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Apple’s Ad-Targeting Crackdown Shakes Up Ad Market

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Re: Apple’s Ad-Targeting Crackdown Shakes Up Ad Market

#31

Post by manigandham »

signal11 wrote: post #17
jedberg wrote: post #7

I was talking to my friend about this the other day. He's an executive at an ad company (not Google). He had an interesting take on this: Yes, it is in fact working and breaks targeting and retargeting. But what is the outcome of that? The CPMs (how much the website makes) are 10x higher for re/targeted ads. So as they stop working, do you think the website will cut their revenue? No, they'll either put up a paywall,…

I don’t get targeted ads. They’re quite dumb. If I look at product X, ads for product X follow me around the web, which isn’t that useful because I’ve already done my research and am not quite ready to hit “buy” no matter how many ads you show. Ads for similar products I might be interested in, but I’ve not seen too many of those served up by these ad networks. Untargeted ads at least might show me something new and…

That's not how they work. What you're seeing is the issue with not having data shared between networks and the resulting poor targeting.

Retargeting has better results than any other type of targeting but unfortunately there's a gap between the ecommerce systems knowing you bought something and the ad networks used to market those ads. It's easy to drop a pixel and say you looked at a product, but it's much harder to let that same network know that you're no longer interested for whatever reason.

Add in complexities like multiple devices, browsers, ecommerce stores, payment methods, and it only gets harder. This is usually why retargeting is much better with smaller direct-to-consumer companies which tend to have a single customer database and payment method to sync from.

Re: Apple’s Ad-Targeting Crackdown Shakes Up Ad Market

#32

Post by chipotle_coyote »

jedberg wrote: post #7

I was talking to my friend about this the other day. He's an executive at an ad company (not Google). He had an interesting take on this: Yes, it is in fact working and breaks targeting and retargeting. But what is the outcome of that? The CPMs (how much the website makes) are 10x higher for re/targeted ads. So as they stop working, do you think the website will cut their revenue? No, they'll either put up a paywall,…

I'm not nearly as anti-ad as many people I've interacted with on HN and Twitter. I like the idea of getting free-to-me content supported by ads. I resisted running ad blockers for a very, very long time.

But.

The ads just got bigger. And bigger. And more intrusive. They approached 50% of the visible content (and that's on the desktop, not mobile). They played more video. They played more music. They started blocking the content I was trying to read, all in an effort to get me to click.

So I gave in. I run an ad-blocker, too.

Your friend inadvertently pinned what I personally think is the original sin of online advertising: measuring an ad's success through the number of clicks it gets. Ads in other mediums aren't designed with the idea that the only successful ad is one that makes you go AAAAH MUST GO BUY RIGHT NOW RIGHT NOW DROP EVERYTHING AAAAAAAA... but 20 years ago, some dingdong decided that because it was possible to measure "direct engagement" with ads on the web in a way you couldn't with TV or print, it was appropriate to measure ads that way.

Think of how different the web might be if, instead, we'd just sold ads by the number of visits to an article the ad is on... or better yet, by the number of visits to the web site, period. "But that's not an exact measure! We can't tell if it's really worth what we're being charged!" You also have no way of knowing whether or not that full-page color ad in the New Yorker is "really worth" what you're being charged, but you know what? You got along fine that way for decades. You did. Your business was fine.

Re: Apple’s Ad-Targeting Crackdown Shakes Up Ad Market

#33

Post by manigandham »

turdnagel wrote: post #30
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #28

> The cost of reaching Safari users has fallen over 60% in the past two years, according to data from ad tech firm Rubicon Project. Meanwhile ad prices on Google’s Chrome browser have risen slightly. This is a great metric for privacy.

I’m confused by this. If Safari users are harder to target, and demand for targeting Safari users hasn’t changed, shouldn’t the price go up?

The demand for highly-targeted users is what drives up prices. Since Safari users all look the same now and can't be highly targeted, they have lost that high-end demand and prices have fallen to generic display rates.

Re: Apple’s Ad-Targeting Crackdown Shakes Up Ad Market

#34

Post by [deleted] »

turdnagel wrote: post #30
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #28

> The cost of reaching Safari users has fallen over 60% in the past two years, according to data from ad tech firm Rubicon Project. Meanwhile ad prices on Google’s Chrome browser have risen slightly. This is a great metric for privacy.

I’m confused by this. If Safari users are harder to target, and demand for targeting Safari users hasn’t changed, shouldn’t the price go up?

[deleted]

Re: Apple’s Ad-Targeting Crackdown Shakes Up Ad Market

#35

Post by wnevets »

turdnagel wrote: post #30
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #28

> The cost of reaching Safari users has fallen over 60% in the past two years, according to data from ad tech firm Rubicon Project. Meanwhile ad prices on Google’s Chrome browser have risen slightly. This is a great metric for privacy.

I’m confused by this. If Safari users are harder to target, and demand for targeting Safari users hasn’t changed, shouldn’t the price go up?

Me too.

Maybe its because the data that can be collected about safari users isn't worth as much.

Re: Apple’s Ad-Targeting Crackdown Shakes Up Ad Market

#36

Post by jedberg »

dave5104 wrote: post #20
jedberg wrote: post #7

I was talking to my friend about this the other day. He's an executive at an ad company (not Google). He had an interesting take on this: Yes, it is in fact working and breaks targeting and retargeting. But what is the outcome of that? The CPMs (how much the website makes) are 10x higher for re/targeted ads. So as they stop working, do you think the website will cut their revenue? No, they'll either put up a paywall,…

> And those ads will frustrate you even more, because they aren't targeted to you. I would have thought that the frustrating part of an advertisement is the presentation of the ad itself--not necessarily its content.

I actually find myself clicking on targeted ads occasionally because they are so relevant. In that sense, I'd say it's the content that makes it less frustrating.

Re: Apple’s Ad-Targeting Crackdown Shakes Up Ad Market

#37

Post by _bxg1 »

Let us not forget that Apple isn't doing this out of altruism, but 50% because it hurts their competitors and 50% because it makes their users happy. That said, being 50% motivated by making their users happy is more than can be said about Google or Facebook.

Edit: To be clear, I am an Apple customer and it's mainly on privacy grounds. I just like to keep realistic expectations about their present and future behavior, instead of buying into Tim Cook's rhetoric of idealism.

Re: Apple’s Ad-Targeting Crackdown Shakes Up Ad Market

#38

Post by jedberg »

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #32
jedberg wrote: post #7

I was talking to my friend about this the other day. He's an executive at an ad company (not Google). He had an interesting take on this: Yes, it is in fact working and breaks targeting and retargeting. But what is the outcome of that? The CPMs (how much the website makes) are 10x higher for re/targeted ads. So as they stop working, do you think the website will cut their revenue? No, they'll either put up a paywall,…

I'm not nearly as anti-ad as many people I've interacted with on HN and Twitter. I like the idea of getting free-to-me content supported by ads. I resisted running ad blockers for a very, very long time. But. The ads just got bigger. And bigger. And more intrusive. They approached 50% of the visible content (and that's on the desktop, not mobile). They played more video. They played more music. They started blocking…

> So I gave in. I run an ad-blocker, too.

Me too. I worked for a company that made almost all of it's revenue from advertising. It felt hypocritical to run an ad-blocker. But it just got so bad I had to do it.

I'm just worried about what will happen to the web for all the people who don't run ad-blockers. I care about them too, especially since they are the customers in a lot of cases, and if they go away from the web completely because it's so bad, what then?

> Think of how different the web might be if, instead, we'd just sold ads by the number of visits to an article the ad is on... or better yet, by the number of visits to the web site, period.

That's actually how many ads are sold. By CPM (cost per thousand impressions).

Re: Apple’s Ad-Targeting Crackdown Shakes Up Ad Market

#40

Post by paulmd »

manigandham wrote: post #18
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #5

How has this been so effective, when Panopticlick still says my Safari browser has "a nearly-unique fingerprint"? (And based on what I've read from other users's experience, this is normal.)

It's mobile Safari that is hard to fingerprint and getting harder with each version. Most adtech still runs off cookies to share data and store identifiers and those have been basically eradicated. Having to fingerprint every pageview also creates latency and still isn't that deterministic so everything will need to shift to probabilistic and contextual targeting. That's a hard change to make for most legacy networks…

Aren't cellular providers tagging connections with unique identifiers to make targeting possible?
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