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Comment by nedt | Hacker News Reader

It's already enough to just have plain ads. Like we have them on the streets, at the bus station, newspapers, etc. No tracking needed at all, just give out the message. If you need to target people to it in the context of the place or content you are showing it with. But you don't need to know anything about the user seeing the ad. Targeting by user doesn't work anyway.

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> Targeting by user doesn't work anyway.

How did you reach this conclusion? The main problem is that it works way better than traditional marketing medium.

It's the reason Google and Facebook are so massive, why would publishers choose to pay them if it doesn't work?

> why would publishers choose to pay them if it doesn't work?

Because they believe it works and it's impossible to prove otherwise?

By the same logic cigarettes are presumptively beneficial...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ESoYS9SZW-4

I've seen it being used.

Like on the frontend side with Facebook which thinks if I'm interested into cycling I will also be interested in cars (both are on the street, right?) or if I'm interested in some more dirty humor I also want to see more "naughty" stuff.

And also on the backend used by magazines and they mostly don't use the user profiles because it's too targeted and doesn't have enough audience. And if you make the targeting broad enough you'll have again people interested in chocolate so you target them with wine and whiskey.

Or even better on Amazon where you can buy a new TV and when you have done so it will suggest you even more TVs for the next months.

Depending on the data you collect, targeting by user - unfortunately - works. If the granularity is not one user, it will be a hundred. If not, a thousand, and so on. I've seen apps run ads targeting a total of 5 cohorts(together holding a hundred million users), and I've seen companies run ads targeting 100s of cohorts with the same number of users. They all work better than no targeting at all.

However what you're saying isn't completely wrong. I've also seen user targeting become a self-fulfilling prophecy. What happens is that it's championed by a high level executive as the panacea for improving revenue, implemented, and seen to not work. Now, as we all now, the C*O is Always Correct, so everything else around it is modified until the user-level targeting A/B test shows positive results. Usually this ends up in the product being tortured into an unusable mess.

Before you target 5 different cohorts it's better to target the context of where the ad is shown. i.e. web content normally already has a category and people reading an article about cheap flats in a city might be very much interested in renting or buying a flat. By collecting signals on a user you might only get that interested after a longer time, if you even have a profile, and by the time you pick it up they might have a new flat and are no longer interested.

Yes definitely. User level targeting comes after targeting particular ad spaces in some ad platforms. But it still adds enough marginally to be useful.

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