the elephant in this room

Posted Jun 1, 2015 1:23 UTC (Mon) by dmarti (subscriber, #11625)
In reply to: the elephant in this room by tpo
Parent article: Speed and bandwidth improvements with Firefox Tracking Protection

You want elephants, how about this: Targeted advertising, platform competition and privacy by Henk Kox, Bas Straathof, and Gijsbert Zwart.

This is a 44-page Economics paper that comes to the conclusion...

We find that more targeting increases competition and reduces the websites’ profits, but yet in equilibrium websites choose maximum targeting as they cannot credibly commit to low targeting.

Since a credible commitment on low targeting can't come directly from LWN (or any other individual high-quality site), LWN might as well send you the targeted ads until you do them a favor and start using tracking protection.

(What I'm working on is a way for sites to "nudge" users from more trackable to less trackable, which helps the site beat fraudulent and other low-value competitors.)