> If you don't, and don't want to be tracked for ads, how do you propose things work?
There are so many hobbies and interests where the rich, meaty information people can benefit from is found on old-school blogs and websites that their owners have maintained without expecting to make much money at all, besides the occasional click-through to an Amazon referral link.
However, those blogs and websites have now become hard to find because they have been pushed down in search results due to Google's changed algorithms and ad-supported websites heavy on SEO – sometimes those ad-supported websites are literal copies of earlier advertising-free blogs where a developing-world freelancer was paid to rewrite all the content just enough to avoid a DMCA takedown. Also, the advertising-supported world of mobile social-media apps has made people today less likely to step outside of their walled gardens and consider small third-party independent websites.
So, to a degree, things would work better in certain cases if targeted-advertising-supported websites disappeared; their decline would reveal a whole world of useful free content that was there the whole time.
Wikipedia is a well-known example of a vast amount of content that I can read without any tracking or targeted ads. In fact, there's very little advertising at all -- a few times a year they show me a banner asking for donations to the site.
SEO was a thing before tracking and widespread advertising, though, and I can't see it disappear even if we somehow manage to ban those widespread tracking practices. Remember keyword stacking?
Businesses providing paid services on the internet will still want to get noticed before those free smaller websites and will do whatever they can to appear first in relevant search engines results regardless. The reasons to get people on their sites would shift from showing them ads to selling them a paid product, but reeling people in is still going to be the objective.
There are many great arguments against tracking, but IMHO, SEO isn't one.
Car dealerships send direct mail post cards to you if you've bought from them before. Seems like individual retargeting to me.
If you've every made the buying decisions for an organization, you've been targeted individually before. Through digital economies of scale, it's less expensive to do with consumers now and allows for publishers to get paid to generate content at the same time.
Indeed, their page doesn't make it obvious, but on a computer you can use extensions for Chrome and Firefox. Puma is the only option on mobile though ( never heard of it either).
Puma is a fork of Firefox that does other cool shit: it supports Handshake for DNS, uses DDG by default, and there are some mentions of IPFS that I don't know if it's implemented or not.
I have yet to play with it though, mostly because I do the vast majority of my browsing on a desktop.
Thanks a lot. Coil looked like its own browser, and I didn't want yo use another browser. I was using a similar service in the past, but unsuscribed because most created I wanted to send money weren't receiving it.
Yeah, it's not as obvious as it could be, i'm in the process of writing an article on the subject and how important i think it is combat ads and tracking in the long term.
You can, but do you remember the times on the Internet when that was the case? I vaguely remember cents per thousands of ad clicks, which would make most websites financially unviable.
You can, but do you remember the times on the Internet when that was the case? I vaguely remember cents per thousands of ad clicks, which would make most websites financially unviable.
I do, and the amount of money webmasters made back then was much better.
Some of the sites I ran got $10-$15 CPM. Ad campaigns targeted to my sites' niches could be up to $25 CPM.
Ever since Google introduced AdWords and its race to the bottom, content-heavy web sites are lucky to get 10¢ CPM.
But since the new kids on the block have never experienced a profitable web without tracking, they don't know any better and think it didn't exist.
But AdWords isn't a race to the bottom; it's the opposite. Google's ad business is so big because Google drives so much more value than other ad targeters.
This will never happen because the people who would pay the most to avoid targeted ad tracking are the ones who are the most valuable to advertisers (essentially, people able and willing to spend money). So when you see Facebook making $20 per user or whatever and think “I’d pay $20 to avoid being tracked,” it’s actually Facebook making nothing from a ton of users, a little from a bunch of them, and a huge amount from their “whales,” and the people willing to pay to avoid being tracked are most likely in the “whales.”
I would say with some subscription services you see the inverse of this - i.e. streaming media. IIRC youtube creators make more per view with subscribers than they do with ads, but I could be wrong.
Simple answer: The sum of all online marketing dollars is more than the sum of any amount of money people would pay for online content.
That alone means direct payment will never replace ads.
Most people are not reading The Financial Times or Bloomberg, they are reading rags like The Sun and Facebook gossip. I would love for that content to go away, but really, ad supported models work great for that demographic.
I think you miss my point. Even if online advertising (as well as marketing, but that's a different concept) was completely worthless, the number of paid dollars would not go up, and the "total GDP" of the internet would go down.
If that's a desired future we should be honest about it, but it's a future without as many independent journalists who can't afford a team to sell their content, for example.
Indeed, because for many of them the only option is ads, because almost nobody uses any alternatives ( the only one i know of is Web Monetization). Until it's massively used, few site owners will make the effort.
I think I would be fine with paying too, but by paying you're giving up all of your personal information. Unless websites will suddenly start accepting something like Monero, I actually prefer to be tracked, as I can at least block it.
If a highway robber stops you and demands "your money or your life" and you object, they can't justifiably say "well if you don't pay me, how do you propose things work?"
The responsibility isn't on the user to either consent to tracking or to come up with an alternative business model that allows people to monetize things. The responsibility for monetizing things falls on the people who want to do the monetizing. They have to figure out a business model that works and that users consent to.
