Talk:Online advertising/Archives/2017

Not my favourite sentence
Consumers view online advertising as an unwanted distraction with few benefits and have increasingly turned to ad blocking for a variety of reasons.


 * blanket view of consumers
 * some people profess to watching the Superbowl just to see the ads; it's the blunderbuss nature that turns advertising into an unwanted distraction
 * increasingly turned to — as written by every tech journalist with six deadlines per day
 * for a variety of reasons — buh bye, cogency

How about we try something more informative?

I'm just spit-balling here to suggest a different tact:

Online advertising took on its present shape at the height of the browser wars during the Dot-com bubble of 1997–2001, a period notorious for its Wild West departure from the staid norms of traditional print and broadcast media.

Three technologies gain prominence during that era substantially altered the balance of power between the content creator and the content consumer: Macromedia Flash Player, and a pair of unrelated technologies with similar names, Java and JavaScript, each of which provided novel degrees of interactivity and delegated control, at a time in the history of computing where the home PC was gaining multimedia capabilities by leaps and bounds, combined with the broadband revolution augmenting the deliver of rich content.

A race to the bottom soon developed among the least ethical content providers aimed to ensnare the unwary consumer—many of whom had very little experience or understanding of this new and face-paced technology—in an inescapable house of mirrors in which pop-up ads would rematerialize faster than a non-technical user could manage to close unwanted windows, rendering what had formerly been viewed as a productivity appliance (the home PC) unusable for its original purpose.

With no mechanism of formal complaint to industry oversight or central control of the Internet (which famously doesn't exist) consumers were left to their own wits and resources to avoid becoming ensnared by aggressively toxic advertising tactics. An industry of browser extensions took shape, beginning with simple blacklists which evolved over time to become sophisticated ad blockers.

A core problem with the technologies used to distribute interactive content is that the user has no guarantee the content is well behaved until it already passed through your front door and has helped itself to your couch, your Cheezies, and your liquor cabinet, Uncle Buck style. Increasingly, consumers have come to the realization that not letting Uncle Buck into your house in the first place is the most effective strategy at enforcing house rules of guest etiquette.

From the industry side, this strategy has the unfortunate bycatch of depriving legitimate content of a viable revenue model, yet the industry has been slow to enact a code of advertising conduct where empowers the user to specify and enforce their own standard of house etiquette.

Instead, industry powerhouses like Google and Facebook have evolved into advertising networks with internal controls over the advertising delivered, though these controls do not always prevent malware from being delivered to the trusting consumer. When this happens, the consumer has essentially no recourse for damages. The third party advertiser is hard to track down, typically far away, and next to impossible to sue in small claims court; under the terms of service of Google and Facebook, neither of these behemoths can be sued, either.

For these and other reasons, many consumers now view online advertising as an unruly house guest with few benefits to offset serious risks to privacy and security, and have increasingly adopted a blanket ad blocking posture.

That would take some editing. There might be problems with tone, length, and POV. The upside, however, is that it actually explains something, always a good thing to bear in mind why authoring an encyclopedia. &mdash; MaxEnt 15:42, 17 September 2017 (UTC)