What!? The entire ad industry is a scam to everyone involved? Who could have for seen this?
Are there any known high-profile experiments where targetted versus content-related advertising was compared? Somehow it seems that targetted advertising works (or worked), or at least that's what all the big players believe.
The more interesting question is what real difference it makes to companies that buy advertising whether they buy targeted advertising versus trackerless advertising. After all, trackerless advertising was good enough for a very long time.
I’m not objecting to advertising, but the privacy violations.
> and I wouldn't say those industries are inherently worse than others.
I wouldn’t (and didn’t) say that either.
In my experience, I try to avoid companies with objectionable practices, but in a lot of cases, all the vendors are varying degrees of unscrupulous. Or the vendors that are ethical have a significantly worse customer experience because they're playing fair against competitors who are playing unfair. So, I'm left to either choose the least bad vendor or face massive inconvenience from not using a competitive vendor.
It's kinda like those Silicon Valley execs that make these (mental) poisonous products but don't let their kids use them...? So thank you for the dividends, but I will feed my family (mentally) healthy stuff and not (mental) junkfood.
All because "hey the poor ad execs need one more speedboat!". Thank you for your service :)
Interesting hypocrisy at work here.
The only reason why anyone needs to advertise is to prevent others who do advertise from stealing all their customers. This is also why ads are becoming more intrusive and annoying over time - because you need to make your ads even more effective than the competition if everyone else already also uses ads.
I get that we’re all embittered by having annoying, low-quality adverts thrust in our faces, but there’s no need to become completely cynical about economies in general.
Well, maybe the adverts by themselves aren't enough, but... gestures broadly
It seems to me that the real problem with it all is the false dichotomy that so many people seem to have bought into. It wasn't too long ago that we understood that we need to balance out both sides for a society to flourish. Capitalism is useful, yes, but unfettered capitalism slowly eats itself and everything adjacent to it.
> Why is the choice always "capitalism" or "not capitalism"?
Any set A induces a partition of the universe into A and not A. You haven’t made any suggestions at all. Just the usual moaning — which is justified, but not at all helpful.
That’s a statement that requires some evidence. Advertisement drives the world economy.
It’s not namecalling — it is a stupid point.
Advertisers want particular social groups. Large, well-defined ones. (E.g., "women with young kids and disposable income".)
What particular features you want in your ML model to get those groups is a technical implementation detail.
Not to the advertiser, no.