This an interesting crossroads in evolution of internet business models.
Privacy advocates, EFF, DDG, and even Google saying they don’t want 3rd party scripts and cookies (hooray)
EFF etc say they also don’t want an alternative where browsers use machine learning to analyse a users browsing history and assign them a potentially invasive label.
Google says this is already happening anyway with the current 3rd party solution, they who you are, what you do online so why not try to make it reasonably private.
So what does Big Privacy want instead? No 3rd parties, no machine generated interest ids. No potential customer data?
How should businesses owners gather market intelligence on their potential customers? How should potential customers signal their interest in new products?
A couple other initiatives that are taking off are Trade Desk Unified ID 2 which attempts to combine enormous surveillance databases with 1st party scripts to achieve a similar level of intelligence collected under the 3rd party cookie model.
What is the best way for the consumer internet to interact with businesses?
What is the best way for the consumer internet to interact with businesses?
Consumer identifies a need, they search for businesses that offer product or service that addresses the need; go to their page and make a trade. Simple. No ads. Just make sure your service can be found and that you provide enough information for consumer to make a choice.
This is in contrast to today: the business identifies a need, they find vulnerable people who they can potentially convince that they have the need that this business addresses already and sell it to them.
I’d say that from a user standpoint ads that are based on the page/site content are ideal, but from a business standpoint the drop in revenue (comparatively) by moving to such a model at scale makes it a non-starter (just a guess, no data to back it up).
More speculation: I wouldnt think this drop in revenue is due to quality of the ads themselves but rather how it limits the scope - if we’re no longer serving ads to the individual across websites then this makes the number of times their profile is sold/profited off of fewer.
Contextualized advertising gets my vote, though I’m sure there are other alternatives.
That would be interesing if an ad platforms focused on site by content category, so someone selling graphics cards would buy spots from google or facebook, etc to be placed on a specific site like videogameenthusiastists dot com or more general site like gizmodo, but the dictionary site who might under 3rd party have known that a visitor is a video game enthusiast will no longer receive the ad placements.
Interesting to think about how all of this will change the web, however it works out.
How should businesses owners gather market intelligence on their potential customers? How should potential customers signal their interest in new products?
The way I see it, this is not my concern. I know the ad business keeps a lot of content mills afloat, but I’m not particularly enamored with how that has turned out.
The point is that they are still going to do it anyway through things like Unified ID, Turtledove (outside scope of FLoC) so while we can object to the latest thing in the media, how would we propose they do it? If nobody cares then they have a bag of tricks full of worse measures waiting in the wings.
