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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

#181

Post by lucideer »

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…

I think this is just it though. Everyone assumes targeted advertising works, because it seems self-evident that it should. And the only people likely to have significant data on whether it works have a vested interest in convincing everyone that it does work (regardless of whether that's true or not).

It may be that targeted ads are more effective, but some counters to your points:

> John has a 10th wedding anniversary coming up.

A wedding anniversary is a significant thing–some John's may be swayed by an advertisement, but many would consider it a bit of a cheat not to put more "novel" thought into it.

> Mary is single and goes to the gym every day.

Frankly, the former of those two data-points could mean anything. Much of what advertisers believe about consumer habits of single people could easily be correlation.

As for the latter, anyone with a daily gym routine is less likely to want to change it. Selling gym membership to someone speculatively hoping to start going to the gym is a better bet, but much harder to track.

> Steve just got a promotion and likes the BMW 3 series.

Going back to the anniversary gift—I seriously doubt many people are much swayed by one-off ads in buying something as significant as a car (unless Steve has 10+ cars, in which case the promotion is less relevant). This is case where untargeted ads definitely have a much bigger role (Steve sees many BMW ads passively over a number of years).

It may be there's some cases were targeted ads are extremely effective, and some where they're not. And—as you've pointed out—it may be that Google et al. aren't really incentivised to actually be good at targeting as long as their advertisers believe they're good at targeting (which goes hand in hand with market dominance).

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

#182

Post by duxup »

WA wrote: post #162
duxup wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Or "let’s sprinkle some noise in here so people think we’re less efficient than we truly are, so that we appear a bit dumber and less creepy." But probably the truth is that these systems aren’t that good :)

You'd think they'd sprinkle in something less ... annoyingly skewed that obscure what I actually want to see.

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

#183

Post by kijin »

Mirioron wrote: post #123
kijin wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. A…

Contextual targeting still works. No ad agency in their right mind will run a French ad on a webpage written in German, or show an Italian ad in an app where the default language is set to Swedish. None of this requires tracking individual users across websites and apps.

Besides, as other commenters have pointed out, there is no concrete evidence that targeting individual users is any better (in terms of bringing in more sales) than targeting the combination of region, language, website topic, and on-page keywords.

If you're so worried about the sustainability of European ad agencies, maybe you should stop fearmongering and start trying to improve contextual targeting technology to such an extent that it provides even more value to your customers than behaviorally targeted alternatives. If and when GDPR-like regulations arrive in other parts of the world -- I'm pretty sure the noose is getting tighter in the U.S. as well -- your European agency will be in a perfect position to grab market share there.

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

#184

Post by BoorishBears »

krageon wrote: post #40
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?

If you are working on propping up the ad industry I certainly won't lie awake at night if you are inconvenienced by it dying.

You’re pretty short sighted huh?

I don’t work with ads.

But we have B2C clients that wouldn’t exist without the ad industry, in fact how would people know we exist without the ad industry?

How many of your customers are funded by ads, or use tools funded by ads, or have customers of their own that are?

Not to mention stuff most people use, like GMail, Google Search, “free” apps

We’re part of an ecosystem, you can’t point at the shitty parts and get all uppity, you are on the same ship

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

#185

Post by fastball »

badwolf wrote: post #139
rusk wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Tbf Amazon has the least experience with ML of the FAANGs.

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

#186

Post by snowwrestler »

wlesieutre wrote: post #138
rusk wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ad…

In terms of usability, vertical space almost doesn't matter anymore. The vast majority of people have an interface that makes vertical scrolling effortless, whether it's a trackpad gesture, mouse scroll wheel, or touchscreen drag / flick.

Horizontal scrolling is harder to do and less common/conventional (chicken and egg as to why, but it's the reality today).

You might not like the way it looks, but it's clearly better for usability to spend more vertical space in order to prevent horizontal scrolling.

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

#187

Post by nemothekid »

SiempreViernes wrote: post #57
nemothekid wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can only give you speculation on what I’ve seen in online video. If you are a smaller publisher, unless you get particularly active in courting advertisers (i.e. spend time going into sales), the niche advertisers will never even look at your content. The 20-something digital ad manager has no motivation to risk his job doing speculative ad spend. As a result your ads are less relevant and your inventory’s CPM drop…

If you are a small publisher, why would your ad prices endanger any but the smallest of advertising budgets?

As an advertiser, you go down the tracking route and you decide to spend 1M targeting women 21-35.

With tracking, you spend all on an exchange that has a ton of supply. ELLE competes with JennyBlogger. You potentially hit a ton of women across different properties. You may be advertising to women on male dominated outlets (the “promise” of digital tracking)

With the direct route, an ad manager may spend that 1M on specific properties, maybe between ELLE, Vogue and InStyle. This is a bit of a simplification as most firms have separate direct and programmatic spend, but the amount of money allocated to each depends on the perceived return of each inventory type.

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

#188

Post by soared »

lucideer wrote: post #181
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…

I think this is just it though. Everyone assumes targeted advertising works, because it seems self-evident that it should. And the only people likely to have significant data on whether it works have a vested interest in convincing everyone that it does work (regardless of whether that's true or not). It may be that targeted ads are more effective, but some counters to your points: > John has a 10th wedding anniversa…

You grossly misunderstand digital advertising or your bias has completed clouded your logic.

> A wedding anniversary is a significant thing–some John's may be swayed by an advertisement, but many would consider it a bit of a cheat not to put more "novel" thought into it.

No idea what you mean here by cheating or novel thought. We're talking about whether knowing that info allows you to have more successful advertising compared to random chance. Serving John ads for roses, chocolates, and vacations will be more effective than serving those ads to a random person.

>Frankly, the former of those two data-points could mean anything. Much of what advertisers believe about consumer habits of single people could easily be correlation.

Correlation is the whole point. If someone who is single and goes to the gym is correlated to certain purchases or behavior, you can advertise those. And being single, a woman, and a gym-goer isn't super valuable by itself but combined together you can advertiser women's athletic clothing that is functional but also attractive.

> As for the latter, anyone with a daily gym routine is less likely to want to change it. Selling gym membership to someone speculatively hoping to start going to the gym is a better bet, but much harder to track.

Again, you don't understand advertising. If I know someone goes to the gym every day I'm not going to advertise gyms to them. I'm going to advertise water bottles, protein, healthy meal kits, athletic clothing, etc.

> Going back to the anniversary gift—I seriously doubt many people are much swayed by one-off ads in buying something as significant as a car

We're not selling Steve a car with targeted ads. We're taking his promotion and propensity towards bmw to assume hes wealthy and likes luxury goods. You advertise more expensive goods to him, rather than cheap ones.

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

#189

Post by tivert »

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…

> 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 diet. Are such details of no significance determining what ads to show these people?

I think there are a few factors:

1. Targeted ads are more likely to show people things they're already familiar with. The ads are more "expected" so there's less novelty. Untargeted ads can inadvertently hit wants and needs that aren't part of the user's tracking profile.

Closely related to that: targeted ads can induce their own special kind of fatigue. If all you see are diet ads because your profile says you want to lose weight, you're going to get really sick of seeing diet ads. The targeting actually works against effectiveness.

2. Targeted ads are much more exploitable by scammers. See: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/01/the-s.... This leads to a greater erosion of trust. The expense of traditional and untargeted advertising weeds out such scams.

3. Building a good user profile is hard. If you get it right, you have the problems I described in #1. If you get it wrong, you're blasting someone with ads that are completely off the mark (like weight loss ads for a very healthy and fit person).

4. If a user sees one targeted ad a week, that ad is likely to punch above its weight. If they see 50 targeted ads every day, the effect is much different. They're more likely to develop negative emotional reactions to the ads, as they gain awareness and get creeped out by the tracking and attempted manipulation.

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

#190

Post by tokyodude »

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…

You're probably right but ...

I don't have any data on my own actually behavior, only my feelings. If I search for "React" on Google and ads for react based services or other software services appear it doesn't bother me. If I'm on stackoverflow or jsfiddle and there are ads for software dev related products and services great! If I'm on Polygon and see ads for games, perfect!

It's when I see targeted ads unrelated to the activity that I feel angry, annoyed, upset. For example I viewed some apartments on an apartment site. Then I went and checked movie reviews on yahoo (japan) and every ad was for that exact apartment I looked at. It's not just creepy it's anger inducing. I'm not interesting in looking at apartments. I'm looking at movies. It's like the sales person from the last store I visited followed me into the movie theater and is badgering me to buy the clothing I looked at

So, I'd basically like to believe there's 3 tiers

1. 100% un-targeted, random ads

2. Content targeted. Video game ads on a video game site. Or BMW ads on an article about BMWs

3. User targeted. Being tracked all over the net to try to divine what I want and showing me ads for that.

It's easy to believe 2 and 3 are better than 1. I want to believe 2 is as good as 3, maybe better since it's not creepy.

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