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Comment by rhacker | Hacker News Reader

i don't get the point of showing me something I searched for on Amazon or Vitacost about an hour later. It's almost like they're just doing that to check a feature box in some advertiser list of features they're selling to someone but it's not actually even useful. If I'm about to buy an intex raft I'm going to do it when I was looking at them, not 3 weeks later.

Further, there's really no intelligence in ads yet. If I'm looking at intex rafts it probably makes sense to sell me fishing gear, yet none of that happens. Also I hate fishing. I just like floating on a raft.

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> i don't get the point of showing me something I searched for on Amazon or Vitacost about an hour later.

(Disclaimer: this is a description of an advertising technique as currently used, not advocacy for that technique. All ads should go away whether personalized or not.)

This kind of ad is called "retargeting", and it turns out to be somewhat effective. If you're looking at a product, and you're debating whether to buy it, seeing it again makes it more likely you'll come back and make the purchase. (And, for that matter, makes it more likely you'll make the purchase there, rather than somewhere else.)

Key word being, "more likely". An unfortunate effect of scale and cheapness of digital ads is that even if the effect of retargeting on any given visitor is very tiny, it still makes economical sense to deploy it, as it'll add up. The extra marginal annoyance and frustration inflicted on everyone who views those ads is, of course, just an externality.

That's absolutely true.

In particular, there's an interesting distorting effect caused by large-scale ad vendors and sites that want ad revenue. They always show an ad, and the only question is which ad. While I think ads should just not exist (and people should universally block them), it would be an interestingly different world if the alternatives were "useful ad" versus "no ad".

Remember the people selling rafts are the customer, not you.

You are a person plausibly "interested in rafts" and you made money for someone else, probably many times over 3 weeks.

> i don't get the point of showing me something I searched for on Amazon or Vitacost about an hour later.

Anecdotally, I've often bought things from retargeted ads like these. It reminds me about things I was considering earlier.

Because, on average, doing that leads to more sales for Amazon than not doing it. They don't care how any given user (you) responds to it, they care about what increases sales across an extremely large user base. Trust me, they have tested this and it's worth doing for them even if you thin it's pointless.

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