
Ad Companies Love Google’s Ad Blocker, but Hate Apple’s Privacy Features - artsandsci
https://www.howtogeek.com/342297/why-ad-companies-love-googles-ad-blocker-but-hate-apples-privacy-features/
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fouc
A good reminder that Google's customers are actually advertisers, whereas
Apple's customers are the end-user.

~~~
kyrra
(I'm a Googler, opinions are my own).

I'd say it's a lot more complicated than that.

If you are paying Google, you are definitely a customer. This would be
anything from GSuite/cloud, Fi, Play store, Express, and many others. Google
isn't just Ads, there are a lot of products and lot of teams that have
different priorities and concerns.

Product teams here that you don't pay still care about their users. It's good
to remember that there are still engineers behind these products. Many of them
have similar opinions to those expressed on HN. When an unpopular decision is
made, people are vocal with their concerns.

~~~
SllX
I absolutely believe that engineers and product teams do care about their
users.

That said, I also completely believe that Executives at Google are driven by
what drives the majority of Google's revenue, i.e. the people that pay them
the most money, their customers, advertisers.

Engineers can have the best of intentions but what Google or any company,
especially a publicly listed company beholden to their shareholders,
ultimately ends up _doing_ is what ultimately benefits their shareholders as
decreed by their leadership.

I'm not saying you should trust any corporation to ultimately have your best
interests at heart. I'm saying you should trust what is on their balance
sheets to determine what values they will hold and protect when they decide
their lobbying budgets in Washington, Brussels, etc. for the year. After that,
you can vote with your wallet, time, attention, or whatever asset it is you
hold that a given corporation covets.

So can you say with certainty that if I pay for GSuite that Google won't mine
my hosted data/metadata or other information any more or less than someone
that doesn't? Does Google only track my purchases in the Play Store to keep
track of what I have in fact purchased as a good storefront would, and not to
store it in a larger profile they've constructed of me or just sell the info
on to a broker? I pay for YouTube Red, so does Google not use any information
from my YouTube profile for advertising purposes on its other properties?

~~~
eitally
I can say with certainty that Google does not treat paying G Suite customer
data the same as consumers'. It is not mined, it is not targeted, and it is
not used in any way for advertising purposes.

I can say this as a former G Suite buyer who signed the contract & ToS, a
current googler working with G Suite and Cloud resellers, and as someone who
has been a part of Google's internal GDPR readiness programs.

I cannot address the rest of your questions authoritatively, but I don't
particularly care about those, either, comparatively.

~~~
aformergoogler
_It is not mined, it is not targeted, and it is not used in any way for
advertising purposes._

(For the curious, this has been repeatedly disproven.)

~~~
ReverseCold
This seems to say otherwise (?)

[https://gsuite.google.com/learn-more/security/security-
white...](https://gsuite.google.com/learn-more/security/security-
whitepaper/page-6.html)

Does it have exceptions somewhere / am I not reading close enough?

------
bsears
Good on Apple for allowing tracking cookies to be blocked, i'd next like to
see them implement blocking of tracking scripts.

They are a nuisance to privacy as well as contributing to web bloat. I've seen
sites with 20+ trackers each with their own javascript and all it takes is for
one to be compromised for an XSS vector to be opened.

~~~
negus
That's true, but this web bloat pays the bills. It is what brings you and
billions of other people great services like maps, email, translate etc for
free. Web without ads would not be the same as it is now and I'm not sure
whether it would seem better to you

~~~
alkonaut
Honestly just charge for the services or take them offline I say. I want to
pay for Facebook with money. I can’t.

I’d really like to see a complete attack - technical _and_ legal - that goes
even further than Apple’s on the current ad business model even if it means
90% of ad revenue disappears over night, and a similar fraction of “free”
services do too.

~~~
victorhooi
People say this - but they rarely put their money where their mouth is.

History has shown time and time again that people are cheapskate. I know I'm
guilty of this as well.

We like to signal that oh yes, we have money, and we'll pay. But then they
seize up when they see the bill.

I subscribe to things like 1Password, Netflix, Hulu, Pocketsmith etc. If I sat
down and added it all up, I assume it'd be several hundred a year. Even
working in tech, I still sometimes think twice about paying for all these
things.

How much would you pay for Facebook? $20 a month? $30 a month? $100?

I suspect you and I both have very little insight into how much it actually
costs to run Facebook - but working for another internet giant, I can say it
probably costs a lot more than the average layperson assumes.

~~~
Guest9812398
I run a community site, with a lot of loyal long term users (most users check
the site about 10 times a day and have been registered for years). My AWS bill
is 15k per year, and the site earns 70k a year from a couple of
advertisements.

Now, I also give users the option to pay per month to remove advertising and
receive a number of additional perks for fun. However, only 100 of the 100k
active users decide to do so, and that only brings in 5k a year in earnings.

In short, 15k in expenses, 70k from advertising, and 5k from users willing to
pay money. So, if advertising fails I go from a 60k profit to a 10k loss per
year, and the site would quickly close.

~~~
igravious
Uh?

_Only_ 5k a year in earnings?

100 users out of 100k is .1% (a ratio of 1,000)

If the other 99.9% of your users paid the same rate that'd be 5k x 1,000 = 5
million which is _way_ out of whack with what your advertisers think your site
is worth which is 70k. You're overcharging your users by a substantial amount
(a factor of approx 72 if my calculations are correct) so it's unsurprising
only .1% have opened their wallets. The other 99.9% don't want to be fleeced
by you.

~~~
Guest9812398
There are a few things you need to keep in mind. Users that are willing to pay
are typically from higher paying advertising regions, because those are areas
where people have higher income. Therefore, I might generate $1 a year per
user in advertising, but the average region where people are willing to pay is
generating $3 per year.

That changes your calculation to a 24x increase.

Ok, then you need to realize only the most active users typically want to open
their wallets. The users visiting 20x a day are going to pay before the people
that visit a few times a week. So, if a paying user is typically 3x more
active than a non-paying users, they're generating more advertising income.

That changes your calculation to an 8x increase.

Now, I should inform you users have 3 different payment options. All options
remove advertising, but some users pay more because they want to support the
site. So, users can actually pay 50% less than the average numbers I shared in
the previous message, and still have advertising removed.

That changes your calculation to a 4x increase.

Ok, this is now looking more accurate, and I would agree the average user is
probably paying 4x more than I earn from them in advertising. This is done on
purpose to optimize earnings. If I lower payments by 4x so they're close to
advertising rates, I'm not going to have 4x as many users sign-up. Even a 1
cent payment option will scare away 95% of people.

So, yes, I'm charging people more than they generate from advertising. If I
charge them the same amount, then I would very likely have 150 instead of 100
paying users and see lower earnings. This doesn't influence my original
message, and how advertising is the most important source of revenue for many
sites. Without advertising there is no way I could cover my 15k in expenses,
and no amount of fine tuning to my user payment system would get me to those
numbers.

~~~
igravious
Are you just guessing or did you A/B test it to find out the optimal pricing
structure that is also fair for the user?

~~~
prepend
Since s/he charges $50/year I think we all know that the answer is that s/he
did no testing.

The option is probably more of just a cool way to foster community than to
actually generate revenue/profit.

------
tomc1985
Why should we, or Apple, care about how much money these ad companies are
losing?

~~~
shaki-dora
Most professionally-produced content on the web is ad-fianced. Quality
journalism, for example, is necessary for a functioning democracy. And no,
bloggers and other hobbyist cannot replace The New York Times.

While (some) publishers may be able to survive behind a paywall, the average
citizen is unlikely to subscribe to more than maybe one or two. Where
currently they may get their news from dozens of independent outlets, they
will inevitably be restricted to far less diverse set.

You can easily do the following experiment: try not visiting any websites that
have advertising for a month or so. Almost by definition, this is will be a
loss for you (because otherwise you would not visit any such sites now).

Now, some people will argue that all these creates should simply adopt some
other business model. I think that's obviously foolish, considering the
sizeable number of failed attempts. But if you believe that, say, half of all
publishers can somehow pull it off, the question becomes: Is avoiding ads
worth cutting the amount of professionally-produced content in half?

And, if you are wrong and 90%+ of newspapers, literary platforms, trade
publications etc. actually die in the process: would we not lose something far
more essential than what we gained?

~~~
thaumasiotes
> And no, bloggers and other hobbyist cannot replace The New York Times.

...because?

~~~
tomc1985
At minimum, they probably aren't trained in journalistic integrity?

~~~
thaumasiotes
Would you be more worried about whether a reporter was formally "trained" in
journalistic integrity, or about whether their reporting was accurate?

~~~
tomc1985
The former helps ensure the latter (minus the quotes, of course)

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combatentropy
I like customized ads. All my life I hated advertising. It was really weird
when I started my own business and started to get postcards for things related
to my business and I found myself actually enjoying them. Furthermore, I don't
get the aversion to tracking cookies. I just don't see a likely downside to
it, though I've heard theoretical ones like what if the U.S. becomes a
communist dictatorship some day.

That said, my targeted ads online still haven't nailed it. Half the time
they're for something I just bought. Like, I just bought a watch on Amazon, so
now on Facebook I see ads for watches for three weeks. Too late. (Of course
the example is fake. Nobody buys watches anymore.) Anyway, half the time
they're too late, the other half they're just too off the mark. For example,
I'm thinking of moving. So I research apartments in that city. So Facebook
shows me ads for apartments for the city I'm still in.

The best ads for me have been the ones based on AdSense -- that is, the text
of the page that I'm on. I'm reading an article about how to use a hammer, and
at the bottom is an ad for a hammer. No tracking cookies required, and yet a
better match.

~~~
konschubert
I wonder if all those ads that are shown too late show up in some marketing
department's data analytics with really good conversion rates...

~~~
shostack
Not if you've already converted. Those are likely wasted impressions that drag
down numbers, not improve them.

Often what can happen is you can have retargeting lists setup that populate
automatically, but depending on how they are implemented, how frequently they
are updated, etc., they may have set things up as exclusion lists properly (or
even just removed people from the retargeting list). Likewise, that data may
not carry over super well across devices in all cases.

This stuff can be a headache to setup and maintain, particularly at scale, and
I think a lot of people don't realize the complexity of what is involved when
they haven't done it themselves.

------
michaeljbishop
Why would this be surprising? Apple has no skin in the advertising game, while
it's the core of Google's income.

~~~
bobbyi_settv
Advertisers are the core of Google's income. "Ad Companies" are to a large
extent their competitors.

------
andybak
"Consumers love free content, hate micro-transactions and subscriptions."

It will will be interesting to see how this pans out away from LaLa Land where
people work for free.

Personally I wouldn't be sad if a huge chunk of the internet content industry
disappeared and we returned to the halcyon days of amateur bloggers. But many
people being sold on the evils of advertising aren't fully understanding the
economics of the market that provides their daily fix.

------
soared
A bit overblown on the reaction to Apple's changes, but this article is
generally true. I'd love to serve only high quality ads on high quality
inventory. There is a ton of cheap, low quality impressions in the market
right now. It can be difficult to /not/ buy these, and this is a step in the
right direction. Right now there are 3rd party vendors that analyze sites and
block sites with 3+ ads, or certain types of content, but they aren't terribly
effective and often block high quality sites too.

My biggest challenge is blocking sites I know are absolute garbage but they
use strategies to stop me from blocking them. Fucking topix.com / topix.net is
really difficult to block because they constantly create new domains
(topixstars.com, topixparenthood.com, etc) so blaclisting their domain isn't
even effective.

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IntronExon
Am I wrong to think that all of this is trying too little, too late? Why
wouldn’t people just use an adblocker st this point? Everyone I know and care
about gets them installed by me, and I’m sure that not unusual. Getting uBO is
isn’t a technically challenging activity, and it works.

Am I missing the obvious again?

~~~
bestnameever
uBO seems to block ads well enough for me but not the tracking. I can easily
see this by turning off uBO. What's a good way to block tracking within
chrome?

~~~
IntronExon
uMatrix and a random user agent spoofer should do it.

------
Jerry2
Google, first and foremost, is an advertising company. Their main business are
ads and everything else revolves around creating products that attract users
to use their services so they be monetized using their ad platform.

The whole purpose being Google's "ad blocker" is to protect their advertising
business. They know that ads are starting to annoy a lot of people so they're
going to ban worst offenders and try to stop users from installing an actual
ad blocker that blocks all ads.

Apple is not an advertising company and they care about their end users and
want them to buy their devices. Providing an unobtrusive and private browsing
experience is what they care about.

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brockers
I'm not a big fan of Apple, but this is one obvious side benefit to the
company that writes your software being the one that sells you your hardware.
User experience extend to more than just the feel of you keyboard.

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Wehrdo
I've always wondered how much a typical internet user generates in ad revenue.
Basically, if I wanted to buy out my ads for a year, how much would it cost
me?

I've never seen this number, and it seems highly relevant in the the debate
over ad-supported services versus paywalls.

~~~
myroon5
AVG PrivacyFix used to have a (probably biased and inaccurate but still) neat
little tool that estimated how much you were worth to FB, Google, Twitter, etc
after connecting your accounts. But I can't seem to find it anymore.

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aarbor989
To be frank, Apple blocking 3rd party cookies really doesn't make that big of
an impact. The Safari market share is small enough where it really doesn't
matter, and there are already cookie-less tracking solutions in place that are
more reliable than cookies anyways

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gozrik
Does this popup block plan include exit popups and email capture js boxes? If
so, some specialized SaaS companies like Sumo could be out of business

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yorby
Are they talking about PRISM privacy features? (IE: because the NSA doesn't
let them tap into the data)

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code4tee
Another reminder that with Apple you are their customer. With Google you are
their product.

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FiveSquared
Finally HTG! Love the website and it is a gem. (Not sponsored)

