Governance for advertising on the Web
New Research: Is an Ad-Supported Internet Feasible in Emerging Markets? | The Mozilla Blog
Fresh research conducted by Caribou Digital and funded by Mozilla explores digital advertising models in the Global South — whether they can succeed, and
Why Stack Overflow Doesn’t Care About Ad Blockers - Stack Overflow
Hi! I’m Steve Feldman, Senior Ad Ops Manager at Stack Overflow. My whole life I’ve been fascinated by advertising. Even as a kid, I wondered what a company was trying to tell me by using one word instead of another in an ad. Over time, I developed a strong (read: subjective) opinion of what makes an ad ’good,’ and what makes an ad ’bad.’ It took me many years-- in fact, it wasn’t until joining the Ad Sales team at Stack Overflow-- to finally figure out that the common thread shared by the best ads is relevance. Maintaining that relevance is how we’ve managed to avoid one of the biggest issues facing publishers today: ad blocking.
Scam Ads Are Flooding Social Media. These Former Meta Staffers Have a Plan
Rob Leathern and Rob Goldman, who both worked at Meta, are launching a new nonprofit that aims to bring transparency to an increasingly opaque, scam-filled social media ecosystem.
Community by Design
Social media empower distributed content creation by algorithmically harnessing "the social fabric" (explicit and implicit signals of association) to serve this content. While this overcomes the bottlenecks and biases of traditional gatekeepers, many believe it has unsustainably eroded the very social fabric it depends on by maximizing engagement for advertising revenue. This paper participates in open and ongoing considerations to translate social and political values and conventions, specifically social cohesion, into platform design. We propose an alternative platform model that includes the social fabric an explicit output as well as input. Citizens are members of communities defined by explicit affiliation or clusters of shared attitudes. Both have internal divisions, as citizens are members of intersecting communities, which are themselves internally diverse. Each is understood to value content that bridge (viz. achieve consensus across) and balance (viz. represent fairly) this internal diversity, consistent with the principles of the Hutchins Commission (1947). Content is labeled with social provenance, indicating for which community or citizen it is bridging or balancing. Subscription payments allow citizens and communities to increase the algorithmic weight on the content they value in the content serving algorithm. Advertisers may, with consent of citizen or community counterparties, target them in exchange for payment or increase in that party's algorithmic weight. Underserved and emerging communities and citizens are optimally subsidized/supported to develop into paying participants. Content creators and communities that curate content are rewarded for their contributions with algorithmic weight and/or revenue. We discuss applications to productivity (e.g. LinkedIn), political (e.g. X), and cultural (e.g. TikTok) platforms.
AI may fatally wound web’s ad model, warns Tim Berners-Lee
Web inventor warns reliance on AI agents threatens multibillion-dollar revenues for Google and Meta
The politics of ‘platforms’
Online content providers such as YouTube are carefully positioning themselves to users, clients, advertisers and policymakers, making strategic claims for what they do and do not do, and how their place in the information landscape should be understood. One term in particular, ‘platform’, reveals the contours of this discursive work. The term has been deployed in both their populist appeals and their marketing pitches, sometimes as technical ‘platforms’, sometimes as ‘platforms’ from which to speak, sometimes as ‘platforms’ of opportunity. Whatever tensions exist in serving all of these constituencies are carefully elided. The term also fits their efforts to shape information policy, where they seek protection for facilitating user expression, yet also seek limited liability for what those users say. As these providers become the curators of public discourse, we must examine the roles they aim to play, and the terms by which they hope to be judged.
Thank you for ad blocking | thankyouforadblocking.com is a public awareness campaign focused on increasing awareness about the danger associated with online advertising.
I became interested with the topics of privacy and internet user rights more than 20 years ago in my native Finland, which at the time was toted as the first information society in the world. I was one of the first commercial internet developers, and became fascinated with the user data aspect of the internet the moment I saw awstats for the first time. It was an early server-log based web analytics solution, in the time when there were no tracking tag based solutions available. The idea of allowing 3rd-party tags on websites came later. Today it is not hard to find premium websites with more than 100 such 3rd-party tags.
NETmundial Multistakeholder Statement | Net Mundial
Global Multistakeholder Meeting on the Future of Internet Governance
Ads and Ad blockers
Last time, we shared how ethical advertising works to keep Read the Docs sustainable without creepy ad targeting. This time, we will share about one of our biggest challenges with advertising. At the beginning of April, Read the Docs was added to one of the most popular ad block lists: the Easyli...
Facebook Wants to Help Sell Every Ad on the Web
Facebook will help marketers show ads to non-Facebook users who visit websites and applications in its Audience Network ad network.
What If We Made Advertising Illegal?
What if we banned all advertising? Not regulate it—abolish it. This proposal would transform manipulation machines, and maybe save democracy itself. A thought experiment worth considering.
User Agency in Other People's Websites - Orion Reed at JOTB25
Collective funding, governance and prioritization of a browser engine projects · Issue #11 · w3c/breakouts-day-2025
Session description Today, each of the three main, open source browser engine projects have a steward organization which contribute, by far, the lion's share of the project's commits - 75-9...
The Yak Online Governance Primer :: The Yak Collective
How do you do online governance? This primer is intended as a guided tour through a curated set of readings — based on a year of study by the Yak Collective1 — that can help groups and organizations navigate this question.
Can We Ever Know If Online Advertising Really Works?
In the summer of 2003, Viacom executive Mel Karmazin managed to sum up old media’s horror of the Internet with one of business lore’s greatest vulgar...
