripmall?
Targeted digital ads let you get in front of people in your area. There are very very few local websites anymore.
I block most ads too, but there’s no denying that occasionally on facebook, some semi-local brewpub goes hey, check out our new menu items and it turns out to be a win for them and for me.
Advertising is dicey, in a lot of cases, it’s in the hands of the enemy but the economy, especially small business doesn’t float without it.
The way I see it when it comes to physical ads I see them, I walk past, they’re gone. Online targeted advertising is more like if there were a bunch of flying TV screens outside that constantly follow you around and try to take up 90% of your vision while you’re trying to cross the road, and some stores become impossible to enter without an ad-blocker because the doorway is literally jammed with flying TVs.
We really need limits on how much advertising can be on the screen and places you can advertise and how often you can be advertised to that would make a hell of a lot of sense. When you have shitty web pages like an index card sized recipe drawn out to 15 pages long to make you click through tons of ads. The advertiser should be able to detect people doing that s*** and not pay them.
But targeted advertising is also a single ad on a social media site for a brew pub or a florist in your neighborhood advertising a mother’s Day special or a new cheap arrangement they just made out of an accidental over-order.
No, advertising is not necessary when a user can search a catalogue with multiple optional constraints, as we did in the olden days of printed catalogues.
Advertising is harmful - it’s somebody trying to persuade you that you need to buy a thing. First, you’ll usually know when you need something. Second, the salesman is not someone you’d believe normally.
It’s an interaction which normally should be initiated by you, not by sellers. Which makes advertising utterly useless immediately.
To put it another way, the difference is push vs. pull. A catalogue is a pull offering: the person looking at it is doing so by choice, because they’re interested in what it offers and want to buy something (or at least window shop). An online ad is a push offering: it’s presented to people who did not choose to see it, are not interested in it, and just wish it would go away and let them get on with what they’re actually trying to do. Pull advertising is (usually) acceptable. Push advertising is not.
Not only that, but advertising pays the bills for the majority of websites. It’s a necessary evil unless people want to pay every website host to see their content.
I’m not sure how true this perception is in more recent years. Many popular sites, with enormous traffic volumes that could drive digital impression ad revenue, are instead pushing subscriptions or other monetization models.
For instance, the New York Times makes — by far — more money on digital subscriptions than digital advertising. Digital advertising revenues are also declining for them.
Another example is Spotify, where ad revenue from their ad-supported tier did not cover their operational costs and now represents around only a tenth of their revenue compared to subscriptions.
The exceptions to this are generally search and social media sites, where the product for sale on these sites are the users themselves. They’re just advertising platforms, which of course make their money from digital advertising.
So I’d say one issue with digital advertising is that it often does not pay the bills for the site owner. Its value is tied to its ability to convert visitors to buyers, but it has to be ramped up to such an extreme level it instead only creates bad experiences.
I should have phrased it, helps pay the bills. For the end user if you don’t want to pay a monetary fee, then ads are the option. I would never go to some pages if I had to have a subscription to view content, and i assume many others wouldn’t either. Ads, as gross as they are, keep the Internet running for now
Not all ads are like that. I work for a small company that needs targeted advertising, we don’t spend for a couple of months out of the year when things just become insanely expensive I’m trying to rely on organics. It’s a significant drop when you turn off that UA spend. For advertising budget pays for itself many times over
What if we just got rid of digital advertising altogether in the US? How many issues of privacy, health and personal finance would disappear or be greatly reduced?
It’s hard for me to imagine what that would look like or the downsides other than to the digital advertising industry itself.
Advertising plays an important role in the sale of digital goods and the physical sale of goods through digital means. It’s the only way you can really drive traffic to unknown markets.
Without advertising You’re going to be relying on YouTube videos or Google Play store or Apple store to get any sales. Any free online services would probably be a thing of the past. Small businesses would have trouble competing with larger entities can already put products in your face.
It’s not impossible to remove digital advertising and replace it with something else but I’m pretty sure the something else would be worse than what we have already
Targeted advertising, which requires collecting personal information without people’s knowledge, is what makes online advertising the absolute worst kind of advertising. That could be addressed on a way that could allow other less malicious forms to exist.
Opie did not say targeted advertising OP said get rid of all advertising I was responding to that
Yes, OP said all advertising. You mentioned the main problems with ditching all advertising. I added to the conversation with a poasible middle ground that addressed the worst parts.
You’re going to find that the appetite for un-targeted advertising to be much lower than that of targeted. The ROI for un-targeted blast is much lower than a smaller more focused targeted campaign.
As such, you’ll either see even more ads on the same content (in order to obtain similar level of revenue for the publisher), or, as the other user suggested, free ad supported service be a thing of the past.
Neither of which are good for the mass audience. People already aren’t willing to pay $1 to remove ads on most free ad supported apps, you’re going to find small businesses collapse left right and centre as result of the change.
That’s fine. I will either continue to use adblockers, pay, or stop using the internet outside of what is required to function in society. I already refuse to use anything that has decided to go ad supported without the ability to block ads and has a price I’m not willing to pay.
If small (or large) businesses require the mass collection of personal information by malicious advertisers to exist, then they don’t derserve to exist.
I agree with the sentiment. But also consider the threshold for “what is required to function in society” is experiencing endlessly expanding feature creep. The great mass hysteria of 2020 dealt the heaviest blow.
My prediction is different: I think that, in the long term, banning targetted ads will have almost no impact on the viability of ad-supported services, or the amount of ads per page.
Advertisement is an arms race; everyone needs to use the most efficient technique available, not just to increase their sales but to prevent them from decreasing - as your competitor using that technique will get the sales instead.
But once a certain technique is banned, you aren’t the only one who can’t use it; your competitors can’t either.
And the price of the ad slot is intrinsically tied to that. When targetted ads were introduced, advertisers became less willing to pay for non-targetted ads; decreased demand led to lower prices, and thus lower revenue to people offering those ad slots on their pages, forcing those people to offer ad slots with targetted advertisement instead. Banning targetted ads will simply revert this process, placing the market value of non-targetted ad slots back where it used to be.
Nothing worth feeling bad for will collapse.
People are not willing to get ads into every orifice, just nobody’s asking them. Ad blockers are reactive.
Bigger businesses will feel more pain, I can promise you that. Smaller businesses do not benefit from this ecosystem, quite the opposite - it heats up those who pay more for advertising, or those who are partners with those doing advertising.
As of payments again - when you are getting ads into your face with a message that you can pay to use something without them, you naturally feel against it.
I go through significant efforts to block digital advertising at multiple levels. Yet, I do not find it difficult to discover new things to buy (from both small and large businesses).
For myself, I suspect most of that is supported through online communities related to my interests and hobbies. Those purchases feel more informed and often more intentional too.
That is a very well placed observation from a consumer standpoint. Now consider it from a flower shop in your neighborhood trying to compete with the grocery store and FTD.com
How are you going to get your foot traffic other than word of mouth and people seeing you in a stripmall?
Targeted digital ads let you get in front of people in your area. There are very very few local websites anymore.
I block most ads too, but there’s no denying that occasionally on facebook, some semi-local brewpub goes hey, check out our new menu items and it turns out to be a win for them and for me.
Advertising is dicey, in a lot of cases, it’s in the hands of the enemy but the economy, especially small business doesn’t float without it.
The way I see it when it comes to physical ads I see them, I walk past, they’re gone. Online targeted advertising is more like if there were a bunch of flying TV screens outside that constantly follow you around and try to take up 90% of your vision while you’re trying to cross the road, and some stores become impossible to enter without an ad-blocker because the doorway is literally jammed with flying TVs.
We really need limits on how much advertising can be on the screen and places you can advertise and how often you can be advertised to that would make a hell of a lot of sense. When you have shitty web pages like an index card sized recipe drawn out to 15 pages long to make you click through tons of ads. The advertiser should be able to detect people doing that s*** and not pay them.
But targeted advertising is also a single ad on a social media site for a brew pub or a florist in your neighborhood advertising a mother’s Day special or a new cheap arrangement they just made out of an accidental over-order.
When ads go wrong they really go wrong.
No, advertising is not necessary when a user can search a catalogue with multiple optional constraints, as we did in the olden days of printed catalogues.
Advertising is harmful - it’s somebody trying to persuade you that you need to buy a thing. First, you’ll usually know when you need something. Second, the salesman is not someone you’d believe normally.
It’s an interaction which normally should be initiated by you, not by sellers. Which makes advertising utterly useless immediately.
I’d argue the catalog could be seen as advertising though.
“This is what you can buy from us” and the language in those catalogs presents everything in the best possible light.
Catalogs were almost always free, because it marketed products to consumers… Aka advertising.
You’d open one only when you wanted it.
A database with various characteristics being the main component and the advertising text not being that is better, yes.
To put it another way, the difference is push vs. pull. A catalogue is a pull offering: the person looking at it is doing so by choice, because they’re interested in what it offers and want to buy something (or at least window shop). An online ad is a push offering: it’s presented to people who did not choose to see it, are not interested in it, and just wish it would go away and let them get on with what they’re actually trying to do. Pull advertising is (usually) acceptable. Push advertising is not.
Don’t threaten me with a good time
Not only that, but advertising pays the bills for the majority of websites. It’s a necessary evil unless people want to pay every website host to see their content.
I’m not sure how true this perception is in more recent years. Many popular sites, with enormous traffic volumes that could drive digital impression ad revenue, are instead pushing subscriptions or other monetization models.
For instance, the New York Times makes — by far — more money on digital subscriptions than digital advertising. Digital advertising revenues are also declining for them.
Another example is Spotify, where ad revenue from their ad-supported tier did not cover their operational costs and now represents around only a tenth of their revenue compared to subscriptions.
The exceptions to this are generally search and social media sites, where the product for sale on these sites are the users themselves. They’re just advertising platforms, which of course make their money from digital advertising.
So I’d say one issue with digital advertising is that it often does not pay the bills for the site owner. Its value is tied to its ability to convert visitors to buyers, but it has to be ramped up to such an extreme level it instead only creates bad experiences.
I should have phrased it, helps pay the bills. For the end user if you don’t want to pay a monetary fee, then ads are the option. I would never go to some pages if I had to have a subscription to view content, and i assume many others wouldn’t either. Ads, as gross as they are, keep the Internet running for now
I wonder how many sales really go down just driven by the dystopian internet ads that pop up into your face or hide half the screen…
Not all ads are like that. I work for a small company that needs targeted advertising, we don’t spend for a couple of months out of the year when things just become insanely expensive I’m trying to rely on organics. It’s a significant drop when you turn off that UA spend. For advertising budget pays for itself many times over
Never said all ads are like that. Still wondering how much dystopian ads like that bring along in actual value.