The Opinion – on ads

Forward. I wrote this over a decade ago and, though I still agree, I think the solution might be more obvious. Since, every online ad industry has failed to capture the essence of what makes an advertisement useful and valuable, the incentives just might not be there.

So, instead of more tracking, we need less. Ban ads tracking, go back to basic billboard style ads, targeted based on the content of the page, not based on the user, which really means pursuing accidental or guilty curiosity clicks. Imaging curated your own advertisements on your website, ensuring the content there doesn’t distract from the content you’re actually trying to present.

Non-tracking ads would likely simplify costs for advertisers, lower incentives to shower pages with ads, and lower incentives to block them. The whole process would do a lot in raising their value for online publications, bringing the online ecosystem into a healthy balance.

Banning tracking might have the cascade effect of de-personalizing the web, bringing us back all the benefits of web 1.0 and early web 2.0 before the web turned into an automated hellscape that’s difficult to distinguish from the beginnings of Dead Internet Theory.

Tracking your preferences could be limited to clearly labelled check-boxes because they would actually care what you wanted to see. You might even be able to see the web through someone else’s perspective by trying different preferences, bringing back a real sense of shared experience and community instead of the loneliness that personalized experiences offer.

In hindsight, it might seem obvious all along.

There is nothing wrong with an ad. I will throw it out there right now. Ads are a good way to make money without directly charging a user. In truth it can be a wonderful form of business. But I’ll get to that later.

Ads, currently, are intrusive, annoying, and totally out of place (for the most part). People don’t click on them, and they don’t like seeing them. They often distract from of whatever the user is trying to do. The owner of the page gets paid based on number of clicks or number of views depending on the agreement but truly I’ve never seen a banner ad I was happy I clicked on, And that’s only on the rare occasion that I actually click on a banner ad (besides those nice Google Chrome ones, I love those, but it may be because I already use Google Chrome…). Flashy ads also take up quite a bit of RAM and processing power, slowing down older machines. Anyway, the point is, internet ads generally don’t work and are done WRONG. I emphasize heavily on ‘wrong’ because there IS a wrong and a right way to do ads. The right way isn’t to do away with ads either.

Ads can and do have a usefulness to them. They bring us things we haven’t seen before. They introduce us to something new and interesting (hopefully) and open a new path in our minds. This even happens as the current ad structure is. Although it can be rare, ads introduce us to many things that can be of use to us. This is the point of ads (to the consumer/user it is). This is why we still look at ads when they seem well designed or interesting.

Google has done a good thing, they have tried to bring the world relevant ads. In Google Search they are very good at this. I often find myself clicking their ads simply because they’re exactly what I am looking for. In other places, though, it’s not quite as refined. Most (some aren’t) ads that are picked by Google to be relevant on any given website are not as interesting as they’re supposed to be. I would bet that Google’s algorithms for finding relevant ads is based on the text and subjects within the page. This is as much as they can do to find relevance and it’s really a good strategy. The problem is, with the text and subjects on any given page Google finds ads that would have to do with the information on that page. In other words, they bring the user ads that don’t show them anything new, because they’re on a page that already has the information. I can certainly see a problem.

The right way to do ads. See this from both sides, people want new and interesting. Businesses paying for the ads want views, clicks and publicity. Therefore, to make a truly successful ad, one must bring the user something_new and interesting_ enough that they will see, click and be happy they clicked. When a person is happy about something they tell their friends about it,publicizing it, which satisfies the desires of the business who issued the ad. This is a win win scenario. The trick is for the Relevant Ad Company to realize how to make this happen. My suggestion is that Google (being a very VERY large Relevant Ad Company) bring ads to a page based on the subject and text of the page. With the subject and text of that page (and anything else they know about the user) they figure out what would be interesting and/or new to the user. With the absolutely massive amount of people and data from those people that they have under their belt it shouldn’t be too hard to create a system that figured out what people liked based on what they were currently discovering (and what they’d discovered and searched for in the past). Many people use some type of ad-blocking program, relevant ads would remove the need for ad-blocker on said sites, empowering businesses and improving the user experience.

TL;DR

And so, I send out a call to Google: Create more relevant ads based on what a user would want to see. Others will follow.

Whether they find this or not truly relevant ads will happen in due time anyway (hopefully) simply because systems and technologies continually evolve. Someone within Google will and probably has already figured out what I’ve figured out and they will call for it to be implemented. On that day we will begin to have a happier, more prosperous, internet. Until then, use adblocker.