Related discussions:
- Google engineers want to introduce DRMs for web pages, making ad-blocking near-impossible in the browser
- Web Environment Integrity Explainer
Ultimately, this is a clear indication to me that the advertising standard for the Internet is unsustainable. The profit margins with the model were always thin, but at this point, there’s barely any profit left. I think that the internet needs to move to a new model of revenue, but I’m not sure exactly how or what that model should be.
Google’s first quarter 2023 report shows they made massive profits off vast revenue due to advertising.
It is about control though. The thing that caught my eye is that they’re saying that only “approved” browsers will be able to access these WEI sites. So what does that mean for crawlers/scrapers? That the big tech companies on the approval board will be able to lock potential competitors out of accessing the web - new browsers, search engines, etc. but much more importantly… Machine Learning.
Google’s biggest fear right now is that ML systems will completely eliminate most people’s reason to use Google’s search, and therefore their main source of revenue will plummet. And they’re right to be scared, it’s already starting to happen and it’s showing us very quickly just how bad Google’s search results are.
So this seems to me like an attempt to control things from that side. It’s essentially the “big boys” trying to consolidate and firm-up their hold in the industry and not let newcomers rival them, as with ML the barrier to entry has never been lower.
See, this is what happens when we let a single provider monopolize the development of web engines - one party can essentially impose the standards, as it can be clearly seen here.
This would be bad, no doubt.
What makes ads a blight on websites is rather simple when you look at the scheme of things. I understand websites are reliant on monetary factors to keep running such as server costs etc. However, the caveat is balance. A user shouldn’t be inundated by huge amounts of ads. Some of the sites I go to you have pop up windows that show up randomly in the middle of an article as you’re reading, and hard to close without clicking on the ad. Kind of reminds me of back in the day when you would go to a page and the content was overshadowed by those glaring ads that would draw you to them away from the content you were Looking for. As a designer you should not have more ads than you do content. For example, when I left Reddit I was seeing ads on my feed at a rate of almost 1 ad for every 2 posts. That’s overkill. You only need 1 ad every 7 - 10 posts
