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Comment by squeegmeister | Hacker News Reader

I think the point is that advertisers care about groups, not individuals

I'd suggest it's not groups instead of individuals, but the other direction; particular attributes (fragments of individuals) instead of individuals. An advertiser, at the point where they want to advertise their baby wipes, don't care whether or not you're into fishing. They only care about whether or not their ad for baby wipes is going to someone who has the attribute "in the market for baby wipes". To the extent they care about groups, it's only because they aren't interested in an advertising campaign that targets one person, but they don't need anything more than "a bunch of people who are in the market for baby wipes".

An advertiser may care about more than one of these things at a time ("interested in baby wipes" + "what culture do they identify with" so I can target things culturally, for instance), but even a very highly-targeted ad will be ignoring all sorts of attributes.

You said "not groups" but then you wrote a bunch of words that describe "groups" so the distinction you're trying to draw doesn't make any sense.

I understand that the parent's point is "people who are into fishing and baby wipes" is not a coherent or meaningful group (in the sense of 'stratum' or 'cohort') of the population. Neither fishing nor baby wipe marketeers would typically care about this so-called group.

If you are really applying attribute tags to individuals, you are not "grouping" them in the usually-understood meaning of stratifying.

In truth, you are still building an individual profile for each person, but describing it in a disingenuous way.

My point is that advertisers aren't interested in groups of people as they are whole people, but just fragments of individuals that happen to match very specific characteristics they are advertising at.

Under most circumstances this would be a distinction without a difference, but in this specific case it turns out to be important. If advertisers are interested in "groups" than they may still think of themselves as needing identity, and demographic breakdowns, and wanting addresses for those groups, etc... but if you conceive of all they care about as being "in the market for baby wipes" there is no reason to give advertisers anything more than "here is an advertising opportunity for baby wipes", and no other information. Not an aggregation of "individuals", with all the extraneous baggage that comes with, but aggregations of fine slices of attributes that they have no need to correlate to anything else. (Only residual desire because they're probably still used to thinking about "individuals".)

I'm having trouble understanding your point.

>there is no reason to give advertisers anything more than "here is an advertising opportunity for baby wipes", and no other information.

That's exactly what advertisers are offered. Do you believe otherwise?

Advertisers want to divide the population into smaller and smaller and more and more specific groups. Given the technology they absolutely would target individuals.

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