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The Race for Human Attention
-- By LiranNacker - 04 Nov 2016
Introduction
People consider online advertisements to be a small price to pay for freely consuming digital content. This understanding is flawed. For years now, online publishers have relied on ads as their main source of revenue. Under this financing model, what appears to users to be “free” access to content in exchange for their decision whether to click an ad or not – is in fact a contractual relationship between the online publisher and the advertiser, in which, in return for sponsorship, the advertiser gains the ability to target the publisher’s users with specialized ads. For this to be effective, users end up paying for “free” content with something far more valuable than money – a form of two-layered currency – their attention and their privacy.
The Bad – Attention
The rapid transition of mainstream media to Internet-based formats has created an environment in which advertisers are constantly vying for human attention online. Online publishers have enabled advertisers to intervene in how content is displayed at the user’s end – heavily affecting the user experience; and creating a (far from elegant) mosaic of “rich” ads comprised of animated text, video and sound. Users accessing online newspapers in pursuit of knowledge are bombarded with unavoidable and distracting banners and popups – as part of the advertiser’s attempt to shift the user’s attention away from the original content sought.
The Ugly – Privacy
Induced by this race, new capabilities have been introduced within this field – namely in the form of Targeted and Retargeted advertising – that pinpoint a particular audience with highly personalized ads. This form of “new-age” advertising consists of easy to deploy tracking technologies (namely Cookies) and various analytic tools, aimed at tracking, analyzing and predicting users’ online behavior. In such an environment publishers are incentivized to commercialize their users’ information and knowingly allow for invasive, sometimes malware-vulnerable, software to run at their users’ end.
The finish line of this race for attention is the heavy price payed by users for this “free” digital content – a commercial database containing people’s interests, searches, likes and dislikes; and neither the publisher nor advertiser have any interest in putting this practice to rest. I am not suggesting there is anything inherently wrong with presenting a user with personalized ads, however, it is wrong to “surveil” a user for mere commercial benefit, without the user’s explicit consent; and without giving the user access to the data collected.
The Good
Recently, online publishers and advertisers have been forced to reconsider certain aspects of this model. This is perhaps mainly due to the financial damage inflicted upon this industry by its users’ growing use of Ad-Blockers. According to PageFair, in 2015 there were 198 million active Ad-Block users and ad-blocking has been estimated to cost publishers nearly $22 billion that year. This increase in popularity of ad-blocking between 2014-2015, appears to correlate with the growth of Retargeting.
This technology has enabled users to disrupt this mechanism by gaining back the control over how content is displayed at the user end. Ad-Blockers prevent the first type of payment by users, by preventing ads that do not meet certain criteria or originate from blacklisted domains to run, thereby reinstating attention back to the content and away from the ad. More importantly, Ad-Blockers prevent tracking tools from loading on websites and tracking users’ online activities.
The Future
A. The Publisher
In this unprecedented shift in power, users have clearly signaled to online publishers that they are no longer willing to be commercially surveilled. In “response”, the Newspaper Association of America has recently filed a “ Complaint and Request for Investigation” to the FTC, regarding deceptive ad-blocking practices. I believe that online publishers should seize this current “attack” to stay true to their journalistic ethics and disassociate themselves from this problematic relationship with advertisers that potentially affects press freedom. This can be achieved by adapting other financing models which do not rely on ads and do not promote collection of data and analysis of human behavior.
“Paywalls” and other subscription-based models are likely to reduce the audience to only those who can afford to pay for content. Therefore, a more feasible financing model for online publishers would be a model that relies on the audience’s willingness to contribute, if they so choose – for the creation of content that they enjoy and love. Sceptics of this model should consider the funding mechanism used to support Wikimedia Foundation and the success of Wikipedia to provide free, ad-less content; as well as the success of a slightly different model used by National Public Radio, which is rapidly moving away from corporate sponsorship, by relying on contributions from listeners.
B. The User and the State
Users should take responsibility and continue to demand that advertisers allow them to read and browse privately. This does not mean that all corporate sponsorship of online journalism should be banned; however, users must oppose the continued reduction of online privacy, for mere commercial benefit. In parallel, Regulators should intervene in the relationship between online publishers and advertisers and continue to adopt privacy rules to protect online users.
Conclusion
Privacy is a right, not a bargaining tool. We need to rethink this environment in which personal information is the cost of “free” content – as putting online privacy at risk in order to consume content and receive services online is morally wrong and entirely unnecessary. I believe this change should begin exactly where the problem began – online journalism. Success in shifting human attention back from the ad to the actual news content – will gradually bring back online privacy, and will, I believe, set a precedent for greater abusers of users’ information, to rethink their financing models.
It is up to both online publishers and their users to bring about this change. And it requires their attention now, because the days of advertisers tracking us inside our homes, with banners appearing on kitchen appliances and shower mirrors, suggesting that we are out of milk – are nearing. In fact, they are already here.
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