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Why I Work on Ads

jefftk.com

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Re: Why I Work on Ads

#871

Post by magicroot75 »

mediaman wrote: post #645
kingsuper20 wrote: post #61

The online ad business generally mystifies me. While an awful lot of the internet, especially the surveillance advertising part, looks to be the greatest misallocation of engineering (and other) talent in the history of the world, ya gotta ask about the efficacy. The only reasonably accurate targeting I've ever run into is the occasional ad for something I just browsed on Amazon. I've never clicked on an internet ad.…

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…

There's an extremely well defined industry surrounding conversion lift. Which is exactly what you're talking about. Advertisers use holdout groups to test what % lift was correlated to an ad. Using large enough datasets, it's possible to have strong statistical confidence in the effects of ads on user behavior.

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#872

Post by [deleted] »

nearbuy wrote: post #856
munk-a wrote: post #662

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I quit advertising after only a couple of years because it blackened my soul. If I was helping to harvest people's personal lives for private profit I can only imagine it would have been worse. I can definitely feel this - I worked in mobile gaming for a little while. The camaraderie was amazing, I keep in touch with a number of coworkers from that job - the company was terrible (like gaming companies tend to be) b…

> If you need to justify your work by calling out the charity you're doing with the earnings then I think you, internally, have identified that what you're doing is causing harm to society. You're misunderstanding the author's intent here. He's saying he works so that he can donate to charities. That part of his answer would remain no matter what type of work he did. Charity is important to him. He was giving a large…

[deleted]

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#873

Post by [deleted] »

alex_young wrote: post #693

Here's an honest question: Why should a search engine cost so much? Look at Wikipedia - it's a search engine and content repository for all of the world's knowledge, and its operating expenses are around $100M / year. The Internet Archive has an annual budget of $10M / year. Google on the other hand, has annual revenues of $181B / year, or about 2000 times Wikipedia's spending. Is the crawling part hard? The folks at…

[deleted]

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#874

Post by joshuamorton »

meowface wrote: post #721
joshuamorton wrote: post #595

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That a privately owned corporation is allowed to read your messages and sell what they find to the highest bidder is vile and honestly makes me wonder how we got here. [I work at Google too, not on ads though] Could you clarify what you mean by this. A natural reading of these two things ("reading your messages" and "selling to the highest bidder") aren't true. There are lots of things you could mean (reading messa…

>Sometimes people mean sell your eyeballs, in that they gather data and then use it to sell your attention Does Google collect information about what websites you visit (via Chrome / Google Analytics / Google account cookies) and what search queries you make and what search results you click on and provide or sell that information to advertisers in some shape or form? (Where advertisers includes not just third partie…

> provide or sell that information to advertisers in some shape or form?

If you're using "provide" in the common sense, then no I don't think so. No one gets a "Josh is a hackernews reader" report. I just get ads for things that appeal to HN users.

There are arguments that you can use this for sort of targeted attacks to get more info, for example if you have a website and can correlate an ad request with a username, you can then put together that "joshuamorton" is interested in things HN users like. But I'm not sure how real those kinds of attacks are (I think a major limiting factor is that they're expensive, since if your goal is to only gain information, you have to compete but also never win a bid, and that's very difficult and like in practice its just cheaper to do your own tracking).

> My understanding is that Google indeed isn't doing this - but that they did do exactly that up until 2017, which wasn't that long ago.

Yes but my recollection is that even before then (at least for some time), gmail data was siloed. It was only used to serve ads in gmail, so this was very much a first party only sort of thing (same as if I run a forum and serve interest based ads on different parts of that forum).

It's just much hard to explain that than to explain "not used at all", so we stopped entirely.

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#875

Post by Reebz »

meowface wrote: post #734
dougmwne wrote: post #732

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you buy your clothes at the thrift store or at the mall? If you buy them at the mall, how did you choose those stores? Did you buy those clothes to make sure you were meeting other people's expectations? Were those people's expectations shaped by advertising, marketing and branding? If you wear flour sacks, then my humble apologies and sincere congratulations.

It's kind of close to the equivalent of flour sacks for me; I don't shop in either thrift stores or malls or think about expectations, and I buy new clothes very rarely. When I do, I order the same cheap generic solid-color clothes off of Amazon, and sometimes one or two other low-cost generic brands (based simply on what's cheapest when I sort by price, as long as the ratings aren't way below the rest). I admit I'm…

It is difficult to reflect on how we’re influenced, but yes, you are almost certainly being impacted to nudge you to purchase one thing or another. Unless you’re using solely cash payments and also do not own a cell phone, then you’re in the data ecosystem. In your case, it is probably likely that you don’t get advertisements or emails for luxury items, even if your income would allow such a purchase.

The great misunderstanding of this industry is that what ads you see are just as important as the ads you don’t see, which allows for profit maximization.

In your circumstance, it may be true that bank transactions are farmed and analyzed to be additive to data gathering on the web, which in turn is additive to the offline data gathering offered by various companies. Every transaction made is analyzed for location, merchant, purchase category, amount, date & time, and more.

Most of the other commenters who are claiming and linking to articles that ads don’t work aren’t in the industry. This is an important distinction because what we’re talking about here are the machines that crunch all this data are considered trade secrets and/or intellectual property. Also, slightly off topic, but it’s important to understand that ads != marketing. Ads are a child component of marketing. When you look at the overall function of marketing (of which product management is a discipline, no matter how desperately some attempt to align it to technology), then consider how much of a factor data analysis and operationalization of data is a driver of success for Fortune 500 companies. Almost any company in consumer technology (e.g. FAANG), consumer healthcare (CVS), telecommunications (AT&T), FMCG or retail (Walmart, Costco), and retail banking (Chase, Wells Fargo) are using these techniques to build better products, sharpen communications, and win new customers.

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#876

Post by ExtraE »

noir_lord wrote: post #365
ExtraE wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a new $gadget/$smartphone/$tablet/$whatever? What about your SO/father/niece? (You might not, but I bet a lot of people reading this and agreeing do buy a bunch of stuff they don't need without realizing it).

Nope, mobile is three years old, desktop is nearly three, ThinkPad is nearly four. Haven't bought anything techie for about 18mths and when I do mostly shop on specs, reviews from sources I trust. I viscerally loathe advertising, I don't like been manipulated in any context so I run a background process mentally watching for it :). I'm an advertisers nightmare, I'll not only ignore your advertising I'll go to signifi…

Do you buy brand name clothing? Cereal? Medicine? Did you buy your car/bike/transportation new or used? Where do you go to find a job? Etc

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#877

Post by kerng »

jefftk wrote: post #160
kerng wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The criticism of FLoC is that it makes profiling a lot easier because a website can access the ID with javascript. And there are also a lot of design questions remaining that Google hasn't answered or is not sure about. Eg. How will ad bidding work with FLoC? Finally, and most importantly as it relates to this post - Google pays an enormous amount of money to employees to spend their time and intelligence on building…

> How will ad bidding work with FLoC? I don't work on FLoC, but why wouldn't bidding handle it just like any other signal? For example, here's where it is in the OpenRTB docs: https://developers.google.com/authorized-buyers/rtb/openrtb-... An advertiser could take it into account in considering whether they want to bid and how much.

How would company A know you they wanna bid on the ad? How do they know this FLoC ID represents people with interest in their product?

I think I have an idea. So by visiting site A, A gets your cohort and now there is somewhere a "central store" or register. Using that A can now do ad bids for that entire cohort to reach others.

But where is that central store? Is Google running that?

Might also work fundamentally different.

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#878

Post by jefftk »

kerng wrote: post #877
jefftk wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How will ad bidding work with FLoC? I don't work on FLoC, but why wouldn't bidding handle it just like any other signal? For example, here's where it is in the OpenRTB docs: https://developers.google.com/authorized-buyers/rtb/openrtb-... An advertiser could take it into account in considering whether they want to bid and how much.

How would company A know you they wanna bid on the ad? How do they know this FLoC ID represents people with interest in their product? I think I have an idea. So by visiting site A, A gets your cohort and now there is somewhere a "central store" or register. Using that A can now do ad bids for that entire cohort to reach others. But where is that central store? Is Google running that? Might also work fundamentally di…

One way an independent publisher could use FLoC is for "lookalike" targeting. For example, if your best customers often have IDs D4W1 or JQ82, you could choose to target ads at those IDs.

Some entity might choose to run a "store" like you're describing, but there's no reason there would only need to be one.

It looks to me like Chrome is proposing a low-level feature that anyone can build more sophisticated products on top of.

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#879

Post by filoleg »

creato wrote: post #789
filoleg wrote: post #593

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Why doesn't FB offer a "premium" tier for people to buy their way out of ads? Warning: here goes my armchair theory. Because as soon as you put a price tag on it, people will instantly see that they can actually get that "premium" tier for free by using an adblocker, which will lead to more people using adblockers. If something is just free, most people don't really care for it. But if it is something that is free w…

Why doesn't (or does?) this apply to youtube, spotify, or other similar services?

My guess is because for those services you listed, ads explicitly stop the experience and make you watch ads to continue to be able to use the service normally.

If I watch a Youtube video and it gets interrupted by an ad, I am stuck until it is over and cannot consume my content. Same with Spotify. So understandably, people would be willing to pay for the premium tier. I, myself, pay for premium on those services to not deal with ads, as they steal my time and interrupt my normal usage of those services.

With FB, ads aren't interrupting the experience. They are just there, but you are welcome to completely ignore them and proceed consuming your content. I wouldn't pay premium to get rid of FB ads, even if it was just $1/mo. Especially given that, more than once, I got genuinely useful ads that helped me with making a good purchasing decision (the final decision came down to me doing my independent research before buying, but the ads pointed me towards the type of stuff I was looking for). So I don't gain much by getting rid of FB ads (as they are non-interruptive), while potentially losing out on some stuff.

I think the last bit I mentioned is kind of the key to FB strategy. They don't want to offer the "no-ads" premium tier, because they don't want to pose their ads as an annoyance you have to pay to get rid of, they want to pose them as a value add. Not trying to argue whether it is indeed a value add for users or not, just theorizing how FB product team sees it and tries to pose it.

P.S. I don't work in ads or anything even tangentially related. And neither do I have a stake in FB or any other ad-related business. Just describing my genuine user experience.

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#880

Post by fxleach »

HWR_14 wrote: post #368
fxleach wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is that you cannot have good online advertising without a little bit of the stalking. Do you listen to podcasts? Their ads are shite. I don't want to hear another ad about "Coroner" on Netflix. The only reason they are making money is because podcasts are "hot" right now and everyone is throwing money at them. That money pile will slowly deplete in due time and they'll find a way to introduce ads that are m…

What's strange is that podcasts and baked into video ads are far more effective on me. I'll block any alternative ad source I can, so if it's not baked into the content I don't see it. But I have no clue what would distinguish (to me) a non-shit ad? Is it saving me money on something I was already going to buy?

> But I have no clue what would distinguish (to me) a non-shit ad? Is it saving me money on something I was already going to buy?

Yes. I've been looking for weight equipment over the past year because of the pandemic and gyms being closed and the majority of ads on Instagram are now exercise equipment. I ended up seeing an ad for a company in my country with fairly decent prices and bought a new squat stand. The price difference between the one I bought and the ones I was looking at from companies in the area was around $200. I give up some privacy, they give me targeted ads. Please give me more.

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