Anywhere there are eyeballs, there will be ads. And wherever there are ads there are privacy concerns.
Netflix waited until they had sufficiently killed off cable TV, then went back to creating the same problem it fixed. No ads in ChatGPT today, but soon as it (or a competitor) gains meaningful marketshare, there will be ads.
> And wherever there are ads there are privacy concerns.
Not necessarily true. Physical billboards are ads but (mostly) without privacy concerns, until they start putting cameras on them watching who walks by and looks.
I miss old contextual advertising. Like you read a sports website, you see ads for matches, sports gear, etc, all based on the content not the user preferences.
That's just a lesson that capitalism is insatiable. Early on, Google didn't have personalized ads and they were still making money hand over fist just because search queries are an excellent signal into stuff you may want to buy. But in "line must always go up" fashion, there is even more money to be squeezed out if they surveille everything you do to personalize ads. Same thing happened with Facebook. They had a ton of data about what ads to show you solely based on your interactions on Facebook's (now also Instagram's) site and apps, but they could make even more money if they tracked you everywhere online in order to increase their ad click-through rates.
The adverts were better too. When I'm seaching for "vacuum cleaner reviews", there are adverts for vacuum cleaners.
After I make my decision and buy one (online, or in person), I no longer search for "vacuum cleaner reviews", but I search instead for "skiing in January" and I no longer get adverts for vacuum cleaners, I get it for ski resorts.
Yeah, those were better days: if you googled for some problem you were having with, say, a piece of equipment, you'd get ads from obscure little stores selling parts for that equipment, or special solutions for that problem. The ads were actually for things you might want, related to whatever you were searching for at that moment. And they were simple little text ads, next to the search results, so you knew they were ads, but they weren't in the way or stealing your attention.
That's not how it works. Rather, Google realizes someone else would take over their business if they didn't make their product better. If Google stuck to no data and XYZSearch used data, then XYZSearch would provide a better product and Google would go out of business. It doesn't take greed, the "could make even more money" part, to have an incentive to do better. All it takes is a desire not to go out of business.
Odd take IMO that Google's ever encroaching ads make their product better. Heck, Larry and Sergei even wrote a treatise (it used to be available directly off google.com, can't remember the name) about how they would be different from search engines at the time, how they wouldn't sell search position, and how the ads model was fundamentally at odds with end user experience. That's hilarious now as Google has gone to great lengths to make ads as indistinguishable as possible from normal search results, and for some terms my entire front page is ads. Compare that to "early" Google where ads were clearly identified in top and right sections with a yellow banner.
That might make sense if everyone were picking which search engine to use based on the relevance of its ads, but they aren't. In fact, early Google was popular in part because it wasn't all covered in ads.
I wish all this data mining seemed to be worth a damn to me. Sponsored ads I see are either directly related to my search term, which is hardly a difficult problem, or based on my purchase history, which is baffling and frankly kinda stupid.
Hey! You just bought a filter for your air purifier! Want to buy a new one! For a different purifier you don't own!
That's one of my favorite scenes in Minority Report. It's even better that they used a real company (Gap) which likely paid to have their store depicted as a dystopian hellscape. People think of Stephen Spielberg as a director of fluff, but I can't think of a more subversive moment in a mainstream blockbuster.
I don't think competition would solve this, because most people would just take the ads offer and from a business perspective there's 0 reason to offer an ad-free option.
Of course, consumers cannot possibly estimate the cost of ads. They can't tell how much of the stuff they buy is because they're influenced, or how many years of life they throw away by watching ads in the long run. Ads could be costing them 1 dollar a year, or maybe 1,000. But they don't know, and they sure as hell won't be paying 5 bucks for a product if there's a "free" ad version.
What does that even look like, practically speaking? Is sponsored segment an ad? Is wearing branded apparel an ad? Is doing a press junket for a new movie an ad?
Facebook immediately comes to mind. Does google even have an ad-free version? Youtube nominally does (though that doesn't stop channels from running their own).
YouTube and Gmail do. I have both ad free. Google search does not. Facebook only did in Europe afaik, but I’d argue it’s not priced fairly. I don’t use most of meta, but would love an ad free instagram. But even if I were in Europe, the price is 20 a month. If I used other meta products that might be fine as a bundle, but is absurdly high for just instagram.
Most newspapers require payment but have no ad free option either.
I fully understand YouTube on this. Banning promoted/sponsored segments would be censoring the creators. Practically it's also too difficult to draw a line.
Not running ads is what you do when you care about user experience. If you start running ads it’s because you care more about money than user experience.
As long as there is robust competition the consumer’s preferences will be favored, because success comes at their discretion.
So I think it’s more like “wherever the consumer isn’t the customer there will be ads”.
Company A has no ads because they care about user experience
Company B has ads. Company B makes more money and can therefore provide more features / more content. Company B ends up providing more of what users want.
Uber won versus taxis because Uber provided a fraud-free experience, and the taxis were acting fraudulently. Uber would tell you how much a trip would cost, and let you pay for it through your phone (through your saved credit card); a taxi would drive in circles to run up the fare, perhaps even just turn off the taximeter altogether and make up a charge on the spot, and claim their credit-card reader is broken.
Netflix waited until they had sufficiently killed off cable TV, then went back to creating the same problem it fixed. No ads in ChatGPT today, but soon as it (or a competitor) gains meaningful marketshare, there will be ads.