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Insane state of today's advertising part 3

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Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#341

Post by thecrazyone »

briandear wrote: post #282
oasfboasbfos wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only good ad is a dead one. With very few exceptions, especially in the consumer space, you won't need advertising if you actually need something. You'll search it out or your friends will tell you what to buy. Advertising serves as a way for the capitalist class to exert veto power over other aspects of society by yanking funding at opportune moments (see the current Google snafu or Bill O'Reilly's departure fro…

This is total nonsense. Without advertising, how does a new competitor compete with the entrenched incumbents? How does anyone find out about your product? News media? Because media converage is often the result of having a paid PR firm pitching your story to reporters. Reporters then become the gatekeeper for what becomes successful or not. As far as word of mouth, that is very difficult to rely upon as a repeatable…

you're on point.

Also, we don't need to weigh the pros and cons of advertising as long as all actions are voluntary.

Why is it somebody else's business to make the world suit your tastes, you need to put effort for it, either by paying or creating such a product in the world, not by imposing it on others with regulations

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#342

Post by Symen »

eveningcoffee wrote: post #158
x0x0 wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Advertisers. Preroll ads are valuable because people are mostly paying attention. eg you went to youtube to watch X, and they show you 15 seconds of swiffer beforehand. The problem is there aren't enough preroll ad slots available to satisfy demand. Therefore, companies invent them. One thing I know people are doing is this: film a video every day. Talk about who cares. It could be upcoming movies; the tv show with d…

> Preroll ads are valuable because people are mostly paying attention. eg you went to youtube to watch X, and they show you 15 seconds of swiffer beforehand. Personal anecdote time. Preroll ads are the main force for me behind installing the adblocker. I just can not stand something that manipulates my flow. I call it televication of the Internet. It is unbearable. If for some reason I am not able to block them then…

> If for some reason I am not able to block them then I just do not watch them and I am not listening to them (I look elsewhere, say a lalala mantra in your mind).

I've started using a similar strategy on YouTube in order to selectively "protest" against bad ads. Whenever I stumble upon a long unskippable ad or a short very aggressive ad (loud and/or offensive), I mute the video and start reading comments for a while, or I alt+tab to a different video, etc. Sometimes I leave the page if the video (or uploader) is not worth the hassle.

In my mind this can lead to 3 different scenarios:

* Google notices this behavior and decides to enforce heavier regulation on ads (they already killed >30s unskippable ads this year).

* Google notices this behavior and tries to fight it (e.g. by pausing the ad if the volume is not low enough, the Spotify way). In the browser this leads to an arms race that Google can't win. In the worst case I would go back to avoiding all advertising using adblock and/or alternative financing if available (YouTube RED, patreon, etc.)

* Google doesn't react, bad ads lose so much value that most uploaders stop using them. They don't want to alienate their viewers for so little benefit.

We need many people to apply this strategy for this to work. However in the short term content creators still get paid, and I get the personal satisfaction of screwing over bad advertisers.

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#343

Post by thecrazyone »

avaer wrote: post #196
manigandham wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This happens because it's a business problem with perverse incentives across the entire advertising supply chain - and no amount of technical solutions will solve it. It's the same issue with every anti-fraud vendor and the new hyped blockchain nonsense. Until buyers and agencies vote with their dollars, nothing will change.

The thing is people are voting with their dollars, but it's on credit. People don't want to pay for "free" content, and "free" software. So instead they pay with malware, insane data charges, markups to pay for ads, markups to pay for dealing with fraud, the indefinite privacy tax of their data, markups extracted from monopoly positions, and much more. The problem is people don't see all of these exorbitant fees, but…

Well if you don't pay, how's the supplier of said free service going to survive.

Note: I'm not supporting viruses and malware, here in my argument

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#344

Post by thecrazyone »

manigandham wrote: post #287
avaer wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is people are voting with their dollars, but it's on credit. People don't want to pay for "free" content, and "free" software. So instead they pay with malware, insane data charges, markups to pay for ads, markups to pay for dealing with fraud, the indefinite privacy tax of their data, markups extracted from monopoly positions, and much more. The problem is people don't see all of these exorbitant fees, but…

I'm not talking about consumers but advertisers who are the clients and the media agencies they hire to produce and execute these media campaigns. The internet has increased efficiency and lowered prices but this also has an effect of amplifying any misaligned incentives - so now agencies which are bonused on clicks will deliver cheap clicks, whether it's actually producing sales or not.

What's your point? If they don't drive sales, they'll stop advertising or go out of business.

Not sure what's your concern here

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#345

Post by beagle3 »

alkonaut wrote: post #291
beagle3 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would generally stop advertisers from being able to verify ad impression, or to correlate users across sites. killing the most successful advertising whale (retargeting) in the process.

Why is that? Assuming that the advertising site would just have a proxy that tunnelled everything to the ad server, would the ad server not get the exact same traffic? Do you mean that the problem is that the site showing the ads could easily fake more client traffic to the ad server?

> site showing the ads could easily fake

Yes, that's what I mean by "unable to verify"; If the site is honest, everyone would be just as happy, but there is already so much fraud, even with (relatively) trustworthy Google and Facebook, that everyone wants some ability to verify; If all the traffic goes only through the site, that ability is lost.

> Assuming that the advertising site would just have a proxy that tunnelled everything to the ad server, would the ad server not get the exact same traffic?

Not exactly - the wide-sense-cookies[0] that allow the ad server to track users across different web sites would not be. Fingerprinting[1] would still work subject to advertisers trusting the proxy.

[0] including flash objects, etags, localstorage, etc, see https://samy.pl/evercookie/ for a 7-year-old discussion.

[1] https://panopticlick.eff.org/

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#346

Post by [deleted] »

gpm wrote: post #63
rahimnathwani wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the ads were static (e.g. advertiser A bought a specific place on one of publisher B's pages, for a month), and advertiser A didn't want independent verification that the ads were seen, then your proposal could be simply implemented. "What am I missing?" Many ads are served after real-time auction: whilst your browser is loading and rendering the page, an auction is going between advertisers for the ad spot(s) on…

The proxy suggestion seems to have merit though, it would still give advertisers the ability to run auctions, track users and ad views, etc, while avoiding domain filtering. OTOH I suspect ad blockers would adapt quickly... it's not clear it would be worth the investment to set up.

[deleted]

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#347

Post by edpichler »

oasfboasbfos wrote: post #148
jdangu wrote: post #76

Awesome to see that subject #1 on HN. At my startup Confiant [1], we block bad ads in stream on behalf of publishers. Cedato aka Algovid aka TLVMedia is one of our prime targets, we block millions of their ad impressions daily. They are essentially buying cheap display ad placements to resell them as fake video preroll ad placements. They sell on video exchanges like AOL's AdapTV and others. To maximize their yield,…

The only good ad is a dead one. With very few exceptions, especially in the consumer space, you won't need advertising if you actually need something. You'll search it out or your friends will tell you what to buy. Advertising serves as a way for the capitalist class to exert veto power over other aspects of society by yanking funding at opportune moments (see the current Google snafu or Bill O'Reilly's departure fro…

I have a different opinion. Yesterday I was cycling and passed by a very good restaurant close to my house, the local was empty, and I was wondering why it's empty if they are very good, they have very good food and relative cheaper prices. I just realised they don't do ads! They are very bad in marketing despite the fact of being an exceptional restaurant, nobody remember them, they waits they customers remember them. I talked to myself many times "I need to go back there", but they passes and I always forget it.

I did a parallel with my software business. You can have an exceptional software, but you can't stay frozen waiting your customers to find out you. Be very good is not enough on a world too much information.

But, I think the traditional ad industry is not sustainable. Nobody wants to see intrusive ads, I believe content marketing and organically ads (I don't know if this term really exists), like in sports, are the best for the long run.

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#348

Post by grkvlt »

dkersten wrote: post #265
oasfboasbfos wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only good ad is a dead one. With very few exceptions, especially in the consumer space, you won't need advertising if you actually need something. You'll search it out or your friends will tell you what to buy. Advertising serves as a way for the capitalist class to exert veto power over other aspects of society by yanking funding at opportune moments (see the current Google snafu or Bill O'Reilly's departure fro…

> With very few exceptions, especially in the consumer space, you won't need advertising if you actually need something. You'll search it out or your friends will tell you what to buy. I typically use adverts to help me decide what to buy, but the adverts count as negative points towards the product, because I feel that if a product needs to rely on persuasion techniques, or to bombard my eyeballs all the time (espec…

> adverts count as negative points towards the product > i use adverts to tell me what not to buy

These sorts of attitudes seem odd. What products do thses people buy, since pretty much everything being sold in the west is advertised in some way? It seems like the sort of think someone would say as a sort of virtue signalling, but I can't believe its a policy anyone could stick to.

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#349

Post by beagle3 »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #147
umeshunni wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ad auctions that happen on Google (and Yahoo etc) are a simpler version of what happens on the web since there's only one publisher (i.e Google) and a single 'ad network' (i.e. AdWords). On the web, there are multiple publishers, served by multiple ad networks and multiple exchanges (and it's turtles all the way down) Nowadays, bidding on the web happens through the OpenRTB protocol. See https://www.iab.com/guide…

I am constrained by the non-disclosure I signed when I left Google from disclosing how I know this, but I know that the auctions on Google are "not a simpler version" :-). That said, I think IAB's efforts to make auction priced advertising available to people who don't use Google's ad network is commendable.

AppNexus[0] used to provide RTB to many networks in 2011, including Google and Facebook. Isn't that still the case?

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

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#350

Post by rahimnathwani »

chippy wrote: post #263
TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pro tip: not all domain names have an associated website. Mine neither.

Encona is also a very popular and in my opinion delicious brand of hot spicy sauces in the UK.

Yup. I live in China now, so bring back a few bottles of Encona's 'original' hot pepper sauce on each visit to the UK.
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