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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

#261

Post by guareber »

AznHisoka wrote: post #158
faizanbhat wrote: post #151

As someone who worked in ad tech for half a decade, I fail to understand the fuss about cookie based targeting. We're speaking of databases mapping data to random numbers stored in a file that can easily be deleted. The real issue is ad targeting by a handful of large companies that have personally identifiable information. It's not like cookie based targeting is very effective either. It's very difficult to get cook…

What if I want to target women who recently bought Chanel perfume? How would I go about doing that unless I do cookie targeting?

Get them to sign up to your mailing list and send them an email ad. Anything else should be off limits.

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

#262

Post by labawi »

dorgo wrote: post #246
zwaps wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You probably would be well advised to read up on the economics of consumer differentiation and price discrimination. All of today's ad-tech is set up and developed for that purpose. Whether overtly or covertly, it is the singular purpose, because the case is so clear cut: We are distributing the share of the pie between companies and consumers. It is therefore clear why people aware of basic economics consider agress…

Why is price discrimination bad? It is about charging the highest price the customer is still ok with. Sure, if a merchant knows how badly you want his product he can increase the price. But, on the other hand, he will decrease the price for somebody who wouldn't pay the high price. It's like bargaining on a fair. A method to determine a price suitable for both sides - instead of charging every customer the same pric…

Sometimes price discrimination may be overall good, but it easily leads to price gouging and I believe there a laws against it, for a good reason.

Should I pay 1.2x, 3x or 100x as much today, just because you know I desperately need the product/service today vs. yesterday?

What happens when I get (wrongly) classified as rich and now can't afford a normal life?

Should medication cost if it is for life threatening issues? Should basic necessities cost more because my house burned down/got robbed/lost my luggage/whatever and you know I have money?

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

#263

Post by guareber »

repsilat wrote: post #110
munchbunny wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'…

There's also a countervailing force, depending on the market. First an example that supports what everyone is talking about: * User X loves cola Pepsi and Coke both bid more to serve their cola subscription services or whatever. Ad price goes up. Now add more data: * User is a Coca Cola fanatic. Even though this is the same user, the ad price goes down , because Pepsi doesn't want to bid. Now add another Pepsi fanati…

I think this is only on fake-scenario. In a real DMP, the user would be "loves cola","loves coca cola","loves fizzy drinks","drinks sugared drinks", and about 30 other related segments, and one of those would definitely sneak by.

Humans create audience segments, and it's in the interest of dataset producers to have each user be a part of the maximum number of members they can be to maximize monetisation.

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

#264

Post by guareber »

Razengan wrote: post #201

Sometimes I wonder if the entire ads racket isn't a case of the emperor with no clothes. Has anyone here actually had a meaningful increase in users and revenue by using targeted-ad services, that they couldn't achieve by more organic methods (e.g. posting on places like Reddit, word of mouth)?

Did a side hustle in a startup for a while, and for us a conversion was a user signup. Facebook ads were _really_ cost effective. Every time we ran a small batch of ads at our audience segment (professionals of a specific discipline in a couple of geos) we'd get a lot of signups, way more than by any organic means (which also have a cost, just not always translated to cash).

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

#265

Post by panpanna »

AsusFan wrote: post #244
panpanna wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate tracking like everyone else but what you wrote is just pure FUD. Apple forces Firefox/chrome to use their crippled engine but that has nothing to do with the parts that do the tracking. For the record, Firefox has built-in anti tracker which is enabled by default and they do that on all platforms. And don't forgot the privacy enhancements Samsung added to their browser years ago.

> For the record, Firefox has built-in anti tracker which is enabled by default and they do that on all platforms Firefox's anti-tracking protection doesn't block google analytics by default. They only block "third party" cookies - which in practice translates as: Google's competition. The fox knows better than to bite the hand that feeds it.

Do you have a source for that?

Firefox docs and disconnect don't say anything about this

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/enhanced-tracking-prote...

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

#266

Post by soup10 »

danaris wrote: post #165
snowwrestler wrote: post #150

> Only about 9% of Safari users on an iPhone allow outside companies to track where they go on the web > In comparison, 79% of people who use Google’s Chrome browser allow advertisers to track their browsing habits on mobile devices through cookies. Something to keep in mind the next time you see someone from Google complaining about how Apple won’t allow Google Chrome to run natively on the iPhone.

Apple will let whatever browsers want to run on iOS. Chrome is, in fact, on there. They just won't let them using any rendering engine but WebKit—and this restriction long predates Google's current level of draconian dominance in that sphere. I don't believe the tracking settings are tied to the rendering engine, so I would be surprised if Chrome on iOS has settings that different to Chrome on macOS in that regard.

So they allow WebKit reskins, that's not the same thing as allowing competing browsers.

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

#267

Post by guareber »

kevindong wrote: post #90

> A Criteo spokeswoman said that by making the ad-blocking feature automatic in Safari, Apple “does not truly promote choice for the users of its browser.” That's an... interesting take on the situation.

Everything Criteo says is just terrible. They're about as borderline legal as it gets. I'm 100% expecting them to get massive GDPR related fines in 2020.

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

#268

Post by tempguy9999 »

faizanbhat wrote: post #151

As someone who worked in ad tech for half a decade, I fail to understand the fuss about cookie based targeting. We're speaking of databases mapping data to random numbers stored in a file that can easily be deleted. The real issue is ad targeting by a handful of large companies that have personally identifiable information. It's not like cookie based targeting is very effective either. It's very difficult to get cook…

Let's rephrase that

> I fail to understand the fuss about cookie based targeting

...because he...

> worked in ad tech for half a decade,

To continue

> It's not like cookie based targeting is very effective either

Then why's it being done? Because it doesn't work, or because it does?

> Instead most companies do the bare minimum and try to make a guess that is slightly better than a coin flip

Uh huh. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_advertising

"In 2016, Internet advertising revenues in the United States surpassed those of cable television and broadcast television. In 2017, Internet advertising revenues in the United States totaled $83.0 billion, a 14% increase over the $72.50 billion in revenues in 2016"

That's the bare minimum. Right.

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

#269

Post by panpanna »

acdha wrote: post #257
panpanna wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate tracking like everyone else but what you wrote is just pure FUD. Apple forces Firefox/chrome to use their crippled engine but that has nothing to do with the parts that do the tracking. For the record, Firefox has built-in anti tracker which is enabled by default and they do that on all platforms. And don't forgot the privacy enhancements Samsung added to their browser years ago.

Using “FUD” in one sentence and calling WebKit “crippled” in the next is not a good way to establish yourself as a rational analyst. Firefox is my primary browser but I don’t think advocacy like that is helpful.

3rd party browsers are forced to use a webkit engine instead of their own. By any definition, this adds a severe limitation => crippled.

I also think (I could be wrong) safari has access to a slightly different webkit engine than third party browsers.

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

#270

Post by adgasf »

labawi wrote: post #262
dorgo wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is price discrimination bad? It is about charging the highest price the customer is still ok with. Sure, if a merchant knows how badly you want his product he can increase the price. But, on the other hand, he will decrease the price for somebody who wouldn't pay the high price. It's like bargaining on a fair. A method to determine a price suitable for both sides - instead of charging every customer the same pric…

Sometimes price discrimination may be overall good, but it easily leads to price gouging and I believe there a laws against it, for a good reason. Should I pay 1.2x, 3x or 100x as much today, just because you know I desperately need the product/service today vs. yesterday? What happens when I get (wrongly) classified as rich and now can't afford a normal life? Should medication cost if it is for life threatening issu…

The argument against that is that if sellers cannot increase prices in times of crisis they have no incentive to stockpile for such events. This leads to shortages and even higher prices on an unregulated black-market.

I'm not saying that I buy this line of reasoning, but there's the counter-argument.

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