Every privacy-focused push by Apple – or anyone, really – forces publishers to find less invasive methods for engaging with their audience, without having to rely on skewed data and grotesque tracking. How could that be bad for journalism? We got rid of blinking text and popup ads for a reason, and this is just the next step.
because one possible consequence of this is that it forces people to move towards closed platforms like Apple's own if they want to effectively advertise and that includes forking over substantial amount of money to those platforms.
Which is of course the economic incentive that a company like Apple has to introduce these measures, it creates an asymmetry where Apple has all kinds of user information, but competitors don't.
And if you want to see the effect that declining ad revenue has on journalism you can just look at the decline of local journalism across the US as revenue shifted from advertisers to digital platforms.
> Which is of course the economic incentive that a company like Apple has to introduce these measures, it creates an asymmetry where Apple has all kinds of user information, but competitors don't.
It's completely fair to speculate that this is Apple's true goal, but I actually do feel a little bit better about Apple doing this than, say, Facebook, or Google. The reason I feel a little bit better is that Apple at least still has an actual business model where people give them money in exchange for a product. I'm willing to be charitable and speculate that at least some of the reason Apple releases services like this is that it will cause people to continue to buy iPhones (which are wildly profitable).
In this case and things like ATT, Apple is saying "you can no longer do this to our users unless they agree to it first". And they default to asking users. That users are the ones making these choices is an important point.
These features Apple introduce sell well because people (including me) want them.
If that means journalists lose revenue, they should look for other ways. Using intrusive ads as an excuse for “otherwise we don’t have money” is just dumb. They’re free to think of other ways.
The best journalism I’ve read (ftm.nl, dutch) is a subscription service and they don’t rely on ads or tracking. The sites that do this kind of tracking, in my anecdotal experience, produce shitty journalism.
If this is bad for journalism, we’ll end up in that crisis and figure out a way that doesn’t use these methods.
> These features Apple introduce sell well because people (including me) want them.
You want the service, you don't necessarily need it from Apple though. That's the crux of this entire argument: Apple's black-box model is terrible for the industry. Apple is opposed to any roads that don't run through taxable lands, so it should come as no surprise that they want to tear down everything that keeps the web currently working. The less functional the internet becomes, the higher pressure there is to use native apps: that's likely part of why Safari is woefully broken and outdated compared to Chrome and Firefox.
> If this is bad for journalism, we’ll end up in that crisis and figure out a way that doesn’t use these methods.
We are already in that crisis. Whenever a paywalled link crops up on Hacker News, the first comment is always an archived version for the 99% of readers who would otherwise be unable to read that. Compared to the past 15 years of reporting, that's a direct downgrade. Adding synthetic friction to the flow of information never works: games get cracked, movies get shared, shows get ripped and music gets leaked. It's nothing new, and pretending like it's somehow not going to affect the next decade of reporting seems a little disingenuous to me.
Where along the way did society come to implicitly accept the (completely false) dichotomy that the only two possible options are "ads" or "shitty journalism"?
But they do? Apple is literally in the news business, the services business (many of which rely on ad revenue to compete with Apple's own services), increasingly in the ad business itself (revenue is expected to rise to 11 billion in 2025, growing quickly)[1], and as I just laid out in the post above, has a huge interest in just laying waste to independent revenue streams outside of their own channels, in the exact same way digital platforms overall benefited from laying waste to the small and mid-sized ad-industry.
> Apple is literally in the news business, the services business (many of which rely on ad revenue to compete with Apple's own services)
They are a news aggregator and distributor, they are a customer of media and news agencies. Or a parasite, depending on point of view. Still not a competitor. They also still don’t compete with ad brokers and don’t do any targeted advertising.
> increasingly in the ad business itself (revenue is expected to rise to 11 billion in 2025, growing quickly)
These ads are in the Stores and keyword-based. Which is distasteful, but not quite the same level. Again, they don’t distribute ads, and are not in the market for targeted advertising. They don’t compete with ad networks, and if they weren’t doing that there would just be no ads on the store. Like it was not that long ago.
> in the exact same way digital platforms overall benefited from laying waste to the small and mid-sized ad-industry.
If the mid-sized ad industry does not rely on tracking, blocking invisible pixels in newsletter won’t affect it. If it does rely on tracking, then it can’t die soon enough.
Apple is very explicitly in the tracking and ad targeting business. See https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT205223 for the information they collect in order to allow ad targeting against you. They unfortunately don't explain just what the data they "make available" to "strategic partners" is though.
Note: I'm not claiming that Apple is somehow a particularly bad actor in that regard. But their ads are not just keyword based. They track you, and sell access to you based on the information they collected, just like other adtech companies. Does that change your conclusions?
from your link, "Apple doesn’t detail its current ad revenue, and analyst Samik Chatterjee seems to imply that the number could only be reached by including some form of advertising within or around Apple TV+" and "Apple’s most recent earnings report revealed that it earned $12.51B from Services in calendar Q3/fiscal Q4, though there is no breakdown on how much of this comes from ad revenue."
so it seems that the current revenue is a guess and the projection is a guess.
This asymmetry is already very real, and a quite dominant pattern of Apple's strategy is now to build mechanisms to protect explicitly their ability to monetize all aspects of their _users_, not so much their devices.
These small steps taken under the banner of "preserving the users' privacy" are also steps to make sure that all those clumsy users don't get offered something without giving Apple the opportunity to profit from it first.
And the only disarming response to this so far is "yeah, but that's fine for me. I WANT Apple to take control, they're the good guys with the cool products!"
This is paid keywords in the stores. They don’t do targeted advertising and are not an ad broker, which are the companies whining about being unable to track people.
Fine: call it Dynamic Advertisement if it helps you sleep at night, but Apple is still targeting the user with an ad that is relevant to the content they're searching for. Furthermore, Apple's policy seems to only apply to their own platform: it's estimated that they spend hundreds of millions of dollars on AdSense marketing campaigns, which are highly targeted and among the least respectful ad platforms around. Evidently their motto of "privacy is a human right" only applies if they deem you "human" enough...
I totally agree with your Apple pays for Google Ads which they now are the most invasive.
But, people don't mind targeting when it is context-based, rather than user-based. Tracking is following a user or device. Context is, well, this is a website about camping, I'll pay for ads for my sleeping bags. The user isn't really part of the process, there is no tracking, just targeting which I am sure everybody is fine with if it doesn't cross the "tracking" line.
> “This is another sign that Apple’s war against targeted advertising isn’t just about screwing Facebook,” Joshua Benton wrote in Nieman Lab. “They’re also coming for your Substack.”
I mean good? Like you, I struggle to see the downside of this, really. Probably the only risk in the bigger picture is the degree to which wealthy billionaires fund free lies such as Brietbart or the Murdoch papaers, while actual research and journalism is pay-for. But the wealthy billionaires are doing that anyway, so it's hard to see much change.
I don't know about journalism per se, but for journalists, they presumably arrived at the status quo as the profit maximizing option, and removing it will, to varying degrees, impoverish them.
That is a sensible first hypothesis, but it rests on many assumptions, in particular that the market doesn't have any prisoner-dilemma/tragedy of the commons aspects to it.
It is quite conceivable, for example, that every single journalist is better off if they make click-bait listicles instead of investigative journalism, but the profession as a whole suffers.
It forces publishers into closed gardens. I am willing to bet Apple's work here will have the same effect that advertising did on RSS, which is that newsletters will turn into truncated notifications designed to bring you to a website where they can get the business metrics they "think" they need.
I actually think there is a nice middle ground for something like a basic view counter, and some open rate data to be available in an aggregated, anonymous way.
