Advertisers are willing to pay way more for targeted ads. If an app is relying on advertising revenue, the inability to target ads will directly cause the app to generate less revenue.
The solution here is to outlaw targeted advertising, so that marketing budgets can realign to appropriately pay for normal advertising again.
As it is, the efficacy of targeted advertising is a myth. Google claimed in a blog post that their own internal study showed over a 50% benefit in targeted advertising for publishers... but an independent, academic study showed a difference of about 4%.
(Google has suggested, of course, that their wildly different outcomes are because you know, Google has data nobody else has, and obviously Google would never manipulate it's exclusive access to all that data to make studies look like what is best for their business.)
Adtech giants need advertisers to believe they need targeted advertising, because targeted advertising relies on mass data collection only they are capable of getting. If people realized the necessity of using Google and Facebook's mass user data was... a complete lie... any old ad firm could compete with their businesses.
You're thinking too small. Targeted advertising deserves to die in a grease fire, but a proper solution is to universally make an individual's personal data their property and require companies to cough up compensation every time it is used in commercial form. Any attempt to sidestep the compensation must account as fraud.
Holding on to user data needs to be a painful liability. The cost of such micro-accounting alone should incentivise companies to keep hold of as little information as possible, so as not to incur excess processing costs. The aggregated cost of payment processing on top of that will provide a secondary cost vector and further discourage using such data. Combine with GDPR and CCPA like power to demand companies to divulge their full accounting details of your data, and all of a sudden the pain becomes real. Not to mention very expensive.
>Adtech giants need advertisers to believe they need targeted advertising, because targeted advertising relies on mass data collection only they are capable of getting. If people realized the necessity of using Google and Facebook's mass user data was... a complete lie... any old ad firm could compete with their businesses.
Targeted advertising is as old as advertising. Why do you have cloud companies advertising on the billboards in San Francisco, but not in Beatty, Nevada? Why do you have coupons? Why Cosmopolitan has different ads than Linux Format? Why NBA games have different ads than The Bachelor?
Why do companies spend more and more money with companies that do provide better targeted advertising? Do you really believe that P&G spends billions of dollars on advertising, without understanding which forms of it are effective?
There's a valid discussion to be had about scope, allowed sophistication of targeted advertising that should be allowed, and regulations about it, but claiming it doesn't work just shows lack understanding of the topic.
Targeting by placement and location are just proxy for user targeted ads, due to lack of better abilities. Gives you very broad targeting criteria - like San Francisco is likely to have people interested in cloud. Cosmopolitan is likely to have middle age women readers, etc. User-targeted advertising gives you much higher granularity, which makes ads campaigns more effective for advertisers.
Is privacy invading targeted advertising a concern and something that needs more debate? Yes. Can it be creepy and cause harm in some cases? Yes. Should world be driven by advertisers ROI? No. Are user-targeted ads ineffective? Hell no.
But also, just because something is concerning and bad for some aspects of the life (like privacy), it doesn't mean it should be wiped out of the floor, as cheaper and effective advertising does help to grow any capitalist economy. Trade-offs are needed (same as we don't ban oil, even tho it's bad for environment), and it'll become more regulated (either self-regulated by industry, or by governments), but it's not going to disappear.
>The solution here is to outlaw targeted advertising
Thanks, but no. As an end user, my preference goes as:
no advertising >>>>> targeted advertising >> untargeted advertising
And I am not just speaking hypothetically. Google has a switch in your account settings where you can flip a toggle to turn off all targeted Google advertising and make it un-targeted. I couldn't last more than a day with this and flipped the toggle back on.
While with targeted advertising, most ads were useless, they at least were somewhat relevant, and a few even piqued my interest. With untargeted advertising, I was getting absolute trash that was actively annoying me.
> it's my phone not the developers, not the advertisers, mine.
Are you willing to extend this argument to Apple as well? Do you also think that it is not Apple's phone, and that you should be able to do what you want with it, if you choose to?
Because right now Apple does not really agree with your opinion that it is your phone, that you can do what you want with.
People who buy an Apple device often do so in part because Apple does a better job with privacy. The fact that this makes life harder for advertisers is kind of the point.
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