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Comment by dhosek | Hacker News Reader

Before I completely dropped social media, I had a f—k the algorithm attitude towards the ads. I made a point of clicking through everything that was completely uninteresting to me. That road led to a non-stop flood of class-action lawyer ads.

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I’ve heard that mesothelioma class action lawyer advertisements are among the most expensive on social media.

Cynical hypothesis: once the platforms realized you’ll click on anything, they decided to show you their highest-compensated ads.

Personal injury (caused by negligent 3rd party) but not necessarily class action (and especially not workers comp cases) are consistently the highest cost clicks I bid on regularly.

Those ads mock me. Have a severe negligence case that nearly killed entire family. By time we recovered enough to deal with legal side the statue of limitations had passed.

That's not cynical at all; that's exactly what i-the-human-looking-at-trends would do, and it's almost certainly what an automated system would go for as well.

You're not wrong but it depends on the platform and campaign. If the ads are bought click-optimized then yes... if conversion optimized then the algorithms will learn to avoid zealous clickers.

It’s funny, once I started watching luxury houses (I became rich last year, bought a house and wanted inspiration to decorate), I got flooded with ads about “How to become rich”. (Obviously none of those include programming…).

Not cynical at all, this is exactly how Real Time Bidding (RTB) works.

I like to read this with the belief that his attitude towards the ads had somehow led to the class-action lawyer ads being 100% relevant.

It’s a race condition to the bottom.

It's interesting how this exposes the dynamics of ad-space.

Advertisements as points in a metric space A. Clicking ads as a contractive mapping C:A->A. Class-action lawsuit ads as a fixed point in A when iterating C.

This must imply something interesting about human psychology or ad economics, or both. Why does the fixed point end up as class action suits and not something else? It's not what I would have expected.

I don’t think you can infer human nature here as much as psychology of advertisers. I think it was GrubHub that started advertising on porn sites at one point and published some interesting findings from that. The reason the started to advertise there was because it was cheap and because other food related businesses were not advertising there. What they noticed is that most ads on porn sites are for porn, so ads for food stood out. And it didn’t hurt that often times people get hungry after they are done with porn. So in my mind the class action lawyers are just a niche that happens to advertise there and is the lowest common denominator that matches a wide range of people when nothing more targeted does. It could be mattresses or shoes or something else, but right now it’s lawyers.

Thinking about it, one of the marketing received wisdom things is that you often want to associate your product with sex. What is probably the easiest way in the world to associate your product with sex?

Ye it is quite strange that there is such a price difference between sites for the same ad CPM when the advertiser can select audiance somewhat through tracking anyway.

Why is clicking ads a function from the space of ads to the space of ads?

Why is it a metric space? Why is it a contraction?

I should have been more specific - what I meant is that the ads that instagram chooses to show you can be thought of as points in ad-space. So when you click on ads and instagram chooses to show you different ads as a result, you have traveled around in this space. I say the space is metric because it is meaningful to say that two ads are more or less similar. I assume the "click all ads" mapping is contractive because if you take two different people with different histories of clicking ads and therefore different flavors of ads shown to them, and they both just start clicking on all ads regardless of content, the ads they both see after doing this should be more similar, or closer in ad-space. So iterating this should just get to a point where they see the same ads (or at least ads that are progressively similar)

I've done this, and it led to a lot of ads for shoes.

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