Advertising: a sustainable utopia?

Advertising generates $50 billion annually in the US alone, but how much of that figure reflects real value? Approximately ⅓ of click traffic is fraudulent, leading to $10 billion in wasted spending annually. Counting revenue due to fraud towards the value of advertising is like counting money spent on diabetes treatments as part of the GDP -- if those figures went to zero, it would reflect a healthier ecosystem, or healthier people in the diabetes case. For people making money on advertising, it is difficult to accept that a reduction in annual revenue can mean that things are better for everyone else.

Even when ads are displayed to real people, they often create little to no value for the ad creator. According to Google, half of ads are never viewable, not even for a second. In addition, adblocking usage grew by 70% last year, and 41% of people between 18-29 use an adblocker. The advertising industry responds to these trends by making ads increasingly distracting (requiring large amounts of resources and unsafe plugins to run), collecting increasingly large amounts of data, and creating more opportunities for abuse by government agencies and other malicious actors. As Mitchell Baker put it, do we want to live in a house or a fish bowl?

There has to be a better way. Why can’t a person buy and blank out all of the ad space on sites they visit at a deep discount, since targeting machinery would no longer be relevant? Why aren’t subscriptions available as bundle deals, like in streaming video? Solutions like these are hypothetical and will remain so as long we maintain the fiction that the current advertising revenue model is a sustainable utopia.

Tracking Protection for Firefox at Web 2.0 Security and Privacy 2015

Edited to add: I wrote a followup post to address comments here and elsewhere that advertising is working as intended. This paper has been reported incorrectly in several places as being about cookie blocking. Tracking protection blocks all traffic, not just cookies.

My paper with Georgios Kontaxis got best paper award at the Web 2.0 Security and Privacy workshop today! Georgios re-ran the performance evaluations on top news sites and the decrease in page load time with tracking protection enabled is even higher (44%!) than in our Air Mozilla talk last August, due to prevalence of embedded third party content on news sites. You can read the paper here.

This paper is the last artifact of my work at Mozilla, since I left employment there at the beginning of April. I believe that Mozilla can make progress in privacy, but leadership needs to recognize that current advertising practices that enable "free" content are in direct conflict with security, privacy, stability, and performance concerns -- and that Firefox is first and foremost a user-agent, not an industry-agent.

Advertising does not make content free. It merely externalizes the costs in a way that incentivizes malicious or incompetent players to build things like Superfish, infect 1 in 20 machines with ad injection malware, and create sites that require unsafe plugins and take twice as many resources to load, quite expensive in terms of bandwidth, power, and stability.

It will take a major force to disrupt this ecosystem and motivate alternative revenue models. I hope that Mozilla can be that force.