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Comment by fxleach | Hacker News Reader

The issue is that you cannot have good online advertising without a little bit of the stalking. Do you listen to podcasts? Their ads are shite. I don't want to hear another ad about "Coroner" on Netflix. The only reason they are making money is because podcasts are "hot" right now and everyone is throwing money at them. That money pile will slowly deplete in due time and they'll find a way to introduce ads that are more targeted towards the individual that's listening and guess what, we'll be right back here with the same supposed problem.

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Well, Slate Star Codex and its sidebar of ads was a good counterexample. I would routinely click through to find out more, because its ads were a) aesthetically pleasing (they had a consistent style, for example) and b) highly relevant to my interests (because a very consistent type of person is interested in the ads on that particular site). To a lesser extent, I think the human-delivered ads given by the presenters of The Magnus Archives podcast were decent enough, though the algorithmic ones were predictably useless.

It's possible to target ads to a specific audience by exploiting the selection effect that led to your audience existing. This doesn't favour general-audience communities, sure, but I'd honestly be happy with the answer "general-audience things just aren't how the future looks".

What's strange is that podcasts and baked into video ads are far more effective on me. I'll block any alternative ad source I can, so if it's not baked into the content I don't see it.

But I have no clue what would distinguish (to me) a non-shit ad? Is it saving me money on something I was already going to buy?

> But I have no clue what would distinguish (to me) a non-shit ad? Is it saving me money on something I was already going to buy?

Yes. I've been looking for weight equipment over the past year because of the pandemic and gyms being closed and the majority of ads on Instagram are now exercise equipment. I ended up seeing an ad for a company in my country with fairly decent prices and bought a new squat stand. The price difference between the one I bought and the ones I was looking at from companies in the area was around $200. I give up some privacy, they give me targeted ads. Please give me more.

> The issue is that you cannot have good online advertising without a little bit of the stalking.

The usual answer to this is to use the context rather than personal information and browsing history. You bring less value to the company advertising their product, but I'd argue that most people are fine with this approach.

The problem is that current incentives lead to a race to the bottom: if some advertisers are less ethical, they can arguably bring more value to their clients, and the ethical advertiser cannot compete anymore.

I hate to be cynical, but I think the reason why online advertisers keep harping on about the "benefits" of personalized ads is that it justifies their existence. They can keep trying to sell whiz-bang audience profiling and attribution technology, even if it doesn't work all that well.

Contextual advertising, on the other hand, is simple. It shifts the focus away from technology and toward people: recognizing your audience and crafting a message to them, instead of trying to have a computer do it for you. It's old-fashioned marketing.

> The issue is that you cannot have good online advertising without a little bit of the stalking.

Perhaps today, but not if we design browser APIs that allow targeting without cross-site tracking: https://github.com/WICG/turtledove https://github.com/WICG/privacy-preserving-ads/blob/main/Par...

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