105 | Web technology has grown without paying much attention to digital advertising, and 106 | conversely ad technology has evolved without paying much heed to the fundamentals of Web 107 | architecture. This mutual ignorance has been the source of growing tension. The mission of 108 | the HEAT WG is to resolve these tensions, make advertising a first-class citizen of the 109 | Web, and to design advertising technology as Web technology. The end goal is for the Web to 110 | be the best advertising platform that it can be, and better than any other. 111 |
112 |116 | Digital advertising is a key business model that supports the production of content on the 117 | Web and subsidises access to it. As an advertising context, the Web has a solid foundation. 118 | It is an environment designed for trust, and a trustworthy environment is a good 119 | one to advertise in. 120 |
121 |122 | Unfortunately, however, advertising has not been treated as a first-class citizen on the 123 | Web, and as a result the system of digital advertising that developed as a sidecar to the 124 | Web sits uncomfortably with the Web's overall architecture and with the expectations of its 125 | users. 126 |
127 |128 | This has led to substantial tension. Digital advertising is largely done adversarially with 129 | respect to users, with lip service paid to dubious notions of control or consent and too 130 | often a cavalier approach to users' computing resources and privacy. The current system is 131 | also failing to provide a sustainable business model for publishers to create quality 132 | content and is proving inefficient for advertisers, much of whose money is lost to fraud as 133 | well as opaque layers of intermediation and arbitrage. Broad sharing of data has been 134 | associated not just with privacy issues, but has also been identified as a key factor 135 | leading to market concentration. 136 |
137 |138 | The scale of the Web, of advertising, and of what rides on both makes this set of issues 139 | challenging. We can, however, fix this, and that is what the HEAT WG is tasked with 140 | accomplishing. 141 |
142 |143 | The Web can, and does, support multiple business models, but none of the alternatives have 144 | proven able, on their own, to make up for the shortfall that the disappearance of 145 | advertising would constitute. Advertising is here to stay; the question is how to implement 146 | it in a way that matches the Web's foundational values. The Web was designed for broad 147 | access, and ensuring that advertising can be a key sustainable contributor to the Web is 148 | entirely in line with that goal. The Web is a massive piece of infrastructure and shared 149 | knowledge, and advertising a key contributor to sustain it. 150 |
151 |152 | This view of advertising comes with consequences. The first is that advertising is for 153 | end-users. Supporting the Web infrastructure serves no purpose other than to improve 154 | the lives of people, and that is what advertising must be for. Today's advertising ecosystem 155 | treats the user as an adversary, a target whose data, attention, and computing resources 156 | we are entitled to. This breaks the promise of trust which is at the heart of the Web. 157 |
158 |159 | The second is that advertising must be sustainable. It must support and help 160 | improve key components of the Web. An advertising ecosystem that fails to sustain 161 | publishers, which is what we are seeing in today's system, is one that is poorly designed. 162 |
163 |164 | This leads directly to a third consideration which is that advertising must be 165 | effective. The more effective it is, the less of it is needed. The more attractive it 166 | is to advertisers, the better we can improve Web infrastructure with limited taxation of 167 | attention. 168 |
169 |170 | Finally, such an essential system must, by its very nature, have very strong properties 171 | of governance and accountability. Users must know how their attention is used, 172 | advertisers must know where their money goes, publishers must control what runs on their 173 | sites. 174 |
175 |180 | The group is tasked with standardising Web technology to support a wide variety of 181 | advertising use cases on the Web, while maintaining privacy for users and sustainability for 182 | the platform. 183 |
184 |185 | The group will only consider proposals that are thoroughly respectful of people's privacy. 186 | Proposals that rely on users waiving away the protection of their data are explicitly out 187 | of scope. 188 |
189 |190 | In assessing whether, amongst the many potential solutions that exist in the advertising 191 | space, a given proposal is in scope the group must consider whether it abides by this 192 | priority of constituencies: 193 |
194 |224 | The group is expected to work on the following specifications: 225 |
226 |264 | Buying directly from publishers is an effective way to cut out wasteful spending on 265 | intermediaries, but it requires the publisher to be large enough to have a direct sales 266 | operation and advertisers to want to go directly to publishers. For small businesses, it 267 | is often easier to buy inventory from a large self-serve platform than from a handful of 268 | local publishers, even though the latter might be more effective. 269 |
270 |
271 | An API with which to buy campaigns directly from a publisher, exposed at a predictable
272 | .well-known endpoint, would provide a step forward in this direction.
273 | Standardising an API means that products could be created by independent companies to buy
274 | directly from publishers, and to set up campaigns easily across multiple publishers (eg.
275 | all the papers in the county).
276 |
288 | TBD 289 |
290 |