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> It doesn't have to be this way. "Context sensitive" advertising is more privacy respecting, easier to implement and monitor and can be more cost effective.

This is what launched Google's money printing machine: Showing ads matching the current intent (current search) thus solving a current problem.

I actually dislike this sort of advertising even more. Because it pretends to be the solution to your current problem when often it’s not.

At least out-of-context ads can be more easily ignored.

> It isn't good for companies buying the ads by participating in sham "auctions" with no real insight into or control over the process. They are literally begging to be ripped off.

You seem to think that companies have a choice. I've been advertising for years, Google has been rolling out the standard ads in favor of automated "personalized" one for a long time.

They kept removing features again and again.

In more of removing features and making basic ads impossible to use, they have a team of people that will keep calling you and to offer you 'guidance' on how to run your ads. These guidance almost always revolved around enabling the automatic advertising algorithms and disabling your old school ads.

I consider myself quite smart with internet things but even me, at some point, got baited into switching to these automated ads because at the end you run a business that is completely different from marketing and it's not your core business. You're not expert into marketing and especially not into Google ads so it's easy for these experts to trick you.

I have seen my money syphoned by these automatic techniques with quite bad roi.

And all these self made people or very small companies (which represent the vast majority of the business), they are just as easy target for Google than I was.

Big companies can afford ads consultant that will run the advertising campaigns and optimize everything, but small ones are stuck doing things themselves on a system that is purposely made to hand over your money and let the computer do it's 'magic' with targeted advertising.

And if you're not happy with Google, what you gonna do ? It's not like there is competition. Everyone use Google, Google is a monopoly.

I tried switching to bing ads, Facebook ads, but its just not possible. No one use bing. Facebook leads were never as profitable as Google one, at least in the market I advertised.

You know you don't actually need Google to advertise, right?

I was hosting websites in 1998 when Google was still in Larry Page's garage. We sold ads the same way magazines and newspapers always have: we had a sales staff and they did their job well. There's no reason we can't go back to that.

Then Google will sell ads for terms related to your business and eat your lunch.

The original vision of Google died when they bought DoubleClick.

In my experience, people increasingly use their phone when they need to buy something and just google it.

If you're not there by your competitor is, you lost the game.

The other case for personalised advertising is when a purchase is almost made.

I was recently searching for a toy across Etsy, Ali Express, eBay. I didn't buy it. A day later, I saw 'suggested' purchases on Amazon for the same toy. I boycott Amazon, so I don't often visit their website.

I normally block (successfully?) almost all of this advertising, so I find it particularly creepy when I receive it.

I agree. But in the crappy experience topic, it seems to me that this is just bad engineering. If I were to build an algo to show personalized ads, I would definitely account for the likelihood of someone wanting to buy 2 consecutive cars vs a car and maybe some car related products. How was that decision made, because it seems that an entire industry adopted this and called it a day.

There's no incentive for the ad platforms to account for that, real-time bidding will make money for them no matter the experience of the ad being showed.

If you get another ad for a product you already bought the advertiser already paid for placement, a click through is just a bonus on top of that. Even more when information is so secretly guarded that any analysis of the impact of an ad is extremely flawed, it hasn't solved the old adage from John Wanamaker:

> Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half

It's meant to be that way, the ad platforms do not want advertisers to know what is waste and optimise their ads further than what's needed to keep them advertising, they just need to throw some bones here and there, convert a few people through clicks, to make themselves look indispensable.

There's no incentive to improve that, at all.

How was that decision made, because it seems that an entire industry adopted this and called it a day.

Easy --- advertisers pay for bad ads the same as good ones --- why bother stopping the bad ones?

Convincing so many advertisers to just blindly trust the system and buy into the concept of black box "personalized" advertising is actually the real marketing coup here.

According to some stats, global use of ad blockers is now over 40%. Once it exceeds 50%, I believe this stupidity will slowly start to die out.

> are wasting their money and my time and bandwidth

_You_ think it doesn't work, but it does. Or at least 'on average' it does. As for your time, perhaps you value your time. But again, 'on average', there are so many people spending hours and hours on Insta, TT, etc. and those people clearly don't care about focus/time/ads, because it is their (mental/spiritual) bread and butter. When a young woman 'follows' 100 'influencers' and each posts twice per day, that young woman consumes at least two hundred ads per day and if she buys at least one item per day, that's a win for 'them'.

Regarding the car/pet scenario, if they are any good they should be advertising stuff to clean dog piss, brushes, etc.. items that "will keep your car clean when you got a pet".

But again.. it works. People make money.

They are so dumb too. It rarely actually presents ads for things I might be interested in as I search but once I buy something they will follow me for a week. Buying an item seems to be a much stronger signal to them, it makes very little sense how this currently works.

Seeing ads appropriate to a site however makes me a bit wary of the site itself, it needs enough difference to the context to not harm the sites reputation.

Have you considered that you blocking personalized ad networks might, perhaps, have led to you seeing poorly personalized ads?

Like say, advertising a car to you after you recently purchased one?

> "Personalized" advertising isn't good for anyone except the ad networks.

According to Meta, their personalized advertising alone generates over $0.5 trillion of economic activity per year.

As much as the Hacker News crowd hates on ads, it's indisputable that it's good for businesses and the broad economy.

https://research.facebook.com/economiccontribution/

JFC… I’m begging for you to please think about things like this in ways that aren’t strictly about “the economy”. It’s so so so clearly a net loss for society it’s not even close. You have to literally ignore everything else other than this idea of “shareholder value” to come to such a ridiculous position.

Not sure if relying on research made by an advertising company, about it's own positive impact, is something that you should blindly trust.

I think what many of us question is whether nor not those same $0.5 trillion would be generated by contextual ads. There's no doubt that ads work, but we really don't know to what extend.

E.g. if I'm on a pages looking at watches, should I get ads for watches, or would it be better to show ads for the washing machine I was looking up last night? Google, the search engine, clearly thinks it's better to show ads relevant to my search term, but they are also in a special position that's not applicable to a news website.

People working in the field has also previously commented, here on HN, that the ad networks are basically hustling the advertisers, selling them ad space / users that they know will perform badly, to move more "inventory". That generates economical activity, but does that benefit anyone beyond the ad networks?

According to Jack the rock slinging glazier, the broken windows he creates generates massive returns to the economy when people pay him to fix the windows.

You mean the same Meta and their ads and data collection that have been directly and indisputably linked to literal, actual Genocides? And teen suicides? And Cambridge Analytica?

Oh, but they shuffled some money around the economy (mostly into their coffers), so it was all worth it in the end, because as we all know the magic economy is the only thing that matters.

> it's indisputable that it's good for businesses and the broad economy.

I dispute this. Therefore it is not indisputable.

I support my dispute thusly: imagine a world where there were no ads. All the money spent on ads would be spent on other things. Those other things would, I assert, be better for everyone involved than ads. The world would be a better place.

I support my assertion that anything else would be better than ads by pointing out that for businesses advertising is an arms race, all your competition and you are in an auction for customer attention in which the winner is one of the duopoly that control all internet advertising. And for users I just point to waves hands at everything we hate about the modern internet all that. QED.

I don't disagree with you broad statement that ads are a shitty thing on the whole, but their cost should be viewed in real terms not financial terms. That is, the cost is the people that work on the tech, the resources spent delivering them, the attention diverted to looking at them etc etc. The ad companies are sitting on huge cash piles so clearly there's a shortfall in the value of resources that can be bought if we stopped spending on ads.

This is the Parable of the broken window [0] in action. The piles of cash that the ad duopoly are sitting on could (and would) be spent elsewhere, and that would benefit us more (by my assertion above)

It's not "look at all the money they made, this service must be valuable", it's "is the money they made the best possible use of those resources?" and my answer is "definitely not"

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window

According to Meta, their personalized advertising alone generates over $0.5 trillion of economic activity per year.

Why should I care that they make a boatload of money while making the life of everyone else crappier? Advertising turns everything into shit.

Crapware pre-installed onto your brand-new phone or laptop [1]? Advertising. Pervasive tracking added to Windows? Generating profiles for advertising. Smart TVs sending regular screengrabs to Samba TV? Analytics for advertising. Like your $2000 smart fridge? It's going to be much worse because Samsung is piloting advertising. Every tech product is getting infected by this disease, both shoving unwanted ads into your face and tracking your pervasively.

Of course, someone is going to argue that we cannot have 'free' products without advertising. In the end the consumer is paying for advertising as part of (increased) product prices.

There's a lot of money in international drug trading, and some people/orgs are getting filthy stinking rich pursuing that, consequences be damned.

By your logic, that makes it a good business. I dispute that.

I believe the main purpose of tracking based advertising is to know your gender, politics and social class to show you the right kind of car and pet supply.

This discrimination is quite important and before internet people would self discriminate on those basis and buy different magasines, see different movies, walk different streets and advertisers could target their demographics based on that.

Now everybody goes to the same social networks so the tracking is used to provide this discrimination

A good example is gym membership. There's 20eur/month and 300eur/month ones. The 300eur/month ones really don't want to advertise to everybody, they have a really specific demographic target in mind.