AdTech Sucks
lockwood.dev
AdTech Sucks
1–10 of 158 posts
Re: AdTech Sucks
#2Yeah, it sucks for advertisers, too.
From another active thread concerning the ad industry:
> Using Google retargeting ads, less than 5% of desktop traffic goes on to click anywhere on my website. And it's worse for mobile than on desktops.
Re: AdTech Sucks
#3Yeah, it sucks for advertisers, too. From another active thread concerning the ad industry: > Using Google retargeting ads, less than 5% of desktop traffic goes on to click anywhere on my website. And it's worse for mobile than on desktops. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20124231
You mean it sucks for you. How can you speak for all advertisers, especially based on a sample size of 200 clicks?
You have to diagnose what could be off on your end before making extreme blanket statements.
These ad systems are tools, and tools only work as well as how you use them.
Re: AdTech Sucks
#4Online ads seem to perform poorly and, for larger companies with brand recognition and large budgets, almost no lift. I've been under the impression that adtech is a bubble, but I'm not an expert in the space.
Re: AdTech Sucks
#5"""The systemic issue occurs because marketers and AdTech companies unreflectively increase surveillance and data collection in the hopes of increasing media attribution. Even the most trivial data point, the most granular site visit or location data, stored on a person-by-person basis, could conceivably be used to demonstrate that a customer may have come into contact with one of your campaigns."""
I'm genuinely intrigued by AdTech. It exists, but no one likes it -- i.e. before internet ads --> TiVo, internet ads --> ad blockers. I understand it can attract talent due to profits and the engineering + data problems, but is that the main attraction for developers? If you worked in adTech, what attracted you to it? Is there a hope you could make more ethical or privacy aware or () ad tech systems?
Does adTech even work? Is there an active campaign somewhere / grassroots movement to "boycott" recruitment to ad tech companies?
(Just trying to get a better understanding here, ad tech has become symbiotic with the current state of the internet, so I would like to better understand it.)
Re: AdTech Sucks
#6"""The systemic issue occurs because marketers and AdTech companies unreflectively increase surveillance and data collection in the hopes of increasing media attribution. Even the most trivial data point, the most granular site visit or location data, stored on a person-by-person basis, could conceivably be used to demonstrate that a customer may have come into contact with one of your campaigns.""" I'm genuinely int…
Author here.
I was attracted by the money, but also the exciting technical challenges. AdTech had all the largest datasets! At the time I entered the industry I wasn't really thinking about the ethical concerns. I just didn't think those issues would bother me as much as they ended up bothering me.
Re: AdTech Sucks
#7"""The systemic issue occurs because marketers and AdTech companies unreflectively increase surveillance and data collection in the hopes of increasing media attribution. Even the most trivial data point, the most granular site visit or location data, stored on a person-by-person basis, could conceivably be used to demonstrate that a customer may have come into contact with one of your campaigns.""" I'm genuinely int…
Author here. I was attracted by the money, but also the exciting technical challenges. AdTech had all the largest datasets! At the time I entered the industry I wasn't really thinking about the ethical concerns. I just didn't think those issues would bother me as much as they ended up bothering me.
Thank you for sharing your perspective and authoring the article. Is there growing sentiment like yours amongst colleagues and peers in ad tech?
Re: AdTech Sucks
#8The example of the pizza delivery selling the personal details of their customers is precisely why GDPR has value.
People have been dismissing it as being unfriendly to startups. As a software developer I totally get the complaints, but as an Internet user I couldn't care less.
You could say that the free market will adjust itself when consumers will figure out the damage and learn to protect themselves by choosing better alternatives. But there's no way to protect oneself. For example in the pizza delivery case, there's often no way to know that your address and phone will be sold to third parties, unless it's against the law to do so without you giving explicit consent.
Re: AdTech Sucks
#9Yeah, it sucks for advertisers, too. From another active thread concerning the ad industry: > Using Google retargeting ads, less than 5% of desktop traffic goes on to click anywhere on my website. And it's worse for mobile than on desktops. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20124231
5% ain't bad. Depending on site content ctr could be as low as 0,5%. Rates have been dropping for ages.
Re: AdTech Sucks
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
Author here. I was attracted by the money, but also the exciting technical challenges. AdTech had all the largest datasets! At the time I entered the industry I wasn't really thinking about the ethical concerns. I just didn't think those issues would bother me as much as they ended up bothering me.
Thank you for sharing your perspective and authoring the article. Is there growing sentiment like yours amongst colleagues and peers in ad tech?
I'm not sure since I've been out for a couple years, but at the time I'd often have conversations with marketers where I'd come away wondering how they could be so oblivious to the ethical concerns in what they were asking for. I do think as time goes on, more and more people are becoming aware of the issues, but I see that uniformly across society rather than in tech.