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

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Post by hashhar » Wed, Jan 16, 2019, 9:04 PM UTC

hawski wrote: post #222

fastball wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It seems that it would pay out a lot for them to do a few simple heuristics by hand. For example: if just bought something do not show a thing from the same category. At most show a thing from accessories category, which I think they do.

Up until recently i used to work at a major Indian eCommerce and can confirm that most companies use a mix of the simple heuristics you suggest together with some data mining.

So, they would take your recent purchases, clicks, searches and wish listed products and recommended products from some accessory category or related products. ie. Traditional mining combined with heuristics.

It also helps to have separate widgets for similar products and for cross-sell products.

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

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Post by manigandham » Wed, Jan 16, 2019, 9:06 PM UTC

JAlexoid wrote: post #239

manigandham wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because advertisers don't want to deal with a bunch of smaller sites. That's why ad networks and exchanges exist, so you can buy a single impression for the right user wherever they are across the web. Take away the fine-grained targeting and you end up with big blind campaigns running on a few large sites with the biggest reach. This is the way TV and radio work, wasteful and expensive but great for the channels tha…

Fine grained targeting is a myth.

It's definitely real and used for hundreds of billions in annual ad spend. Perhaps you're referring to effectiveness, in which case that's dependent on thousands of factors.

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

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Post by dsr_ » Wed, Jan 16, 2019, 9:14 PM UTC

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #261

SilasX wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

This makes sense. While the "you might need a second vacuum cleaner" argument maaybe checks out, the "you might need a second sous vide machine/espresso bean grinder/welding machine" definitely doesn't make sense.

There are some people who end up buying all the best coffee bean grinders in search of perfection; there are people who can't resist a classic MIG welder. But those people were going to buy them anyway, and represent too few sales to justify any expenditure.

What you need are complementary goods. These people bought coffee bean grinders? Show them ads for travel mugs, for high-end coffee subscriptions, and fancy grinder-cleaning brushes.

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

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Post by manigandham » Wed, Jan 16, 2019, 9:15 PM UTC

mook wrote: post #220

manigandham wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because advertisers don't want to deal with a bunch of smaller sites. That's why ad networks and exchanges exist, so you can buy a single impression for the right user wherever they are across the web. Take away the fine-grained targeting and you end up with big blind campaigns running on a few large sites with the biggest reach. This is the way TV and radio work, wasteful and expensive but great for the channels tha…

Why can't middlemen still exist, just without the individual targeting? Can't sites still self-report their categories (so that, say, a dog grooming site would say they should get dog ads)?

They can and they do, that's what ad networks are. There are plenty of ways to group sites by category and readership without individual targeting but middlemen add percentage costs to the ad spend which the industry has been slowly pushing out.

The bigger issue is that fine-grained targeting is still wanted so if you remove 3rd-party tracking then advertisers will go towards the biggest sites that can supply it via their own 1st-party tracking. Even then it's still hard to work with many vendors so even more of the money is now going to Google and Facebook who can just do it all with better data than anyone else.

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

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Post by spacehome » Wed, Jan 16, 2019, 9:18 PM UTC

JAlexoid wrote: post #334

Cpoll wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But if you determine that targeted ads are worst than scattershot, the correct conclusion isn't to do scattershot, it's to invert your target group.

The issue is that this "target group" is typically "people that visited your website and stayed there for some time". Unless you have a promo, you really don't want to advertise to them... But that is exactly what you end up doing, because you can't target "people that visited my website 6+ months ago".

Why not?

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

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Post by komali2 » Wed, Jan 16, 2019, 9:19 PM UTC

FakeComments wrote: post #271

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…

There’s a bigger effect: context. I don’t want to buy beef jerky when I’m reading about a military strike in the Middle East, no matter how much my profile indicates I like beef jerky — but I might be open to a book on politics. Because reading about content is self-selected disclosure of interest, the NYT already has all the information they need to target me — they know I read politics, and when I’m in that context…

>Because reading about content is self-selected disclosure of interest, the NYT already has all the information they need to target me — they know I read politics, and when I’m in that context.

This seems to me what "targeted advertising" should mean - NYT says "for all routes of nytimes.com/politics, show political ads. If it's local news, open it up to classifieds for local business." Etc.

If someone's on the page, is that not enough information?

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

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Post by lrem » Wed, Jan 16, 2019, 9:24 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…

> Having said that, I'm constantly surprised by how bad Google is at targeted advertising. For example, today when I visit nytimes.com I see an ad from Google with the ad text in French. Hey Google, despite my recent visit to Paris I don't speak French - maybe your AI experts could analyse my 13 years of Gmail and search history to figure that out!

No, they literally could not, because the data flow between Gmail and Ads has ben severed a while ago:

https://blog.google/products/gmail/g-suite-gains-traction-in...

These kind of things are treated pretty seriously. There are teams whose job is literally making sure that your data does not leak from one Google product to another in a way that would violate your privacy. Source: I'm an engineer in Google, but in none of the mentioned teams.

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

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Post by manigandham » Wed, Jan 16, 2019, 9:26 PM UTC

tboyd47 wrote: post #147

manigandham wrote: post #64

I work in adtech. This has nothing to do with how effective targeting is, and a single site does not reflect the entire industry when they're all competing for the same pool of ad dollars. There is a massive drop in EU programmatic advertising because of GDPR. Most EU advertisers now buy a few large campaigns with coarse targeting instead, and sites with the biggest reach like NYT will get more money but there's less…

I didn't downvote you, but I worked in adtech a couple of years back, and observed the opposite. We saw direct-sold contracts overtake DFP income almost immediately after the team started looking for them. It was a mid-size company (about 1,000 employees). My reasoning on why this is is that networks like DoubleClick don't care or know any of the qualities that raise the value of a particular publication in the adver…

Direct-sold contracts will always have more income because they are larger deals, the same way TV buys easily reach into millions, but you have to pay for that sales team which cuts into margins so net net can be very different. Advertisers are getting more into programmatic to consolidate their media teams into a few DSPs and strategies because of the targeting and attribution capabilities of digital.

My sources are the CEOs of major ad exchanges and the internal discussions with their BD and revenue teams, although there are some posts about it [1]. Europe has seen a big drop in liquidity on open-exchanges and while a lot of spend has shifted to private deals, it's still more labor to setup and and manage those deals so spend is now further focused on Goog/FB and large sites.

1. https://digiday.com/media/google-data-protection-regulation-...

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

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Post by manigandham » Wed, Jan 16, 2019, 9:29 PM UTC

alkonaut wrote: post #166

manigandham wrote: post #64

I work in adtech. This has nothing to do with how effective targeting is, and a single site does not reflect the entire industry when they're all competing for the same pool of ad dollars. There is a massive drop in EU programmatic advertising because of GDPR. Most EU advertisers now buy a few large campaigns with coarse targeting instead, and sites with the biggest reach like NYT will get more money but there's less…

> This is another case of regulation benefiting the bigger players > curious what downvotes are disagreeing with here not downvoting but I suppose it might be that your post comes across as saying that's necessarily a bad thing. if you need to be a big publisher to mamage doing well-behaved (not ad-net served ads) and you aren't a big player - then my opinion is you should shut down rather than use ad-nets. I don't c…

The biggest players are Facebook and Google who are further entrenched by this regulation, even though it seems like they were supposed to be the targets. All the other sites suffer as a result, while only large ones like NYT stay viable. Many smaller players are now looking at paywalls or patronage to stay in business.

You can easily avoid sites you do not like but I don't see what that has to do with integrity (of what exactly?), or why you think that everyone else would also be ok with losing 80% of content and jobs? Billions of people over decades have shown they prefer free and plentiful content and it's unlikely that is changing anytime soon unless you can somehow change human behavior first.

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

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Post by ThrowawayR2 » Wed, Jan 16, 2019, 9:30 PM UTC

BoorishBears wrote: post #324

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

Such hyperbole; computers are embedded in every aspect of daily life now.

Moreover, even if by some miracle you happened to be correct, propping up the adtech software industry does not justify its negative externalities any more than preserving tobacco jobs justifies the continued sale of cigarettes and subsequent deaths or preserving coal jobs justifies the pollutants produced and its subsequent deaths.