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Ideally ads should be like a recommendation system. If you want to buy a hard drive, the 'best' ads should be of hard drives that suits you, either because of their price, their features, or whatever you personally want. In order to build this profile, the recommendation system should know you, your data. Lots of recommendation systems exists, and those who's first objective are users seems the best ones (preferably if they are offline so your data is not shared).

But what about an ad? By definition it's something someone pays to be shown. When Google shows you targeted ads, they aren't showing you the best ads for you, they are showing you the best ads of those companies who paid for it (and probably the price influences its ranking). The user is not the first objective.

In an ideal world, personalized ads wouldn't be called ads, and would be like having an assistant. You want a hard drive? Here is the best hard drive for you, or a list if you prefer, and then you buy it and the company earns your money.

In the current world, that's far from the reality.

Interestingly a problem we as nerds often have is thinking that if we have the best product or best skills that it will win out. In reality the best often doesn't win because there are many other factors (and we can see a history of superior technologies being beat out). That assistant that acts as an actual recommendation system and removes the human element could bring us closer to that meritocracy based product world, which seems beneficial to everyone. But determining what is best is a very difficult problem to begin with.

Good long-term relationship building can be as compelling a feature as what the product actually does. It's short-sighted to discount the value of enjoying having bought what you buy.

> But what about an ad? By definition it's something someone pays to be shown. When Google shows you targeted ads, they aren't showing you the best ads for you, they are showing you the best ads of those companies who paid for it (and probably the price influences its ranking). The user is not the first objective.

I mean, that is an assumption, unless you work at Google and is currently sharing the algorithm with us. Most likely, they show you the best ad they can based on targeting criterias and the information they know about you. It could very well be possible that Google not always picks the highest bidder. The winning score is most likely calculated based on a combination of signals, eg bidding price, user's preferences, user's buying history, etc.

Of course is an assumption (should have used the word 'probably', my mistake). My point was that once the bidding price enters the equation it no longer can be considered a recommendation system, even if it's only one factor of multiple (as I suppose).

"In an ideal world, personalized ads wouldn't be called ads, and would be like having an assistant."

Right, I'm truly stretched to the limit to think of any ad that I've seen on the web that's actually been truly informative to me. For that I have to go back to ads in specialized technical magazines that used to list detailed specifications for the products they were selling, today web advertisers simply don't do that - all we get is hyped-up uninformative and often misleading crap that interferes with our access to the site's web pages.

Similarly, many, many websites that are selling stuff are cluttered, disorganized and otherwise hard to navigate (as well as being very, very slow). Of course, this is a deliberate marketing ploy but the effect on me is that I'm straight out of there as fast as possible.

Internet advertising has always been an unmitigated mess and unlike those old magazine ads, almost without exception, it's gotten in the way of the main presentation to the utter annoyance of website visitors. It's little wonder so many use ad blockers.

For years, my solution has been to block ads as well as all the accompanying JavaScript of which much is devoted to spying on the user.

Eliminating both ads and JS not only speeds up websites enormously but also it eliminates all those hesitant pauses and other jerky/delay-like responses that make browsing such a damn pain.

I'm now so used to 'clean' browsing that I cannot ever imagine myself returning to the standard defaults - ads and JS. For those who ask 'how do you do this or that without JS?' I'd just say this, there are millions of sites on the web, if one blocks me then I instantly move on (one good point about the web is that most of the information on it is paralleled across multiple sites and there are many sites that are more user friendly than others). That said, there are rare situations where I still have to use JS. When necessary I just toggle it on and off, the default being off.

As far as I'm concerned the web has been ruined by invasive advertising and we need a new paradigm to fix it. There are many options for that but it's too big a subject to discuss here.

Hard drive is a great example. And it shows that advertising is completely backwards.

It starts with a seller, who wants to sell this hard drive, no matter what, and then pays to find a buyer. Targeted advertising is a false promise that if the date of birth, sexual orientation, political preference, and the favourite color of everyone are known, the advertiser can somehow find buyers for a smaller fee. Indeed, most of the hard drive buyers are older than 20 and like women. There's a correlation to exploit.

This business model is completely backwards in the digital age. What is possible now, instead of profiling people, Google/Facebook/Amazon could have been profiling products, sellers, their supply chains, organize information, build knowledge graph, and rather than profit from a seller pushing their message, they could have took a commission for finding just the right hard drive for everyone, no matter what color they like.

The point is profiling sellers and their products is a harder problem than scamming and nudging unsuspecting users. We all know how great Amazon search is. Targeted advertising on the other hand is just the same as print era advertising but cheaper.

If someone knows that they want a hard drive with at least 100GB of storage, is it really necessary to construct advertising system infrastructure that can (attempt to) learn the users' requirements and needs (the same way an assistant might do)?

Isn't it simpler, cheaper and more respectful of people's own decision-making faculties to provide them with a way to retrieve a list of hard drives that match their requirements, and make their own choice?

My guess is that in 80%+ of situations, simple measurements and properties of products (with price, reliability, and perhaps other ranking factors to tie-break) are all that consumers want.

> For example, if I want to buy a hard drive, the ads don't tell me what kinds of hard drives there are and what the pros and cons of each of them are.

Even if ads did this, would anyone believe it? The obvious conflict of interest removes all legitimacy from any claim in any advertisement.

Now people just search for reddit posts instead. We want to see what real people think about the product, not some paid-for opinion. We want to see the products compared with their competitors. Advertisers figured this out and have started astroturfing on reddit as well...

"Now people just search for reddit posts instead. We want to see what real people think about the product, not some paid-for opinion."

You're dead right, there is no other way to get real/accurate facts about products other than to check the experience of others.

One gets good at it too, one quickly learns how to distinguish those who've vested interests and hype up their products over those of rivals, similarly one learns to ignore the clueless who down rate a good product simply because they're incapable of reading the manual.

I've found that doing such research across multiple sites to be absolutely invaluable.

The only ad that ever helped me, and that was indeed because of tracking, was for a desktop computer I was buying for a non tech friend: I searched for it and knew where to buy it when an ad popped up from a competing company offering the same thing for a few 100E less. As I would have not found this company by myself (they have adwords but their seo is nonexistent) it helped my friend. This is the first time in 25+ years of having internet I clicked on an ad and bought something.

To not have this privacy invasion, I would have gladly paid a few 100 more though.

And a confusing thing (to me); why did that ad only show up in another site (some news site with an unrelated article) instead of in Google when I searched for those specs? It did not have to be personalized at all: it just could have shown when I literally was searching for it with the search results adwords?

I seldom buy stuff I see in ads (or anything really) but I recall one case where targeted ads actually helped me.

I was looking to buy an item but the store had so many options that I got completely overwhelmed with choice paralysis. Afterwards I started getting ads from said store in chunks of three items. It made it possible to evaluate things in peace over time since I was only exposed with a few options at a time in my regular feeds. I finally ended up buying one of those options.

Maybe it's more of a problem of choice paralysis but the fact that the options naturally and slowly showed up when I wasn't actively looking made it much easier.

Was looking for a light weight laptop with very a very long battery life and an add for one showed up on my Facebook feed. I wouldn't buy it just from that ad, but I definitely looked that model up and considered it - ultimately I went for the new Mac, but if not that would have been a good candidate too.

To the contrary I got an add for the local bus service, which I checked out and found to be targeted to everybody living in Denmark and being 18+. It was extremely not relevant to me because I am a happy driver (happy in particular that I don't have to use the bus service).

You don't have to buy the hard drive that is being advertised to you. At the end of the day, it's your decision. If ads were not targeted, you'd see a milk shake ad instead. How's that better?

Edit: my milk shaker example is not even that great. If targeting was killed, you'd most likely see ads from massive corporations only - those who have a lot of cash to spend on ads. Little players (small business owners, startup owners) would have zero chance to compete against those corporations. They'd lose every single ad auction.

“How's that better?”

Because it doesn’t require invasive surveillance.

>If targeting was killed, you'd most likely see ads from massive corporations only - those who have a lot of cash to spend on ads.

Why? If I run a niche site with ads I'd want to pick ads that fit my site and audience, similar to picking affiliate programs. Picking relevant ads should be my job a as a site owner.

Because most businesses run their ads through exchanges, where supply and demand meets each other. An exchange runs an auction. The winning bidder is the one whose ad your users will see. If small businesses won't be able to target their niche users, corporations will increase their bid price and swallow smaller auction participants.

I think you're right that it would be bad for small businesses. But for users(I meant users as viewers of the ads), I still don't think it adds much value. If getting information wasn't easy like the old days, I can understand how targeted ads are beneficial. But I can look for hard drive info and reviews easily these days. And the information I find will likely be a lot better than ads. Personalized ads and non-personalized ads don't look a lot different in terms of benefits they bring to the viewer.

> Little players... would have zero chance

This is not entirely correct. It comes back to CTR (click thru ratio) and with the loss of 'targeting' then the CTR will plummet unless the platform reverts back to 'market targeting'. That is, websites will need to choose the class of ads on their websites, and the more irrelevant they choose, the less they'll get paid (because CTR will drop). So, from a small advertiser's perspective, they'll need to make sure their ads only appear on relevant websites (eg. tech on tech sites, milk shakes on food sites).

A one-man-show (eg a plumber's business) already knows that social ads work better for them anyhow. Maybe billboards and local classified ads will make a resurgence as a result.

Edit: I should add that Goog is already ahead of the targeting ads for the small local business, with their "my business" product, which allows you to search locally for businesses.

> I have the impression that google claims that personalized advertising somehow benefits users

there is literally no evidence for this

I think non-personalized ads are better for users.

The less that advertisers have the ability to manipulate me, the better.