A really great article by Gilad Edelman in Wired asks Why Don’t We Just Ban Targeted Advertising? The article is from March but I somehow missed it and it’s definitely worth writing about. Even without going into any details at all, almost everyone would agree that getting rid of targeted advertising and the malignant adtech industry that depends on it would increase the goodness in the world significantly.
But, it turns out, there are some specific beneficial outcomes that we could expect from getting rid of targeted ads. When you see the list
- Privacy
- Less hate and fallacious content
- Less political manipulation and election interference
- A possibly revitalized journalism industry
- Less discrimination
it’s hard to believe that merely banning adtech would have a positive effect on all those areas but the article makes a pretty good case for it.
But what about the content providers? If we take away their advertising, wouldn’t all their content disappear? The article concludes no. Even Google—the chief adtech offender, along with Facebook—still earns 60% of its income from non-targeted ads and, of course, most serious research into the matter concludes that targeted ads aren’t really that much more effective (about 4% more).
Edelman concedes that banning adtech may be a “cure-some” rather than a cure-all but that it’s an excellent start in restoring the Internet to a better time before the advertisers starting surveilling everything we do and selling our most private activities to anyone willing to pay.