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Comment by sveme | Hacker News Reader

One reason I'm using Adblockers and Ghostery is the immense number of trackers found on any website that are supposed to help in delivering personalized ads to any future website visit. Seriously, ad companies: Stop trying to show me personalized ads! Please, serve ads that have something to do with the stuff I'm looking at. When looking at a coding site, why do I have to see an advertisement for the jeans that I did not want to buy four days ago? Why not show me books/websites/hosters/whatever that are related to the coding problem I'm currently trying to solve? It used to be somwhat like that, years ago. We should all go back to that and stop tracking users with dozens of trackers, all connecting to their servers when loading a site, crumpling the speed with which I'm seeing the content.

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Please, serve ads that have something to do with the stuff I'm looking at.

I second that. I couldn't agree more with this comment. I use to make a lot of searches for pharmaceutical products for one of my projects and then Google decides to show me tons of drug related ads regardless of the context of the site I'm currently visiting. It's frustrating to say the least. Like I don't have any other interests.

But I'd like to hear from people hosting AdSense on their sites. Has profiling raised CTR rates significantly?

> But I'd like to hear from people hosting AdSense on their sites. Has profiling raised CTR rates significantly?

Probably hard to tell, since there are a lot of confounding variables. Most notably, conversion across the board has plummeted in recent years (I forget the exact percent, but I think it's about one third).

So if you're a website funded by ads and your traffic has grown 10% since last year, you've actually taken a pay cut!

It's useless to "serve ads that have something to do with the stuff I'm looking at". I read an article about smart thermostats the other day. I don't need a thermostat, I rent a shitty apartment! My HVAC is wrapped into my rent, I don't even care how much it costs. I saw an ad for bleach laundry detergent on YouTube, which I would never use because I listen to punk rock and don't own white anything. I've pretty much stopped watching TV because all they show are make-up and tampon commercials.

The advertisers need trackers, otherwise they're just yelling into the void. It never used to be like this because people were pretty homogeneous. A few decades of globalization and multiculturalism have made us much more diverse, and an impossible target for generalized advertising.

I'm not defending them, just pointing out the challenges product-makers and advertisers face.

I've pretty much stopped watching TV because all they show are make-up and tampon commercials.

You base your TV viewing on the advertising?

He's not alone: I cancelled cable a couple of years ago for two reasons, the cost (for little to no value), and the terrible UX of ad-funded viewing.

Streamed shows with no ads, ah! Wonderful, good value, even at a higher price (Netflix, IMHO, is leaving money on the table).

Note that Ghostery will block trackers but they do sell your usage data themselves.

Use privacy badger or a tracker-blocking list for your ad blocker if you're that concerned about privacy.

On another note, as an ad person, context-aware ads are alive and well, for instance if you mention a specific thing in your Facebook updates you're more likely to see an ad for it. But the hard fact is that personalisation and retargeting works very, very well.

The real mistake ad companies do is that you should not see that ad if you didn't want to buy the jeans (or you bought them on a different device), which is hard to guess but not impossible

Shouldn't that be off by opting out of Ghostrank?

Personalisation does work to some degree, I can see that on Facebook. But especially in that place it tends to creep me out and I do make an effort to never visit Sponsored Content.

Yes, I believe you should be fine if you opt out.

Still, as much as I understand the need for Ghostery to monetise, I personally prefer to trust the EFF.

Ad targeting is alive and well only to those building it. Targeting via tracking does not work : http://zgp.org/targeted-advertising-considered-harmful/

Maybe someone fromThe Deck could comment on why their approach is better.

"Targeting via tracking does not work" is a very bold claim. Better targeting is a selling point of billion-dollar ad tech companies, and retargeting just pushes more products.

Some sorts of tracking are harmful, I don't like the current state of affairs either and cookie syncing is downright evil (the practice of calling a pixel from a third party domain to "sync" your first party cookie with theirs) and abused.

I just don't think it's as black and white as some people make it sound, not all advertising is obnoxious and unwanted and as a consumer it's ultimately almost impossible to escape trackers completely (unless you expect consumers to run Tails and browse websites as static html)

The problem is that it's a selling point for companies, but the actual CX is very different. As people are educated on how it all works, they are choosing to block it. Not all ads have to be bad, but the ad sector never got its act together and now are being confronted with the hard reality that folks making actual products have known for awhile. I've seen this played over and over again. Ignore UX long enough and it will bite your bottom line eventually.

So the real solution is better tracking? I don't think this solves OPs problem.

As a full disclosure, I used to work on a platform for serving ads.

For one, while certain websites or apps show a clear signal that can be used (e.g. coding, hence the user can be shown ads on coding tools), many other websites or apps are not giving a signal on preferences or intent, this besides the ads inventory being an issue.

For example when you're reading political news, or when you're playing chess, what ad could you be shown that could be related to politics or chess? I can answer this - without a user profile, best case scenario is that you're shown something at random, with a disastrous conversion rate. And worst case scenario is ads being used for spreading pieces of propaganda on controversial issues and I remember for example how a certain gold mining company was attempting to manipulate with downright lies the viewers of certain YouTube videos that were criticizing their open-pit project. And because such ad spots are basically worthless, they can be bought for cheap.

I'm personally all about privacy and the security of my data, being downright paranoid. But privacy is one thing, blocking ads is another. If you don't like ads, then don't use those services or websites. That's how you end up rewarding alternatives and personally I rewarded many alternatives that way. Even if you want to punish bad actors, you still give them the eyeballs, you still distribute those links to your friends, etc. The concept of voting with your wallet is basically broken.

And contrary to the music and film industry that has pushed for DRM, this time people that block ads don't have the proper moral ground to stand on and also the industry is not going to go down without a fight. Consider that you can't block ads in mobile apps without having root privileges. This will turn out to be a whack-a-mole game and it won't last for long. Just wait until these websites will start to serve ads from their own domain, with ads being indistinguishable from the surrounding content ... oh wait, this is already happening ;-)

Worst of all is that you end up hurting other people - from publishers, many of whom are already on the verge of bankruptcy, to people that will suffer the consequences even if they don't use ad-blockers, as the history of video gaming can teach us. Do you enjoy the DRM laden pay-to-win gaming industry that others have created for you? As personally I'm thankful that I've outgrown video games.

> ads being indistinguishable from the surrounding content

I think this is an improvement, compared to the current situation of ads getting in the way of the content I want to read.

Except that the FTC has their eye on native ads for a very good reason.

The game industry also brought us Cities Skylines, Minecraft, Witcher 3 — popular, no effective DRM, no issue with people pirating, as most end up buying the game anyway.

It will end up in better quality for everyone if only those products people are willing to pay for exist.

If you hitch a ride to a run-away wagon heading toward a cliff and don't listen to the screaming passengers jumping off when they decide enough is enough, no one else is to blame if you're still hanging on to the trailing rope as it sails over the edge. Stop blaming the passengers for not putting up with the bumps. Your ride is over.

UX will win.

Here is the moral ground that I stand on: I pay for the data coming down my link, you don't. Your ads and trackers cost me money, and there is every chance that your ads cost me more money than the site owner gets from that "ad impression."

You can not claim any moral ground at all. Claiming that web sites will fold if you don't exist is like a drug dealer claiming that taking them off the street will make life worse for the drug addicts.

Sites funded by invasive ads need to adapt or die.

I would like to see a micropayment system where I can load up a few dozen dollars a month and pay shares through +1 or liking pages. Sure, 1/1000 of my $50/month isn't going to make much of a difference, but if you are getting paid through ad impressions you will get a similar monthly return.

Even better, you will make more money by producing content people like, with reduced incentive to split a five word article over six pages of ads.

These days the ads are to the point that if I see a site start janking around as the stylesheets load and ads start pushing content around, I just force quit Safari right there on the spot. I don't have the time or money to support a web fuelled by the advertising dollar.

If you don't want that data consuming your bandwidth, then don't load those websites. It's as simple as that. Oh, and if you try to make the argument that you are justified in using ad blockers because that bandwidth costs you money and other people agree with you, then you can say goodbye to net neutrality.

> Sites funded by invasive ads need to adapt or die.

But that's the point - they won't adapt in the direction that you want and they won't die. Why? Because you're not punishing the bad actors. Expect ad-blockers to stop working in the coming months. They only worked until now because they weren't considered to be mainstream ;-)

> I would like to see a micropayment system ...

Right, because that would solve the privacy thing. Micropayment systems for rewarding websites and projects with donations have already been tried and it's not working. For one because people claiming this never put their money where their mouth is. And also because the pool of people that can afford to spend $50 a month on reading websites is not that big, as we're speaking about the middle-class living in first-world countries, many of whom as I said don't give a shit.

#firstWorldSolutions

How do I know whether a link takes me to a Verge or Buzzfeed clone site without following it?

Find a better way to fun the web site. We are engaged in a tech war which is going to end up with users turning off CSS and JavaScript. Then how will you feed ads to people?

> Oh, and if you try to make the argument that you are justified in using ad blockers because that bandwidth costs you money and other people agree with you, then you can say goodbye to net neutrality.

Except that I'm the one paying for the traffic, through my ISP. If carriers complain that there's too much traffic for the money they're paid, that's an issue of not charging the user enough for the service being provided.

I can always pay more money for more quota.

I still can not understand the mentality of US mobile service providers who just give you one-price-fits-all service. They're selling a limited resource (i.e.: consumption of broadcast bandwidth), but don't charge the heavy users more than the light users.

It's foolishness like that that makes ISPs start thinking about charging high volume content originators for use of their network.

If I choose to not download certain parts of your web site (e.g.: the JavaScript and third party resources), that's my way of controlling costs. It's not up to my ISP to make that decision for me (much less start charging content providers for the privilege of transit).

Please, serve ads that have something to do with the stuff I'm looking at.

I understand your point and feel yr pain but:

How do you do that without some sort of tracking? Advertising as well as the 'recommendation engines" in Netflix or Amazon track your clicks to see what you are interested in.

Otherwise you get programmatic advertising. Which means you get beer ads during football games; luxury brands in the NYTimes Magazine; etc.

Yes, exactly. Just do programmatic advertising. And select it manually, not through a shitty algorithm like Google does today.

You want the ads to be better targeted for you but you don't want to be profiled or tracked? That is going to be difficult for most publishers.

My company could do that because we sell our ads directly and approve each one by hand and therefore have our own sales and ad operations staff. A lot of sites don't have the resources or scale to do that though.

No. If I have to take up with ads, I want them to fit to the content I'm currently looking at, not stuff I looked at days ago. Paraphrasing another comment (though disagreeing with him), the probability that I'm interested in smart thermostats while I'm looking at content on smart thermostats is vastly larger than the probability of me being interested in jeans while I'm looking at content on smart thermostats.

Unfortunately the dirty secret of ad targeting algorithms is that they don't actually work very well. Computers aren't good at understanding context. It's a hard problem.

Google is better at it then most and, well, you've seen AdSense. It's just OK.

Both consumers and advertisers are mostly aligned in that they want relevant ads. The idea that taking away information about the user is going to somehow make the ads better seems like a stretch.

Well, there is a simple way to solve that: website owner and Ad creator both describe their site/Ad in categories with some hashtags. Just match based on those.

As a consumer, I would love this. But my understanding is that most/many companies have found "retargeting" to be very effective.

So it's annoying, but we also seem to respond to it. As long as that second part remains true, I don't think it's going away.

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