> Because we lost so much data, we also instituted a self-reported attribution “how did you hear about us” survey. Eight months in, and we’ve actually found new channels and learned a lot about our old ones. Ironically, a lack of data actually led to new insights.
As a user you'll probably find you get more clickbait, more ads, more paywalls, less access to high quailty content, etc as publishers scramble to survive. (Because the value of their ad inventory drops.)
And as marketing is less efficient, higher budgets are required to drive the same results. We can potentially expect to see these costs gradually passed on to the consumers and watch more businesses fail.
How many times do you actually click on, or buy things from the ads you are shown?
You make it sound like we should all be grateful. Like ads are adding value to our lives. They don't. Outside of marketing, nobody cares about ads. We train our cognition to cancel out ads. We avoid them. The only people looking at ads and appreciating them are the ones, like yourself, who find them useful for things nobody asked for. I'd much rather you DON'T track me and --gasp-- DON'T show me an ad either. "But then you'll see worse ads!" Good. I'll ignore those too.
In my lifetime I've probably been shown $10,000 worth of ads on the internet, and I've probably spent $12 on them. Ironic that the only people who think that ads matter are the ones who's job it is to buy them with other people's money. Keep spending your bosses money, and I'll keep wasting it for you.
Well said. I'm also perplexed and frustrated by all the ad-tech apologists I'm hearing lately both here and IRL. There's the soft "no alternatives!" version where ads and enshittification are some kind of obviously necessary force of nature that we should expect and just have to deal with, and the more extreme stance that it's actively good for us somehow.
Anyway like many other humans on the internet, I've been tracked for decades now and somehow the junk thrust on me is still not even close to relevant for my demographic, and it's usually like they don't even know my gender or age group within 20 years. Except of course surely FANG have figured that out, so are they just routinely defrauding people that buy "targeted" ads and throwing them at any random eyeballs they have access to? It sounds paranoid to think that a crime on that scale would exist since it seems hard to pull off or keep quiet, so I guess we just keep listening to self-reported statistics that every dollar spent on ads wins $8 in sales. But.. I'm glad it's not my dollar
> We train our cognition to cancel out ads. We avoid them.
Anecdotally, I've noticed that with Reddits latest addition of allowing users to highlight posts yellow with a "super upvote" that, without thinking about it, my eyes immediately ignore those posts.
The part I like most is how every time I buy something I then get ads about that exact thing.
Mate I've already bought the thing, I'm not making a collection, and I'm not buying a $200 ham every other week either, that was a christmas gift you goof.
