Hacker News Reader

Comment by etherealG | Hacker News Reader

I think you're missing the point of how current targeted advertising works. The person paying for the advertising is the one choosing when/where to show it to you. They are intentionally getting in your way with something irrelevant, since it suits their campaign goals.

What you describe is a system where the consumer has control over how they are advertised to, but that only works when you are the one with power in the situation. If you use a service for free, like a website, your eyeballs are the service being sold, and the advertiser is going to utilise that service in his interest. That includes putting ads you "don't like" in front of you, that actually do influence your chances of buying that product, on average, in an upward trend.

View on HN

As an advertiser, I would love to only show relevant ads. Current methods for targeted advertising are extremely broad and ineffective, as in: females 35-44, interested in travel, living in Texas.

Want to target hobby astronomers who watch a specific Youtube channel? Impossible. Cloud developers who follow the same 3 tell-tale Twitter accounts that clearly define the group? No can do. People at the big 4 in SV with Go in their resume on LinkedIn? Pfff, you wish.

All the data to serve truly relevant ads is there, but advertising networks do not offer the type of targeting required. Today if you want to reach a specific audience you have to make a native advertising deal with the content creator, which is outside the budget and skillset of most advertisers.

I think this is because:

1) If they allowed you to target such a narrow niche, you'll be turned off when you see there's only XXX people total. And you'll be even more turned off when you see you generated 2 clicks out of those XXX people. But when you see the total reach of such a broad demographic is X million people you get excited.

2) It's hard to reach such a specific demographic. Only Facebook perhaps might have that granular an information about people who view their ads.

1) I think this is definitely the case, but with the broad group 90+% of the clicks turn out to be fraudulent in my experience. Unfortunately the advertising networks have little incentive to fix it, but the current state is ripe for disruption.

2) As an advertiser I'd like to define the demographics in very simple terms of white-listing on the platform. Twitter doesn't need to find out who are cloud developers: I'll tell the 2-3 twitter accounts the target audience must be following, which I know for a fact makes the followers also cloud developers. I don't need YouTube to figure out who are astronomers: I'll tell the channels astronomers subscribe to etc.

On #2, Twitter does allow targeting by uploading specific usernames: https://business.twitter.com/en/targeting/tailored-audiences...

demographics is mostly unimportant in that world.

imagine you want to sell an add for a chainsaw and you have two customers, a grand mother and a lumber jack. of course you'd pick the later, but once you found out that the grand mother has been googling chainsaws and visited several sites, demographics goes out the window for importance.

this is why google is so much more successful than facebook.

They are different use cases. Sometimes you want to generate brand awareness and target people who have never heard of you, or aren't looking for what you are selling right now.

I don't necessarily mean a micro niche like the one mentioned. But in the end, catering the niches is the way to go. Ham Radio website? Let them see great ham radio ads. Web developer website? Let them see the great the IDE or the perfect new webhoster. Don't spam people in the current way in the search of the final conversion of something unrelated only.

So there might be an opportunity.

You are using the wrong advertising platform for sure. Everything you want to do is absolutely possible, and more. Well, you can't do the twitter one. But you can do that on Linkedin and can easily do the hobby + youtube channel thing. The two problems are that those audience you want are absurdly tiny and would expensive to reach and that since you don't know about these capabilities you don't have a big enough budget to take advantage of them.

Edit: (With programmatic rtb display ads)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com