I think there's a very non-trivial chance the person who wrote this article knows much more about advertising than you think: http://www.hilarymason.com/about/
There are obviously a number of ad revenue driven pressures on Yahoo Mail's design. The display advertising market is very different from the search engine market. It is only tangentially about the clicks. The biggest pressures are:
"Premium Locations": these aren't necessarily the places that get high click throughs, but rather the locations which are prominently displayed and noticed by the users, which causes them to stand out in a world awash in banner ads. This competes with good UI design, which wants to put important functions in these exact same locations.
"CPM": just getting way higher impression counts. This translates to filling the screen with as many ads as possible, stealing screen real estate and really disrupting eye flow.
"CPA": Lots of ad networks/DSP's try to arbitrage between CPM and CPA. Misclicks don't generally help much with that beyond hindering optimization efforts to use clicks as signals. Mostly what this does to design is encourage "rest points" in applications where users are likely to actually take the time to go all the way through to a conversion (think of it like TV commercial breaks in sports).
"Uniques/F-Cap": You want to raise the bar on the minimum # of impressions seen by every visitor, because those early impressions are far more likely to be people who haven't seen the ad before. Advertisers pay a lot more (10x more is not unheard of) for that. So, there is pressure to spam the visitor with as many impressions as possible before they are likely to leave (which makes it hard to serve ads in a way that is proportional to the value the user derives from the experience).
"View based conversion": The underbelly of the adverting network. In theory this is a good thing. In practice, it creates an incentive to shove ad locations in to the page that the visitor never even notices (ironically the opposite of the problem the article contends).
Some people have apparently gotten the impression I was questioning your credentials, your intelligence, or somehow attacking you personally. At least in terms of intent it couldn't be farther from the truth! While I think your naïveté about online advertising undermines your article, all it might imply about you personally is your curiosity about online advertising is low as compared to other pursuits. If anything, I'd say that is a compliment. If I conveyed or you perceived anything other than that, I certainly apologize.
'She' has a name, Hilary Mason or @hmason.
If it had read, "He's a data geek..." it would have only have been offensive because they got the gender wrong.
I understand the line of reasoning, however the tone of the comments about the article are negative and not up to standard. [1] It is not a question of gender but how to discuss, acknowledge & discuss an authors work in a civil manner.
You are criticizing the people who are behaving in a civil manner for the behaviour of those behaving uncivilly. Try to focus on the jerks, there's an off chance they might get it.
Yes & no. I'm don't think I'm being that critical, 'why don't you refer to someone by name.' I take your point though. As for focusing on "Jerks", I ignore them. I'd rather point to measured responses like your own illustrating to "Jerks" how to respond.
Ms. Mason has confirmed her lack of domain expertise, so I guess that settles it.
In the process of attempting to highlight an important lesson about applying data analysis, she has highlighted another important and related lesson: regardless of the level of one's data analysis expertise, without domain expertise to contextualize the data, it is terribly difficult to do any kind of useful analysis.
A lot of people with her background come to the online ad business. While brilliant, they find they have a lot to learn and a lot of assumptions that they need to throw out the window. Fortunately, the brilliant ones have no problems learning so they come up to speed quickly, but this doesn't help them to understand things prior to digging in a bit.
And these kind of cutesy oneliner descriptions of one's skills make me cringe: "Simply: I make beautiful things with data".
OK, she works as a "chief scientist" (that's not even a job, for us, old time folks, but anyway) at bitly (a URL shortening service, i.e as far away from a real business as you can get, that aspires to be a "bookmarking service" also.
Please define 'real business'. What does a company need to have to be a 'real' business? Users? Revenue? Profits? A product that at least some people are willing to pay money for?
I agree that bit.ly is a very simple concept, but I take issue with the disdain in your post - even URL shortening stops being straightforward once you expand from n = 1 to n = 10,000,000. And bit.ly does a lot more than 'just' that.
This reminds me of McCain's 'real America'. You may not like {NoVa, these kinds of startups} and you may think that they don't capture the 'true' spirit of {Virginia, business}, but at the end of the day, their {votes, dollars} count just as much as 'real' {America, business}.
You may not think Hilary's qualified to talk about the details of Yahoo's particular advertising model, but don't extend that into what's bordering on an ad-hominem attack against a very legitimate startup, as well as a key figure at said startup.
Revenue and eventually profits. Even if "url shortening" is a "real business", it still is in the very far outskirts of "businesness". A very marginal value adding service, that exists solely because of some very marginal deficiencies of other services. Even Twitter has trouble monetizing, a "url shortening service" 100 times more so.
>even URL shortening stops being straightforward once you expand from n = 1 to n = 10,000,000.
I fail to see how. Even a simple setup can handle 10,000,000 shortened urls with aplomb. And url shortening is the most sharding friendly use case you can get, ie linear scaling is trivial in a url shortening service.
>You may not think Hilary's qualified to talk about the details of Yahoo's particular advertising model, but don't extend that into what's bordering on an ad-hominem attack against a very legitimate startup, as well as a key figure at said startup.
Well, she may or may not be qualified. I just pointed out that the page the parent pointed to as proof of her competence on the matter doesn't _prove_ her qualifications at all.
I'd like to ask you to think twice before publicly questioning someone's credentials like this. Whatever your intentions, picking on someone's CV just because of a blog post you disagree with is not only rude, but it sends a message -- particularly to women in tech -- that if they speak publicly, if they offer up their opinion, they will be attacked not about the content of their point but about their competence to speak at all. I believe this kind of attack has real consequences on our field, and I would urge everyone to show everyone the respect they'd want for themselves.
Dave
Oh, don't worry about that. I'm an equal opportunity insulter! I didn't even care that she is a woman or not while making my point. Nor do I think that women in tech need special treatment. We all get what we all get. Do you see exchanges between males being any more courteous?
Notice also how I avoided to speak about their opinion on Yahoo at all -- they might or might no be 100% correct.
I only responded to the statement by some parent poster, that her CV "proves" that she is especially knowledgable in the ads field.
Is he legit in the "titled world?" :)
Which is very common in modern business, but shouldn't happen when you have "science" in there. Lives a bad taste.
Science is all about clarity and SPECIFIC fields of study. Nobody does "science" in general.
You say "Nobody does 'science' in general", but you are wrong. Many people work at organizations that have a broad range of scientific pursuits in a broad range of fields of study. The Chief Scientist's job is "ensuring that [the organization's] research programs are widely regarded as scientifically and technologically well founded and are appropriate for their intended applications".
It's largely equivalent to a PI role of a university research project, except that there are things going on in the company other than pure research and so there are chief officers of other things too. Nobody thinks that "primary investigator" is a fluffy title on the grounds that people don't do investigation in general; it's clear they're investigating specific things.