Comment by dangus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dangus | Hacker News Reader

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I don’t know if there’s any merit to this idea, but it seems to me that saturation can become a real problem.

At this point skipping a story or feed ad in Instagram is like a nearly instant reflex for me.

Plus, the programming on the recommendations is laughably amateur for company as resourceful as Meta. If I interact with an ad one time I’ll see the same ad over and over for days or weeks.

Sure, I was curious for a second, but it seems strange that Meta can’t tell that I’m not interested anymore just by monitoring basic usage of the UI.

At the end of the day the advertiser is the one left paying for these repeated ineffective ad impressions.

Somewhat related, I am a little surprised Meta hasn’t tried a Discord-like revenue model where paid annual memberships bestow quality of life and cosmetic social status types of benefits. Even if it wasn’t their main source of revenue it could at least diversify the business and lend some stability to their revenue.

Facebook’s revenue per user is less than $10. Discord charges $99/year for Nitro. I feel like Meta has such a one-track mindset on advertising that it doesn’t consider different revenue models for its businesses.

Meta spends a lot of time talking about the metaverse but Discord is already the metaverse. Why isn’t there a subscription Meta Quest game pass with Discord-like social features? It’s a no-brainer.

Where’s the “pro” paid version of Instagram? Why doesn’t Instagram sell subscription access to things like exclusive camera filters, stickers, and editing tools?

I feel like the company is full of missed business opportunities.

>At the end of the day the advertiser is the one left paying for these repeated ineffective ad impressions.

If advertisers had a better option, Meta will have gone out of business by next week.

Actually, that's a real thing advertisers DO want.

It's called retargeting.

> that's a real thing advertisers DO want

I think GP is talking about a more specific thing, and it's one I experience all the time too: that I'll visit a website briefly one time, by accident, or to satisfy some curiosity, or look up the specifications on something I already own, or to get a link to send to a friend, or whatever other non-purchase reason, and then get shown ads for their thing over and over and over again until the end of time despite the fact that there's a 0% chance that I will ever buy it.

I'm sure it's true that, in the general case, advertisers want to show ads to customers multiple times, but in these particular cases, they shouldn't want to show them to me -- I'm definitely not going to buy the thing, and they're wasting their money, and it seems like Facebook ought to be able to better differentiate between users like me who will definitely not convert and users who might (like GP said: seems like there ought to be detectable patterns in the way I do or don't engage with the content that should signal my lack of interest).

Exactly what I’m saying. I clicked or expanded something out of momentary curiosity. Maybe the ad was provocative or mysterious and I wanted to see what the deal was.

Step two, I get retargeted. That’s fine and expected.

Step three, I get retargeted. Again. And again…and again.

What I don’t understand is how Meta/Instagram can’t figure out at least a little bit sooner that I was clearly just satisfying my curiosity and now every time I see the same ad I scroll by extra fast or otherwise interact in ways that should indicate disinterest.

People complain about this all the time.

It is annoying, but it's not illogical.

If you have looked at something once, say there's a 99% chance that you have no further interest in it. But the 1% chance that you are potentially going to buy it after being shown the ad again is still much better odds than showing it to a random person, or a random person who is somehow correlated to the target market.

Even after seeing the ad 50 more times and ignoring it, you are probably still a statistically better lead than someone who has never interacted with the ad. They're not making a strong assumption about you, even though it seems that way. They're making a very weak assumption based on the small number of people who clicked once, hesitated, saw the ad 49 times more, carried on hesitating, and now are finally ready to buy.

It definitely isn't some big problem that bothers me at all.

I do wonder if advertisers can turn that behavior off and/or limit the number of times their product is shown to the same person.

I also wonder if Meta has some kind of model that's predicting post-impression interest.

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