A ban on tracking-based personalised advertising will provide an incentive to reinforce sustainable alternative models and, in fact, will be a condition for making them viable. The advertising industry already has sustainable, proven concepts for effective online advertising that do not require targeted tracking and personalisation (e.g. contextual advertising).
I love my feed reader:
Feed readers are an example of user agents: they act on behalf of you when they interact with publishers, representing your interests and preserving your privacy and security. The most well-known user agents these days are Web browsers, but in many ways feed readers do it better – they don’t give nearly as much control to sites about presentation and they don’t allow privacy-invasive technologies like cookies or JavaScript.
Also:
Feed support should be built into browsers, and the user experience should be excellent.
Agreed!
However, convincing the browser vendors that this is in their interest is going to be challenging – especially when some of them have vested interests in keeping users on the non-feed Web.
Contextual advertising works. Targeted advertising? Who knows!
Let’s see all that proof that 400+ requests for thirsty ass always-running JavaScript is just what we have to do to make advertising good.
This is disgusting, if unsurprising: Google aren’t going to deprecate third-party cookies after all.
Make no mistake, Chrome is not a user agent. It is an agent for the behavioural advertising industry.
Back when South by Southwest wasn’t terrible, there used to be an annual panel called Browser Wars populated with representatives from the main browser vendors (except for Apple, obviously, who would never venture onto a stage outside of their own events).
I remember getting into a heated debate with the panelists during the 2010 edition. I was mad about web fonts.
Just to set the scene, web fonts didn’t exist back in 2010. That’s what I was mad about.
There was no technical reason why we couldn’t have web fonts. The reason why we didn’t get web fonts for years and years was because browser makers were concerned about piracy and type foundries.
That’s nice and all, but as I said during that panel, I don’t recall any such concerns being raised for photographers when the img element was shipped. Neither was the original text-only web held back by the legimate fear by writers of plagiarism.
My point was not that these concerns weren’t important, but that it wasn’t the job of web browsers to shore up existing business models. To use standards-speak, these concerns are orthogonal.
I’m reminded of this when I see browser makers shoring up the business of behavioural advertising.
I subscribe to the RSS feed of updates to Chrome. Not all of it is necessarily interesting to me, but all of it is supposedly aimed at developers. And yet, in amongst the posts about APIs and features, there’ll be something about the Orwellianly-titled “privacy sandbox”.
This is only of interest to one specific industry: behavioural online advertising driven by surveillance and tracking. I don’t see any similar efforts being made for teachers, cooks, architects, doctors or lawyers.
It’s a ludicrous situation that I put down to the fact that Google, the company that makes Chrome, is also the company that makes its money from targeted advertising.
But then Mozilla started with the same shit.
Now, it’s one thing to roll out a new so-called “feature” to benefit behavioural advertising. It’s quite another to make it enabled by default. That’s a piece of deceptive design that has no place in Firefox. Defaults matter. Browser makers know this. It’s no accident that this “feature” was enabled by default.
This disgusts me.
It disgusts me all the more that it’s all for nothing. Notice that I’ve repeatly referred to behavioural advertising. That’s the kind that relies on tracking and surveillance to work.
There is another kind of advertising. Contextual advertising is when you show an advertisement related to the content of the page the user is currently on. The advertiser doesn’t need to know anything about the user, just the topic of the page.
Conventional wisdom has it that behavioural advertising is much more effective than contextual advertising. After all, why would there be such a huge industry built on tracking and surveillance if it didn’t work? See, for example, this footnote by John Gruber:
So if contextual ads generate, say, one-tenth the revenue of targeted ads, Meta could show 10 times as many ads to users who opt out of targeting. I don’t think 10× is an outlandish multiplier there — given how remarkably profitable Meta’s advertising business is, it might even need to be higher than that.
Seems obvious, right?
But the idea that behavioural advertising works better than contextual advertising has no basis in reality.
If you think you know otherwise, Jon Bradshaw would like to hear from you:
Bradshaw challenges industry to provide proof that data-driven targeting actually makes advertising more effective – or in fact makes it worse. He’s spoiling for a debate – and has three deep, recent studies that show: broad reach beats targeting for incremental growth; that the cost of targeting outweighs the return; and that second and third party data does not outperform a random sample. First party data does beat the random sample – but contextual ads massively outperform even first party data. And they are much, much cheaper. Now, says Bradshaw, let’s see some counter-evidence from those making a killing.
If targeted advertising is going to get preferential treatment from browser makers, I too would like to see some evidence that it actually works.
Further reading:
My colleague Chris has written a terrific post over on the Clearleft blog: Is the planet the missing member of your project team?
Rather than hand-wringing and finger-wagging, it gets down to some practical steps that you—we—can take on every project.
Chris finishes by asking:
Let me know how you design with the environment in mind. What practical advice would you suggest?
Well, here’s something that I keep coming up against…
Chris shows that the environment can be part of project management, specifically the RACI methodology:
We list who is responsible, accountable, consulted, and informed within the project. It’s a simple exercise but the clarity is useful for identifying what expertise and input we should seek from the named individuals.
Having the planet be a proactive partner in your project ensures its needs are considered.
Whenever responsibilities are being assigned there are some things that inevitably fall through the cracks. One I’ve seen over and over again is responsibility for third-party scripts.
On the face of it this seems like another responsibility for developers. We’re talking about code here, right?
But in my experience it is never the developers adding “beacons” and other third-party embedded scripts.
Chris rightly points out:
Development decisions, visual design choices, content approach, and product strategy all contribute to the environmental impact of your website.
But what about sales and marketing? Often they’re the ones who’ll drop in a third-party script to track user journeys. That’s understandable. That’s kind of their job.
Dropping in one line of JavaScript seems like a victimless crime. It’s just one small script, right? But JavaScript can import more JavaScript. Tools like Request Map Generator can show just how much destruction third-party JavaScript can wreak:
You pop in a URL, it fetches the page and maps out all the subsequent requests in a nifty interactive diagram of circles, showing how many requests third-party scripts are themselves generating. I’ve found it to be a very effective way of showing the impact of third-party scripts to people who aren’t interested in looking at waterfall diagrams.
Just to be clear, the people adding third-party scripts to websites usually aren’t doing so maliciously. They often don’t realise the negative effect the scripts will have on performance and the environment.
As is so often the case, this isn’t a technical problem. At root it’s about understanding people’s needs (like “I need a way to see what pages are converting!”) and finding a way to meet those needs without negatively impacting the planet. A good open-minded discussion can go a long way.
So I echo Chris’s call to think about environmental impacts from the very start of a project. Establish early on who will have the ability to add third-party scripts to the site. Do all of those people understand the responsibility that gives them?
I saw this lack of foresight in action on a project recently. The front-end development was going really well and the site was going to be exceptionally performant: green Lighthouse scores across the board. But when the site went live it had tracking scripts. That meant that users needed to consent to being tracked. That meant adding another third-party script to generate a consent banner. It completely tanked the Lighthouse scores.
I’m sure the people who added the tracking scripts and consent banners thought they had no choice. But there are alternatives. There are ways to get the data you need without the intrusive surveillance and performance-wrecking JavaScript.
The problem is that it’s not the norm. “Everyone else is doing it” was the justification for Flash intros two decades ago and it’s the justification for enshittification via third-party scripts now.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
It’s been dispiriting but unsurprising to see American commentators weigh in on the EU’s Digital Markets Act. I really wish they’d read Baldur’s excellent explainer first.
John has been doing his predictable “leave Britney alone!” schtick with regards to Apple (and in this case, Google and Facebook too). Ian Betteridge does an excellent job of setting him straight:
A lot of commentators seem to have the same issue as John: that it’s weird that a governmental body can or should define how products should be designed.
But governments mandate how products are designed all the time, and not just in the EU. Take another market which is pretty big: cars. All cars have to feature safety equipment, which varies from region to region but will broadly include everything from seatbelts to crumple zones. Cars have rules for emissions, for fuel efficiency, all of which are designing how a car should work.
But there’s one assumption in John’s post that Ian didn’t push back on. John said:
It’s certainly possible that Meta can devise ways to serve non-personalized contextual ads that generate sufficient revenue per user.
That comes with a footnote:
One obvious solution would be to show more ads — a lot more ads — to make up for the difference in revenue. So if contextual ads generate, say, one-tenth the revenue of targeted ads, Meta could show 10 times as many ads to users who opt out of targeting. I don’t think 10× is an outlandish multiplier there — given how remarkably profitable Meta’s advertising business is, it might even need to be higher than that.
It’s almost like an article of faith that behavioural advertising is more effective than contextual advertising. But there’s no data to support this. Quite the opposite. I wrote about this four years ago.
Once again, I urge you to read the excellent analysis by Jesse Frederik and Maurits Martijn.
There’s also Tim Hwang’s book, Subprime Attention Crisis:
From the unreliability of advertising numbers and the unregulated automation of advertising bidding wars, to the simple fact that online ads mostly fail to work, Hwang demonstrates that while consumers’ attention has never been more prized, the true value of that attention itself—much like subprime mortgages—is wildly misrepresented.
More recently Dave Karpf said what we’re all thinking:
The thing I want to stress about microtargeted ads is that the current version is perpetually trash, and we’re always just a few years away from the bugs getting worked out.
The EFF are calling for a ban. Should that happen, the sky would not fall. Contrary to what John thinks, revenue would not plummet. Contextual advertising works just fine …without the need for invasive surveillance and tracking.
Tracker-driven behavioural advertising is bad for users. The advertisements are irrelevant most of the time, and on the few occasions where the advertising hits the mark, it just feels creepy.
Tracker-driven behavioural advertising is bad for advertisers. They spend their hard-earned money on invasive ad tech that results in no more sales or brand recognition than if they had relied on good ol’ contextual advertising.
Tracker-driven behavioural advertising is very bad for the web. Megabytes of third-party JavaScript are injected at exactly the wrong moment to make for the worst possible performance. And if that doesn’t ruin the user experience enough, there are still invasive overlays and consent forms to click through (which, ironically, gets people mad at the legislation—like GDPR—instead of the underlying reason for these annoying overlays: unnecessary surveillance and tracking by the site you’re visiting).
Even the smallest of business websites now seems to have cookie popups simultaneously telling us they ‘value your privacy’ while harvesting data about who we are, where we are, what we’re looking for and what we were doing online before we landed there.
Tracking scripts have become so pervasive that they have effectively become an industry standard, and most businesses deploy them not only without question, but without consideration of what it means for customer privacy.
Analytics serves as a proxy for understanding people, a crutch we lean into. Until eventually, instead of solving problems, we are just sitting at our computer counting ghosts.
This article is spot-on!
I don’t run analytics on this website. I don’t care which articles you read, I don’t care if you read them. I don’t care about which post is the most read or the most clicked. I don’t A/B test, I don’t try to overthink my content.
Same!
You can split the web in many ways. Lionel Dricot wrote about one of those ways in a blog post called Splitting the Web. In it, he outlines an ever-increasing divide he sees on the web.
On the one hand you’ve got people experiencing the advertising-driven, tracking-addicted big players who provide a bloated and buggy user experience.
On the hand, you’ve got the more tech-savvy users with tracking blockers (misleadingly called ad blockers) using browsers and search engines that value privacy and performance.
It feels like everyone is now choosing its side. You can’t stay in the middle anymore. You are either dedicating all your CPU cycles to run JavaScript tracking you or walking away from the big monopolies. You are either being paid to build huge advertising billboards on top of yet another framework or you are handcrafting HTML.
Maybe the web is not dying. Maybe the web is only splitting itself in two.
This reminded me of a post by Chris. No, not The Great Divide, although that’s obviously relevant here. Chris wrote a post just yesterday called Other People’s Busted Software is an Opportunity:
One way to look at it is opportunity. If you make software that does work reliably, you’ve got a leg up. Even if your customers don’t tell you “I like your software because it always works”, they’ll feel it and make choices around knowing it.
I like that optimistic take. If the majority seems to be doubling down on more tracking, more JavaScript, and more enshittification, then there’s a potential opportunity there (acknowledging that you’ve still got to battle against inertia and sunk cost).
This reminds of a fantastic talk that Stuart gave a few years ago called Privacy could be the next big thing:
How do you end up shaping the world? By inventing a thing that the current incumbents can’t compete against. By making privacy your core goal. Because companies who have built their whole business model on monetising your personal information cannot compete against that. They’d have to give up on everything that they are, which they can’t do. Facebook altering itself to ensure privacy for its users… wouldn’t exist. Can’t exist. That’s how you win.
This rings true to me.
I wish more publishers and services took this approach to evaluating technology:
We scrutinize third-party services before including them in our articles or elsewhere on our site. Many include trackers or analytics that would collect data on our readers. These may be standard across much of the web, but we don’t use them.
A new organisation with the stated goal of keeping podcasting open.
Their first specification is a consolidation of what already exists. That’s good. We don’t want a 927 situation.
My only worry is that many of the companies behind this initiative are focused on metrics and monetization—I hope they don’t attempt to standardise tracking and surveillance in podcasts.
The Podcast Standards Project, a grassroots coalition working to establish modern, open standards, to enable innovation in the podcast industry.
Define “innovation”.
How browser fingerprinting works and what you can do about it (if you use Firefox).
The positively steampunk piece of hardware used for tracking Alexei Leonov’s Apollo-Soyuz mission.
Almost no-one has given informed constent to being tracked through spy pixels in emails, and yet the practice is endemic. This is wrong. It needs to change.
A drop-in replacement for Google Fonts without the tracking …but really, you should be self-hosting your font files.
Steven Johnson profiles Lou Montulli, creator of the cookie, and ponders unintended consequences:
Years ago, the mathematician Edward Lorenz proposed a metaphor to describe how very small elements in a system’s initial conditions can lead to momentous changes over time. Imagining a tornado that ultimately emerges out of the tiny air perturbations caused by the flapping of a butterfly’s wings, Lorenz called it the “butterfly effect.” For better and for worse, Montulli’s cookie may be the most pronounced example of a technological butterfly effect in our time. But instead of a butterfly flapping its wings, it’s a 23-year-old programmer writing a few lines of code to make a shopping cart feature work. Almost three decades later, we’re still riding out the storm that code helped create.
A fascinating interactive journey through biometrics using your face.