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Why I Work on Ads

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Re: Why I Work on Ads

#761

Post by kelnos »

imron wrote: post #628
filoleg wrote: post #574

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I keep reading on HN, Facebook ad network ads (which includes Instagram) are by far the best and most precise in terms of targeting, it doesn't even get close. And from my anecdotal experiences, I have to agree with both you and what I see on HN in that regard. Not only they get the advertisers right up my alley, they even get the exact products I want to click on. For a specific example: I don't get easily…

> and I have no kids According to their algorithm, you do now.

Which is crazy, but often does happen. I have a nephew and niece, so I've bought baby / small-child stuff, but mainly just around major holidays and their birthdays. And yet I still get plenty of random product suggestions on Amazon for kid-related products, even during the 95% of the year that I'm not looking for that stuff.

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#762

Post by DistressedDrone »

katzgrau wrote: post #655
mediaman wrote: post #645

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the interesting things about advertising is that nobody really knows if it works, and there's a growing body of evidence that it largely doesn't work. We are sold on the idea that they work, because someone clicks this ad, we track them, they buy the product, and we attribute the sale to that ad. But we don't know whether the customer would have bought anyway. And some research suggests that, for the most part…

Digital marketing performance is increasingly measurable and there's more data than ever proving that it can be extremely effective. You can certainly waste a lot of money doing it too. Getting the right message in front of the right user at the right time is a lot harder than people think it is. The above is where there's a lot of smoke and mirrors in ad tech. But for advertising as a whole, it's not a massive indus…

> But for advertising as a whole, it's not a massive industry because it doesn't work.

Though I don't doubt that you are right on the whole, this is a poor argument; homeopathy and other snake-oil are a massive industry as well.

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#763

Post by shkkmo »

joshuamorton wrote: post #746
futureshock wrote: post #716

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a very important piece you're missing here and once you get it, it's hard to see the world in the same way. A product you pay for doesn't care how often you use it. The tennis racket sits there. It doesn't matter how much you use it, that's your choice. A product you pay for with your attention has a voracious appetite for your attention. The more you use it, the more valuable it is to the company that made i…

This is still ultimately true with things you subscribe to though. Netflix vies for your attention even though you pay directly with $$, because if another streaming service takes more of your attention, you'll pay for it (potentially instead).

Not really, Netflix definitely wants to have you use their platform frequently so you value it enough to keep paying for it. But this is balanced against the cost of making sure you don't run out of content and cancel anyway. They also pay a bit more for bandwidth and servers if you watch a lot.

So while Netflix wants all your TV time, they derive no extra benefits if all your time us TV time. This is absolutely not true of advertising supported services that make more from you the more time you spend.

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#764

Post by meowface »

kelnos wrote: post #753
meowface wrote: post #713

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least you're getting something out of it when it isn't ads, though. If it's a game (like Candy Crush, mentioned in another comment), at least you're getting some tiny dopamine hit, no matter how repetitive and empty. For social media, at least you're getting that slight bit of humor or outrage bait. I don't like these things at all, but they're something . With an ad, you're solely siphoning off a portion of my in…

I despise ads, but I think paying for a stimulating, informative article (for example) with an ad view is inherently less destructive than paying for a meaningless, empty dopamine hit, or manufactured outrage.

In that case I'd rather subscribe to/pay the author directly. (Who's to say an ad impression on some company's website will even help the author in any way? Maybe there's a chance it could indirectly, or maybe there's a layoff or pay cut planned soon anyway.)

For that and several other reasons, I strongly prefer independent solo journalists (or very small independent self-operating teams) rather than ones that work for publications. I think Substack and Patreon are far better solutions here than advertising is, for example.

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#765

Post by ploxiln »

katzgrau wrote: post #655
mediaman wrote: post #645

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the interesting things about advertising is that nobody really knows if it works, and there's a growing body of evidence that it largely doesn't work. We are sold on the idea that they work, because someone clicks this ad, we track them, they buy the product, and we attribute the sale to that ad. But we don't know whether the customer would have bought anyway. And some research suggests that, for the most part…

Digital marketing performance is increasingly measurable and there's more data than ever proving that it can be extremely effective. You can certainly waste a lot of money doing it too. Getting the right message in front of the right user at the right time is a lot harder than people think it is. The above is where there's a lot of smoke and mirrors in ad tech. But for advertising as a whole, it's not a massive indus…

> Digital marketing performance is increasingly measurable

Yes, I believe this is true. But also, I've heard that payouts per impression are going down precipitously. Desperate news sites are chock full of heavy ads because each impression pays less and less. Popular Youtube channels increasingly run their own integrated promotional content instead of depending on youtube ad revenue which keeps falling, even as viewership rises.

It's reasonable to suspect that as ad performance becomes perfectly measurable, payouts to content creators will asymptotically approach zero, because most ads don't work. Consumers spend most of their time looking at ads that don't work at all. That the occasional well crafted and placed ad does work isn't much consolation.

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#766

Post by kelnos »

bigyikes wrote: post #699
propogandist wrote: post #691

Earlier quoted context omitted.

be aware of the conversations you have in a 24hr to 48hr period, see if "targeted" ads appear in your feed, which relate to things shared in those conversations. I've seen things go from saying things in a conversation to targeted advert on Twitter, for example, in under 1hr routinely (although not always). Many of my peers have reported the same. While I've reproduced this on multiple devices (Android + iPhone) over…

I still don’t believe audio surveillance exists at this scale, and I still haven’t seen any evidence that these events are anything but coincidence. It seems to me that Facebook is extremely good at targeting me with ads (via Instagram) for products I might be interested in. I’m also much more likely to talk about products I’m interested in. I’m also much more likely to notice the spooky scenarios where the ads match…

> I still haven’t seen any evidence that these events are anything but coincidence

My feeling here is that it's just like when someone in your family buys a particular make/model of car, you start noticing the same car on the road and are surprised that you never noticed how many of them there are.

That same ad for a set of Bose headphones might show up in your feed once a week, but one of those days you just happen to have a conversation about headphones with a friend, and it feels weird.

The paranoia in me sometimes wants to believe that my phone is listening to me all the time and is extracting ad keywords from everything I say, but I have a hard time figuring out how it would work.

Uploading voice clips, even using a good compressor like Opus, would still be noticeable. Maybe not by me, personally, but someone would have noticed that by now. Doing on-device voice recognition is possible (uploads of compressed text might not be noticeable), but my intuition is that would be a huge drain on the battery if it was running all day, processing everything it hears.

But who knows. Maybe it is possible, and there's a novel, but secret technology that enables it. It's a little far-fetched, though, I think.

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#767

Post by nikitaga »

adriand wrote: post #647

The author writes that you can either pay with money or you can “pay with your attention”. What’s left unsaid is the cost of that attention. I believe that cost is very high and it isn’t just ads, it’s the design of countless products including social media sites, games and even the site you’re reading this on right now. It’s all designed to extract as much attention as possible, and the cost is people’s ability to c…

With ads you're not just paying with your "attention" (waste of time and focus), you're also paying with changes in your behaviour, perceptions, and attitudes.

As much as we like to imagine our minds to be impenetrable bastions of rationality, they are not. We can easily be enticed and manipulated to do things we wouldn't otherwise do, to see things differently than we otherwise would, to consider things we wouldn't consider, and all of that is exactly what the advertisers are paying for.

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#768

Post by shkkmo »

traek wrote: post #652
adriand wrote: post #647

The author writes that you can either pay with money or you can “pay with your attention”. What’s left unsaid is the cost of that attention. I believe that cost is very high and it isn’t just ads, it’s the design of countless products including social media sites, games and even the site you’re reading this on right now. It’s all designed to extract as much attention as possible, and the cost is people’s ability to c…

That's not a feature of advertising as a business model, it's just a feature of growth-focused businesses. The same forces apply to products that you pay for with money. For a very obvious example, just look at Candy Crush.

It is not even remotely a feature of all growth-focused businesses.

For example, Slack is a growth focused company that uses a subscription model for revenue and has no incentive to maximize time spent in their App.

You are correct that advertising, microtransactions and gambling lead to very similar business model incentives.

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#769

Post by hisnameismanuel »

kelnos wrote: post #755
katzgrau wrote: post #655

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Digital marketing performance is increasingly measurable and there's more data than ever proving that it can be extremely effective. You can certainly waste a lot of money doing it too. Getting the right message in front of the right user at the right time is a lot harder than people think it is. The above is where there's a lot of smoke and mirrors in ad tech. But for advertising as a whole, it's not a massive indus…

> there's more data than ever proving that it can be extremely effective Can you provide some pointers to that data (as the parent did for the contrary position)? Forgive me, but it seems you work in advertising, so I'm not sure if you're the most unbiased person to assert something like this without evidence.

With most advertising mediums, you can only show correlation.

But with many parts of digital, you can show certain pages of your website exclusively to those who have clicked on ads (ie. hide those pages from regular browsers).

In this way you can directly measure the direct effects of the advertising spend.

There are many businesses, including three that I own, that have grown as a sole consequence of social media advertising. We have not promoted these businesses in any other way (no SEO, no trade shows, nothing).

I'm not going to share my advertising accounts with you; I'm just going to ask you to trust that when I get my laptop out and show my results to my 'marketing skeptical' friends, they stop being skeptical.

Actual words, from one of these friends: "wow. That is like a money printing machine."

Consider for a second: how many advertisers that are actually succeeding are going to publicly call attention to their success? Would you?

The only hint is Facebook and Google's revenues. They go up, and I am one of the people who makes their revenues go up.

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#770

Post by HWR_14 »

cm2012 wrote: post #495
HWR_14 wrote: post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If by "not ever let advertisers exclude black people" you mean "after March 2019 has not knowing let advertisers exclude black people" than FB and the NYT would agree with you: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/19/technology/facebook-discr...

No, you have never been able to target by race. NY times is referring to algorithmic targeting that incidentally correlated to race, which FB cleaned up in 2019.

There is no difference between "filter out black people" and "filter out X, (X correlates 99% with black people)". And I mean that legally, morally and practically.

Here's a list of ways around "cannot filter by race". It took 2 seconds on google: https://www.searchenginewatch.com/2011/12/06/how-to-target-e...

But, you seem to be shifting the goalposts pretty significantly. So, do you agree with the base point that targeted ads can produce pretty bad results?

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