Advertising worked fine before internet tracking was a thing. Everything from Coca-Cola and the New York Times down to Fred's Corner Dry Cleaner and The Podunk Tribune survived and thrived on the old, low-tracking model.

It's companies like Google and the other internet ad-serving companies that turned the ad industry into a data arms race, and the media outlets got caught up in it.

There's a cliché about "the internet killed newspapers." No, internet ad companies killed newspapers by falsely convincing them that an ad view on a screen is worth 1,000 times less than an ad view on printed paper, so they have to make up the difference by harvesting everyone's data.

I think it's a little bit of both. Internet commoditized newspapers and unbundled them, allowing us to peruse individual articles without the regard for whole. But you're right that instead of figuring out a proper way to deal with this, papers just got convinced by adtech companies and doubled-down on ads on-line.

(Then again, were they wrong? The model works. Much like for a factory that dumps all its toxic waste into the nearby river, the model works. Doesn't mean it deserves to, and that it will work forever.)

I think you're mistaken there. If the model worked, then thousands of newspapers wouldn't have closed, downsized, or worse. We'd be back in the 80's when cities like Cincinnati and Chicago had FOUR real daily newspapers, and just about every single radio station had its own news department.

What happened is that the internet ad companies convinced newspapers that an ad that used to cost $1,000 for 1,000 people to see in print should only cost 10¢ for 1,000 people to view online.

What happened is that now advertisers can measure the impact of their ads and realize they just wasted $1000. If advertising was worth $1k, ad companies would still charge it. The people getting screwed in the old system were the advertisers.

The world only sustained thousands of newspapers because physical delivery made them inherently local. The internet made the market for news national, if not global. Consolidation is natural.

Personally I can't stand all attention grabbing moving things so have been using all sorts of adblockers since they first showed up. Before then I played around with custom css in netscape and blocking in the hosts file, running a local webserver for faster blocking instead of blackholing stuff. uBlock is so much easier to use :-)

What makes you believe that this hypothetical comparison is false?

The problem with traditional advertising is that everyone sees it, regardless of their interest in the subject matter or lack thereof. As an advertiser you have to pay to show your ad to a lot of people who aren't likely to be interested.

What Google and Facebook brought to the game was targeting. If you can target your ads to people who are already interested in that subject -- or even just more likely to be interested than the average person -- then your ads will in fact be more effective dollar per dollar. You avoid paying to show the ad to everyone else who is unlikely to be interested.

Some companies like Coca-Cola engage in brand advertising, where their goal is to build awareness and respect for their brand among everyone in the general population. This kind of advertising has less need for precise targeting. But not all companies need this kind of advertising. Plenty of smaller companies are looking to advertise to people who are likely to want their specific product, whether it's a video game or women's clothing or a product for parents of young children, etc.

To give a made-up example, if you're trying to sell an indie video game, then you'll spend your small advertising budget much more effectively if you target your ads to people who enjoy video games, than if you target the general population. If you're selling a first-person shooter video game, then you'd like to target your ads to people who play first-person shooter video games (and not necessarily target video game players who only play Farmville or Bejeweled).

It's very possible for me to imagine that highly targeted advertising to a segment of people who are interested in a product like that will be 1000 times more effective than traditional advertising that everyone sees. You're paying to show it to far fewer people, and each person is far more likely to act on it.

This is false. The internet ad tech companies didn't invent marketing demographics. Advertisers who want to sell things to old people advertise on TV shows and in magazines that appeal to old people. Advertisers who want to sell Product X advertise in places where people who want to buy Product X might see it.

No, traditional media doesn't have the granularity or seemingly instant feedback of online ads. But there's a reason that an ad in print has more gravitas and impact on the reader than an online ad. Digital ads are ephemeral, and are forgotten as quickly as they are seen. With the exception of writing an ad in the sand on a wave-washed beach, every single other advertising method has more impact than online ads.

What Google and Facebook brought to the game was targeting.

I wish that was true. If it was, then I wouldn't be bombarded by ads for things I have no interest in from companies in places I can't buy from.

Right now on my Facebook feed:

- Ad for a concert by a band I don't like in a city 600 miles away.

- Ad for homeowners insurance for a house I don't own from an insurance company that doesn't operate in my state.

- Ad for an Xbox video game. I don't own an Xbox, and don't play video games.

- Ad for a business credit card for a business I don't own.

Tell me again about how Silicon Valley's ad tech industry is benefiting both me, and the advertisers.

Nonsense. "I don't click on ads, therefore online ads are useless" is not a valid methodology.

I buy Facebook ads for a niche audience. I can track them; the ads work and bring me business and put food on my table. There is absolutely no way I could advertise with traditional media; demographics like "males 18-24" is nowhere near targeted enough.

I don't click on online ads either. But then I'm just not the type of person that does. That doesn't change the fact that they work in a measurable way.

This seems to be an argument for "an ad view on a screen is worth 1,000 times less than an ad view on printed paper", which you seem to be arguiing against in parent comments...

Every ad I hear is injected into my phonological loop. It fades as the neural activity drops back to normal.

An ad is an ad is an ad is an ad is an ad. It does not matter whether it reaches my brain from a computer monitor, a television screen, a radio speaker, or newsprint. I have the choice to attend to it, or not.

The argument here is that ads viewed or heard by robots will probably never reach a human brain. The computer-delivered ads make different types of metering and targeting possible, but they also make the advertiser vulnerable to automated exploits and automated blocking.

In print, you can extrapolate from statistical modeling and circulation numbers. In television and radio, the same can be done with ratings numbers. On the Internet, there are so many possible metrics. The problem is the advertisers started an arms race they cannot win, because they had to make themselves more useful than the media companies' internal advertising departments.

Those guys could sell fractions of a page of static ads. Those ads get served with the same content, every time someone reads the paper. Any targeting has to be based on the predicted audience for the content itself. Men's razors advertised in the sports section; the exact same razors but marketed to women advertised in the lifestyle section. Car, boat, and RV dealers advertised in the business news section. If the online edition of newspapers embedded their own non-scripted copy of static print ads, served from their own servers, from the same places as their article images and stock photos, nobody would bother trying to block them. That's just what newspaper articles look like, to everyone that remembers when they were actual papers that got delivered by kids on bicycles.

The ad services that sucker media companies into using them are worth 1000 times less than the ads served in-house, because of all their clever nonsense they attempted in order to trick the media-companies into using them. I don't need to block dumb ads; I might want to, but I don't need to. I do need to block ads that run scripts and set cookies, because they hijack my own resources to make my experience across the entire web worse. There is nothing inherent wrong with writing an article that has a permanent, static set of ads in it.

Old media had the full-page, half-page, quarter-page, per-column-inch, and classified ads. A new media article can be pasted into a template, with a fixed number of advertising slots. Show the article template to your registered advertisers, who know your standards for the slots, and let them buy specific slots for specific articles, categories of article, or anywhere on the site. Paste the approved ads into the slots for them, and archive the article page. That's now what the site serves whenever the URL is requested, forevermore. It's the same as going to the library and looking up a newspaper microfiche page from October 15, 1985; the ads are still the same, and just got one more impression.

If you want to have any idea of how well advertising works, you have to approach it from the perspective of an advertiser, not an ad target. Then you can get real data. You are a data point of one.

I built a large print-on-demand apparel marketplace. Most of the sellers were driving traffic with facebook ads. It worked great. Unfortunately (for the sellers) so many people jumped into the game that they bid up the ad rates. Now Facebook makes most of the money in the tshirt business... but you can't say the system doesn't work.

Guess what, I actually thought about doing that just "for science" - setting up some nonsense page, launching a $5-10 ad campaign, and seeing what happens. I.e. measuring the impulse response of the system, in a way.

To be clear, I source my distrust to adtech partly from personal experience as well. I worked at a company that also did social media marketing once, in particular it would run content marketing on Facebook for people. I had a first-hand look at "how the sausage is made", and my overall impression is: marketers having no clue about statistics dump some charts into a Word file and write a story about how that graph means things are great; customers having no more clue and no way to verify effectiveness believe that. Both sides are happy, and money changes hands.

Also funny you mention print-on-demand, for two reasons. One, I'm building a side project in this space right now. Two, print-on-demand apparel are the ads that are pissing me off the most right now on Facebook (in particular a certain company that's named after a game animal saying "hello" in Hawaiian).

Completely agree with this. I actually preferred ads that would be directly related to what I was viewing at the time. For instance, if I'm viewing a local bicycle club, I'd much rather see ads for a bicycle repair shop than for the Airbnb I glanced at last night. The current ad model is hugely distracting in that way, and I find it really annoying.