AdTech Sucks

Having worked for an ad network: it doesn't matter how good your recommendation algorithms are if all you have in your ad campaign pool is shitty diet and car ads.

In terms of security breaches, this maybe SHOULD be true, but isn't.

In terms of bad feature development, it's a little melodramatic. I'm not saying you can't misinterpret something so bad it causes something catastrophic, just that it's more likely to be a couple percent drop in some subset of traffic for some cohort. Not the worst thing.

> The default shouldn't be collecting and warehousing everything, the default should be, "when in doubt, throw it out."

We have a lot of things where I work that I wish we were collecting now, not because we could use it now, but because we could use it later. And you can't go back in time and get it (usually).

Throwing data away is easy.

I wish I could have the foresight, the prescience to only store what I know I'll need.

X is just the content of the ad and is usually entirely advertiser-defined. Some ad networks will allow you to do some fancy stuff to help determine the best phrasing or arrangement or whatever of your ad.

Z can be in dollars per impression, per click, or per conversion. An impression is one person being shown an ad one time. A click is a person clicking an ad. And a conversion is advertiser-defined but is usually someone buying the product being advertised. Bidding per click is the most common.

Then when a user loads a page with an ad on it, the ad network finds all campaigns that are eligible - meeting the criteria defined in Y. It then runs an "auction". It has to calculate which eligible advertiser is willing to pay the most for that potential impression. But not all advertisers are bidding per impression, so some prediction comes into play. If an advertiser bid per click, then the expected amount they will pay is the probability the user will click multiplied by the price if they do click. Their probability of clicking is often called CTR which stands for "click-through-rate" so that's where the bid * CTR comes from. Usually an ML model takes what is known about the user, the ad, and the page, and predicts CTR. Similarly for conversion-based bids, it's bid * CTR * CVR, where CVR is "conversion rate". Whichever ad comes out with the highest result of this calculation is shown.

And so, I think that advertising is not the root cause, its consumerism, which has been anointed as this engine that drives positive economic growth under capitalism. And like any other macroeconomic theory it falls in this contradicting category of 'thats bullshit' and 'that totally makes sense'. "Studies show X" whoop-de-doo. Advertising simply enables consumerism, and the people who you're calling dickheads actually enable a TON of software developers to even have jobs. Where is all the tech we're building being used? To build websites to sell stuff. To build databases to store all this info, to build entertainment platforms to sell you more stuff, to build logistic systems to organize this useless selling of stuff, etc, etc. Unless you're somehow connected with selling things or otherwise generating economic activity, why would anyone pay you to build it?

Edit: Sorta off topic, but our little conversation reminded me of a quote from Lord Of War.

>Yuri Orlov : I don't want people dead, Agent Valentine. I don't put a gun to anybody's head and make them shoot. But shooting is better for business. But, I prefer people to fire my guns and miss. Just as long as they are firing. Can I go now?