After GDPR, The New York Times cut off ad exchanges and kept growing ad revenue • Hacker News Board

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

#241

Post by BoorishBears » Wed, Jan 16, 2019, 5:40 PM UTC

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #177

BoorishBears wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What the fuck are you talking about? How many people in this industry indirectly rely on companies like Google for employment? What percentage of mobile app development is paid for with ads? What percentage of web development is paid for with ads? How many open source projects are contributed to by developers who work at companies that rely on ads to you, pay their actual bills How many “side projects” on this site a…

Take it down a notch? Lots of sites sell things, which is enough reason to make those sites. Millions of sites are representing businesses (restaurant etc). No, the web isn't going away because joe shmoe can't put up ads. Its so cheap to put up a website anyway, folks do it for many reasons.

How do you think those people sell? Or their customers find them? Where do people search for sites representing businesses?

The Software industry would retract almost to the point of death relative to its current size without ads.

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

#242

Post by pbhjpbhj » Wed, Jan 16, 2019, 5:45 PM UTC

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.

Dyson users probably disproportionally have second homes, holiday homes, etc.. You're more likely to recommend to a friend of you see a deal "hey, I bought this awesome vacuum, you should get one, I saw a deal" ...

It's not as silly as it seems.

I buy repeat items as gifts (I like this, X will like this), or for my parents (home stuff), or when I bought something for one child I know and it turned out to be well made and now another child needs/wants one; or tech stuff that turned out well when someone else needs the same repair (eg new HDD).

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

#243

Post by j-c-hewitt » Wed, Jan 16, 2019, 5:46 PM UTC

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's not necessarily Google but the advertisers using the platform and how the ad is configured. Google itself addresses these kinds of ambiguities all the time but if the user puts coarse configuration on it, then it will do what the user told it to do like show French ads to non-French speakers who just visited the country.

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

#244

Post by maxxxxx » Wed, Jan 16, 2019, 5:48 PM UTC

bdamm wrote: post #164

TuringTest wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely that would make sense the next time you visit the city, not for the same visit.

There’s some marketing theory about brand reinforcement near a purchase creating a more likely customer later. I’m not a marketer though.

The easiest way to get "brand reinforcement" is to deliver a good product. I will remember them. Right now it seems they want to get "brand reinforcement" through constant nagging which already causes me to dislike the brand.

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

#245

Post by specialist » Wed, Jan 16, 2019, 5:48 PM UTC

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've worked on recommenders for a big brick & mortar with significant e-commerce.

Our team's recommender algorithms were marginally effective. Despite having significant data on our customers.

The new new thing is "personalization". We'll see if that helps.

If I had to guess, broadcast and individual targeting both (can) work, but the middle ground is fool's gold.

IMHO, I'd like to see renewed emphasis on improving search, browse, foraging. I generally know what I want, but still struggle to find it.

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

#246

Post by soared » Wed, Jan 16, 2019, 5:50 PM UTC

bunderbunder wrote: post #240

soared wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This used to be possible but every reputable publisher and exchange doesn't allow it anymore, mostly for this reason.

I thought part of the problem with the ad exchanges was that they're very hard to police, so what they officially don't allow has limited bearing on what actually happens.

Typically an ad will go through multiple vendors (dsp, exchange, ssp, ssp, etc) and then to the publisher. One of these will catch it, and if not a publisher as big as NYT has tools in place to catch it.

But yes things can slip through, but its mostly unapproved creative (gambling, etc) rather than code which is easy to catch.

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

#247

Post by AnthonyMouse » Wed, Jan 16, 2019, 5:51 PM UTC

misterprime wrote: post #238

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then you're sniping existing customers from other retailers, which is zero-sum when everybody does it, and it's possible for your competitors to tell when you're doing it and retaliate by doing the same. At which point you're both paying for advertising that only cancels out the competitor's advertising. A smart retailer is not going to be the first one to take a turn down that road. It's essentially iterated prisone…

That may be the genius of targeted ads. Once one vendor starts doing it, the other vendors have no choice but to bid on the same target. Winner: ad platform.

> That may be the genius of targeted ads. Once one vendor starts doing it, the other vendors have no choice but to bid on the same target.

Except that they do have a choice.

Suppose there are five competitors. Everybody knows Steve is going to buy a BMW 3 Series. The margin is $5000. Assuming everyone else is going to do what you're going to do, how much does it make sense to bid to advertise to Steve? If you bid $1000, you have a one in five chance of making a $5000 margin. If you bid $5000, you have a one in five chance of making $5000.

So the optimal amount to bid is $0, because you have the same one in five chance at $5000 if everyone bids $0 than if everyone bids $1000 or $5000, but then you have a $1000 expected value rather than a $0 or $-4000 one.

Now suppose the others aren't using the same utility function as you and so may bid a different amount and you get a bidding war. So the first thing that happens is somebody bids $100 expecting to make $5000 -- bully for them, until the second one bids $200. Everyone raises their bid to $1000 because that's what a 20% chance at $5000 is worth. If one of the competitors drops out, the others will raise their bid to $1250 because now it's a 25% chance.

Which means there's never any profit in it for the advertiser. If anybody plays then at least one competitor will retaliate and everybody loses a total of $5000 to the ad platform. If nobody plays, everybody gets an expected value of $1000. Being the first to quit costs you nothing, but being the first to play costs you and each of your competitors $1000. Who is going to play this game?

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

#248

Post by _0w8t » Wed, Jan 16, 2019, 5:51 PM UTC

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #206

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…

> 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? It's possible that some combination of…

The ads in NYT can still be targeted to the article content. Surely it may be less efficient then personalized ads but then the newspaper does not pay ad broker.

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

#249

Post by throwawaymath » Wed, Jan 16, 2019, 5:52 PM UTC

cyborgx7 wrote: post #226

throwawaymath wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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" - r…

I am talking about the tracking here, not the advertising. Reasonable people can not disagree on weather or not tracking everyone individually is harmful or not.

The heart of what I'm getting at is that you cannot be the arbiter of whether or not it's reasonable to disagree about that. As a direct consequence, being cavalier about it will not work for solving the problem. I'm trying to inject nuance into a problem I'm acknowledging exists, not engage in a holy war against the existence of the problem.

If you think reasonable people can't disagree with you about this topic, then fine. Forget that! Instead replace that thought with the idea that a nontrivial number of software engineers - likely the supermajority - will be materially impacted by significantly changing the amount of tracking enabled by advertising. You cannot tell them to just take up knitting anymore than you can tell people who disagree with you to just stop disagreeing with you. If only it were that easy.

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

#250

Post by r3bl » Wed, Jan 16, 2019, 5:52 PM UTC

JAlexoid wrote: post #213

reaperducer wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. This happened to me just last week. Unfortunately, it's the least of Booking's user-hostile traits. Like sending me e-mails pestering me to review a hotel I checked into less than an hour before. Or flashing "Hurry! Only 1 room left!" when I know for a fact…

A hotel can be 90% empty and Booking could have only 1 left in their inventory to sell.

The opposite works as well.

On one occasion, I've tried booking straight from the hotel, it told me no rooms available for the selected dates. I've tried Booking, and sure enough, that same room I had my eyes on was available.