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Comment by Dylan16807 | Hacker News Reader

> They are talking about ads, not about which songs are suggested to us.

It has a big list of media and it's trying to pick one that will be effective on you. That part is quite similar.

> Spotify dies not rely exclusively on poor quality third-party data: they also have first-party data about us

Is that why they're saying it doesn't work? Or is it a different reason? Because I see people citing all sorts of possible reasons and intuition can only go so far in knowing which ones are important.

> My guess is that the type of ads they are talking about here are general rotation banner ads

Maybe. But in that case how much is the data the problem and how much is the type of ad the problem?

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Hi, let me try to answer your last point, which imho is the most important.

The problem is the type of ad, which is worth nothing. The data is just BS used in order to dress up the selling of a worthless ad placement for good money; and yes, that data is also largely flawed.

And even if it were not flawed, ‘guessing’ that someone who is supposed to be a certain age, gender, in a certain job, in a certain relationship, with or without kids, etc could be interested in a certain product is much harder than simply guessing that if you like these 10 or 100 songs, you may like this other song.

And how is anybody going to ‘prove’ that all this quasi-magical targeting worked, when click rates are ridiculously low even for highly targeted ads?

Imho targeting and ‘personalisation’ serve just one simple purpose: convince the marketer that he/she is doing the right thing, or what is considered right or best practice at the moment, and so that they are safe and are not going to be fired because, you know, nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM.

> Is that why they're saying it doesn't work? Or is it a different reason? Because I see people citing all sorts of possible reasons and intuition can only go so far in knowing which ones are important.

The Spotify data about like/dislike is rather accurate (like 80-100%), as long as someone doesn't click under substance influence.

Third party data (according to article) has accuracy around 4%-44%.

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