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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

#51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Domains have nothing to do with the businesses and vendors behind them. The vast majority of publishers don't have the resources to run their own adtech infrastructure. 1st-party serving won't change anything with regards to chain of custody in ad content but the new regulations should at least make the chain shorter and more restricted in abilities.

If the malware comes from a domain they own, it is their fault. If they can't be bothered to handle their own ads or pick a better ad vendor, they can pay up for the damage they served up to my computer.

That's not how any of it works, as I just explained. Continue to use your adblocker or avoid sites that run ads.

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

#52

> 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?

I imagine it’s not that it’s harder to target whether someone is using Safari, but that it’s harder/less effective to try targeting demographics within the group of Safari users.

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

#53
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Telecoms like Verizon and ATT have their own adtech companies and were doing this, but regulations and encryption technologies have disabled most of it.

IPv6 with probabilistic modeling comes pretty close though.

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

#55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thanks for the explanation. The supply has become crappier while demand stayed the same.

Demand has decreased. The curve of constant demand with decreased supply pushes the price higher.

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

#56
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Not over HTTPS they aren't.

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

#57

> 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?

Pricing on targeted ads is linked to confidence that a person will perform an action (buy, sign-up, etc). This is a function of the "richness" of data collected -- does the data about you contain demographics, engagement, behavior, so forth.

So a shoe company may pay a lot for a "male/18-35/basketball-fan/shoe-blog-reader". But Safari does not easily allow for that richness of data to be collected, so the price is low.

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

#58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thanks for the explanation. The supply has become crappier while demand stayed the same.

Supply and demand have stayed the same in quantity, but the quality of both has dropped severely. It's the same equilibrium but at a much lower price point.

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

#59

> 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?

In theory a "user" is more valuable the more you know about them because the extra info lets you better target them for higher response rates. Better privacy means you know less about the user, meaning you are less likely to bid high for that user's eyeballs, meaning the user is worth less ad spend.

The actual story is a little more nuanced: when you target an ad, you are usually bidding for users in an auction. You're generally willing to pay more for more specific filters because you're more confident of a higher response rate.

In ecosystems with a lot of data on every user, specific filters actually work, so you end up with higher bids on fewer users, which should drive the average spend per user up without necessarily driving total spend up. With less data, you have to use less specific filters, so you end up with lower bids on more users, which drives average spend per user down without necessarily driving total spend down.

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

#60
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,…

Apple is not willing to understand the whole dynamic in the ads market, including publishers trying to game with the system all time. I've observed the worst on what those publishers can do and am pretty sure about that they will find out a "creative" way to make up for the revenue loss. Of course, I'm not saying this will be user-friendly; publishers tend to be more "creative" when it tries to rather exploit users.
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