Advertising tries to legitimize all kinds of surveillance. Somehow we got the situation where it is considered perfectly normal that a corporation is reading my letters to my wife (she uses Gmail), tracks my every movement (I use Android), and keeps a detailed log of maybe half of the web articles I have ever looked at (depending on what ads they serve and whether I used a blocker). Me calling a spade a spade almost makes me sound paranoid. But can you imagine traveling 25 years in the past and telling everyone “this is the glorious future our ‘not evil’ corporation is preparing for you all”? How would the people react? It took a lot of work and research to make us accept all of this as perfectly normal.
Advertising is the driving force behind most clickbait. Yellow journalism is older than internet. But with paywalls, it would be like “you may go ahead and subscribe to your daily dose of stupidity, but I prefer not to see it and I am not going to pay for it”. With advertising, if I accidentally click on the link, I already paid. So the motivation to make me accidentally click on the link is strong. Thus we get articles that contain all the keywords you are looking for, but not the information you tried to find. Or articles with multiple different, sometimes contradictory titles, where A/B testing chooses the one that makes most people click. My problem with “paying by watching ads” is that people often pay without consenting to, and even if 3 seconds after opening the page they regret having clicked on the link, the ad was already shown, the author of the page made the profit.
I don’t have a full idea of how micropayments should work to make me happy, but I imagine that the micropayment company should be separate from the content providers. You would have to explicitly unlock each article by clicking a button on the page… so there is a chance to go “oops, I didn’t realize this page is paid, no I don’t want to pay for it”. (Mere visiting of the link does not automatically imply consent with payment, not even micro.) After paying, there should be a possibility to somehow provide feedback “I regret having paid for this page”. The feedback should not give you the money back (that would enable obvious abuse), but the next time you are going to unlock an article by the same content provider, the button should show you that there is e.g. a 30% probability you are going to regret this. The buttons would also show you how much money you have already spent today, this week, this year; both in general, and for this specific content provider. There are probably many problems with this vision, and the greatest would be the coordination necessary to achieve this.
You can choose whether to have location tracking enabled, though? I have it on, because I like having a record of where I’ve been and I trust Google to handle this information securely, but I could turn it off if I wanted.
keeps a detailed log of maybe half of the web articles I have ever looked at (depending on what ads they serve and whether I used a blocker)
That’s what the second half of the post is about: a project I’m working on to serve targeted ads without letting advertisers know all the sites you visit.
With advertising, if I accidentally click on the link, I already paid. …even if 3 seconds after opening the page they regret having clicked on the link, the ad was already shown, the author of the page made the profit
Mostly not. Advertisers know whether their ads were viewed and aren’t especially interested in paying for ads no one sees. If you read the whole article the publisher will have many more “viewable” ads than if you click “back” right away. Similarly, if you go back right away you’re probably not going to click on ads.
Another big force behind clickbait is that platforms like Facebook will see a click as evidence that the link is interesting, and show it to more people.
Advertising tries to legitimize all kinds of surveillance. Somehow we got the situation where it is considered perfectly normal that a corporation is reading my letters to my wife (she uses Gmail), tracks my every movement (I use Android), and keeps a detailed log of maybe half of the web articles I have ever looked at (depending on what ads they serve and whether I used a blocker). Me calling a spade a spade almost makes me sound paranoid. But can you imagine traveling 25 years in the past and telling everyone “this is the glorious future our ‘not evil’ corporation is preparing for you all”? How would the people react? It took a lot of work and research to make us accept all of this as perfectly normal.
Advertising is the driving force behind most clickbait. Yellow journalism is older than internet. But with paywalls, it would be like “you may go ahead and subscribe to your daily dose of stupidity, but I prefer not to see it and I am not going to pay for it”. With advertising, if I accidentally click on the link, I already paid. So the motivation to make me accidentally click on the link is strong. Thus we get articles that contain all the keywords you are looking for, but not the information you tried to find. Or articles with multiple different, sometimes contradictory titles, where A/B testing chooses the one that makes most people click. My problem with “paying by watching ads” is that people often pay without consenting to, and even if 3 seconds after opening the page they regret having clicked on the link, the ad was already shown, the author of the page made the profit.
I don’t have a full idea of how micropayments should work to make me happy, but I imagine that the micropayment company should be separate from the content providers. You would have to explicitly unlock each article by clicking a button on the page… so there is a chance to go “oops, I didn’t realize this page is paid, no I don’t want to pay for it”. (Mere visiting of the link does not automatically imply consent with payment, not even micro.) After paying, there should be a possibility to somehow provide feedback “I regret having paid for this page”. The feedback should not give you the money back (that would enable obvious abuse), but the next time you are going to unlock an article by the same content provider, the button should show you that there is e.g. a 30% probability you are going to regret this. The buttons would also show you how much money you have already spent today, this week, this year; both in general, and for this specific content provider. There are probably many problems with this vision, and the greatest would be the coordination necessary to achieve this.
Gmail announced they would no longer use the contents of email to target ads in 2017: https://blog.google/products/gmail/g-suite-gains-traction-in-the-enterprise-g-suites-gmail-and-consumer-gmail-to-more-closely-align/ https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/23/technology/gmail-ads.html
You can choose whether to have location tracking enabled, though? I have it on, because I like having a record of where I’ve been and I trust Google to handle this information securely, but I could turn it off if I wanted.
That’s what the second half of the post is about: a project I’m working on to serve targeted ads without letting advertisers know all the sites you visit.
Mostly not. Advertisers know whether their ads were viewed and aren’t especially interested in paying for ads no one sees. If you read the whole article the publisher will have many more “viewable” ads than if you click “back” right away. Similarly, if you go back right away you’re probably not going to click on ads.
Another big force behind clickbait is that platforms like Facebook will see a click as evidence that the link is interesting, and show it to more people.