Comment by pavel_lishin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pavel_lishin | Hacker News Reader

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> But let's say an advertiser comes to you and says "we want to spend $1M / day to advertise our 10GB game, but only to devices that could install it."

I don't want to call you a liar, but having seen ads that are presumably targeted at me, it feels like a total fiction to say that anyone is actually capable or interested in doing this.

I get advertisements for just absolute nonsense garbage that has no bearing on my life, and no bearing on anything that could have possibly been collected from my device.

The closest thing is that when I was in Mexico for a week, some of my podcast pre-roll ads were in Spanish. (Which, I should note, I do not speak fluently enough to even understand.) Even now, the occasional ad I'm served on a podcast is in Spanish.

And that's it. They saw that my IP came from Quintana Roo, and (somewhat reasonably) decided that I need to hear Spanish-language content. Even when I physically moved back to the United States.

The mobile ad industry is weird, and has some perverse incentives. Good games don't advertise (they don't need to). Games that hook the users just enough that they can show them more ads tend to plow that money right back into advertising to get more users. Those are the ads you see 99% of the time, and they're not really targeted. They're just people who know that the average 15 second interstitial will net them $0.006 in revenue, so they bid for it at $0.005.

Are there whales that spend $1m / day in advertising. Absolutely, 100%. Are they running at all times? No. We typically see that kind of spend from a single advertiser around 30 days out of the year. They're short campaigns, typically around a launch of a big title, and they always try to target as narrowly as they can to maximize their impact.

You're right about it using IP geo-location to guess where you are and what language you want. We also use that to determine if we should show you the GDPR disclosures. But try looking at ads on a Xiaomi phone versus a Samsung and you'll see a different set of ads, because one of those purchasers tends to have more disposable income.

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