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Comment by tracker1 | Hacker News Reader

Given their ad sales model, they're working on ways to serve you ads you're more likely to click on.

We try to show ads that people will click on AND THEN buy/use whatever's on the other end. This maximizes advertiser value, long-term Google profit, and user experience all at once.

So we're trying to show you ads that you want to see, rather than ads that try to provoke you into clicking (like Buzzfeed articles)

I have a better idea. How about turning the tables and making a service that collects info about advertisers instead of users? Then let users browse your database of companies (and/or the products they're pushing) and actively search for what they went. Filters could be ecological stance of the company, color or style of the product, user reviews, published "expert" reviews, etc. Turn all that data over to the user and let them be in control of what ads they see. Let them spy on advertisers instead of vice-versa. It would also be way cheaper since you don't have to maintain this vast data-collecting network.

You can only search for what you already know about (and want to search for).

I already find tons of stuff I didn't know on Google! More, seriously, advertisers already "target" ads based on such loose parameters as age or location. Let me set my age as a filter if I want to, then you can show me those ads. Pinterest is starting to monetize people browsing semi-aimlessly through pages of tangentially-related items. This could just be a variation on that.

Actually, with Google, advertisers don't target anyone, really. They have a few knobs to tweak, but mostly it's Google that does the targeting, based on much smarter (but not yet smart enough) algorithms.

So, you must correlate advertisers.

But it's hard to design something that can not be gamed. As a user, there's no reason to adopt the more obvious possible solutions, because I wouldn't be able to verify that I'm not being tracked. (What means that I'd adblock it like any other source, and thus there's no reason for the site owner to use this one service.)

Are you implying ads is the only way to know about products and ideas ?

very true-did not think about this-good point

This would work if it did not interrupt G's current revenue stream- not sure how the rates would be set for the advertisers- especially smaller ones who need high target niched key words.

> So we're trying to show you ads that you want to see, rather than ads that try to provoke you into clicking (like Buzzfeed articles)

Huh, really? Then why aren't you actually doing that?

http://imgur.com/a/KGsQh

> trying

No, I don't think so. It will be 2016 and we'll still be having this conversation. Money.

Maximized user experience would be no ads.

Not if price is factored in to the user experience. Plus the small amount of value of discovering something you wouldn't have heard of otherwise.

I'm not at all convinced that's true. I pay for Ars Technica because I want them to have money but I don't want to see ads.

Edit: looks like Google might be thinking the same https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Contributor

That would be awesome. Google's one of the few players with enough clout and reach to make a micropayments system that might actually work, or at least get enough users to see how it would work in practice and work through some of the theoretical hurdles.

The only ads I ever notice are for things I already have. Everybody pro advertising tells me how good ads are for me. I started using the Internet in 1991 and have yet to see how advertising is good for me. Here are some ways in which ads are bad for me:

- Increased operator bandwidth charges (REAL money)

- Loss of privacy

- Page download performance

- Garish web sites

- Lost time cleaning up after sites

- Being shown ads for products I already own

I would happily give more money than I pay my operator to content providers in exchange for no ads.

There's always the freebie users for every media form - piracy, adblock, etc. As a supplier of such things I can only really hope you'll spread the word to those that do fill my pockets with delicious fractions of a penny and not let it bug me

The rest? Not really my problem - I wouldn't redesign a website to save you time when you're (objectively speaking) worth nothing to me - that's bad business

On paying more - You might (might, I don't believe you) but you'd be in the minority. Having a system that allows you to paypal the site a penny every few months would be infeasible anyway

I would be ecstatic if I could pay $8/mo. for YouTube with no ads. Instead I use AdBlock and no one gets anything.

Agreed, I would pay for an ad free version of the internet. Unfortunately, as I have to negotiate everywhere and many advertisers act badly or are misleading, I choose the scorched earth option as well.

No ads would mean no Google, which (given Google's market share) I respectfully claim would not be maximized user experience.

I'm perpetually torn about this -- on the one hand, the way they want to serve relevant ads is by knowing everything about my life, even if I don't want them to. On the other hand, I'll get really relevant ads. That's kind of nice.

I am much more complex than my search history- I find that "relevance" to me can depend on things as diverse as my current mood. I too am torn because I know that increased relevance means I am giving away more and more of myself- I'm pretty sure that G has no limits in this pursuit of "relevance."

I hate this so much -- I'll search for some topic, and start getting ads all over the internet related to that topic. Case in point -- a few weeks ago I clicked on an article regarding "Computer Scientist Barbie", and clicked through the Amazon link. Guess how many Barbie advertisements I'm getting now.

Why are you getting ads ? Install adblock and/or ghostery. Fewer distractions, fewer cycles going to adware. I don't see ads in search results or gmail, and not a lot of other places either. Noticeably different on a tablet though, where it doesn't run.

At the other extreme is adnauseum, which clicks on every ad link in the background (so you don't have to).

I don't know about the above commenter, but I have a complex relationship with ads and adblock. I installed it to get around some particularly nauseating behavior of some sites long ago, and largely forgot about it and browsed blissfully unaware of how much it was helping. Then I realized that someone else's Pandora was playing ads, and mine wasn't, it just plays song after song. I felt rather bad about that. This is a well established transactional structure which we are all used to on the radio, songs interspersed with the occasional ad to generate revenue. I feel like I've been stealing from Pandora for a few months now, especially because I've been on the cusp of paying for it for a few months even without the ads.

Visual content with visual ads isn't really that different, except that some sites vastly overshoot the expected norm for the ad-inconvenience to content ratio. I think those few bad-actors are to blame for most the current online ad-climate.

Why don't you just pay for Pandora and feel good about yourself? (Interesting enough, they make more money on the ads than on a paid subscriber.)

> Visual content with visual ads isn't really that different, except that some sites vastly overshoot the expected norm for the ad-inconvenience to content ratio. I think those few bad-actors are to blame for most the current online ad-climate.

Yes, convenience is key. Print magazines often have around 50% ads, but they don't bother as much as on a screen.

Thanks for the adnaseum mention, looks like it's still in a pretty early stage but it's exactly the sort of thing I've been looking for (and contemplating coding myself).

If you have an Android tablet, AdBlock runs very well in FireFox for Android.

Firefox for Android supports browser add-ons, including Adblock Plus.

Use browser profiles (default in chrome, add multifox in firefox), and delete all cookies regularly on your default profile.

The limit of "really relevant ads" is automatically emptying your wallet and delivering things you "want". Even if you didn't want them until you saw the ad.

"want" is a superset of "useful/life enhancing" which is itself a superset of "need". We probably know our needs, and getting things we want but don't really help us may not be a good outcome, but discovering things that help us in our lives that we weren't aware of is definitely a good thing. I would like to see more of that.

It's not necessarily a superset of useful or life enhancing; e.g. an alcoholic and alcohol.

The best case for an Ad vendor is if they can convert you into a productoholic, trigger your desire, and then satiate it. "ad mortem", as it were.

Ad vendors don't want the best for you. They want the most profitable for them. When everything is terrible, improved ads could be good for both - they profit from things you were going to buy anyway. At any other time, discerning individual nuances of your life is difficult and intensive, blanket trying to change what you want instead is much cheaper.

> It's not necessarily a superset of useful or life enhancing; e.g. an alcoholic and alcohol.

Sure it is. "Want" is a superset in that it contains useful/life enhancing things as well as other things that are not that.

> The best case for an Ad vendor is if they can convert you into a productoholic, trigger your desire, and then satiate it. "ad mortem", as it were.

The best case for an ad vendor is to maximize profit from you while minimizing negative outcomes to themselves in doing so. Whether that is maximizing profit over the short term or a longer term, and whether some methods produce more negative outcomes for them (such as public displeasure and possible resulting legislation) is really their decision to make, but I don't think a model as simplistic as what you proposed really covers the reality of the situation. I'm sure mine isn't all that much better though.

Not just serving ads but finding more ways to trick users into clicking them. Have you seen the late load ad over the number 1 search result they started a few months ago?

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