I'm fine with ad targeting being garbage and you should be too.
That means you can't be tracked because it's too stupid to do so.
ChatGPT ad targeting is garbage
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Re: ChatGPT ad targeting is garbage
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ads didn't give us Wikipedia. The vast majority of blogs and forums were not for profit. Specialised media outlets were always subscription-based. Large amounts of valuable information like research papers, technical documentation and curated databases were paywalled. The content that ad-based websites brought was mostly clickbait designed around serving these ads.
An yet here we are, on a giant advertisement.
Its marketing all the way down. ;0)
Re: ChatGPT ad targeting is garbage
#63Yes, ChatGPT ads are a heaping pile of garbage. I feel sorry for anyone that’s wasted perfectly good marketing spend on such nonsense. Outside a captive platform like Amazon, most ads are garbage and a total waste of money. If I’m on Amazon trying to buy X and my search for X “promotes” an option to the top of the list yeah that probably influences me buying that. But the broader online ad ecosystem is a total waste…
presumably if this was true advertising spend would dry up in these useless cases. The fact that it hasnt and people intensely dislike spending money without getting anything for it, I suspect it must work on someone.
I suspect your hypothesis is not falsifiable. Maybe randomly advertising golf balls to random people is just as effective, but we don't have the tracking infrastructure in place for non-targeted ads in order to test that theory.
Re: ChatGPT ad targeting is garbage
#64If I were Mark Zuckerberg I would be salivating waiting for a call from Sam Altman.
facebook ad targeting is also garbage. They have my entire history since 2004 and they still sometimes: think I'm a woman, think I need things for a newborn, think I'm in the market for "short men clothing" (I'm 6'0"), and so on. Sometimes I get ads for farm equipment (I am a lifelong city dweller).
Not sure why, but my ads used to be insanely spot on, now they're meh.
My wife will get ads on Instagram targeting me though.
One day I looked at some retro console, she texted me asking if I was looking at a console, she got like 8 ads for it.
Re: ChatGPT ad targeting is garbage
#65HN isn't really a good place to have an informed discussion on ads efficacy unfortunately. In this thread we have many many people talking about how online ads in general are completely worthless. All of the top comments I see are harping on things like Google Ads having bad targeting for reasons like you are getting recommendations on products you just bought (having experience in the ads industry, yes this is actually a good signal that you might buy another one, even if you don't want to believe it).
Meanwhile, the article is actually discussing ChatGPT ads specifically compared to Google Ads, which they do have success with.
Anyway, my guess is that it's a combination of 1. OpenAI being new and not having the massive work needed yet to set up a fully successful ads network, but they're recruiting a lot of talent from the area + recsys so it's probably not too far off. And 2. we don't really know in general yet how best to do in context ad recommendations. I think this will also improve pretty rapidly with how much talent is working in the space. The best ads will probably look a lot more like Google Search per-request targeted ads rather than Instagram style per-user targeted ads, but I believe we'll see lots of gains fast.
Re: ChatGPT ad targeting is garbage
#66Ads are part of the enshitification of ChatGPT. In the short-term it might offer them some kind of lifeline and I'm sure in their next investor call they'll highlight their revenue from Ads. But if their competitors (including open-weight models) can offer similar quality and ease of use, Ads is just another reason _not_ to use them.
Ads are the hacking of attention. Without attention, ChatGPT cannot exist.
Re: ChatGPT ad targeting is garbage
#67Speaking as a consumer, I’ve always found ad targeting to be way off for Google, YouTube or even facebook. The few times I got ads I ChatGPT it was also off. It’s kinda ironic that with all that AI, they choose not to use any of that intelligence to target ads better. It makes you wonder what all those engineers are working on if not the main revenue driver.
>It’s kinda ironic that with all that AI, they choose not to use any of that intelligence to target ads better.
I couldn't possibly be more par for course for OpenAI
Re: ChatGPT ad targeting is garbage
#68Strange how this went straight from front page to position 157.
Re: ChatGPT ad targeting is garbage
#69HN isn't really a good place to have an informed discussion on ads efficacy unfortunately. In this thread we have many many people talking about how online ads in general are completely worthless. All of the top comments I see are harping on things like Google Ads having bad targeting for reasons like you are getting recommendations on products you just bought (having experience in the ads industry, yes this is actua…
As someone who has been doing marketing and buying ads for 20 years, I find your optimism touching. ;0)
Re: ChatGPT ad targeting is garbage
#70Strange how this went straight from front page to position 157.
The fact that there is a commercial relationship between OpenAi and YCombinator is surely a coincidence.