ChatGPT ad targeting is garbage
successfulsoftware.net
successfulsoftware.net
Meanwhile, the article is actually discussing ChatGPT ads specifically compared to Google Ads, which they do have success with.
Anyway, my guess is that it's a combination of 1. OpenAI being new and not having the massive work needed yet to set up a fully successful ads network, but they're recruiting a lot of talent from the area + recsys so it's probably not too far off. And 2. we don't really know in general yet how best to do in context ad recommendations. I think this will also improve pretty rapidly with how much talent is working in the space. The best ads will probably look a lot more like Google Search per-request targeted ads rather than Instagram style per-user targeted ads, but I believe we'll see lots of gains fast.
At most, I would call advertisement a Tragedy of the Commons. But the way publicity works, it feels like the tragedy is unavoidable; all smart advertisers will eventually transgress against normalcy.
No. I literally never want to see an advertisement on my computer, unless I'm visiting a local forum with local advertisements. If I want to see a product or service online, I will search for it using my search engine that does not accept payment for search rankings.
Global, digital advertising is clearly a different class of advertising than local advertisements.
My personal bet would be the country would suffer for it quite a lot, similar to places that have banned e.g. loans, but it'd be very cool if I were wrong!
I wonder why you think the country would suffer?
Without paid media, marketing spend gets pushed to “organic” and “content marketing” aka blog spam and other crap.
But then, is any and all public communication about a product or a service originating from a stakeholder of said product or feature basically an ad?
I suppose depends how broadly “ad” is taken to be. Is a webpage an ad? Presumably no if it’s your landing page.
OP is presumably talking about invasive ads that try to take the attention of people who aren’t looking for the product in question
No one likes to acknowledge this, but there is an alternate timeline where only the rich kid in school has a Google account, reddit account, meta account, and almost all content is still produced by massive media conglomerates.
Ads suck and everyone hates them, but don't lose sight of what they enabled by hyperfocusing on the bad.
Here in Serbia, even in the worst of times (sanctions, NATO bombing in 1999), people with internet access could participate in local and global fora, newsgroups etc. It was expensive to get a computer and internet access, but people were willing to pay to host a small community. Late in 90s and early in 2000s, there was a huge number of cheap "virtual hosting" providers, and even cheaper LAMP stack providers, where people would run their own phpBB or similar forum software. IRC I probably need not mention.
This "great equalising" has been nothing but a negative in the long run.
I am not reminiscing anything here, but I do believe this counterpoint does disprove the claim to the contrary :)
It is not at all obvious that this would be a worse timeline to live in.
The content that ad-based websites brought was mostly clickbait designed around serving these ads.
I looked for rain boots, and I bought a pair of rain boots. Getting ads for rain boots now isn't going to drive any purchasing, right? Meta or Alphabet get paid still, so the advertisers are getting hosed.
It's not a positive signal, because for the lifespan of that product I just bought, I have removed myself from the addressable market.
My experience with performance adtech was that 95% of the energy went into targeting whales, with a focus on products that drive massive revenue (mobile gaming, gambling, crypto). It's truly insane what these whales are spending.
Sure, there's still a lot of money in the 5%, especially for a surface like ChatGPT where people are making retail decisions. But I'm not particularly shocked if they're a little behind.
I couldn't possibly be more par for course for OpenAI
But I go to some blogs (philosophy, jazz, and men's clothing) that have ads that are literally just image links. The ads are actually relevant to the content, and because I go to the blog of my own volition, that means that more often than not the ads are at least somewhat relevant and usually worth a look, like the curated ones you see in a magazine. Most other ads online are so irrelevant it's almost comical, and I have no idea why people pay to use those services. All these tech giants who make enormous sums of money from advertising are emperors with no clothes - a hard look at the quality of their product reveals it's unanimously considered garbage by the public. Their promise of delivering hyper targeted advertisement was obviously a lie predicated on market capture and becoming the only middlemen in town.
Believe it or not, they did not deliver.
It must be lovely to be that innocent. ;0)
Outside a captive platform like Amazon, most ads are garbage and a total waste of money.
If I’m on Amazon trying to buy X and my search for X “promotes” an option to the top of the list yeah that probably influences me buying that.
But the broader online ad ecosystem is a total waste of money. Yes, I once searched a question about golf balls… no I don’t want to see “targeted ads” about golf balls following me all over the internet for the next three weeks.
Probably more that from an ROI perspective that’s probably the “least worst” vs the best.
I'm not an ad guru by any means, but isn't it expected that you will get junk clicks with a bid like that? Seems like a you-get-what-you-pay-for scenario.
No. Bidding low means less or no clicks, but should not affect traffic quality.
1. Click fraud is rampant, and the ad platforms seem to not care in the least as long as they can drain your budget.
2. The ad bidding process is completely opaque, and no auditing seems to be done, my inclination is that there is large scale fraud here too.
Did they try bidding more? It's possible they are just only getting the dregs. (In which case the ads would be expensive instead of garbage)
OP here. No. The cheapest version of my PerfectTablePlan software is £19.95 + VAT, one time fee. So I would be insane to bid £2 per click.
>It's possible they are just only getting the dregs.
Bidding higher generally means more clicks, but the quality could be worse due to winning bids when your content is less relevant.
And again, who does not want to drive a tractor in their city when they hit the pothole? Or at least to re-plow half of the city just because of the stupid buildings they put in there?
My wife will get ads on Instagram targeting me though.
One day I looked at some retro console, she texted me asking if I was looking at a console, she got like 8 ads for it.
That means you can't be tracked because it's too stupid to do so.
The main place I see ads is YouTube on iOS. I used to have ad targeting turned off, but I’ve since opted into all of googles tracking and ad-targeting, in attempt to curate the ads I see and improve them.
I’ve had all the Google tracking and ad-targeting turned on for close to a year now. Google still can’t even target me ads that are in English. I can’t read Chinese or Turkish or Spanish but I still get ads in those languages. Most of the ads are still scams or questionably legal products. And nearly all advertisements are blatantly targeted toward the wrong demographics. I get both “you can buy this multi million dollar hotel” and “you can use food stamps at our store”. I sometimes see advertisements for local politicians (same state), which might be targeted, but I just as frequently see ads for politicians I cannot possibly vote for. (opposite side of the country)
I get mostly mistargeted ads, but I’ve put a lot of effort into it.
But if their competitors (including open-weight models) can offer similar quality and ease of use, Ads is just another reason _not_ to use them.
- Why is online news just partisan rage-baiting? Ads
- Why is real journalism dying? Ads
- Why are your web search results less helpful? Ads
- Why are recipes 2,000 words long? Ads
- Why is social media engineered for scroll-maxxing?
- Why is your car/TV/refrigerator spamming you?
- Why are pharmaceuticals so expensive?
- Why is your population voting for assholes?
Future generations are going to look back at how we live with advertising the same way we look back on leaded gasoline and asbestos.
This is not really true. Ads, especially the classifieds, were often the only way that newspapers and news organizations stayed afloat aside from public funding. What happened was the major ad-tech companies captured the revenue and the subscriber data that came from ads and viewers that would normally go to those organizations. "Real journalism" often didn't make much if not any money. "Real journalism" at least for most of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st has always existed alongside advertising. Magazines literally survived on advertising, their entire product to readers was long form content, while, to brands, a higher quality product and more targeted subscriber base. It's pure romanticism to say that ads themselves were the problem. Ad-tech, it's monopoly control in the hands of 2-3 behemoths, is the real issue.
By their nature, they should be a positive.
However, media in general (from classical like newspapers, magazines, radio and TV to more modern like news sites and streaming platforms) has been leveraging sound psychological research to influence people to start holding views the editorial policy wants them to. And translated to ads, to them wanting and paying for things they do not need and have not originally even wanted. Back when Windows 95 came out, there was an urban legend how people waited in lines in front of stores to buy it even if they did not have a computer — I never cared enough to check if this was true, but even back then it was acknowledged how you could influence people to simply spend money where it does not bring them any value.
Tech industry had a large problem to enter the market and sustain itself on what was largely volunteer, non-profit environment of the early Internet and web days. The dot-com boom was over (and crashed), people were starting to build real products, but sustaining them was hard. And enter ad-tech, with profiling and targeting enriching the already existing psychological research about how you get people to spend when they don't really have a need or problem to address.
So I believe you are complaining more about the state of media today — I was actually hoping guerilla journalism through personal blogs gets us the real thing back, but oh boy was I wrong :) — than ads or ad-tech directly.
BTW That why money off vouchers are so common with ads. Because this is an actual way you can check if the ad is working. Although there are confounding factors - maybe they were going to buy from you before they saw the voucher?
I don't think any single form of advertising is effective on the whole population.