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Comment by xmprt | Hacker News Reader

The weird thing about websites like YouTube is they do a combination of topic matching and user matching. Why bother with tracking users so extensively if you're going to just go ahead and demonitize videos that are "sensitive" content. Just place the ads in front of the audience regardless of what they're watching. At the end of the day, advertisers and viewers can't possibly care what video it's showing on as long as they're getting the right target audience. The only people that do care are journalists looking to write a sensational hit piece to fan outrage culture.

I hope your method succeeds because it would be a whole lot better than this crappy middle ground that we have right now.

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> At the end of the day, advertisers and viewers can't possibly care what video it's showing on as long as they're getting the right target audience.

This isn't true?

Advertisers certainly do care. They don't want their ad dollars to be spent paying publishers for content that's controversial because it makes them look bad. It also has the potential to damage their brand.

This actually happened and is what led YouTube to lose a significant amount of ad revenue which in turn created the situation we have now.

I work for Google, opinions are my own.

> ... advertisers ... can't possibly care what video it's showing ...

I read this as 'advertisers don't care about the particular topic of the ad in general.' They don't care if you're watching a DIY home fixit video, or a coder streaming his working session, as long as you're a target for diapers and they're advertising diapers.

And it sounds like the person you’re responding to is countering this very premise.

“They don't want their ad dollars to be spent paying publishers for content that's controversial because it makes them look bad.”

Yes, there's a whole subset of the industry dedicated to preventing such a thing, with players like IAS, DoubleVerify, MOAT, ...

They care insofar as political controversy is concerned. Topically, they are not concerned. This is the distinction I feel does exist.

What actual difference does drawing this distinction make? It doesn’t change the advertisers behavior.

Ah, the old endemic versus non-endemic debate. Increasingly, you're right, but some brands really like the prestige of having their ads appear with content related to their topic.

>Why bother with tracking users so extensively

Because there is a good chance governments will pay for that data in the future.

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