Online Advertisement, Privacy, and Journalism

I think the draft is rather 2012. Your way of describing the extent of data-gathering, the focus on banner advertising and "native" advertising, which is just another cycle being turned, the absence of analysis of the way the placement platforms at Google and Facebook (which are now garnering between them 99% of all the new digital advertising spending in the world outside China)---all seems ill-designed to give the reader a current view of the situation.

Why are we discussing advertising-supported media content, instead of discussing how businesses that are product and services businesses either succeed or fail depending on how the advertising platforms treat them? Why is "ad-blocking" even an issue, given that digital media are intrinsically filterable, and whatever I use to read data from webservers isn't necessarily a "browser" made by an advertising company? Serving the ads off the same address that serves me parts of the data stream I want (which is what "native advertising" now really means) defeats only primitive forms of ad-blocking, which are not how sensible people protect themselves both against the monitoring and against the attention-distortion at the same time. (The NY Times does various things to interfere with my reading of the news they publish, some of which might be considered advertising and other bits might be thought of as "content," but if I don't want them I can be filtering them out equally. Ads are really just anything I don't want, as spam is really just email I don't want to read. In both cases, computers are ideally skilled at helping me remove what I don't want to see.)

I think the best route to improvement is to broaden the discussion of advertising, from media-content decoration to the activities of the platforms themselves, and to look more closely at privacy technologies beyond in-browser ad-blocking.