After GDPR, The New York Times cut off ad exchanges and kept growing ad revenue • Hacker News Board

Re: After GDPR, The New York Times cut off ad exchanges and kept growing ad revenue

#101

Post by cyborgx7 » Wed, Jan 16, 2019, 2:46 PM UTC

manigandham wrote: post #94

cyborgx7 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to misunderstand what this thread is about. This thread is not about "marketing". It is about personalised targeted ads.

Yea I get it. Advertising is a subset of marketing, and efficiently connecting people with a message inherently involves targeting. There's a reason 2 of the biggest companies on the planet are ad networks.

>efficiently connecting people with a message inherently involves targeting

The point of this thread is that maybe it doesn't.

Re: After GDPR, The New York Times cut off ad exchanges and kept growing ad revenue

#102

Post by tomjen3 » Wed, Jan 16, 2019, 2:47 PM UTC

MarkMc wrote: post #52

bitofhope wrote: post #6

I honestly would not be surprised if the difference in effectiveness of targeted vs untargeted advertisement turns out to be none, negligible or even unfavorable to targeted. Sure, NYT is not enough data to be significant, especially when compensating for my confirmation bias, but I would really like to see more sites stop tracking, at least from an ethical standpoint.

I would be absolutely astounded if targeted ads did not provide significant long-term advantage to a big player like Google. How can it be that having intimate knowledge of someone would not allow you to sell them more stuff? John has a 10th wedding anniversary coming up. Mary is single and goes to the gym every day. Steve just got a promotion and likes the BMW 3 series. Michael is overweight but has just gone on a d…

You and I might, a prior, believe that they would be much more valuable, but after 10 years and with some of the sharpest minds in the world working on the problem, facebook has never once shown me an ad for something I wanted. I have as far as a recall only twice clicked on ad on google with intent to acquire the item (as opposed to just clicking on the ad rather than go to the homepage of a company).

If you could actually create ads for things that I would want, personalized ads are probably worth more. I just don't think it is possible with current technology.

Re: After GDPR, The New York Times cut off ad exchanges and kept growing ad revenue

#103

Post by nopriorarrests » Wed, Jan 16, 2019, 2:48 PM UTC

apexalpha wrote: post #81

nopriorarrests wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's absolutely working so well because they are NYT. They can get sweet "branding" dollars from advertisers, and with branding nobody cares about return on money spent. Smaller sites have zero chance to strike a deal with large agencies who are serving large brands. So their only chance to increase ad revenue is to offer targeting, to improve viewability (aka put banners on top), and to hope that they will get enoug…

This comment makes no sense to me. First of all: do you have any source for your first statement that "It's absolutely working so well because they are NYT" other than your gut feeling? Just because other sites are smaller doesn't mean they can't do it or work together. Smaller sites now also don't do targeted advertising; they just hire Google or any other ad network for that. They could do the same with non-targete…

>do you have any source for your first statement that "It's absolutely working so well because they are NYT" other than your gut feeling?

6 year experience working in ad-tech on different projects.

>Just because other sites are smaller doesn't mean they can't do it or work together.

Well, try to get a slice of Procter&Gamble or Volkswagen ad budget being a small guy and not having any targeting.

> they just hire Google or any other ad network for that. They could do the same with non-targeted ads.

This is not how it works.

If you are a small site, you set a google or any other ad network tag on your site -- right.

After that, when someone visits your site, you initiate a call to these ad networks with user cookie.

If this user is identified as known (say, male, 25-35 y.o., NY, was interested in Hi-Fi equipment) some advertiser may pay a lot to show an ad to this guy. 5$ CPM is not uncommon, and you may even get $10-20 from time to time.

If this user is totally anonymous and there are no advertisers interested in him, good luck getting even $0.5 CPM. Most probably impression will go unmonetized.

>About your edit: Yes, this is literally how advertising has always worked; you 'target' an entire audience, not an individual.

nope. in case of retargeting or even modern prospecting you do target individual, just as in example above.

If good portion of your audience is known to DMP's (Data Management Platform, basically tracking silos, google "Salesforce DMP" for example) and other ad-tech players, you will easily get x5 return on showing ads to them, as compared to anonymous users, all other things equal.

And this is how you make money being a small publisher on the internet these days.

Re: After GDPR, The New York Times cut off ad exchanges and kept growing ad revenue

#104

Post by tomjen3 » Wed, Jan 16, 2019, 2:49 PM UTC

YouKnowBetter wrote: post #86

MarkMc wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would be absolutely astounded if targeted ads did not provide significant long-term advantage to a big player like Google. How can it be that having intimate knowledge of someone would not allow you to sell them more stuff? John has a 10th wedding anniversary coming up. Mary is single and goes to the gym every day. Steve just got a promotion and likes the BMW 3 series. Michael is overweight but has just gone on a d…

> How can it be that having intimate knowledge of someone would not allow you to sell them more stuff? It allows you to sell more ads to the marketing people since it sounds very compelling. So there is your model. The fact that I am still shown ads for items of the complete opposite (football) team that I am clearly (online visible, on FB, in my gmails, from my google search history, from my chrome browsing habits)…

Google has probably put in you in the category interested in "sports", without giving it a second thought.

Re: After GDPR, The New York Times cut off ad exchanges and kept growing ad revenue

#105

Post by ehnto » Wed, Jan 16, 2019, 2:54 PM UTC

rock_hard wrote: post #61

MarkMc wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would be absolutely astounded if targeted ads did not provide significant long-term advantage to a big player like Google. How can it be that having intimate knowledge of someone would not allow you to sell them more stuff? John has a 10th wedding anniversary coming up. Mary is single and goes to the gym every day. Steve just got a promotion and likes the BMW 3 series. Michael is overweight but has just gone on a d…

You be surprised how much less sophisticated Googles and Facebooks ad targeting is! We are far away from a machine classifying you as being single and going to the gym every day or liking BMW and having gotten a promotion. Not that I don’t think we couldn’t get there...but today these system are far away from it! Just go to your Facebook ad settings to understand how primitive the information is they have about you.…

One thing I have wondered for a little while is how all these learning algorithms will handle change over time. A lot of my advertising is for things I may have liked perhaps 5 years ago, but no longer have anything to do with. It's also a bunch of super wrong things, like parenting, even though it also thinks I'm a single male who likes holidays, and skiing, even though it doesn't snow where I live and I've never even entertained the idea.

It's clearly confused, and so my wonder is how do they correct that over time? How do you un-scramble a scrambled machine learned profile? Can you even detect that it's gone awry?

Re: After GDPR, The New York Times cut off ad exchanges and kept growing ad revenue

#106

Post by buboard » Wed, Jan 16, 2019, 2:54 PM UTC

reitanqild wrote: post #68

buboard wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this logic (barely) works for blogs. if your game is an aquarium game, it doesn't mean that your users are only interested in aquarium cleaning products.

> if your game is an aquarium game, it doesn't mean that your users are only interested in aquarium cleaning products. Correct. On the other hand, the topic of the game is just one of the contexts. A trivial example: At least we can infer that the player likes to play games, so advertising for mobile games, discount gaming consoles etc might be a better match.

yeah but the category "plays games" is too broad, rivaled by "reads blogs". And after the users have seen enough of gaming ads (and not responded) they are offeered the bottom of the barrel: russian brides (true story).

If we are going to go down the road of doing increasingly detailed ad customization as publishers, we will have come full circle to reinventing targeted ads by another name.

Re: After GDPR, The New York Times cut off ad exchanges and kept growing ad revenue

#107

Post by distances » Wed, Jan 16, 2019, 2:54 PM UTC

rusk wrote: post #65

MarkMc wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would be absolutely astounded if targeted ads did not provide significant long-term advantage to a big player like Google. How can it be that having intimate knowledge of someone would not allow you to sell them more stuff? John has a 10th wedding anniversary coming up. Mary is single and goes to the gym every day. Steve just got a promotion and likes the BMW 3 series. Michael is overweight but has just gone on a d…

My experience of targeted advertising is Amazon trying to sell me things I’ve already bought ...

And Booking pushing advertisements for the exact same hotel I've just checked on their service. I can't understand how that would seem like a good idea to anyone.

Re: After GDPR, The New York Times cut off ad exchanges and kept growing ad revenue

#108

Post by ehnto » Wed, Jan 16, 2019, 2:56 PM UTC

Sharlin wrote: post #99

codq wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps there's some kind of Baader-Meinhof phenomena going on here. When a targeted ad is creepily accurate and on point, people flip and think that the machines have figured us out. But the ads that are irrelevant just fly by us without a hit. The one-out-of-a-hundred ads that get it right, likely due to an ad targeter's lucky strike, are the ones that get under our skin, and the only ones we really notice.

But do people generally think that targeted ads are especially accurate? If anything, I’d think people are bothered by all that privacy invasion and still getting completely irrelevant ads!

God forbid you accidentally click on the wrong product in a re-targetting carousel. Now "the advertising complex" thinks I'm super into motorbikes. I don't even have a license.

Re: After GDPR, The New York Times cut off ad exchanges and kept growing ad revenue

#109

Post by delinka » Wed, Jan 16, 2019, 2:56 PM UTC

rusk wrote: post #65

MarkMc wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would be absolutely astounded if targeted ads did not provide significant long-term advantage to a big player like Google. How can it be that having intimate knowledge of someone would not allow you to sell them more stuff? John has a 10th wedding anniversary coming up. Mary is single and goes to the gym every day. Steve just got a promotion and likes the BMW 3 series. Michael is overweight but has just gone on a d…

My experience of targeted advertising is Amazon trying to sell me things I’ve already bought ...

This seems to be ingrained deeper than targeted ads. Orders give me the option to "buy it again" for things that I only ever need one of.

Re: After GDPR, The New York Times cut off ad exchanges and kept growing ad revenue

#110

Post by JCharante » Wed, Jan 16, 2019, 2:57 PM UTC

pavlov wrote: post #36

josefresco wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think what you're referring to is different or more advanced. Simple remarketing involves putting a tracking pixel on your website, and then your ads show only to those users on another platform such as Facebook. It usually (on the base level) does not include purchase history.

I think that's the exact problem to which GP poster is referring: tracking only knows about URLs visited but not purchase history. A visit to the product page "vacuum cleaner WheezyMatic 3K" will get you flagged as interested in that product and you'll get shown ads for it — even though you already bought it on the original site.

Maybe the ads could have content along the lines of "The WheezyMatic 3K: The Best On The Planet" and so when someone who already has bought the product sees those ads, they're instead reassured about their purchasing decision.