Adtech is built on a privacy fault line
There seems to be a really strong disdain on HN for AdTech in general, which I think is misguided, and comes fundamentally from a &quot;web consumer&quot; mentality. I think that it would be valuable to reframe the question from the producers point of view:
1) I am a niche small business - how do I let people know that I exist?
2) I run a website and would like to monetize it - how can I get paid for the content that I produce?<p>The ad-tech solution is actually quite elegant in theory - if you can show ads only to the people to whom they are relevant, then, as a small business you can let people know you exist without blowing your ad budget, and, as a content producer, the more valuable an ad-view is, the more you can charge for it.<p>The current movement to avoid tracking is an extremely powerful centralizing force. The large platforms know a lot about you already - Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple, etc. So, in a way, &quot;we&#x27;re not going to let AdTech track users&quot; = &quot;we&#x27;re going to make only ads on large platforms effective&quot;, which means that both content producers and advertisers will prefer them, and then people ask &quot;where did the old internet go&quot;?<p>The AdTech system isn&#x27;t ideal, but it would be great if the people who criticize it came up with something other than &quot;fuck the small businesses and content producers&quot;.