Hacker News Reader

Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

I was talking to my friend about this the other day. He's an executive at an ad company (not Google). He had an interesting take on this:

Yes, it is in fact working and breaks targeting and retargeting. But what is the outcome of that?

The CPMs (how much the website makes) are 10x higher for re/targeted ads. So as they stop working, do you think the website will cut their revenue? No, they'll either put up a paywall, or put 10x more ads on their page. And those ads will frustrate you even more, because they aren't targeted to you.

And in the meantime, Google and Facebook will still know everything about you. It's just the smaller websites who suffer by not getting ad revenue. And they weren't even getting your personal data in the first place.

I still side with Apple on this one, but he has a good point. Overall what they are doing will probably just make things worse for everyone that isn't Apple, Google, and Facebook.

View on HN

I'm not nearly as anti-ad as many people I've interacted with on HN and Twitter. I like the idea of getting free-to-me content supported by ads. I resisted running ad blockers for a very, very long time.

But.

The ads just got bigger. And bigger. And more intrusive. They approached 50% of the visible content (and that's on the desktop, not mobile). They played more video. They played more music. They started blocking the content I was trying to read, all in an effort to get me to click.

So I gave in. I run an ad-blocker, too.

Your friend inadvertently pinned what I personally think is the original sin of online advertising: measuring an ad's success through the number of clicks it gets. Ads in other mediums aren't designed with the idea that the only successful ad is one that makes you go AAAAH MUST GO BUY RIGHT NOW RIGHT NOW DROP EVERYTHING AAAAAAAA... but 20 years ago, some dingdong decided that because it was possible to measure "direct engagement" with ads on the web in a way you couldn't with TV or print, it was appropriate to measure ads that way.

Think of how different the web might be if, instead, we'd just sold ads by the number of visits to an article the ad is on... or better yet, by the number of visits to the web site, period. "But that's not an exact measure! We can't tell if it's really worth what we're being charged!" You also have no way of knowing whether or not that full-page color ad in the New Yorker is "really worth" what you're being charged, but you know what? You got along fine that way for decades. You did. Your business was fine.

> So I gave in. I run an ad-blocker, too.

Me too. I worked for a company that made almost all of it's revenue from advertising. It felt hypocritical to run an ad-blocker. But it just got so bad I had to do it.

I'm just worried about what will happen to the web for all the people who don't run ad-blockers. I care about them too, especially since they are the customers in a lot of cases, and if they go away from the web completely because it's so bad, what then?

> Think of how different the web might be if, instead, we'd just sold ads by the number of visits to an article the ad is on... or better yet, by the number of visits to the web site, period.

That's actually how many ads are sold. By CPM (cost per thousand impressions).

I've heard the ad industry has been moving toward that model rather than clicks, which seems good -- but it doesn't seem to be appreciably helping make the ads suck less. For years Daring Fireball paid its bills and then some with a simple, non-moving, square sidebar ad; obviously that wouldn't keep the lights on at Vox, let alone the NYT, but I can't help but think ads could have been... better.

There are places that at least strike a balance that doesn't make me want to poke my eyes out -- The Outline, for instance, at least now that they've toned down the over-engineered JavaScript woo they launched with -- but it's depressing how uncommon that is.

You omitted the most important reason why blocking is necessary: malicious and deceptive ads.

I want to check a story by my local newspaper. I don't have my phone handy so I borrow the nearest work computer that isn't typically used for web browsing. I open an incognito window and go to the website, click on the article, and read through it. I leave the page open while I go back to work. Sometime while I'm not paying attention one of the many ads on the page refreshed because when I turned back instead of the newspaper I see a full-screen message that my computer has been "hacked". There's an pseudo-unclosable alert box warning me not to turn off the computer and to call "Microsoft" at some phone number. This computer didn't have speakers attached, but if it did I suspect they would have been making noise or using text-to-speech to read the fake warning.

This is a daily occurrence for thousands of unwitting computer users. You can't blame the victim by saying they were doing anything to make themselves vulnerable. I saw this happen on a continuously patched and vulnerability-scanned Windows 10, running the most up-to-date chrome. While visiting the website of a mainstream web site operated by a major newspaper syndicate.

I put the responsibility to stop this on the ad networks, and the site operators who partner with them. Until you can guarantee that none of the ads you serve are malicious or deceptive, I'm blocking everything and denying your revenue stream.

> the original sin of online advertising: measuring an ad's success through the number of clicks it gets

The measure is often the number (or even the value) of conversions an ad gets. I think it is a good measure for everybody. I wouldn't block ads if they were garanteed to have conversion-rates > 90%. This would mean that I only see ads which are highly relevant. What we have instead are conversion rates < 5% (or even < 1%) - which is basically noise or spam.

>only successful ad is one that makes you go AAAAH MUST GO BUY RIGHT NOW RIGHT NOW DROP EVERYTHING AAAAAAAA...

Exactly. That would be a good ad. Instead we see useless distracting spam ads which bring no value to users nor businesses.

I don’t get targeted ads. They’re quite dumb. If I look at product X, ads for product X follow me around the web, which isn’t that useful because I’ve already done my research and am not quite ready to hit “buy” no matter how many ads you show.

Ads for similar products I might be interested in, but I’ve not seen too many of those served up by these ad networks.

Untargeted ads at least might show me something new and interesting.

That's not how they work. What you're seeing is the issue with not having data shared between networks and the resulting poor targeting.

Retargeting has better results than any other type of targeting but unfortunately there's a gap between the ecommerce systems knowing you bought something and the ad networks used to market those ads. It's easy to drop a pixel and say you looked at a product, but it's much harder to let that same network know that you're no longer interested for whatever reason.

Add in complexities like multiple devices, browsers, ecommerce stores, payment methods, and it only gets harder. This is usually why retargeting is much better with smaller direct-to-consumer companies which tend to have a single customer database and payment method to sync from.

Amazon has been repeatedly showing me office chair casters as a suggestion after I bought a set on Amazon.

Despite having much better information on things I actually spend money on than the average ad network (all my devices have adblockers), Amazon isn't clever enough to figure out that I'm probably done with that product category for years.

To explain how this happens will take several pages of notes on the complexities of ad serving that are the exact opposite of "not clever enough".

A summary is that your adblocking may have an impact on syncing stats, your purchases are not unique enough to matter for that category, serving some ad is better than serving no ad, and it maybe better to show you that impression however worthless than to bother with something else considering the auction dynamics at that point in time.

Do you think that's true when it comes to Amazon's recommendations, which I'm assuming are largely based on activity on Amazon itself? My adblockers don't keep Amazon from tracking things I do on their site while logged in, nor from showing me product recommendations.

Actually before I was ad blocking, two large local electronics stores did the same stupidity. I bought some expensive electronic toy, then was followed for a week by google ads for the exact same electronic toy. Which i had just bought. And was expensive enough to not buy another. And the ads were for the EXACT SAME STORE i had just bought it from.

I repeat, that was before I began blocking ads. For a while I was on the 'let the web sites make some money' side. Then the web sites became unreadable with ads on so it's uBlock Origin now.

That's what I described about the ecommerce system being different than the ad network. Products usually have their own pages where you can easily be added to a 'interested' segment.

It's very hard to remove you from that segment on a consolidated check out page that would need some backend mapping with the products you bought and the removal pixels for each product and ad network, along with lots of other issues. It's just not that simple as you may think to keep things in sync.

So they're okay with me considering them stupid? :)

As the customer, I don't care how hard or easy it is. I can imagine how it would be implemented, but 99% of the world population can't.

Note that they never gave me ads for stuff i only looked at, only for stuff that went through my shopping cart. If it's already there, I guess it makes figuring out if i bought it or not easier?

The explanation I've seen is that yes, most people who buy certain products (a microwave oven, say) are probably done for a long time and less likely than the average person to buy one, but overall the group of people who just bought a microwave oven are still much more likely than the average person to buy another one. So yeah there are a bunch of people for whom the ads seem extremely stupid because of course you don't need another one, but enough who think "you know, I could use one in (the camper/the basement/the rental/the garage-office), actually, but it'll need to be a smaller one" that it's worth advertising other options to the whole group. (for the record, I hate all ads and wish they'd go away)

I've read loads of suggested explanations for why this is a thing over the years, and none of them have ever felt satisfactory to me.

However, none of the people doing this really care why this is a thing, they care that, for some reason, this is a thing. It's vastly more profitable than nearly every other type of advertising, and since nobody _really_ knows how that works either, they just follow their tried and tested patterns that work.

Obvious _you_ wouldn't be this dumb. But it turns out that, on average, you are exactly this dumb ...

I suppose it might be true that the sort of person who buys 50 sets of office chair casters first buys one set to try out, and if they're happy with that, comes back for more in a week. The chance that I might be that person is relatively high reward (a ~$1000 sale), and Amazon doesn't have a better idea of what I'm going to buy.

The simple answer is that there's a far greater number of people who saw the product but didn't buy then those who did. Conversions are a tiny percentage that scales with price, so showing ads to everyone who saw it raises that conversion rate.

It doesn't really affect the people who already bought it since the conversion is complete, and the wasted impressions are trivial compared to the cost of implementing more complex tech to keep things in sync.

Perhaps there's a secondary effect of negative reputation from seeing ads for stuff you bought but the data doesn't bear it out.

>"but it's much harder to let that same network know that you're no longer interested for whatever reason."

Yes and no. As a best practice, for a SaaS product I marketed I would always build exclusion lists (ideally ones that auto-updated based on syncing with our funnel data) to stop showing ads trying to get people to buy who were already paid subscribers.

eCommerce obviously has different challenges, and the effort to create those synced exclusion lists may not actually be worth the performance improvement at scale. But it is certainly possible when an advertiser has both sales data and ownership of the retargeting lists.

> And those ads will frustrate you even more, because they aren't targeted to you.

I would have thought that the frustrating part of an advertisement is the presentation of the ad itself--not necessarily its content.

I actually find myself clicking on targeted ads occasionally because they are so relevant. In that sense, I'd say it's the content that makes it less frustrating.

Your proposed tradeoff space are not the only two options.

As a ‘third way’, you can match ads to real content, and have audience interests and advertiser interests aligned.

Folks who try this, find it works, in some cases only a percentage point or two worse than high end retargeting, and in most cases, better than retargeting when sold by third party or retargeting across run of site.

EDIT: CPC (cost-per-click) and CPM (cost-per-thousand impressions) are both fine when matching ads and content. For instance, the ‘affiliate link’ business is predicated on the idea that inline clicks on products mentioned in content are so valuable as to be individually worth a piece of the actual sale.

affiliate sites are created purposefully with persuasive text specifically to rank high on google and cause sales. in the generic case, a website would have to specify its own advertising-keywords, because contextual mismatching the audience.

Regardless, i think an ad service with only contextual ads will either fail, or end up implementing the wheel (targeted ads) to survive. tracking adtech does lead to more effective, less intrusive ads in the average case. The tech that will dethrone google will be a service that matches buyers and sellers better than google.

> As a ‘third way’, you can match ads to real content, and have audience interests and advertiser interests aligned.

Doesn't work because the advertisers usually want to sell something different from what the majority of users are interested in. If they strictly respected the interests of the users most of the ads would disappear.

> It's just the smaller websites who suffer by not getting ad revenue.

I’m ok with anything that frustrates people who get money from ads.

Why cut off your nose to spite your face?

More like cutting off an ugly sticker off your back than nose.

Apple is not willing to understand the whole dynamic in the ads market, including publishers trying to game with the system all time. I've observed the worst on what those publishers can do and am pretty sure about that they will find out a "creative" way to make up for the revenue loss. Of course, I'm not saying this will be user-friendly; publishers tend to be more "creative" when it tries to rather exploit users.

The engineers at Apple are well aware of the games that adtech plays.

Do you work for/with Apple regard to this issue? I followed discussions with WebKit devs and had an impression that they don't really care about the ecosystem but only Apple users. It seems they had never reached out to publishers/advertisers in the design phase of ITP. Later, they prepared a crappy conversion tracking mechanism to compensate the loss, but this design also had never involved the ecosystem.

I do not currently work for Apple on this, but you can read about the ways Intelligent Tracking Prevention has changed to adapt to the ecosystem on the WebKit blog: https://webkit.org/blog/category/privacy/. I was under the impression that the ad click attribution work (which I think is what you’re talking about) is being proposed as a standard and is open for comments right now.

I understand how ITP works, its intention and goals since this had a significant impact on my work. And assuming a good intention on Apple's side, this makes me pretty confident that Apple doesn't want to put significant investment of its resource on studying how the ads ecosystem works (and of course they don't have a strong motivation to do so).

On browser-side conversion tracking, I can say that this will unlikely be adopted by advertisers/publishers in the current form. This is not my own opinion, but more about general feeling across advertisers/publishers that I've met.

> I followed discussions with WebKit devs and had an impression that they don't really care about the ecosystem but only Apple users.

Then all is good.

apple has millions of devs of apps who amount essentially to an army of gig workers who expect to be paid via ads or in-app-payments. if apple is not making sure the devs have a fair revenue stream , it's equivalent to abuse of the same kinds Uber is accused of. sadly, the terms of all similar platforms favor exclusively the companies and not the devs. Still, labor laws exist.

> No, they'll either put up a paywall.

Personally, I think I'm fine with that, provided the paywalls get cheaper—right now, they're all very clearly more expensive than what you'd make in ad revenue. Of the two options, paying content creators for what they produce seems much more "healthy" for society.

> or put 10x more ads on their page.

If the site becomes impossible to browse, I will leave.

> And those ads will frustrate you even more, because they aren't targeted to you.

I don't find targeted ads any less annoying than untargetted ones.

I like targeted ads, but I want them targeted to the content I'm consuming, not me personally. If I'm reading a blog or article on rock climbing, then, yeah, show me ads for all the gear. I'm interested. But don't show me an ad for an Instant Pot because I googled it last week. That's creepy.

I agree. From what I understand this is the DDG model. I don’t hate ads, sometimes they’re even helpful, but I do hate being tracked.

Adverts that relate to the content they're next to are contextual ads, rather than targeted ads.

They're apparently not very good for advertisers.

They are the only ethical kind.

They are not "as good". Advertiser are addicted to demo, behavioural and interest targeting because that is what Google and Facebook gave them.

Contextual targeting is happening, but it doesn't perform well as behavioral one yet while the risk is much higher for advertisers/publishers with the current technology (e.g. gun ads on a mass gun shooting news). With a sufficient technology, the situation can improve though.

That’s how Brave works—using zero-knowledge proofs, it uses your browsing history to inform its opt-in ad network on what ads should be shown to you. That info doesn’t leave your device.

And if you opt-in, you get paid using their cryptocurrency Basic Attention Token: https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/13/20962085/brave-beta-1-0-...

Why does it need my entire browsing history? The example given above didn't ask for that.

Not sure it needs your entire search history: https://www.reddit.com/r/BATProject/comments/8v11fr/how_will...

The problem is they had a great solution with advertiser ID which is already used in apps. Expose that to websites and they would get a good compromise for both sides.

> Yes, it is in fact working and breaks targeting and retargeting. But what is the outcome of that?

Improved privacy. The rest of what you said is irrelevant.

No, they'll either put up a paywall

That would be a great alternative. I buy Apple stuff because the business model is simple. I give them money and they give me stuff.

i dont know any computer or phone manufacturer that gives phones for ads.

All consumer PCs except for Macs are subsidized by ads - the Intel Inside, Powered by Nvidia stickers and the crapware that comes on PCs.

Android phones are also subsidized by manufacture and carrier crapware. Not to mention that Android manufacturers get Google Play Services free in exchange for Google ads and analytics.

The most popular streaming media devices - Rokus - have hard coded buttons that go to the highest bidder. I have a Roku remote right now with an RDio button and there are some auth a Blockbuster button. Not to mention half the home screen on Roku devices are taken up with ads.

Microsoft has ads in Windows 10 and Skype.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com