I totally understand your sentiment and am not against your thoughts and approach. However, isn't this like Mark Zuckerberg replying to the question of tracking, “We want to show better and targeted ads.” (or something in that line).
As someone who's worked on a few ad supported apps, I have to admit that I share Zuck's sentiment. How do we make money if few are willing to pay for apps and ads don't pay enough?
The obvious answer is "don't." I just looked, and I've spent $250 on mobile apps this year. They are all mobile applications that do useful things for me, be it improvements to HomeKit or media creation tools--Affinity has me for like $150 by themselves this year!
If your mobile apps don't make money without invasive ad targeting, that's OK: others clearly can (see the sibling commenter), and we can get by with fewer mobile apps that don't when they are are presenting so thin a value proposition as to be unable to get users to pay for them through conventional means.
The "hard men / strong times" line in your profile (which, to be candid, is a pretty gross pretext for a lot of bad-actor politics, but you picked it not me) echoes deep here: there are plenty of endeavors that sell something people want enough to pay actual money for them, and you can always do that instead. I haven't worked for an ad-supported tech business since my first job out of college in 2010, and most of their business was actually in air travel and hotel bookings, the ads were tertiary. The jobs and the products exist.
Let's unleash the hot take cannon for a second: users basically don't need apps. Businesses do--and there's a ton of money in LOB mobile apps even--but almost every B2C mobile application I can think of is some form of luxury good. Making the case for a luxury good is harder than making one for one of self-evident value. Congratulations--you picked hard mode, and nobody is obligated to make it easier.
Optimize for making value to people who will pay for it, not virality or shareability, and perhaps you have a path to not needing to play with edgy patterns.
You aren't the average user. Most users can't even afford decent housing or food. Let alone $250/year for apps, and they will never pay. I'm sorry, but I think we just have fundamental disagreements about what software is.
We do disagree. But one of us is describing, and one of us is depending, and that skews things a little, doesn't it? Upton Sinclair had a line about this.
What value, in a sane system, does selling advertising that targets people who "can't even afford decent housing or food" actually do? How are the goods you are selling--human attention--actually turning into revenue for the advertiser if the user has no money to act on the advertising? Or is it just one more iteration on a mutual deception that exists to create a predicate for "any of these mobile apps are worth creating in the first place"?
You're building a bigger house of cards with every post.
Poor people might be better served with targeted ads to help them find lower cost goods to save money, access helpful services they otherwise wouldn't know about, and seek out support groups/clubs/organizations. Not everything in this life is evil ya know.
They might but we both know they won’t be. They’ll be targeted with ads which exploit the fact that they are in an extremely vulnerable state.
In fact, the more desperate, the more willing they’d be to click on an ad, which gives a perverse incentive to advertisers and developers to worsen their financial position.
But please, show me examples of these good targeted ads because while in theory they could exist, something tells me they very much don’t.
Just because you refuse to say it publicly does not mean you don't know it.
> The non-profits in my area (which is very low income) would very much like to target my local community better/cheaper.
They certainly would, but have they? I asked for a very simple and specific thing. Examples of targeted ads right now that are specifically targeted towards low-income folks and which are doing it to better their lives.
Please, by all means, show me examples. Not anecdotes. Not opinion. Hard examples.
Until then, it's a pipe dream used to justify your company's desire to further invade people's privacy.
> Just because you refuse to say it publicly does not mean you don't know it.
Does that honestly sound fair to you? I'm not putting words into your mouth. Please respect my agency and I'll continue to respect yours in kind.
> Please, by all means, show me examples. Not anecdotes. Not opinion. Hard examples.
Aren't examples also anecdotes? https://www.sheerid.com/business/blog/why-and-how-you-should...
> Take for example, Headspace, makers of the popular meditation app by the same name. The company created an exclusive discount to help teachers who might not be able to afford the app use it to manage their stress.
So your example is… someone advertising their app so a teacher can spend slightly less money? That’s your choice for targeted ads being used for good? Seriously?
That’s a long way down from those theoretical local non-profits.
And if that’s the best you’ve got, then I don’t know how anyone could say anything but fuck no to invading their privacy for a shiny discount to an app they likely don’t even need.
You asked for an example and I gave you one, but it's not good enough for you. Where shall the goalpost move next? If it feels like it's an example of low consequence that's because it is: what we're arguing about is pretty trivial to most folks. And that might not make sense, but here's why: most folks aren't on hacker news nor care so deeply about such things.
The goalpost is exactly where it has always been, your example is just a horrible way to try and show that targeted advertising can be used for good. How does it "better their lives"? It's not like Headspace is giving the app away for free; teachers still have to pay for it.
In the single example you did provide, the motivation behind the targeting is still strictly to extract money from people. It may be to extract slightly less money from a specific group, but it's not like Headspace is doing the targeting out of the goodness of their hearts; they are doing it because they think they will get more profits from the higher number of sales even at a discount.
Using the most capitalistic example is certainly a choice you can make, but it's not one that is going to convince most people of your cause. If you want to convince people that targeted ads can be used for good, then actually show that it can be used for good instead of talking about theoretical and hypothetical non-profits and providing the weakest possible example when pushed for reality.
Non-profits and for profit companies alike can use targeted ads to mutually benefit those they are targeting. Obviously for profit companies exist to make money. Do you think that true altruism is a real thing? Everybody has a motive and that's the game we call life.
As far as my real-life local non-profit example: my local PP chapter reached out to my local side business IG account to share posts of their social media to widen their audience. Wouldn't it be great if they could better target people in their target demographic more easily / affordably?
There are many nice things we can’t have because they are exploited by bad actors. There is a nearly infinite amount of evidence that targeted ads go hand-in-hand with abusive, anti-social practices.
So I am sorry that you and your innocent nonprofits are being impacted by the massive, exploitative, evil machine that inherently builds around grinding away privacy, but it’s an unfortunate side effect of how many ethicless assholes there are.
I never said that my business model did, nor that big money was involved. Please don't assume my position and re-read the thread. All I had said was that a non-profit in my area would very much like to target my local community better/cheaper.
That's kind of my issue: In journalism it's hard for us to make money because we have a low amount of users who are wiling to pay to disable ads (or remove paywalls for that matter) while at the same time ads don't pay us enough despite high user engagement, so what do we do?
That's kind of missing the point? Sure you spent a lot on your laptop, but it isn't (as) a significant portion of your income, presumably.
A typical developer is spending much less on a phone as a % of their income, whereas a typical iPhone buyer is spending much much more — to a surprising degree.
Agreed, but setting laptops aside, would you spend ~1.8% of your pretax income on a phone? — And not for the best phone either, just the base pro, or an upgraded regular model.
I certainly wouldn't, but a lot of iPhone users are. I'm not judging, I'm genuinely surprised.
I only spend 15% of my pretax income on my 15 year mortgage. But I make BigTech money working remotely. So I find that question kind of irrelevant. I definitely don’t expect the average person to only spend 15% of their income on housing.
Expenses don’t scale linearly with income.
When I was making $22K a year in 1996, I bought phone for $300, was that too much to spend on a cell phone too?
I wasn't comparing general living expenses, I was comparing iPhone ASP to the income of those buying them. $1k:53k is less affordable than $300:22k accounted for inflation — for tech that is much more mature and commoditized today than it was back then.
Again, it's just surprising and not a value judgement.
Roll back maybe 10-12 years ago. I had a Tomtom in my car, maybe £200. An iPod. Probably the same again. A point and shoot camera. Same again. A 3G WiFi stick and contract for my laptopp. A personal laptop that saw a lot of use. A dedicated Sonos hardware controller. A GPS on my bike, and of course an actual phone (N95).
How many of those devices have been coalesced into one £1200 iPhone. I call that a result.
You...know most people don't buy a brand-new phone every year, right?
I don't recall exactly what I spent for my iPhone, but it was 4 years ago, so if we assume it was about $1000, then based on that median income, that makes it 0.5%. Does that seem more palatable to you...?
Yeah I could easily afford that but I haven't spent $250 on phone apps in my entire life. I don't think I've even spent $25. $250 is more like what I'd pay for the phone itself.
Totally, but what do you do with mobile devices that needs it? I use iOS with iPads and iPhones, so buying Affinity (which works great on an iPad with a Pencil but also has software for quick edits on a phone) makes a lot of sense to me. They provide value, so I paid for them.
This, not simply "doesn't have money", is the thing about mobile apps that it feels like most people in that most things a user wants to do on a phone don't actually need an app, and if they do it's probably because they're buying something or talking to somebody and neither of those are categories that need more entries with a lower security barrier.
Maybe your app just isn't worth the downsides of building an unaccountable, global surveillance panopticon. I'm sorry =/ If we destroy the panopticon, perhaps we can find new business models that aren't as destructive.
What about it? Most of the big names seem to be switching to a paywall model, which is fine with me. A local outlet has an almost entirely reader-supported model that seems to be working for them[1]. There are options other than the global surveillance panopticon, and the more we support those options, the more viable they will become.
As someone who works with a national news outlet, I can tell your for certain that paywalls are failing, and we're now considering how to recoup lost revenue with ads that don't pay as well as they did five years ago.
That sucks, but I'm still zero percent interested in supporting the unaccountable, global surveillance panopticon. Don't blame me that Facebook & Google destroyed your business model!
I don't know. I think the best approach would be to ban surveillance capitalism, (e.g. make gathering personal data illegal), and then new business models would fall out out of the new situation. More likely, old business models would re-appear: selling ads to relevant publications (e.g. video game ads on video game websites), instead of targeted to users; selling products direct to customers instead of funding via ads (this is currently difficult because the surveillance business model out-competes it).
Another approach could be to break up the big tech companies into a bunch of tiny pieces, and hope something more ethical comes out of the more distributed market power & natural competition.
I'm not a marxist by any means, but breaking up the monopoly into smaller companies might make sense. The newspapers before them had similar regulations and faired well.
I think you need a more nuanced take than "journalism is dying" – a more accurate take might be that journalism is centralizing for professionals (NYT, major cable networks have scarcely ever been doing better... don't take my word for it, read the financial statements) and decentralizing for amateurs (substack, twitter, etc.).
Journalism is evolving and changing, but it isn't dying or going away. Hyper-targeted ads will not "save journalism".
News sites can't compete with big tech companies on targeted ads, they're at a systemic disadvantage.
News sites have to spend X% of their margin to continuously generate content to attract viewers, while big tech companies spend 0 to attract viewers because viewers are the generators of their content. For this fundamental reason, news sites never be able to compete on targeting granularity or ad pricing.
Rather than fighting a losing battle, it's better to put your chips behind a battle where you have a differentiated advantage (in the NYT/Cable News companies, it's the cornered resource of accredited voices in reporting and editorial).
It would be net-negative to try to compete in the space targeted ads. They'd be better off offering low-revenue, low-cost blanket ads (i.e. advertise in the "automotive" section of the website to non-subscribers), where the cost to the ad operator is effectively zero because they don't have to maintain a database of user ad profiles.
It means that people are willing to pay for apps. As with any product endeavor, success isn't evenly distributed — a small percentage of developers ("small" or not) are making interesting and/or useful apps that have achieved product/market fit. The rest follow Sturgeon's law and/or don't know how to find their audience.
You make money by not assuming people won't pay for apps. I'll happily pay for an app that serves a purpose for me and makes my life easier. If your app is good enough, people will pay for it. I'm more likely to uninstall an app with ads. Believe it or not, I don't want to sit through ads for the latest castle crasher or casino game that I'll never install.
Most average users I know HATE ads. They understand that every app has them but they’re in the same boat as the user you responded to: much more likely to uninstall an ad based app
That's the beauty we lost with targeted ads: less ads for the user, and more revenue for the app. There were obviously issues with that model, but it was a better experience for most people.
Wait wait wait... you think that having more-targeted ads (which will have a higher CTR and thus are more valuable to the advertiser, and thus lead to a higher CPM for the publisher) will lead to less ads? What planet are you on?
I was already starting to think you're full of it from your responses to other posters, but now I'm sure of it.
On iOS at least, ad prevalence has increased over time because targeted ads have been effectively abolished: more ads, with less relevance, are required to gain the same amount of revenue.
it seems more like ad prevalence has increased over time so that advertisers and ad-based services can make more money
after all, it increased before any attempts to rein in targeted advertising (which still exists, it's just harder to hyper-target in some circumstances)
I should say that, while I disagree with you, I think your comments have been well made & respectful. I regret that people are downvoting them simply for disagreeing.
We never should have gone beyond context-based ads. Hyper-targeting just feeds the enshittification of everything. The advertising business was doing just fine before the web.
