Hacker News Reader

Comment by cestith | Hacker News Reader

Rather than giving the advertiser a list of my interests, it'd be nice if the advertiser gave me a list of keywords for the ads it might show next and my browser requests the ad for me. A default browser could then be configured to learn with a thumbs up / thumbs down / never show me again type of Bayesian training. Or a non-mainstream browser could request random ads.

View on HN

But most people would never up/down the ad, which means the ad would be targeted more randomly, which means it wouldn't be as effective, which means the website/content owner wouldn't get as much money for displaying it.

I don't think that solution works in the current environment, unfortunately.

If I clicked the ad, thumbs up, if not thumbs down. With appropriate weights this can work.

But.. Ad networks will never implement this, cause priority there :

1) ad network 2) advertiser 3) publisher 4) user

This bumps user from 4th place to 1st place

They would never implement it because there is no valid signal here. The vast majority of users would just thumbs down every ad they see because they believe that will result in less ads.

Go check out the messaging around Ad Choices and how poorly it ended up working.

Ad Choices also intentionally obscured the access into by making it small and appear to be ad branding rather than a button.

> The vast majority of users would just thumbs down every ad they see because they believe that will result in less ads.

This... just doesn't apply to the scheme described:

>> If I clicked the ad, thumbs up, if not thumbs down. With appropriate weights this can work.

Ad networks are in business based on ad performance, which is driven by the user. Even though there's quite a lot of terrible UX with online ads (for lots of reasons), the user does matter more than you think.

As of today, some ads pay per click (CPC), but most ad spots pay per 1000 views (CPM). Ads can influence behavior after they are viewed, regardless of whether the user decides to interact with the ad. I'm sure Google has put tons of effort into trying to tie ad views to purchases, both online and offline (I bet GMail and Google Pay are leveraged for this).

I am not claiming this is good or bad, but clicks are not a good enough signal of efficacy for the vast majority of ads shown on the internet.

A good ad network's JS should be able to tell how long the ad was in the viewing portal, or for a video interstitial how long it played before the viewer skipped the end. That sort of signal could be useful, especially the way many sites use horizontal ad banners like horizontal rules in the pages.

If the advertiser is able to try a large amount of keywords they might still be able to infer the client's interest list based on what it requests.

That's for sure, and more fringe interests would still be more informative than more mainstream interests, too. It wouldn't be as direct and therefore provides a bit of a barrier.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com