Comment by deleted_account | Hacker News Reader

Comment by deleted_account | Hacker News Reader

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This article discusses the Dutch national broadcaster NPO's switch from targeted ads to _contextual_ advertising, placing advertisements based on the content of the publisher site instead of user features of the person reading the page.

STER mentioned in the article is NPO's ad agency. The whitepaper is available on STER's site: https://www.ster.nl/onderzoek/een-toekomst-zonder-advertenti...

I haven't read the whitepaper (waiting on the English language version.) Where the increased revenue is coming from isn't really clear. It seems really unlikely they're increasing revenue by charging more per impression.

Cutting out the ad network could make up for it, but then this seems like a case of STER setting itself up as supply platform. It works great for large publishers, but doesn't really scale.

Totally related: expect to see more if these articles. The demise of third-party cookies is coming and groups like W3C's Web Advertising Business Group [https://www.w3.org/community/web-adv/] and efforts like Chromium's privacy sandbox [https://www.chromium.org/Home/chromium-privacy/privacy-sandb...] are picking up steam.

I still struggle to understand why people seem surprised when contextual advertising works better than targeted.

Targeted works on social media because that's the context, the user is looking for a distraction and ads can be as effective a distraction as your aunt's cat. Showing me ads for a new car when I'm reading about a terrorist attack is just the stupidest thing I can imagine. There's no context, no intent.

If I'm on a car site reading about the best new hot hatches and you show me an ad for your new hot hatch, then that's a whole different scenario.

It doesn't "scale", but advertisers get higher intent traffic, publishers can charge a higher premium, and the ads feel native so the customers might actually appreciate them. The extra effort is worth it.

...'cause _historically_ contextual advertising doesn't work better than targeted. And contextual targeting is hard, because determining context is hard and it can fail catastrophically (I recall the apocryphal story about a washing machine manufacturer's banner smack dab in the middle of a macabre news story about a toddler abandoned in a clothes dryer. Brand safety FTL.)

Your example on the "car hatches" is a really simple case and there's only so many niche publishers out there catering to specific audiences. That's how you end up with media companies like Vox and Gizmodo. And in terms of scale...well, go look at the Digital Media comscore rankings: https://www.comscore.com/Insights/Rankings

As for "advertisers get higher intent traffic", that simply isn't true. I'm not refuting your intuition 'cause it absolutely sounds right, but in terms of tracking and targeted ads knowing stuff like, "You left product in your checkout cart." is a waaay higher signal of intent.

> As for "advertisers get higher intent traffic", that simply isn't true. I'm not refuting your intuition 'cause it absolutely sounds right, but in terms of tracking and targeted ads knowing stuff like, "You left product in your checkout cart." is a waaay higher signal of intent.

For simple ecommerce flows, sure. But it isn't just intuition, having bought plenty of programmatic inventory over the years, there are perhaps as many non-online-selling advertisers using programmatic as there are straight "something in your cart" retargeters.

We used to get orders of magnitude higher conversions from websites where we did a direct buy aligned completely with the site's audience. The reason we didn't do more was scale - you can't do direct buys with every site, especially not when you already don't trust your buying agency. If we could, we'd have dropped programmatic entirely.

You also get agencies boosting their retargeting conversion numbers with BS like "view throughs". If your agency is trying to get retargeted view throughs in their hard conversion data, you're being scammed.

(In fact, I "accidentally" left the retargeting pixels switched off in GTM for a month. Made no difference to volumes or conversion rates - the reason they were turned back on? FOMO, plain and simple).

> cause _historically_

I'd argue that there isn't much "history" here to work on. The novelty of ad tracking is still very much there, and brands are still buying (and buying in huge scales, making up for precipitous drops in conversion rates), but when non-ecommerce brands stop being hoodwinked by buying agencies there will be a snap back.

Very few advertisers would want their content associated with a tragic news story like that. Not so directly as on a page with just that story anyway. During a national news cast? Maybe later in the program.

Tagging for the negatives is almost always more important than the positives.

Who tags though, publishers? I mean, you're right; I'm not being a contrarian for the sake of argument.

Contextual targeting probably will have a more interesting pitch in a post-third-party cookie Internet, but it's not going to be _the_ solution. There are already proposals for targeted advertising that may be more compelling/cheaper-to-implement, see TURTLEDOVE: https://github.com/WICG/turtledove.

OOC, what does "Scale" even mean here? is the OP saying you cannot infinitely serve ads because a given piece of content only attracts a finite number of viewers? or that there are a finite number of subject for a piece of content that can have relevant ads served?

To borrow your terrorist example, presumably there are no advertisers (that we permit and condone) who would like to advertise terrorism related products?

Do we have any reasonable numbers for what portion of actual web traffic is related to either product/service research or future purchase plans? My impression of my own browsing traffic is that it is probably about 50% by number of page loads.

You can cut the number of pages you place adverts on by quite a number when you can raise prices (in fact, probably quite a lot of news brands could cut them from their news stories entirely and just have them on their lifestyle content, especially on advertorials which often only need minimal configuration on their end). The issue with scale is the physical act of identifying and buying.

The best kind of contextual advertising is direct buy aligned with the content. For that, you need a big sales team cutting deals - you can't just tell your one man-band digital marketer to plug some demo info into a bidding platform and be done with it.

My programmatic spend was probably 10x my largest direct buy, but was a simple 20 minute phone call with the buying agency vs a month long BS sales cycle with the company I was direct buying from (although the lunches are nicer...).

"what does "Scale" even mean here?"

I meant in context of the number of publishers that advertisers need to deal with to purchase impressions.

Cutting out the ad networks probably makes sense for Ster and NPO. I know nothing about Dutch media, but I'm guessing they're big enough to court large brands with big marketing budgets on their own.

[edit: The "Mass media in the Netherlands" Wikipedia page is bananas: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_media_in_the_Netherlands. I'm gathering advertising on NPO is regulated by a public body; the STER from the article.]

NPO is the public broadcaster umbrella organization. It could very roughly be compared to e.g. BBC, with the big caveat that NPO itself does not create any content. Instead, its member broadcasters do. That's a relic of the Dutch pillarized system. NPO is funded both through taxes, and through advertisements. STER is the organization that handles the latter, and indeed it is a public body.

Presumably they mean that contextual advertising is hard to automate, thus requires consistent marginal human effort for each marginal amount of revenue. (Not sure that's true, but it's what "scale" generally tends to mean.)

> presumably there are no advertisers (that we permit and condone) who would like to advertise terrorism related products?

How about a handgun ad (tagline: "When seconds count, the police are only minutes away.")? Assuming the advertisee isn't in a oppressive regime, you can make money by selling them guns (or ammo if they already have guns), and do some minor bit of good by increasing the chances that the next terrorist is shot dead before they can kill anyone. (If they are in a oppressive regime, you've at least added one more bit of impetus toward violently overthrowing said regime, and hey, maybe they'll buy one of your guns on the black market.)

Edit: depending on the type of terrorist attack, you could probably advertise other emergency supplies like gas masks or fire extinguishers.

What about counter-terrorism products? I can totally whip up some copy for anti-virus or firewall software by referencing terrorism. It's not a direct connection, but probably strong enough.

How do contextual ads deal with language and geographic location? If reddit were to use only contextual ads does that mean that someone from, say Latvia, will never see ads that are locally relevant to them? I imagine most Latvians on reddit don't hang around the Latvian subreddit and advertising a local Latvian service on r/hairdressing isn't going to work. You also have to consider that if you just assume people's language then you'll end up with a lot of pissed off people, because you keep serving them content in Russian.

In other words: it's all well and good for the Dutch national broadcaster, but what about everyone else that gets an audience from a variety of countries?

Contextual advertising doesn't imply the system's completely ignorant of the device's detected language or geolocation. It simply means you're not employing a series of correlated requests across a stable identifier (browser cookie, IDFA, etc.) to model some outcome, e.g. probability to purchase, for a given advertisement.

Instead you infer a set of user features based on the domain/content _and_ attributes of the single request: device, geo, time of day, language, etc.

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