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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

#351

Post by aurelwu »

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.

I always wondered why that happens at all but then I thought maybe it is because of their historic origins starting out as book seller - where showing another book after you bought a book makes absolute sense. While for refridgerators it makes no sense, they should put stuff in categories to distinguish that but then they are a super big company and I am single selftaught developer trying to make my living out of it.

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

#352

Post by jhayward »

fastball wrote: post #185
badwolf wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

It depends on how you measure that. They certainly were the first to make serious money by using simple regression to suggest 'people also bought'.

In general I think that all of the personal surveillance / categorization will end up being more truly profitable (as opposed to 'twinkie calorie' profits of ad networks) as they are used to suggest price points for products and services rather than to direct attention to products.

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

#353

Post by [deleted] »

BoorishBears wrote: post #175
cyborgx7 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you already acknowledge that it's just a bullshit job because people need to make money to live, maybe they could do something that is not actively harmful.

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…

[deleted]

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

#354

Post by manigandham »

bradyo wrote: post #333
manigandham wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to misunderstand how marketing works. Creating customers is how companies grow and requires advertising, so creating those channels is filling a business need. Throwing money at people doesn't change that need. >> Literally anything not actively harmful. "Literally" must be the most overused word in English today, but a vague description like that is completely unproductive to any discussion and doesn't even…

"Filling business needs" is also not an objectively useful thing. There are many businesses I would prefer not advertise (e.g. cigarette and gun companies) and many more industries that are nearly zero-sum (and thus advertising just moves a fixed pool of money around). I'm not sure where this idea that growth for the sake of growth is inherently good came from. In fact, we've demonstrated many ways it's harmful.

Because the human population grows, so concepts such as societies and economies follow. It's that simple. You can run a small business that remains at a steady state but you still need constant customers to remain viable, and even if every company stayed small there would be new ones started, so growth is inherent.

Marketing spend is a proportion of GDP so it'll scale along with it, and is thus not zero-sum. As for regulation, that is needed in the industry and why we have limits on certain categories.

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

#355

Post by vertexFarm »

wdr1 wrote: post #328
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.

I'd like to see some data which was collected in a quantifiable, carefully controlled and rigorous way. I'm not trying to be snarky or saying it doesn't exist, I'd just like to see some credible data.

I was able to find this study after banging my head against a bunch of paywalled sites trying to charge money for public domain research:

https://beesystrategy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Chris-S...

Working on reading through. Seems like it would be difficult to control an experiment like this, since the subjects know they will be seeing advertisements as part of a study and won't really be purchasing these items. I don't know, I'm looking forward to learning more about the experimental procedure. Also they seem to be measuring somewhat vague self-reported impressions about the ad in context of being targeted / untargeted, not the actual sales they produce. Drawing a line between these impressions and real ad performance seems to be mostly a matter of opinion. As I said it seems like a tough thing to quantify, and I'm hoping that people smarter than myself have found credible methods to truly measure it.

Do you have anything you'd like to recommend?

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

#356

Post by FakeComments »

redwall_hp wrote: post #340
FakeComments wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In other words: targeted advertising is about making ads cheeper for advertisers, whereas the traditional assumption is that the real estate is valuable and desirable. e.g. companies want their ads in the New York Times or the Superbowl. Targeted advertising is a way of spreading ad dollars out more, which ultimately is detrimental to large publishers as well as being unethical on the data harvesting side. (I choose…

It’s actually about raising the price for advertisers:

Instead of only political books being able to advertise on that page, they’re bidding against beef jerky and cars and so on. This raises the price for the ad slot by creating (false) demand.

Without those out-of-place, targeted ads there would be less demand for every ad slot, and people could bid less for them.

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

#357

Post by vertexFarm »

SmellyGeekBoy wrote: post #93
raverbashing wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean that following the users with the same repetitive ads across the net (for things that he might have even bought already) is not so effective? Yeah, tracking probably throws the ads into a local minima. But ad algos don't care about conversion, they care about charging the ad buyer more.

> But ad algos don't care about conversion, they care about charging the ad buyer more. Bingo. The users clicking the ads aren't the ones funding the advertising networks - it's the people buying the ads. If you can convince them that targeted ads are more effective (and it would certainly be a safe assumption based on most peoples' understanding) then you can charge them more. I'm not sure why you're being so heavil…

Yeah, I've been struck by this possibility while reading a lot of the rebuttals here. "Targeted ads work because otherwise why would they be so prevalent?" or "targeted ads work because x, y and z." There could be a kind of meta-advertising at work here, where adtech is often actually marketing towards the ad market itself. Would that mean it works? In a way--clearly lots of people are buying into it. And people wouldn't necessarily notice the scheme, because after all even if targeting isn't as effective as they claim it's still a form of advertisement and would generate some sales as dumb ads regardless of whether the targeting is really effective. We'd have to measure how much above that baseline the ads are driving actual sales somehow.

But I've yet to see some actual controlled evidence showing clear data in terms of sales that we can be reasonably sure were generated by targeted advertising. I think such evidence probably does exist, I'm not saying I don't believe it just yet. But all the arguments here seem to confuse science with scientism--what we have is a lot of reasoning and academic explanations of how people think it works, which is just not the same as evidence. It doesn't matter if something sounds like the way it might work in real life, we have to make observations to call something data. I haven't seen much data here.

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

#358

Post by lucideer »

soared wrote: post #188
lucideer wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You grossly misunderstand digital advertising or your bias has completed clouded your logic. > A wedding anniversary is a significant thing–some John's may be swayed by an advertisement, but many would consider it a bit of a cheat not to put more "novel" thought into it. No idea what you mean here by cheating or novel thought. We're talking about whether knowing that info allows you to have more successful advertisin…

> Serving John ads for roses, chocolates, and vacations will be more effective than serving those ads to a random person.

That statement makes sense intuitively, but what we're discussing here is whether our intuition reflects reality. It may seem to self-evident to you, but do you have data?

All of your examples "make sense" from the same intuitive perspective, but all assume the subjects are positively influenced by the advertisements more than a randomly selected subject would be. That's an assumption.

Please don't condescendingly remark that I "don't understand advertising" when you've missed the point entirely. This isn't about how the ad industry works—ad companies are clearly economically successful—it's about whether (as another commenter eloquently put it) that emperor is wearing clothes.

> Correlation is the whole point. If someone who is single and goes to the gym is correlated to certain purchases or behavior, you can advertise those.

The point is that the correlation we're talking about here is a proxy. If a lot of people buy a product and are single, but most aren't buying that product because they're single, it means they're buying it for another reason, which may or may not change relative to their relationship status.

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

#359

Post by JAlexoid »

reaperducer wrote: post #281
JAlexoid wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair... Paris Hilton can be a Hilton hotel in Paris. So... Even an proficient English speaker can be mislead

Even an proficient English speaker can be mislead I don't think so. A human would understand context. AI isn't supposed to be simple string matching.

Really? Take anyone that has no clue who Paris Hilton is and without implying what you mean by "Paris Hilton" ask them something about Paris Hilton.

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

#360

Post by golemiprague »

I don't think I have ever seen an ad and clicked on it in order to get something. For the NY Times a lot of the ads are just for branding and they pay per views, not click throughs or acquisitions, so need to factor this into the results. Other websites with different size and recognition might need different kind of advertising where personal data is more important.
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