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Apple’s Ad-Targeting Crackdown Shakes Up Ad Market

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Re: Apple’s Ad-Targeting Crackdown Shakes Up Ad Market

#321

Post by Retric »

panpanna wrote: post #316
Retric wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Edit: I don’t think Crome has a better engine. For sake of argument lets’s suppose Android Crome was a 90 and iOS Crome is currently a 70 due to the rendering engine. In theory they could replace the engine and hit say 85 given enough resources. But, they could also replace the engine hit 75 and blame iOS. Their still demonstrating an improvement and intentionally crippling it at the same time. That said any such mea…

Technically they are not introducing a new engine. Chrome is well established with a 60-70% market share. Not saying thats a good thing either... But you have a very pro-apple and anti-google way of thinking here which I think misguided and does not actually benefit you. Even with those made up numbers chrome would improve from 70 to 75 which is by all means a win for the consumer (you!) but you are ready to dismiss…

I edited the post to make it clear I don’t think Crome has a better engine having seen many issues on android phones. I was simply saying if they had advantages on other platforms you can’t assume they will carry over.

Anyway, I still test and find different issues with Crome on Android tablets, phones, and desktop due to significant market share and I would do that for iOS Crome. Sure, Chromes developer tools helps fixing some of these but I have had various CSS issues not replicate.

However, most companies don’t do this so adding more rendering engines with slight bugs seems to make things worse for consumers. There may be short term benefits, but long term it’s a net loss as many developers would only support a subset of iOS users.

Re: Apple’s Ad-Targeting Crackdown Shakes Up Ad Market

#322

Post by SAI_Peregrinus »

greggman2 wrote: post #192
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #5

How has this been so effective, when Panopticlick still says my Safari browser has "a nearly-unique fingerprint"? (And based on what I've read from other users's experience, this is normal.)

because pantoptclick is wrong! you can be in California and using say an iPhoneX and it will tell you you're one in 500k. If you calculate the number of people with their iPhone set to English in the PST timezone (the only things there is to distinguish one iPhoneX from another) and then you divide that by the pantoptclick number you get it's claiming there are only 10-100 iPhoneXs in all of Seattle Metro Area, San F…

It's not wrong, it's just potentially misleading.

> Your browser fingerprint appears to be unique among the 251,543 tested in the past 45 days.

It only counts against those other people who visited panopticlick, and that in the last 45 days. That's explicitly stated, but hidden in the click-through for details section.

There are also things it can't detect, such as the existence of the Cookie Auto-Delete extension. So it thinks cookies are enabled and can be used for tracking, but in reality they get deleted whenever I close a tab (and links to new domains get opened in new tabs). Or user-agent randomization, which will make your fingerprint more unique but less useful for tracking.

Re: Apple’s Ad-Targeting Crackdown Shakes Up Ad Market

#323

Post by AznHisoka »

dointheatl wrote: post #315
AznHisoka wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.” https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

And you just responded to the weaker interpretation of his argument (which is easier to criticize) when you called it "too emotional."

And you responded to the weaker interpretation of my argument. And so we are in a loop.

my orig response was an innocent, curious question while his was an impulsive rant/essay.

Re: Apple’s Ad-Targeting Crackdown Shakes Up Ad Market

#324

Post by matheusmoreira »

AznHisoka wrote: post #254
matheusmoreira wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Couldn't agree more. I hate it when people respond to concerns with "I make money that way, how could I possibly go on otherwise" as if it somehow legitimitized their unscrupulous activity. Their profits are nobody's problem but theirs and there is absolutely nothing wrong with putting them out of business if that's what it takes to stop their abusive surveillance capitalism. If people's use of privacy-focused softwa…

You got too emotional when reading my response. I was just asking the question because I was genuinely curious whether there was technically a way to do so w/o cookie targeting. I have no interest in doing such targeting. I was interested in whether a HNer had a creative workaround.

The way you asked the question suggested you were trying to find alternative methods to track people. That implies the method of tracking (cookies) was the problem rather than the tracking itself. My response to that is tracking people isn't something that should be done to begin with. People should not want to track others. It should not be possible to track people in any way, let alone make any money from the practice.

Re: Apple’s Ad-Targeting Crackdown Shakes Up Ad Market

#325

Post by shostack »

manigandham wrote: post #31
signal11 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t get targeted ads. They’re quite dumb. If I look at product X, ads for product X follow me around the web, which isn’t that useful because I’ve already done my research and am not quite ready to hit “buy” no matter how many ads you show. Ads for similar products I might be interested in, but I’ve not seen too many of those served up by these ad networks. Untargeted ads at least might show me something new and…

That's not how they work. What you're seeing is the issue with not having data shared between networks and the resulting poor targeting. Retargeting has better results than any other type of targeting but unfortunately there's a gap between the ecommerce systems knowing you bought something and the ad networks used to market those ads. It's easy to drop a pixel and say you looked at a product, but it's much harder to…

>"but it's much harder to let that same network know that you're no longer interested for whatever reason."

Yes and no. As a best practice, for a SaaS product I marketed I would always build exclusion lists (ideally ones that auto-updated based on syncing with our funnel data) to stop showing ads trying to get people to buy who were already paid subscribers.

eCommerce obviously has different challenges, and the effort to create those synced exclusion lists may not actually be worth the performance improvement at scale. But it is certainly possible when an advertiser has both sales data and ownership of the retargeting lists.

Re: Apple’s Ad-Targeting Crackdown Shakes Up Ad Market

#326

Post by AznHisoka »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #324
AznHisoka wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You got too emotional when reading my response. I was just asking the question because I was genuinely curious whether there was technically a way to do so w/o cookie targeting. I have no interest in doing such targeting. I was interested in whether a HNer had a creative workaround.

The way you asked the question suggested you were trying to find alternative methods to track people. That implies the method of tracking (cookies) was the problem rather than the tracking itself. My response to that is tracking people isn't something that should be done to begin with. People should not want to track others. It should not be possible to track people in any way, let alone make any money from the pract…

Ok I understand. Thanks.

Re: Apple’s Ad-Targeting Crackdown Shakes Up Ad Market

#327

Post by Zak »

swish_bob wrote: post #292
shantly wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The explanation I've seen is that yes, most people who buy certain products (a microwave oven, say) are probably done for a long time and less likely than the average person to buy one, but overall the group of people who just bought a microwave oven are still much more likely than the average person to buy another one. So yeah there are a bunch of people for whom the ads seem extremely stupid because of course you d…

I've read loads of suggested explanations for why this is a thing over the years, and none of them have ever felt satisfactory to me. However, none of the people doing this really care why this is a thing, they care that, for some reason, this is a thing. It's vastly more profitable than nearly every other type of advertising, and since nobody _really_ knows how that works either, they just follow their tried and tes…

I suppose it might be true that the sort of person who buys 50 sets of office chair casters first buys one set to try out, and if they're happy with that, comes back for more in a week. The chance that I might be that person is relatively high reward (a ~$1000 sale), and Amazon doesn't have a better idea of what I'm going to buy.

Re: Apple’s Ad-Targeting Crackdown Shakes Up Ad Market

#328

Post by donclark »

exhilaration wrote: post #307
panpanna wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a source for that? Firefox docs and disconnect don't say anything about this https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/enhanced-tracking-prote...

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Firefox/Pri... The above specifically shows you to make sure your site continues to function when Google Analytics is blocked by Firefox. I can't find any evidence that Firefox doesn't block Google Analytics.

I highly recommend: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/umatrix/

Re: Apple’s Ad-Targeting Crackdown Shakes Up Ad Market

#329

Post by inetknght »

manigandham wrote: post #222
inetknght wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No. TLS certificates have nothing to do with domain ownership or the businesses providing services behind them. > Anyone can buy and transfer certificates. The registrar has a business relationship with the domain because the domain was purchased. The domain's owner uses DNS to point to an IP address. The client connects to that IP address and verifies that the IP address knows about the domain. "I paid for you to…

> " Business contracts don't mean shit to me because I can't inspect them. I can inspect DNS, however. " Your personal beliefs don't overrule how global business is conducted. Domain name ownership has nothing to do with business operations, liability or regulations. You can blame a certain domain all you want but it's ultimately meaningless. > " Publishers can just as easily create advertisements and host them... Sc…

> I have 15 years of experience in adtech and know 100s of publishers personally. It's not that easy and it's only getting more complicated as advertisers, campaigns and measurement get more sophisticated.

Advertising doesn't need to be sophisticated or complicated.

> Please don't underestimate an entire 12-figure industry as if everyone else is clueless and you figured it all out.

Please don't assume I don't understand how advertising works.

Re: Apple’s Ad-Targeting Crackdown Shakes Up Ad Market

#330

Post by dointheatl »

AznHisoka wrote: post #323
dointheatl wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And you just responded to the weaker interpretation of his argument (which is easier to criticize) when you called it "too emotional."

And you responded to the weaker interpretation of my argument. And so we are in a loop. my orig response was an innocent, curious question while his was an impulsive rant/essay.

>You got too emotional when reading my response.

I'm not sure there is any stronger interpretation available here. You're baselessly speculating on gp's emotional state. That is the opposite of "assume good faith."

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