A complete collapse of the viability of targeted advertising would be totally fine with me.
The business models that would become viable in that reality would be a better equilibrium and the incentives would be better aligned between software companies and their users.
Highly targeted advertising disproportionately benefits the little guy. I say this as a little guy, running a small dog treat e-commerce company. Almost all of my new customer acquisition is by way of Facebook ads.
If you get rid of Facebook ads and go back to the non-targeted, TV commercial and newspaper type ads, my company might not survive. Purina, though? They'd be fine. They can afford to spend enormous amounts, and they've got a range of products that means their potential customer base is much bigger than mine.
Your local vet can affordably reach pet owners in their area with targeted advertising. If it goes away, that will hurt them and greatly benefit VCA (huge, nationwide chain of vet hospitals).
You're right in the sense that my business model would become inviable, but the result is that you're going to concentrate power even more heavily among the largest corporations. Is that really a good thing?
The cancer of targted advertising has only been with us for like 20 years. Small companies have existed way before that. Blaming people who want to protect those who don't even know what a server or a company is from their data being harvested because you can't sell them dog food is just ridiculous.
That being said, if you are concerned about monopolies, there are better ways to fight them. Unfortunately they have been neglected in the last few decades. Perhaps channeling your money/influence towards that instead of ads would be better for everyone.
To channel my money towards anything I have to make money. To make money I have to sell things to customers.
The world prior to 20 years ago was a very different one in terms of the scale and reach companies could achieve. Pretending as though the situation now is comparable is just naive on your part.
And honestly, the drama of calling it a cancer is just silly and dramatic. If you think this is all so terrible, go live in a commune instead of posting on a message board that is run by an organization that is deeply connected to big tech and all the things you're complaining about. I guess you probably can't see that connection all the way up there on your high horse, though.
>To channel my money towards anything I have to make money. To make money I have to sell things to customers.
Nobody said you should stop in this instant. I was criticizing how your approach to fighting your competitors inadvertently does a lot of damage to people that don't know any better.
>And honestly, the drama of calling it a cancer is just silly and dramatic. If you think this is all so terrible, go live in a commune instead of posting on a message board that is run by an organization that is deeply connected to big tech and all the things you're complaining about. I guess you probably can't see that connection all the way up there on your high horse, though.
This argument is basically the "yet you live in a society, curious" meme[0]. I work also work in tech(as an industrial automation contractor to be precise) so I enjoy the technical aspect of the conversations here. That being said I set a goal 5 years ago to not give SV gigacorps a single cent either directly or indirectly. It helps me keep a clean conscience in arguments like this.
Make no mistake I'm no leftie. I just find the direction the online world is heading deeply concerning. Social cooling[1] and all that. The fact that your means of making money is caught in this crossfire is not what I'm aiming for.
It’s nice that Facebooks enables you to reach customers and make your businesses viable and profitable.
Doesn’t mean that Facebook isn’t a cancer on society, enabling a skyrocketing in polarization, setting groups up against each other against their best interests, giving megaphones to the most vile humans turds imaginable etc.
The nice and civil “Mount Pleasant baseball league” Facebook page that your ads run on and that make your business profitable are at best an unintended side effect of that.
I think you’re being unfairly downvoted and your point is valid. It’s the strongest argument in favor of targeting and I think it’s also true - it gives big advantages to smaller players so I concede all of that.
I think on net the problems targeting creates are worse than the small business benefits, but that’s an easy position for me to hold because I don’t run a small business.
I also think in a world where advertising models are not really viable for supporting software companies (or media) - you get better models that have a better outcome for the group. Things like Substack.
I’d imagine in that world there’s still room for your company to succeed, but the model is probably different. Maybe niche community sites where people review high quality dog food? Someone from your company could be part of those communities in a genuine way. There’d still be advantages for little companies - it’s just hard for people to model what that kind of world would look like.
So I both agree with you that targeted advertising today helps the little guy, but I disagree that a world where that model isn’t viable is one where the little guy can’t exist.
Comments like the sister reply to mine don’t help because they make it seem like I don’t care about the trade offs - I do, I just think they’d be different and the costs today are pretty bad.
The business models that would become viable in that reality would be a better equilibrium and the incentives would be better aligned between software companies and their users.