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Comment by leggomylibro | Hacker News Reader

The ads that I find most useful are the ones which mimic olde newspaper/magazine ads by simply showing things relevant to their general readership.

The advertisers don't need to know a thing about me, they just need to know the general demographics and interests of the publication.

For example, the ads on this blog[1] are far more relevant and less invasive/annoying than anything that Google ever showed me before I started aggressively blocking ad networks. I assume that it is because the blog knows what I am interested in better than Google does, simply because I voluntarily go to their website and read their content.

[1]: https://hackaday.com/

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The problem for e.g. Facebook, Reddit and other link aggregation sites is that they have a very non-specific audience - which is fine for e.g. Coca Cola that want everyone to see their ads, but impractical for small advertisers that want to target a specific niche.

The promise of the ad networks is that they'll find the niche sites for the advertisers who then don't have to find suitable places to advertise on and buy ad space in a bunch of different places - less administration needed.

I don't think that this adds enough value to be worth eroding the privacy of all web users, but apparently it is according to the people who make the decisions. ️:shrug:

(Apparently HN strips away emoji from comments, didn't know that.)

Consider this though, would those marketing schmucks invest that much money into dystopian tracking on the web if they didn't have the data to back it up?

The problem is in the user. They do this because we let them. Spread the adblock around your non-technical peers whenever you can.

I think this phenomenon has also a lot to do with self marketing of ad agencies. To stand out against the numerous competitors, they want to provide as much information as possible to their clients about potential customers, target groups, etc.

I agree that we should block those even harder. The bad side is that whitelisting sites doesn't work well and well behaved actors are punished too. Especially those, since they do not employ measures against blocking in the first place. That does cost those sites that you actually do want to support.

So the current situation is that bad actors ruin it for everyone.

Are you sure hackaday isn’t using third party ad networks?

Nope - but I see the same sort of ads on every machine including public ones, they don't follow me, and they aren't annoying.

So if they do use an ad network, it seems like one that can connect me with products that I'm interested in without being intrusive.

I guess that I have no assurances that they aren't collecting my information and not using it, but down that road lies madness.

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