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I'm honestly not sure how true this really is. I don't do anything intentionally to screw with advertisers, aside from standard ad blockers, and the targeted ads I get from things which aren't ad blocked are just... eh?

I give Google a tonne of data, they know everything I search for, they know where I live and where I shop, they know how long I spend in a shop before buying something through android pay, et cetera. My targeted ads are still just junk.

Ads for websites I've visited because I've done work for them, products I've already bought, and stuff that seems completely unrelated seems to make up 99% of it. I guess the first category works as a "let's remind people the things they've used exist" in a coke kind of way, but why have Google been able to trick people into believing that this is 'effective targeted advertising'?

> Google been able to trick people into believing that this is 'effective targeted advertising'?

Because there was nothing before Google (or if there was it was even worse shit than what G was peddling).

And the game is still that. G doesn't have to do much, just beat/buy the next one.

And that's how FB got them, sort of blindsided them by that one trick, Sergei and Larry now hate them! You won't believe which one! Google lost the walled garden social network game. Users spend a lot of time with other users instead with content directly, so the network effect dominated.

Also, you're probably not the lowest common denominator, you're not the target audience for the usual ads.

Targeted ads always seem to trail my interests. I search for a product, buy it, and then see ads for that product for two weeks. If Facebook and google want to show relevant ads they’ve got to figure out a way to be ahead and not behind my interests.

If I buy a smartphone on amazon, guess what they try to sell to me next? I'm constantly disappointed by tech giants ability to do their job: selling things to me. They don't even need these fancy machine intelligence stuff. A "switch case" could make bettere recomendations than the state of the art. But the highlight in recomentdation business is still: buyers who bought x also looked into y.

Why do you think this increases as value? Back before targeted advertising, if I saw an ad for a kitchen gizmo on a reputable publication, I would know that the maker of the gizmo was serious and cared about the publication. Now the the ads are targeted, all I know is that the maker paid a shady ad network a couple bucks and I got caught up in their profile.

Value hasn't really increased here; in fact, I'd say that ads now are a lot worse in quality than they used to be.

The difference with targeted ads is only that users are more likely to click on them. It's driven the cost per click down, and made advertising dirt cheap.

In the old model of advertising, the gizmo maker put out an ad in a reputable publication, spending quite a bit of money to do so, and got a small number of high-quality leads. With targeted advertising, the gizmo maker blasts their ad out everywhere, and, for a small amount of money, gets a large number of medium-quality leads. Overall, I'd expect they'd get more sales with the targeted advertising, simply due to casting a wider net.

I'd like to push back on "Google and Facebook actually can know the audience better than the content creator".

This is the idea that has powered online businesses in the last 10 years, but I'd argue that just because conceptually Google can know me better than NYTimes the raise in ad blockers has shown that the ad distribution ecosystem doesn't really know their users that well.

I must be living in a very different world from the one where "Google and Facebook ads are so effective" that no other strategy is possible.

I wouldn't attribute a rise in the use of ad blockers to Google or Facebook. It's more of a reaction to intrusive ads, the sort where a video expands to cover the content you're trying to view. Most people (that is, average users, rather than technologically-inclined ones) don't care that much about tracking.

As far as Google and Facebook pushing other advertising networks out of business, it's not that they're so effective that no other strategy is possible. It's more that they're effective enough, and so cheap that other networks can't compete.

Is there research on how effective the Google/FB model is compared to content based? I wonder if fine grained tracking is even all that more powerful. Regardless, there must be diminishing returns and I wouldn't be surprised if we're there now.

This is great in theory, but the potential never seems to have come to fruition in practice. Google tries to figure out what I'm interested in globally, but what it tends to end up with are ideas that are either irrelevant, outdated, or inappropriate for my mood at the moment. In the best case, Google has figured out that I'm currently in the market for a new smartphone, but right _now_ I'm looking at car reviews, and what I want to see are good deals for the cars I'm interested in, not the new Samsung Galaxy model.

Compare this to a popular car review site I use, which seems to manage their own ads. You know what ad I'm shown when reading a review for a car? A deal on purchasing or leasing that car. This is something I'm highly likely to be interested in _now_, and if the deal is good- there's a decent chance I'll click on the ad.

When I'm reading a magazine, ads are often not just NOT an annoyance, but are actually part of the experience, because they're advertising things that are really interesting to the target audience of the magazine. There is a very small handful of websites where I will even glance at the ads not by accident, and none of these are using Google's ad network...