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Comment by nopriorarrests | Hacker News Reader

so much true. people are worried about their data being sold to advertisers, while the little dirty secret of the ad-tech industry is that nobody has any data, tbh.

facebook and google do, but they are not selling it. and the rest of ad-tech loves to boast about their "data" on every conference while all they have is /dev/random output, more or less.

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Until flashlight apps stop trying to request location data, I do not feel it's safe to assume the industry has no data

Well, yes, let's say that your flashlight app requested your location data and you agreed. You were in a park during dawn and you were looking for the stairs.

And there were like 2 ads shown to you during this 50 seconds period, while you were in the dark and not looking at your phone but using it as a duh, flashlight. And then you stopped the app to save your battery.

Do you really think some advertiser benefited by using this data?

And what "independent" ad-tech is dealing with is millions of cases above. Consistency is important. FB and GOOG have consistent data, collected over days and years, properly matched, correctly aggregated. All others are dealing with flashlight crap.

For plenty of people, apps can still get background location data.

This.

A lot of those arguing your parent comment's point in other threads here and elsewhere seem to magically forget background data. Out of sight, out of mind.

Use a simple app to track background connections on your phone (e.g. NetGuard or the like) and you'd be amazed at how much gets sent back to the mothership.

That's not how it works. Do you actually have adtech experience?

Mobile apps are 1000x more invasive than anything on the web and these SDKs constantly send data in the background. There are also 100s of signals that get correlated to build single device profiles across time. FB/GOOG do have an advantage but that doesn't mean everyone else is useless and if you have ISP partnerships then you can actually get even more consistent data down to a device and household.

An even dirtier secret is that you can have great data like Facebook but still serve incredibly irrelevant ads that everyone ignores. Google and FB presumably know massive amounts about me but I've never been shown an ad on either service that's worth clicking (on the off chance I even bother to look at them).

Absolutely. They suck, they just suck less. With FB, you can _at least_ try to advertise to "small business owners in CA" and get a few leads for your SaaS.

Good luck doing it with independent ad-tech and their "data".

It really only plays as a branding message- like a superbowl ad. I've never bought anything immediately after seeing a superbowl ad, but the brand (Doritos, whatever) is in my brain now (as I eat my Tostitos of course).

This is also not true.

I have a great deal of experience, and I've seen that you can generate final sale for some non-brand obscure SaaS platform (so no branding effect here at all) for like $30 per sale in Facebook, $90 in a good independent ad-tech platform, and $600 in a bad platform.

Facebook still totally kicks ass and absolutely can make money for you if your SaaS brings you $100 in a first year. (100-30=70 in incremental profit for you). Hell, even really good ad-tech platform (yes, they exist) can make you money, though less so (100-90=10 in a first year). Shitty platforms are money sink, though

They can only sell the ads they've got in inventory. I've been on FB since 2006 and the last ads I remember seeing were for godawful Farmville-style games and shady dating sites. My profile would tell them I'm college-educated and living in a developed country with a network of similarly educated friends. And yet, I have never seen a single ad that didn't look like it would have fit right in at a late night infomercial.

The Twitter PWA Chrome app sadly doesn't block Promoted Tweets, and it's the same thing there; low-quality ads from garbage companies I'd never consider buying from.

People always say nothing works because they never see relevant advertisements.

But the disconnect here is the at the ad VIEWER is not the customer, the purchaser of the ad is the customer. It might be whoever has a relevant ad for you won't bid enough for you to see it.

That's a really interesting point. A lot of people seem to see FB & Goog as adtech or something, when in fact they simply sell one of the main requirements for advertising - ad space.

Whether the ad is well targeted or not, the host still makes a profit (both monetarily and in terms of their own tracking data)

That's solid economics. If a war breaks out, be the one that sells guns. I seem to recall a quote along these lines but it escapes me...

I suspect that Verizon, T-Mobile and AT&T also have data.

True, but being old and slow telco businesses they totally failed to monetize it.

Verizon bought AOl, HuffPost, Techcrunch and plenty of other media to build an advertising giant by pairing data with sites audience -- and took 4.6 BILLION WRITEDOWN on the whole venture [1] because failed to make it work.

[1] https://www.recode.net/2018/12/11/18136127/verizon-aol-yahoo...

EDIT: oh and AT&T will learn the same lesson with their recent 800M AppNexus aquisition. Just give it time.

They didn't totally fail to monetize it:

https://www.engadget.com/2019/02/07/carriers-were-selling-yo...

> Carriers sell information about you to data aggregators, which normally require the user to consent before selling it on further. But some third parties opted to sell information, like people's whereabouts, on to bodies such as bail bond companies, bounty hunters and landlords. In its original report, Motherboard paid an bounty hunter $300 to get the location of a phone to within a few hundred meters.

They totally failed to monetize it for advertising purposes. Taking cases like $300 per single person location, paid by bounty hunter, is arguing in a bad faith, and has nothing to do with ad-tech.

>They totally failed to monetize it for advertising purposes

It has been illegal for them to do so until relatively recently.

It will be interesting to see how the mobile operators now try to monitize their 1985 - 2007 location data collected b4 GOOG/FB were in the game, will they just sell it to Google?

And don't forget the browser plugins that siphon your data.

this is wrong, and sloppy thinking to say so.. sloppy people busy talking fast do not have data, but that does not at all equate to "no one has data"

I work in ad-tech.

In fact, this is almost tautologically true. If you have:

-- good data

-- on large enough scale

you are not going to sell it. You going to take advertiser dollars and match their ads against right audience, while safeguarding this data as your main know-how. Go and buy "barbell training fans in FL, US" and "women interested in fashion in CA, US" from facebook. Sorry, not for sale.

If instead you decide to "sell the data" it means that you can't really make it work for advertisers. Or, in other words, said data is mostly useless.

> you are not going to sell it.

I don't know why someone would posit this falsehood.

You are going to sell it to EVERYONE you can (legally and sometimes not). There is no ad-tech company that does not take this stance. You get information about Honda buyers, you're going to sell it to Ford, then take what you sold to Ford (exclusively) and sell a repackaged format of the data (summary) you sold to Ford and sell that to Subaru ALONG with the data Ford asked for in the future.

Data management platforms (DMPs) are an entire concept built around selling the data. Every adtech company (that has any tech) sells the data that is collected, outside of using it for internal targeting. The number of demand partners and amount of useful targeting data to leverage for them, is necessarily a smaller set than what you collect.

Edit: This is experience from multiple senior ad-tech positions.

>I don't know why someone would posit this falsehood.

lol

>You are going to sell it to EVERYONE.

Exactly. And you know what you end up with? I checked lingerie website yesterday to buy a present for my girlfriend, this data was sold, now I'm a women in some DMP. I've bought a bottle of Talisker, now i'm wealthy man in the same DMP (even if I can only afford Talisker one time per year!!!). I've also bought some drugs for my grandfather, and now i'm +70 audience and I'm getting "senior discounts" ads while not being even 35 years old.

This is the problem with data platforms. Take data from everyone, mix it, and you have /dev/random. It's totally fine to milk advertisers for their money (which original article is all about), and not fine for anything else.

Advertisers finally start to understand it. And this is why GOOG and FB are getting all the money and ad-tech is slowly dying.

EDIT: And since -- as you correctly noted -- everyone is incentivised to sell ALL data to EVERYONE -- this is how you end up with a pool full of piss instead of water. Because everyone sold everything to this pool.

I find this oddly comforting.

I think this is true, but there is rational for why you would sell the data even if the data is good. On a hypothetical scenario, say there was a great app for checking price comparisons for some esoteric product, or even say televisions. People download the app, and use it in Best Buy, etc. to compare tv prices. The location data therefore might be high quality/relevancy in one situation, but have low frequency and use to be valuable as a single source for advertising/selling to a hedge fund. Therefore, there would be hypothetical value to a data vendor aggregating and normalizing all these small sources into one feed.

In practice, the level and quality could vary significantly, and the difficulty to normalize the feeds could be much harder in practice. If you get data in aggregate from Foursquare and Yelp, potentially it can tell you enough to gauge foot traffic in restaurants, but to your point, it probably can't be used to build an advertising platform.

There are plenty of legitimate data providers. They're just overshadowed by shady and fake data vendors because they're cheaper and provider "better looking" results that help agencies look better and earn their bonuses.

Maybe in ad-tech, but many organizations have lots and lots of real information.

Insurance companies are a great example. The data providers for pharmacy and automotive are another.

Well, that was true back in 70's and this true now. If some brick-and-mortar business knew a lot about you (like your bank) -- it still knows a lot about you.

Ad-tech is different by boasting that they do know a lot about you, while in fact they have no clue.

Most companies would never have to go the lengths insurers go. They'll hire PIs to literally follow claimants around IRL to make sure they really do have a workplace injury. I know this because I worked at an office tasked with reviewing and annotating the videos they recorded.

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