Advertising Is Killing The Open Web. It Doesn’t Have To

I’ve preached against bogus web advertising for nearly 30 years. It’s half the web’s problem, and most of the bandwidth problem. If publishers would have held true to some of the original basic advertising modes, the industry wouldn’t be where it is today. Programmatic advertising could change everything. But lazy ad buyers are failing to embrace that change.

John Battelle writes a really important article and lays out a theory that is dead on. He’s fed up with web advertising as most of us are . . . he writes :

But honestly, who else out there is sick of being followed by ads so stupid a fourth grader could do a better job of targeting them?

Case in point is the ad above. I took this screen shot from my phone this past weekend while I was reading a New York Times article. The image — of a robe Amazon wanted me to buy — was instantly annoying, because I had in fact purchased a robe on Amazon several days before. Why on earth was Amazon retargeting me for a product I just bought?!

Advertising Is Killing The Open Web. It Doesn’t Have To.
John Battelle is one of the ones you might want to follow, he’s on Medium — A Founder of NewCo, Federated Media, sovrn Holdings, Web 2 Summit, Wired, Industry Standard; writer on Media, Technology, Culture, Business