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Comment by cratermoon | Hacker News Reader

Everyone in adtech, except perhaps Google, is worried. One non-Google player I know is seriously concerned about what the cookie-less web means or online ads. Essentially the entire online advertising industry, both publishers and advertisers, is built on 3rd-party cookies.

The goal: to show you only ads for things you care about and are likely to buy and be influenced by advertising for, is good. But the reality is a mess.

Some of the downsides of Google's proposal are obvious, given its position, but there's at least one downside that users might notice: lots more ads targeted only by the demographic of the publication, making the web look more like print media or TV and presenting you and me with a lot more space on our screens wasted showing ads for things you don't care about.

As for the "fingerprinting" proposals? Bad. Very Bad. Think digital "facial" recognition bad.

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As opposed to the current advertisements, which are for... A mobile game? Another mobile game. A behavioral science app. A hyperspecific ad for a watch based on a video game I played, which would be cool but is useless because I have already bought that exact watch. An ad for an armored personnel carrier.

Please. Individual targeted ads are worse than content-based ads.

Wait a second. An armored personnel carrier? What's the conversion funnel here? Do they send it to you? Do you get a discount if you equip your own personal motorized infantry battalion? Is there an update channel for anti-air?

I get all sorts of ads from defense contractors when I am in Ottawa, the capital of Canada.

I think they are just intending to target lobbyists/politicians.

I fell left out because I want an ad for an armored personnel carrier - I won't need it, but at least that ad would be for something cool.

Honestly it feels like there haven't been any decent innovations in a long time. Aside from Apple producing an ARM laptop that doesn't suck I can't really think about what the last product I was excited for was.

I never said that the targeting was any good. I said it was a mess, just that it was supposed to be good. Believe me, advertisers are very aware of the problem of showing you ads for things you just bought and would love to stop doing it.

I like to click on the weirdest ads I see, either because I'm curious or because I'm a sucker.

It does ... weird things to the ad targeting; I'm currently seeing ads for crystal figures that cost six figures. They're pretty, but not that pretty.

It's fascinating to me that people buy ads pointing to things that essentially no one can afford. I guess the idea is that they'll attract attention and people will click around the site to find cheaper things?

High value item economics is different though. You need many fewer people to buy one for the same profit margin, so casting a very wide net just to catch those 5 people a year that would actually want it might be worth it.

Advertising was around for thousands of years before tracking. The fear is that they won't make as much money and will have to go back to how they did it before all the privacy invasion. Very sad indeed.

It's easy really, you just put ads on sites visited by your target market. That's how advertising was always done before Gattica style snooping was involved.

Individually targeted advertising needs to be illegal. It's bad for society.

It's not unreasonable to think that a lot of current digital ad spend is 1) an arms race for slices of a pre-existing attention pie that also resembles a protection racket, 2) a huge waste of money.

There have been a couple of natural experiments showing #2 where entire digital ad spends were slashed at once with little to no impact.

As for #1, look at where a massive chunk of Google's revenue comes from: companies trying to squat their own name and similar keywords to prevent some competitor's product from showing up next to their own.

Targeted advertising through tracking is only good for “aggregators” that want infinite eye balls.

Any platforms that create content already have well targeted ads without tracking. e.g. HBO

Even on content aggregators, that target niche audiences like HN have well targeted ads without tracking. Jobs and of course Ycombinator listed everywhere.

Killing tracking kills the mega content aggregator industry (front page of Reddit, maybe Facebook feed, etc) but this is likely a good thing.

The goal: to show you only ads for things you care about and are likely to buy and be influenced by advertising for, is good.

No, that's bad. The last thing I want is to be influenced by adverts.

I'd rather be influenced by relevant ads that could possibly be useful than ones that will just annoy me.

And I'd rather not make ads less effective because that would mean either more ads or fewer publishers.

> I'd rather be influenced by relevant ads that could possibly be useful than ones that will just annoy me.

It's easier to ignore ads that are totally irrelevant.

The ads that are targeted are the most distracting.

I'd rather see ads about some detergent than about a new SSD drive that will catch my attention and makes me forget what I was looking for in the first place. When I need a new SSD, I will just visit a shop. I don't need ads for that.

But i'm happen to need a better mousetrap and so if you can in some way let me know you are selling one I'll be glad to take a chance in yours.

Sure I can ignore ads for feminine supplies (as a male they are obviously useless to me), but I'd prefer if I didn't have to.

This is a silly argument. Don't you think you'll have a much better chance of finding a better mouse trap by actively searching Google for it than by waiting for some targeted ads to come by?

Let's say that your search for mouse traps comes back with the classic type that kills.

Wouldn't it be better that you see an ad for a no kill mouse trap that you didn't even know was a thing? Ads can sometimes inform people about products that they didn't even think existed.

But a Google search is specifically designed to solve this problem. Targeted ads, however, also could mislead, distract, cause overconsumption, and invade your privacy.

And if there was a better mouse trap, then any salesman would quickly learn about it (e.g. at business conferences etc), so you could just go to a shop and ask.

Finally, if you really insist that targeted ads are superior to anything else, then you could just opt-in to a service that provides ads. And you could tell the service all your private details so it knows how to better serve you (without the service having to guess at it).

Just don't assume that someone else needs targeted ads to have a fulfilling life.

Not if you don't know that the better mouse trap was even possible. You are not going to search for "breathable, waterproof shoes" if you don't know GoreTex is a thing.

Granted somewhere in the last 20 years we have mostly stopped innovating and started optimizing and so now you get ads for branded Skinner boxes (sorry, free to play mobile games) rather than, say, cancer cures but if there were innovating products worth buying, you wouldn't search for them because you wouldn't even be able to imagine them.

> Not if you don't know that the better mouse trap was even possible. You are not going to search for "breathable, waterproof shoes" if you don't know GoreTex is a thing.

Sure I am, if I care about shoes being breathable and waterproof. Why would I not do that, and instead hope a magic box will read my mind and guess what I need?

Most people who get wet shoes just accept it as part of life. They don't get on Google and ask how to prevent wet shoes because they don't want to go around wearing kayaking shoes all the time.

The fact that there exists normal-looking waterproof shoes isn't something that they know about or would search about

Growing up in the pacific northwest, I don't think this is a most people thing. :) everyone I know walking around there cares about wet feet, since it's likely to happen 270 days out of the year.

Evolution will take care of people who don't know how to address their own needs.

If we don't let that happen, this might be the result:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiocracy

I almost always hold off on purchases for a few days to compare what I eventually put in my cart (if anything) to ad-served competitors. There's usually very little overlap with them and the products I was already looking through, so it's a nice additional avenue of shopping around. Sometimes the ads include discounts/promotions as well, which is an added bonus.

I did search last year, before it was invented. Why am I supposed to search again in hopes one exists now?

If you need it you'll search for it. Then an ad is relevant. Otherwise it's probably trying to manipulate you to buy something you don't need or in very rare cases inform you of something you needed but didn't know existed. I have a feeling the latter is fiction.

Why pick either of those alternatives? Block all ads, whether "relevant" or not, so they don't compete for your valuable attention.

> And I'd rather not make ads less effective because that would mean either more ads or fewer publishers.

I'd rather make ads so ineffective that they go away entirely. Some publishers will find a way to adapt.

The Ad matching service gets paid when you buy something, regardless of whether it is relevant, useful or needed by you. What is effective for you, and effective for the ad network are two separate things. Also, ads by their very nature are designed to manipulate you into buying a product. The more personal information they have, the easier it is to manipulate you. Maybe you're still OK with that, but many people think that this is the wrong direction for the web.

Oh no, nobody depends on linking up an ad impression with an actual purchase. Not only is that incredibly hard to do, with few exceptions, the conversion rate is abysmal.

Money changes hands at the time the advertiser agrees to buy the space on the publisher, based on the CPM of the offer. A publisher that can more reliably link ad impression with sales can charge a higher CPM, but nobody in their right mind would buy and sell ads based only on conversion.

Exactly! Even for free market believers, ads are just a way of manipulating consumers so that they are less rational, and so they are a distortion of the market (in favor of the biggest players, of course, as they can spend the most on advertising).

News flash: you're influenced by all kinds of things you don't notice, and not all of those things are what you might consider "advertising".

Time for everyone in adtech to start advertising Firefox then. Google has made it clear they want to be the only platform where users can watch ads. OSes, Browser, websites.

> ...there's at least one downside that users might notice: lots more ads targeted only by the demographic of the publication, making the web look more like print media or TV...

...this is bad? Sounds great to me.

> ...showing ads for things you don't care about.

This is what targeted advertising already accomplishes: showing me ads for things (or equivalents of things) I already own. Either that or things so wildly off base I have to wonder if the targeting works at all.

Yes, advertisers would love to stop showing you ads for things you just bought. If you see a wildly off base ad, it's likely not targeted, it's just part of an ad buy.

Targeting only by the demographic of the publication is not so great because publishers usually only have a vague idea who their actual demographic is. Take for example the TV show Golden Girls. It was supposedly all about the 50+ demographic, but it was a huge with with queer people of all ages right from the start.

> If you see a wildly off base ad, it's likely not targeted, it's just part of an ad buy.

I usually see such ads them immediately after purchasing the item in question. It's almost as if the targeting models are, in an abstract sense, extremely over-fitted.

> Targeting only by the demographic of the publication is not so great because publishers usually only have a vague idea who their actual demographic is.

As far as I'm concerned, coarse granularity targeting is a feature, not a bug. I often discover legitimately interesting things I didn't know existed but are adjacent to my interests in venue-scoped advertisements.

Even if I didn't find targeted advertising morally objectionable (I do) I would still consider it functionally inferior to more coarse-grained venue/demographic/etc-based placement.

Targeted advertising doesn't help me discover new things, it tries to preempt purchases I'm already likely to make, and put them in front of me. I don't think that's actually very useful.

If you see an ad for an item you just purchased, that's definitely targeted. By "wildly off base" I mean for something unrelated to any of your interests or site where it runs.

>presenting you and me with a lot more space on our screens wasted showing ads for things you don't care about.

As opposed to the ads for toilet seats from that one time I bought a toilet seat online 6 months ago.

If anything forcing adds to be dumb will mean that we get high quality publications in niches again. If you sell model ships advertising on model-ships-magazine.com actually incentivizes a quality site that is interested in furthering the hobby and keeps your dumb smart ads from clogging up the rest of my life.

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