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Comment by pavlov | Hacker News Reader

Targeted ads are like a cancer on the web front-end. It started out unnoticeably with one mutant script infecting a page, and now we’re at the point where the majority of client network traffic from accessing a news article goes to ad peddlers and trackers — the cancer has overtaken the host.

A chemotherapy that starves the cancer’s food supply by 25-40% overnight sounds like a success to me.

(Edit: USA Today decided to actively remove the cancer tumors and created an adless site for EU visitors. The results are amazing: load time shrunk from 45s to 3s, network requests from 500+ to only 34! Source: https://twitter.com/fr3ino/status/1000167643431784449?s=21 )

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Not to mention the ads keep following you after you buy the thing.

And this is not only because of lack of information. Checks out a cellphone from Amazon, buys the cellphone, still get ads saying "you might like this cellphone"

> Not to mention the ads keep following you after you buy the thing.

There may be sense to this madness.

I believe rate of returns is increasing as online sales takes over. The only way to actually see and touch many electrical devices is to buy and return them e.g. there is no store in my major UK city that has premium non-mac laptops on display. It means you might buy and return 3 devices to find the one you want to keep. If the return rate is 30%+ then a completed purchase really is a strong indicator that might purchase the same thing.

Scoff. 30%? There's no way a rate of returns is anything like that. Just think of the volume of post that would be going out of suburban post centres! The delivery network obviously doesn't look anything like that.

I think it's much simpler. The chance that any person is say, buying a fridge at any point is very low. If you're 99% sure that person has already made their purchase, that means there's a 1% chance you're wrong, and they're still looking! That's a much better signal than any other signal you're going to get.

>Just think of the volume of post that would be going out of suburban post centres! The delivery network obviously doesn't look anything like that.

According to this article in the Toronto Star, online return rates are around 20%, rising to 30% in the holiday period.

https://www.thestar.com/business/2017/01/15/online-shopping-...

30% is not sustainable for any business. You have to take into consideration that once a product is returned then the merchant has to sell it as a used one with a significant discount. Selling 30% of your inventory at discount means you're doomed.

Amazon Warehouses is the official Amazon seller of used (returned) goods.

However they also sell returned items to others. There are multiple huge warehouses where I live filled with (mostly) returned products being auctioned off to the public by a middleman. The volume is astounding.

The only place I’ve seen powerful/prosumer non-Mac laptops that you can play with in store in the UK are big department stores - e.g. John Lewis.

Actually, PC World had demo machines out to play with last time I was in there, but very few in comparison to the tech department of the department stores.

A simpler explanation might be "They don't know you bought the thing." Either because they're different retailers, or because the data are hard to put through from the checkout to the marketing department.

Maybe it's hard to connect Google's idea of who a user is with the store's user accounts. Maybe the ad-buying algorithm is suuper simple, and getting a dev to "do it better" isn't worth the cost.

If it's just "this person searched for car rentals two days ago, let's show them car rentals today," that seems simple enough to make money over "no targeting," with obvious and acceptable failure cases like "already booked a car" and "phone got stolen, should show ads for pawn shops instead."

> Targeted ads are like a cancer

>> Not to mention the ads keep following you after you buy the thing

If you don't want irrelevant ads for items you already purchased following you around, then you want better targeting.

I think many people just don't like ads at all. If I had to live with ads, I'd prefer to have relevant ads, but that's just me.

I don't mind ads as a concept.

I do very much mind ads that stick a massive zombie in my face when i happen to be browsing a url listing that may hold something about games.

I hear this argument a lot but I disagree.

While some advertisements can alert you to a product that will be helpful, many have the psychological intent of producing dissatisfaction and are an attempt to compel you to purchase something you do not need and your life probably would be better off without. Advertising is deliberately about producing discontent and it makes people more unhappy and more dissatisfied with their lives.

I would rather see ads that I can immediately dismiss than have ones that make me start desiring that which I don't really need.

So you're just against advertising.

That's fine but I don't think there is an alternative business model that doesn't rely on advertising to feed the current demand of entertainment. I hope I'm wrong and people like you who find advertising distasteful can have access to the wealths of society with some alternative form of funding

But if I want relevant ads don't I want them relevant to things I'm searching for anyway? I.e. advertise things on sites (and sections) where I'm looking for that category anyway.

There's no need for 'targeted' ads that follow me around if the ads are in the places I expect when looking for something.

Content providers should be ensuring they display quality and relevant ads, not relying on 'other' services to come find the consumer.

Quality and relevant ads is exactly what targeted marketing is about. If the advertiser doesn't know who I am how will she know to serve me a qhality and meaningful ad? Maybe if it's targeted to what I'm searching for and it often is, but that leaves out a lot of people that rely on advertising, like newspapers and social media companies. What's a relevant ad for a news article?

>If the advertiser doesn't know who I am how will she know to serve me a qhality and meaningful ad?

The same way they do in television, radio, film and every other medium?

> Quality and relevant ads is exactly what targeted marketing is about.

Not really. Targeted marketing is about particularly narrow conceptions of quality and relevance. IMHO, the logic of targeting and tracking has severely twisted the meaning of those terms in marketer's minds.

I’m fine (or at least ok) with ads. I’m not fine with being stalked.

You can choose not to visit sites that use ad services that "stalk". You're not entitled to the content of a media brand under your terms

Then they're welcome to block me with a paywall, as some do.

NPR even went as far as offering a text-only version of their site: https://text.npr.org/

They have had that for some time now. It‘s unrelated to the GDPR.

Also, lite.cnn.com

That's been up for quite a while, actually, to help low-bandwidth and screen-reader users.

What's new is that they're redirecting to it if you're EU (like myself)

Edit: It's a pity there's no real archive in the text version, as far as I've been able to tell. No way to scroll down to yesterday's news or anything.

I'm loving that the privacy policy linked on text.npr.org links EU users to a URL on the non-text version which is again just showing a prompt. The actual text-only version of the EU privacy policy is the one linked from that prompt, not the text site.

I'm pretty sure that wouldn't satisfy the requirements for the privacy policy being easily accessible if this were an EU company.

Amazing.

But that's why everyone uses ad blockers.

It's just unusable otherwise

You still have the issue that the content must be of a form that a) attracts advertisers and b) attracts readers, so ad-blockers are only partially effective, you are still consuming content that is written with (consumption of) advertising in mind.

I don't think there is any solution for that when visitors to the web site are the primary source of income for the individual or organisation behind it. All schemes, even Basic Income for journalists, are flawed in some way if you rely on single sources for what you would consider authoritative sources of information. A return to the Coffee Shop model, as advocated by The Economist, seems to be the most viable, given current human nature.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_coffeehouses_in_the_17...

But is everyone really using ad-blockers? I thought it was obvious, like you, I mean, why wouldn't people use ad-blockers and keep living inside a garbage typhoon? Then, I saw some "studies" [1] saying the total of users relying on ad-blockers is ridiculous, like not even 1/5. It's baffling but seems like most people are still struggling against pop-ups.

[1] https://pagefair.com/downloads/2017/01/PageFair-2017-Adblock... (If this study lies, what wouldn't surprised me to the slightest, it would be by inflating the numbers, considering they sell counter-measures.)

Most people are using whatever is the default browser on their mobile phone. And if they do use a desktop, most users still struggle with the single-vs-double-click, never mind the right-side mouse button.

Most people also don't understand the difference between a URL and a Google search. Installing an ad blocker is way beyond their understanding of how the web works.

Yes, definitely.

I meant everyone that even talks about these things, like us for instance.

Wow, that America Today stunt is really impressive, feels almost surreal. Great way to fill the time until things sort out and they eventually devise a way of compliant monetization.

> "How fast the internet could be without all the junk!"

Or, in other words: if journalists didn't have to eat.

Why i have been using noscript for ages, and why i feel quantum is barking up the wrong tree.

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