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Comment by kgwxd | Hacker News Reader

"That means we could still get relevant ads"

Ugh, if you're an advocate for privacy, please don't perpetuate the delusion that users actually want "relevant" ads, or that these ids are solely used for that purpose.

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Well I would actually prefer if ads were relevant. Relevant to whatever it is they're next to though, not necessarily relevant to me (because frankly that's no-ones business).

Same with youtube's recommendations. At this point over half the recommendations are almost entirely irrelevant to what I'm watching, and usually only have a vague connection to something I once watched, except for the ones I'd actually already watched.

There's a risk we miss the point point in this discussion (as every time the topic comes up). Even here on HN there are those who don't mind or even actively want "personalised" ads. We'd assume the community here is aware of the wider risks of surveillance or "social manipulation platforms".

The real issue is choice. I personally choose privacy over personalisation. I also understand that businesses need revenue - so I pay for e.g. email rather than using an ad-supported service.

My issue is that I can't choose privacy. I've taken reasonable steps to make it difficult for Google, Facebook at al (ad blockers, pihole, etc.). But I'm realistic to know it's an up hill struggle. I've never had a Facebook account (nor instagram/whatsapp) but I know I'll exist as a shadow profile.

Whether ads are good or bad; whether they're personalised or not, and if so how, isn't the fundamental issue. I've no issue with those that do want personalisation (assuming they understand the consequences obviously). The issue is that I can't choose. And everything G/FB/etc are doing is focused on building ever more walled gardens, so it becomes ever more difficult to exist outside them.

You can't choose because your choice is expensive for the business. The famous saying by Wanamaker is exactly about that: you can waste less money by targeting people potentially interesting in the ads. This is the strength of Google, FB and the rest: they can funnel the money where they're more likely to generate more money and easily convince the accounts they're more efficient than indiscriminate advertising via TV and other channels where you can't profile the customer. You, a disobedient citizen, are just an obstacle in this scheme. This is one big reason any revolution in this area is extremely unlikely to happen.

Very well put, if depressingly so!

> easily convince the accounts they're more efficient than indiscriminate advertising via TV and other channels where you can't profile the customer

Does anyone know of any studies here? That is: is there demonstrably better return on "personalised" ads vs. contextualised?

I don't expect Google/Facebook would publish anything other than support for the former. I'd love to think there was some evidence to suggest they're selling snake oil. That may be wishful thinking, but worth asking anyway.

You can choose by resetting your advertising ID.

Partially. Except (1) that only works on platforms that support it and(2) the advertising platforms will just work around it anyway.

1) The problem is that Apple doesn't allow it to be used for the web where it could help privacy there too by removing cookies.

2) Apps are reviewed, there are no workarounds and there is no need to when there is a sanctioned API that does exactly what is necessary.

I don't want do be influenced by advertisements and as such I opt out of any tracking ("relevant ads"). I do want relevant videos. The two are totally separate topics.

Turn off your video history.

This is an interesting idea. Does anyone know if it has already been A/B tested and shown to generate less profit than say building a recommendation profile for the user? I suspect that in the long term, optimizing ads for user profile would be more profitable, considering that the marketing cycle usually takes time from the initial consideration up to the conversion.

It would be nigh-infeasible to run a test like this. Some researchers at Yahoo! did a study about a decade back [1], and it makes for very interesting reading if you're into that sort of thing. Long story short, it's hard enough to detect when an ad campaign doubles the advertiser's investment. I'd expect that it's even harder to tell whether different kinds of ad campaign work better, since there you would expect a smaller effect size.

That said, if you believe in the wisdom of the crowds, it's at least highly suggestive that the per-impression price of personalized ads tends to be a fair bit lower than that of non-personalized ads. That would seem to imply that the market has come to believe that personalization is less effective than other forms of targeting. Or perhaps that it's most effective for campaigns that, for whatever reason, are expected to be low-payoff.

[1]: http://www.davidreiley.com/papers/DoesRetailAdvertisingWork....

This is what DuckDuckGo does as I understand it. If you have ads enabled they only have to do with the content of the search results.

Isn't that what Google Adsense used to do back in the day, i.e. show games in gaming sites for example?

Honestly, the "Not Interested" button does wonders for youtube's recommendations.

I have to prune out a shitty clickbait video from them every couple of weeks, but it almost always gives me videos I'm either interested in or are close enough to what I'm interested in that it's not irritating.

> Same with youtube's recommendations. At this point over half the recommendations are almost entirely irrelevant to what I'm watching

Exactly. I had to disable YouTube Watch History and YouTube Search History [1] for it to stop "recommending" utterly irrelevant videos to the one I'm watching. It still manages to put "related" videos into the middle of search results that have nothing to do with the actual search.

[1] https://myaccount.google.com/activitycontrols

I'm in agreement with you, seeing ads for right wing causes and feminine beauty products is less than ideal for a liberal male.

I like relevant ads, click them, and usually get really happy when I find cool stuff with them. I've bought at least a handful of things off of instagram ads that were relevant to my interests. I also discovered a dog carrier backpack I now use to cycle with my dog to the beach every weekend from a Facebook ad that I got while browsing a dog owner Facebook group.

I'm just leaving enough data to support my assertion because I'm tired of this meme that "nobody looks at ads" or "all ads are bad".

I also deliberately do not use any ad blocking even though I know they exist and would save me bandwidth because I do get value from personalized ads.

Fair point, although:

> a dog carrier backpack ... from a Facebook ad that I got while browsing a dog owner Facebook group

That’s not a personalised ad. That’s just an ad. (I.e. it doesn’t need tracking)

But the rest of your (masochistic ;P ) point stands.

When I go to a popular website right now, with ad blocking disabled, I see, above the fold:

* One huge video ad for a home decoration magazine (I could not care less)

* One animating ad for car loans (no interesting in that)

* One animating flash ad for payday loans (actively hate these)

* One static banner ad for a gas grill (no interest, just got a new one last summer)

These do not seem to be particularly tailored to me, and definitely are not tailored to the content I've chosen to view. They're on the main page of the site. This is why I use ad blockers. Browsing the web without one is agonizing. Also the reason I don't really watch TV anymore, the ads put me off. Maybe I'm in the minority, but it sure seems to me like this minority is growing.

Ads that are "irrelevant" are still leaving an impression in people's minds. They will be a subconscious push toward the particular service when time comes for you to need it.

Re: payday loans, I'd guess no one who uses those expected to use them until they did. Not that you ever will. But the point is, your reaction doesn't mean their targeting formula is wrong.

Much of advertising is about building subtle positive associations in people's minds and/or leaving a seed for them to remember when the time comes. Other advertising is like the dog carrier mentioned above -- a specific product and not a brand.

It gets confusing when all advertising is lumped in together in discussions about whether it's "relevant" or not.

Finally a lot of advertising is about keeping brand loyalty for current customers -- make them feel good about their choice so they keep making it.

I make the assumption that advertisers are both smarter than me and understand the human mind better than me.

Your ad blocker probably blocks the tracking as well, no? So turning it off for one page just shows the default non-tracked ads.

Fair point, I haven't browsed the web without an ad blocker for years. Hopefully, ad networks don't have much of a profile on me. I'd like to keep it that way. I feel that keeping a permanent profile on my interests without my consent is wrong, and I take measures against anyone easily building such a profile on me.

Wouldn't a good compromise be to deliver ads that are relevant to the content I'm viewing, instead of ads tailored to my profile? Search ads, for example, are quite fine in my book, as long as they match my immediate search history instead of a personal profile secretly built over a long time.

> Hopefully, ad networks don't have much of a profile on me.

You can find out:

http://bluekai.com/registry

has a tool that shows you what data BlueKai/Oracle have on you (or any of their third-party branded and unbranded data suppliers).

> I'd like to keep it that way. I feel that keeping a permanent profile on my interests without my consent is wrong, and I take measures against anyone easily building such a profile on me.

That's why we have (and should have) the GDPR.

These cookie countermeasures are annoying for application developers...

> Wouldn't a good compromise be to deliver ads that are relevant to the content I'm viewing

Yes. These are context-sensitive ads and they're by-far the most common.

I bought a pair of shoes off of a Facebook ad that I absolutely love. I was expecting them to suck because they came through an ad but was pleasantly surprised.

Vessi shoes. Fully waterproof shoe (I've literally walked into a pool with them) but breathable with a nano-fabric that has holes too small for water molecules but big enough for air/steam. (Supposedly, though H2O sounds like a pretty small molecule so I'm not sure if there's more to it than just size, perhaps viscousness.)

That puts you in a small (17%) minority: https://www.emarketer.com/content/do-people-actually-want-pe...

You are an exception to the rule, if you are actually honest here (and I have some doubts). Nobody I know, IT or not, likes ads anywhere - TV, radio, side road, internet, whatever.

They actively decrease the experience of everything one does (block the view around the road, forces loud delays into movies, takes space and are absolute nuisance almost anywhere on the web).

I don't hate them, just actively ignore them even if there would be a genuine new porsche being offered for $1. If you want to reach me anyhow, ads are the worst possible way. And I am not alone.

Well, Google's balance sheet tells me otherwise.

How so? The willingness to pay for digital ads actually has nothing to do with whether ads are effective (the statistical problem of attribution).

For example, this was a pretty damning research paper on the topic,

- https://poseidon01.ssrn.com/delivery.php?ID=0180870830661140...

The paper is about predicting ROI, and that is a well known problem in advertising. Now, the same author of the paper you linked, Randall A. Lewis, has a paper about whether advertising actually works [1] and it does, "we find statistically and economically significant impacts of the advertising on sales. "

[1] http://www.davidreiley.com/papers/DoesRetailAdvertisingWork....

You are wrong. The second paper is attempting to measure sales lift (with randomization, which many ad campaigns disallow because the marketer doesn’t want to pay for holdout inventory, so it’s not really the same situation that most companies are in when calculating lift), but sales lift does not mean there was positive ROI. You can increase sales all day, but if you’re spending more than you’re making to do so, it’s not effective and usually indicates some unsustainable effect that is more about short term attention than about a meaningful effect of information transfer about a product (and indeed in [1] the authors found a very similar effect - that there is usually positive lift on a customer activity like visits or site shopping cart checkouts, but that among users driven to the site by digital ads, their purchases were far less in total value, enough to more than offset the cost of advertising to drive them).

[1]: https://marketing.wharton.upenn.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/...

I think you’re confused. I’m not disputing whether ads create positive lift in intermediate metrics like visits, clicks or sales.

I’m saying the research pretty conclusively shows that despite that created positive lift in intermediate metrics, it does not translate to positive ROI, or a weaker version is that it may create positive ROI but on average marketing campaigns even from the country’s biggest marketers would need to be 10x-1000x larger than they are to even be able to distinguish such wildly incompatible outcomes as +100% ROI vs -50% ROI, to the point that for most companies buying digital ads, they literally have no idea if they are making money or losing money by doing so.

"the total effect on revenues is estimated to be more than seven times the retailer’s expenditure on advertising during the study."

How is this not positive ROI?

The first paper explains why such estimates are deeply unreliable, even in the second paper.

People literally pay money to see relevant ads.

Fashion magazines are basically vehicles for ads. Even if you exclude sponsored content, a major draw of such magazines are the full page ads.

Secondly, Mozilla are not blind to the idea that tracking won't go away completely.

Sure, but would even the most avid reader of fashion mags want to see fashion ads while looking over their mother's photos on Facebook? Or while browsing a programming sub-reddit?

Because that's what 'relevant ads' usually means in contexts talking about ad blockers.

Yup.

It's kinda shocking, but if you talk to non techncial people, they just accept adverts as a fact of life and actually quite like it when they show them things they like.

Hell, those "You looked at this item on our website last week, do you still want it?" adverts are incredibly successful. My company does them and they have (for adverts) a fantastic conversion rate.

People buy magazines for the content, the ads are an unfortunate side effect of the low cost.

Not entirely. A lot of lifestyle magazine articles are essentially targeted ads for vetted products (see wedding or parenting magazines)—something that’s understood on both sides of the communication. It lends to serve the purpose of saving time for the reader in finding what they’re looking for to serve a specific need.

The unwanted side effect of that is probably the little greedy voice inside people that causes them to buy even more things they don’t need because all of the dressing up made it sound appealing.

Back when I was a kid I used to spend at least as long reading the ads in the computer magazines as I did the articles.

The same went for the gaming magazines (White Dwarf particularly). Even the ads that were just price lists were fascinating, just to see what was available to go and check out on the next trip to a games store.

Computer Shopper magazine in the early 1990's was a huge magazine about 3cm thick printed on cheap paper (like a phone book if people still know what that is...)

It was probably about 95% ads and just a few articles. Before comparison price sites it was a good way to find cheap prices for computer parts

Back then ads had often a lot of information because they were often the only way to learn something about the product. Today’s ads have almost no information but are designed to arouse emotions.

A few weeks ago I noticed someone on the same train reading what seemed like a fashion magazine. As far as I could tell every single page was just a high fashion ad for some luxury good. Just photography, a brand trademark and maybe some captions indicating the edition or product range. It wasn't a catalogue. There were no serial numbers or prices. Just glossy ads as "content" interrupted by regular ads.

Trust me, there's a market for people who want ads.

I think they just want to see what’s in fashion.

Kinda depends on the magazine. Fashion mags it’s hard for me to even tell which is which.

The content is essentially an ad.

True, and I suspect if most of the consumers understood this they wouldn't pay anything for it.

Why? It's basically soliciting vendors but with a broader scope. If you're redoing your kitchen you might actually want to buy a home magazine full of ads. It's Pinterest, which is hugely popular and I use all the time, but for print. Once I find roughly what I want I still have go through the vetting process to make sure it's not trash but it kinda solves the unknown unknown problem.

However, ads when I'm not looking for them can just fuck right off.

hey dear friend, sry for the hijacking thread here, do you have any new methods to bypass Medium paywall? your old method is not work anymore :(

Then we just need an option to opt out of ads for anyone not wanting to pay. Be that through money or attention. I am all for it.

I agree, I think people should start thinking more often what garbage would they not have bought if they hadn't seen that ad.

"Do I really need that dog backpack? How many times will I ever use it? Would I actually have needed it if I didn't know it existed in first place?"

Personalization of everything (ads, products, content of any kind) is at an all time high and driven completely by demand. Relevance is the most requested feature by every user and the #2 complaint about ads.

There is no gain or advantage in irrelevance.

Whose demand... advertisers or consumers? I imagine the #1 complaint about ads is the fact that they are there.

All ads are irrelevant. If they weren't, they would be part of the content itself. Or the entire content is an ad, and it can be ignored.

The number 1 complaint is that there are too many ads, a complex combination of lack of other payment models, tragedy of the commons in adtech, and, in a small part, irrelevant targeting.

>> All ads are irrelevant. If they weren't, they would be part of the content itself.

Relevancy has multiple factors, including contextually relevant to the content you are viewing.

> please don't perpetuate the delusion that users actually want "relevant" ads

This seems really short sighted. Why wouldn't folks prefer relevant ads? I certainly do.

you pay nothing for the vast majority of your web resources you use every day.

More relevant ads = more money = better free services for you.

Would you rather you be forced to watch C.O.P.D medication pre roll ads and ads for meselthelioma ?

I'd rather pay a few dollars a month for the services I need than be targeted by ads that manipulate my emotions to purchase expensive things I don't want. I'm really happy the market has options for people like me.

Are you suggesting people would prefer ads that are completely irrelevant to them?

I'm suggesting everyone on the planet automatically tunes out ads, what is shown is irrelevant no matter how relevant it is. There is no ad industry on the internet, there is only a tracking industry, the ads are just an excuse. There's no good reason Apple should even provide the id.

This is unequivocally false. Ad spend is so high specifically because advertisements work. Advertisers especially love digital because its so easy to attribute revenue back to their ad spend. Google didn't take in $118B for showing ads because "everyone on the planet automatically tunes [them] out."

"advertisements work"

Everyone always wants to believe they're above this. You're not, ads work.

I held this mindset ("I never click ads, and hide them whenever I see them. The whole industry is a giant bubble") for a long time.

Then instagram started showing me ads for small live music events featuring artists I regularly listen to.

I thought I was somehow above it all, but they just hadn't targeted me well enough yet.

Not if you do some mental gymnastics and actively ignore the content. I've gone completely ad-free (sounds like some sugar-free diet, only for the mind), and its a luxury and quality of e-life that is very easy to get used to.

And then you by accident open web in browser without necessary ad-blockers and want to run away from the horrible pathetic mess a lot of internet became.

Its easy - have you ever bought anything via ad? If yes, you support this industry and current state of affairs.

Ads aren’t only online and you buying directly from a single ad impression is not the only form of conversion.

You are definitely influenced by ads.

Ads work for whom? This is unequivocal false for whom? I mean we're talking about consumers, right? Do you really have the intuition that the population of ad-block users are generally worse off for it, as ill-performing shoppers? Because if you're not getting an edge on your shopping performance, then who are the ads working for? Coca-Cola?

Is it that ads are working -- against you?

Rational companies wouldn't be paying for ads and minting multi-billionaires in the process if the results did not surpass the costs. The dominance of online advertising over print/television/physical is largely due to metrics and ROI visibility provided by tracking.

They aren't paying for ads, they're paying for access to the tracking data. There's like 20 primary companies that show up in "targeted" ads, that's not by mistake. They're hip to the what the system actually provides (tracking) and are all in.

Companies, like people, aren’t rational.

And yet companies grow and profit from advertising and it's the default method of monetization on the internet.

Sayings it's not rational is not an argument against whether it works.

That's ridiculous. If everyone tuned them out, it wouldn't be a multi billion dollar industry. People pay attention to ads, and they click ads and companies get very rich pushing their products through ads.

What exactly do you think all these companies want with all this tracking data if not to sell you products with ads?

People pay attention to ads precisely because they constantly steal your attention.

This is clearly not true. Advertisers are not pouring cash into big piles and setting those piles on fire. If everyone on the planet tuned out ads and what is shown was irrelevant no matter how relevant it is then they would stop advertising in that way.

edit: should have just read a few of the replies

They're paying for tracking data, advertising is just a bonus.

>I'm suggesting everyone on the planet automatically tunes out ads, what is shown is irrelevant no matter how relevant it is

Makes you wonder what all the people around here who dreamed of and/or do work for Google/Facebook are doing with their lives. Saving the world, I guess.

I do, irrelevant ads aren't going to alter my behaviour, relevant ads might well do so.

I use ad blockers for anyone I setup a computer for. Are we all becoming less performant shoppers for it? When one views ads, I ask if you're really getting an information edge.

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