Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeartRadio and how the Tech are Ye. It is time for a classic episode. It's time for us to conclude a conversation we started with last week's classic episode. This is called The Problem with
Ads Part two. It originally published on May twenty fifth, twenty sixteen, and Ben Bollen joined the show to talk about the issues with ads because there are a lot of them, and boy howdy, we just get more and more issues as time goes on. I'll touch on that a little bit at the very end of this episode, but yeah, I should probably ask Ben if he would like to do a second go at this topic now that we're several years down the road and we have yet more ways for ads to be served and exploited
since twenty sixteen. But let's sit back and listen to this episode. Not all people who design ad blockers necessarily feel great about it either. That's another element. So we've got like the publishers, some of the publishers and authors admitting to the use of ad blockers despite the fact that their business model depends at least in part on
advertising revenues. That's complicated. But then you also have ad blockers who start to feel that perhaps what they're doing might be more might be doing more harm than good.
We have an example of this.
Yeah, Marco Armant, who created an ad blocker for the iOS store for iPhones. It was one of several ad blocker apps that became available as soon as Apple allowed for that in the app store. It's very popular. I
got downloaded by a lot of people. Was a pay app, so you had to actually purchase it, And after essentially like a weekend of thinking about it, he began to reconsider the fact that he had made and made available this app and decided to remove it from the app Store and offered refunds to anyone who had purchased it
up to that point. And he said the reason for it was that while he thought advertising still is kind of broken online or at least is not an ideal experience for most people, it ultimately could really hurt small businesses that really depend on that web advertising, and if that avenue of revenue is gone, those businesses could go away. He says, Once I start thinking about something I made
could literally put a person out of business. It changed things for me, and I could not let that be something I had contributed.
Crisis of conscience.
Yeah, so you know he decided.
Uh.
He says this specifically says, I've learned over the last few crazy days that I don't feel good making one and being the arbiter of what's blocked making one, being an ad blocker. Ad blockers come with an important asterisk. While they do benefit a ton of people in major ways, they also hurt some, including many who don't deserve the hit. And there's an article in Wired, which again Wired is one of those companies that says, hey, we noticed you're
watching using an ad blocker. Would you consider possibly turning it off while you're here?
You can still visit our website. I mean, what are we Forbes? Yeah yeah, yeah, sorry, I'm going to tone down the snart.
No, but We're gonna get back to Forbes, say, because I gotta I gotta talk about that. So so Wired, you know, they say, like, this is how we make money. You can police consider turning it off. It worked for me. I turned it off because the ads I come across on Wired don't tend to be obnoxious or intrusive or take away my experience. They don't completely cloud my view of whatever it is I'm looking at. They are responsible
with their advertising and I respect that. So anyway, Wired has this article about Arment and his experience, and one of the things they point out is that ad blockers are too blunt of an instrument, meaning they punish everyone equally. They punish the people who are running tons of ads on their page with very little content. I'm sure you've come across one of those in the past where you're like,
is there anything here that's not an ad? They punish those where you would argue, there's very little value for your visit. But they also punish the upstanding folks who are just they're doing their best to make a living doing what they love, but they find it very difficult because of this hit they're taking with ad revenue. So yeah,
very interesting. Now to get back to Forbes. Forbes has this approach where if they detect an ad blocker, they say turn it off or you're not going any further right, right, And they even say, hey, if you turn it off, you can have thirty days to experience the ad light experience with Forbes, and I thought, you know what, that's fair. I will I will see what this AD light experience is. Maybe it's gonna be like wired, and I'm gonna have
a pleasant experience. I turn off my AD blugger, I go on in and the first thing that happens is a float over pop up window playing video automatically scrolls over what I'm trying to read. And I think this is AD light. What does AD heavy look like?
Add heavy? They send someone to.
Your house and they're just like, hey, I couldn't help, but notice you don't have all rugs over here.
We like to sell you some rugs, and we're right outside. It's only gonna take like forty five minutes to an hour for me to tell you about all these rugs.
And the sound.
Yeah, you close the door and all your ears listen.
You close the door, but I'm still here and I'm gonna talk about the rugs through your.
Door for the next forty five minutes. You can't walk this ad.
I mean it's good. It's it's a good point though, because if the AD light experience is still intrusive, Yeah, then what is the difference is it? Again? A hierarchy of types.
Yeah, and that's a good question that I don't know the answer to. I mean, it's and I know I'm slamming Forbes a bit with this discussion, but I under again, I understand the position they're in. It's not like I don't appreciate that, of course I do. I just feel like the whole approach to ads online has been broken since day one. And one of the things I keep hoping for is that the ad block issue will force companies, including really advertising companies, into coming up with ways where
advertising works. Not that we're advertising sneaks in that's not working. No, that just creates more resentment. You've got to find a way to make it work, or you have to find a different way to make money. So you could go the route of like a paywall that some sites have gone to, where you have to pay to get access to the full site, or you could go with something like a Patreon approach, where you develop a loyal audience and then you say, hey, I love making this stuff
for you. I hope you love the stuff that I'm making. It's kind of an NPR model, right, Help me make the stuff you love by giving me a little bit of money each month. That will cover my costs and I can keep doing.
This and I can give you some perks.
Yeah, and there's somewhere it will be perks as well. And honestly, I'm a Patreon for like three or four different things recurring monthly, and in every case I don't care about the perks. The perks were not the reason why I did it. I did it because I appreciated and respected the content I was getting and I wanted to support the stuff I love. And I'm in a position where I can afford to do that. Obviously, not everyone is, and in fact, there's some people out there.
Tom Merritt, great example. Tom Merritt's stand up guy does the daily tech news show Amazing Program, and he says, look, I get it. Some of you. You know your every dollar counts, and I totally understand that, and I appreciate that you listen to so thank you. You are just as important to me. But for people who can afford to maybe throw a dollar or five dollars a month to help me produce the show, do that. And the more people who do, the more shows I can produce.
I can go to six days a week, which is what he's trying to do right now.
Cooler stuff too. You have a higher production value, You get what you.
Pay for exactly. And again, it keeps the show ad free, so you know, he might have a sponsor for an episode or two, but generally speaking, the shows are pretty much had free, which is very refreshing compared to some other shows online where you're like, they've been talking about this ad for three minutes.
Do you remember how? And this goes to other video as well, that's not necessarily personality driven. Do you remember the uproar that Hulu created when people would pay for a subscription what was it, nine, ten dollars whatever? Pay for a subscription that also still had ads in the video?
Come yeah? People were saying, why am I paying to watch these to watch these ads? I thought that the paying was so that I wouldn't have to watch ads anymore. Hulu also has the AD blocker detector, so that says, like, you have an AD blocker on, you want to watch an episode, turn it off.
We are unable to provide the ad viewing experience due to your applock. You can wait them out, though, you could play the the poker game with them.
The screen long enough and it starts to play. Yes, does it really?
Yeah, if you just leave it alone long enough because I'm busy, I would have it on in the background or something.
You just like suddenly you just hear like an episode all of.
A sudden, And to be honest, it brightened me and my cat. It's it's strange though, when we see these different strategies used to address targeted advertising. I have a
question for you guarding this. So one of the big concerns of privacy advocates is that targeted advertising takes this user, this user generated data, and builds a profile off of that we have in the past, or you have specifically on tex stuff explored the search bubble, that past results predict what you were shown when you ask a question, and yeah, it's supposed to be stuff that rather than
the objective truth. The more of a profile you build, the more likely that you're going to find it's going to give you stuff that it thinks you like.
It's essentially a stepping stone to the semantic web, where the web anticipates what you want and gives you your version of what it is you want. The downside of that being that you could create an Internet version of the Echo chamber and you only see the stuff that reinforces what you already think.
Absolutely, and I think that this is I think the dangerous thing about targeted advertising like that is especially because it is automated, right, and it's based on this precedent set.
What can happen is that eventually, through some error in the code, through some misinterpreted series of visits to some other website, it could just decide that Jonathan Strickland must like diapers, and because he hasn't bought them yet, is only an indication that Jonathan Strickland needs more advertisements for diapers until he gets it. And that that can happen,
That can happen to people. So I you know, one of the most I think he used this example before, one of the most in my mind, egregious examples of how to do targeted advertising in the worst possible way is.
Facebook, Ben and I will be back to talk more about the perils of advertising after this quick break. Facebook. The way it works is that you'll end up seeing stuff and started into your feed that can end up being kind of creepy, especially like you said, if it's something that pops up where it's related to a search that you did when you weren't even part of Facebook
in the first place. Yeah, you get these promoted entries into your feed that look like the same sort of stuff that a friend might have left, but it wasn't left by any of your friends. It was just left by your friends at Facebook and whatever advertising agency they're working with. And then of course there's all this stuff that appears in the right rail that looks like it's news articles, but it's not. It's more advertising. And in fact, a lot of the clickbait stuff that shows up on Facebook.
Not that this is Facebook's fault, but a lot of the clickbait stuff that ends up getting shared to Facebook and then re shared by tons of people who aren't necessarily thinking critically, is really just thinly veiled advertorial content, right, or it links to a site that has ridiculous advertising space on it and just a tiny bit of content.
And also this goes to a bigger thing. This is the first instance in human civilization of the capability to block advertisement. Right. So it's something that we forget. We tried a very a daunting and ambitious task on stuff they don't want you to know. My co hosts Matt and Nola and I said, you know what, let's pick a day and let's count every advertisement we see from waking to sleep. None of us could do it successfully because our day to day physical lives are so embedded
with advertising already. To your point, yeah, you know, and it makes me wonder, what if there were some sort of physical analog to that, would people do it? I think the answer is, of course, because people want to feel like they're not being continually pitched to.
Right, and in fact we've you know, this kind of brings us the whole idea about privacy and using an ad blocker to protect yourself, and then the counter two ad blockers, where you get the ad blocker detectors. Essentially, what they're detecting, by the way, is they're just saying was the ad served to the browser? And if the answer is no, then the assumption is the person has
an ad blocker program running on their machine. That leads us to the discussion in Europe where there is this ongoing battle about whether or not ad blocker detectors are in fact illegal or at least violating a policy about privacy. And it's a pretty interesting and weird kind of story. So there's a guy named Alexander Hant who has put forth this argument saying that because a website is capable of telling you have an ad blocker on it, that
violates your sense of privacy. Therefore is illegal to have an ad blocker detector on a service, and ad blockers should not be punished or there should not be this detection system. And it was because of a pretty broad reading of the European privacy law, which says that a company cannot record information about you without your consent right, and the argument was that is the ad blocker is the detection of that, is that actually recording information about
a person? Because if so, then there should first pop up a little message saying this website wants to find out if you're using an ad blocker do you allow
it to do so? And it gets really to a question of practicality, like does the Internet work in such a way that it would be possible to implement a policy that's akin to that or would it just mean that we have to rethink the way these laws are framed because they don't take into account the way the Internet works, and because of that they are passing laws that are counterproductive or in some cases just would never work, they'd be unenforceable, and they would be they would just
cause a massive mess. And so that's an ongoing discussion as we're recording this podcast that has not been decided yet, but there are arguments on both sides about whether or not these ad blocker detectors are against the law or if they're totally legal, and if they are legal, that people can that a company can say, hey, turn your ad blocker off, you vandal your visigoths trying to think of trying to think of European marauders at this point,
you're Viking, and so it's that's an interesting thing to see.
Now.
We don't have anything like that in the US because privacy is something we long since gave up on.
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, we're still doing the song and dance every so often, you know. It's it's one of those we make hallmark card level statements about privacy in the public sphere.
And I guess, I guess really the place to kind of end this discussion to really the kicker. The reason why it would be very difficult for me to argue with any sincerity against someone's decision to use an ad blocker is the safety issue. The malware issue. So earlier this year there was a story about how this this malware group managed to infiltrate advertising companies that served ads to places like the BBC and other major outlets like msn A, like The New York Times.
Big Fish.
Yeah, these are huge outlets that are had to have advertising on them, And what the malware designers had done was they had injected malware into ads that were being served on these so they didn't have to they didn't have to hack into the New York Times or the BBC.
They had to hack into the actual advertising server and insert some malware and disguise it really well, so it's not easy to pick out that malware gets served up as if it's a legitimate ad, and they could convince someone to install some code that ends up encrypting their hard drive. This is called ransomware. So this is when you get a message out of the blue and it says, hey, guess what, sucker, your computer's encrypted, and we've got an
encryption key and we'll sell it to you. So you've got to pay us and we'll give you the key so that you can get back into your computer. If you don't pay us. At such and such a time, we will destroy your encryption key and your computer will permanently be encrypted, and there's nothing you can do about it. Ha ha ha. It's essentially the way the message goes and and so your your computer is held hostage and unless
you pay for it, then you're kind of stuck. And because it was it was the malware attacks were coming from these major trusted outlets. That's a huge problem, right, It's not like it's not like the people were going to you know, some back alley website that was already got a terrible reputation. They were malware.
Yeah, they weren't going to like freeezannexinadderall dot biz.
Yeah exactly. They were going to the New York Times, for goodness sakes. And so if you have an ad blocker, it blocks that stuff because it identifies it as an AD and you never get it, so you are safe from that kind of a malware attack. So it's very difficult to argue, hey, ad blockers are wrong when people who don't use them are potentially going to fall victim to this ransomware attack. And this was a very specific incident.
It's not necessarily ever going to repeat or it may not repeat on a scale as large as it did before, but it drives home that fact that ad blockers are not just for people who are tired of being sold to. It's for people who are like, no, I want to be able to surf the web. I'm very careful with the way I surf the web. I want to make sure that I don't get hit by something despite how careful I am, and I'm getting it from what I
thought was a trusted source. Look y'all, it's not lost on me that it is somewhat ironic for me to interrupt a conversation about the problems with ads so that we can go listen to some ads. But you got to pay the bills, y'all. Here we go. So one of the things I read about was about Forbes being one of those sites that you go to Forbes dot com and you get the message, hey, you need to turn off your ad blogger if you want to have
access to it. But Forbes was also victim to a ransomware attack, which means that you know, you're like, well, I want to read that thing on Forbes, but then you make yourself vulnerable to being attacked by malware.
And Forbes is such great work they do.
And that's the thing is that you know, we're again it sounds like we're really bashing on Forbes, but it's largely due to the problem with advertising, not the problem that Forbes wants to get paid. I totally respect that, of course, and I know I've said it multiple times, but I just want to drive that home is that as someone who I make a living off this, I
want to continue to do so. And part of that means that I have to be you know that my work is going up on pages that have advertising served against it, and I want those pages to do well, and I want those advertisers to do well. But it requires that we have an advertising system that works and that isn't predatory or damaging.
And currently we're still trying to we as a species are still trying to find what that thing is. We're we're kind of in a pioneering wild West state right now.
Yeah. Well, and it's weird because advertising has been around for ages. Ages.
Some of the earliest advertising actually goes back to Greco Roman times. Did you hear about this? No? There were so, well, I might I think you know what I'm going to say, So.
Are you talking about houses of ill repute?
Yes, Archaeologists found that prostitutes would wear sandals with arrows imprinted in the soul of the sandal, so that they would leave a series of arrows as they walked to As you so fittingly put it, the house of ill repute advertising is ancient.
Can do you one better than that?
All right? Laid on me.
Pompeii, the city of Pompeii. They're still paving stones in Pompeii that have the image of a phallus raised a raised like it's actually carved in the stones, pointing in the direction of the brothels and and if you get the tour guide I get for Pompeii, he delights in pointing all of them out and explaining this and uses the the pronunciation of pos posse has a pose on it.
I don't know if you're doing me one better, though, because these are just these are clearly like it sounds like prostitution. Advertisements are the pepsi and coke of early ads.
Well, and to be fair, like you know you were saying making tracks in the dirt, I'm talking about putting forth the effort.
I guess there is I guess there is that. Well maybe that maybe they're brought those were just more stable places.
Well at least until the volcano erupted. Sorry, sorry man, Okay, well that that volcano though, Yeah, one hell of an AD blocker, so too soon? Yeah, yeah, I should have waited a couple more millennia. Yeah, we're having a lot of fun now. This is when we're like, hey, guys, it's Friday afternoon. Guess who's getting loopy? But no, getting back into the modern day discussion of this, and and
and and the concerns that are there. You know. I've also read a piece that was written, I think in zd net about how you should not The author said, you shouldn't give sites that require you to disable ad blockers your clicks because of the safety issue is that if they say that they value money more than they value your safety as a customer, then that's a message that tells you you should not be a customer of
that company. And I thought that's a very hard argument to oppose, right, Like, I don't want to go to a store where they're like, listen, buy some of our stuff. And then I look up and I see that ceiling tiles are about to fall down, or there's a sparking wire that's just laying on the ground.
There's a hid by himself in a puddle, just screaming.
There's a guy in a hockey mask just pacing back and forth. And in the shadows back in the section that I need to go in.
A bird hits the glass. Right.
There are a lot of like there a lot of warning flags that are popping up, and I'm thinking, clearly, this this shot proprietor doesn't care about my safety and just wants me to buy something. I'm out.
Yeah, And I don't.
I don't necessarily mean that websites or shot proprietors for that matter, need to fall over themselves and say, listen, your welfare is our chief concern, but at least shows some concern, right right.
Yeah, exactly exactly, because the audience, the audience ultimately should be the primary concern, yes, right, yeah.
And again, if your goal is to make money by selling to those people, or if your goal is to make money so that you can continue creating content and you're doing it through a partnership with an advertiser, then part of that means you definitely want that audience to be well because otherwise you don't have someone to sell to, right, So it makes it's so easy to see how it makes sense that the best possible approach is to find the one that is not going to irritate your viewer base.
Because if you can figure that out, then you are good to go. If you are if you're able to do it without pushing away your audience, then things are working. The weird thing, and I know where I was going with before I talked about the ancient the ancient advertisement. The weird thing is we've had advertisement for so long, but no real way of seeing how effective it was.
Right right, Yeah, no metric?
Yeah, so television, radio, newspaper magazines. I mean, you could see after an ad campaign if sales increased, and you could argue, well, some of that sales increase must be due to the advertising, and you're probably right, But you can't get to the point where you can say how much of that increase was due to the advertising. It may be that advertising had a small but ultimately not a tremendous impact on sales and something else was responsible
for the spike. It was impossible to say. The real weird thing about the Internet is you can track all that, right, you can track if people click on an AD, and once you get that information, instead of making it more valuable,
it somehow made it less valuable. And possibly they made it less valuable by people saying, you know, advertising not as powerful as I thought it was, which meant all the advertising companies in the world said, uh oh, all the Don drapers of the world said, and that that opening part of the credits, where a silhouette is falling from a building, is starting to look pretty prophetic. Right now, of course, we all know that's not how it turned out.
I have never seen Math, neither of I have just read a lot about it.
I hear it's a lot like Yeah, it's a lot like Slooper. It's exactly like Looper. Uh So, anyway, that kind of wraps up our discussion. And again, this is a weird thing to talk about on a podcast that occasionally has sponsors that also again is part of a company that does web that well, that makes money at least in part through web advertising. But we thought it was an important one to talk about because as as people who create content, we want to see this work.
We want we want to have a job. Ben I don't want to put words in your mouth. But I like what I do for a living.
I'm here for community service.
Actually I got you. Yeah, that explains the orange vest that you have to weigh. Yes, but then we have to report you because we were told you have to wait a time.
So yeah, this is absolutely right. We love our jobs.
We love our jobs, and we want to keep doing them. But as consumers ourselves, we completely understand the plight of people who are tired of these bad experiences. So if I were to leave you with anything, dear listeners, it would be but all the house stuff works domains on your white list, so that I can continue to have a job. But also, if anyone out there is in the advertising world to really give hard thought, like how can we create a better system that serves everyone more effectively?
Because we we do. We need that, we want it, We need it from multiple reasons. The content providers needed, the viewers needed, the advertising companies needed, the vendors need it. We just have to figure that out in a way that has not really worked yet. With some exceptions. There's some online ads that may be extremely effective, and we need to study how those work and what was it that made them special? And perhaps create more appropriate best practices of stuff.
Yeah, you know, it's way more effective. Currently it seems to be or Twitter accounts from companies that talk directly to it with a sense of humor, and in these weird rivalries like fast food company twitters are hilarious. I don't know who they put in charge of it, and I don't know when they sober up. Right for now, the ride is great well, and for.
Me, like, I subscribe to quite a few services as well, including YouTube Bread is one. And because I subscribe to YouTube Bread, I don't worry about ads that doesn't happen, but it means I'm paying a certain amount per month to have access to that. And in fact, I didn't even subscribe to YouTube Bread. Technically A subscribed to Google Music, which then converted into a YouTube Bread subscription, which is awesome. I don't have to subscribe to two different things now.
But that approach I also like, like, I like the choice saying, hey, you know, you can go the route of watching the ads supported content, or if you pay a little to us each month, you can get the ad free version. And I'm fine with that too. And that concludes the conversation I had with Ben Bollin way back in twenty sixteen about the problem with ads. Again, like I said, we could do an update to this, because, as it turns out, there are multiple new ways for
ads to be served to us. The targeted advertising field has gotten way more complicated since twenty sixteen. We're starting to see companies like Meta get serious pushback on the way that they have used targeted advertising, particularly in places like the European Union. With the development of virtual reality and augmented reality, we've got a lot of companies out there just sort of champing at the bit in order
to find new ways to serve ads to us. And those are ways that could be far more intrusive, right, Like if you've got eye tracking hardware and software that are incorporated into a headset, then advertising can end up getting even more intrusive. And that's concerning the whole concept of the metaverse. Brings up lots more questions about advertising
and privacy and security. So yeah, Ben should probably come back on the show and we should talk more about the current and future concerns we have with the way advertising is handled. We hear it, I heart, at least I'll speak for myself, but most of my co workers I feel fall into this category too. We take this seriously.
We want to make sure that we monetize our shows or else, you know, we can't do them anymore because you know, you can't just do this and have yourself get paid for it and not have any way to generate revenue. But we want to make sure we do it in a responsible way, so I know that my coworkers take this as seriously as I do. Where we try our best to make sure that the ads that are paired with our shows are ones that we don't object to, that we feel are a good fit for
our programs, and that aren't predatory in nature. Occasionally we are tricked ourselves or we miss something and we allow something to slip through, but we do our best. I know that I've done that a couple times in the past where in retrospect I'm like, ooh, I should have done a little more research to make sure that this was something that I was comfortable having play on the show. But yeah, we do our best on that because we
do understand that advertising is a double edged sword. On the positive side, you might introduce people into a product or service that they really genuinely could use that could be helpful for them. The other side is you could end up perpetuating a predatory relationship that you definitely don't want. So yeah, the challenges continue. If you have suggestions for future topics I could cover here on tech Stuff, please let me know. You can reach out to me a
couple different ways. You can download the iHeartRadio app. It's free to download and use. You can navigate over to tech Stuff using that little search bar. You'll see that there's a microphone icon on the tech stuff page. If you click on that, you can leave me a voice message up to thirty seconds in length. If you prefer to write to me, you can head on over to Twitter. I'm assuming Twitter still exists, So I'm recording all of these intros and outros in January of twenty twenty three,
and it's months later now. I don't know if Twitter is still a thing. I can't tell the future. I know that it's in real trouble right now, but hopefully it's still around. If it is, go there and send me a message. The handle for the show is tech Stuff HSW and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production for more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.