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Comment by wybiral | Hacker News Reader

Most of the people I've talked to seemed to think that ads were how money was made from services like that. Promoted content that's constantly in their face trying to blend into normal content.

In fact, so much so that it's been hard to get people to realize that the recent issues haven't been related to ads at all. Facebook itself stills seems to be trying to blur the lines between data collection and advertisement.

To me there's nothing wrong with ads. Even content-targeted ads (if I'm reading about gardening then show me an ad for potting soil or gloves). But the push towards creating profiles that follow you around to target ads to you on multiple platforms based on your previous behavior is just creepy and dangerous (when political ads and control over the data comes into play).

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ads (if I'm reading about gardening then show me an ad for potting soil or gloves)

That’s what genuinely baffles me. If I were a manager of a gardening company and I wanted to do targeted advertising I would just buy space in gardening themed publications. The idea of showing people my ads while they’re on other websites and not in a gardening mood anyway makes literally no sense. All this tracking and profiling ads zero value for the ad buyers, so why are they paying for it?

Because it does add value.

Brand awareness/clout. A reminder that you need or want that thing.

You can do that kind of advertising without collecting this much data and creating psychological profiles on every user (think: Coca-Cola).

And even if I like something seeing it repeatedly online just annoys me more than it inspires me to buy their stuff. I think they'd get more bang for their buck by having social media personalities that align with their target market push their product (think: Nike).

If people are likely to be consumers of those things then they'll probably digest media related to those things or other media in the same demographic. This is classic marketing and it doesn't require the level of privacy abuse that Facebook has been trying to justify.

Agreed.

You do that because its not an either/or decision, and the bidding nature of digital advertising means the lower effectiveness will be reflected in what you're paying. You can be paying a premium for people searching to buy gardening gloves, a little bit for people reading gardening stuff, and then a pittance for people that may be related to gardening in some fashion.

You're extrapolating based on your own actions rather than measuring the result. The results say that if you show gardening gloves to enough people at random, you'll eventually get some sales. Everything else is just narrowing down "random" a little bit.

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