This article looks very interesting, but it's full of jargon from the ad industry that makes it somewhat opaque to me. What I have an interest in is, what will this do to the stock market on Tuesday?
Also, I find it interesting and confusing that the site puts up a panel on the privacy policy, which says "By using our site, you agree to these terms". But then it has an "Accept" button, as well as an "X". So (not that this site is unique) what does it mean if I don't click Accept (as is my wont)?
I don't know about Tuesday, but you should have been shorting any company that derives a significant percentage of their revenue from the EU ad market for the last several months. Online ad revenue from the EU will fall and never rise again, it's just a matter of exactly how much. The only thing that might change this is if there is such a public outcry about the negative effects of GDPR that it gets dialed back. But that seems like a longshot.
High quality, highly relevant content just became a lot more valuable.
I subscribe to Sound on Sound, a magazine about music technology. I pay them $90 a year, but I also whitelist them in my ad blocker, because the ads complement the content. If I'm reading a review of a synthesizer or an article about how to record electric guitars, it's really easy to serve relevant ads with good click-through and conversion rates without intensive tracking. Both the content and the advertising serve to enhance my enjoyment of a hobby that I care deeply about.
A lot of publishers are really going to struggle post-GDPR, because their content is clickbaity and vapid. It isn't worth paying for and it isn't relevant to the readers' lives. It exists because it briefly hijacks your attention, which can be profitably monetised by ad networks that invasively track your activities online.
Some good publishers are going to get caught in the crossfire which is unfortunate, but I think that the overall effect will be net positive. If publishers can't sell their ad inventory without recourse to surveillance, they need to seriously examine whether their business model is honorable and whether they are offering something of real value.
Can someone ELI5 to me why we can't simply have ads targeted to content instead of to visitors?
Native ads do this. It's a huge industry, and will likely get far bigger under GDPR. But it takes highly specialized techniques to make the numbers back out as an advertiser. There's a ton of fraud, the bidding strategy is very different from programmatic/retargeting, the ads that work are different, etc. Most of the ad industry doesn't know how to do this, and many types of ads simply won't be profitable on native networks.
From what I'm hearing from my friends that do ecommerce stuff, product ads targeted to the EU are no longer profitable across the board either. That will force a ton of review sites aimed at EU visitors to shutdown, along with many YouTube reviewers. As advertisers pull product ads out of the major ad networks because they can't make money, the revenue of publishers/content creators in the product review space will plummet in lockstep. Amazon has cut affiliate commissions to the point where turning to them is no longer an option for any site that costs money to maintain either.
GDPR seems to be on track to wipe out vast swaths of businesses serving the EU market, and not just the "evil" ones it was trying to wipe out. It's a shitshow, but it was entirely predictable.
1) The correlation between the content people peruse and the products people buy is pretty poor. Take a news site with an article about school shootings- what related content would they advertise? Guns? Back to school supplies? Without knowing why a person is on a page, it's difficult to understand what related products might appeal to them.
2) Tracking user behavior is fairly important to implement click fraud detection- obviously that doesn't justify shady behavior on the part of ad networks, nor does it necessitate the in-depth amount of personally identifying information they may or may not collect. However, some forms of that data- think IP addresses, click history- may be useful.
3) If you already have some data per point 2, why would you waste an opportunity to display something meaningful by putting up an ad that might be completely irrelevant given what you happen to know already?
None of this is meant to justify targeted ads, only to explain why they have better appeal to both content providers and ad networks.
The market is too segmented for broad interest ads to work, and advertisers don’t want to deal with multiple content channels.
Plus, the editorial quality of ads is generally so awful, so you need to align with the users interests to help them accidentally click on it in many cases.
The newspaper was a beautiful business. They had a monopoly or minimal competition, and a critical mass that supported everything from classified ads to flyers to the pet store.
Google's main ad products, AdWords and AdSense, are content based. For many advertisers, this has always been the best type of targeting. E.g. some hotel in Toronto may advertise on the search engine results page when you search for "hotels in Toronto", or view a video about things to do in Toronto.
Ad buyers are uncertain about what the fallout of the GDPR is and are taking a "wait-and-see" approach to advertising. That's causing the price drop, since fewer people are buying. When the dust settles, and they know how to proceed, it will return to normal.
If I could predict how quickly it would bounce back, I'd be tempted to get involved in the exchange market.
Good. Adverts are a drain on society, they increase prices of goods which are advertised, and mean you as the product/consumer end up paying more than the service/website gets, as the adverts take a cut.
Look at television in the US, or even in the UK on non-BBC channels. You watch something for an hour, you get 40 minutes of actual use out of it, you get massive breaks in the narative which reduces your enjoyment, and you waste 20 minutes of your life.
Does this mean you get free tv? No, you're still paying. The only reason that $CORP spends $1 advertising to you in your program is because it will make you spend more than $1 with them at some point in the future.
When you watch advert TV, you're selling 20 minutes of your life not for $1, but to shift your $1 expense now to a $2 expense hidden elsewhere in the future.
Far better to save 20 minutes, and that $2 in the future, by spending $1 upfront, and being the customer, not the product.
Targeted ads are like a cancer on the web front-end. It started out unnoticeably with one mutant script infecting a page, and now we’re at the point where the majority of client network traffic from accessing a news article goes to ad peddlers and trackers — the cancer has overtaken the host.
A chemotherapy that starves the cancer’s food supply by 25-40% overnight sounds like a success to me.
(Edit: USA Today decided to actively remove the cancer tumors and created an adless site for EU visitors. The results are amazing: load time shrunk from 45s to 3s, network requests from 500+ to only 34! Source: https://twitter.com/fr3ino/status/1000167643431784449?s=21 )
Not to mention the ads keep following you after you buy the thing.
And this is not only because of lack of information. Checks out a cellphone from Amazon, buys the cellphone, still get ads saying "you might like this cellphone"
Wow, that America Today stunt is really impressive, feels almost surreal. Great way to fill the time until things sort out and they eventually devise a way of compliant monetization.
Yes it's fantastic. Now if we only could ride the momentum of this and slam something equally as punishing on Facebook, then we could be heading towards a renewed golden age of the internet.
Targeted ads are great. Things cost less because there is more competitions between suppliers and they don't have to pay a lot per piece, since they can target only the specific people who needs the thing they sell. This is GREAT for people with small business and low budgets... but we know now that Europe only care about the big business and billionaire overlords.
Also with targeted ads you don't have to hear/read about products you will never care for a moment in your life.
I feel like the GDPR is working for me to help prevent companies treating my data like it belongs to them.
I guess I'll have to check under the bed for my missing billions.
> Also with targeted ads you don't have to hear/read about products you will never care for a moment in your life.
I don't have to look at irrelevant adverts at all because I use an adblocker. Something I started to use because of the battery sucking CPU fan abusing privacy invading toxic wasteland that is the online advertisement industry.
The tech industry in general, and online advertising companies specifically proved over many years they couldn't be trusted to look after people's data and privacy, so forgive me if I don't shed a tear for the shitbags who now have to stop exploiting me and my family's data.
i hope the US manages to pass a sensible, pragmatic regulation that takes into account the realities of the internet, because gdpr is a bureaucratic nightmare.
It's perfectly possible to do targeted ads without collecting personal data! You just keep personal data where it belongs - on the user's computer/phone - rather than stealing it.
Keep the personal data in local storage, have the logic that chooses ads run locally, and you have targetted ads without invading anyone's privacy.
I don't know if that satisfies the GDPR - not a lawyer. But it would satisfy me.
I always wonder how many of my decisions have been subconsciously influenced by ads. At the moment the only stuff I feel like spending money on is tech stuff. Probably because the only place I visit on the web is tech forums. My spending on other stuff has dropped down drastically ever since I took a hiatus from Facebook.
Solution is simple: don’t do business in the EU. problem solved. Let the companies who can be bothered to expose themselves to litigation and spend $$ on compliance service those customers.
Funnily enough, the GDPR applies not just to foreign companies processing the data of people in the EU, but also to companies in the EU processing anyone's data :-D
Could someone please ELI5 how programmatic ads could be compliant with GDPR? I can vaguely imagine how Google could be compliant. But generally, there are just so many players. How could PII transfers even be tracked?
> how programmatic ads could be compliant with GDPR?
One way would be to:
- store all user data client-side, stuff it in a cookie.
- Guess this user data, associate particular articles with particular data, e.g. X % chance of being male/female, probably likes cars, probably likes the colour "yellow", even if some of this data has been given to you directly by the user.
-"Clean room" ad selection. Have the ad selection algorithm run on the same server/network that serves the content and retrieve desired ads directly without exchanging any user data. Advertisers provide matrices of desirable matches of available ads to match against.
Matches won't be as precise, available data will be very limited, and if a user clears the cookie, you'll have to start from scratch again.
This way:
- you know nothing about the user, except for what could be inferred from their reading behaviour on a single site.
- even that limited data never reaches advertisers, so it can't be collated and aggregated in a pernicious way
- users are in complete control of their own data. If they clear their cookie, there's nothing left on the publisher's side.
-if you shield and rotate your ip logs, they're nothing more than addresses that requested some page at some time. None of the data is combined in an attempt to identify a user, other than possibly in a security context.
So yes, it should be possible even if it needs a more careful approach and more deliberation with regards to user privacy, but that's a main point of the legislation.
It is unlikely, these ad networks are going to have to do a pop up each time they added another ad buyer to their network to allow you to opt in. It really couldn't happen to scummier people in many ways. I expect there are exists some reasonable third party ad aggregation and distribution networks but given the low bar to entry and ease with which the advertiser can be defrauded out of a few thousand dollars, the number of scummy ones dominate by a large margin.
You can capture consent on your first party site (enumerating each of the networks and letting user opt out) and pass that to advertising networks: http://advertisingconsent.eu/
[+] [-] perl4ever|7 years ago|reply
Also, I find it interesting and confusing that the site puts up a panel on the privacy policy, which says "By using our site, you agree to these terms". But then it has an "Accept" button, as well as an "X". So (not that this site is unique) what does it mean if I don't click Accept (as is my wont)?
[+] [-] digitalengineer|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] downandout|7 years ago|reply
I don't know about Tuesday, but you should have been shorting any company that derives a significant percentage of their revenue from the EU ad market for the last several months. Online ad revenue from the EU will fall and never rise again, it's just a matter of exactly how much. The only thing that might change this is if there is such a public outcry about the negative effects of GDPR that it gets dialed back. But that seems like a longshot.
[+] [-] bad_user|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mabn|7 years ago|reply
"If want to agree to processing your data by Company then click Accept or close this window with the [X] button."
Which is ridiculous.
[+] [-] hk__2|7 years ago|reply
You can’t measure any effect by looking at the stock market for one day.
[+] [-] js8|7 years ago|reply
What changed in the landscape that this is no longer possible?
[+] [-] jdietrich|7 years ago|reply
I subscribe to Sound on Sound, a magazine about music technology. I pay them $90 a year, but I also whitelist them in my ad blocker, because the ads complement the content. If I'm reading a review of a synthesizer or an article about how to record electric guitars, it's really easy to serve relevant ads with good click-through and conversion rates without intensive tracking. Both the content and the advertising serve to enhance my enjoyment of a hobby that I care deeply about.
A lot of publishers are really going to struggle post-GDPR, because their content is clickbaity and vapid. It isn't worth paying for and it isn't relevant to the readers' lives. It exists because it briefly hijacks your attention, which can be profitably monetised by ad networks that invasively track your activities online.
Some good publishers are going to get caught in the crossfire which is unfortunate, but I think that the overall effect will be net positive. If publishers can't sell their ad inventory without recourse to surveillance, they need to seriously examine whether their business model is honorable and whether they are offering something of real value.
[+] [-] downandout|7 years ago|reply
Native ads do this. It's a huge industry, and will likely get far bigger under GDPR. But it takes highly specialized techniques to make the numbers back out as an advertiser. There's a ton of fraud, the bidding strategy is very different from programmatic/retargeting, the ads that work are different, etc. Most of the ad industry doesn't know how to do this, and many types of ads simply won't be profitable on native networks.
From what I'm hearing from my friends that do ecommerce stuff, product ads targeted to the EU are no longer profitable across the board either. That will force a ton of review sites aimed at EU visitors to shutdown, along with many YouTube reviewers. As advertisers pull product ads out of the major ad networks because they can't make money, the revenue of publishers/content creators in the product review space will plummet in lockstep. Amazon has cut affiliate commissions to the point where turning to them is no longer an option for any site that costs money to maintain either.
GDPR seems to be on track to wipe out vast swaths of businesses serving the EU market, and not just the "evil" ones it was trying to wipe out. It's a shitshow, but it was entirely predictable.
[+] [-] zdragnar|7 years ago|reply
2) Tracking user behavior is fairly important to implement click fraud detection- obviously that doesn't justify shady behavior on the part of ad networks, nor does it necessitate the in-depth amount of personally identifying information they may or may not collect. However, some forms of that data- think IP addresses, click history- may be useful.
3) If you already have some data per point 2, why would you waste an opportunity to display something meaningful by putting up an ad that might be completely irrelevant given what you happen to know already?
None of this is meant to justify targeted ads, only to explain why they have better appeal to both content providers and ad networks.
[+] [-] Spooky23|7 years ago|reply
Plus, the editorial quality of ads is generally so awful, so you need to align with the users interests to help them accidentally click on it in many cases.
The newspaper was a beautiful business. They had a monopoly or minimal competition, and a critical mass that supported everything from classified ads to flyers to the pet store.
[+] [-] marcell|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mortehu|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cm2012|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tjoff|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] triviatise|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MiscComment3209|7 years ago|reply
Ad buyers are uncertain about what the fallout of the GDPR is and are taking a "wait-and-see" approach to advertising. That's causing the price drop, since fewer people are buying. When the dust settles, and they know how to proceed, it will return to normal.
If I could predict how quickly it would bounce back, I'd be tempted to get involved in the exchange market.
[+] [-] isostatic|7 years ago|reply
Look at television in the US, or even in the UK on non-BBC channels. You watch something for an hour, you get 40 minutes of actual use out of it, you get massive breaks in the narative which reduces your enjoyment, and you waste 20 minutes of your life.
Does this mean you get free tv? No, you're still paying. The only reason that $CORP spends $1 advertising to you in your program is because it will make you spend more than $1 with them at some point in the future.
When you watch advert TV, you're selling 20 minutes of your life not for $1, but to shift your $1 expense now to a $2 expense hidden elsewhere in the future.
Far better to save 20 minutes, and that $2 in the future, by spending $1 upfront, and being the customer, not the product.
[+] [-] pavlov|7 years ago|reply
A chemotherapy that starves the cancer’s food supply by 25-40% overnight sounds like a success to me.
(Edit: USA Today decided to actively remove the cancer tumors and created an adless site for EU visitors. The results are amazing: load time shrunk from 45s to 3s, network requests from 500+ to only 34! Source: https://twitter.com/fr3ino/status/1000167643431784449?s=21 )
[+] [-] raverbashing|7 years ago|reply
And this is not only because of lack of information. Checks out a cellphone from Amazon, buys the cellphone, still get ads saying "you might like this cellphone"
[+] [-] freeflight|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nkkollaw|7 years ago|reply
But that's why everyone uses ad blockers.
It's just unusable otherwise
[+] [-] usrusr|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] C14L|7 years ago|reply
Or, in other words: if journalists didn't have to eat.
[+] [-] digi_owl|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 627467|7 years ago|reply
First I call this the "great unsubscriber" due to the great number of (since) forgotten newsletter i got unsubscribe from. And Now this.
As european consumer (despite being outside europe) i ca only see benefits with this new regulation.
[+] [-] MikkoFinell|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nannePOPI|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wlll|7 years ago|reply
I guess I'll have to check under the bed for my missing billions.
> Also with targeted ads you don't have to hear/read about products you will never care for a moment in your life.
I don't have to look at irrelevant adverts at all because I use an adblocker. Something I started to use because of the battery sucking CPU fan abusing privacy invading toxic wasteland that is the online advertisement industry.
The tech industry in general, and online advertising companies specifically proved over many years they couldn't be trusted to look after people's data and privacy, so forgive me if I don't shed a tear for the shitbags who now have to stop exploiting me and my family's data.
[+] [-] nielsbot|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yborg|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zerostar07|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ajb|7 years ago|reply
It's perfectly possible to do targeted ads without collecting personal data! You just keep personal data where it belongs - on the user's computer/phone - rather than stealing it.
Keep the personal data in local storage, have the logic that chooses ads run locally, and you have targetted ads without invading anyone's privacy.
I don't know if that satisfies the GDPR - not a lawyer. But it would satisfy me.
[+] [-] xstartup|7 years ago|reply
Add fee of lawyers (and future litigation/compliance risk damage) into EU customers' subscription fee.
[+] [-] sanxiyn|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] manibatra|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cm2012|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] clay_the_ripper|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ma2rten|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tannhaeuser|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xstartup|7 years ago|reply
EU has never done anything about them.
[+] [-] azernik|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lima|7 years ago|reply
They just did...
[+] [-] adamnemecek|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mirimir|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] craigsmansion|7 years ago|reply
One way would be to:
- store all user data client-side, stuff it in a cookie.
- Guess this user data, associate particular articles with particular data, e.g. X % chance of being male/female, probably likes cars, probably likes the colour "yellow", even if some of this data has been given to you directly by the user.
-"Clean room" ad selection. Have the ad selection algorithm run on the same server/network that serves the content and retrieve desired ads directly without exchanging any user data. Advertisers provide matrices of desirable matches of available ads to match against.
Matches won't be as precise, available data will be very limited, and if a user clears the cookie, you'll have to start from scratch again.
This way:
- you know nothing about the user, except for what could be inferred from their reading behaviour on a single site.
- even that limited data never reaches advertisers, so it can't be collated and aggregated in a pernicious way
- users are in complete control of their own data. If they clear their cookie, there's nothing left on the publisher's side.
-if you shield and rotate your ip logs, they're nothing more than addresses that requested some page at some time. None of the data is combined in an attempt to identify a user, other than possibly in a security context.
So yes, it should be possible even if it needs a more careful approach and more deliberation with regards to user privacy, but that's a main point of the legislation.
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|7 years ago|reply
Interesting times for ad tech, that is for sure.
[+] [-] ec109685|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]