AdTech ?????? vs Old-time ads ??

Today everyone sees online targeted ads regularly.

I appreciate it if it helps me find useful info, while providing me control over what I see and giving me feel my privacy is respected. Nothing is free, our activities are tracked, which enables offering service free of charge with the advertisement revenues.

But my daily experience tell me, the major platform for web advertisements, do not work in that way.

What a platform service provider should do?

• Be responsible to check all the advertisements, just like most of responsible TV stations and newspaper does
• Provide valuable advertisement to consumers, especially in case of targeted ads
• Provide an intuitive interface enabling users to control what advertisements they want to get - Improve the experience on consumers as well as the effectiveness of ads
• Security of private data and its resale, industry-wide standards should be established, so that users can have less complexity for the control of their data
• Companies which want to advertise, should provide quality contents on the right platform

Ranking of platforms for my personal case

I chose 3 platform to exemplify my points.

Bad Practices : Facebook.com (Meta)

Mixed experience: YouTube.com (Alphabet)

Good practice: NetFlix.com (NetFlix)

Facebooks ads :

• It never shows any useful advertisement which lead me to purchase a product/service
• Sponsored contents are simply trash in most cases, full of fake info, they are made for illiterate people, this is simply a good example of bad internet contents
• The amount of advertisements is huge (ARPU developments fits to my perceived user experience) and it's hard to find updates of friends
• Poor quality control of advertisements

In the end, Meta's mission is "to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together. Our products empower more than 3 billion people around the world to share ideas, offer support and make a difference".

With the current current advertisement practice, their service has deteriorated and unnecessarily complicated for users who just want to get connected with friends and family, the ad money was used to its highly unsuccessful Meta Verse projects, which most of its users are not interested....

In the last years, Facebook failed to take enough measure for phishing, scams, account hacking, just to name a few, it gives me an impression that its basic and most fundamental parts of service is not maintained well.

YouTube:

• Advertisements of investment products, coaching (be a nomad worker like me, etc) appear too often, which I will not buy from all the 'influencer' kind of people who advertise on YouTube
• Some advertisements are indeed useful, in my case, gamified and/or sophisticated language learning tools and such, which I appreciate
• The ads frequency of video changes irregularly, which is irritating to me (I guess it's made on purpose) - I loved the old 'tube' kind of advertisement, which inserts ads at regular intervals, so that I can adjust my reactions for ads, either I watch them if they are interesting, otherwise I use the time to get a glass of water or use the restroom.
• But I like the fact YouTube reinvest its profits into improving the platform - Aloud, dub voice generation tech, which enabled the following video in Spanish scaling to offer 6 other dubs, and in any language, Luis sounds like Luis, thanks to this technology!

Netflix:

Some of you might wonder, Netflix as advertisement platform? Yes, Netflix started to offer cheaper subscriptions combined with relatively light-weighted load of advertisements.

And I like it.

Why? I used it with an account made in Germany, and I get not or less personalized advertisement for German market. With the targeted ads, I feel I get detached from some kind of shared advertisement for this country.

And Netflix ads are just like the advertisements on TV, only trustworthy advertisements are aired, relatively at a constant interval, which is not bothering.

Yes, that is a great difference to other IT platforms, Netflix seems to check all of its advertisement with its policy. The efforts to estimate the trustworthiness of advertisement is a huge pain point, which became really bad on the Web. Netflix takes its responsibility, and it should be a normal thing, but today it is not.

Why this difference?

Section 230, Communications Decency Act (1996) of the USA! (well, it's an oversimplification. I'm overwhelmed by the complexity of our legal systems in our globalised world...)

The safe harbor defined in Section 230 provided the basis that the digital platform service providers running search engines and social networks such as Meta, Alphabet and such are not responsible for the 3rd party contents.

I guess NetFlix is a content provider and not the digital platform service provider which can be exempted from moderating its contents and accompanying advertisements. (I hope my interpretation is accurate but I haven't checked, my bad...)

I originally wrote this article some months ago, and I let it sleep.

Today, a number of the gigantic digital platformers were welcoming the new POTUS assuming his presidency on January 20th, and some of them have made decisions to embrace 'libertarian' approach, such as no more fact checking at Meta.

I woke up and started thinking about what are the fundamental thoughts behind these changes.

It's easy to say that huge corporations want to make money with less costly operations. Yes, I believe it is a key factor.

I also think, however, that it is beyond the profit pursuit. In case of Elon Musk and X, it is also about the libertarian idea that every individual should be able to express her/his opinion without the involvement of governments. Elon wants to promote his personal agenda, which might contradicts from profit making and his libertarian principle.

For the last 1 hour I have read many legal document summaries and faced the difficulty to create a concise summary, as I'm not capable to interlink all the different pieces of info in my mind.

I will come back to this topic, once I'm mentally ready for the challenge!

I close this article with 1 screenshot showing the university of Düsseldorf press release stating it quits using X. While I'm critical of many German organisations, which are too protective and hesitate to take advantage of new tech, at the same time I admire their integrity for the fundamental values with regard to privacy, transparency, democracy and beyond.