Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AdTech Sucks

lockwood.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 158 posts

Re: AdTech Sucks

#61

Post by xixixao »

spectramax wrote: post #55
xixixao wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing you might want to think about: What role do the businesses that benefit from advertising revenue play. You're looking at advertising from the perspective of advertisers pushing themselves into your life, but have you asked yourself how they got that billboard onto the football stadium, that video in front of your favorite show, that page in your newspaper (whether digital or print). > Fuck advertisement. It…

"What role do the businesses that benefit from advertising revenue play" - They want to lure you into buying their products, at times by any means possible. Back in the day when advertisement was word of mouth and perhaps newspaper ads, the playing field included opinions of the people - it fostered increased quality of products because you wouldn't recommend a shit quality product to your friend. In modern society,…

You're still focusing on advertisers (I didn't make this clear enough). Think about the people owning the football stadium, the tv channel, the newspaper (they're likely advertisers themselves, but let's pretend for a moment they aren't).

Re: AdTech Sucks

#62

Post by [deleted] »

xixixao wrote: post #61
spectramax wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"What role do the businesses that benefit from advertising revenue play" - They want to lure you into buying their products, at times by any means possible. Back in the day when advertisement was word of mouth and perhaps newspaper ads, the playing field included opinions of the people - it fostered increased quality of products because you wouldn't recommend a shit quality product to your friend. In modern society,…

You're still focusing on advertisers (I didn't make this clear enough). Think about the people owning the football stadium, the tv channel, the newspaper (they're likely advertisers themselves, but let's pretend for a moment they aren't).

[deleted]

Re: AdTech Sucks

#63

Post by blub »

MarkMc wrote: post #54
asenna wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll give you a better example - I'm an English speaking guy consuming regular US content. I travel quite often and when I'm in non-english speaking places like Thailand, I see ads on Youtube(mobile) purely in Thai language. I use Google products extensively and Google most definitely knows I don't speak Thai. I mean it's almost ridiculous the number of Thai ads I've seen on Youtube. For a company that sophisticated…

This is exactly my experience. Go to Thailand, see ads in Thai. Go to France, see ads in French. Go to Indonesia, see ads in Indonesian. Google has paid thousands of engineers billions of dollars over 20 years and somehow they have failed on this very simple optimisation!

They're just optimizing for selling ad space instead of your satisfaction with the ads. You're just a pair of eyeballs to them, if even that.

Re: AdTech Sucks

#64

Post by DailyHN »

55555 wrote: post #56
DailyHN wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great returns? My only expectations is being able to believe real people are actually clicking the ads. Which I don't.

You realize the prices you pay per click or impression are set by a market, right? The crux of the problem is that other people are just better at advertising than you are. There's a lot of fraud but I'm tired of people on HN who are terrible at advertising saying that "ads don't work." It's like saying "code doesn't work". It's just nonsense. What is your website/landing page URL and what did your ad say?

Maybe more focus should be on the fraud instead of the people who are wondering if ads are worth pursuing because of having to set aside a part of their budget to that fraud.

And considering the pervasiveness of tracking, why isn't the fraud better tracked?

Re: AdTech Sucks

#65

Post by kasey_junk »

dpflan wrote: post #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 int…

Building systems that support millions of requests per second, that have actual real time constraints, that generate tons of data and operate in global networks. That produces a lot of interesting technical challenges.

AdTech absolutely works in some sense. Advertisers are fairly savvy about being able track improvements in sales of the things they are advertising and they have seen improvements using digital advertising. Does all the tracking/segmentation/attribution voodoo work? Does it make up for all the fraud and middlemen? I think those are open questions.

As for a privacy aware ad tech system, I think it’s fairly trivial to do that with something like RTB/open ecosystems. The problem there is that its a low margin business and the race to the bottom doesn’t incentivize it. People operating in that space are competing with Facebook and Google who obliterate the privacy veil & dominate the landscape.

Re: AdTech Sucks

#66

Post by navigatesol »

55555 wrote: post #56
DailyHN wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great returns? My only expectations is being able to believe real people are actually clicking the ads. Which I don't.

You realize the prices you pay per click or impression are set by a market, right? The crux of the problem is that other people are just better at advertising than you are. There's a lot of fraud but I'm tired of people on HN who are terrible at advertising saying that "ads don't work." It's like saying "code doesn't work". It's just nonsense. What is your website/landing page URL and what did your ad say?

>You realize the prices you pay per click or impression are set by a market, right?

>There's a lot of fraud

Makes no sense.

Everytime AdTech comes up on HN, there's inevitably people who defend advertising with "you're not doing it right". Sorry, but the industry is a cesspool.

Re: AdTech Sucks

#67

Post by DailyHN »

bduerst wrote: post #57
DailyHN wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it hard to believe that 97.5% of people can click a link to a website and not even accidentally click something on that website. I'm not referring to real conversions , where yes, skills in marketing and using the tools does make all the difference. All I'm saying is that I paid for 200 clicks that appear to not even have real people clicking anywhere at all.

Only you know how you set up your ads. Did you use the right keyword targeting? Location settings? Is your ad copy relevant to what you're actually selling or even to your website? Does your website have clear CTAs and copy? What is considered your conversion goal? Are you advertising in a popular market? Have you tried optimized with A/B testing for any of the above?

Retargeting + content keyword + location targeting.

That is, people that have visited my site in the past(with separate ad groups to test "expanded audiences"), currently visiting another site with the target keywords, from a targeted location.

And ads are generic branding and go to the homepage.

Conversion goal: simply clicking anything at all.

Re: AdTech Sucks

#68

Post by fermienrico »

iamnothere wrote: post #45
spectramax wrote: post #27

Is there a "pull" rather push aspect to advertisement? Sort of a trade-show equivalent of digital advertisement? Issues with pushing ads down my throat are as follows: 1. I don't want to buy another Sony XM3 headphones. I just fucking bought them and I am seeing more ads of the same thing. 2. Even if I saw ads for relevant accessories, say, I bought an iPhone and I am seeing ads for phone cases; I don't want to see t…

> However, when I am searching for a pressure cooker, it would be great to go to a centralized repository of ads and look through who markets this sort of thing the best and may be have some objective reviews along with it. The Wirecutter used to be pretty good for this, until the NYT bought it. It's still OK now, but it feels like that the pool of products being reviewed in each category is smaller than it once was.…

Agree, you can't trust reviews anymore. 10 years ago I would go on Amazon and I can trust a 5 star product. Now a days, any product is between 4 and 5 stars. The dynamic range literally is 4.0, 4.5, 5.0.

Look at Japanese restaurant review site called Tabelog. Anything above 3 is good. 3.5 is excelltent. 4.0 is rare, probably expensive. 4.5 is michelin star category, mostly sushi places. I've never seen a 5.0 rated restaurant on Tabelog.

Re: AdTech Sucks

#69

Post by navigatesol »

omarchowdhury wrote: post #30
DailyHN wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it hard to believe that 97.5% of people can click a link to a website and not even accidentally click something on that website. I'm not referring to real conversions , where yes, skills in marketing and using the tools does make all the difference. All I'm saying is that I paid for 200 clicks that appear to not even have real people clicking anywhere at all.

No doubt, there is fraud in the system. If you want to be successful in using these ad platforms for your business, you will have to accept that as a fact of life. What you need to do is to exclude bad placements/websites from your campaign. But even before that, you have to see if your ads + landing page are compelling, or you'll just waste a ton of money.

>But even before that, you have to see if your ads + landing page are compelling, or you'll just waste a ton of money.

And how do you determine that, ex ante?

Re: AdTech Sucks

#70

Post by StreamBright »

spectramax wrote: post #27

Is there a "pull" rather push aspect to advertisement? Sort of a trade-show equivalent of digital advertisement? Issues with pushing ads down my throat are as follows: 1. I don't want to buy another Sony XM3 headphones. I just fucking bought them and I am seeing more ads of the same thing. 2. Even if I saw ads for relevant accessories, say, I bought an iPhone and I am seeing ads for phone cases; I don't want to see t…

Could not agree more. The pull approach of ad would be great.

- much less CO2 production

- much less chance of malware / virus spreading

- much higher accuracy

- the web would be usable again without ad filters

Post reply on HN