[Disclosure: I've built a lot of these models in the past]
Do you think it's not repeatable?
...that's like saying "high standards of medicine are bad except for hygiene-minded users." The fact that the user has other concerns in their life doesn't change the fact that it's still bad for them.
But I can verify that I think Google gets my interests wrong more than 9 out of 10 times to the point of repeatingly insulting me and my family, and they are supposed to be very smart so I guess they to have equally smart models.
If they had just stuck to something relevant to the pages I visit they'd probably hit more than 50% of the time. If I visit a video about fixing stuff I might be interested in tools, paint or parts. If I visit a local news source around lunch I'd probably enjoy ideas for dinner from local shops.
That said I probably wouldn't buy much more but at least they wouldn't insult me and my family.
But in the absence of data, I'm leaning towards trusting that a market-leading company incentivized and dedicated to optimizing targeting models has a stronger research on targeting the majority of users than vague internet claims of bad targeting. But what do I know.
Ad-only publications were always very low quality.
https://www.journalism.org/2014/03/26/revenue-sources-a-heav...
I can imagine say, readers of Golf Digest are probably interested in golf. That's about the extent of the research that can be done by a traditional magazine. But there's an entire ad industry (for better or worse) to minimize 'wasted' impressions, and there's a large chasm between "male 25-35" and "specifically John Doe who looked at #9 clubs yesterday but hesitated to buy them, maybe we can win him over". Clearly the later example is prohibited in the spirit of the GDPR, but it's broad enough that it kills the former as well (and puts the extent of information available to the industry back to "golf digest readers play golf").
Not that I am particularly sympathetic to advertising agencies and the machinations of what online ad-tech has become, but I am sensitive to legislation that puts entire industries (I.e. real people's jobs) under a coal fire of "maybe we as a company literally have no viable path forward".
You really don't have to play devil's advocate, one of them is illegal.
If a company has no viable way forward, and has to resort to what the rest of us deemed illegal, it should stop existing. Not all companies should survive at any cost, that's not utilitiatian or desirable.
I'm going to be purposefully obtuse and set up a contrived hypothetical, but to me it's really more like: you came to my store today, but I saw you at the golf shop yesterday. Maybe I watched you closely to learn exactly what you were thinking about buying. I happen to also sell golf things and maybe I want to peddle them to you. So I really go all in on my sales pitch and single you out while you're shopping. That's legal in meatspace. What makes "the same thing, but do it on a computer" illegal and unethical? I think it's a real important question for legislators to answer. Is it the scale? The fact that it can be automated? That we're really not actually comfortable with the meatspace example but didn't have a good way to ban it before?
Just food for thought. I'm mostly neutral on the GDPR, I appreciate the intention but I think we as a society need to define consistent expectations about privacy.
If creepy shopkeepers following you round was a thing I suspect it would be illegal already.
You could even hire someone to wander around your competing stores and take lots of notes about the people they saw. "Red shirt guy shopping around for slim fit pants". Unlikely scenario, but legal to do and to use that information.
My whole thing is - what makes the scenarios different enough that one is prohibited and one is allowed? Certainly if we told folks they must forget their observations about others upon request, that would face some baseline rebuttal about their own autonomy.
Imagine almost every store in your city installed something facial recognition (a la Amazon Go). This system, given to owners literally for free, was created by one company - Google - and allowed them to automatically see what products most people were looking at, what time they were doing so, and their demographic. As payment, Google also gets this data and is able to use it for their means.
Note: i'm just making this analogy. Google Analytics (probably) isn't being used for ad targeting.
What actually happens is that your behavior (in store or not) is permanently observed all the time and ads are served whether you want it or not.
Imagine if in all shops, always you'd get jumped on by attendant trying to sell you things. And sometimes shop attendant would appear out of the blue.
What you're describing you can have today - just convince user to make account in your shop and give you permission to send offers. You can chase him any time you want.
As opposed to the half of them where it currently happens?
Good that you're sensitive, but some jobs simply deserve to die. It happened in the past; behind leaded gasoline, or CFCs, or poisons sold as miracle drugs, were real people with real jobs. Advertising as an industry proved itself to have cancerous nature and grew to do incredible damage to people; it deserves to be burned down to the ground.
Also classifieds were a major source of revenue for many publications and it was destroyed by listing sites like Craigslist. Nobody talks about it but that was the first big blow to the old model.
Realistically, I wouldn't expect targeting more granular than a zip code. But that's still pretty decent as far as advertisement targeting goes. Definitely better than broadcast radio, as one example.
Now the game has been turned. Advertisers don't need to target sports illustrated to sell gatorade. They can see you checked into LA Fitness and most of the people who checked into this particular LA fitness also happened to spend 30s longer looking at a tester gatorade ad, so there is a slim possibility that you too will look at a gatorade ad for 30s and maybe subliminally engage with it next time you are presented with a gatorade in a cooler at the grocery store. The classic is you looking at a product on amazon and seeing it appear all over the web. It only gets more insidious the deeper your digital footprint goes, the more data they have on you, the more correlations they are free to make which would have been impossible back when advertisers were catering to audiences, not individuals. Sprinkle in exploiting modern psychology for profit, and it's disturbing.
The clearest example of this is the collapse of local news.
People like ads.
You know "brand Twitter" and how people like talking about the cheeky thing that Burger King said? That's an ad.
The Super Bowl? People watch for the ads.
Magazines: people collect pretty ad series, like the old Absolute Vodka ones.
Podcasts? We all loved saying "mail kimp" like idiots for a couple months because of a popular ad.
People like ads! …Except on the web.
No one has ever liked a banner ad. Search ads people sometimes like, but no one has ever liked a banner ad. So, they kept adding more banner ads to try to make it up in volume and then they added a shit ton of tracking because they could, but guess what, banner ads still suck and no one likes them.
So, maybe stop trying to make fetch happen? If banner ads haven't been successful for 20 years, maybe they aren't going to suddenly become successful and it's time to stop trying.
Agree. And I guess they have reason to be happy for now.
> The shareholders of companies spending ad money do not care about metrics, they care about revenue.
Agree. And they have reason to be sceptical: a lot of Facebooks growth in ad sales seems to have come from companies who suddenly had to pay to reach their fan base.
> People who buy those ads care about metrics, but while they cannot see inside the FB machine and need to trust them somewhat regarding views and reach they have absolute visibility on the results of that ad spend and where those visitors are coming from.
Another explanation: pay per view ads are massively overvalued but for some reason or another management isn't aware of it or doesn't care yet.
Also there are companies that will track your FB ads and tell you if FB is lying.
I know I'm talking hypotheticals, not anything that helps people make money of actual work done online, right now. But I'd be ready to pay for a fairly done flat rate service that gives me access to quality content on a variety of sites for a reasonable price a month. If you do that, companies would not have to track anything after confirming my login, it would no longer be the main revenue stream.
Are there any good estimates how much money the internet makes from the ad data of an average person, per month? Like, spread among multiple websites? Is that too crazy an amount to ever expect people to pay?
This is a human behavior issue. You would need to change the behavior of billions of people before the ads model gets affected.
Music and movies are highly repeatable and have production costs that users recognize and value. News and general content is not valued the same so nobody wants to pay for it. The severe dropoff in any paywalled site shows the effect of charging for news.
First, there was the web, and there weren't any ads, and that was just the way things were. Then there were ads on the web, and it got to be unpleasant. Then there were adblockers, and things were good again. Then there were adblocker-blockers, and I stopped visiting sites that used them.
I honestly don't know how you're going to make money out there, but it's not my problem.
With AdSense you can use non-personalized ads: https://support.google.com/admanager/answer/9005435?hl=en
(Disclosure: I work for Google)
At least then I’m actually choosing to receive ads. In return it would be nice to have a say in the sheer amount of attention grabbing advertising we’re subjected to in the physical realm. There is no consent there, and this advertising only serves the purpose of businesses selling stuff. Why can’t I charge a cost per view for everything shoved in my face on the way to work, or at the cinema, or on the train, or in any other situation where I’ve already handed over cash? My attention is a scarce resource that holds a lot of value to my friends, family, colleagues, and any other human being in my life. I’d love to paywall access to that.
In short though I believe there has to be a fundamental shift from the belief that ads, tracking, and shadow profiles are the path to profit in an increasingly connected world. Something about the relationship needs to change, maybe towards business-2-citizen instead of business-2-consumer.
Because you don't own whatever is being used to advertise. It's not your decision to make. They can charge you and then show you ads.
>In short though I believe there has to be a fundamental shift from the belief that ads, tracking, and shadow profiles are the path to profit in an increasingly connected world.
Belief doesn't mean anything. What matters is what pays the bills. If alternatives worked well, then I'm sure we'd have plenty of sites that would already be doing this. You could argue that crowdfunding is one such route, but I don't think that will ever work on a large scale. The amount of money required just isn't there.
The reason ad-tech is so common is because people are unwilling to pay any amount of money.
And I agree that pay-as-you-go would put a high mental overhead on sites. That's why we have ads instead.
So, maybe ads are not the answer after all.
Users are still paying for the content just indirectly.
It would be FAR better for everyone if people started paying for content again.
Also, haven't looked at every company they list, but maybe they're covering their bases by listing every company part of adchoices? https://youradchoices.com/participating
Source: I know a guy who runs a blog who wrote Google+ posts about doing it.
If the NYT or whatever started advertising for its audience, I wouldn't have shoes ads all over the place as soon as I buy a pair of shoes on amazon.
The big lie of adtech is that it can advertise better than conventional methods. Yet I've yet to see a relevant ad online - when I see them in paper magazines and metro stations that don't aggressively target me individually.
I'm not against advertising online, I don't like ads because I think they're too good and leverage our vices too much, yet I understand their necessity in the "econo-societal" context we live in. Therefore I am for ads in the metro, TV, magazines, billboards and websites. But I sure as fuck am against individually targeted ads, because even if they worked better I think that'd be going too far, but mostly because they don't work whatsoesver? In my circle of friends I've never heard someone going "yo, I saw this sick ad for [whatever], I'm sold, I'm gonna order one of those". I have however heard some (and myself) say "I saw this concert ad in the metro on my way here, wanna go ?" (The malade imaginaire with Daniel Auteuil ad in the Parisian metro worked on me for instance.)
I could go on and on about this, but I've recently switched to dvorak and I'm pretty slow at typing. My thesis is as follows though: use ads on me, but don't follow me everywhere and try to find out what I might buy again. Use conventional pre ad tech means, they work better anyway.
P.S. google sponsored links are such a dark pattern. I didn't realize it until I saw a very good friend of mine use google (peer googling if you will). He'd wouldn't even notice the sponsored links and click on them as if they were the first non-paid google link - only to click the back button and the second sponsored link again and again, until finally hitting the first non-paid link and being satisfied with its content. He's an architect and therefore very attentive to details and yet, he'd automatically click on them as we were googling after I repeatably explained him what was going on. I bet you most non techies are this way.
P.S.S I haven't even had the time to discuss about the gdpr popups that show iphone style toggles but that are so evily designed that you cannot tell if they are "on" or "off". Or all the sites that check them all by default when they should be off. And all those sites that you just cannot even find where the hell to set these things even after navigating on all the nested links in the popup.
How often do you see ads online that are in one of the hundreds of languages that you don't speak? How often are these ads for a particular business in a location that's in another country?
Without some targeting, many of the ads I get are in languages I do not understand. Sometimes they advertise services that are in another country entirely.
However, doesn't facebook already optionally ask me where I live, birth date etc ? Come on, those are enough info to classify me as student/working/revenue/ etc, and these I give with my consent. You don't need to analyze my location history, throw nlp at my comments, track my hyperlink activity or whatever the hell they do.
That is very kind of you. Thank you!
>However, doesn't facebook already optionally ask me where I live, birth date etc ? Come on, those are enough info to classify me as student/working/revenue/ etc, and these I give with my consent.
I agree with you, but not every service asks you for that information. I don't really want them to ask it either, because I would probably have to register on every website I try to visit to get access to the content. On the other hand, I completely agree that the whole thing has gone overboard. They try to track way too much stuff.
Who even clicks on internet ads? Grandma? Kids? People who weren't on the internet when clicking a banner ad gave you malware? My family has been blocking ads since 2005, I wonder if advertisers even know if their ads are being blocked? If I were Zuckerberg, I'd lie all day about my engagement numbers, because why wouldn't you? Hire a Russian click farm to get your numbers, your board of trustees probably isn't tech literate enough to tell the difference and that's good enough to keep the stock afloat.
Curious...that's not a problem I see much, if at all. If sites simply display ads that are in the same language as their primary content, surely that shouldn't be much of an issue? Or are you in the habit of visiting sites you don't understand?
The only websites I use that are in my native language are the government websites and banks. This would mean that I would not be the target audience of many (most?) of the ads I see.
Just as an aside, I don't get how that works. I buy a thing on Amazon... then I get ads for the thing I just bought.
This happens often. Guies.... I already gave you my money, I'm not buying two TVs now...
Great bold statement out of a personal anecdote! Yet Google and FB joint market cap is 1.3 trillion dollars and they employ thousands of people paid a fortune to build personalized ads models. Everyone must be stupid, right?
And sorry for the bold statement as it is indeed based solely on the tiny view of the world my senses allow me to have. I would however love some of you to tell me some "personal" anecdotes about the effectiveness of adtech on them, I'm curious honestly.
I'd be google and facebook, I'd sure as hell continue diversifying away from adtech as much as possible because you are right, no one is stupid here, hence GDPR.