They are dancing around the issue avoiding to state the revenue that they had from EU targeted advertising. This is NYtimes, they attract american advertising and are primarily targeted at americans. They don't even rely on advertising anymore, they have subscribers. Their story is not very telling for everyone else. Anecdotally, since switching to contextual ads in may my adsense revenue has fallen by ~50% : https://i.imgur.com/Ec5LwZg.jpg
After GDPR, The New York Times cut off ad exchanges and kept growing ad revenue
11–20 of 464 posts
Re: After GDPR, The New York Times cut off ad exchanges and kept growing ad revenue
#12Earlier quoted context omitted.
I hope that whole industry just dies and the hordes of wasted software engineers can instead be used on something that actually adds value to society.
And all the other software developers working on things directly and indirectly funded by that industry should what? Take up knitting?
I suggest they keep coding, but useful stuff and stop the wasteful surveillance.
Re: After GDPR, The New York Times cut off ad exchanges and kept growing ad revenue
#13Typical modern-day “journalism”.
“A scramble to implement GDPR, last-minute scramble to inplement GDPR when it arrived in May” vs “it won’t be a scramble in the US, as companies will have until 2020 to prepare”.
These companies similarly had two years to prepare. And I’m glad they took the hit for not doing so. I’m also glad they’re discovering that selling private info left and right isn’t the only way to earn money with ads.
Re: After GDPR, The New York Times cut off ad exchanges and kept growing ad revenue
#14I honestly would not be surprised if the difference in effectiveness of targeted vs untargeted advertisement turns out to be none, negligible or even unfavorable to targeted. Sure, NYT is not enough data to be significant, especially when compensating for my confirmation bias, but I would really like to see more sites stop tracking, at least from an ethical standpoint.
most of the big websites can afford to stop tracking. The problem is that smaller / weird niche websites can't , and gdpr is disproportionally hurting them.
Re: After GDPR, The New York Times cut off ad exchanges and kept growing ad revenue
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
I hope that whole industry just dies and the hordes of wasted software engineers can instead be used on something that actually adds value to society.
And all the other software developers working on things directly and indirectly funded by that industry should what? Take up knitting?
They can do what people put out of work by new technology created by those same coders do. And knitting. Nothing wrong with knitting.
Re: After GDPR, The New York Times cut off ad exchanges and kept growing ad revenue
#16“The fact that we are no longer offering behavioral targeting options in Europe does not seem to be in the way of what advertisers want to do with us,” he said. “The desirability of a brand may be stronger than the targeting capabilities. We have not been impacted from a revenue standpoint, and, on the contrary, our digital advertising business continues to grow nicely.” I wonder if smaller sites could do the same th…
It's absolutely working so well because they are NYT. They can get sweet "branding" dollars from advertisers, and with branding nobody cares about return on money spent.
Smaller sites have zero chance to strike a deal with large agencies who are serving large brands. So their only chance to increase ad revenue is to offer targeting, to improve viewability (aka put banners on top), and to hope that they will get enough of retargeting dollars.
EDIT: and once you think of it, people from Europe who are reading NYT is targeting option in itself. Most probably they are affluent, english-speaking, etc. If you are large luxury brand, this is all you need.
Re: After GDPR, The New York Times cut off ad exchanges and kept growing ad revenue
#17This is the thing the ad industry really didn't want people to discover: what if the behavioural and personalised targeting wasn't actually worth the cost?
there is a huge amount in variability that is often not discussed. Overall however, behavioral targetting does seem to work. That doesn't mean that there shouldn't be other types of advertising, but often you end up serving "russian brides" ads instead of anything useful.
Re: After GDPR, The New York Times cut off ad exchanges and kept growing ad revenue
#18“The fact that we are no longer offering behavioral targeting options in Europe does not seem to be in the way of what advertisers want to do with us,” he said. “The desirability of a brand may be stronger than the targeting capabilities. We have not been impacted from a revenue standpoint, and, on the contrary, our digital advertising business continues to grow nicely.” I wonder if smaller sites could do the same th…
If nobody can legally do behavioral targeting in Europe, it levels the playing field. That's the whole point of government regulation. Everyone will be forced to run good ol' untargeted ads.
Meanwhile, companies still have their advertising budgets; they'll just have to spend money on untargeted ads. It takes time to measure the relative effectiveness of different types of ad campaigns, so it will take a while for the market to adjust.
Re: After GDPR, The New York Times cut off ad exchanges and kept growing ad revenue
#19I honestly would not be surprised if the difference in effectiveness of targeted vs untargeted advertisement turns out to be none, negligible or even unfavorable to targeted. Sure, NYT is not enough data to be significant, especially when compensating for my confirmation bias, but I would really like to see more sites stop tracking, at least from an ethical standpoint.
You mean that following the users with the same repetitive ads across the net (for things that he might have even bought already) is not so effective?
Yeah, tracking probably throws the ads into a local minima. But ad algos don't care about conversion, they care about charging the ad buyer more.
Re: After GDPR, The New York Times cut off ad exchanges and kept growing ad revenue
#20I honestly would not be surprised if the difference in effectiveness of targeted vs untargeted advertisement turns out to be none, negligible or even unfavorable to targeted. Sure, NYT is not enough data to be significant, especially when compensating for my confirmation bias, but I would really like to see more sites stop tracking, at least from an ethical standpoint.
most of the big websites can afford to stop tracking. The problem is that smaller / weird niche websites can't , and gdpr is disproportionally hurting them.
Which is a non-argument if it turns out that tracking doesnt contribute to higher ad revenue