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Comment by pkamb | Hacker News Reader

The "Publisher" stories I see on Snapchat are invariably stories about various Kardashian/Jenner family members or generic buzzfeed-esque millennial-targeted clickbait.

These seem very poorly targeted towards me. Does everyone see only this? Are there ways to get into different/better advertising buckets? Even something like "GQ" would be far better than the "People" content I'm currently seeing.

On Instagram the ads are targeted at things I would actually click through and buy -- lots of ads for shoes, bags, clothing, kickstarter-like items, etc.

I assume that's via the hashtags and people I follow on Instagram: cars, travel, architecture, etc. + perhaps via some creepy FaceBook magic.

Without hashtags, how does Snapchat figure out what "Publishers" I'd want to see?

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You can tell them to ignore some publishers and subscribe to others. My Snapchat subscriptions are NYT, Wired, WaPo, and a few others. I have blocked People and Daily Mail.

Hold down on a publisher story to get options.

In the last 24 hours I've gotten the newly designed app, and it is much more prominent now on how to subscribe/block publishers. Did subscriptions even exist in the previous app?

Yeah they did - I still don't have the new update and have that model. Like most of Snapchat of old, it's all hidden features. While I'm worried about the new update, there are definitely some advantages. I love the separation concept but just hope they roll back to the non-chronological and maybe the story/message mix.

With Instagram you either get Facebook's hyper-niche targeting parameters, or ads based on previous engagement as well.

Snapchat's targeting is deliberately vague (based on the presumed anonymity of the service) - which can be ok for brand-awareness campaigns, but bad for conversion campaigns, hence why you see it more tailored to puff-piece content over and above specific ecommerce.

Seemed like an interesting tool, but a harder one for SMEs to sign off on compared to IG/FB/Google.

Yes (at least with the new version), you should be able to long click on the story and say show less of this. (Source, I've done this and it's worked pretty well).

>These seem very poorly targeted towards me

Why would you want their ads targeted towards you? That means Snapchat would need to capture and analyze your information at the risk of your privacy. I'm totally fine with Kylie Jenner ads as long if it means my privacy is respected.

Half the reason I like Instagram is that I'm able to follow people I don't know who post interesting things. Photographers, makers, artists, etc. Some of these follows are "brands", I suppose. This is all independent of the actual in-feed advertising product.

I'm not looking for targeted ads on Snapchat, but am looking to replicate that Instagram model of following non-IRL people/things that I like. I thought that's what the entire right Publishers tab was for, but (until today's update) I was only getting Kardashians there and had seemingly no way to promote anything else.

Or maybe I'm using Snapchat wrong.

That's mostly what I see in the publisher section too. I wasn't under the impression that it was curated per user but I could be wrong. I don't interact with the publisher stuff a ton.

Snapchat has object recognition. With a ton of photos/videos stored in memories, they could get a decent idea of one's interests based on object recognition and text used in Snaps.

I find this an interesting and refreshing part of snapchats’ advertising platform (to be clear I do not care about what the kardashians ate for breakfast). Spiegel has said in the past that they would strive to not target individual users based on browsing history, etc. as Facebook and Twitter do. https://venturebeat.com/2015/06/22/ceo-evan-spiegel-in-canne.... This was before the app went public and I’m sure there has been significant pressure from shareholders to produce a better product for advertisers that makes even more money. However, it seems at some point these “untargeted ads” were/are intentional

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