Hacker News Reader

This is a bad test. The alternative to algorithmically target ads is not totally blind ads, the alternative is direct ad-buying which targets based on context.

Buying ads on the NYT Health section is a form of targeting. It's also a much lower noise targeting compared to programmatic.

View on HN

It's a good test for "Advertising targeting techniques are a hoax" - which is the claim people in the thread are making.

I'll also note there's very little scale in direct ad buying - very few niches have scale that matters for any audience smaller than "interested in business". That said, programmatic outside of FB and Google is indeed trash and the NYtimes did well to drop it. But pretty much everyone in the thread conflates Facebook and Google (Again, 90% of spend) with the 1000s of random ad tech firms out there of dubious quality.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com