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Comment by kin | Hacker News Reader

I have a serious question. Obviously if one were to choose between an ad-free experience and an ad-full experience, one would choose ad-free. But, if ads were needed for monetization, wouldn't you choose personalized vs non-personalized? Personally, I would go with personalized because a non-personalized experienced usually has no relevancy and frankly it is inefficient use of money in this world. From there, it really comes down to companies invading your privacy, usually they make the wrong assumptions from it. Why can't there be a way for me to tell the ad-world what I'm in the market for and have them stop trying to snoop around and guess what I want? Most may say that making a Google search is enough to tell ads what I want but I think there are a ton of assumptions made there.

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If personalized ads meant ads that were actually good recommendations for products I could be interested in and would be grateful to be informed about the existence of - maybe. The reality of it is that personalized ads are mostly just ads from those with the money and demographics info to stalk me around the internet - e.g. webshops running after me, believing that I abandoned my shopping cart simply because I got distracted, not because I was trying to figure out what the shipping cost would be and their site didn't leave me any other options. Or sites trying to sell me another vacuum cleaner weeks after I already bought one. The point I'm trying to make is that personalized ads are very poor at actually recommending me anything I care about. They're like semi-incompetent sales clerks in a physical store - I'd really prefer to do my shopping without them breathing down my neck. So long story short, personalized ads are just as useless to me as un-personalized ads, only creepier, and I'd prefer not to be stalked.

Criticism like this essentially boil down to the adverts not being targeted enough. Lumping you in the wrong group, not knowing enough about your intentions, etc.

An alternative interpretation is that the level of stalking, intrusion, & privacy you would have to give up to be targeted enough to make it useful isn't an acceptable trade off (& isn't even technically possible in the near future).

No, I'd say it boils down to ads being a bad way to discover products you are interested in. I love sites like thewirecutter or similar for getting actual recommendations, when I want to seek something out. Randomly getting products recommended in a drive-by fashion as I surf around the internet doesn't work, but even if it did work, it's neither the format nor timing in which I'd ever want to receive these recommendations anyway.

If targeted ads are no better, and maybe even worse, than untargeted ads, that doesn't imply you need more targeting. Maybe it implies targeting doesn't work (at least for the purpose of providing ads the user wants to see).

I prefer contextual ads, ie. related to what I'm currently looking at, not what my ad profile thinks my personality is based on something unrelated I did on another device last week.

> I prefer contextual ads, ie. related to what I'm currently looking at, not what my ad profile thinks my personality is based on something unrelated I did on another device last week.

That would be my preference for browsing the web, or looking at results of a search. But what about the ads that rely on doom-scrolling? The ones that are inserted every two posts on a Facebook feed would be hard to make contextual, for example.

Reading that, I’m SO glad I left facebook.

I don't mind some Instagram ads which are directly related to accounts I follow. For example, follow some musicians on Instagram and get an advert for some other artist's new album. I don't use Facebook but I guess it could work similarly if you follow certain interest-related groups. However, I wouldn't like if it was using my interactions with friends to target me.

Both of these are better that tracking your activity all over the web and using that to target you.

It is a fair criticism, is it not? My go-to for this issue is my Kindle Paperwhite for which I did not spend the extra $20 to turn off the ads. Amazon has over ten years of my reading habits, which mainly consist of sci-fi, philosophical/religious non-fiction, and miscellaneous dregs. You know what I have never, ever read in my life? Some along the lines of the "Witches of Paragrene Point" series of books. Or the "Defending $POPULAR_90S_GIRL_NAME" series (which I take to be "manly hunk is bodyguard for a female has to rescue her at some point"). But those show up on my Kindle, at which point I assume Amazon just isn't even trying.

After about ten years or so of Kindle ownership, I recall clicking the ad and buying the book exactly once. Yup, a sci-fi book, and it was pretty damned good as I recall. The title, you ask? Hell if I know, Amazon never showed me another book from that author ever again. And I wish they would, because I can't remember which one in my "stacks" of sci-fi is the one I want.

Perhaps you didn't read the last part of that comment:

> So long story short, personalized ads are just as useless to me as un-personalized ads, only creepier, and I'd prefer not to be stalked.

You nailed it. I've had personalized ads disabled for years, and a few years back I switched it back on to see if it's any better.

At the time I was shopping for a Pebble smartwatch and kept checking the site if it's on sale, because Pebble had a tendency to do short-time discounts without actually announcing them. After a few times, almost every Google ad was for "Pebble Smartwatch". It not only wasn't useful, it was annoying.

The ad platforms have very clear incentives to deliver the ads that perform best for marketers so that the marketers spend more with the ad platform.

As much as you think the ads are doing a poor job, they're likely doing a better job in aggregate than alternatives.

Retargeting ads deliver higher value than prospecting ads so that's likely why you get so many more of those.

Honest question: Do retargeting ads just appear to perform better because I already had purchase intent and I was already going to go back there to buy it later anyway?

It's hard to tell, since that data isn't publicly available. But I read this article, which makes the case that this is often the case, and that marketing departments are willfully ignoring this, because it's in their interest to appear useful to the rest of their organization, and it's easy to hide using bad statistics: https://thecorrespondent.com/100/the-new-dot-com-bubble-is-h...

This is a completely fair question and is something anyone working in performance optimization (marketing, product, etc.) should be asking themselves all the time when looking at data and finding ways to suss it out.

In the case of retargeting ads, you can run tests to figure it out. When I was doing more on the marketing side, I used to find a non-profit and then show ads for the non-profit to my retargeting audiences. That way we could test to see what kind of value our retargeting ads had vs. a completely irrelevant retargeted ad.

For the most part, the relevant retargeted ad outperformed irrelevant by enough magnitude to make the retargeting campaign profitable.

I think the illusion of "cheap" confuses most marketers. Marketers are left with an unbalanced sense that they are getting higher bang for their buck, ignoring centuries of marketing best practices about expanding reach and exploring non-traditional targets for secondary/tertiary effects. But I think it works well for the ad platforms themselves in the way that it encourages whales just like microtransactions in games. A marketer has an easier time considering opportunity cost for one big ad spend, versus not even paying attention to opportunity cost as they buy a lot of individual micro-targets. (And relatedly not paying attention to how much they are over-spending on people that already have their message versus missing opportunities on greater reach.)

So in a world where targeted ads are actually useful you would probably opt-in? Would you ever try something like this?

You'd take a survey about your interests and/or things you're in the market for then you would get a monthly email with a variety of targeted ads. Over a year ago I wrote down in my "ideas" notebook "privacy respecting opt-in email advertisements" but then when I looked at it again later on I thought "I don't think anyone would sign up for this" haha.

. This idea goes in the right direction, in my views. I already sign ip to newsletters for things I want repeated reminders for, or updates about. If your service replaced newsletters, and could guarantee to work for things like ticket sales as well as commodity items, it might work.

One of the problems with ads is that they try to jump in front of me while I'm going about my business trying to do something else - it's the wrong time for a product recommendation in any case. I'm happy to go on sites like thewirecutter or cleverhiker when I want specific product recommendations for something. But that only works for products and product types that I already know about. If I could have an inbox of products that were likely to interest me, which I could check or ignore at my leisure (sorta like Spotify's Discover Weekly) - yes, I might just check that out, and even keep coming back if it kept giving good recommendations.

The other aspect of it is these ads are supposedly targeted yet they look like they were produced for a general audience like you'd get on TV. They target the lowest common denominator. They are so safe and inoffensive they end up being simply boring to watch.

The products that I care about actually do offer personalized ads without tracking: think podcasts (not from major networks, but podcasts like ATP or Relay FM), blogs (like Daring fireball), and YouTubers in an area of interest I have (MKBHD, Linus Tech Tips). I don't even mind sponsored content from these people because more often than not, the products are sensible, tailored to my interests, and actually appealing. Yet zero optimization or learning went into it outside of understanding what the source material is and marketing against that.

Obviously you have a bigger problem when it comes to larger sites like NY Times, but why not just let me say "hey, show me tech products because I like tech" to personalize, rather than trying to infer what I want and get it wrong? I'd be more than happy to tell every ad network ever what I actually care about, but right now all of the optimization is focused on guessing what I care about instead.

Podcasts should be the gold standard for online advertising. They're perfect for everyone involved: there's no creepy tracking involved, and the ads are appealing because podcast producers tend to know and respect their audience. I never skip podcast ads because they're often entertaining in and of themselves (e.g., Reply All).

I like this sort of "personalization" podcasts do in their ads: with human judgment where the content creators exercise editorial control, not some black box chum box any rando can dump ads into.

They're not perfect for everyone. It's usually a huge blackbox for advertisers who don't know what they are getting until they've dipped 50-100k into it and tracked the resulting conversions later in the funnel.

I'm 100% with this thought. Most "targeted" ads are garbage. I think this is also a chicken and egg problem. I don't want to give up more personal information so the the data set is limited on what i "like".

Instagram has an interesting model. Maybe because of the visual medium that it works well for me. I'll purposely do searches for a thing I'm interested in and click on related posts. After a couple days I'll start getting ads for companies selling things I'm looking for. Recently, new bedding & sheets. I'd imagine it's the same model Facebook uses but i rarely login there.

I want content-linked advertising. If I’m reading a music blog I want to see ads for bands and synths, not razors and wrenches. If I’m reading stackoverflow I’d be content to gloss over ads for text editors and web hosting. Not the same f*ing razor ad.

Call me old school (I’m a 70s baby, 80s child). I enjoyed the content-linked advertising in magazines. I actually read them and used them to learn the market around my interest.

Robot selected ads which follow me around claiming to know what I like based on interactions I had do all the following:

- creep me out because I know I’m being followed

- annoy Me by removing any semblance of my own agency in the event: at least with content-linked ads I have chosen to consume that content and I feel like I want to in that zone

- annoy me by getting me wrong

- annoy me by assuming I’m just like everyone else that ticked the same boxes/set the same flags

- annoy me by presenting mostly mainstream stuff rather than small-scale/artisan/bespoke/local stuff that would be much more interesting. I appreciate that this one ought to work better if the advertising host/network knew where I was browsing from (which is a step towards tracking)

The tracking and bidding has completely destroyed what was actually good about advertising for the consumer.

> I have a serious question. Obviously if one were to choose between an ad-free experience and an ad-full experience, one would choose ad-free. But, if ads were needed for monetization, wouldn't you choose personalized vs non-personalized?

No. If I have to be surrounded by messages trying to manipulate me (which is what ads are, by the way), then I don't want them to be personalized for extra effectiveness (at manipulating me).

I don't really understand how some people seem to treat ads as some kind of neutral, helpful information source. It's almost like saying "I don't mind propaganda, since it's such an efficient way to find out what to think."

Exactly! I feel like most people already don't realize how much they are being manipulated. Each day is a struggle against malicous influences.

Even though I'm aware of it, I still fall for YouTube recommendations. My brain still lights up when I see an ad for a product I recognize. I'm still impressed by the sponsored Amazon search results.

Personalization only makes this worse. Now, that product that I made the difficult decision to pass on will taunt and distract me even in situations when I should be focusing on different things.

I think contextual targeting is more than sufficient, and in fact is the only kind of advertisement that I would gauge is effective for my personal use. If I'm searching for a waffle iron, a restaurant to visit or a new car I expect to see relevant ads because that's exactly what I'm searching for. There's no need to violate my privacy by extrapolating my interests based on my site history. In fact this is what leads me to see ads for something well after I've already made my purchase.

This is the key.

Major firms that switched from outsourced “personalized” ads (ad networks w/ retargeting) to selling ads against content, found their ad revenue go up, and their advertisers found conversions go up.

Turns out that 50 years of advertising industry had gotten pretty good at tailoring ad messaging and placement to content for moving product — much stronger than endlessly showing people ads for a product they just searched and already purchased.

If you are searching for a restaurant, what makes up the context? Is it just the query or are you okay with Google using what it knows about you to show you restaurants in your area?

I think the argument being made is that, even when they know everything about you, they still can't target you properly.

An example, I visit Amazon and my recommendations for the "buy it again" section are all very expensive networking equipment that I literally just ordered from Amazon to build out a new home network. There aren't any recommendations for consumables, like the box of exam gloves, hair gel, or the windshield wiper fluid tablets that I purchased in the last 6 months.

Personalized ads is a way to trick you into buying something which you had not necessarily planned to buy, i.e. psychological manipulation. The more they know about you, the better they can manipulate you into buying their product (whether you actually need it or not). I don't understand how anyone would agree on that.

I'm not fond of the current display of ads on websites and I block them mercilessly. If I'm looking for shoes, I'm shown more shoes in ads (this is my reality right now.) How is that trickery? Unless you're considering any advertisement manipulation. The part where the current model falls down is it doesn't stop (since there's no means to really show that one isn't interested) and a big ticket item like a toilet becomes your inaugural purchase in your new toilet buying hobby. The tech works by identifying users into audiences and marketers use this to allocate campaigns and budget to. Typically this doesn't include a lot of personal demographic information (FB & Google). Filling out a card with interests and opting in would be the best way to do this, something like rough location, age bracket (18-25, 26-34 etc.), income bracket, types of product interests maybe including a few categories of items (designer pants, tech backpack, industrial hardcore music, pizza delivery) recently purchased in a rotating queue.

> Unless you're considering any advertisement manipulation.

Any advertisement is manipulation. Think about it: the purpose of an ad is to influence your decisions primarily for the benefit the self-interest of the party that paid for the ad (otherwise they wouldn't have paid for it). Any benefit you derive from your decision is secondary, and doesn't typically factor into the decision to take out the ad. That's pretty clearly manipulation.

However, there are definitely differences in how manipulative an ad can be. An ad for a plumber in the yellow pages is not very manipulative, but a targeted political ad meant to make you angry that's been interjected into your Facebook feed is very manipulative.

I'm looking at this more from a product standpoint. When someone shows an ad for a vehicle that's priced lower than before and I'm in the market for a car, I'd like to know about it. What do you consider an advertisement? Is a business sign an advertisement? I consider a lunch special saving me the time of thumbing through a menu, I don't consider it manipulation which has negative connotations as well and seems pretty binary, any interaction you have with someone would seem to fall under manipulation. I appreciate the food for thought though.

> When someone shows an ad for a vehicle that's priced lower than before and I'm in the market for a car, I'd like to know about it.

But that's not what modern advertising is. Let's look at a real car ad. Here's the first ad for a discrete vehicle that wasn't a Lambo that I found on youtube searching for "car ad": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pk5QL_kKN_g.

It's message is roughly "if you drive a Land Rover you'll kinda be like this rugged, skillful, and cool adventurer guy who's driving a Land Rover." It doesn't mention price once and barely touches on any features. That's pretty par for the course for modern car ads: they aren't selling the product, but an emotional connection to a lifestyle.

Here's another one, it's the first one I found searching for "car ad" limited to this week: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYkLjcQP26M. It doesn't mention price or and features. It's just pure association of positive emotions with the product.

The Land Rover looks rugged, but "a sleek fusion of zen...and spacecraft" is more my style. The Nissan Ariya is also a force, which is a big plus. Nissan it is, then!

> What do you consider an advertisement? Is a business sign an advertisement?

Product catalogs, menus, and business signs aren't advertisements (though sometimes they contain some marketing or are manipulative, but that's less common with them than with ads). They can be simple informational documents, and are cheap compared to an ad campaign. Ads are typically paid placements in some kind of media, meant to influence a consumer to benefit the advertiser (usually by making a purchase, eventually).

> I consider a lunch special saving me the time of thumbing through a menu...

It would also save time if they just ordered for you. You'd save the time, they'd get to sell you their item with the highest profit margin. Win-win?

> But that's not what modern advertising is. Let's look at a real car ad.

Here's an example of a current automotive special, these are what dominate Google and FB ads (at least with the 150 automotive clients we work with) and there's typically some copy with it soliciting the price and some incentives. If someone's seen an ad there's dynamic ads which can be tailored to that audience. https://pictures.dealer.com/h/huntingtonbeachchryslerjeepcll...

> It would also save time if they just ordered for you. You'd save the time, they'd get to sell you their item with the highest profit margin. Win-win?

For example, the local gourmet Taco shop (cafe to the restaurant) normally has tacos for about $3.99 and on Tuesday they're $1.99, advertised on special with a drink, I know the tacos are good and that's a great deal. Their highest margin item is the auga fresca (which they sweeten with agave), they charge about $4.50 for that. Thanks for taking the time to let me see things from another perspective.

To me, it feels like saying computers will never beat humans at _______ game to claim that computers will never be able to manipulate human decision making.

Marketers have already done this without targeted advertising for decades and gotten extremely good at it. Now they have the equivalent of nuclear weapons (individual profiles and data) and you still think it's going to turn out ok for the people?

non-personalized experienced usually has no relevancy

In my experience, it's the opposite. Non-personalized ads show me a broad range of items that I might possibly be interested in. The same way that newspaper, television, and magazine ads do. While personalized ads show me the same ads for the same products that I've either already purchased, or no am no longer interested in for weeks or months after I've moved on to other things.

frankly it is inefficient use of money in this world

I find this argument... odd. Why, as a consumer, which is how you've framed the overall argument, would I care even a little about the efficiency use of money in this world? I think to refine your point: Why would I give fark one about whether an advertiser's money is spent efficiently, and why is that even my concern at all?

Why can't there be a way for me to tell the ad-world what I'm in the market for

There is. For example, if you're into gardening, you read gardening magazines and garden-related advertisers advertise in those magazines. Easy peasy.

This is old tech that the dead tree folks figured out centuries ago. What's changed is that digital advertising isn't about actual advertising. It's about getting rich quick and easy without doing any heavy lifting that the legacy ad companies did.

Apart from the privacy aspect already mentioned, I'd choose non-personalized to minimize their effectiveness.

Inherently ads are made to manipulate your behavior. I'd choose being manipulated the least possible.

Non-personalized all the way, and for many, many reasons. Two off the top of my head: 1) You already bought the product, and now you see ads for it for the next x weeks; 2) You may not want other people (like maybe a spouse) to know you were browsing for something (like a gift, or perhaps even something untoward).

On the second point, my spouse and I, each of us on our own devices, one of us can search for something, browse a website, and then the other one will start to see the ads for such in their Instagram feed (and for the record, it is usually me seeing the things my spouse is looking for). It is completely insidious and it needs to stop!

I would choose personalized ads if ad companies would personally allow me the choice to select some predetermined categories of ads.

Personalized ads created by siphoning data off everything I do not so much.

Put it this way, to use an example, what kind of relationship would you prefer, someone who knows all the things about you because they asked or someone that comes up to you and is like 'yeah, I know you like this that and the other because i've been following you everywhere you go, listening to your phone calls and installed a RAT on your computer?

This could be great to include on device, the ad profile that's editable there so you're in control and when an affiliated ad network is encountered on a site/platform and with user granted access. A manipulated/curated queue of interests may be shared so recent purchases can be listed to better show relevant ads. Like what if you shared you're looking for phones, or you just bought something so do or don't show more of that?

Serious answer: non-personalized until they figure out a real, safe way of me to post my interests that doesn't involve tracking, and I think that's highly improbable to happen, so non-personalized. I don't see a way of me personalizing ads without sacrificing things I'd prefer to have - my privacy around the Internet.

> it is inefficient use of money in this world

That's the advertiser's problem, not mine, and their choice to spend money just as it's mine to buy what they're selling. Advertising is already largely a guessing game of how to appeal to people and where to do it, and the only way to make it easier /today/ is by violating our privacy. They could spend the money however they want and choose to advertise.

To me it's more about trust regarding the data being gathered and what it is being used for. I care a lot more about how a company can misuse that personalized data to say sway an election.

If the data being gathered is purely to give me better recommendations for better targeted products then sure. If that level of personalization is restricted to just me as a user where I and only I can select the ad selection and that personalization remains on my machine.

The Facebook CA scandal demonstrates to me how frankly these companies are straight untrustworthy. I do not want political/security/insurance/job agencies getting anywhere near any of this data.

" if ads were needed for monetization,"

It is a solution to monetization. It is not the only solution. Lack of economic development has been because of the addictive nature of fascist behavior.

Non-personalized vs personalized is not the question for me; companies might still collect the same data from my "experience" habits.

If they are going to do that I want more profit from it than a custom news page.

Like I want money from the company leveraging my identity for the company's bottom line. I want some of that money if you are going to get a simulacra of me in a fucking database.

And until we get there we are stuck with a few rich lawless men keeping me for themselves.

Why do I care about the advertisers efficiency?

If you were talking about some sort of imagined strong AI personalization I might prefer that assuming ad free wasn’t an option, but this absurd, deep from within the uncanny valley personalization is worse than generic advertising.

The only place I am exposed to generic ads are when watching sporting events at a bar or at someone’s house. Everywhere else I get ads blocked or get “targeted” ads that mildly (at best) offend me that that is what the algorithm thinks I’d be interested in buying. I prefer the generic ads.

The answer for me is no. As I have become increasingly aggressive about blocking ads, trackers, social media, using web containers, and setting up pihole, the ads I do see are hilariously untargeted.

It's been fascinating to get a glimpse of the bigger universe of ad content for women, doctors, lawyers, the infirmed... instead of just the $150 hoodies and baldness pills I used to see constantly.

The problem for me is that I honestly can't think of more than a half dozen instances in the last 20+ years where ads made me aware of something new that I actually wanted, and zero of those were web-based. I can't think of a single time ads swayed my opinion to purchase something I didn't want or caused me to buy something earlier than I would have otherwise. At BEST there have been a few ads that have led me explore options within that market, but the company posting the ad had zero impact on my decision (it almost deters me, since that ad money could have been spent making the product better or cheaper, so the competition is probably a better buy).

Why would I want even 1% of the content I'm consuming to be polluted with irrelevant garbage? That's a huge amount of time and mental effort filtering out stuff like toothpaste ads because I googled directions to my dentist's office.

Nope. Ad blockers on EVERYTHING and custom CSS for sites that whine about ad blockers or display a sea of whitespace to inflate page view times.

Most ads are related to previous searches or visits on the web. I once searched for a new car mirror - now I get car parts ads everywhere. Wouldn‘t it be smarter to have context-dependent ads? If I‘m reading a blog on hexagonal architecture, wouldn‘t I be interested in books on that and related topics? Those kinds of ads would not necessitate tracking.

I’d prefer ads that are not relevant to me because the chance of them manipulating me psychologically into doing something I wouldn’t rationally do is lower.

Advertising is the new smoking. We do not fully understand the damage it does to society and our planet, but it is huge.

Non-personalized -- I want to give up as little personal data as possible. Even if they claim that it's anonymous, with enough browsing data and other signals (IP, browser fingerprinting, etc), it eventually becomes possible to identify you.

As others have pointed out, if you're being subjected to consumeristic propaganda, might as well make it non-targeted so there's less chance of you buying in. It's like being dipped in a tub full of insects. You could choose your favorite type of insect to be crawling all over you... but would that really make the situation that much better?

Personally, the only time I had mildly relevant ads was back when I had an account on Instagram. It served ads for local businesses that actually kinda matched my interests. The rest is just "oh, you searched for info on a long-dead general? Must be interested in WW2 replica medals, buy fifty!"

I would vote for customized ads, but customized based on the content I'm viewing, not customized based on what they think I want or like.

If I'm reading an article about astronomy, give me a link to telescopes to buy. Don't show me the washer/dryer that I've been looking for in another context in my life.

I would even take content-customized ads with slight tweaks based on my personal profile, but still relevant to the content at hand. For example, if I'm in eastern Nebraska, give me the telescope ad from the example above. But if I'm in Philadelphia, maybe show me a link to the observatory at the Franklin Institute.

Wouldn't it make the least sense for advertisers to spend money showing ads to people who are already in the market for their product. Those people will probably be looking it up directly, which is what their website and SEO are there for. If anything contextual ads are probably better for people in the market, so when you search for their product they always appear in the first page of results.

I would think ads are meant to drive you into the market for a product and service, and other marketing tools are made to get you to pick a specific offering.

> Wouldn't it make the least sense for advertisers to spend money showing ads to people who are already in the market for their product

For manufacturers? Sure. But what about storefronts? Having the best price won't matter if no one knows about it.

I was forgetting storefronts, they might benefit from knowing a user is in the market for a good or service.

My thinking (probably wrong) is, if I am in the market for (to use the example someone else mentioned) a pebble smartwatch then I am probably going to look for the best price myself. No reason for storefronts to spend money putting their ads with their price up on unrelated sites and apps, if I'm going to search for a good price for free. It would probably be better just to buy and ad on the search term "pebble smartwatch" and advertise the price.

Given a choice and assuming that ads stick around, I'd prefer to pull relevant personalized advertising when I want to see it.

In other words, allow advertisers to put all their personalized / targeted ads into a common ecosystem, but allow me to dip into that when I'm looking for some specific purchase.

That would mean that advertisers wouldn't have tracking on almost every website and inside almost every smartphone app, gathering information, taking up screen real estate, and consuming valuable bandwidth and user attention.

I'd rather not have personalized ads because I'd rather there not be an incentive to harvest my data to leverage for personalization.

I may be an outlier since I generally try and turn this stuff off everywhere. I also pay for a lot of ad-free content that I like (Stratechery, Stay Tuned with Preet, Persuasion, etc.).

I think the incentives from ads are a corrupting influence in building stuff that users want. I think the 'personalization is good for users' argument is often just a rationalization.

> Why can't there be a way for me to tell the ad-world what I'm in the market for

Because there's no money in that. What's the value in selling you something that you've already decided you want to buy? Advertisers are trying to get into your head and manipulate your perception to make you open your wallet where you otherwise wouldn't have. And when you do decide to purchase a product, that it's the advertiser's brand which you think of first.

I think the OP meant general "market", not the "concrete product X". Hence the decision has not yet been made.

No take the Overcast podcast player for instance. Marco, the author, didn’t want any third party mystery meat SDK in his application and he wanted to control advertising. He created his own ad platform. Ads are based on the category of the podcast you are listening to. Nothing creepy about it and I’ve found quite a few relevant podcasts.

The entire podcast until recently has been supported by no more targeting than guessing about the demographics.

Why on Earth should the Pareto optimality of the advertising business matter to anyone not in the advertising business? That is an extremely alien concern to me.

> But, if ads were needed for monetization, wouldn't you choose personalized vs non-personalized?

No. I simply do not ever look at ads. I've never, in 30 years of browsing the web, intentionally clicked on an ad.

Furthermore, I don't want a company keeping a dossier on me. The exchange of seeing ads for something I might want isn't worth the assault on my privacy, if it worked. And it doesn't work, so no thank you.

I’ll take non-personalized, thanks. I don’t want advertisers sitting there making profiles about me that include everything they can guess.

Exactly. If I leave on personalization , I always fell like they will collect extra data, just for the sake of it.

Non-personalized, because it's less likely to work on me. I don't want to be manipulated.

If I decide on my own to buy something, it won't be hard to find. I don't need to tell advertisers what I'm in the market for. I can just tell Google or Amazon what I want and I'll find it immediately, even though I'm blocking the ads.

> But, if ads were needed for monetization, wouldn't you choose personalized vs non-personalized?

Ads aren't needed for monetization of anything I care about.

Ads are only needed for businesses to scale quickly without having to actually provide a service worth paying for, and that's something we would be better off without.

If I control the variables for personalization, yes. If I don't control them, then no.

For example websites could have variables like mental state (like knowing of you're depressed) and show you ads that could "work better" on you. I think this is unacceptable.

No. Ads should be related to the content, not personalized to the person viewing the content.

While I agree in principle, I don't think this is manageable given how diverse the content is on the Internet. What sort of thing are you going to sell me when I'm reading a news article about wars in the Middle East?

A subscription to Foreign Affairs Magazine

A device on which to read articles about wars in the middle east

An donation to Red Cross/Doctors without Borders/relevant charity

To continue adding:

Books on the history of the Middle East...

A Netflix documentary about the Middle East, offering a free Netflix trial if you want to watch it...

Personalized means I’m buying more relevant ads and paying with my integrity. It’s better to see relevant than irrelevant ads but the amount of personal information I’m willing to give up is tiny and includes zero of my history online.

Definitely personalized. I stopped using FB a couple of years ago, but when I did, its ads were amazingly good (I almost miss them sometimes).

FB would show me an ad for the perfect obscure Kickstarter project that I was happy to back. Win-win.

I would say non-personalized. Like many siblings say, I often see ads for products after I've already bought them (or something similar). That's just useless.

I also remember a funny experience with Google Maps 2 years ago. I had my home and work addresses on profile. They're both in the same city and close enough that it's possible to walk between the two. I was looking at the closest way to go from the office to another place not far away, on foot. The top suggestions google thought I would have a use for while looking around my destinations were hotels. When I live maybe an hour away.

So I figure if Google's recommendations are so useless even though I gave them precise information, how exactly is some random adtech company going to figure something useful for me when all they supposedly have is infered information?

I would probably always pick non-personalized, as my assumption is that the less relevant they are, the easiest it would become for me to ignore them (assuming they are not more intrusive than the personalized ones).

This isn't a scalable solution.

If the value per ad decreases, services will need to display more til the user generates enough value to support the costs they incur.

If TV was able to cater ads to individual viewers then ad breaks would be a lot shorter.

> If TV was able to cater ads to individual viewers then ad breaks would be a lot shorter.

Or they could sell the same amount of ads as they do now for higher prices. Which one do you think the company would pick?

The length of ad breaks is determined by what 'price' the customer is willing to pay in terms of their time.

> This isn't a scalable solution.

I am not sure what your point is.

> If the value per ad decreases, services will need to display more til the user generates enough value to support the costs they incur.

What they need to do is to find a way to pay their bills. If ads allow them to do that then it's great (maybe non-personalized work well enough? Or contextual targeting, as others have suggested in this thread). If users cannot stand the increasing amount of ads then they will stop using their service. Or maybe these companies can adopt a mixed model where people can pay to not see the super intrusive ads, and everyone else gets the ads?

> If TV was able to cater ads to individual viewers then ad breaks would be a lot shorter.

Personalized ads is one of the 'features' of ATSC 3.0 whenever that finally rolls out: https://www.techhive.com/article/3268635/next-gen-tv-to-ushe...

This was the bold new idea of Google, back in the day. At that time, the internet was plastered with banner ads for cars and shoes and other lowest common denominator crap. Personalized ads were a good thing!

oh gosh what was that article claiming that pre-internet, ads functioned as a monetary sacrifice that companies could make as a demonstration of their solvency. if you saw an ad frequently, that meant it was a big, stable company, that was preferable to have an ongoing relationship with. Personalized ads don't have that property. I think the author compared personalized ads to direct-mailers - those junk grocery store flyers that show up in your snailmail. They don't signal anything other than "this product exists"

Why would I prefer to buy from the salesperson who stalks me first?

I would prefer "non-personalised" - simply because "personalised" means that people and companies I know nothing about know lots about me.

You never felt creeped out by personalized ads? I.e. you search for X on website number 1, then visit totally unrelated website number 2 and get an ad for X?

In theory personalized would be better. In practice I have seen several ads targeted just based on "living in large geographical area" and is "any gender aged 15 to 50".

The ones that were personalized where insulting. Like Facebook showing me ads for healing stones when I have my religion marked as atheists.

Facebook needs a lot less data and to force their adbuyers to actually target their ads. Probably though they don't because then the ad buyers will find out how little they actually gain from the ads.

The general consensus within the AdTech industry is that everything is going to be going back to the basic 'context-level' targeting. This will be very akin to the web 1.0 based targeting philosophies.

Still will be relevant to what you're doing and where you're spending your digital time but will lack the cross-site personalization and hyper-detailed targeting layers currently available to advertisers.

If we had a truly diverse internet that wasn't driven by social media, non-personalized would work fine. Want to reach an audience interested in computers? Buy ads on sites that talk about computers. Instead, we have centralized distribution of content that requires personal knowledge to cater ads to individuals in order for them to be remotely effective.

How would you imagine "tell them what you're in the market for" would work? I don't think it would work at scale; almost no user would take time to make a manually personalized ad profile instead of ... not doing that.

If I'm in the market for something, I'm likely to indicate that by doing a search for relevant terms. So the search engine could sell associated ad space to appropriate categories of advertizers.

If I'm reading reviews about a certain product category, it's a fair bet I might be in the market for such a product. So the site could show me relevant ads.

If I'm reading a site devoted to a particular topic or activity, the publisher might reasonably guess that I could be in the market for related products, and offer relevant ads.

None of this requires any privacy-invasive tracking.

If I'm reading a general news site, the site shouldn't have any more idea what I'm "in the market for" than the publisher of a print newspaper I might buy.

If I'm browsing used-car listings, the site shouldn't have any idea what genre of novels I like to read, what my grocery cart usually contains, where I go to work out, or how many pets I have. Why does anyone think it's OK for a company to surreptitiously gather that sort of personal information about everyone?

Why would it be any different from the way advertising worked before Facebook and Google?

Vogue subscribers are probably in the market for new designer clothes. People who watch Cesar Milan are probably in the market for pet supplies. Someone driving down a highway is probably in the market for gas and a snack. Someone who searches for “affordable laptop” is probably in the market to buy a new computer.

You don’t need to track someone’s every move to serve them relevant ads.

I was calling out "user manually provide targeting information to ads companies" as unrealistic, the alternative of "don't have persistent user profiles for ads" is obviously possible.

> But, if ads were needed for monetization

That's a big if.

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