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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

#191

Post by bunderbunder »

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…

In practice, I get the impression that the emperor isn't wearing a whole lot: It's really difficult to demonstrate that any particular ad campaign generates a positive return at all, let alone that any particular technique justifies its cost, or that something that worked well the first time someone tried it will continue working well once everyone is doing it. The whole space looks to me like a morass of wicked high variance, confounding variables for days, spillover effects, blah blah blah.

Combine this with marketers wanting to be more data-driven - and needing to report numbers to their own bosses - and you've got a situation ripe for exploitation. I expect the adtech companies could sell pretty much anything, as long as it smells like numbers.

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

#192

Post by soared »

bunderbunder wrote: post #160

Wild speculation: What if cutting off the ad exchanges was a dose of quinine for the New York Times? NYT is a premium venue for people who want to advertise, because its regular readers (especially the ones who don't live in New York) tend to have above-average disposable income. Because of that, the NYT should be able to charge a premium for advertising with them. But if they opt into the ad exchanges, then they've…

I'm not clear how that would work. How does NYT enabling ad exchanges enable advertisers to target NYT readers or the NYT website?

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

#193

Post by throwawaymath »

cyborgx7 wrote: post #53
throwawaymath wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then in a decade our new sardonic message board reference will be, "Yes, the software engineering industry cratered. But for a beautiful moment in time, we stopped serving ads." I don't think the parent commenter disagrees with you about spying. I think they're trying to highlight the fundamental tension of the is-ought problem at play here. Your normative claim is that it's good to limit activity which reduces consu…

How about we built a society in which people don't have to choose between loosing their livelyhood and being a moral hazard. In the meantime, I'm not going to cry about the deaths of immoral industries.

Okay. Again, you're highlighting an is-ought problem. I'm not saying the problem doesn't exist. I'm saying we can't just "build a society in which people don't have to choose between losing their livelihood and being a moral hazard."

It is at the very least extremely nontrivial and not at all straightforward, even if everyone agrees it's not ideal. I'm not asking you to "cry about the deals of immoral industries" - rather as a pragmatist, I'm asking you to consider that unless we have a concrete way forward, suggesting to kill the industry is not productive.

Categorically speaking, advertising as a problem has several notable properties:

1. Reasonable people can disagree about whether it is harmful (contrast with e.g. murder),

2. Reasonable people can disagree about how harmful it is (contrast with e.g. financial fraud),

3. It enables a significant portion (perhaps the majority?) of growth in the tech sector, which itself has empowered the lion's share of economic growth in the past decade,

4. There are few opportunities even within tech which will both pay comparably and which are not either directly or indirectly funded by advertising profits. Of those opportunities, some (such as fintech) are similarly disagreeable to another subset of the population.

The state of the world we live in is such that problems with these characteristics cannot be realistically solved by reducing or taking away the livelihoods of people who enable the problems to exist. I'm not telling you to not care about the problem. I'm also not telling you it can't be fixed. But I am telling you that you can't be so cavalier about what solving the problem entails if you actually want it to change.

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

#194

Post by soared »

apexalpha wrote: post #81
nopriorarrests wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 enoug…

This comment makes no sense to me. First of all: do you have any source for your first statement that "It's absolutely working so well because they are NYT" other than your gut feeling? Just because other sites are smaller doesn't mean they can't do it or work together. Smaller sites now also don't do targeted advertising; they just hire Google or any other ad network for that. They could do the same with non-targete…

> work together

Say like, combining their inventory into one source (say a supply side platform) and then offer that inventory to buy (say via an exchange).

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

#195

Post by wlesieutre »

snowwrestler wrote: post #186
wlesieutre wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bett…

I don't know, I guess this just doesn't seem unreadable to me:

https://i.imgur.com/XROwES3.png

It's a list making fun of Amazon's stupid duplicate product recommendations and you don't need to scroll horizontally to get that out of it.

Screenshot from an iPhone SE which is a damn small viewport by 2019 standards.

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

#196

Post by rchaud »

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.

Targeted online advertising is at its most effective if you are a small player targeting a very niche market. When you're a well-known brand, you won't see the same ROI. Also, you'll be able to get away with a lot more than you would with a TV or print ad, that would require human verification.

Take something like Alex Jones' male virility supplements. There are numerous 'brands' selling this type of snake oil to vulnerable, ideologically zealous people. Brands like these are fly by night, they wouldn't invest in an ad on say, The Economist.

But you would definitely want that ad showing on someone's feed when they've already indicated they follow pages and personalities that make it obvious you're the target customer, i.e. an easy mark.

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

#197

Post by SilasX »

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.

"We showed him an ad. He bought the vacuum cleaner."

'In that order?'

"Shhhh, just give us money."

Half-joking there -- in a previous discussion, the claim was that the ad-buyers don't care enough to check for whether these product-buyers were ones that had already seen an ad, or it was after the fact.

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

#198

Post by hrktb »

paulsutter wrote: post #174
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.

Examples of effective targeting: - Intent targeting via search remains by far the most effective form of targeting. Type life insurance into Google, very high value ads. Mortgage, a car model, etc. This is why Google is so valuable. - For display, the biggest lift from targeting is via retargeting (showing you the shirt you considered on a commerce site) New York Times was definitely using ad exchanges only for their…

> Intent targeting

I wonder how effective it is actually.

The narrative we are lead to believe is that the user will be thankful to get the information it needs surfaced right in front of them. Or the difference between the paid ad and the organic results will be blurry enough to not have an impact.

Yet I think it works only if:

- the ad effectively matches what the user is looking for (that's not a given, even amazon throws a lot of random things supposed to be in relation to search results), and if the product pushed by the ad is seen as legit.

- the ad is from a brand the user somewhat trust in the first place. For instance most people won't choose an ad from an unknown phone maker if they were searching for an iPhone (or they're getting scammed, and that's another issue). I see very few things average people would just search on Google and buy from a random supplier, especially for mortgage or anything high value.

What I am getting at is, there's a significant amount of effort needed on the vendor part to make an ad work, and I wouldn't be surprised if the brands going these length are not already appearing pretty high in the search results in the first place. Having the top stop could still make a difference, but that's just a nudge, and not something critical or that valuable compared to the rest.

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

#199

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#200

Post by reaperducer »

tzs wrote: post #135
rock_hard wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

I find that after a few weeks of training, Apple News does a much better job of picking stories I'm interested in than Google News. With two exceptions:

There doesn't appear to be a way to filter out sports I'm not interested in, or even all sports.

Apple News has a hard time telling the difference between Paris, France and Paris Hilton.

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