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Comment by contravariant | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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 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.

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.

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.

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?

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....

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.

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