They are not all good, as I point out in an essay about the bad old days of un-targeted advertising.
Twenty-two years ago, there weren’t large Internet companies tracking your every move and serving targeted advertising. But that does not mean that life was perfect for Internet users. Those were also the days when we were deluged with emails with the subject line Enhance Your Penis!. The emails were sent indiscriminately. There was no interest in penis-enhancement products on the part of the vast majority of recipients, quite a number of whom did not even have penises.
“Keep in mind that the reason that advertising exists is because it works.”
It exists because it can. Most people don’t really have a choice in the matter, which takes user preferences off the table. It takes a lot of work to minimize that sort of thing, and I seriously doubt it can be eliminated. It’s not so much that users prefer this model, it’s that users don’t know how to minimize tracking and targeted ads.
While I’m not at all in favor of regulating targeted advertising and I almost never agree with anything Stallman has to say, I don’t agree that eliminating this advertising model is eliminating the users’ preferred choice.
Well, yeah, my preferred model is to gorge on whatever I want and not get fat.
I think Arnold’s point is that “users’ preferred choice” is impossible, and we shouldn’t pretend it is (though, you know, I heard about this great diet … ).
Sure, and that’s obviously unworkable. My eating habits are starting to drive home that point.
Is targeted advertising “bad”? RMS tends to lead with Reductio Ad Absurdum and slips right into Ad Hominem, so it’s difficult to take anything he says seriously. I suspect it’s unsustainable, though. More and more targeted and intrusive ads is causing a rise in ad blockers and similar plugins. Content providers may complain, but in basic economic terms, most of them are charging too much for the perceived value of their content. Put it another way, their content isn’t worth the ads, the begging for newsletter subscriptions, and all the other hoops you have to jump through to read whatever they’ve posted.
However, that point will be driven home even more with a subscription model. Which I actually think is the best model, even if it will never happen. Subscriptions will drive out content providers who don’t provide content worth enough to pay for. And overall, I think the web needs a great deal less worthless content. “Worthless” defined as “content people only want if it’s free”.
Advertising is a wonderful thing and it supports a lot of creative activity. And targeted advertising improves its effectiveness, I get that. The “news” algorithms are more of a worry. When Facebook and Google target the news I worry that they are also able to influence politics.
There won’t be a “ban” on targeted advertising. Users will eventually organize around defensive measures that obfuscate their identity when they use the internet. Internet vendors won’t even get to know who their customers are any more. Vendors can try going back to a scattershot advertising strategy. Good luck with making that work.
In a specialty, targeted ads are essential information about the industry. In many of the trad mags of yesteryear, and the trade pages today intermix ads and reports, almost indistinguishable. Orderbooks, catalogs, have to have them.
So I search for something on Amazon, and later I see ad for something similar on Facebook – Orwell was right!
In my view the real problem with advertising-based business models is not “abuse of the data” but the incentive to provide addictive junk content. With a subscription model, there is no incentive to encourage compulsive overuse of a website. With a targeted advertising model, there is. Facebook, Buzzfeed etc basically have the attention-retention incentives of a casino or a drug dealer.
While it’s true that reporters want to be paid, that one seems up for grabs. I write my blog for free. You write your blog for free. People create all sorts of content for free. I wouldn’t assume that one’s the immutable fact.
Razib Khan wrote something close about 5 years ago.
I actually wrote a response to Razib back then, agreeing with it. I didn’ t want to shill my own piece but hey, since you mentioned it.
Razib ends that March 6, 2013 post:
… consider the experience of the end user. When I was a kid to read about science you had to get a copy of Scientific American, Discover, or Omni. Today there are thousands of high quality science blogs, some of them written by the scientists themselves! For the consumer of media we live in a golden age. There are certain high end reportage products which will need institutional backing, but there is now an ocean of content for anyone interested in science.
Many of those blogs no longer exist, or have been turned into cryptic Twitter feeds–something Razib has commented on. It is definitely worse today for the “end user.” On the other hand, Razib’s excellent blog is still going strong, now at gnxp.com