This content originally appeared on Adactio: Journal and was authored by Adactio: Journal
Back when South by Southwest wasn’t terrible, there used to be an annual panel called Browser Wars populated with representatives from the main browser vendors (except for Apple, obviously, who would never venture onto a stage outside of their own events).
I remember getting into a heated debate with the panelists during the 2010 edition. I was mad about web fonts.
Just to set the scene, web fonts didn’t exist back in 2010. That’s what I was mad about.
There was no technical reason why we couldn’t have web fonts. The reason why we didn’t get web fonts for years and years was because browser makers were concerned about piracy and type foundries.
That’s nice and all, but as I said during that panel, I don’t recall any such concerns being raised for photographers when the img element was shipped. Neither was the original text-only web held back by the legimate fear by writers of plagiarism.
My point was not that these concerns weren’t important, but that it wasn’t the job of web browsers to shore up existing business models. To use standards-speak, these concerns are orthogonal.
I’m reminded of this when I see browser makers shoring up the business of behavioural advertising.
I subscribe to the RSS feed of updates to Chrome. Not all of it is necessarily interesting to me, but all of it is supposedly aimed at developers. And yet, in amongst the posts about APIs and features, there’ll be something about the Orwellianly-titled “privacy sandbox”.
This is only of interest to one specific industry: behavioural online advertising driven by surveillance and tracking. I don’t see any similar efforts being made for teachers, cooks, architects, doctors or lawyers.
It’s a ludicrous situation that I put down to the fact that Google, the company that makes Chrome, is also the company that makes its money from targeted advertising.
But then Mozilla started with the same shit.
Now, it’s one thing to roll out a new so-called “feature” to benefit behavioural advertising. It’s quite another to make it enabled by default. That’s a piece of deceptive design that has no place in Firefox. Defaults matter. Browser makers know this. It’s no accident that this “feature” was enabled by default.
This disgusts me.
It disgusts me all the more that it’s all for nothing. Notice that I’ve repeatly referred to behavioural advertising. That’s the kind that relies on tracking and surveillance to work.
There is another kind of advertising. Contextual advertising is when you show an advertisement related to the content of the page the user is currently on. The advertiser doesn’t need to know anything about the user, just the topic of the page.
Conventional wisdom has it that behavioural advertising is much more effective than contextual advertising. After all, why would there be such a huge industry built on tracking and surveillance if it didn’t work? See, for example, this footnote by John Gruber:
So if contextual ads generate, say, one-tenth the revenue of targeted ads, Meta could show 10 times as many ads to users who opt out of targeting. I don’t think 10× is an outlandish multiplier there — given how remarkably profitable Meta’s advertising business is, it might even need to be higher than that.
Seems obvious, right?
But the idea that behavioural advertising works better than contextual advertising has no basis in reality.
If you think you know otherwise, Jon Bradshaw would like to hear from you:
Bradshaw challenges industry to provide proof that data-driven targeting actually makes advertising more effective – or in fact makes it worse. He’s spoiling for a debate – and has three deep, recent studies that show: broad reach beats targeting for incremental growth; that the cost of targeting outweighs the return; and that second and third party data does not outperform a random sample. First party data does beat the random sample – but contextual ads massively outperform even first party data. And they are much, much cheaper. Now, says Bradshaw, let’s see some counter-evidence from those making a killing.
If targeted advertising is going to get preferential treatment from browser makers, I too would like to see some evidence that it actually works.
Further reading:
- The new dot com bubble is here: it’s called online advertising by Jesse Frederik and Maurits Martijn.
- After GDPR, The New York Times cut off ad exchanges in Europe — and kept growing ad revenue by Jessica Davies.
- Subprime Attention Crisis by Tim Hwang.
- Clean advertising by me.
This content originally appeared on Adactio: Journal and was authored by Adactio: Journal
Adactio: Journal | Sciencx (2024-07-16T14:57:05+00:00) Ad tech. Retrieved from https://www.scien.cx/2024/07/16/ad-tech/
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