This is a post that I drafted when Facebook released their last results, and never got around to publishing. Why publish it now? For a start, none of this is breaking news, so it remains as relevant as it ever was. More importantly, with the ongoing bonfire of Twitter, the questions of whether ad-funded social networks are a good thing or not is more relevant than ever.

My position remains that none of this tracking nonsense is worth while. I have never been served a relevant ad through surveillance-driven adtech. Meanwhile, brand advertising works just fine, simply by virtue of the brand being present in the right context: bike gear on a cycling blog, that sort of very limited targeting that only requires a single bit of information about the audience.

Meta Loses Top-10 Ranking by Market Value Amid Worst Month Ever
Social media company falls behind Tencent in value ranking
Facebook parent has lost $513 billion in market cap from peak
Stock has fallen 46% from last year’s record.

What do the terrible results announced by Facebook — I refuse to give in to their desire that we call them Meta — actually mean?

Zuck blamed Apple's ad tracking prevention features for wiping $10B off their bottom line, and there has been a concerted push since to present this as somehow a bad thing, especially for small businesses. I agree with Nick Heer that this framing is pretty gross on Facebook's part, but what I wanted to do today is to discuss alternatives that are open to marketers today.

I'm not in marketing these days, and I never worked directly in the demand-generation side that would get actively involved with this sort of thing — but I have worked closely with those teams and been in the planning meetings, so I have at least an idea of how that business works.

Everything starts with a campaign: you have a particular message you want to get out, you want it to reach a particular audience, and you want some idea of how effective it is. Given those goals, there are different ways to go about running your campaign — different largely in their ethics, rather than in their actual results. Let's take a look.
Alice and Bob work for ACME Widgets Corp. Both of them are launching marketing campaigns for the coming quarter — but they take different approaches, even though they have the same metrics set by their boss, Eve the VP of Marketing.

Alice goes all-in on the surveillance model: her emails have tracking pixels, the links they point to are all gated behind a form that also signs you up for a newsletter, she places ads that follow users around the web once they have come within her surveillance web. She even messes with the favicon and the hosted fonts on the website in order to be able to track users that way. At the end, thanks to all of this effort, Alice can show Eve attribution metrics with a certain click-though rate for her outreach and a certain acquisition cost per customer, set against their likely lifetime value to ACME.

Bob takes a different tack: his emails are plain text, without even any images — since plenty of people now reflexively block all images in email, or load them through proxies. The links in the email are customised so that Bob can tell which email was the one that triggered the action, but then they go directly to the linked resource. He also buys ads, but instead of direct calls to action, Bob focuses on brand advertising in the sorts of publications that the prospective customers are likely to read. At the end, Bob can also show Eve attribution metrics, click-through rates and customer acquisition costs — but he has got there with without irritating prospective customers, or falling foul of either technical countermeasures or policies such as GDPR or CCPA.

Comparing Alice and Bob’s Results

Effectively, Alice and Bob have access to the same metrics; it's just that one of them is going about the process of gathering them honestly. The only data point Bob is missing is the open rate on those emails — but first of all, how useful is that metric in reality? If the indicator that an email was opened is that a tracking pixel was loaded, Alice doesn't know whether the recipient actually read the whole thing, or paged past her email quickly on their way to something they actually wanted. And even assuming that it's an accurate representation of how many people read the text but don't click on any of the links — what can Alice do with that information that Bob would not also do with the information that he sent out X number of emails and Y% of recipients clicked on the call-to-action link? And no, for goodness sake, the answer is not even more layers of attribution woo that claims to be able to identify whether someone came to the ACME website because they remembered the email, or the billboard ad, or because someone mentioned it to them at work — let alone trying to embed the "read progression" code that far too many websites now include.

Secondly, all of these intrusive metrics now have a firm expiry date stamped on them. On top of the ad tracking prevention, Apple now offers a Private Relay capability in iCloud that hides originating IP addresses. Browsers already no longer report a whole lot of information that they used to, precisely because it was used for creepy tracking stuff. By building her campaigns this way, Alice might achieve her goals today, but soon she will not be able to run campaigns like this, and will have to learn to do things Bob's way anyway.

At the core of Bob's method is turning tracking inside out. Instead of trying to stalk users around the Web, engaging in a constant arms race and violating their clearly expressed preference, Bob simply figures out where his most valuable prospects gather and advertises there. First-party data is enough for his purposes, and while individual ads might be more expensive in CPM, he avoids engaging with an ecosystem that is ridden with fraud. He also does not need to worry that the ACME ad might show up beside some tin-foil-hatter YouTube channel and get bad press that way — and the time he doesn't spend micro-managing ad placement can be spent more productively on creating better copy, or an entire other campaign.

Context matters in other ways, too: when a prospective customer is reading about the latest political crisis, famine, or natural disaster, they are not in a widget-buying mood, so showing them a widget ad is counter-productive anyway. Instead, Bob puts his widget ads in widget blogs, places them with streamers who test widgets, and gets hosts of widget-focused podcasts to read out his ads. All of these channels have very limited tracking; podcasts offer none at all, unless Bob creates a special landing page or discount code for listeners of each podcast. And yet, those are some of the most expensive ad slots around, because the context makes them very strong indicators of desire to buy.

Eve looks at the campaign performance numbers presented by a haggard Alice and a relaxed Bob, remembers the news stories about Apple and Google clamping down further on ad tracking, and suggests gently to Alice that maybe she should sit with Bob and figure out how to get the job done without the crutch of surveillance ad tech.

🖼️ Photos by Charles Deluvio and Headway on Unsplash

A recurring topic when it comes to curbing the power of Facebook to influence the real world is somehow to curtail its huge advertising revenue. Campaigns such as Sleeping Giants have made it their business to call out advertisers whose brands had been associated with unsavoury themes, causing revenue to alt-right websites to drop as much as 90% (despite some shenanigans to attempt to reverse the drain).

In the wake of all this, large corporations such as Disney have made a big deal of "boycotting" Facebook:

Walt Disney has dramatically slashed its advertising spending on Facebook according to people familiar with the situation, the latest setback for the tech giant as it faces a boycott from companies upset with its handling of hate speech and divisive content.

The reasons for the supposed boycott are never stated clearly, but centre on supposed enablement of the alt-right by Facebook. I suspect that the actual recruitment is happening elsewhere, e.g. through YouTube’s recommendation algorithm, but that is a whole other issue.

Facebook seems unswayed:

Facebook executives, including Carolyn Everson, vice president of its Global Business Group, previously told advertisers that the company wouldn’t change its policies based on revenue pressure.

This actually looks like the correct response, given that otherwise pressure could presumably also be brought in the other direction. Imagine weapons manufacturers demanding that calls for gun control be censored or otherwise limited, and threatening to cancel advertising.

Facebook may also have correctly identified the real reason for the "boycott". Disney’s results for the past year show that overall revenue fell 42% to $11.78 billion, driven primarily by an operating loss of $1.96 billion in the parks and consumer products business, and a 16% fall in their studio business. The coronavirus pandemic causing cinemas and amusement parks to close is hardly Disney’s fault¹, but it’s not surprising that they might look to cut some advertising expenditures, while also making themselves look good in the process.

It’s not cost cutting (bad, reactive), it’s joining a boycott (good, proactive).

It’s also worth looking at who is cutting what. Disney is still advertising on FB, but it’s direct-action ads to drive people to sign up to Disney+, their streaming service which is one of the few bright spots on their results with 60.5 million paying customers. That’s what FB is good for. It’s terrible at brand advertising, where you’re trying to build buzz around a new film that everyone has to see, rather than customising the benefits of Disney+ to each specific audience.

If you want everyone to pack the cinemas to see the new Star Wars film, you don’t need to advertise to everyone individually; you just get a billboard in Times Square. On the other hand, you can sell Disney+ many different ways:

• Parents of young children: it’s a Pixar delivery mechanism!
• Teenage boys (and men who never grew up, don’t @ me): it’s all Marvel superheroes and Star Wars all the time!
• Older adults: National Geographic documentaries!
• Musical fans: we have Hamilton now!

And so on: micro-segmentation is what adtech in general is good for.

This is why it’s worth looking beyond the headlines, at a boycott that is both more and less than it appears. Facebook will weather this boycott, and so will Disney.

In a timely update, today brings the story of a Dutch broadcaster that killed cookies and saw advertising revenue go way up. It turns out, advertisers don’t need to know much about users, beyond what they are reading or watching, in order to make sensible decisions about whether and how to advertise to them or not.

Instead of targeting a certain type of customer, advertisers target customers reading a certain type of article or watching a certain type of show.

The article calls this approach "contextual advertising", and according to the results of NPO’s testing, they convert at least as well as, if not better than, micro-targeted ones.

In January and February of this year, NPO says, its digital ad revenue was up 62 percent and 79 percent, respectively, compared to last year. Even after the coronavirus pandemic jolted the global economy and caused brands to drastically scale back advertising—and forcing many publications to implement pay cuts and layoffs—NPO's revenue is still double-digit percentage points higher than last year.

Everyone’s happy! Well, except for adtech vendors:

The main explanation is simple: because the network is no longer relying on microtargeted programmatic ad tech, it now keeps what advertisers spend rather than giving a huge cut to a bunch of intermediaries.²

And good riddance to them. Their only value proposition (such as it is) is that they will identify the high-value users browsing, say, NPO’s web site, and enable customers to advertise to them elsewhere on the web where the cost of displaying the ad is lower. What’s in it for NPO and other high-value outlets? Nothing; their value is actively being hollowed out. The advertisers aren’t that much better off, because now their ad and their brand is getting displayed in cheap locations beside low-value content, instead of on a reliable solid broadcaster’s web site. Everybody loses, except the adtech creepiness pushers themselves.

The sooner we move away from micro-targeting, the better.

🖼️ Photos by Annie Spratt and Travis Gergen on Unsplash

Even though I no longer work directly in marketing, I’m still adjacent, and so I try to keep up to date with what is going on in the industry. One of the most common-sensical and readable voices is Bob Hoffman, perhaps better known as the Ad Contrarian. His latest post is entitled The Simple-Minded Guide To Marketing Communication, and it helpfully dissects the difference between brand advertising and direct-response advertising (emphasis mine):

[…] our industry's current obsession with precision targeted, one-to-one advertising is misguided. Precision targeting may be valuable for direct response. But history shows us that direct response strategies have a very low likelihood of producing major consumer facing brands. Building a big brand requires widespread attention. Precision targeted, one-to-one communication has a low likelihood of delivering widespread attention.

Now Bob is not just an armchair critic; he has quite the cursus honorum in the advertising industry, and so he speaks from experience.

In fact, events earlier this week bore out his central thesis. With the advent of GDPR, many US-based websites opted to cut off EMEA readers rather than attempt to comply with the law. This action helpfully made it clear who was doing shady things with their users’ data, thereby providing a valuable service to US readers, while rarely inconveniencing European readers very much.

The New York Times, with its strong international readership, was not willing to cut off overseas ad revenue. Instead, they went down a different route (emphasis still mine):

The publisher blocked all open-exchange ad buying on its European pages, followed swiftly by behavioral targeting. Instead, NYT International focused on contextual and geographical targeting for programmatic guaranteed and private marketplace deals and has not seen ad revenues drop as a result, according to Jean-Christophe Demarta, svp for global advertising at New York Times International.

Digiday has more details, but that quote has the salient facts: turning off invasive tracking – and the targeted advertising which relies on it – had no negative results whatsoever.

This is of course because knowing someone is reading the NYT, and perhaps which section, is quite enough information to know whether they are an attractive target for a brand to advertise to. Nobody has ever deliberately clicked from serious geopolitical analysis to online impulse shopping. However, the awareness of a brand and its association with Serious Reporting will linger in readers’ minds for a long time.

The NYT sells its own ads, which is not really scalable for most outlets, but I hope other people are paying attention. Maybe there is room in the market for an advertising offering that does not force users to deal with cookies and surveillance and interstitial screens and page clutter and general creepiness and annoyance, while still delivering the goods for its clients?

🖼️ Photo by Kate Trysh on Unsplash

A quick review of the status of the Big Three¹ social networks as of right now.

It seems Facebook is testing ads in Messenger now, which is an incredibly wrong-headed idea:

Messenger isn’t really a "free time" experience the way Facebook proper is — you use the former with purpose, the latter idly. Advertisements must cater to that, just like anywhere else in the world: you don’t see the same ads on subway walls (where you have to sit and stare) as on billboards (where you have two or three seconds max and your attention is elsewhere).

I always hated Messenger anyway, just out of reflex because they had felt the need to split it off into a separate app. In fact, I kept using Paper until Facebook finally broke it, in no small part because it kept everything together in one app. It also looked good, as opposed to the hot mess of FB’s default apps.

Between that and the "Moments" rubbish junking up the top of every one of the FB apps, I am actively discouraged from using them. At this point I pretty much only open FB if I have a notification from there.

Meanwhile, Twitter is continuing on its slow death spiral. It is finally becoming what it was always described as: a "micro-blogging" platform. People write 100-tweet threads instead of just one blog post, and this is so prevalent that there are tools out there that will go and assemble these threads in one place for ease of reading.

It’s got to the point that I read Twitter (and a ton of blogs via RSS, because I’m old-school that way), but most of my actual interaction these days is via LinkedIn. I even had a post go viral over there - 7000-odd views and more than a hundred likes, at time of writing.

So this is where we are, right now in July 2017: Twitter for ephemeral narcissism, Facebook for interacting with (or avoiding) the same people you deal with day to day, and LinkedIn for actually getting things done.

See you out there.

Photo by Osman Rana on Unsplash

At what point do the downsides of Javascript in the browser exceed the upsides? Have we already passed that point?

If you have any concept of security, the idea of downloading code from the Internet and immediately executing it, sight unseen, on your local machine, should give you the screaming heebie-jeebies. A lot of work has gone into sandboxing the browser processes so that Javascript cannot escape the browser itself, and later, the individual web page that it came from. However, this only dealt with the immediate and obvious vulnerability.

These days, the problem with Javascript is that it is used to track users all over the internet and serve them ads for the same products on every site. Quite why this requires 14 MB and 330 HTTP requests for 537 words is not entirely clear.

Actually, no, it is entirely clear: it is because the copro-grammers ("writers of feces") who produce this stuff have no respect for the users. The same utter disrespect underlies the recent bloat in iOS apps:

One Friday I turned off auto-update for apps and let the update queue build up for a week. The results shocked me.
After the first week I had 7.59GB of updates to install, spread across 67 apps – averaging 113MB per app.

Okay, so maybe you say who cares, you only update apps over wifi - but do you only browse on wifi? 14 MB for a few hundred words - that adds up fast.

And what else is that Javascript up to, beyond wasting bytes - both over the air, and in local storage?

How about snaflling data entered into a form, regardless of whether it has been submitted?

Using Javascript, those sites were transmitting information from people as soon as they typed or auto-filled it into an online form. That way, the company would have it even if those people immediately changed their minds and closed the page.

Yeah, that's not creepy or abusive at all. Shame on everyone involved: people who built the tech and people who adopted it. #adtech https://t.co/3R5wfpBJKJ

— Dominic 🇪🇺🇺🇦🏳️‍🌈 (@dwellington) June 22, 2017

My house, my rules. I look forward to iOS 11, and enabling every blocking feature I can.

I really want media sites to earn money so that they can continue to exist, but they cannot do it at my expense. A banner ad is fine, but 14 MB of Javascript to serve me the same banner ad everywhere - at my expense! - is beyond the pale.

Javascript delenda est.

This from @benthompson’s morning letter is true and obvious. Yet, lots in media think people don’t really want video pic.twitter.com/dp8lPs9SsX

— Jay Yarow (@jyarow) August 29, 2016

Here's why video doesn't work as a general delivery mechanism for content. So far, it has taken me about twenty five minutes to watch about ten minutes of this video. I also had to find headphones and plug them in, and I had to be somewhere I had the bandwidth and leisure to single-task in this way. None of these are givens.

On the other hand, I can consume (or at least skim) text very rapidly. If I just need to get the gist of a topic or answer one question, text is far and away the most efficient way to do it. There is very little as depressing as finding that the only documentation of how to do something is a twelve-minute out-of-focus howto video, filmed on somebody’s cellphone, narrated in a soporific and near-inaudible drone, and of which I care about precisely five seconds.

If someone sends me a piece of text that looks interesting but that I don’t have time to look at right now, I can easily file it for later. All of my text gets saved to one place - in my case, to Instapaper - and I know that when I open Instapaper, I will have a queue of interesting articles, stories, or whatever to read at my leisure.

Video doesn’t work that way. Sure, both YouTube and Vimeo allow me to save something for later, but only for their own platform, so now I have to remember where I saw something to be able to retrieve it. And that doesn’t even account for media sites like the BBC that insist on reinventing the wheel and using their own video platform¹.

Also, no service I know of allows video to be saved offline², so I still have to be online to see my queue of videos that I saved for later. No watching in the plane for me! That’s unfortunate because it’s one of the places where I can really power through my Instapaper queue.

(me, trying to consume some Branded Content)

That’s not to say I don’t watch video - I do. One of the reasons I own an Apple TV, and have done since the Apple TV 2, is to watch YouTube. There is a ton of high-quality content out there. I’m a car nut, so I have subscriptions to channels like Petrolicious, The Smoking Tire, and Jay Leno’s Garage. The thing is, though, I treat these like watching TV: on the couch, often with a beer in hand, and with a reasonable hope of not being interrupted.

Speaking of interruptions, let’s talk about ads. I have complained before about intrusive video ads interrupting me when I’m reading - but what about intrusive video ads interrupting me when I’m trying to watch video?

Most videos these days have a pre-roll ad - those ads that you can (usually) skip after five seconds³ to get to what you actually wanted to watch. In the context of the ten-minutes-plus duration of the sorts of videos I choose to watch, that’s a minor annoyance at most. On the other hand, if I click on a link from some random site, so with low investment, and the first thing I see is a thirty-second unskippable ad? I’m out of there.

Advertising in text on the other hand can be⁴ pretty subtle, and if I see something in the sidebar that looks interesting out of the corner of my eye, I can finish what I’m doing and get back to it. In "snackable" social media formats like Twitter or Facebook, ads are even less intrusive, scrolling by in your timeline. I have followed sponsored links from both, whereas I have never interacted in any way with a video ad, except to close it.

In summary

I truly hope that the current predictions of "video everywhere!!1!eleventy" are just the latest helium-infused bout of hype. The noisy, single-threaded future that Facebook et al want to usher us into is not somewhere I want to live. And that goes double for AR - if you think I don’t like the bandwidth requirements and the need for headphones of flat video, imagine if you will the hatred I feel for goggles and clogging my downstream pipe for minutes on end for some show-off animation. No, thank you.

Image by Uğur Gürcüoğlu via Unsplash

There has been a long battle between advertisers and people who just want to browse the web without ambush videos jumping out at them or overlays taking over their screen. For a while, mobile was spared the worst excesses of badvertising, to the point that people were actually concerned about Facebook’s ability to monetise on mobile¹.

Unfortunately, mobile platforms have now achieved full advertising parity with desktops. Worse, because the screens are smaller, and much of the ad tech still assumes a desktop browser by default, the mobile experience is often worse than the desktop one. For instance, what on the desktop would be a popup or an overlay turns into a complete browser hijack on mobile.

For this reason, and for the performance improvements, I run an ad blocker on my phone. I continue to endure ads on my desktop browsers, because no matter how annoying they are, I realise that it’s currently pretty much the only way journalists on the web get paid.

The problem is that some publishers are pushing back. I followed a link to Forbes on mobile, and got hit with this message, demanding that I whitelist Forbes or else.

How user-hostile is this? I see no benefit whatsoever in logging into Forbes, and given Forbes’ history of serving malware-laced ads, they are the last outlet I would consider whitelisting.

The reason users are up in arms over advertising on the web is its intrusive nature. We all fully realise that advertising is needed to pay for the content we enjoy. However, that does not constitute unlimited permission to assault our eyeballs (and our ears!) and spy on our behaviour.

Ad blockers by and large operate by blocking the big advertising networks. When a user sends a strong signal that they do not like those networks or their behaviours, the correct approach for a news outlet would be to default to display advertising without tracking. This should be a familiar model; it’s how print advertising works. Put an image in the sidebar, or even in the body of the text; that’s not a problem. Hide a video that pops out and starts playing at full volume? Plant cookies on my system that follow me all around the web, not just on the Forbes site? That’s a problem - that I resolve by blocking the source of the video and the cookie.

Publishers that align themselves too closely with the advertising networks are playing a dangerous game. They are already dangerously dependent on those networks for such profits as they can eke out, but those profits are dependent on their continued ability to attract viewers.

If people see a Forbes link and click past it, because they can’t be bothered with dealing with the mess that is the Forbes site, the money spigot will dry up very quickly.

Image by Dmitri Popov via Unsplash

Last week brought iOS 9, and with it the long-awaited support for ad blockers in Safari.

I am not really comfortable with the idea of blocking ads; while it was more or less a requirement to block the worst excesses a decade or so ago if you wanted any sort of usable web experience, on the desktop at least that is no longer the case. It's an open question how much of this is due to adtech providers giving up on their most obnoxious tricks, how much to features like popup-blocking being built in to all major browsers, and how much to ad blocking on the wetware - simply ignoring most of the ads that are served to me.

It's another story on mobile.

. @BenedictEvans My compromise w/ my conscience: installed on iPhone but not on iPad (or Mac). My take: http://t.co/gTNOBkDwkD

— Dominic 🇪🇺🇺🇦🏳️‍🌈 (@dwellington) September 18, 2015

Part of the problem is the ad networks themselves. Print publications generally carry significant amounts of advertising, but because it's controlled by the publisher, the ads that make it into the magazines are typically relevant to readers and in line with the rest of the content. For an example of a magazine that gets this right, pick up a copy of Monocle. The ads are for the same sorts of brands that also come up in the editorial content, they are tasteful and well presented, and generally in line with the high production values of the rest of the magazine. The same goes for their advertorials - sorry, branded content: relevant, unforced, clearly signalled, and often actually interesting in their own right - at least if you're a Monocle reader.

Now name the last time you had an experience like that on the web.

You can't - because hardly any web sites choose their own ads. They all sign up with one or several of the big ad networks, and they will serve you whatever they feel is relevant - to their customers, regardless of what you are reading or watching at the time. This disconnect can lead to idiotic consequences, with the same products stalking you around the web even once you've already bought them, or even been prevented from buying them!

What if an #ad network wrote a code of conduct (no audio, movement, fake UI elements…) & then implemented #adblock for ads that violate it?

— Dominic 🇪🇺🇺🇦🏳️‍🌈 (@dwellington) September 20, 2015

So how do we get out of this situation? Micropayments for content do not look like a practical solution, so what can be done to avoid either beggaring online outlets or giving up on protecting our eyeballs and cellphone bills from the worst excesses of advertisers?

If ad networks are the villains - can they also be our saviours? What if they started policing their own ads better, enforcing "polite" ads? At a minimum:

• No auto playing audio or video

• No movement or resizing

• No pop ups

• No redirects (I see this on mobile, presumably as a side effect of evading pop up blockers on desktop)

• No faking UI elements (pretending to be an OS message)

• No excessive size, measured as a percentage of the actual content

I would have no problem whitelisting that network. In fact, if they made a blocker that only allowed through ads that respected such a code of conduct? I'd install that blocker!

Pity it'll never happen. Instead, we will get some sort of buggy-whip-maker protection rule, and we'll just keep muddling along.

Image by Pablo GarciaSaldaña via Unsplash

There’s been a lot of talk about content blocking lately, in the run up to the public release of iOS 9 with its built-in support for [content-blocking Safari extensions](https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/ios/releasenotes/General/WhatsNewInSafari/Articles/Safari_9.html "Safari 9.0" ). Straight from the horse’s mouth:








> Content Blocking gives your extensions a fast and efficient way to block cookies, images, resources, pop-ups, and other content.








This is something people have been doing on the desktop for a long time. I used to run ad blockers myself, but [as I wrote](http://findthethread.postach.io/post/ads-and-ad-blocking "Ads and Ad Blocking" ),








> I feel that \[ad blocking\] meets my moral definition of theft. Companies put out content with the expectation of being paid for it, so it seems churlish at best for me to enjoy the content but refuse them the chance to make a fraction of a penny from their advertisers off my enjoyment. There is a line, but nowadays I am more likely simply not to visit offending sites than to try to bypass the ads.

Jean Louis Gaséee believes that the consequences of widespread ad blocking will be [disastrous](http://www.mondaynote.com/2015/08/31/life-after-content-blocking/ "Life After Content Blocking" ) for media companies.








> This is going to be painful for those whose ad-supported business model is in danger of breaking. There will be blood.








I think that may well be true. The current state of ad tech is not ideal, but it’s what we have, and what a lot of people are paying the bills with. However, while we have become used this state of affairs on our desktops, it’s a different story on mobile. On even a single-digit-Mbps home broadband connection, the additional impact on a page load of the ads, analytics and tracking muck is not hugely significant. Our fixed connections are fast and not really metered on a scale where we are watching the individual megabytes.








Neither of those factors holds true on mobile devices. There, connections are slow, unreliable, and strongly metered. Dean Murphy has created a pre-release iOS content blocking extension, and [his benchmarks are eye-opening](http://murphyapps.co/blog/2015/8/22/crystal-benchmarks "Crystal Benchmarks" ).








> On average, pages loaded 3.9x faster with Crystal and used 53% less bandwidth. Just by having Crystal installed, I saved a total of 70 seconds and 35MB of data on these 10 pages.








On mobile, that’s ***huge***. Everyone will want to install Crystal (or similar extensions) for those sorts of gains.








This is without even getting into some of the other aspects of ad tech. Privacy is the obvious one, although for most Muggles it doesn’t seem to be a huge priority. Nevertheless, if you want to scare yourself you can try using the [Lightbeam add-on for Firefox](https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/lightbeam/ "Lightbeam for Firefox - Mozilla" ) to see *just how much* tracking is happening behind the scenes of even major web properties. That has been true for some time on desktop, though, and hasn’t caused any widespread outrage.








What is different on mobile, apart from connection speed and bandwidth constraints, is the interaction itself. Ads on the desktop take up a relatively small proportion of the screen real estate. On mobile, ads can take up *the entire screen* when loading the front page of popular web sites. Users have to scroll down an entire screen just to get to content!








In addition, users have been running their own content blockers on their wetware for a while now. I don’t even *see* standard ads any more, because I have developed reflexes that cause my eyes to scan right by them without ever taking them into my conscious awareness. To force their way past this problem, ad tech developers (one rung up from actual malware developers IMHO) have come up with all sorts of schemes, from interstitials, to CSS-based "popups" that hover in front of the content, to things that zoom out if you inadvertently roll your mouse cursor over them, and no doubt even more heinous variations are in the pipeline right now.








The thing is, on the desktop these things are only moderately annoying. I don’t have Flash installed on this machine, which already cuts down on the potential irritation, and the rest I deal with by simply not visiting especially grating web sites.








On mobile devices, these things are *horrid*. My wife, normally a sweet and well-mannered person, was reduced to incoherent rage this morning when an ad on a web site she was attempting to visit on her phone kept redirecting her to another site. This was no doubt intended as some sort of grey-area pop-up spawning thing, but iOS simply interpreted it as a straight redirect. Result? That website may have got the one visit and its ad-load, but it will never get another from either of us.








Bottom line? I will continue not to run content blockers on my Mac, but on iOS, I’m installing Crystal as soon as I get my hands on iOS 9.








After the initial period of pain, I don’t think it’ll even be as bad for publishers as they think it will be. I have no doubt that there will be disruption, and some of it will be painful. Some web sites will go down, and while my rational response is that they will be getting their comeuppance for a crappy business model, I do feel sympathy for the writers who will be out of a gig through no fault of their own.








My point is different: as with much of this Big Data nonsense, I have a sneaking suspicion that nobody is actually *using* any of the data that are collected. My [personal experience](http://findthethread.postach.io/post/online-shopping "Online Shopping" ) bears this out. Sure, the gathered data are used in some limited sense, but no truly innovative deep analysis is carried out that you could not have done on the subscriber rolls of the *Readers’ Digest* back in the day. Dumber web advertising will do *just fine* without all the tracking and analytics that are *de rigeur* these days.








Relax and enjoy the resurgence of simple banner ads.





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Image by [kazuend](https://twitter.com/kazuend) via [Unsplash](https://unsplash.com)

This is how things are now.

The other day I was shopping for some end-of-season discounts on ski gear. I'm okay for snowboard stuff, but I could use some new ski gloves, and you can never have too many socks and base layers.

I found a few things, put them in my shopping cart, but then I got distracted and didn't complete the transaction.

I came back the next day, only to find that the shopping cart had timed out and all my selected items had flown back to their various departments. I didn't really need anything, so I rage-quit the browser tab and thought no more of the issue.

…except that for the last week the retailer has been stalking me around the web, mainly but not only on Facebook, with ads for exactly the items I had been looking at.

So let me get this straight: you know who I am, you know what I was looking at, and you're willing to pay Mark Zuckerberg to show me ads for those products - but you can't be bothered simply to leave the items in my shopping cart so I could, I don't know, check out and pay you for them?

An ounce worth of common sense beats ten tonnes of "social intelligence", "sentiment analysis", and stalker-ish Facebook advertising - trust me on this.

Image by Elisabetta Foco via Unsplash