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Comment by baybal2 | Hacker News Reader

There is a long standing misconception regarding the value of "insight" coming from traffic analytics.

There is no shortage of companies getting megabytes of data points per person, yet they don't seem to be getting terribly ahead of ones who don't.

The a/b testing cult is a prime example. I knew companies who "optimised their websites to death" blindly following the deemed "signal." I knew of a guy who ran Borland's internet marketing and a lot of stories from him how hundred thousands in ad spend were ending up bidden on common sense defying keyword combinations.

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Amazon has all of my ebook buying history, and they have shown me hundreds of ads for ebooks on my Kindle lock screen, and they have never once shown me an ebook that I would have interest in buying. It is spectacularly awful.

Maybe because many people still use libraries (which don't share data) so there's no good database of reading habits the way there is for streaming movies. (Which recs seem to work much better for)

I don't find Netflix recommendations to be that useful. They recommend categories for sure.. but I like a wide range of movies and it is usually on a per movie basis.

I don't find NetFlix compelling because after I watch great movie X the service cannot recommend me another movie that is of the same caliber.

Also, there are a lot of independent movies and TV shows on NetFlix. And they suck. Horrible acting and plot but the cover is sometimes good enough to trick you into wasting time taking a look.

> after I watch great movie X the service cannot recommend me another movie that is of the same caliber

Statistically, after viewing a great movie the next one will be rated as less satisfying. We build up our expectations to a level that is not in sync with reality. This psychological insight was used at one of the early Netflix challenges by one of the top contestants.

No matter how specific I enter a query, Netflix will respond with a scattershot collection of its own titles, quickly descending into utter irrelevance to my search terms.

They never, ever admit that they don't have what I'm seeking and then suggest alternatives.

I get it free from Tmobile but hardly use it.

I suspect the reason Netflix is better here is because Netflix goes out and chooses its content, and has few incentives to discriminate between what it shows me -- its incentive is largely to keep me using the service enough to justify renewal, however that happens.

Amazon, meanwhile, has an incentive to show whatever ads pay the most. In this case, it's something of a winner's curse situation -- the ads that pay the most are often the ones that overestimate the value of an ad placement, not the one who correctly estimates the value of an ad placement. And if the ads don't generate the expected revenue, as long as Amazon can find more suckers, there's never a feedback loop occurring where Amazon's poor ebook ad placement ends up aligning with anything they care about. So I get ads for a lot of self-published trash (either in the Get Rich Quick With Bitcoin variety or the modern day romance novel sort), Amazon gets money, and most of these authors need a very low conversion rate so what do they care.

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