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Comment by actuator | Hacker News Reader

If ads are just restricted to intent based on page/video/query, small advertisers lose out on effectiveness but is this is a big issue for big advertisers?

I have read FB engineers comment on HN that FB has a long tail of advertisers. Is that why they are being more vocal out of all companies?

In any case, I personally don't have a problem with ads as a revenue medium for companies, just the expansive data mining, especially when it is not communicated to the user clearly. Ads do provide a very good avenue for revenue generation for products where most users won't pay for the service because of competing products or just the frequency in which they use them. On the advertiser side, they do help push information about new products which we might not have known earlier.

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It seems reasonable to me that data collection enables more cost-effective targeting for small businesses. At the same time, it's done involuntarily and has privacy and self-censorship implications. It's likely that reducing user-identified data collection will both be a win for privacy, but also a detriment to the long tail. Of course, when Facebook makes this argument, it seems false, given their long neglect and, indeed, antipathy toward privacy. It also seems false because it uses small businesses to cover for large ones (who probably need less targeting anyway, given their mass-market products.) Tide won't suffer but artisan knitting needles might.

> If ads are just restricted to intent based on page/video/query, small advertisers lose out on effectiveness

Any research proving this?

Just quoting FB's wording and my hunch. As the other commenter gave an example, if you have a niche product which only a fraction of people would be ever interested in, it would help if you can know who those are, and restrict targeting to them.

I can search for knitting needles or be viewing a knitting post on Instagram. If an artisan needle seller wants to target his product it doesn't help targeting people who are not interested into artisan stuff. So to maximize the ad budget impact the ads are better left targeted specifically to people who have a higher likelihood of buying artisan stuff. This problem doesn't affect some mass market knitting needle seller.

I'd imagine that the advertiser could only show needle ads next to content about sewing / knitting and be very effective at reaching the desired audience without resorting to collecting PII about that audience.

Any reason this wouldn't work?

As I wrote in my example, this intent based method works for a big advertiser which is making a mass market product; but say someone producing a niche artisan knitting needle which only say 1 in 100 people who are interested in knitting needles will be interested in, would benefit from targeted advertisement. Otherwise, they would end up spending a lot of money on ad space not worth bidding for.

A nitpick, the advertiser is not collecting and getting PII. FB the ad platform, owns and controls that data.

Understood. My suggestion was that Facebook "target" based on the content of the post/article/website. Thus a needle ad is shown next to a kitting post. This can certainly be an artisan needle producer buying 1000 impressions...

Fully understand that Facebook is keep the PII close - that's their differentiation.

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