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Comment by beauHD | Hacker News Reader

I just wish AdTech companies had a system where you could fill out an extensive form, where you openly state what your preferences are, because the targeting seems very skewed and wrong, at least from what I've experienced.

Facebook thinks I like rock music, but I really like house music. Facebook thinks I eat meat, but I am a vegan. Facebook thinks I like cars, but I don't even drive. There's no way of telling Facebook what my tastes and lifestyle preferences even are.

Facebook just infers based on keywords and what things I interact with on their platform, which is a terrible way to gauge preferences, since I could talk about cars in a comment, per se, but that doesn't mean I drive.

It's the same with all other ADs I get. They're all almost fraudulently inaccurate, and as an engineer I think we should be building things that work properly, are lucrative on their own merit, and not based on borderline fraud.

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There's a growing base of evidence in both the US and the Netherlands (from news media websites, I believe), that targeted advertising is effectively a bubble, and didn't yield higher metrics or revenues. In fact I believe in a couple of examples, they saw higher growth and revenues from ads by going totally non-targeted.

There's an entire sector now focused on trying to hyper-target ads, on the presumed basis they're more effective. If the house of cards falls down, and people realise untargeted ads perform better without all that extra cost, things could get interesting.

Unfortunately it isn't as simple as that, as "independent" audience measurement seems to still be a requirement that leads to adtech type solutions emerging.

To go back to your observation about the quality of targeting though, this shows in a way that it simply doesn't work... The trouble is advertisers continue to throw money at the services falsely claiming to have these accurate data-driven targeting models, without seemingly ever thinking to cross-validate them to be sure they aren't absolute nonsense of false claims of targeting demographics - your ones having entirely the opposite of Boolean demographics show how wild it can be.

I fetched my data from Spotify and the limited data they had (in theory objective data) was chronically wrong - they had tried to put me into a group based on phone network used, but it didn't even get that right, despite that being trivial to do(!)

There's growing evidence that large media companies can generate revenue from advertising deals from large brands with high-level interest targeting.

That doesn't say anything about the performance of targeted ads - just that high-level targeting is a suitable replacement for narrow targeting at a certain scale.

That's a separate concern from niche publishers (without direct sales teams) and niche brands (who only have a few thousand dollars to spend on marketing) who both want to maximize the value they're getting from the ecosystem.

And that's where the real money in advertising is. Fortune 500 companies boycotted FB last year and it didn't make a dent in their revenue, because they have millions of small businesses that all spend $50 on ads per month. That level of spending is only effective with narrow targeting.

Interesting. Reminds me of the analogous process of iteratively improving a model or fitness function and over time ending up with something overfit.

Facebook kinda lets you do this now. Filling out a preference sheet, that is. Buried in your ad settings is a list of what FB thinks are your interests. You can remove any that don’t match.

Doesn’t always work though. You can remove all “interests” related to meat, and then still get slammed with steak ads after you clicked “like” on an article criticizing the beef industry. There seems to be a shadow list of interests that the user can’t see or edit.

The one combo that does work over time is deleting interests and consistently choosing “Do not show this ad again” for the unwanted subjects. But that’s more work than most are willing to do. I only did it because the ad system is interesting to me and I wanted to see how trainable it is.

Couple this with the questionable junk they're always advertising too. Even when they do advertise correctly it's not anything I would ever consider buying. I left the platform last year and haven't looked back, it's a time suck/waste all around.

I'm convinced that the real target of targeted advertising is actually the ad buyers and not the ad viewers. It's a tool to increase the revenue of the ad sellers.

There is. It’s a bit crude and as far as I remember you can only remove things.

https://www.facebook.com/help/247395082112892

> Facebook thinks I like rock music, but I really like house music. Facebook thinks I eat meat, but I am a vegan. Facebook thinks I like cars, but I don't even drive. There's no way of telling Facebook what my tastes and lifestyle preferences even are.

Advertisers can also choose to target you via Facebook, even if you aren't in their apparent target demographic. I think this issue is a combination of both innaccurate and accurate targeted advertising.

Ads are intended to make you to need something new, or to like something that you don’t need.

Ads showing you something you cannot afford can increase your desire of it, thus envying who can afford it, etc.

An ad appearing over and over is not necessarily intended to make you buy something. There are lot of sociological and psychological implications behind.

Someone in your network, Ethernet sort, likes those things. Either at home or at work.

Lots of targeting is based on IP Adresss not device.

Form I would fill out:

[√] Doesn't like ads.

I mean I get it. I got to know somewhere that something I’m interested in buying exists. However, there has to be a better system then tracking my every move online and then force-feeding me ads about crappy products that I don’t like or worse, outright scams. I even watch videos on youtube about products I’m interested in VOLUNTARILY. How is this a billion dollar industry?

> I got to know somewhere that something I’m interested in buying exists.

I even have a problem with that. It's hard to put into words — I'm put off even by the idea that I am to be treated as a consumer. I am even slightly embarrassed when I consume a non-necessity.

I don't like door-to-door salespersons. It's not because they are pushy that I dislike them but because they are unbidden. An unsolicited ad is a door-to-door salesperson — even if it is for a thing I wanted.

When I want something, I feel I should be the one to act to seek the thing out. The truth is, I likely consume more than I should and prefer that there be friction.

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