The New York Times Phasing Out All 3rd-Party Advertising Data (axios.com) 28
The New York Times will no longer use 3rd-party data to target ads come 2021, executives tell Axios, and it is building out a proprietary first-party data platform. From a report: Third-party data, which is collected from consumers on other websites, is being phased out of the ad ecosystem because it's not considered privacy-friendly. This has forced several big publications to rely on their own first-party data, or data that they collect directly from their users. Beginning in July, The Times will begin to offer clients 45 new proprietary first-party audience segments to target ads. Those segments are broken up into 6 categories: age (age ranges, generation), income (HHI, investable assets, etc.), business (level, industry, retirement, etc.), demo (gender, education, marital status, etc.) and interest (fashion, etc.) By the second half of the year, The Times plans to introduce at least 30 more interest segments.
Great news (Score:5, Interesting)
I have all third-party content blocked by default when viewing sites. I'm fine with first-party advertising, but third-party advertising is far too unregulated to be safe, as seen by the high-profile sites that have unknowingly run malware-laden ads. And that's before we even start talking about holding them to some semblance of a standard when it comes to load times, content, or other matters.
Moving to first-party doesn't necessarily solve all of those for users, but it likely will solve most of them.
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Revenue is getting scarce, and it seems the best way to get money to pimp your site out to the tracking cookies used by Facebook and Google. The NYT might get some credit, but also it may be too little too late.
Also, the fact that Apple is locking down Safari to protect user privacy may have something to do with this. I know that a lot of websites I visited broke and
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I have all third-party content blocked by default when viewing sites. I'm fine with first-party advertising, but third-party advertising is far too unregulated to be safe, as seen by the high-profile sites that have unknowingly run malware-laden ads. And that's before we even start talking about holding them to some semblance of a standard when it comes to load times, content, or other matters.
Moving to first-party doesn't necessarily solve all of those for users, but it likely will solve most of them.
I think moving to first party advertising is going to make ads less safe wrt. malware. FWIV, I have more trust in the will and ability of large networks to deal with it than of a gazillion small, hardly staffed first party operations.
Privacy, otoh, would certainly be improved by this - and the third party privacy threat from Google, Facebook et al. might be a bigger threat than malware. Malware needs to be handled by multiple other layers in addition to the ad networks (browsers, security software, OS) in
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They pitch it like they are doing you a favour but all the major web browsers are moving to blocking 3rd party cookies and other crap anyway. You are just a bit ahead of the curve by enabling the blocking now.
So actually they have no choice and the only way to save their advertising business before it gets completely wrecked by browsers and ad blockers is to make it first party.
Re: Great news (Score:1)
Didnâ(TM)t RTFA but according to the summary the decision is about not using 3rd party data as a base for advertising rather than not showing 3rd party ads.
In my view both are a good thing.
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Once again (Score:2, Insightful)
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but it won't block this type of ad, so you'll see them. But NYT will own whatever bad things it does to your or with its data.
I think this is the proper way to do ads really, hope more places do it.
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Clearly NYT have demostrated what kind of bean counter idiots run the place. Here is what you do if you create the content for that advertising. You align the advertising with the content, not the person reading it and what they wanted in the past but what they want in the future and that will align with the content they read.
So scary stuff unfortunately does align with selling insurance and medical services, you would want those ads to be very subtle otherwise they would leave a very bad taste. Finnacial
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Because this helps people who aren't you? Shows that you can take this in house? Serves as a model to point other businesses towards?
It's not all about you, pal.
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Once again why should I care?
Because the message sent by ad-blocking is finally being heard and you stand to benefit from it even if you end up blocking first-party ads. Think about it, if a site living on first-party advertising misbehaves, there's no passing-the-buck to some fly-by-night ad-service. That site either has to fix it or weather the loss of their viewers. No more: "Oh we didn't know our 3rd party ad service was using malware, we've changed to a different vendor!" It becomes: "Well we tried unethical things to soak up i
Cloudflare... (Score:2)
..but will they add cloudflare to speed up page load times?
Perhaps they can make their content free again. . (Score:3)
Yeah, I know I'm dreaming, but I find the NYT paywall to be more annoying than most. I would be okay if they just did it for recent stories, but as the country's foremost news publication, the archived stuff should be free. Both for students who are doing research and regular people who just want to be informed, providing this content without requiring a subscription is just the decent thing to do.
It's also shady that they block browsers that are in private mode. That demonstrates that they don't really respect privacy, as they are claiming, and they want to have their trackers loaded on your system. This move seems more like a way for them to get around ad-blockers and maximize their advertising revenue. They have the clout to sell ads directly, which most media sources do not. I have mixed feelings about that—I'm glad to see a diversification of online advertising and they don't even have the capability to invade users' privacy like Google does, but I'm suspicious of their motives.
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"the country's foremost news publication" you mean "a Democratic Party propaganda outlet".
Glad to be of help.
Thatâ(TM)s nice (Score:2, Insightful)
What Iâ(TM)d really prefer is that they move away from their overwhelming liberal bias and unending fake news. I remember when they had a lot more integrity then they do today. Hell, even their former editor recognizes how biased they have become.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/... [thedailybeast.com]
Fewer than 2 in 5 Americans trust the New York Times at all.
https://www.statista.com/stati... [statista.com]
Whether itâ(TM)s fabricating revisionist history 1619 project, Russian collusion delusion or a host of other things they have bec
What an insane liar (Score:2)
The quotes you linked to don't support your assertion. You imply that the former editor is taking them to task for "overwhelming liberal bias" and "fake news". In reality, the critique is that they didn't cover the rise (or at least candidacy of) AOC and that the focus of the paper was shifting into human interest stories/firsthand reactionary accounts. Those are very .different things!
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"Is The New York Times a Liberal Newspaper? Of course it is."
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07... [slashdot.org]">-- Source: New York Times
I would quote from the piece here but I would end up with the whole thing as every single paragraph is gold. Please read it yourselves, it explains a lot.
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-- Source: New York Times [nytimes.com]
Corrected link. That's what I get for not previewing comments.
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That's an editorial from a NYTimes employee whose job is to read a bunch of letters from readers and synthesize them. It's not an admission that the NYTimes is liberal. It's a statement that conservative readers perceive it as liberal.
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2 in 5 trusting them seems like they are doing well these days, where everything is so hyper partisan and everything that contradicts one's preferred narrative is presumed to be fake news.
BTW your Statista link blocks the entire graph with an unremovable pop-over demanding I sign up and pay them to see it. No.
A shift to server side tracking? (Score:4, Interesting)
This is great news, and part of a bigger trend I'm seeing. The Dutch public broadcasting agency's own internal advertising agency (which handles advertisements on public tv) announced it would stop supporting all third party tracking too (Dutch source [tweakers.net]), since it turned out that 90% of visitors to the websites declined tracking cookies anyway.
However, I also remember reading this quote by Alexander Hanff about how a lot of tracking is moving to the server side:
"Furthermore, whereas Apple’s approach to tracking scripts with Safari is welcomed - it would be incredibly naïve to believe that this technology can stop online tracking and here is why. Blocking third party scripts (no matter how intelligently) is addressing a problem from 2008 – it does little to address the problems we face in 2017 and beyond. You see, the adtech industry started to move away from third party technologies some time ago in an attempt to circumvent changes to the European ePrivacy Directive (2002/58/EC) in 2009 which outlawed the use of third party tracking technologies without consent. Those who seek to exploit our privacy and track our online behaviour came up with a number of solutions to circumvent the law including server side tracking - and there-in lies the biggest problem for Apple’s new claims."
https://exde601e.blogspot.com/... [blogspot.com]
Now I don't know the degree to which this shift is actually happening. But I worry that as we block client side scripts, a lot of tracking might simply move further away from view?
Yet another database to be stolen (Score:1)
Also: does this mean they'll stop serving ads from 3rd party servers? It reads to me like they will just start collecting their own data, the article doesn't seem to say where the ads will come from.
Listen up, NYT (Score:2)
I started blocking about a decade ago when paid-for, antivirus software on my folks' machine didn't stop an infection, which I suspect came from a web ad. If ads were once again static pictures (ironically, like they are in newspapers), I wouldn't block them, if reasonable. If they continue their animation/scripting games, I will continue to s