Mozilla is the latest company to work on privacy-preserving ad attribution. Is "privacy preserving ad attribution" an oxymoron? Is it even possible? And if it is, should Mozilla do it?
I get what people think about ads. I run an adblocker on top of a pihole. I do that because ads became too intrusive. Not just too accurate, but because they became 60% of a given page, and pop-overs, and crap like that.
I’m not alone in scrubbing ads from my life. But, as ads are banished from our lives, nickel and dime-ing has become more popular.
Now everywhere I go a site is demanding a subscription, and there are fears of a future of micro transactions. Imagine a future where you load $20 into your browser and spend 0.0002 cents on every page load…everywhere.
The internet, as with everything, runs on money. Nothing is free. So I genuinely hope someone can come up with a fair compromise. Ads got too bold and we shut them down. Now they are coming at us directly for cash. Which do we prefer? If they went back to more sane ads, would we turn off our blockers? Or are we just waiting for the internet to run on bitcoin/monero, ad-free (or ads-as-alternative), but pay-per-view?
Seems like a good post as any to ask this.
Genuine discussion:
I get what people think about ads. I run an adblocker on top of a pihole. I do that because ads became too intrusive. Not just too accurate, but because they became 60% of a given page, and pop-overs, and crap like that.
I’m not alone in scrubbing ads from my life. But, as ads are banished from our lives, nickel and dime-ing has become more popular.
Now everywhere I go a site is demanding a subscription, and there are fears of a future of micro transactions. Imagine a future where you load $20 into your browser and spend 0.0002 cents on every page load…everywhere.
The internet, as with everything, runs on money. Nothing is free. So I genuinely hope someone can come up with a fair compromise. Ads got too bold and we shut them down. Now they are coming at us directly for cash. Which do we prefer? If they went back to more sane ads, would we turn off our blockers? Or are we just waiting for the internet to run on bitcoin/monero, ad-free (or ads-as-alternative), but pay-per-view?