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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

#131

Post by Scoundreller »

rusk wrote: post #65
MarkMc wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

Or, sometimes in my experience, something I was selling.

I browsed retailers to copy the specs into my ad.

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

#132

Post by dazc »

adzicg wrote: post #90
codq wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps there's some kind of Baader-Meinhof phenomena going on here. When a targeted ad is creepily accurate and on point, people flip and think that the machines have figured us out. But the ads that are irrelevant just fly by us without a hit. The one-out-of-a-hundred ads that get it right, likely due to an ad targeter's lucky strike, are the ones that get under our skin, and the only ones we really notice.

I read somewhere (can’t remember the book name unfortunately) that Tesco in the UK faced this problem when they started sending out personalised coupon booklets based on loyalty card purchases. People were freaking out. Then they started adding coupons to the booklet designed to be irrelevant - say if they figured out that someone was newly pregnant, they’d send a few pages of baby stuff, but also inject lawn mower c…

You still get that if you shop online, everything you ever bought suggested as an add on to your basket.

I can see how this could cause embarrassment and, maybe, awkward questions if one's partner also uses the same account.

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

#133

Post by mlthoughts2018 »

Meanwhile, NYT experiments with predicting readers’ emotional state and using that information to target ad placement...

https://digiday.com/media/project-feels-usa-today-espn-new-y...

NYT is deeply hypocritical when it comes to digital advertising.

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

#134

Post by dazc »

fyfy18 wrote: post #111
adzicg wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read somewhere (can’t remember the book name unfortunately) that Tesco in the UK faced this problem when they started sending out personalised coupon booklets based on loyalty card purchases. People were freaking out. Then they started adding coupons to the booklet designed to be irrelevant - say if they figured out that someone was newly pregnant, they’d send a few pages of baby stuff, but also inject lawn mower c…

I remember during college I was working at Tesco, and a customer way buying a lot of baby food, and she had received some Clubcard coupons for them. I asked her if she had grandchildren, she said no, but her husband really likes baby food.

A niche yet to be exploited?

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

#135

Post by tzs »

rock_hard wrote: post #61
MarkMc wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You be surprised how much less sophisticated Googles and Facebooks ad targeting is! We are far away from a machine classifying you as being single and going to the gym every day or liking BMW and having gotten a promotion. Not that I don’t think we couldn’t get there...but today these system are far away from it! Just go to your Facebook ad settings to understand how primitive the information is they have about you.…

> You be surprised how much less sophisticated Googles and Facebooks ad targeting is!

If Google's ability to discern my interests for ads is as bad as is their ability to discern my interests for news, then I would not be surprised.

I have never been aware of listening to any music by the band "Foo Fighters". I've almost certainly heard their songs in passing, but never in a context that gave me the name of the band.

A friend on Facebook posted a link to a YouTube video called "Dave Grohl brings kid on stage in Kansas City to rock out", in which Grohl, who is apparently the lead of the Foo Fighters, invited a kid from the audience at a Foo Fighters concert up to play a song, and I watched this video. (The kid asked to play a Metallica song, which Grohl and the Foo Fighters knew and played, so I still have not knowingly listened to any Foo Fighters music!)

Google has latched onto this and decided that I am interested in Dave Grohl news. Every time I go to Google News, for the last several weeks, the top of the "recommended by your interests" section is a story about Grohl or the Foo Fighters. Even though I hit the "show fewer stories like this" link for most of them, still they come.

Furthermore, they are almost all negative stories. The one thing they have of me showing any interest in Grohl and/or Foo Fighters, that video of the kid on stage, was a positive thing. But what they are giving me is a parade of stories about Grohl screwing over current or former bandmates, Grohl misbehaving while drunk, etc., from what appear to be trashy gossip publications. Yet a bit of research shows that Grohl is apparently actually a nice guy, well regarded. If I click the link to tell Google to not show me anything else from one of these trash publications...it obeys and just turns to other one to find Grohl gossip for me.

What the heck, Gooogle!?

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

#136

Post by kristianc »

criddell wrote: post #48
kristianc wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is possible for advertisers to configure it so that this does not happen (in theory), but a lot simply do not bother. I've seen some compelling case studies that it does work, and even at low conversion % for big-ticket items (like hotels etc) it's insanely cost effective.

If I shop around for a lamp on 5 different websites and finally buy from a 6th site, how do those first 5 websites learn that I bought a lamp? The pervasive tracking of which retargeting is the most visible form is mostly what drove me to use an ad blocker. I wonder if the cost effectiveness calculation factors in lost future purchases?

Assuming that five different websites would all run a re-targeting campaign for the same lamp - it's tricky, and you would probably be relying on the retargeting cookie expiring, or you hitting the frequency cap for each.

It's possible that at the level of the ad network the products could be disambiguated, and then cancelled so that other companies did not waste ad spend. This would be difficult as the products would have different SKUs.

At the level of a single retailer, the retailer places a burn pixel on the checkout page which registers to no longer place ads for that product.

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

#137

Post by Kye »

131012 wrote: post #12
BoorishBears wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Startup idea: AdRev for knitting patterns.

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

#138

Post by wlesieutre »

rusk wrote: post #129
wlesieutre wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I agree in principle, but

- I don't

- think that

- individual paragraphs

- for a list

- is a very good

- use of space

- on small screens

- or on large ones

Code blocks are crappy for small screens, but so are lists written as a series of paragraphs.

Unfortunately, HN seems opposed to supporting non-paragraph linebreaks, lists, blockquotes, or any other sort of formatting. That's fine, it's up to dang and the other admins who run the place and they don't want to support other formatting, but it means that the code format gets abused as a poor approximation for these things.

EDIT: I should also point out that your source says "fixed-width is intended for code." You left that word out and it's an important one. If it said "is only for code" the meaning would be different.

Side note, reddit lets you do a line break by ending a line with two spaces before hitting enter. Just tested to double check, it doesn't work here. I wish it did, and replacing space-space-newline with
seems like a pretty trivial and unobjectionable feature, but here we are.

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

#139

Post by badwolf »

rusk wrote: post #65
MarkMc wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

This is a point I bring up when casually talking with non-tech minded friends when they start talking about machine learning taking over everything...

I bought a Dyson last summer. Amazon is still suggesting that I buy more vacuum cleaners.

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

#140

Post by Tsubasachan »

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.

What if I told you the NYT has been doing "untargeted" advertising for 150 years?

Besides if you advertise in the NYT you ARE technically targeting people: namely NYT readers. Thats a demographic right there. And a lucrative one.

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