Nepomuk Seiler
highfivve / Head of Engineering
Ad Tech relationships status: complicated
I believe advertising is necessary for any business, it works and it is a valid monetization strategy for a publisher. After that, it gets complicated.
Software engineers dislike online ads for a couple of reasons and I can relate to every one of them.
- Personalization still requires privacy intrusive techniques
- A websites UX decreases with too many ads on the page
- Additional complexity in developing and maintaining your website
Still, if your company’s main revenue stream is advertising, this is what pays your bill at the end of the month. The issue is, that this isn’t a binary decision – ads good, ads bad. Here are a few takes from an engineering perspective on these issues.
Personalization and privacy don’t pair well
Tracking people on as many websites as possible and inferring interests, demographics, and intentions is fuzzy at best. Very few companies can change their privacy policies to track you through their browser, devices, and all services, because they have all of these things and can collect enough relevant data to have an accurate picture of you.
The way forward is not to remove ads or personalization, but personalise on context rather than tracking-inferred targeting data, that is highly privacy violating. And you know who thinks so, too? Prebid. Very recently a bunch of automated rules for new code were added that disallow fingerprinting in new code.
As an engineer, make sure you vet your ad tech partners properly and understand what they are doing. And think about how you can provide a relevant targeting context for advertisers, so it may not require a third party vendor.
A websites UX decreases with ads
The design of your website is important. The main issue is:
It’s the direct result of The Rot Economy, a growth-at-all-costs mindset built off the back of immovable monopolies where tech companies profitably punish users as a means of showing the markets eternal growth. In practice, this means twisting platforms from offering a service to driving engagement, which, in Facebook and Instagram’s case, meant finding the maximum amount of interruptions that a user will tolerate before they close the app. In Google’s case, it meant making changes to search that made advertisements and sponsored links significantly harder to differentiate from “real” search results and allowing the quality of search results to decay to the point that users now rely on TikTok and Reddit instead.
– from They’re Looting The Internet –
A lot of publishers just want to survive. Google, Meta, and friends want more profit. They achieve this with a simple formula. More ads, more revenue. This is not innovation. Instead, it demonstrates a lack of it. Google is even willing to decrease search quality for profits. This is only possible if you have a monopoly and people have no other options. A federal judge concurred and ruled that Google is in fact a monopoly.
Killing your product for profit is not good for anyone. Users, the company, or advertisers that advertise on this product. There are even companies that sue you as an advertiser if you don’t want to advertise on their hate speech platform.
As an advertiser, I want my ads to be shown not only to a relevant audience but also within a product that is well-regarded by its users. As engineers, it’s our job to provide viewable, but not super annoying ad space, structure our content into targetable segments and make users understand the value exchange: your attention for free usage of the service. A good product can have ads that are helpful for users and serve advertiser needs. I hope that someday it becomes reality that publishers have full control over ads on their page.
Additional complexity
But seriously, ad tech is complex, and depending on the size of your company, you can do this on your own or you can find a company that manages your ad stack for you.
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