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After GDPR, The New York Times cut off ad exchanges and kept growing ad revenue

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Re: After GDPR, The New York Times cut off ad exchanges and kept growing ad revenue

#121

Post by wlesieutre »

rusk wrote: post #74
wlesieutre wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Customers who bought this television also bought: 1) different television 2) another television 3) alternate listing of the same television and 4x the price because it's controlled by some idiot algorithm 4) more television 5) yet another television Suuuuure they did

Can you not use fixed-width for block quotes please? It’s very difficult to read on smaller screens!

I'd avoid it for anything important, but if you can read the first ten characters of each line I think you get the point of my list there. Didn't want to waste the space with paragraph breaks between items.

Re: After GDPR, The New York Times cut off ad exchanges and kept growing ad revenue

#122

Post by mtgx »

MarkMc wrote: post #52
bitofhope wrote: post #6

I 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.

I would be absolutely astounded if targeted ads did not provide significant long-term advantage to a big player like Google. How can it be that having intimate knowledge of someone would not allow you to sell them more stuff? John has a 10th wedding anniversary coming up. Mary is single and goes to the gym every day. Steve just got a promotion and likes the BMW 3 series. Michael is overweight but has just gone on a d…

Then you should try buying some Google Display ads sometime. See how quickly Google wastes your money, because the tools it provides are nowhere close to the targeting you may have in mind. The audiences you'll get to target even after a lot of manual fine-tuning will still feel too generic.

But they'll also still be expensive because everyone else also thinks the data is super-targeted so they throw a lot of money at it, increasing bids.

Re: After GDPR, The New York Times cut off ad exchanges and kept growing ad revenue

#123

Post by Mirioron »

kijin wrote: post #18
blakesterz wrote: post #2

“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 th…

>If nobody can legally do behavioral targeting in Europe, it levels the playing field.

No, it doesn't. All it means is that Europe will become even less relevant in tech than we already are. Just because European companies can't do behavioral targeting doesn't mean companies outside of the EU can't do that and the EU has no jurisdiction over them, if they can even find out that this is going on in the first place. All it will mean that European tech companies get out-competed.

Another thing you're not considering is that the EU has 30+ languages in it. I'm sure it will be great to see advertising in languages you can't even read. That will drive home the point that only France and Germany matter even more.

>Meanwhile, companies still have their advertising budgets; they'll just have to spend money on untargeted ads.

Advertising budgets don't exist in a vacuum. Their size depends on how much money they can make based on those ads. If it costs more to advertise than it brings in as sales then you just don't advertise. If targeted ads aren't a necessity then neither are online advertisements.

Re: After GDPR, The New York Times cut off ad exchanges and kept growing ad revenue

#124

Post by cyborgx7 »

manigandham wrote: post #120
cyborgx7 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>efficiently connecting people with a message inherently involves targeting The point of this thread is that maybe it doesn't.

What's the evidence? This article? That's not the reason why, the whole EU market is down and there are just fewer but larger ad campaigns which go to the sites with the biggest reach. It's regulation causing consolidation.

The GDPR is a great piece of legislation, that significantly improves people's privacy. Your arguing about how terrible it is will not convince anybody that your industry's practices aren't evil. They will only reinforce it.

Re: After GDPR, The New York Times cut off ad exchanges and kept growing ad revenue

#126

Post by lanerobertlane »

wukerplank wrote: post #29
josefresco wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does this include "remarketing"? From what I read it's much more effective. For those that don't know, remarketing involves showing ads to only people who have visited your website, or interacted with your brand before. Is this considered targeted?

I always wonder if this really works? Amazon uses it a lot and all I get ads for are products that I already bought. Which is pointless.

Anecdotal, but I've ran ads cold, targeted and re-targeted ads on Facebook for clients and eventually dropped re-targeting from the service I offer because it's extra time to build the campaign, extra cost and little to no benefit in terms of lead acquisition.

Re: After GDPR, The New York Times cut off ad exchanges and kept growing ad revenue

#127

Post by Mirioron »

thatguyagain wrote: post #78
manigandham wrote: post #64

I work in adtech. This has nothing to do with how effective targeting is, and a single site does not reflect the entire industry when they're all competing for the same pool of ad dollars. There is a massive drop in EU programmatic advertising because of GDPR. Most EU advertisers now buy a few large campaigns with coarse targeting instead, and sites with the biggest reach like NYT will get more money but there's less…

I don't understand. What stands in the way of a small niche website for, say, dog owners to sell ad space for dog related products without having some kind of data hoarding ad tech behind it?

Time. Would you rather deal with one website that gets a billion hits or 1000 websites that get 1 million hits each?

Negotiating deals, verifying them and all that stuff costs time and money.

Re: After GDPR, The New York Times cut off ad exchanges and kept growing ad revenue

#128

Post by pelario »

distances wrote: post #107
rusk wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience of targeted advertising is Amazon trying to sell me things I’ve already bought ...

And Booking pushing advertisements for the exact same hotel I've just checked on their service. I can't understand how that would seem like a good idea to anyone.

I've thought the same (and heard the same booking "blunder"), until I visited a city I had visited before, and went for the exact same hotel...

Re: After GDPR, The New York Times cut off ad exchanges and kept growing ad revenue

#129

Post by rusk »

wlesieutre wrote: post #121
rusk wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you not use fixed-width for block quotes please? It’s very difficult to read on smaller screens!

I'd avoid it for anything important, but if you can read the first ten characters of each line I think you get the point of my list there. Didn't want to waste the space with paragraph breaks between items.

This is a matter of custom, fixed-width is for code [0]

It is more typical to italicize a blockquote, perhaps with leading `>` to mark it out:

> like this

- and this is a list-item

- and so is this

it's just a matter of courtesy to those using smaller screens and assistive technologies

Thanks!

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc

Re: After GDPR, The New York Times cut off ad exchanges and kept growing ad revenue

#130

Post by duxup »

MarkMc wrote: post #52
bitofhope wrote: post #6

I 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.

I would be absolutely astounded if targeted ads did not provide significant long-term advantage to a big player like Google. How can it be that having intimate knowledge of someone would not allow you to sell them more stuff? John has a 10th wedding anniversary coming up. Mary is single and goes to the gym every day. Steve just got a promotion and likes the BMW 3 series. Michael is overweight but has just gone on a d…

It does make sense the way you describe it.

But the ads I see are way off target.

Hell Google's news ... AI or whatever they're doing has been absolutely convinced I'm a Nebraska Cornhuskers fan, probabbly because my team plays them and I google something about them once in a while.... but in the past even when I told Google directly "I don't want to see stories about Nebraska Cornhuskers" ... after a while it again becomes convinced I'm a huge Cornhuskers fan.

I'm just not sure these systems are ... that effective.

Not to say it is easy, the systems have to be really complex / interesting.

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