Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

digiday.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

321–330 of 464 posts

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

#321

Post by jonas21 »

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…

> 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?

It says so right in the part of the article that was quoted:

“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...

(the "he" is the NYT's SVP for global advertising)

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

#322

Post by moron4hire »

schintan wrote: post #209
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Even though Steve has already decided to buy a BMW 3 series, he most probably hasn't decided which dealership to buy it from. So a dealership advertising has a good chance of a look in.Same case for Mary, she knows she wants to buy a fitbit , but where to buy from can still be influenced by an ad.

He's probably going to buy the BMW from the only BMW dealership in his vicinity. They tend to try to keep from stepping on each other's sales territory.

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

#323

Post by yifanl »

jonas21 wrote: post #321
apexalpha wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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? It says so right in the part of the article that was quoted: “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 targe…

The SVP himself is speculating from the wording, so I wouldn't use this as a source.

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

#324

Post by BoorishBears »

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #300
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…

As Upton Sinclair so aptly observed " It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it! " There was a thriving core to the software industry that existed well before the ad-fueled web and still exists today. Plain old business websites, line-of-business internal software, desktop apps, embedded and IoT software, etc., none of these things depend on ads. If yo…

The problem isn't no one will find work.

It's that there was a thriving core decades ago that supported a fraction of the people the software industry supports today.

> Plain old business websites, line-of-business internal software, desktop apps, embedded and IoT software, etc.

All experience a monumental retraction the likes of which our economy has never experienced the moments ads go away.

No industry, let alone some niche in tech, would be unaffected if Google and their ad-revenue driven efforts dried up tomorrow morning.

If you can't see that there is plenty fewer things to do for the economy to do if ads are curtailed, you need to broaden your horizons.

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

#325

Post by saynay »

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…

Over-targetting creeps people out, so I sometimes wonder if Google (and others) intentionally slip in "bad" targeting to lower peoples guard.

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

#326

Post by noir_lord »

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #259
WA wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :)

Oh they definitely do this. At least the traditional loyalty-card/coupon-enabled physical targeted ads do add enough random stuff that you find it non-creepy, after they had a few high-profile cases back in the day where they started targeted advertising of baby products to teenage girls, and parents got mad. The kicker was they turned out to frequently be real cases of teen pregnancies.

I remember that, it was Target wasn't it and they inferred her pregnancy status because she started buying unscented deodorants and stopped buying sanitary products.

Funnily enough when I'm discussing the dangerous nature of large datasets in the hands of companies/bad actors (sometimes the one and the same...) and the "creepy" effects this is one of the examples I use, I've found that if you know a little about the person and couch the argument in a way they can personally respond to, they understand even if they don't know the first thing about technology generally.

EDIT: https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targ... for anyone who hasn't seen it.

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

#327

Post by GuB-42 »

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 :)

The have to put in some out of context ads sometimes, just so they can train their system.

For example they may show you an ads about hairdryers after you searched for computer keyboards. There is absolutely no relationship between the two, but Google doesn't know it yet, so they try. After all, there may be a correlation. In the likely event where there isn't, Google will simply stop showing hairdryer ads and show you computer mice instead (a known correlation) or running shoes (another experiment).

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

#328

Post by wdr1 »

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 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.

The devil in the detail is how well the targeting is done.

Is there a big difference between poor targeting & untargeted? Not really.

Is there a big difference between good targeting & untargeted? Massive amounts of data to say yes.

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

#329

Post by jillesvangurp »

This does not surprise me. A few things that I know about the ad business:

- There are a lot of players in the market

- Most of them oversell their ability to actually target effectively; I actually know some sales people in this space. Bla bla, machine learning, bla bla bla algorithms, bla bla bla smoke and mirrors.

- Especially the smaller players tend to not have usable profiles on the vast majority of users for reasons of not having existed long enough or not having enough customers to have actually captured enough relevant data.

- Any new ad company has to fake it for quite some time until they actually have enough data. And with GDPR, that data is now a lot harder to come by legally.

- Some of ad companies are fraudulent in the sense that they overcharge their customers for clicks that never happened. E.g. bot traffic is a big revenue driver for ad providers and most of them conveniently can't tell the difference between a bot and a user they supposedly profiled.

So, what just happened is that the NYT cut off most of the worst offenders in this space and ended up with better quality ad providers with better conversions (even without profiling).

Profiling is actually only needed if you have lots of ads competing for the same space. If you reduce the number of ads, the need for profiling goes away. Also, you compensate for bad profiling this way since more (random) people will see your ad. So previously under-performing ads might actually benefit from being shown to random people as opposed to some silly algorithm that uses bad/incomplete profile data to take the wrong decisions.

So what the NYT figured out is that they are better served by a small number of high value ads shown to random people than a great many low quality ads from low quality providers targeted to a handful of their users.

Targeting still has a place in this market but it needs to be consensual; which is going to be a tough sell to end users.

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

#330

Post by [deleted] »

schintan wrote: post #209
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Even though Steve has already decided to buy a BMW 3 series, he most probably hasn't decided which dealership to buy it from. So a dealership advertising has a good chance of a look in.Same case for Mary, she knows she wants to buy a fitbit , but where to buy from can still be influenced by an ad.

[deleted]
Post reply on HN